I forgave him, Khan had said.
Evan stood and walked to the opposite side of the cellar and pressed his forehead against the cool stone and took deep, shuddering breaths. Khan did it here, he tortured and killed his own son for betraying him. For betraying the family business.
What would his parents have done to him if he’d stumbled on the truth or threatened to expose them? He could not imagine this. No. Never.
Khan’s voice echoed in his ear: I know them much better than you do.
Evan closed the body bag. He went upstairs to the den. He dragged Thomas Khan’s body down the basement steps, placed him next to his son. He went back upstairs, found a folded sheet in a bedroom closet, and covered both corpses with it.
He drank four glasses of cold water, ate four aspirin that he found in the first-aid kit. His eyes hurt, his stomach ached.
He returned to the study and tested the desk and a credenza; both were locked. Evan went back to the basement and searched Khan’s pockets; no keys, but a wallet and a PDA. He powered it on; a screen appeared, asking for his fingerprint.
He dug Khan’s right hand from under the sheet, pressed the dead man’s forefinger against the screen. Denied. He grabbed Khan’s left hand, pressed Khan’s left forefinger against the screen. It accepted the print, opened to show a normal startup screen. He studied the applications and files. The PDA held only a few contacts and phone numbers: a few Zurich banks, a listing of London bookstores. There was an icon for a map application. He opened it. The last three maps accessed were London; Biloxi, Mississippi; and Fort Lauderdale, Florida. A notation on the Biloxi map, showing the location of a charter air service. Biloxi wasn’t that far from New Orleans. Maybe that was where Dezz and Jargo had fled after the New Orleans disaster.
But nothing that announced, X marks the spot where your father is.
Except maybe Fort Lauderdale. A specific place in Florida. And Gabriel had said Evan’s mother had claimed that they would meet his father in Florida. Carrie thought his father was in Florida.
Carrie. He could try to call her. Reach her through the London CIA office. Tell her he was alive. But, no. If Jargo’s agents or clients within the CIA thought he was dead… no one would be hunting him. And they had known he was in London, had nearly killed him. Bedford’s group had been compromised.
He wanted to know Carrie was safe; he wanted to tell her he was alive. But not now, not until he had his father back. She wouldn’t go back to the house Pettigrew had taken them to, he believed; if Pettigrew worked for Jargo, it was too dangerous. She would carefully reunite with Bedford.
Evan reconfigured the password program to delete Khan’s fingerprint and used his own thumbprint as the passkey. It might be useful later. He put the PDA in his pocket. Standing up, he spotted a toolbox in the corner and took it upstairs.
He jabbed a screwdriver into the desk lock with caution; after the trick pepper-spray lighter he could not take anything on face value. But there was only the click of the metal against metal.
He picked up a hammer and with four solid blows cracked open the locks on Thomas Khan’s desk. In one drawer he found papers relating to the ownership of the house. It had been bought last year by Boroch Investments. Boroch must be a front for Khan; if there was no obvious connection to Khan, the police wouldn’t come here. Thomas Khan wouldn’t show his face if he could help it in digging his escape tunnel.
In the desk drawer he found stationery and envelopes for Boroch Investments, a passport from New Zealand, one from Zimbabwe, both in false names with Thomas Khan’s pictures inside. There was a phone, in need of a charge but working. He dug out the charger from the back of the drawer and began to power the phone up. He checked the call log; the list was empty.
He forced the lock on another desk drawer. It held a metal box, containing bricks of British pounds and American dollars. Beneath that an automatic pistol and two clips. He counted the money. Six thousand British pounds, ten thousand in U.S. funds. He set the cash on the desk. The side desk drawers were empty.
He attacked the credenza with a hammer, a screwdriver, and then a crowbar. Dizziness oozed into his brain, from lack of eating, from exhaustion, from the pepper spray, but he knew that he was close, so close to getting what he needed. So close.
The door cracked under the crowbar. Empty.
No, it couldn’t be. Couldn’t. Khan would need data files, he would need to access new accounts, erase old ones. There had to be a computer in this house aside from the PDA. Unless the bastard kept it all in his head. Then Evan was back to zero.
He searched the room. The small closet held office supplies, old suits, a raincoat. He went through the guest bedrooms – practically bare – and the downstairs bedroom. He searched carefully, knowing he was no pro, but reminded himself to be disciplined and thorough. But he found nothing, and the chance to close his hands around Jargo’s throat started to turn to smoke.
In the darkened den, he risked a reading light. The bookcase. Khan had hidden his gun behind the volumes.
Evan searched the rest of the bookcase. Nearly every inch filled with good books, leftovers from Khan’s store. How could such a psychopathic bastard have such excellent taste in reading? But nothing else lay concealed behind the books. He rifled through the kitchen cabinets and pantry. He dumped canisters of salt and flour on the floor. Nothing. A freezer full of frozen dinners, but he ripped them open, dumped them in the sink, hoping a disk or CD might be hidden inside. Suddenly he was hungry and he microwaved a frozen chicken-and-noodle dinner, nauseated at eating a dead man’s food. He decided to get over it.
He sat down on the floor and forced himself to calm down as he ate. The food was tasteless but filling. His stomach settled. The jet lag and the fade of his adrenaline rush swamped him, and he fought the urge to just lie down on the floor and close his eyes, slip into sleep. Maybe there was nothing more to find.
The basement. The one room he hadn’t searched. He went down the darkened steps. Past the sheeted bodies. The basement was small. Square, with a stacked washer/dryer on one side and metal shelving on the other. The shelves held an assemblage of junk. More books, boxed. He went through them all. A television set with a cracked screen. A box of gardening tools, clean of mud, probably never used. A couple of cases of canned soups and vegetables and meats, in case Khan had to hide a fellow operative.
His gaze went back to the TV with its cracked eye. Why would anyone keep a small broken TV? TVs were cheap now. To repair the screen, you might as well buy a new one. Maybe Khan was driven by a sense of waste not, want not. But he had been well-to-do. A broken TV was nothing.
Evan took the TV down from the shelf. He retrieved a screwdriver and unfastened the back.
The television had been stripped of its guts. Inside was a small notebook computer and charger. Evan powered on the laptop; it presented a dialog box prompting him for a password.
He entered DEEPS.
Wrong. He entered JARGO.
Wrong. He entered HADLEY. Wrong. The CIA could crack this, but he couldn’t. Even if he deduced a password, Khan might have encrypted and passworded the files on the system. He would be a fool not to take that precaution.
Evan stared at the screen. Maybe he should just take the computer and go to Langley, the CIA’s headquarters. Turn himself in…
… and not save his father.
His father’s face floated before him in the darkened basement, and he stared at the father-and-son bodies of the Khans. If he believed the past few days, his father was a professional killer who had stamped out lives the way others stamped out ants. But that wasn’t the father he knew. It could not be, the truth could not be that harsh or that simple. He had to have the data to rescue his father.
Or, he thought, he had to create the illusion that he had the data.
The laptop. He didn’t need the data, he just needed the laptop itself to barter for his father. It might hold the exact same files his mother had stolen. At the least it was a negotiating point: he could always threaten to turn over the laptop to the CIA unless his father was released. Jargo couldn’t know with certainty that the files were, or weren’t, on Khan’s machine. Even if this didn’t hold the client list, it might hold enough data – financial, logistical, personal – to destroy the Deeps.
His mother might have stolen the files from this very laptop. He tried to imagine how she had done it. She’d
