In the Company of Liars Read online

  Contents

  JUNE

  SATURDAY, JUNE 5

  ONE DAY EARLIER: FRIDAY, JUNE 4

  THREE DAYS EARLIER: TUESDAY, JUNE 1

  MAY

  SIXTEEN DAYS EARLIER: SUNDAY, MAY 16

  FOUR DAYS EARLIER: WEDNESDAY, MAY 12

  ONE DAY EARLIER: TUESDAY, MAY 11

  ONE DAY EARLIER: MONDAY, MAY 10

  ONE DAY EARLIER: SUNDAY, MAY 9

  ONE DAY EARLIER: SATURDAY, MAY 8

  ONE DAY EARLIER: FRIDAY, MAY 7

  ONE DAY EARLIER: THURSDAY, MAY 6

  ONE DAY EARLIER: WEDNESDAY, MAY 5

  ONE DAY EARLIER: TUESDAY, MAY 4

  ONE DAY EARLIER: MONDAY, MAY 3

  ONE DAY EARLIER: SUNDAY, MAY 2

  ONE DAY EARLIER: SATURDAY, MAY 1

  APRIL

  ONE DAY EARLIER: FRIDAY, APRIL 30

  ONE DAY EARLIER: THURSDAY, APRIL 29

  ONE DAY EARLIER: WEDNESDAY, APRIL 28

  ONE DAY EARLIER: TUESDAY, APRIL 27

  ONE DAY EARLIER: MONDAY, APRIL 26

  ONE DAY EARLIER: SUNDAY, APRIL 25

  TWO DAYS EARLIER: FRIDAY, APRIL 23

  ONE DAY EARLIER: THURSDAY, APRIL 22

  FOUR DAYS EARLIER: SUNDAY, APRIL 18

  ONE DAY EARLIER: SATURDAY, APRIL 17

  ONE DAY EARLIER: FRIDAY, APRIL 16

  ONE DAY EARLIER: THURSDAY, APRIL 15

  ONE DAY EARLIER: WEDNESDAY, APRIL 14

  ONE DAY EARLIER: TUESDAY, APRIL 13

  ONE DAY EARLIER: MONDAY, APRIL 12

  ONE DAY EARLIER: SUNDAY, APRIL 11

  ONE DAY EARLIER: SATURDAY, APRIL 10

  TWO DAYS EARLIER: THURSDAY, APRIL 8

  MARCH

  EIGHT DAYS EARLIER: WEDNESDAY, MARCH 31

  ONE DAY EARLIER: TUESDAY, MARCH 30

  ONE DAY EARLIER: MONDAY, MARCH 29

  ONE DAY EARLIER: SUNDAY, MARCH 28

  TWO DAYS EARLIER: FRIDAY, MARCH 26

  ONE DAY EARLIER: THURSDAY, MARCH 25

  ONE DAY EARLIER: WEDNESDAY, MARCH 24

  ONE DAY EARLIER: TUESDAY, MARCH 23

  ONE DAY EARLIER: MONDAY, MARCH 22

  ONE DAY EARLIER: SUNDAY, MARCH 21

  ONE DAY EARLIER: SATURDAY, MARCH 20

  THREE DAYS EARLIER: WEDNESDAY, MARCH 17

  THREE DAYS EARLIER: SUNDAY, MARCH 14

  NINE DAYS EARLIER: FRIDAY, MARCH 5

  TWO DAYS EARLIER: WEDNESDAY, MARCH 3

  ONE DAY EARLIER: TUESDAY, MARCH 2

  ONE DAY EARLIER: MONDAY, MARCH 1

  FEBRUARY

  TWO DAYS EARLIER: SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 28

  TWO DAYS EARLIER: THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 26

  ONE DAY EARLIER: WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 25

  THREE DAYS EARLIER: SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 22

  FOUR DAYS EARLIER: WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 18

  ONE DAY EARLIER: TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 17

  ONE DAY EARLIER: MONDAY, FEBRUARY 16

  THREE DAYS EARLIER: FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 13

  ONE DAY EARLIER: THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 12

  ONE DAY EARLIER: WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 11

  ONE DAY EARLIER: TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 10

  ONE DAY EARLIER: MONDAY, FEBRUARY 9

  ONE DAY EARLIER: SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 8

  ONE DAY EARLIER: SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 7

  ELEVEN YEARS EARLIER

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  In The Company of Liars

  A Berkley Book / published by arrangement with the author

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 2005 by David Ellis

  This book may not be reproduced in whole or part, by mimeograph or any other means, without permission. Making or distributing electronic copies of this book constitutes copyright infringement and could subject the infringer to criminal and civil liability.

