The Girl Who Wrote The New York Times Bestseller: A Novel (Thaddeus Murfee Legal Thrillers Book 8) Read online

  Maritan was several years Mrs. Evans junior, a surgeon trained at America's oldest hospital, Bellevue. He told Mrs. Evans he'd never known love before. It took her all of seventy-two hours to fall madly in love and phone her sister in Poughkeepsie to tell her so. The man wanted her to come away, she told the sister; but he insisted she first confront Royal Evans and tell him she wanted half of everything. Including his Swissair retirement.

  Her sister asked, would she do it? Would she demand half of everything?

  Mrs. Evans didn't equivocate. Maritan was the nicest man she'd ever known. He was considerate, caring, and soft-spoken. He wanted to know everything about her, hung on every word she uttered. Two blissful nights with a youthful, virile, intelligent doctor—what woman in her fifties could resist? Especially when Royal Evans was distant and growing angry in his advancing years. He hated the kids crossing the lawn, he hated dark skins, he hated Europe, and he hated her family. When he was home, he refused to shave and their time together consisted of white whiskers and regret. The thought of it: that she had thrown away thirty years. It came down to an easy choice for Mrs. Evans.

  "Go for it," her sister encouraged. "You only go around once."

  Mrs. Evans told Royal Evans there was no way she could ever turn away from Maritan the surgeon. She demanded half of everything. Including his Swissair retirement. He imagined himself living in a studio with a foldout bed above a butcher shop, the victim of a sack and pillage.

  He decided to dig in and let it blow over. But she was having none of that.

  Mrs. Evans demanded he leave the house that night. He tossed down two scotches and refused. She dialed the police while he watched and listened to her report a domestic disturbance. Taking the scotch bottle, he grabbed his flight bag and left. Now the Chechens had them separated. They followed him and checked into the room next door in the Palmer House in Chicago.

  The following morning, the Chechens noisily settled around the next table as Royal Evans ate breakfast in the hotel cafe. Evans couldn't help but overhear. The topic was an upcoming flight to Zurich. The Chechens erupted into a violent argument about flying times and time zones. Evans was astonished, because it was his flight and he would be flying their plane; so he interrupted them and offered his thoughts.

  Ayub, the younger of the two, eyed him with bristling suspicion as he spoke.

  "And you know this how?" Ayub said sharply.

  Evans smiled his friendly, Welcome Aboard smile, hiding from them the fact he actually loathed them because they were dark and spoke with accents. "I know it because I have been the pilot on this trip probably two hundred times. To make a long story short, your friend is right, and you are wrong."

  Ayub relaxed and let the pilot see he was warming to him. "Well, this is unexpected help. How can we thank you?"

  "Not necessary. Call it serendipity. Just let me finish eating in peace."

  "I shall call it that. And I shall buy your breakfast as well if you will allow it. Then you won't hear us again. Not one single peep."

  "No need for that."

  "We insist. Please—join us for coffee."

  "I'm fine over here."

  "Are you on a layover?"

  "No, I live here as of last night. Problems at home."

  Ayub winced. "Aniji, he knows all about that. He had an American wife once."

  The older man, Aniji, shook his head sadly. "Never again. No American women."

  Evans nodded and found himself oddly sympathetic. "I hear that," he said.

  "And what is your name, captain?"

  "Royal Evans. And you can forget about the captain stuff. I'm off-duty."

  They traded stories. They were petroleum engineers visiting Russaco's home office two miles away. They explained they were from Russia and they found America inspiring and wonderful. Which pleased Royal Evans. Everyone likes to hear visitors admire their home. They asked if he had ever toured a petroleum refinery and he laughed and said no, he had not thought about visiting a refinery. One thing led to another, and he agreed to accompany them on a tour of the local plant. It just might help take his mind off the problems at home. And for Russians, they weren't so bad, after all, thought Royal Evans. And who knows, the Chechens said, maybe Mrs. Evans will have come to her senses in a day or two. Evans said he doubted that, that she hadn't strayed even once in thirty years. No, this was serious, and he dreaded the worst.

