A Man Overboard Read online

  “The previous mammogram.”

  “That’s kind of fast, isn’t it? For a mass to form that big?”

  “What concerns me more than that, Jack, is that those breasts,” she pointed to the normal film, “are not those breasts.” She moved her finger to indicate the other photos.

  Jack held up one of each, comparing them.

  “I don’t have to be a radiologist to tell the difference between a B-cup and a double D.”

  He looked at the images again. “What the hell are you telling me?”

  “Have you noticed Stacey’s breasts shrinking?”

  “No.”

  “Then the film with the mass can’t be Stacey’s. Besides, a mass that big would be detectable during a routine exam. Timonen would know this.” She shook her head. “I don’t know how the photos could’ve gotten mixed up. Or how Timonen missed it.” She grew silent. “It doesn’t make sense.”

  But Jack was a step ahead of her. “And you said no one knows where Timonen is?”

  She nodded, her eyes distant. Then they focused, and she looked at him. “Your wife doesn’t have breast cancer, Jack.”

  * * * *

  Stacey didn’t have cancer… He should be jumping for joy through the parking lot, dancing in the rain and singing at the top of his lungs. If, of course, the implications weren’t so dark. As much as he wanted to believe that the whole thing was just an innocent mix up—Stacey’s images getting switched with someone else’s—it simply wasn’t a piece of the puzzle that fit anywhere. As Dr. Kelly had said, Timonen would never have missed it. And now he was MIA, too. What happened on the ship had been planned in advance, the masked men boarding in Miami with a specific mission to carry out…the cancer being the very setup for the cruise!

  But the whole idea of taking a cruise was…Viktoriya’s. She, in fact, had even paid for it. And she had packed up and disappeared with Joseph.

  He dialed Donny as he pulled out of the parking lot, his heart thumping in his chest.

  Voicemail.

  “Hey, Don, it’s Jack. Listen, I need to talk to you. Call me back as soon as you can.” He ended the call just as another was coming in. “Hello?”

  “Pull over.”

  “What?”

  “It’s Johnson. I’m right behind you. Pull over at the McDonald’s.”

  Looking into the rearview mirror, Jack saw a black Ford sedan flashing its lights at him. Slowing, he pulled into the driveway and stopped beneath the famous golden arches boasting of billions served, one of the reasons he was sure America was so fat and unhealthy. He wanted to shoot the sign. It was just one of those days—a Michael Douglas Falling Down day.

  Johnson came running up alongside the passenger door, knocking on the window before Jack could get the pistol out of the glove compartment. He motioned for Jack to unlock the door and slid into the seat and out of the rain. After taking a second to adjust his jacket and tie, he turned and faced Jack. “I heard back from the cruise line.”

  “Yeah?”

  “The tapes were erased.”

  “What?”

  Johnson stopped him by holding up a hand. “I know. I also had someone check on your wife’s cell. There’s no signal at all, which it creates even when it’s off. I pulled the phone records and got the person that texted your wife’s phone the night of…” He trailed off, not wanting to walk Jack back through those moments.

  Jack nodded, saving him from having to finish the thought.

  “It wasn’t Vadim, but it was registered to a Russian male. Coincidence?”

  Jack took a deep breath. A Russian man sends some bizarre text to his wife hours before they’re abducted? He couldn’t help but think of the FSB and wondered again what Ivan was keeping from him. “Did someone review the letters yet?”

  “Someone’s working on it as we speak.”

  He debated whether or not to tell him about Ivan and his SVR theory, and ultimately decided to sit on it for now, to see what the FBI came up with on its own.

  “One of your mother-in-law’s credit cards was used at a gas station in Connecticut,” Johnson was saying.

  Viktoriya… “The cruise was her idea,” Jack said. And when Johnson didn’t respond, Jack turned. “My wife didn’t have cancer. Her mammogram results were switched or doctored. And now her primary is missing.”

  He nodded his head toward the doctor’s office that was now sitting half a mile behind them. “You just find that out?”

  “Yeah.”