  For information address:

  The Berkley Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Putnam Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  The Penguin Putnam Inc. World Wide Web site address is

  http://www.penguinputnam.com

  ISBN: 978-1-1012-0507-5

  A BERKLEY BOOK®

  Berkley Books first published by The Berkley Publishing Group, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  BERKLEY and the “B” design are trademarks belonging to Penguin Putnam Inc.

  Electronic edition: March, 2006

  TITLES BY DAVID ELLIS

  In the Company of Liars

  Jury of One

  Life Sentence

  Line of Vision

  For Jennifer, Jim, Jenna, and Ryan Taylor

  JUNE

  SATURDAY, JUNE 5

  McCoy is first through the door. She hears the man running through the house, his bare feet slapping across the hardwood floor. “Back bedroom,” she is told via her earpiece by a member of the team at the rear of the house, looking through the kitchen window, blocking an escape route.

  They flood in behind her, a team of eight agents, but she is first down the hallway. Her back against the wall, both hands on the Glock at her side, she shuffles up to the bedroom door and listens. Over the sound of her team’s shoes on the hardwood, she can hear sobbing. She reaches across the width of the door and tries the knob. The door opens slightly, then McCoy pushes it open wider with her foot and pivots, her Glock trained inside the room, and she sees what she expects.

  He is standing at the opposite end of the bedroom, near what appears to be a walk-in closet and then a bathroom. A large bed separates the man and McCoy.

  McCoy holds a hand up behind her, freezing the other agents in place, before returning her hand to the Glock trained on the suspect.

  “Put the gun down, Doctor,” she says.

  Doctor Lomas, she knows, is a broken man, nothing like the proud figure she has seen in the company brochures. She stifles the instinct to think of him as a victim, though a victim, in many ways, is precisely what he is. It is hard to look at this man, barefoot in boxer shorts and a rumpled white T-shirt with stained armpits, with flyaway hair and an emaciated frame, and see the promising scientist he once was.

  The doctor is crying uncontrollably, his chest heaving and tears flowing. Part of her job is seeing the worst in people, watching them feel, firsthand, the collapse of their lives. But she doesn’t often confront a man holding a revolver to his temple.

  Behind her, McCoy hears one of the agents on his radio, calling for paramedics. Others are searching the remainder of the house, kicking open doors to rooms and closets.

  “I didn’t know,” Lomas manages through halting breaths, but of course that statement itself means that he did know, or at least suspected. “I didn’t. I didn’t know, I didn’t—”

  “I believe you, Doctor,” she says calmly. “Put the gun on the bed and let’s just talk.”

  “They’ll kill me,” he says.

  He’s not talking about the federal agents swarming outside the bedroom. She knows it. Doctor Lomas seems to assume she knows it.

  “There’s no ‘they’ anymore, Doctor. ‘They’ are all in custody. You’re the last one.”

  He doesn’t seem to be listening. Fear of death does not seem to be foremost in his mind. No, what’s causing the heaving of his chest, the trembling of the arm that tries to keep the gun pressed against his skull, is not what will happen now but what has already taken place.

  The television, resting in a dark oak armoire, is on a cable news station. The h
eadline blaring across the bottom of the screen is “Muhsin al-Bakhari Captured.” Reporters are live from northern Sudan, the cameras on the assault that took place last night on a convoy of terrorists resulting in the capture of the Liberation Front’s number-two man.

  “You know why you’re the last one we picked up?” McCoy says to Doctor Lomas, as evenly as she can. “Because we know you’re not a threat. We know you’re not a bad person. Because we know you were tricked.” McCoy motions to the television set. “You see that, Doctor? You see we caught Mushi?”

  Doctor Lomas blinks, as if surprised by the change of topic. Suicides, in these instances, often go down a single track on their way to pulling the trigger or slitting their wrists. The key is to pull them away from their tunnel vision, to make them think about anything at all that might sober them up.

  “So what?” His voice breaks, trembles. His trigger finger twitches.

  She is ten feet from the doctor, but the bed prevents any interception she might attempt. If this guy wants to die, she won’t be able to stop him.

