Deadline Man

“She told me I would fall in love with a writer and he would be a righter of wrongs, too.”

“I know.”

She steps to face me and takes my hands. She has lovely hands, pale with long, sculpted fingers. She could be a hand model.

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; “And he would be a very worldly man who would scare me a little. But he’d be just what I needed. I like to tell that story. But I would have had this vision without the fortuneteller. I had it that day you kissed me, right here.”

I look at her and my chest constricts. Is this what they mean by heartache? In the long moment, I know I’ll miss her forever. I know I’ll look back and ache and wish I had done differently, been a different man. It passes and I place her hands at her side brusquely. I never had a sixth sense. I do have an essential intuition necessary for journalists and cops. I can tell when someone is lying to me.

“Goddammit, Rachel, lives are at risk here.” I advance on her and her loving face suddenly shows fear. “I know you’re lying to me. Your father invested in Hardesty’s hedge fund. Don’t you get it? I’ve got blood on my hands! Somebody’s going to pay! I want the truth!”

She says my name over and over, denying she knows anything, retreating as I match her step for step. A part of me, deep inside the bastard, is watching that she doesn’t trip.

“Tell me!”

She starts crying. She looks behind her, to see an avenue of retreat. But I take her shoulders and make her face me. Then she whispers, just audible above the noise of the wind.

“Dad was in the CIA.”

Chapter Twenty-six

I had only met Craig Summers once before the encounter at Pike Place Market. Rachel had taken me to meet her parents for dinner. The “meet the parents” thing had set off my worry meter, but I had enjoyed the evening. Summers didn’t live at all like the stereotypical Seattle tech mogul. He and his wife owned a Victorian painted lady on Queen Anne Hill. It was beautifully restored and tastefully furnished, but honestly, too, as if real people lived there. The parents were nice people. I should have expected no less considering their daughter.

Now, as we sit in my car, Rachel lays it out for me. The real Craig Summers bio was somewhat different than what appeared in the newspaper. In fact, he went through the University of Washington in three years on a full academic scholarship. Then he joined the Central Intelligence Agency, where he worked for a decade. When he became the chief executive of his first company, Praetorian Systems, it was a CIA front.

True, it sold new software for tracking ships by commercial satellite—but the technology came out of government labs, not Craig Summers’ brain. It was “sold” to the U.S. Navy and allied navies at first, giving the agency a way to launder some money at the same time. But it gave Summers and his team credibility as defense contractors, and soon less-friendly governments came calling, sometimes covertly. The idea wasn’t to sell the software, but to identify international arms merchants, offer virus-ridden software code to less-friendly governments, and find domestic double agents. It was a late Cold War enterprise. Once the Berlin Wall fell, Summers indeed made money from the sale of Praetorian—but it was his separation fee from the CIA.

Rachel claims she knew none of this until she was in college.

“I hated him when I found out,” she says. “I was in my student rebel days and had read about CIA abuses. When I grew up a little more, I came to believe he was serving the country. Then I got mad all over again after 9/11, when I read about the secret CIA prisons, rendition. The black sites. Dad was genuinely angry about it, too. He was horrified. He said he had never done anything like that, that it violated the agency’s own rules. I believe him. He’s a good man.”

It is hard to imagine Rachel of the calm dark blue eyes rebelling against anything, but we never really know anyone, do we? “And Moonglow Systems, that was a scam too?” I ask. It was Summers’ next company and biggest success.

“Dad was never in a scam,” Rachel says with heat in her voice. “And, no. Moonglow was all his. He’s a very good executive. He understood the possibilities of the Internet very early. He built that company.”

“With a nice nest egg from the CIA.” Maybe Craig Summers invested some of it with Troy Hardesty because Hardesty was involved with the CIA, too. Maybe that’s why Troy’s hedge fund survived the recession so well. Maybe her dad stayed on as a consultant with the agency. When I say this to Rachel she flares at me.

“I don’t know anything about that! I’ve never even heard this man’s name before you told me about this. How do you know he and Dad knew each other?”

I scan the parking lot in the rearview mirror, seeing nothing amiss. “So the guys who roughed me up are CIA. I need to keep you out of this,” I say. “Your note said he knew bad people. Did you write that?”

She shakes her head. “My part was the missing you terribly line. And that you were making a mistake, with us.”

“And 11/11—written as a date. You don’t know.” I sigh heavily.

She stares ahead and says nothing. I don’t think she knows. The sun breaks through the light cloud cover and suddenly the sound has a brilliant white V running across it. It lasts for long moments of silence.

“You said you have blood on your hands,” Rachel finally says. “What do you mean?”

Now it’s my turn to clam up. All I dare tell her is what I finally say. “It’s better, it’s safer, that you don’t know.”

“Those were almost exactly the words dad used, the day he just lost it about you. He said, ‘Oh, my God, I’m going to have blood on my hands.’ I don’t think I’ve ever seen him more upset.”

I ask her when this was.

“The Sunday after you dumped me.”