  Johnson fell silent, his gaze again locked in the distance as if answers were hidden across the gray sky. “Donny trusts me, Jack. You should, too.”

  Jack was taken aback by the comment. “I am trusting you.”

  “Donny came to a dead end with the picture you gave him. So he sent it to me. I know you don’t trust me like you trust him, but—”

  “Trust you the same way I trust one of my best friends? You’re one of them, Agent Johnson. Ruby Ridge, Wacco, Oklahoma City, the World Trade Center—”

  Johnson sighed. “I’m not one of them, Jack. But…”

  “But what?”

  “You have a decision to make, so let’s look at what we know so far. Your wife doesn’t have cancer. The person who told her she did is missing. Your mother-in-law sets you up on a cruise. Three masked men throw you off the ship, and your wife disappears after writing a suicide note. The ship’s security tapes are erased. Your mother-in-law takes off with your son. Someone with a key to your house tries to burn it down after removing certain things of Stacey’s. Someone shoots at you. Someone does burn down your house…”

  Jack nodded, but it sounded like the stupidest thing he’d ever heard. This wasn’t some badly scripted TV movie, this was his life. It was happening to him! “What’s your point?”

  “I passed the picture along. It’s not the Vadim in the letters. This man was a KGB agent that died in 1982.”

  If the entire solar system crash-landed in his lap, Jack wouldn’t have been more surprised. “Are you telling me that my wife kept a picture of a dead KGB agent hidden in her closet?”

  Johnson sighed. “I don’t know what else I’ll be able to uncover on my own, Jack. That picture is raising eyebrows in the bureau, and it won’t be long before other agencies get a whiff of what I’m digging up. So here’s where you have to make a choice. Either drop this thing now and let all the dots remain unconnected and focus on finding your son…or let me open up an official FBI investigation.”

  He thought about it. “What else can you do?”

  “Not much. And anything I do is going to take time. I’m relying on favors here. It could take me weeks to find Viktoriya’s car. Or it could take me hours with official support.”

  “And once it’s official…”

  “You have to back down and wait things out, and…” He ran a hand through his hair. “You’re going to have to endure those tough questions we talked about before.”

  He threw the door open and swung his feet around, planting them in a puddle. “Think about it. You’ve got an hour to make up your mind.”

  “What do you think I should do?”

  The FBI agent looked right into his eyes. “Honestly, if I were in your shoes, I would be mostly concerned with finding my son. And then, depending on what I believed was going on, I’d either want my wife back or I wouldn’t.” He stepped into the wetness, and thunder rolled across the heavens.

  Jack didn’t notice the door slam shut or Johnson’s sedan roar past him. He was in another world, one connected by a satirical, golden-arched gateway.

  “I’d either want my wife back or I wouldn’t…”

  What the hell was that supposed to mean?

  19

  The next two hours, Jack sat alone in a diner and waited for Donny to call him back. He had no appetite to speak of but somehow managed to force a bacon omelet into his mouth. The coffee, however, had no trouble going down and kept coming. He was on his sixth cup, and his mind was spinning in circles while his foot ta
pped impatiently on the tile floor beneath the booth seat. He wanted to be doing something. But he was stuck with “waiting”—which was the name of the bubonic rat without teeth trying to gnaw him into a plague-laced skeleton. He thought he might explode, spontaneously combust into a cloud of frustration, the incessant feel of rat gums on his psyche pushing him to the brink of…well, Falling Down.

  For a moment, he had considered just driving to Connecticut. But that was a stupid idea. Was he going to walk the state asking random pedestrians if they’d seen an old Russian lady with a four-year-old boy? It might feel better than sitting here doing nothing, but it wouldn’t accomplish an iota more. So instead, he thought of the choice Johnson gave him, about the cryptic message he’d exited with. And it was halfway through coffee cup number two—an hour after Johnson had left him in the McDonald’s parking lot—that the agent called asking for his decision. And Jack had given it to him.

