The Garden of Betrayal - Lee Vance [80]
“I’m going to have to go soon,” I said, rubbing my eyes. “I promised Rashid I’d meet him at eleven.”
“Did Rashid know the Venezuelan guy who got murdered?” Kate asked.
“Maybe. I haven’t asked him.”
She drew a dotted red line from Rashid’s name to Carlos Munoz’s and labeled it with a question mark. I looked at the line and shook my head.
“Any relationship the two of them might have had is ancient history. We have to be careful of cluttering the picture with extraneous facts.”
Kate glanced at Claire.
“It’s hard to know what might be important,” Claire said, shrugging.
“The problem here is that the only obvious link between everything and everybody is me,” I said, circling my head to stretch my shoulders. “I broke the Nord Stream story, I received the Saudi data, I’m the one who was bugged, and Kyle was my son.”
“My God,” Claire gasped. “What if that’s the connection?”
“What if what’s the connection?” I demanded.
“You. You just said it. Kyle’s your son.”
My heart skipped a beat.
“Meaning?”
“Meaning we’ve always assumed Kyle was kidnapped randomly,” she said tremulously. “That’s what made things so difficult for Reggie and the other police, right from the beginning, because they didn’t have any motive to work from.” She rose unsteadily and took the marker from Kate’s hand. “But look at the facts. Kyle was supposedly last seen in a car belonging to an OPEC diplomat, and that same diplomat was in trouble with his own people because he’d turned down a bribe of shares in an oil company.” She touched Kate’s written words with the tip of the marker as she spoke. “Don’t you see? It’s all your world. Maybe the connection we’re looking for is you.”
I couldn’t breathe.
“We don’t know enough to reach any conclusions,” Kate protested vehemently. “It’s not fair to blame Dad.”
“This isn’t about blame,” Claire said, visibly struggling to stay composed. “There’s more than enough blame to go around. This is about finding out what happened to your brother, and about protecting our family.” I could feel her looking at me, but I couldn’t meet her eyes. “What do you think, Mark?”
Thinking was beyond me. Claire reached across the table and took my hand.
“Stay with us on this,” she pleaded. “We really need your help.”
“You might be right,” I managed, drawing strength from her touch. “Kyle might have been deliberately targeted.…” My voice faltered, and I began again. “Kyle might have been deliberately targeted because of something I was involved in.…”
“Why?” Kate asked.
“I don’t know. But if we’re right, those same people might still be out there, and they might be interested in me again for some reason. They could even be the people who broke into our home and bugged us.”
There was a horrified silence as we all considered the possibility.
“I need to talk to Reggie,” I said.
Claire squeezed my hand hard and then let go.
“No. I’ll talk to Reggie. You have to go meet with Rashid.” She leaned back and touched his name card on the flow chart. “He knows everybody and everything in the oil world. That’s what you’ve always told me. You have to go ask him if he knows who took our son.”
27
Claire’s words thundered in my head as I staggered the three blocks crosstown to the Four Seasons. I couldn’t think of anyone who had reason to attack Kyle to get to me, or even of a reason that seemed plausible. Revenge? To send some kind of message? But I hadn’t been able to come up with a reason for anyone to spy on me, either. Claire was right—even if I’d never met him, Carlos Munoz was part of my world. It was only because the possibility of a connection between my work and Kyle’s disappearance was too terrible for me to imagine that I hadn’t realized it sooner. I did a sudden about-face on the corner of Madison, seized by a panicked urge to rush back to the Meridien and make sure that Kate and Claire were still okay. No one knew where they were, I reminded myself,