  They toured the refinery. They gave him a Russaco hard hat to keep. Little stuff, including buying his dinner. That night they drank together, and they spiked his scotch. When Evans woke for a bladder call at five a.m., he was horrified to find with him in a bed a female who couldn't have been more than fifteen. His two new friends were at the foot of the bed, video recorder in hand, stony-faced as he regained consciousness. It swam into view for him, and he realized.

  He had been had.

  They played the video, showing him the hard drive version of the Kama Sutra. Evans ran to the bathroom and threw up. By the time he came back he was shaken and ashen. A quick look around. The girl had disappeared. But his new friends were still there. In fact, they had just ordered up a carafe of coffee and six Danish. They wanted to talk. Man to men. For they had a proposition.

  They held tickets on his next flight. A thousand miles out over the Atlantic he would turn over control of the plane to his co-pilot and go to the restroom. When the cabin door came open, they would rush the cockpit and take control. The 777 would divert to Moscow, and he would fly it there. His reward: $1 million. He did the math: his 401k was at $1.3 million after thirty years of toil. Mrs. Evans was in for one-half, her community property share. The Chechen's deal looked better to Evans. Plus they would destroy the recording of the sex-with-a-minor incident, and he would not have to spend his retirement behind bars. The math worked top-down and bottom-up, so Evans agreed.

  Two days later his flight came up.

  They took one cab to the airport. One big happy outing, at that point. Royal Evans rode in back, sandwiched between them. It turned out they had British passports, good as gold in the U.S.

  Captain Evans moved from back seat in the cab to first chair in the 777. In the cabin of Swissair Flight 3309, Chicago to Zurich, nonstop.

  In a cockpit lockbox, Captain Evans kept a small pistol. He always swore he would use it to prevent a skyjacking. But this time, when they breached the cabin doors, he was busy in the restroom. When he emerged, he played the victim role and immediately assented to re-program the autopilot and head for Moscow. After all, there were 324 civilians aboard his flight; and his first thought was for their safety. The co-pilot and First Class stews all heard the threats to kill the two pilots and crash the plane in the Atlantic. Captain Evans couldn't—wouldn't—allow that.

  So Moscow was dialed into the autopilot. No announcement was made to the passengers.

  The first skyjacking since 9/11 had just been committed. Not a shot fired, not a throat cut. Just a sickening video recording on a cheap camera starring Royal Evans and a street teen. Jailbait wasn't even the right term. Prison bait was more like it.

  Captain Evans looked into the night, at stars above and pitch black below; diamonds tossed at velvet. At 450 knots and slipping into the northern hemisphere polar jet stream, there was no stopping the Moscow-bound aircraft.

  Captain Royal Evans was out of good ideas.

  At that point, he was just driving.

  3

  When he arrived in America, Sergei Barishnakov's passport and papers said he was Steven Barry. He obtained a student visa under that pseudonym, using the falsified identification papers provided to him by Russia's GRU—the Russian counterpart of the CIA.

  He attended Dartmouth, where he was a member of the ski team. During winter months, he skied every weekend. He became a ski bum and in doing so looked very upper-middle-class American.

  After six semesters and six summer schools, he earned a degree in Cyrillic languages. Next up: UCLA and Ph.D. studies in linguistics. With practice, all
Russian accent was erased and a wholly new personal history penned in the books. Following graduation, he was hired by the CIA and posted stateside, working out of Langley as a ciphers expert. The CIA knew nothing of his Russian bloodline and history. The Agency's own records confessed that out of every 10,000 hires a foreign agent from an unfriendly state would make it through. Steven Barry proved the statistic.

  He married another Russian Agent, one Mary Anne Junpay of Philadelphia; and they had two children. Mary Anne stayed home with the kids, encrypted Sergei's stolen CIA data, and then broadcast it to Russia via a trawler operating off Kodiak, Alaska. In later years, she used encrypted tweets.