  He needed to find Stacey and Joseph as fast as possible, and obviously, his background in sales didn’t qualify him for that sort of mission. So he relented and gave Johnson permission to make his investigation official. But that didn’t mean he intended to sit around idle like this while the FBI got in a pissing match with Homeland, CIA, NSA, and whatever other departments would want to get involved with what seemed to be shaping into an international charade (if Ivan’s theory was correct, which the KGB photo seemed to indicate). No, he wouldn’t sit still, couldn’t. He wasn’t sure what he would do, but certainly not nothing.

  His incapacity to understand Stacey’s involvement with these Anna and Vadim people had him at a loss, and he figured that side of things would be best left to the Feds. Maybe Stacey wasn’t involved at all; maybe the letters were Viktoriya’s. Maybe Stacey had gotten the books from her, all this going back to Viktoriya in Russia, Anna and Vadim being old friends from the Motherland. But if that were so, Stacey hadn’t thought to mention it when the topic came up. And were the Pearson books even old enough to be Viktoriya’s? Not that they had to be from Russia, but if not, then… Ah, who the heck knew?

  Hopefully, the FBI.

  Again, all he could do was wait for a phone call…or make his own. He called Ivan, wanting his friend’s full impression of the letters, of whatever it was that he’d held back before. But of course, he didn’t answer. Swearing under his breath, and finally unable to bear the toothless rat on his back any longer, he stood and went to the register. After paying the bill, he stepped into the parking lot and observed the veiled position of the sun. It was getting close to six o’clock. It had been a long day so far. He’d been shot at, his house reduced to a pile of ash… As he stood searching for his car, he considered going to a bar. If he had to waste time, he might as well be unconscious for it.

  A familiar ringtone cut the dreary atmosphere before he could step off the curb.

  “Yeah?”

  It was Donny.

  Jack asked if he could stay with him for a little while, until things began sorting themselves out.

  Donny said he’d be home in half an hour.

  * * * *

  Donny had no wife, kids, or pets to share his house with, just a girlfriend of three months who sometimes frequented the darkness beneath his sheets. So, “Mi casa, su casa,” he’d declared upon welcoming Jack through his front door. And from every indication, he’d meant it.

  “So, you gonna fill me in now?” Donny asked. It was pushing ten o’clock, and they were sitting on couches opposite each other. They each had a brown, glass bottle in hand.

  And finally unable to avoid it any longer, Jack went through the whole ridiculous story again, pausing only to lift the bottle to his lips and brush away an occasional tear.

  Donny sat open-mouthed, staring at his friend. “The FSB?” he repeated. “Ivan said that?”

  Jack nodded. He’d introduced Ivan to Donny a couple years ago at a barbeque he and Stacey had hosted.

  “I wonder why he isn’t calling you back,” Donny wondered aloud, his eyes drifting. Then they snapped back to Jack. “Hey, I’m sorry about the picture thing. I couldn’t do anything with it.”

  “It’s fine.”

  “Can’t believe the guy was KGB. What do you think Stacey was doing with it?”

  “That’s the million-dollar question, isn’t it?” After a few passing seconds drowned in silence, he stated, “I can’t just sit here and wait, Don. I need to do something.”

  “Then go to the gym. Hit the bag all night if you need to, but you can’t go off playing Charles Bronson with this stuff. And like it or not, you’re going to be a suspect.”

  “That’s absurd.”

  “Is it? You were the last one seen with her. Your mother-in-law and son are gone. Your house was burned to the ground—”

  “You forgot the part where I threw myself into the ocean, too.”

  “Says you.”

  “There are thousands of passengers who—”

  “—were asleep. And if there’s no video, then all anyone has is your word.”

  “They turned the damn ship around. They pulled me out of the water.”

  Don leaned forward. “And you think the cabin boys are gonna rise to your defense after the cruise line did everything it could to sweep the whole thing under the carpet?”

  Jack swore under his breath.

  “It would never hold up, of course,” Donny concluded, waving his hand in a dismissing motion while leaning back into the big cushions of the couch. “But there’s enough initial suspicion to hold you if they wanted to. Be smart. This ain’t Hollywood. You can’t just go kicking down doors. You’ll either get killed or arrested, and either way it’d be the end of a very disappointing and short movie.”

