Crystal Whisperer (Spotless Series #3) Read online

  He cleared his throat. “Would you like to take it?”

  “No. Nononono!”

  As I said this, March glanced down at his watch. There too, a single buzz announced a new message. Harassment tactic, huh? I could think of only one person who would know I was here with March and might need to reach him badly enough to try my phone.

  “Phyllis?” I ventured.

  I liked March’s PA; I really did. But at the moment I wished for her to find raisins instead of chocolate chips in her cookies. Every day. For the rest of her life.

  March confirmed my suspicions with a nod, and the black chronograph’s glass went dark, turning into a small LCD screen—I needed to find out where he had bought that toy. I didn’t get a good look at the words flashing on the screen, but he did. With an expression of utter apology, he moved away from me to open his laptop, which sat on a small desk near his bed.

  I watched him connect to a news website and open the live streaming. We both stood still, tight lipped, as the anchors started reporting breaking news of what they called “the worst terrorist attack targeting the United States since 9/11”: the bombing of a jumbo jet over Long Island. The aircraft had disintegrated before even touching the ground, killing all 613 passengers and crew.

  If that background video of people breaking into tears in front of the cameras hadn’t ruined the mood already, seeing the face of my biological father appear on the screen did.

  2

  The Biltong

  “Let her go, Bin Salhad!”

  “Ha ha! Do you think I’m afraid of a decorated SEAL? Destiny is mine!”

  —Natasha Onyx, Muscled Passion of the SEAL #1: Desert Heat

  —Hi, I’m Karen Mills, and you’re watching ABN Live News. I’m here with Professor Emmett Stevens, director of the National Center for Terrorism Studies, and author of seven best-selling books on national security. So, Emmett, the first thing our viewers really want to know is: Who is Dries Kovius, the man suspected of having engineered the bombing of flight DL504?

  —Good question, Karen, and the answer is that we don’t know much at this point. What strikes me is how quickly his name filtered out after the crash was announced: we can assume he’s been under surveillance for a long time.

  —Wouldn’t that mean a spectacular failure of our homeland-security efforts?

  —I can’t be the judge of that. But profiles like his . . . they’re the toughest to assess, because he’s been off the grid for almost thirty years. I honestly believe no one could have predicted what happened this morning.

  —I have to ask. Are we looking at the new Osama Bin Laden?

  —Hard to tell. To me, he sounds more like a professional anarchist, a man who’d embrace others’ causes for the sake of creating destabilization.

  —What do we know about him, about his life?

  —Well, according to the FBI, he’s fifty-two years old, born in Johannesburg. Our South African colleagues confirm the existence of a death certificate with his name, dated from January 1986.

  —He was thought to have been killed in a helicopter crash, right?

  —Yes, with his elder brother. It’s very likely that he used his brother’s death to stage his own disappearance. I think you’re right to compare him to Bin Laden, Karen, in the sense that . . . here, we have the owner of an industrial group, someone wealthy, someone who grew up on the lucky side of the apartheid. And this man, he, um, went rogue, rebelled against the system that engendered him, but also used that system.

  —But how do you go from selling beef sticks to bombing a plane and killing six hundred innocents?

  —That’s what I mean when I say he used the system. This is a man who spiraled into some kind of nihilistic, ultra-violent ideology, who faked his own death so he could train in Afghanistan in the eighties. But he needed funds just like anyone else, and that’s why he invested in legit businesses and siphoned cash from them. Kovius built his empire of death on beef sticks.

  —And ostrich sticks.

  —Yes, and ostrich sticks, Karen.

  —But why strike now? Why this particular flight?

  —There’s a combination of factors. First, this was a Venice–New York flight, operated by Delta Air Lines, and the majority of the victims were American citizens. Then we have the plane itself. The AirBW 850 is largely perceived as a symbol of American industrial superiority. We’re talking about the largest commercial aircraft ever built and the first to feature a full-length sky roof. Additionally, as you know, contact was lost around 11:00 a.m., above the Hampton Bays—

  —On US soil. So, Emmett, you agree that this is clearly an attack against US interests?

