Gone before goodbye, p.16
Gone Before Goodbye, page 16
Barlow nods. “We’re on the same side here.”
“Good. Then call. I want to hear her voice.”
Barlow heads over to his desk and sits down. Porkchop takes the chair across from him. Barlow opens his phone and checks phone numbers. He puts speakerphone on and calls one. No answer. He calls another. The same.
On the third number, a voice answers with one word. “What?”
Porkchop jolts up. He recognizes the voice. It’s the guy who was in the car with Maggie.
“It’s Evan Barlow,” Barlow says.
“Yes, I know. My phone has caller ID. What do you want?”
“I’d like to speak with Doctor McCabe for a moment.”
Silence.
“Hello?”
“She can’t come to the phone right now. Don’t call back.”
The call disconnects. Porkchop has Barlow try again. No reply. One more time, the same. Porkchop says, “Tell me everything.”
Barlow stands up and starts pacing. “Why are you so sure something is wrong?”
“Someone destroyed her phone.”
“How can you possibly know that?”
“I don’t want to waste time explaining this to you. Tell me what you know.”
“It’s not that complicated. Or uncommon. It’s like you said. Über-rich people come to me. They want the best, and they want full discretion. I’ve traveled on my own a few times. A Saudi prince once. A rich man in Brunei. They fly you in on private jets. They pay you a fortune. It’s all off the books.”
Porkchop nods for him to continue.
“I’m sorry about your son. I met Marc several times. He was a brilliant surgeon. And I know, well, when he and Maggie were together, you could feel the connection, you know what I mean?”
Porkchop gives him nothing.
“So when Maggie lost him and then her license… I wanted to help. She’s a brilliant surgeon too. You probably know that. I figured this was a good opportunity. They wanted the best plastic surgeon money could buy. Maggie needed money and wanted to get back in the game somehow.”
“What kind of surgery?”
“Cosmetic. There would be two patients, so at least two surgeries. The client’s mistress would be getting breast augmentation. And the client himself wanted some facial work. I don’t know the specifics.”
“Who was the client?”
Barlow shakes his head.
“What?” Porkchop says.
“I don’t know who the client is.”
“How can you not know?”
“That’s part of the discretion. They all have middlemen.”
“That was the middleman on the phone?”
“Yes. He calls himself Ivan Brovski. I doubt it’s his real name. He’s the one who contacted me. He’s the one who spoke to Maggie.”
“And you don’t know who he works for?”
“Right.”
“So before you send a doctor overseas like this, you don’t vet the client?”
Barlow says nothing.
“Then how can you know if they are legit?”
“None of them are ‘legit,’” Barlow half snaps. “That’s sort of the point. How did I vet him? A million dollars was deposited for me in an overseas account. Just for taking the meeting. That’s the vetting. I got another million dollars when Maggie agreed to take the job.”
“So they pay you that kind of money to, what, find a top-notch doctor who will work discreetly?”
“Yes.”
“And that’s what happened here?”
Silence.
“Evan?”
“No. This case was a little different.”
Porkchop doesn’t like the way Barlow is starting to squirm. “Different how?”
“Like you said, most of the über rich, they trust me to find them excellent medical care in the most discreet manner possible. That’s how it works—and it works well for all. It’s in all our interests to keep this as clandestine as possible. I’m sure you understand.”
“So what was different this time?”
Barlow opens his mouth, closes it, tries again. “I was going to suggest a surgeon,” he says. “A man I’ve worked with before. He’s an excellent physician right here in New York City.”
“And they didn’t want this guy?”
“No. They wanted Maggie McCabe.”
“They asked for her specifically.”
“Yes.”
“So you weren’t the one who recommended Maggie to them?”
“No. Ivan Brovski came to me. He said he needed a doctor—but that they already knew the perfect one.”
“Maggie?”
“Yes. His instructions were pretty specific. Maggie was the doctor they wanted. Period. They knew I was her trusted family friend.”
“So you didn’t recommend Maggie,” Porkchop says. “It was all a setup.”
