The Invisible

call off our arrangement, then so be it, but I won’t do it. She deserves a chance to take those fuckers down, and I’m not going to take that away from her. I can’t take that away from her.”

There was a long, tense pause, and then the Spaniard came back on, his voice tight and insistent. “Kealey, perhaps I didn’t make myself clear. This isn’t a choice. You can’t decide one way or another. You’re going to do it, and that’s final.”

“Hey,” Kealey snapped, his hand tightening around the phone. He had tried letting the man down easy; this was something else entirely. “Fuck you. I don’t have to do a fucking thing you tell me. Who the hell do you think you are? Now, listen—”

“No, you listen. In case you’ve forgotten, I want to remind you of something. When you flew to Pakistan, you left someone behind.”

Kealey closed his eyes and bit back his instinctive response. Suddenly, it was all clear, but he tried not to let his emotions cloud his judgment. There was no way that Machado would go that far . . . would he? “Naomi.”

“That’s correct. I talked to your employer a few hours ago, and he’s brought me back into the fold, in a manner of speaking. He asked me to help get her out of the country. In other words, she’s with me for the foreseeable future.”

“You wouldn’t hurt her,” Kealey said. He was fairly confident that he was right. He had misjudged the older man in Spain, but he didn’t think he’d gotten it that wrong. “You spent thirty years in the DO. She’s one of us, Machado. If you hurt her, you’ll be throwing away everything you ever did with the Agency, not to mention the fact that they’ll track you down in a heartbeat.”

“What is your point, Kealey? Perhaps I didn’t make myself clear when we last spoke. I’m seventy-two years old, and the doctors are not optimistic when it comes to my health. I have very little to look forward to. Marissa is my youngest daughter and my only living child. She is everything to me, and I would do anything to keep her out of harm’s way.”

“Machado, if you—”

“Anything, ” the Spaniard repeated, “even if that means sacrificing your girlfriend. For eight years, Kealey, I’ve had to choke on the memory of what the Agency did to my daughter. Eight years! ” His voice was trembling with rage and something else that Kealey couldn’t identify.

“I understand that, but—”

“No, it is something you can never understand. I will not let it happen again,” the Spaniard continued. His voice had dropped into a frightening monotone, a fact that had not escaped the younger man’s attention. “And I don’t care what I have to do to stop it. Not anymore.”

“Listen, Naomi has nothing to do with this. You have to let her go.”

“I wouldn’t have to kill her, mind you.” The older man was already working it out, Kealey realized, figuring out the best way to pull it off.

“She’d simply . . . disappear.”

“People would know what you did, Machado,” Kealey said. He tried to sound sure of what he was saying, but he couldn’t entirely disguise his rising panic. The man sounded completely sincere; clearly, he was not moved by the fact that Naomi was as innocent as his daughter. “I would know.”

“Maybe, but you’d never be able to prove it. You know the record I have at Langley, and the investigation alone would keep Marissa tied up in congressional hearings for the next eighteen months. That would serve my purposes just as well.”

“You sick fuck,” Kealey said. It was all he could manage; he just couldn’t believe what he was hearing, and he couldn’t pretend any longer. “You sick fucking bastard. Why me? Why not your man Fahim, or whatever the hell his name really is? Why can’t he do it? Why didn’t you turn to him in the first place?”

“I thought you might ask that, but the answer is simple, Kealey. Fahim is a good man, but his loyalty has its boundaries. You were in the right place at the right time. Marissa is an active operative with the CIA, a covert employee of the U.S. government. Were he to pull the trigger, the Agency would track him to the end of the earth. They would never stop looking.”

There was a brief pause, and then Machado continued. “You, on the other hand, are known for your somewhat . . . unorthodox methods. You’ve survived some very controversial incidents over the course of your career, and you’ll survive this. Given your admirable record, the worst they’ll do is kick you out. Besides, you need something from me, and I need something from you. Believe me, I will keep my end of the bargain.”

“It’s no fucking bargain,” Kealey snapped. “Not from my point of view.”

“Yes, it is,” Machado insisted. “Think of Fitzgerald. If you do this, you’ll be saving her life. You’ll be a hero to every American man and woman, and to many others around the world. And in the long run, you’ll be doing the right thing for Marissa as well.”

“That isn’t for you to decide. She’s a grown woman. You don’t have the right to decide her future, and neither do I. If I go through with this, I’ll be taking away the one thing she wants most in the world. Have you thought of that? Have you even considered what she wants? What’s best for her?”

“Enough,” Machado snapped. Kealey knew he’d hit a nerve, but it was too little, too late. “It’s time for you to make a decision. Now, what will it be? And just remember, at this particular moment, I’m less than twenty feet from your little friend. Her life is in my hands.”

Kealey restrained his instinctive reply, but only just. “How do I know you’ll let her go when it’s done?”

“You don’t. But I have no desire to hurt her. The only way that will happen is if you want it to.”

“Fuck you,” Kealey spat. He shut off the phone and tossed it back to Fahim without warning. The Afghan caught it awkwardly. Ten seconds later it started to ring, and Fahim lifted it to his ear. He spoke a few words, listened, then spoke again and ended the connection. Walking over, he reversed his grip on the gun and held it out to Kealey at arm’s length.

Kealey wrapped his hand around the warm plastic grip. He could tell from the weight that the Makarov 9mm pistol was fully loaded, but he pushed the slide back a couple of centimeters, anyway. When he saw the brassy glint of the chambered round, he released the slide. Then he took a few steps back and raised the weapon. When the muzzle was level with the other man’s face, he said, “What’s to stop me from shooting you right now?”

The Afghan appeared unconcerned, his swarthy face fixed in a neutral expression. “I expect you already know the answer to that,”

he said calmly.

Kealey shook his head in frustration, but the man had called his bluff. He flashed on Naomi, the way he’d seen her the previous day: leaning against the door frame of her borrowed bedroom, clear droplets of water on her shoulders and tears in her eyes, her skinny arms wrapped round her lean, undernourished body. He was torn by the image in his mind, just as he was torn when he was in her presence. It was clear that she wanted nothing to do with him, but he couldn’t abandon her. He’d heard everything he needed to hear in Javier Machado’s voice. In Kealey’s mind, there was no doubt that the Spaniard would carry out his threat, but either way, he wasn’t prepared to risk double-crossing the former case officer. There was just too much to lose if he was wrong. And that left just one alternative.

His legs felt like concrete blocks as he crossed the gravel, his feet sinking into the loose, rain-soaked pebbles. He couldn’t believe it had come to this; in a thousand years, he never would have made the connection. He just didn’t see how he could have known what Machado was up to. Petain’s participation in the upcoming op was highly classified information, and there was no way he could have known about it, mainly because he didn’t have to. Even with that piece of information, though, he didn’t think he would have been able to spot Machado’s true intentions in Cartagena. There were just too many links to follow, and his attention had been focused on other things, all of which took precedence over Marissa Petain’s family history.

In the end, though, Kealey knew that these thoughts were meaningless. There was no point in deluding himself. He could try to rationalize it for as long as he wanted to, but nothing would change the fact that he had missed some crucial developments, and now Petain was going to pay for his mistakes.

As he crossed the last few feet through the driving rain, Petain started to speak, clearly anxious to learn what had happened. Then she saw the gun in his hand. She met his eyes, and she must have seen the truth behind them, because her face went completely white, and her knees seemed to buckle. She wrapped her hand around the handle of the access door for support, but she managed to stay on her feet.

“What are you doing, Ryan?” Her voice carried a slight tinge of hope, but only a tinge; on some level, she already knew what was going to happen. “Why did he give you the gun?”