  “So,” McCoy says, “you helped make that happen. This,” she says, nodding to him, then gesturing toward the TV set, “was about that.”

  “That—” Lomas’s face contorts, a hideous, trembling snarl of a mouth struggling with the words. “That’s where it went? To—to them? To terrorists?”

  “We intercepted it,” McCoy says quickly. “We have the formula in our possession. It’s over, Doctor. No one was hurt.”

  “Allison Pagone,” he whimpers. “She’s dead because of me. I knew she didn’t kill herself,” he adds, more to himself. “I knew they killed her.” He starts to quiver again, his whole body like a shot of electricity has hit him.

  “Listen to me, Doctor, Allison Pagone—”

  “No closer.” Lomas takes another step back and brushes the wall. With the jerk in his movement, his right elbow drops, and the gun slides off his temple, pointing upward.

  McCoy fires once, into the brachial nerve near the collarbone on the doctor’s gun side. The doctor’s hand immediately releases the gun, which falls to the floor and bounces into the closet. Two reasons for severing the brachial nerve—he can’t hold the weapon and he can recover, for the most part, from a shoulder injury; had she gone for his hand, he’d never be able to use it again.

  She is on him immediately, as he slides to the floor. Lomas makes no effort to reach the gun. He doesn’t even seem to notice the wound, a red, widening stain on his T-shirt, dark at the center.

  McCoy finds the nearest piece of laundry, a pair of underwear, balls it up and applies pressure to the wound. Doctor Lomas stares wide-eyed, a deep, consistent moan coming from his throat.

  McCoy talks to him. She tells him to hang on, everything is going to be okay. She looks up and sees the bullet mark in the wall, which means it went through cleanly, no ricochet down to a major organ. He was lucky. Luckier than some.

  The paramedics arrive and take over. In the bathroom McCoy splashes some water on her face and lets out a groan. Her partner, Owen Harrick, is behind her, smiling at her in the mirror.

  “It’s over, Janey,” he says. “This is the end.”

  “Yeah.” She shakes the water off her hands.

  “What you have to do,” Harrick advises, “is forget about the beginning.”

  ONE DAY EARLIER

  FRIDAY, JUNE 4

  He knows immediately that no one will escape, and that few will survive. He knows it the moment he is blasted out of his drowsiness in the back of the dark truck by a deafening boom, the explosion of what he assumes to be the lead truck in the convoy. He knows it as the truck in which he is traveling screeches to a halt over the uneven terrain, as the men seated on benches on each side of the darkened cargo area fall into each other, and as the truck behind them slams into their rear, sending the men sprawling to the floor.

  He knows it as he and the others in the second truck scramble for their weapons. He knows it when he hears, over the sounds of his brothers’ cries, the thwip, thwip, thwip of rockets cutting through the air—undoubtedly in the direction of the rear truck in the convoy—followed quickly by the explosion upon impact with the gasoline engines.

  He knows that the Americans have found them.

  And they know who is traveling in this convoy. That is why the obvious security flanks have been eliminated from the outset. In no more than ten seconds, the front and rear trucks have been obliterated, trapping the two middle trucks on a narrow, winding road.

  Ram Haroon looks toward the rear of the truck, where the sheath covering the back is flapping open. He sees small flashes from the red-orange gasoline fire two trucks behind.

  Haroon races for the exit as the gunfire erupts—the pop pop, pop pop from the M4s, the rat-a-tat-tat from the stationary machine guns—lead splitting the canvas exterior of the cargo cabin and hitting skulls, torsos, bone. Haroon extends himself horizontally as he dives through the sheath, trying to minimize himself as a target, trying to freeze out the sudden smells of blood, of bowels releasing, of death.

  He lands on the hood of the third truck, slamming his head onto the cold surface, and everything goes dark.

  First he dreams in smells: the odor of burning gasoline, the copperlike scent of burning flesh. Then he dreams of dust filling his mouth, of wounded cries and urgent prayers before death. He dreams of his mother and sister. He dreams of his leg on fire.

  He dreams of a man talking to him in broken Arabic, and Haroon’s eyes open. Two sets of boots, two sets of legs, two M4 rifles within inches of his cheek.

  “Irka,” one of them shouts. “On your knees, fuck-face.”