“I don’t know if I would call it a setup—”
“This client. The oligarch or whoever. He requested Maggie personally?”
“Not the oligarch,” Barlow says.
“Who then?”
“His mistress. A woman named Nadia. She’s the one who specifically requested Maggie McCabe and only Maggie McCabe.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The end of the dream, if this is a dream, is always the most painful.
She is with Marc again. Somehow, she both knows he is dead and yet completely accepts that he is alive. Yes, this makes no sense, but that’s true of most dreams when you analyze them. Or maybe it’s different this time. In the past, Marc has always come to her. This time, maybe, just maybe, she is coming to him. Either way, Marc is there. They sit at an old wooden table in the middle of a vineyard. There are two glasses of red wine in front of them. Neither has been touched. The sun is setting, the sky a burnt orange. She and Marc sit side by side. He looks out over the vineyard. She stares at his profile. She can’t look away. She fell in love with that profile. It belongs on a Roman coin, she would joke. A tear runs down Marc’s cheek. “I promise you that your life will be extraordinary,” he says to her. Those had been the closing words of his wedding vows. She remembers how overwhelmed she’d been when he said it, standing in front of everyone they loved and cared about, that line, that final line. “I promise you that your life will be extraordinary.” Damn, she’d thought at that moment, such a good line that when she finished her own vows, she’d repeated it. “I promise you that your life will be extraordinary.” Not happy. Not fulfilling. Not complete. Extraordinary. They were not going to buy that suburban house and work in private practice and do the work of married physicians with two-point-four kids and a barbecue in the yard and a basketball hoop in the driveway. In the dream, a tear runs down Marc’s cheek, as it did when he spoke on their wedding day. But that tear had been one of joy. This one is not. She takes his hand. His hand is real, she notices. She can feel it. She wouldn’t be able to feel it if it was a dream. It’s flesh. It’s Marc’s hand. This is reality. Marc is alive. So why is her heart sinking? He finally turns to look at her and when he does, his grip slackens. No, no. Stay. You’re here. With me. But Marc is pulling away. She reaches out and grabs the hand tighter. But the hand is gone. He’s still there. The tear is still on his cheek. Comfort him. Love him enough so that he would never ever go. She throws her arms around him, pulls him close. Don’t go. Please, Marc, stay. This isn’t a dream. This is real. Except now she is starting to awaken. There is nothing crueler. She tries desperately to swim back down, to stay, to cling to this old wooden table in this dream vineyard. Marc is alive here. That’s all that matters. But something is pushing her to the surface. She fights it. But she knows she can’t win. Marc begins to fade away. She is in that crest now, that strange crest between the dream world and full consciousness. There is clarity here, terrible clarity—this is only a dream; Marc is still dead—and it crushes her anew. She feels the tears on her cheeks, real ones, and she knows.
Marc is gone. Marc is dead.
When Maggie blinks her eyes open, a man’s face is staring down at her.
It’s not Marc, of course. It’s Charles Lockwood. The playboy from Ragoravich’s ball.
“You’re okay,” he says to her. “You were hurt in a car accident. But you’re okay now.”
The dream flees. It is amazing and merciful how fast that happens. The only remnants are the tears on her cheek. Maggie opens her mouth to speak to him, but nothing comes out.
“Here,” Lockwood tells her. “Take these.”
He scoops some ice chips into a cup and puts them in her mouth. Maggie knows the move—it gives someone water but won’t let them take in too much at once. Charles wears a white dress shirt, the sleeves rolled up on his knotted forearms. He checks her vitals. The playboy is gone now. The physician has emerged.
“Don’t try to talk yet. Just tap your finger once for yes, twice for no. Do you remember the accident?”
It takes a second and then the memories of her escape rush in—opening the bedroom window, the biting cold, the roof, the gunfire, the Ferrari. It’s all there. Jumbled maybe. But enough.
They’d chased her. They’d shot at her. They wanted her dead.
She had tried to get away. Something hit her. She lost control…
She signals yes. She does so with the finger tap, but she also tests out a head nod. The pain is minimal.
