London Bridges - James Patterson [71]
About eleven, I walked Kayla outside to her Health van. We stopped and talked for a moment on the front porch.
“Thanks for coming by to see her,” I said.
“You don’t have to thank me,” Kayla said. “I do it because I want to. It just so happens that I love your grandmother. I love her tremendously. She’s one of my guiding lights, my mentor. Has been for years.”
Then Kayla leaned in very quickly, and she kissed me. She held the kiss for a few seconds. When she pulled away she was laughing. “I’ve wanted to do that for the longest time.”
“And?” I asked, more than slightly surprised at what had just happened.
“Now I’ve done it, Alex. Interesting.”
“Interesting?”
“I have to go. I have to run.”
Laughing to herself, Kayla ran out to her van.
Interesting.
Chapter 92
AFTER SOME MUCH-NEEDED R & R I went back to work and found that I was still assigned to the extortion/terrorism case, which apparently now involved chasing down whoever was responsible, whoever had the money. I was told that I was picked because I’m relentless.
In a way, I was glad it wasn’t over. I was still in touch with several of my contacts on the case: Martin Lodge in England, Sandy Greenberg with Interpol, Etienne Marteau in Paris, but also police and intelligence in Tel Aviv and Frankfurt. Everybody I talked to had possible leads, but no one had anything hot, or even what I would consider lukewarm.
The Wolf, or maybe al Qaeda, or some other clever, homicidal bastards were out there with close to two billion dollars in their coffers. Among other things, three city blocks in Paris had been destroyed. Political prisoners had been released. There had to be some slipup, some way to find them, or at least some way to discover who they were.
My second day back, the analyst Monnie Donnelley and I made a paper connection that interested me enough to drive all the way out to Lexington, Virginia. I arrived at a two-story contemporary on a back road called Red Hawk Lane. A Dodge Durango was parked in the driveway. A couple of horses grazed in a nearby paddock.
Joe Cahill met me at the door of the house. The former CIA agent was all smiles, just as I remembered him from past meetings about the Wolf. Joe had told me over the phone that he was eager to help the investigation in any way he could. He invited me inside and had coffee and a store-bought crumb cake waiting in his den. The room had views of an outlying pasture, a pond, and the Blue Ridge Mountains off in the distance.
“I guess you can tell I miss the job,” Joe said. “Some days, anyway. You can do only so much hunting and fishing. You fish, Alex? You hunt?”
“I’ve taken the kids fishing a couple of times,” I said. “I hunt some, yeah. Right now, I’m hoping to bag the Wolf. I need your help, though, Joe. I want to go over some old ground. Something has come up.”
Chapter 93
“ALL RIGHT, YOU WANT to talk about him again. How we got the Wolf out of Russia? What happened once he arrived in America? How he disappeared after that? It’s a sad but well-known and documented story, Alex. You’ve seen the files. I know you have. Almost ended my career.”
“Joe, I don’t understand why nobody seems to know who he is. What he looks like. His real name. That’s the story I’ve been getting for over a year now, but how can it be? How could we work with England to extricate an important KGB guy, and not know who he is. Something bad happened in Paris—but nobody knows what. How is it possible? What am I missing? What has everybody missed so far?”
Joe Cahill spread his large workingman hands, palms up. “Look, I obviously don’t have all the pieces, either. It’s my understanding that he was undercover when he was inside Russia. Supposedly, he was a young, very cagey agent, which would mean he’s still only in his early forties. But I’ve also read reports that he’s in his late fifties or sixties now. That he was actually pretty high up in the KGB when he defected. I’ve also heard that the Wolf is female. I think he spreads the rumors