  U.S. Army Rangers, working in pairs, searching for survivors and confirming the dead. One of them steps back, training the rifle on him, while the other pats Haroon down for explosives. Then he grabs Haroon’s shirt and pulls until Haroon is on his knees. His shirt is violently ripped from his body, his hands zip-tied behind his back.

  He knows why they attacked and who they wanted. Their high-value target. Muhsin al-Bakhari.

  Haroon struggles to gain his bearings, his body limp from the assault and his mind in chaos. He is in northern Sudan. It is early June. It is close to midnight. “Kiff! Kiff!” the Ranger says to Haroon, yanking him to his feet. A blindfold is wrapped over his eyes, and he moves forward tentatively, his legs unreliable, assisted by a Ranger’s hand cupped under his armpit.

  Don’t let them take you alive, he has been told. They will torture you. Corrupt you. Take you to Guantánamo Bay and make you turn on your brothers.

  Die with dignity, they have told him.

  But resistance is obviously futile. This whole thing was timed perfectly. The Americans did not plan for a gunfight. They planned for a massacre.

  Ram Haroon recalls other instructions as well, outside the presence of the leaders. Show them your hands and they won’t kill you.

  He hears the thwop, thwop of the rotors of a Chinook helicopter as he is marched forward, forced into a jog. He feels a wash of air as he approaches the Chinook, and a hand on his head pushes it down, even though Haroon knows the rotors are well overhead.

  He is turned around. A hand on his shoulder forces him to sit on a cold aluminum floor. He shivers. The rotors spin faster and louder, the copter shakes—even sitting, he lurches to one side and bumps into the barrel of a rifle pointed at him. The copter shakes again and rises.

  He feels a boot pushing against his arm. “Hal Tatakalm Alingli’zia?” an American shouts at him in passable Arabic. “Ma Ismok?”

  “Zulfikar,” he answers wearily. “Sorirart Biro’aitak.”

  A moment passes. The Americans are speaking to each other in excited voices. This is a moment of celebration for the Rangers. Nausea overtakes Ram Haroon, the jerky movements of the helicopter and the smell of burning flesh, still lingering in his nostrils, combining to launch the bile to his throat. They are enjoying themselves, these Americans. A moment for which all Americans have waited for years—the
capture of Muhsin al-Bakhari. A story they will share with their grandchildren someday.

  Where he will go now, he does not know. They have quickly whisked away the few survivors, including the one whom the Americans prize the most. Left behind is a massacre; over thirty Islamic soldiers dead.

  And then it comes to Ram Haroon. He remembers the woman at the airport in America four days ago. McCoy, that was her name. Yes. The woman at the airport knew this was going to happen.

  Haroon shakes his head, silent. He will probably be sent to Guantánamo Bay, along with the others. He will never see his homeland again. His life will never be the same.

  He wonders what has become of his partners in the States. He assumes that they will soon be in U.S. custody as well. And if they have gotten so far as to coordinate this attack, they have probably learned what really happened to Allison Pagone, the American novelist, as well.

  THREE DAYS EARLIER

  TUESDAY, JUNE 1

  McCoy knows almost everything about him. She knows his names—his real one and the one he is using. She knows one parent is listed as Pakistani, the other as Egyptian, and that the paperwork all the way back to Islamabad will show that. She knows that the CIA files will show that he is an operative with the Liberation Front, an organization responsible for the death of more than nine hundred civilians in the past five years. She knows he will deny that if asked. She knows that he is studying for a graduate degree in international economics at the state university. She knows when he flew into the United States. She already knew, before receiving the call, that he had booked a flight to Paris. She knew about ten minutes after he bought the ticket.

  Jane McCoy stands with her partner, Owen Harrick, and the BICE agent in charge at the airport, a guy named Pete Storino, in a small room with monitors along a high shelf.

  McCoy has spent the last ten minutes babysitting Storino, explaining why she couldn’t tell him squat, giving him numbers to call to clear all this. Storino doesn’t like it and he doesn’t like her. The BICE guys aren’t the happiest these days. With the reorg under Homeland Security, Storino’s agency is now the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. They don’t like it because people call them “BICE” agents. FBI agents don’t like it because they think of their agency as “the Bureau” and don’t want another one. The agencies left out of the BICE acronym, like the Coast Guard and Border Patrol, were pissed off because, well, they were left out. Word is, they’re going to change it to the Bureau of Investigations and Criminal Enforcement, keeping the acronym but giving it a more general connotation, but McCoy will believe it when she sees it.