If I am guilty of anything, it’s negligence. I didn’t sense the ground moving beneath my feet. I took the words screamed that night for what they appeared to be: idle threats. Others did not.
A month later, I was flying from Cairo to London on a British Airways flight when it happened. Around the world, Citium scientists were assassinated. I had twelve Citium security agents in my employ; all were killed. I was unaware of this when I arrived at Heathrow. Indeed, in the cab on the way to the flat in Belgravia, my mind was only on Madison’s birthday party, which was the following week.
The door to the flat was locked. When it swung open, I saw instantly that our home had been ransacked. I drew my sidearm, but I was too late. In my peripheral vision, I saw a figure, dressed in black, standing in my office off the foyer, the glass pocket doors closed, obscuring him. I spun, bringing my weapon up, but he was quicker. The bullet ripped through the glass, into my side, and blew me back against the console table and the antique mirror that hung above it. But I didn’t lose my grip on the Sig Sauer P226. I squeezed the trigger, fired three rounds, and saw the man fall.
I spun, moved to the dining room. That action saved my life. The second man was in the kitchen. His shots into the foyer barely missed me. I fired through the wall, blind, then burst into the kitchen through the butler’s pantry, catching him from behind. I had winged him. I didn’t wait for him to turn; I shot him through the shoulder. He dropped the weapon.
I stood over him, held the gun in his face, listened for movement from my study, but heard none.
“Who sent you?”
Blood oozed from his mouth. He was European, with a close-cropped haircut, military or former military.
He gnashed his teeth, grunted. I grabbed his jaw, dug my fingers into his cheeks, separating his clenched teeth, but I was too late. He had cracked the tooth. The poison had already slid down his throat. I grabbed a ladle from the kitchen, forced the handle down his throat, and tried to gag him, but his body was already going limp.
Holding my side, I raced to the study. The other man was dead too. My files were gone. The safe lay open.
I grabbed the phone and dialed Lin’s office at the university. No answer. I tried to stop the bleeding in my side. I’d need a doctor soon. I dialed my Citium assets in London. No answer. Berlin. No answer. Hong Kong, Tokyo, New York, San Francisco. They were all gone.
I raced to our master bedroom. Drawers lay open. Our luggage was gone. So was the children’s. I counted that as a good sign.
I heard footsteps in the foyer. I peeked out into the main hall, expecting to see a bobby, but instead saw two more black-clad former military men, guns drawn, sweeping the hall, moving toward me.
I squatted, took a spare magazine from my belt, thrust the Sig Sauer around the door frame, and squeezed off round after round. I wanted the men alive, but I wanted to live more.
I heard them collapse to the floor. I put a fresh magazine in, retreated to Madison’s bathroom, found a hand mirror, and used it to peer into the hallway without exposing myself. They were down, unmoving.
I put on a black overcoat and fled into the London night. Going to a hospital was a risk I couldn’t take. A doctor we had used in my MI6 days patched me up.
In a cheap bed and breakfast near Tottenham, I made the rest of my calls. They confirmed my worst fears: an all-out purge of the Citium had occurred.
I still had several false identities; I used them to leave the country. I had no clue where Lin would have gone. Hong Kong was my first guess. I was wrong; she wasn’t there. I tried everything to find her. I called her colleagues, but no one knew anything; she had given no warning about her departure. I placed ads with hidden meaning in the newspaper, with no luck. I tried calling Citium members, but everyone was either dead or had gone underground.
So I did the same.
I waited, hoping the Beagle would make its scheduled docking at Nome, Alaska, but it never appeared. I saw three possibilities. My hope was that the vessel had been commandeered and the crew and researchers taken prisoner. Or that someone aboard had learned of the purge and that the Beagle and all souls on board had gone into hiding. I looked for proof of either scenario, but found none. That left the final option, my worst fear: they’d sunk her. The loss of the ship was tough. I had made a lot of friends on board during my time there. The research it carried was impossible to value—and essentially impossible to find.
I didn’t try. I was entirely focused on locating Lin. She was a needle in a worldwide haystack, but I dug into it. I rented a small cottage in the country, a hundred miles from London, kept to myself, and spent every second investigating who had conducted the purge. There was no internet in 1983, no cell phones. People were much harder to find back then, but I made progress. Slowly, pieces began to emerge—Citium cells still operating. The names had changed, but there was a trail. A company called Invisible Sun Securities had absorbed much of Citium Security. I began putting the pieces together. I never stopped looking for Lin or the children.
The years went by, and my hope faded little by little. By 1991, I had designed an operation I hoped would reveal the truth about the purge. Everything was in place. But a week before I was to make my move, a package arrived at my door, delivered by an unmarked parcel van. No signature required. The house was like a fortress. I even had a bomb shelter under it.
With an extension arm, I cut the package open.
What I saw inside broke me.
It was a San Francisco Chronicle article about a medical student, Andrew Shaw, who had died in Uganda the previous week in a bushfire. He had been working for the WHO on an AIDS awareness campaign. I recognized my son’s face, but I didn’t want to believe it. Yet underneath the article were several photos of his burned body. Tears streamed down my face.
A handwritten note on a scrap of paper was also in the box.