Panic by Jeff Abbott

Author:Jeff Abbott [ABBOTT, JEFF]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
ISBN: 9780748129676
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
Published: 2011-02-16T16:00:00+00:00

24

Keeping a man imprisoned was like buying a tour inside his soul. Jargo had seen men, locked in the cramped confines of his homemade jail, talk to people long dead and gone; cry and sob after days of complete silence; one unfortunate drowned himself in the toilet. Strength was often shallow; confidence was a ploy; bravery a mask.

He already knew Mitchell Casher’s soul. It was a soul incapable of betraying anyone he loved. It was a soul that trusted few, but that trust ran deep as gold veining through the earth.

Jargo went inside the room. Mitchell lay on the bed, a heavy chain bound around his waist and his ankles, long enough to permit him to reach the toilet. Mitchell was unshaven, unwashed, but dignified. The room smelled of the dried-food packets he’d left for Mitchell, since he and Dezz could not stay to serve as his jailer.

He stood watching Mitchell, who did not say hello. Jargo lit a cigarette. He had not smoked in fifteen years. He pulled hard on the smoke, breathed in, coughed like a tobacco virgin. He studied the glowing ember of the cigarette.

‘I’m afraid to ask,’ Mitchell Casher said.

‘I have a difficult question for you,’ Jargo said, ‘but I really must insist on honesty.’

‘I’ve always been honest with you.’ Mitchell’s voice was broken, worn with grief for his wife and fear for his son. He sounded like the dead Mr. Gabriel. Jargo offered him a cigarette and Mitchell shook his head. The imprisonment would take months, years, to break him; bad news about his son would shatter him at once, Jargo knew.

‘I appreciate your honesty, Mitch. Will Evan fight for you?’

‘“Fight for me”? I don’t know what you mean.’

Jargo sat down across from Mitchell Casher. The glow of the light, high above in the ceiling where no prisoner could reach it, was eye-achingly dim. No window graced the room; Jargo had bricked it years ago, after an unfortunate incident involving a shard of glass and the wrist of a stubborn informant within Castro’s regime. But Jargo considered Mitchell not to be missing a view. Outside, the night sky of southern Florida hung heavy with clouds that resembled cancers. ‘Will he fight for you? Will Evan try and get you back?’

‘No.’

‘I’ve been thinking long and hard about Carrie and what she’s done. I don’t know for sure that she is CIA; at the least she’s freelance now, and she’s taken Evan to sell him and his information to the highest bidder. I suspect that bidder will be the CIA.’

Mitchell put his head in his hands. ‘Then let me go. Let me help you find him. Please, Steve.’

‘Find him? You and I can hardly stroll into Langley’s lobby and ask for him back now, can we?’

‘They’ll kill him.’

‘Yes. But not right away.’ Jargo took another drag on the cigarette, and this time the tobacco soothed his nerves. You never really forgot how to smoke, he thought. The way you never really forgot how to swim, to make love, to kill.

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