“How…?” she manages to say.
“You reached out to me.”
She gives him a confused face.
“The phone number you called. Our emergency line. It came through. We moved fast.”
Emergency line. She tries to remember. Her head is swimming. The phone number. The one the Marc griefbot had given her. When she tries to speak, Lockwood shakes his head and tells her that she should rest. She ignores that and tries again to shake her vocal cords free. When she finally gets out a few words, they sound muffled and far away. “You knew Marc.”
“I did, yes. I assume he gave you my phone number?”
How to answer that…? She can’t. Not really. So she just nods.
“There’s a lot to tell you, Doctor McCabe,” Lockwood says. “I need your mind clear for that. It’s not yet. I know, I know. You think you’re ready. But you’re not.” He moves his chair closer to her. “First though, I need to know why you’re here.”
How to even explain it all to him?
“I need to know why you’re staying with Oleg Ragoravich.”
He waits. She lets her head fall back on the pillow. Her eyes close.
Does she trust him?
Marc—or the griefbot version anyway—had given Maggie his phone number and told her to call. That means when he was alive, Marc trusted Charles Lockwood. Shouldn’t that be enough? Maybe. But then again—and it may be because her head can’t stop spinning—
how does she know what Charles Lockwood just told her about getting a call is true? Everyone has been playing head games with her. She knows that now. None of this is accidental or coincidental. Ever since Dr. Barlow approached her at Johns Hopkins, Maggie has felt the thing she hates the most—out of control. She feels manipulated, lied to, like she’s fighting against too strong a current. So is Charles Lockwood another part of that? Is he telling the truth or another liar?
There is one way to know for sure: Ask the griefbot.
She sucks on more ice chips. There’s an IV in her arm. She takes a second or two to scan herself and assess her own injuries. There are places of soreness and pain, but she feels pretty damn good. She wants to ask him about that, about her injuries, but she gets that right now Charles is focused on his own questions. When the chips melt and her mouth is moist enough to speak, she says two words: “My phone.”
“What?”
“I need my phone.”
“I don’t advise you calling anyone,” he says. “They’ll be monitoring anyone close to you.”
“Who will be monitoring?”
He shakes his head and scooches a little closer. “Maggie, listen to me. I will explain everything when you’re ready. It’s a lot. But right now—and I can’t stress how important this is—I need to know why you were staying at Oleg Ragoravich’s house.”
“I need my phone first.”
“I don’t have it,” he says. He leans back, blinks, runs his hand through his hair. “Your”—he stops, searches the air for the word—“extraction—it was not easy. Do you remember the crash?”
She nods.
“A bullet grazed your upper back. Wait, are you in pain? I should have asked you that first.”
“I’m fine,” she says.
“The old Ferrari didn’t have seat belts and luckily, I guess, your windshield was shot out. So you didn’t slam into it on impact. You rolled down a ravine. That’s what saved you. You were hard to reach. Ragoravich’s men couldn’t get to you right away. They figured the exposure would kill you anyway. You have frostnip, by the way—you’re lucky it wasn’t full-on frostbite. That will hurt for a while. Point is, they saw no point in rushing to you. The ravine is tricky in the snow. That gave us time to get there.” He looks off, his eyes welling up. “Do you remember an SUV chasing you?”
She nods.
“There were two men in it. They’re both dead.”
Silence.
“So I don’t know where your phone is. In that Ferrari, I guess. Maybe in that ravine, I don’t know. It’s not important. We can get you another. If you’re too tired to answer questions—”
“I’m not.”
“You had my emergency phone number,” Charles says.
“Yes.”
“Only one way: Marc gave it to you before he died.”
That wasn’t the way, of course, but it would be too much to explain the griefbot right now.
“And if he gave you the number, then you know you can trust me.”
She doesn’t know that, but it makes sense. And what choice does she have? She doesn’t even know where she is. She only knows that Marc had warned her that Ragoravich or Brovski would try to kill her, that they had indeed tried, and that someone, probably Charles Lockwood, had saved her.
