Critical Space (9 page)

She was wearing spectacles, thin wire-frames not unlike my own, and she had once again altered her hairstyle, now wearing it very short so that the shape of her head was clear. But it was a token disguise, and there was no doubt that the woman on the wall in front of me was the same woman who had killed three men just minutes before; there was no doubt it was the same woman who had tried to kill me and Dale and Pugh the previous summer; there was no doubt at all.

I waved my fingers at the picture, cutting the light of the projector with the shadow of my hand.

"Hi, Drama," I said.

She didn't wave back. She couldn't. It was only a picture.

The knowledge didn't make me feel any safer at all.

The one with the Boston accent introduced himself as Ellis Gracey. Gracey was pushing into his fifties, with black hair that had lost its battle against encroaching gray, worn short and neat. He used a Montblanc fountain pen to take notes, and he smiled whenever he asked a question. The smile was blatantly insincere, and never reached his eyes. His companion was introduced as Matthew Bowles; I figured him to be twenty years Gracey's junior. Both men wore suits, but Bowles appeared the more fastidious of the two, keeping his tie tightly knotted at his throat.

Both claimed to be from the CIA, and considering what I'd just seen, I had no reason to doubt them.

"Has she contacted you?" Bowles asked.

"Twice this week I've been asked that," I said. "If she had contacted me, you would have heard about it, believe me. I'd have screamed so loud the whole damn city would be on notice."

"Twice this week?"

"A journalist I know asked."

Bowles fussed with his necktie, making the knot, if anything, tighter. "Chris Havel?"

"Read it, have you?"

"Book's gonna be a bestseller," Gracey said with a grin. "We've all read it. Hot stuff."

"Why did Havel want to know if you'd been in touch with Drama?" Everything Bowles said came out in the same rapid hush.

"She wanted to know if I could arrange an interview for her. I couldn't. Are you two saying that Drama's on her way to Manhattan?"

"We don't know, you believe that?" Gracey's smile grew momentarily brighter. "She could be in the city already, we haven't got a fucking clue. Only thing we know for a fact is that she ain't in this room at this moment, and that's it."

"Is she on the job?"

"You saw the crime scene shots, what do you think?"

"I think she's hunting, but I'd really like it if you told me I was wrong."

"You're protecting Antonia Ainsley-Hunter starting tomorrow, Drama was in Dallas as of fifteen hours or so ago, give or take a few minutes. Those are facts. Infer what you like from them."

"What I'm inferring is not something I like," I said.

"We have no confirmation Drama's hunting, and no evidence indicating that, if she
is
hunting, she's hunting your principal. Does that help?"

"Not much," I said.

Bowles had disconnected his laptop from the LCD projector and was setting the computer inside the briefcase. Finished, he opened the top folder in front of him. The folder was stamped in red ink with some impressive but dull-looking warnings about security violations and national secrets. He removed an eight-by-ten black-and-white and set it out, facing me. I was still seated too far from them to get a good look, and so I got up and moved closer, taking the chair at Bowles's elbow.

"Have you ever seen this man?" he asked.

The picture was of a pseudo-military unit of some sort, a group of eight men in a mixture of fatigues and what might have been hunting garb. The men were all white, and ranged in age from early twenties to late fifties, from the looks of them. The figure Bowles was interested in had been circled with red ink. He looked to be six feet tall, perhaps two hundred pounds, with balding hair and a narrow mustache clipped tightly over his lip. In the photograph, all of the men were holding weapons -- long guns, either rifles or shotguns -- though the man in question appeared unarmed.

"Who is he?"

"Have you ever seen him before?" he repeated, with no change in inflection.

"Not to my knowledge."

Bowles took back the photograph. I looked at Gracey, who shrugged, as if he didn't know who the picture had been of, either.

"Who is he?" I asked again.

"He may be a colleague of hers," Bowles said.

"You mean another one of The Ten?"

Bowles finished replacing his things in his briefcase, and Gracey gave his Montblanc a final twirl before nesting it in his breast pocket. It was clear neither was going to give me anything more.