  Jack stared into the opening of the beer bottle, his mind churning in another direction all of a sudden. “I just don’t understand why she’d keep it a secret from me.”

  “The letters and stuff? Some secrets are dangerous, Jack. Who knows, maybe she was protecting you. Protecting Joseph.”

  He sighed and rubbed his eyes. “Viktoriya got us on the boat.”

  Donny nodded. “Something to think about.”

  Jack started laughing. “I know she never liked me. You think she could’ve hired hitmen to get rid of me? That she took Joe away from the house before it was burnt down?”

  Donny fell silent.

  “I’m joking,” Jack said.

  But Donny didn’t seem amused. “The guy was ordered to get some of her things before burning down the house…”

  Jack stopped laughing. He’d already assumed this, but there was something more in Donny’s eyes. “What are you saying?”

  “How much didn’t she like you?”

  “Are you freakin’ serious?”

  “What if Viktoriya did pay someone off to conjure up the cancer story? To get you on the boat? To get rid of you?”

  Jack frowned, started to say something, stopped, started again, and ultimately just took another drink.

  The Russian countess…

  Donny continued. “She moved for god sake. Took your son somewhere. Why the hell would she do that?”

  Could it be true? Jack thought. Could his mother-in-law hate him that much? Would she have the resources to pull it off? The black-and-white photo of the man came marching into his mind’s eye, posing in the form of some vague answer spelled out with three single letters.

  K.G.B.

  He ran an unsteady hand through his hair. “The guy I shot…he was surprised to see me. And not in an ‘I didn’t think you were home’ sort of way. I wasn’t supposed to be there.”

  “That’s because you were supposed to be dead. That’s the thing, Jack. If you disappear out in the ocean, this story’s over. Someone gets away with it, no questions asked. But now here you are asking questions, getting the FBI involved. Hell, you’re connecting dots that no one would’ve thought twice about. You’re shooting the people that are trying to clean it up!” He put the bottle to his mouth, letting Jack ponder his words.
r />   Jack looked down at his feet. “If you’re right, if this all goes back to Viktoriya and has nothing to do with the books or letters or the FSB—” He paused, unable to actually suggest it.

  Donny chewed at his lip for a second. “Do I think Stacey could be in on it?”

  Jack looked up, his eyes submerged beneath fresh domes of water.

  A phone rang and startled them both.

  Standing up, Jack began tossing cushions, looking for his cell. Finding it, he saw Ivan’s name on the display screen. “Ivan?” he answered. He walked out of the room, leaving Donny behind. “Tell me what you’re not telling me. I know there’s something in those letters that—”

  Before Jack could cross the threshold into another room, he froze.

  “What do you mean?” he whispered, his voice trembling.

  Donny looked up.

  Jack felt the floor beneath his feet start to move, and he stumbled sideways, leaning against the wall for support.

  “You okay, Jack?” Donny got up and stepped toward him.

  “Thanks,” he whispered into the phone. Then he hung up. Turning to face Donny, he said, “I think I’m gonna need something stronger to drink.”

  “What is it? What’s wrong?”

  “Ivan thinks that the Anna in the letters…is Stacey.”

  20

  He woke up from the dream to discover that he’d fallen off the couch. The dream—unreachable moonlight shimmering through moving darkness above him—lingered for a while after, and relief didn’t erase the absolute feeling of abandonment until he was back on the couch and listening to the tick-tick-tick of the wall clock hanging from a nearby wall. Each passing second escorted him up another step and into Donny’s house…to the reality it belonged to. After five minutes, the nightmare fantasy was forgotten, replaced completely by the reintroduction of real facts just as terrible. And the tears began to fall again.

  * * * *

  Donny came down the stairs and passed through the morning light that was streaming through the dining room window. He was dressed in shorts and a faded T-shirt that was clinging desperately to what remained of an NFL shield.