  When Christine Susmann went deep-cover using the credentials of Ama Gloq and Steve Barry became aware of the CIA ruse, the false identity was superimposed on the actual identity and relayed to Moscow GRU. Russian intelligence added one more face and one more phony name to its list of CIA intelligence assets.

  "We might as well be trading agent identities right out in the open," said GRU agent Karli Guryshenko, the Muscovite in charge of CIA spying. "We know their agents and they know our agents. Maybe we should put them on baseball cards." This last part was never said aloud except one time: Knee-walking drunk on Evanota Vodka, Karli had made this statement to Irina, his wife, at a mandatory state dinner. The next day she told him about his comments and his face turned white. Had anyone heard him? No one, she assured him. "But you and your baseball card spies better pray President Irunyaev never gets wind. It's very cold in Siberia and the woods there are full of fools who didn't know when to shut the hell up!"

  It was Karli who reviewed the Christine Susmann/Ama Gloq pedigree. He saw to it that her fake identity was keyed into Russian computers and made available to GRU agents worldwide. All 22,500 of them.

  Christine's secret had remained unknown to the Russians all of 4.5 hours.

  Back in Langley, Steven Barry was impressed. Christine's outing was the fastest since the Bush Administration had thrown Valerie Plame under the bus. Luckily for her, Plame was in the United States at the time. When it came to be Christine’s turn, she was headed toward Moscow on a skyjacked 777.

  A new record, which would likely result in a vacation award for the skier Steven Barry.

  Aspen Mountain just moved that much closer to his skis.

  4

  The passenger in 14D blinked awake. He called the steward. The steward hurried back to him.

  "Yes? What can I get you?"

  He carefully studied the steward's face.

  "I feel a slight turn in the flight path. Why would we be turning over the Atlantic?"

  "My goodness, Mr. Murfee, aren't you the astute one?"

  Thaddeus Murfee shook his head.

  "Not at all. It's just that I own a Gulfstream and I know a turn when I feel it. And I've been feeling it the past five minutes. Slow, almost like they're hiding it. But we turned and I know it. What's up?"

  "We had a slight cross-wind. The autopilot adjusted. Happens all the time."

  "No, it doesn't happen like that. Crosswind corrections are long arcs. There's no sensation of turning with those."

  The steward stood upright.

  "Well, I've told you all I know. Would you care for a nice glass of wine to help you relax?"

  "No. I won't be sleeping. Nor will I relax."

  "Good night, Mr. Murfee."

  Thaddeus stared out the black window. He saw only the reflected blink of navigation lights skipping along the clouds far below. Beside him, to his right, sat Christine. Although her eyes were shut as if sleeping, he was certain she had heard every word of his exchange with the steward. Lawyer and paralegal had boarded the plane together, joking and talking like employer and employee off to accomplish a law task in Europe. Nothing unusual, just another day at the office for the very busy young lawyer and his assistant. They had found their seats in business class and gotten comfortable.

  To Thaddeus' left, a young Hispanic woman was sleeping as the plane added 150 knots in the jet stream. She had a laptop perched precariously on her lap. Thaddeus' inclination was to reach across and take it out of her hands before it dropped to the floor. But he knew his move could be misinterpreted, so he let it go. He found the button on the arm of his seat and reclined the back. He closed his eyes.

  * * *

  The young Hispanic woman blinked awake. Something had changed. She closed up her laptop and wiped a drop of sleep spittle from her mouth. A tinge of excitement ran down her spine. At last, she was on her way. Her stated reason for flying overseas had been that she planned to write a story on Nazi banking in Zurich. But she actually had other ideas. She shivered and draped the airplane blanket across her knees. She placed the laptop on the floor and sat back. Now, what had changed?

  Her question was answered when the man beside her called the steward back. He was told the plane had made a course correction; that was all. The passenger seemed satisfied, so she relaxed back into her chair.

  Eyes closed, she dreamed of the Pulitzer Prize awaiting her. She would follow that up with the required book. A New York Times bestseller.