  —Obviously, but I think Kovius is just an instrument here. There’s a video recording, which I’m certain you’ve seen . . .

  —Taken by security cameras in Venice Airport? Our teams are making some verifications as we speak. I know our viewers expect nothing but the entire truth from ABN, and we’re working nonstop to authenticate this footage and share it with you. So stay tuned, we’ll be back shortly for this special report on the bombing of flight DL504.

  I sat still on March’s bed for a good minute after he had paused the live streaming. On the screen, a black-and-white picture of Dries stared at us. It must have been taken a decade ago, at a time when he was still March’s mentor. He looked younger, with the same harsh yet elegant features. No trace of gray in his dark hair and, even back then, that razor-sharp gaze under somewhat bushy eyebrows. A million questions raced in my mind. Chief among these: “What the hell?” and “Of all the guys to conceive me with, did my mom really have to pick the vice commander of a secret society of South African assassins?”

  Technically, Dries wasn’t even the man I called dad—never had been. He and I had met for the first time six months prior during the hunt for the Ghost Cullinan. Long story short: when my mother got hired to steal the diamond by a tentacular crime syndicate called the Board, Dries convinced her to screw them and hand it to him instead. Or so he thought. She figured that it’d be unwise to help the Lions develop their business any further and vanished with me and the stone. Dries found us, but my mom was shot by one of his men before he had a chance to get his precious Cullinan back.

  Nobody wins; fast roll the credits.

  Except those Board guys—and especially their boss, a nice lady people called the Queen—never quite got over the loss. They kept looking for the next decade, until one day, at last, they found a single bread crumb. That led straight to me. The Queen, who was getting a little impatient, sent an OCD hitman to my apartment and, well, you know the rest: March and I followed the trail of bread crumbs all the way to the Cullinan . . . and Dries. It didn’t go well, and there wasn’t much left of Dries’s Tokyo penthouse after March was done reuniting with his master. Yet, uncharacteristically, Dries initiated a reconciliation of sorts after losing the diamond and two dozen henchmen in the process.

  But still, we weren’t what I would call close.

  I turned to March, who stood with his arms crossed, his shuttered expression betraying nothing of his thoughts.

  “How much of it is true?” I asked.

  “I have no idea.”

  “I don’t mean the bombing. I mean”—I made an all-encompassing gesture—“everything else. All that stuff about his life.”

  “The biltong, it’s a side business.” March sighed. “The rest was more or less accurate, but he didn’t go to Afghanistan for training, he—”

  “I don’t think I want to know what he did there.”

  “I understand.”

  “So that’s his real name, Kovius?” I asked doubtfully.

  I read the hesitation in March’s eyes. Even after all this time, he couldn’t bring himself to betray the man who had picked him from the streets at the age of eighteen, freshly out of juvie, to teach him a “better” way: contract killing. Dries had shattered an empty shell, reshaped it into a man, and given his creature a purpose and a brotherhood. A place in the
world.

  It had been ten years since March had left the Lions, but he could no more escape that past than he could his own skin: each new recruit received a large scarification on his back, in the shape of a fearsome lion head. I had seen March’s own carving, traced its torturously detailed African pattern. I knew the code number it concealed. His pledge of loyalty to Dries was forever etched in his skin. It was an integral part of him.

  March’s lips moved, and in the twitch of his brow, I guessed what he was going to say. “Yes, that is his name.”

  A lie.

  It wasn’t as if we were married or anything; he didn’t owe it to me to unveil every last one of Dries’s secrets. But it still stung to have those cobalt eyes look straight into mine as he lied. Wasn’t he the one who had declared a few days ago that now that we were together, we’d be honest with each other?

  Unwilling to start a battle I had no idea how to fight anyway, I let myself fall onto the bed’s comforter. “At least that expert didn’t mention the Lions. It’s good . . . right?”

