The Informationist: A Thriller (39 page)

She dialed, and the relief she felt at hearing Logan’s voice was obviously reciprocated on the other end of the line.

“You got my e-mail?” he asked.

“I did, and I need your help,” she said. “I’m putting events into play, and I won’t be back stateside for a bit. There’s the possibility that when
I don’t show up in Houston as Kate expects, she’s going to run. I need to know where she is at all times. Can you handle that?”

“I’ve already got it covered.”

“What about Richard Burbank?”

“Him, too.”

“Instinct paid off, Logan. I owe you big time.”

“Michael, what the hell is going on?”

Munroe sighed. “She set me up.”

There was silence on the other end, followed by a stream of expletives, and when they ended, Munroe said, “Burbank used me as a cat’s-paw, and Kate fed him the information to make it possible. Don’t go anywhere. I’ve got a few things I need to take care of first, but I’ll be seeing you in about a week.”

“What’s the plan? What are you going to do about Kate?”

“Trust me,” she said, “you really don’t want to know.”

When Munroe exited the hotel, Bradford stood waiting with the taxi. They rode to the airport in silence, and after they had checked in and were standing in the terminal waiting for the flight to board, Bradford said, “Something’s going on, and I’d like to know what it is.”

Munroe rested her head against the wall, stared up at the ceiling, and let out a slow breath. “It goes against every instinct I have to talk about this with you,” she said, and then she paused and turned toward him. “I’m not going to give you a lot, but you deserve at least something. I’ll tell you what I can, and that’s the best I can do.”

“I’ll take what I can get.”

“I know now where the information leak is,” she said. “It cuts deep and personal, and I need to deal with it on my own terms, in my own way.” She paused. Sighed. “We have two days to get to Houston and put the information in front of the board.” She turned to look at him. “It’s on you, Miles. I won’t be returning with you, won’t be stateside until I sort through this—Paris will be good-bye.”

Bradford struck the heel of his boot on the cement floor, repetitive dull taps that filled the silence, then slid down the wall into a squat, staring at nothing. “I’m not stupid enough to attempt to stand in your way,” he said. “Even though it’s what I feel I should do.” He looked up. “I’ve
just lived through two days of hell with you, Michael. To say that I’m concerned is the understatement of the year. You’re not planning to go chuteless off Angel Falls, are you?”

Munroe shook her head and then smiled weakly. “I’m all right, Miles. Really, I am. I’ll be back in Dallas in a few weeks—I promise I’ll look you up. I owe you that.” She held eye contact long enough to remain credible and then slid down the wall to the floor and sat beside him.

She had lied through omission, had conveniently left out the part where she planned to follow him to Houston and commit murder in cold blood.

M
unroe stalked the streets, collar turned up, hands tucked deep into the pockets of the ankle-length coat she’d procured off a departing passenger at the airport. Even in the sun, the difference between the equatorial summer night and the mild Parisian winter morning was about sixty degrees, and it would have been a relief to return to the warmth and comfort of the room she’d secured at the Park Hyatt.

She moved decisively in the direction of Place Pigalle, the city’s chic red-light district famous for the Moulin Rouge, sex shops, and peep shows, its side streets and alleys notorious for so much more. The forces urging her onward were entirely her own; there were no voices, no anxiety, and the demons were silent. Her senses were overwhelmed by the thirst for revenge, and she paused for a moment and stood beside a wall, one leg kicked back against it for support while she studied passersby.

The intense focus on murder should have been disturbing, but she felt no conscience.

This was the abyss, that murky mental darkness she had so long held back one anxious breath at a time, though it wasn’t dark. Here it was light and freedom. It was total control and power and peace. And enveloped in this goodness was the knowledge that she had finally become the monstrosity of Pieter Willem’s making. His taunting laughter
called out from the dead and was brushed aside as an inconvenient afterthought; all these years later he had won, and now she no longer cared.

Munroe thrust her hands deeper into the coat pockets and followed the sidewalk. Her eyes tracked random faces in the pedestrian crowd, her feet moved, and her mind churned in process and calculation. She crossed to rue Saint-Denis and spotted in a doorway, leaning against stone masonry as if unaware of solicitous glances paid by prospective clients, a body with a face that matched what she’d been searching for. He was a boy of seventeen or eighteen—prostitute, drug addict, child of the streets. Perfect alibi.