So why not? She had to trust someone.
“I was hired to do plastic surgery,” Maggie says.
Charles Lockwood frowns at that answer. “On?”
“Oleg and a young woman named Nadia.”
“That’s the mistress I saw you talking to?”
She nods.
“So how did they end up hiring you?”
She explains in spurts about Evan Barlow, about Nadia’s breast augmentation, about the facial surgeries on Oleg Ragoravich, about Ragoravich disappearing from his recovery room, about the sudden panic, about the attempt on her life. She doesn’t go into the griefbot. As she speaks, exhaustion wedges its way into her bloodstream and spreads. It takes everything she has to stay awake.
“You know it’s not a coincidence,” Lockwood says. “You being hired for this job.”
She does now, doesn’t she?
“Who are you?” she asks.
“My name is Charles Lockwood. Just as I said.”
“Are you CIA?”
“Let’s just say something like that.”
“Where am I?”
“You’re safe,” he says. “And to answer your next question, you’ve been here two days.”
Two days. Her head drops back on the pillow. She wants to ask a million more questions, wants to stay awake, but her eyes are starting to flutter closed.
“I want to know…” She stops speaking.
“You will. I’ll tell you everything soon. But one last thing for now.”
Her eyes are closed now.
In the dark, she hears his voice: “Where is Trace Packer?”
“Bangladesh maybe,” she tells him.
“No, he’s not. Trace is missing, Maggie. We think he may have intentionally gone off the grid.”
“I don’t understand.”
And then, as Maggie sinks under, hoping to head back to that dream in the vineyard, she could swear she hears Charles Lockwood say something that makes absolutely no sense: “We think Trace is trying to find your husband.”
Maggie doesn’t see Charles Lockwood the next time she wakes up. Or the time after that. She is being looked after by two women in hospital scrubs. The women are kind and quiet. Maggie feels her strength returning. She asks them questions—where am I? where is Charles Lockwood?—but they give her a lot of tight smiles and no answers. She is soon able to get out of bed, walk around. Her recovery may seem remarkable, but her injuries ended up being more superficial than serious. There is some pain near her shoulder where the bullet grazed, and her head aches from the aftermath of a concussion.
But she also feels antsy and ready to go.
That night, when Maggie wakes up in her dark hospital-like room, she senses someone is with her. Her eyes adjust enough to see the silhouette, and then the face comes into focus. It’s Charles Lockwood. He stares at the wall.
She speaks first. “Why did you say Trace is trying to find Marc?”
He doesn’t move.
“Marc is dead,” she says.
“I know.” Charles Lockwood leans back in the chair. “I shouldn’t have said that.”
“Why did you?”
“How are you feeling?”
“Like I want some answers. Like I want them now.”
He nods. Her eyes are adjusting. She can make out his face now. The gloss and polish she’d seen at Ragoravich’s have been wiped away. There are lines etched on his face. His hair has a touch of gray. He looks weathered, worn.
“There’s a lot to tell you,” he says. “I also don’t know how much you know already. I don’t know how much you knew at the time or how much you figured out later.” He turns to her. “Do you know who Eric Hoffer is?”
“No.”
“An American philosopher. He has this quote I love: ‘Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.’” He smiles. “Good, right?”
She doesn’t reply.
“Corruption starts small,” he continues. “My uncle was a pastor. He had this pious parishioner, a sweet widow, to handle the church’s budget. Mrs. Tingley. She devoted her life to that congregation. She worked long hours. One night, when she stayed late yet again, she got hungry and wanted to get a sandwich. She’d forgotten her wallet at home. That’s what she said. Who knows, right? Anyway, Mrs. Tingley ordered a sandwich from the local sandwich shop and used some of the petty cash from that week’s tithing to pay for it. No big deal. Easily justified. Then she did it again. Then she ordered two sandwiches and brought one home for her son. That’s it. Just an extra sandwich. Ten years later, the parish realized Mrs. Tingley had embezzled almost half a million dollars.”
