The FBI Thrillers Collection Books 1-5 - Catherine Coulter [676]
“I’m thinking she wants to do both. At least now you two are together. The rest will come, Thomas, just be patient. For God’s sake, she’s known you for twenty-four hours.”
“You’re right, of course. But—never mind. Jesus, Krimakov just went right in there and killed everyone,” Thomas said. “Everyone, without hesitation. To flush me out that first time, he released Becca. I can’t imagine what he’d do to her now that she’s with me. Well, yes I can. He’d kill her with no more remorse than when he killed all the others. And yes, there’s no doubt in my mind that he believes she’s with me now. Damnation, he had a silencer on the gun, Adam.”
“Yes.”
“Agent Marlane had six shots pumped into her. He saw that the male agent wasn’t me, knew he’d been set up, and went berserk. Dell Carson, the agent playing me, had his gun out, but he didn’t have time to fire. Neither did Agent Marlane.”
“Yes. I know.”
“How the hell did he get away? Hawley had undercover folk stationed all over that floor and the exits.”
Adam shook his head. “His disguise must have been something else. Maybe he even dolled himself up as a woman. Who knows? Do you remember if Krimakov did disguises back then?”
Thomas leaned against the corridor wall, his arms crossed over his chest. “No. But it’s been so many years, Adam, too many. What troubles me, and I know I can’t let it, is that Becca just can’t be sure that the guy who took her, the guy on the phone to her, was older.” Thomas shook his head. “Another thing. Vasili was fluent in English, but I’ve read the transcripts of the conversations he had with Becca. It sounds so unlike him. And what he wrote, what he said to her, what he did. Calling himself her boyfriend, murdering Linda Cartwright, then digging her up, smashing her face, all as a sick joke to drive Becca over the edge. That’s the behavior of a psychopath, Adam. Krimakov wasn’t a psychopath. He was supremely arrogant, but as sane as I was.”
“Whatever Krimakov was back then, he’s changed,” Adam said. “Who knows what’s happened to him during the past twenty years? Don’t forget all those killings: a second wife, two children, the guy whose password he used to get into the computer system to expunge all his personal data, killing someone to fake his own accidental death in that car accident. How many more we don’t know about? And that brings up another question. You said that you believe you’re now his only focus, his purpose for living. What about his son? He’s in that burn clinic in Switzerland. He doesn’t care about him anymore? Or maybe that wasn’t an accident, either, and he tried to kill him, too?”
“I don’t know.”
Adam said, “Maybe he was always over the top and he’s just gotten more so, and maybe that goes to explain why he appears not to be worrying about his son. No, Thomas, don’t argue with me. He’s now here—in a foreign country to him—no longer in Crete. He’s on our turf, and he probably hasn’t been here for all that long.”
“Listen, Adam, we don’t know that. Officially, Vasili Krimakov hasn’t come into this country in the past fifteen years. He was here once back in the mid-eighties, checking around, trying to sniff me out. That was when he killed that assistant of mine simply because he’d seen her with me and decided that she was my mistress. But I got away that time and he left, returned to Crete. We’ve learned he went to England a number of times, but he hasn’t gone back there recently. Unofficially, he could have bounced in and out of the United States with a dozen different phony passports. Who in Greece would catch on to that? Or if they did, even care?”
“Still, we have to assume that he was in Crete most of the time. For God’s sake, he was married. He eventually had a kid with this woman. So he simply can’t know his way around here all that well.”
Thomas said, “Becca is right. He’s a monster, no matter the excuses I make for the man I knew more than twenty years ago. Of course I didn’t really know