  Her name was Angelina Sosa and she was a 2012 Honors grad from the University of Chicago School of Journalism. In college, her heroes were Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of Watergate fame. Her latter-day hero was Edward Snowden. A millennial herself, she saw in Snowden a servant of the people, by the people, and for the people. Her parents violently disagreed with her, calling him a traitor and someone who should be locked away forever; but that's how it was with parents, she decided. There would always be this gulf or that.

  At UC she had a minor in Russian and a second minor in Russian Literature of the Czars. With Pushkin, Lermontov, and Gogol, a golden age in literature began. For her, this was literature to be adored. Better yet, it should be read in the original Russian; and so she did, even training herself to think in Russian at will.

  At first her visions of winning worldwide acclaim for her reporting had been hazy. She knew she needed the inside track on some sort of problem, some sort of mess, or some measure of governmental intrigue that would catch the public's fickle fancy. Maybe something about some politician or office holder; even a governor. Chicago was rife with ne'er-do-wells who were too often gracing the front pages of local papers. Ferreting out their unsavory political schemes and under-the-table/behind-closed-doors dealings. That's what Angelina had in mind. Exactly that. In fact, two previous—living—Illinois governors were incarcerated, doing time for crimes committed while they were in service to the people who had elected them. But how to get that inside track? How, exactly, does one go about digging up the dirt on wickedness? Where to begin?

  She stiffened as the man beside her took a deep breath and slowly exhaled. Evidently he was asleep. She eyed his profile from the deep shadows of the nighttime Business Class. He wasn't too shabby-looking, she thought, maybe a little too preppy. He hadn’t changed all that much since the last time they sat together. She was sure he wouldn’t remember. As for her own taste in men, Angelina gravitated toward someone a little more edgy, a little more unshaven, than the guy in the next seat. Then she felt flustered at her naiveté about the world. Here she was, leaping to conclusions about someone based only on what he looked like. She knew better; she knew how successful this attorney was. She mentally kicked herself for being so childish. She wouldn't find any great story if she kept allowing her prejudices and illogic to lead her blindly through the world. Grow up, girl! She corrected herself. Grow the hell up!

  At that point, she lapsed into a four-hour fuzzy state of being, situated somewhere between coma and twilight sleep. Business class didn't lend itself to sleeping any more than any other part of these international flights, she guessed, never having flown internationally before. But she was abruptly jolted back to a state of wide-awake when she heard a passenger complain loudly to a stewardess, "Miss, we've just flown over Zurich and we're not descending! What is going on?"

  5

  Katy Murfee w
as young—only twenty-eight—and her stomach was as flat as a girl's. Which she hated because she wanted another baby. She wanted to see her stomach swell and protrude and grow a baby. Thaddeus Murfee's baby.

  They'd been successful once before, with Sarai. But Sarai was now six and needed a brother or sister before the age difference became too great. In fact, Katy wondered whether they had already passed that magic age when siblings that follow siblings are considered by the older ones to be too young to play with. She prayed that time hadn't come, but she knew the time was now or the playmate link would be lost. Katy had come off the pill six months ago and had expected to immediately conceive. But it hadn't worked that way.

  And now she was genuinely concerned.

  She was working long days at Lodzi Ashstein Miracle of Life Community Center. She would generally be onsite by seven a.m. to oversee the breakfast feeding and she would generally stay until ten at night. She always wanted to make sure everyone got a bed--or at least a bedroll, if the beds were all filled. It was a labor of love. No work had ever been more rewarding to her than working with the homeless, the sick, and the hungry. Plus, Turquoise had co-opted what now amounted to four good-size rooms for the chemical dependency groups that met there and also played cards, held dances, and sold raffles. That was a whole other organization; and Katy felt blessed by it and blessed by the fact that Turquoise usually had it under control, with Katy's help. As an added bonus, Lodzi Ashstein himself spent his mornings in the building, helping meet the needs of veterans and their families. His specialty, he called it.