  March sat next to me. “I doubt whoever leaked Dries’s name to the press would dare to bring them up. There are specific penalties for that.”

  I was tempted to ask what, but after a second of reflection, I decided that I didn’t want to investigate the matter. We were probably talking about nasty stuff here. A chiming sound drew my attention to March’s laptop on the desk; a call window had just opened, and Phyllis’s face appeared on-screen. There was no trace of the usual sly cheerfulness in her gray gaze, and her wild red curls had been tamed into a loose bun.

  I knew she didn’t like Dries much—to be fair, I had once witnessed him call her a bitch and threaten to eviscerate her son—but her tense features softened into friendly understanding when she caught sight of me behind March. Her lips pursed before she spoke in a steady voice. “I tried to gather as much intel as possible, but this doesn’t look good.”

  “Who’s leaking his name?” March asked.

  “Technically, the FBI, but they’re being spoon-fed by—”

  “The CIA?”

  She gave a faint shrug. “Business as usual, boss.”

  I moved closer to the desk. “But why are they doing that? That doesn’t sound like something Dries would do. Are they trying to frame him or something? I thought the Lions minded their own business, and no one minded theirs.”

  “Well,” Phyllis began, leaning back in a black leather armchair, “based on the intel circulating right now—”

  “ABN mentioned a video,” March said.

  “Yes. Just a second.”

  She typed something, and another window popped up, this time with some grainy footage playing. I recognized Dries as one of three men wearing sunglasses and standing near a private jet on a sunny airport tarmac. He was chatting with some heavy guy wearing what appeared to be traditional Saudi attire: a long, white tunic and a white-and-red checkered ghutra. After a few seconds, Dries handed his interlocutor a small suitcase. The fat guy could be seen opening the case and checking its contents before giving it to a third man. That one wore a dark suit and looked like some kind of assistant. He immediately left after a courtesy bow to the Saudi guy.

  “What’s in the case?” I asked.

  “No idea.” Phyllis began. “But what you see here is security footage recorded at Venice Airport ten hours ago. The guy taking a delivery from our favorite bedside rug is the lovely Sheikh Abdul Latif Ibn Muhammad Ibn Bashir, former minister of defense and aviation of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. He’s in exile after some half-baked coup blew up in his face a few years ago, and he’s now a strong supporter of the rise of a global Sunni caliphate that would spread from Turkey to Oman.”

  “The world belongs to dreamers,” March commented somberly.

  We watched as, on screen, the third man walked away and into one of the airport’s terminals. “So we have no idea what his business with Dries is?”

  “Oh, we do have an idea.” Phyllis winced. “The one carrying the case is Dondedieu Saïd, better known as Abu Saïd. French jihadist. Small fry. He did the typical trip from Spain to Turkey, crossed the border to Syria to join Al-Nusra, until he got a higher calling and became some kind of low-grade errand boy for Bashir.”

  “Where did he take the case?” March asked.

  “Onto flight DL504. He made it through security, embarked with the rest of the passengers, and now he’s on both the victims and the suspects list.”

  I ran my palm across my face. “Dries gave him something to bomb the plane?”

  Phyllis rapped impeccable red nails against her glass desk. “Sure looks like it.”

  I lay sprawled on March’s bed in front of my laptop, combing conspiracy forums for unofficial news regarding the bombing. Already, the Internet was working its magic: Dries was a confirmed reptilian shapeshifter, the secret leader of Boko Haram, and many users also recognized him standing among the wreckage of the Silver Bridge on a picture dating back to 1967 . . . Never mind that he’d have been a toddler at the time: mothmen, as one guy clarified, only possess an external human appearance and do not experience any stage of growth.

  March, for his part, had been sitting at his desk for almost an hour, hunched over his laptop, gobbling mint after mint from the precious tube that never left him. The video-call window kept popping up as Phyllis forwarded him bits of intel slowly trickling from the deep web. I could tell that, beneath his cool façade, the news had hit him hard too. Possibly even harder than me, because of the tangle of awe, disappointment, gratitude, and resentment weaved into March and Dries’s bond.