She walked a long diagonal path across the road and made eye contact; the boy straightened at her approach, his eyes sizing her up in a look disguised as interest. She was close enough now to breathe him in and allow the other senses to confirm what her eyes had already noted. Right height, right build, good facial features. Hair would need to be colored and shortened, but otherwise he would do. “I want you for a week,” she said. “Who do I need to talk to?”

Taking the boy off the streets meant having to negotiate with thugs, and Munroe followed him down an alley and up narrow tenement steps with her right hand wrapped around the weapon she’d carried out of Cameroon. There were moments when tension filled the run-down room, when money changed hands and avarice appeared to control mental faculties and a fight seemed inevitable, but in the end she stepped back into daylight without having to resort to threats or violence and with the boy trailing reticently behind.

She went as far as the end of the street, then turned and stopped. She grabbed his wrist and pulled him close, lifted his sleeves, searched for needle marks and bruises, found none; put her thumb to his chin and moved his head to the side, examining his skin. “What’s your drug of choice?” she asked.

“I don’t do drugs.”

“I don’t have fucking time to waste,” she said. “It’s not heroin, it’s not meth. What is it? Crack? Coke? Prescriptions?”

He mumbled an affirmative.

“You have a dealer?”

He nodded, and she tossed him a phone. “Call him.”

The boy’s first name was Alain, and Munroe didn’t catch his last, didn’t care to, didn’t need it. He was a breathing and functioning young male whom nobody would miss; it was all that mattered, and she’d be back to clean up this loose end long before the week expired.

Paying off the boy’s hustlers had been for his peace of mind, not hers. She wanted him unafraid, comfortable, willingly following instructions. And they were simple: Remain at the Park Hyatt and run up as large a bill as possible—room service, Internet shopping sprees, anything he wished so long as for that one week he received no visitors and did not set foot outside the hotel. Every day he did this, his drugs would be delivered to the room by front-desk staff believing they were handling business documents, the instructions given them having been far more detailed and explicit than those she gave him.

When Munroe left the hotel, Alain was fast asleep, and she’d made sure he would remain that way for the final few hours she’d be moving about town leaving the last traceable threads of her existence. At the bank she deposited her passport, ID, and credit cards in a safe-deposit box and walked out the door with only the forged Spanish passport in the name of Miguel Díaz and twenty thousand dollars.

She purchased a laptop, burned several copies of Emily’s recording to DVD, and sent two overnight to Logan for safekeeping. She stopped by a specialty electronics store to purchase harder-to-find items and then, after calling to confirm locations on Kate Breeden and Richard Burbank, left for the airport, where a charter waited to take her to London. From there the flight would route to Canada, and she would enter the United States on foot, then travel by road to Boston, where she would connect with a second charter and continue on to Houston.

Munroe spent the trip poring over documents she’d culled off the vastness of the Internet. Everything she knew about the Burbank assignment had passed through Kate Breeden, and as information was only as good as its source, everything was now suspect. Munroe read and jotted notes, her concentration broken only by the stops, starts, and connections of the journey. Time spent on the ground allowed her to follow threads and download additional files, and by the time the wheels of the last flight hit the tarmac in Houston, she knew exactly why Emily Burbank had been meant to die.

The eighteen-hour transit put Munroe on the ground a half day behind Miles Bradford and less than ten hours before the board of trustees was scheduled to meet. It was a narrow window of opportunity, and she counted on Burbank’s greed and Kate’s duplicity to hold them in place until after the board met.

From the airport Munroe caught a cab and stopped first at a pet store before heading downtown to the Alden, where a request at check-in netted the room adjacent to Breeden’s. As of yesterday this was where Kate had been staying, and although a prior call to the front desk had confirmed that she hadn’t checked out, it said nothing about her actual whereabouts. In an alcove off the lobby, Munroe switched from leather gloves to latex and dialed Breeden’s room, let the phone ring, and after getting no response, took the elevator up.