"Tell me you're on top of this situation," I said. "That you're doing your best to locate her."

"We're on top of the situation, and we're doing our best to locate Drama." Gracey's smile dropped away and the expression he was offering now was veering dangerously close to sympathy. "You do what you do for Ainsley-Hunter, and you let us know if you hear from our lady friend or anything like that, all right?"

"That's it?"

"We're finished, at least for now. Nothing more we can tell you, and apparently you've got nothing you can tell us. If Drama appears on your radar, tell Special Agent Fowler -- he'll let us know. Otherwise just keep your head down and your back to a wall."

Gracey got to his feet. Bowles hesitated a moment longer, then reached across the table, offering me his hand. I looked at it, then at him, wondering if he thought this had really been worth a handshake.

After another second, Bowles refracted his hand, gathered his things, and followed Gracey out the door. Before he stepped out he looked back to where I was still seated.

"Sorry," he said.

It sounded to me like an honest condolence for my failings.

Natalie was in her office, flipping through the stack of location photographs we'd taken over the last few weeks, checking them against our maps. I entered without knocking.

"Call Dale and Corry, get them here now," I told her.

My look as much as my tone kept her from asking the obvious question, and I went back to my office without another word, making straight for my phone. I tried calling Moore at home and got his machine, left a message for him to contact me. Then I tried his cell phone and got his voice mail, so I left the same message again. I was hanging up as Natalie came in.

"What happened?"

"I'd rather wait until everyone's here."

"Is this about Lady Ainsley-Hunter?"

"Wait until they're here, Nat."

She looked around the office, then said, "I'll order dinner."

"That'd be good."

"By the way, Bridgett called."

"What'd she say?"

"I'll wait until they're here, I think."

We glared at each other, and I realized I was being a prick. I also realized that my stomachache had sent colonists up to my head to see if they could get some action of their own started.

"As of eight minutes past midnight this morning, central standard time, Drama was in Dallas, Texas," I said. "She killed three men at a storage facility, and in all likelihood armed herself with the weapons they kept there."

Natalie lost her voice for a second, her mouth opening slightly but no sound following.

I knew what she was trying to ask. I said, "I saw the photographs. There's no confirmation that she's coming here."

"But she could be."

"It's possible. I think it's unlikely."

She kept staring at me. After a second I saw that her look wasn't actually fixed on me, but had slipped to a side, and was focused past my shoulder.

"What?" I asked.

"The blinds are open."

I turned around and looked out the window behind my desk, realized just how exposed my back had been to the world. From my view, there were easily dozens of perches where a sniper could roost and take a shot into the office. I felt the edges of panic returning, the same feeling that had clung to me in the first days after Drama had vanished. The urge to hide under my desk was suddenly powerful.

"She's not after us," I told Natalie.

"There's this book, you may have heard of it. It's on display in store windows and people are talking about it on the radio and it's all about this professional assassin and these protection specialists who stopped her from killing a man."

"It doesn't make sense that she would be after us."

"Shut the blinds, Atticus."

"She's being sloppy, she let herself be photographed in Dallas, and she's better than that. She knew the camera was there, she had to have known."

"Everything she does, she does for a reason, and she's got a reason to come after us now. We have to call Havel."

"Why would Drama let us know she was on the move? She had to have known we'd find out. She can't be after us or Chris. She can't be after our principal."

"She loves games, Atticus." I heard Natalie shift on the carpet, and her voice stayed soft, but her words started accelerating. "Shut the blinds. My paranoia, I know that. Yours is cars, mine is snipers, and I'm asking you please, Atticus, shut the goddamn blinds now."

I stared out the window, using one hand to shield my eyes from the sunset. Nothing that looked like someone who wanted to kill me leaped out from in or on the surrounding buildings. Below, the Holland Tunnel traffic was writhing its way to and from Jersey.

"For God's sake..."