  I looked up from my screen, watching his fingers tap the touchpad every now and then as he went through yet another file about Abu Saïd. I was reminded of those Saturday nights, during my teenage years, when my dad would be working in his study, similarly hunched and silent. I’d creep down the hallway to watch him, waiting for him to be done. I wanted him to drop those damn financial reports, look up, and talk to me. He sometimes did, if I hovered around his desk long enough. He would groan that I was worse than a mosquito, get up from his chair, and take me to dinner at the Russian Tea Room.

  In case you’re wondering, I’m not talking about Dries here. I know it’s gonna sound a bit opportunistic, but when my mom found out she was pregnant with the spawn of a professional killer, she chose to give the news to the nice American banker she had just met instead. And so, Simon Halder, one-week London fling, Olympic-level curmudgeon, became my dad. The kind of dad you spend two weeks in summer with, the one who sends you stuffed bears and postcards for your birthday . . . until my mom was killed, and I went to live with him.

  I guess it’s true that life’s trials reveal a person’s true colors: He rolled up his proverbial sleeves and grumbled his way through the challenge of socializing a traumatized fifteen-year-old girl who had been homeschooled and lived in her pajamas for the better part of the past decade.

  My mother had let me grow up free yet sheltered. With her, I had never set foot in a classroom, never stayed in the same place for more than three months, and seldom played with kids my age. She’d taken me all around the world, and I’d learned everything school can’t teach you: languages, culture, politics . . . My dad had been left to deal with everything else.

  He did a fine job, considering that I made it through high school, stopped picking my nose in public around the age of twenty-two, and graduated from Columbia engineering with honors.

  Anyway, what worried me the most at the moment was that my father knew about Dries. Back in the day, my mom had left out the fine print about her ex, but he had sort of guessed the guy was bad company. To the best of my knowledge, Dad hadn’t made any attempt to reach me yet, but it was only a matter of hours before the hunt began—less, if luck screwed me. I got up from the bed with a sigh and did what I knew best: hover.

  March’s arm moved to catch me as I padded past him. “Come here.”

  He pulled me toward him. I relaxed in his hold and wrapped my arms
around his neck, resting my cheek against his. I didn’t mind the slight rasp of his five-o’clock shadow; it was an integral part of my little bubble of heaven, a warm, cozy place that smelled of soap, laundry, and mints.

  I quickly scanned the pictures on the laptop’s screen: mug shots of guys I’d never heard about, some satellite images of the wreckage. A tired smile stretched March’s lips when I kissed the corner of his mouth. “Have you learned anything new?”

  “Yes and no. Details about the crash . . . nothing conclusive. Bashir is off the grid, and the Saudis made it clear they don’t want to see his name tied to the attack.”

  “Is that why the FBI is targeting Dries? Where is he anyway?”

  He took my hand and pressed an absent kiss to the back of my knuckles. “No idea. Possibly still in Italy.”

  “Won’t the Lions help him?”

  “No. He wouldn’t allow it. The brotherhood comes first: he’ll let himself become a target if it means protecting the rest of the organization.”

  “You mean he’ll take the fall for them?” I completed, an unpleasant weight in my stomach at the idea.

  “Not exactly. I have no doubt that he’ll indulge the authorities in a game of cat and mouse to shield the Lions . . . but I’m not sure that this”—he gestured at the screen—“is their work. The Lions are assassins, mercenaries. They cauterize strategic targets, destabilize local governments—”

  “But they don’t do mass murder.”

  “No, they are professionals fighting other professionals. I can’t see them bombing a commercial flight, not even to eliminate a target.”

  I let go of him to lean against the desk. “They have bombed planes before though.”

  From the silence that followed, I gathered that March and I had been entertaining a similar train of thought. Who, in the CIA, could possibly be working so hard to convince the investigators that Dries was responsible for the attack on flight DL504?