In the dark interior of her own room, Munroe removed the eyehole from the door, replaced it with a camera that fed into the laptop, and then for ease of egress depressed the door latch with a strip of tape. Preparations made, she lay next to the door with the laptop at her side, and when her head touched the floor, exhaustion that had previously gone unnoticed settled in. How long had it been since she’d slept? Thirty-two hours, thirty-seven?

Through two hours of numbing silence, Munroe fought to keep alert, and now, at two in the morning, there was still no sign of Breeden. Based on Logan’s surveillance photos, Munroe had been certain that Burbank wouldn’t have Kate stay overnight, but still, choosing the hotel had been a gamble that might have done nothing other than waste a perfect opportunity. Munroe was waging an internal debate over the emergency recourse of contacting Logan for an update when the soft vibrations of footfalls alerted her to a presence, and a few seconds later Kate’s profile filled the screen on the laptop.

Exhaustion was displaced by adrenaline, and Munroe was out the door, in the hallway, and standing behind Breeden with the weapon pressed into the woman’s spine before she’d had a chance to open her door. “Hello, Kate,” she said.

Breeden jumped slightly, put a hand on her chest, said, “Michael, you scared the bejesus out of me,” and fumbled with the handle. Munroe
opened the door and shoved Kate inside, pointed toward the bed, and said, “Sit.”

Breeden remained standing. Slow and hesitant, she said, “No.” And then, with a bark of nervous laughter, “What are you going to do? Kill me?”

Munroe slammed the back of her hand against Breeden’s face, and the force of the blow knocked her to the bed. Kate looked up with shock in her eyes, and then with deliberation wiped a trickle of blood from her mouth. Munroe pressed the muzzle of the gun to Breeden’s forehead and said, “Yes. I’m going to kill you. And the question you need to ask yourself is how much pain you’re willing to endure before you die, because you know I’m certainly capable of inflicting it.”

Munroe took a step back and tossed Breeden a roll of duct tape. “Around your ankles.” When Kate had finished, Munroe pushed her backward so that she was in the center of the bed. She wrapped the tape between Breeden’s ankles and then used it to anchor Breeden’s feet to the bed frame. When she had finished, Munroe stepped back and said, “Fucking touch the tape and I’ll put a bullet in your kneecap.”

Breeden sat, hugged her knees, and a tear trailed down the side of her face. “Why are you doing this?” she said. “What is it that you want from me?”

Munroe ignored the questions and picked Breeden’s purse up from the floor, fishing out the keys. “Which one goes to Richard Burbank’s house?”

A look of pained innocence crossed Kate’s face, and she said, “Why would you think
I’ve
got his keys?”

Munroe tossed an envelope onto the bed and watched for reaction as Breeden went through the eight-by-ten glossies. Breeden’s fingers held the photos lightly, flipped through them nonchalantly, and then there it was, thumb clamped tightly to a photo and a second of hesitation, and then another and another until the masked calm was replaced by true pain, and Munroe took the photos back and stuffed them into the envelope.

Breeden said, “Michael, this isn’t what it looks like … those photos. It’s not what you think.”

“Doesn’t matter what I think,” Munroe said. “It only matters what
is. You fucking sold me out, Kate, to a man who cared less about his wife and daughter than he did about his Italian suits.”

Breeden’s face clouded over. She said, “What?” and Munroe held up the keys, jangled them. “You’ll save me … what? A minute? Two minutes? Which key is to his house?”

“The square brown one,” Breeden whispered.

Munroe laughed, hard and unfeeling. “I hope the betrayal was worth it.” She grabbed Breeden’s left wrist. Breeden struggled, and Munroe struck her again, then forced the wrist down onto the bed and, with the arm stretched out, wrapped the tape around it and anchored her to the side of the bed frame. Munroe took the other wrist and repeated the procedure so that Breeden was splayed like a crucifix. “So why’d you do it, Kate?” she said.

“It doesn’t matter,” Breeden said. Munroe snapped three leashes onto a choke chain, wrapped and knotted a length of one around Breeden’s feet, and repeated the procedure with the others around the wrists, then ran them under the bed, tested them for tension, and slipped the choke over Breeden’s head.