I closed the blinds and turned back. Setting sunlight ran through the slats that covered the window, cutting the shadows in the room with narrow strips of orange and gold. Natalie had moved out of the doorway, and her expression surprised me. I'd known her a long time, and I'd seen most of her emotions -- the ones she was willing to wear on her face, at least -- and I had seen her nervous, I'd seen her worried, I'd even seen her afraid. But I'd never seen her terrified.

"It's all right, Nat."

"No, it isn't. We can't do it again."

"She's had a year. Why now? If it's the book, then why now, when she can't do anything to stop it?"

"We should have canceled. We have to call Moore."

"I tried reaching him, I left messages. We'll be fine."

She regarded me with the fondness one normally reserves for an exceptionally naive child. "You're crazy, Kodiak."

"Yeah, but it's that good, devil-may-care, rides-his-motorcycle-in-the-rain crazy," I said. "This is no different than what we were dealing with earlier today, it's the same situation as with Keith. It's circumstantial evidence, nothing more, and it can't keep us from doing our job."

She shook her head. "You can't compare the two, it's not the same at all, Atticus. Keith is a
potential
stalker. And we don't even know if he's prone to violence. But a professional killer -- we know what she's capable of, we've seen her work."

"An assassin is just a stalker who is better at his job, Nat. And at least with Keith there's evidence proving an obsession with Lady Ainsley-Hunter, if not an intent to do violence. With Drama we don't even have that. I don't believe that Drama is after us, and I don't believe that Drama is after Lady Ainsley-Hunter."

Her jaw flexed. "Then why did the CIA feel it necessary to inform you she was in the country?"

It was a question I'd already asked myself, and since I didn't know the answer, I brushed past it, saying, "It doesn't matter. We muddle through, we stick with what we're good at, we protect our principal. If worse comes to worst, we'll shoot a lot of people."

"Or get shot a lot ourselves." She closed her eyes, willing herself to relax, and when she opened them again the last hints of her fear had vanished. "You
are
crazy, you realize that, don't you?"

"I have never argued that point," I replied. "What did Bridgett say when she called?"

"She's on her way to Philadelphia to interview Keith's brother. She said she'd call later if she found out anything of use."

"Okay, good. See? We're on top of this."

"Oh, yeah, we're all over it." She moved back to the door, then stopped. "Sorry about that."

"Ain't no thing. She scares the crap out of me, too."

She frowned and went into her office. I headed for the conference room. It was dark in there, and I closed the blinds before switching on the lights.

Dale and Corry arrived at six-twenty, apologizing.

"Weekend traffic," Dale told me. "You'd swear they put these drivers on the road just to annoy me."

"Or worse," Corry said. "I thought he was going to run one guy off the road."

"I could have done it, too." Dale puffed out his chest boastfully. "I know how."

"Yes, we're very proud of you, Speed Racer," I told him. "Conference room, if you please. We've ordered dinner."

I waited until they had gone down the hall, then doubled back to the front and locked the door and switched on the alarm. My belief that Drama wouldn't be coming after us was sincere, but the precaution seemed wise all the same, although if she were coming here, our security system wouldn't do much more than annoy her.

Natalie caught my eye when I joined them, and I nodded. Dale and Corry were already seated, digging into Thai food that had been delivered just before they arrived. Natalie was putting the finishing touches on the diagram she was drawing on the dry-erase board, a map of the route we'd take from the street into the Edmonton Hotel, through the kitchen and to the elevator banks. Other maps were spread out on the table, held down with the paper containers of
tomyum gai
and
nue gra pao.
Photographs and notes were tacked to the corkboard and taped to the walls.

Corry slid me a soda, saying, "Okay, so why the rush?"

I popped the top, watching the whiff of carbon dioxide that escaped when the seal was broken. "Fowler took me to see the Backroom Boys again this afternoon."

"You learn any cool code names?" Dale asked.

"No new ones."

The sounds of eating stopped.

"Oh fuck me," Corry said.

They took it better than either Natalie or I had done, I thought. Maybe they just did a better job of hiding the fear. Neither of them interrupted me as I repeated what Bowles and Gracey had said.