The Informationist: A Thriller (4 page)

Munroe turned the page and jotted another note on the addendum. All things considered, the extensiveness of the search was impressive, and the family had committed a sizable chunk of resources to it. But there were questions the history did not answer.

Papers were strewn around her. The coffee cup on the bedside table had been filled and refilled several times and, in spite of precautions, had left a ring on the furniture.

Munroe picked up the mug—time for another. It was nearly eight in the evening. Noah would be back soon; he wouldn’t be able to help returning to her. She poured another cup of coffee.

The details of the case ran through her head, and with them came the memories. It was another life, another world, untamed and vast, where stretches of two-lane tarmac ran veinlike through sub-Saharan emptiness, and buses—old, rusted, and belching black smoke—pumped the blood of humanity along the way.

It was a world where urban areas were intractable masses, indelible human footprints that rose out of the landscape fusing modernity with the castoffs and refuse of Europe and Asia, where even the new was old before its time, and where hot running water and stable electricity were still considered luxuries to most.

Munroe took a sip of the tepid liquid and let out an involuntary snort. No wonder each investigation turned up nothing. The continent was vast, records nonexistent, and evidence scarce. Finding the girl was highly improbable.

But the challenge was seductive, and its alluring tendrils wrapped themselves around her mind like the ethereal threads of a spider’s web.

A gentle knock at the door jolted her from her thoughts. She opened the door, and Noah greeted her with a kiss and handed her a small white rose. She tucked the flower behind her ear, and he looked past her to the
documents spread out on the bed. In French he said, “Are you busy? Should I come back another time?”

She tugged on his shirt collar, drew him close, and kissed him. “No. Give me a minute to put this in order. There’s something I want to show you.”

Outside, Munroe pulled away the sleeve that protected the bike from the elements and curious hands, and Noah knelt down beside it and brushed his fingers across the sleek body.

“From one enthusiast to another, I thought you could appreciate it.”

He smiled. “I do.”

They headed to lower Greenville, where they found a dance club and spent several hours moving around the floor oblivious to everything and everyone around them, engrossed in the rhythm and in the closeness of their bodies. By the time they got back to the hotel, it was nearly three in the morning.

The days that followed brought a similar pattern. Noah would be gone before she was fully awake, and in his absence she perused and deliberated over the information provided in the Burbank files. When he returned, they would take the bike out.

She showed him Dallas, took him to the places she rarely found the time to go to, and when they had experienced all that they could, they would return to the quiet of the room and the satisfaction of exploring each other’s bodies. Being with him brought peace; the edge of anxiety that had been stalking her since her arrival ebbed, and inside her head the demons were sleeping.

I
T WAS THE
fourth morning, and for the first time Munroe woke with Noah in her bed. She ran her fingers over his chest, and he reached for her hand, rolled to his side, and kissed the top of her head.

Munroe switched on her phone, and waiting was a message from Breeden. She got up to jot a few numbers and then crawled back into bed and snuggled against Noah’s chest. “When is your flight?” she whispered.

“Tomorrow evening.”

“I leave for Houston early tomorrow,” she said.

Silent for a moment, he said, “We still have tonight.” There was genuine sadness in his voice and, worse, she felt it too. He was meant to be a challenge, a conquest to numb the torment of anxiety, not to seep into the crevices of her mind. “I’ll be back at eight,” he said. “Have dinner with me?”

“Of course,” she whispered and kissed him, and then as a way of escape climbed out of bed for the shower.

W
HEN HE HAD
gone, Munroe sat cross-legged on the bed with dossiers on Richard, Elizabeth, and Emily Burbank lined up in front of her. The dossiers—assembled by Breeden or whoever Breeden had hired to put them together—were standard practice, critical to an assignment. Every potential employer had a private motivation for pulling her into a project, and that motivation didn’t always coincide with what she was officially told.

Munroe searched the dossiers for information to better understand the background, and after having spent the greater part of the day finding nothing more than what amounted to high-society gossip, she tossed them aside.

She left the hotel just before six and headed north on the bike, no destination in mind, only the desire to burn fuel and, through a surge of speed, purge the demons that had begun to stir. The adrenaline worked as a nostrum, an appeasement, a small sacrifice to the gods in exchange for a few hours of peace.

Three hours later, with nearly three hundred miles added to the odometer, Munroe returned to the hotel. When she entered the room, Noah greeted her with a full bouquet of flowers—no accusatory questions about why she’d kept him waiting, only a kiss and the fragrance of the roses. She smiled and reciprocated his kiss. Both were gestures of rote, neither calculated nor genuine. Internally, she was shutting down.

He produced a bottle of wine and poured a glass. “Are you still going to Houston tomorrow?”

She took the glass, kissed him again, and set it aside. “I’ll leave at six or seven,” she said. She shrugged out of her jeans. “Let me shower, and then we can go.”

He stroked her cheek and ran his fingers through her hair, then sat on the edge of the bed and pulled her, half naked, to his lap. His hands slid around her waist. “Come with me to Morocco.”

The invitation should have signaled triumph, official notice that the challenge was over, that it was time to go. She slipped off his lap and stood by the window, staring at the city lights in the distance and hating most that she wanted what he offered.

It wasn’t the first time a conquest had made such a request or similar words had been spoken, but it was the first that she’d felt a twinge of longing—that desire to fly off into the proverbial sunset for however long it might last.

“I’m not saying that I don’t want it,” she said. “I just can’t do it.” Silent for a moment, she returned from the window, climbed onto the bed, and placed a knee on either side of his legs. She held his face to her chest and kissed the top of his head.

He held her tight and then with a deep breath stood, pulling her up with him. “I need to go,” he said.

From his wallet he extracted a business card. “So that you can find me—in case you change your mind.” He placed it on the desk and, without looking back, left the room.

The door closed, a resounding thud in the silence. Munroe picked up the wineglass, swished the liquid in a gentle circle, ran her thumb against the stem. It was so delicate, would be so easy to snap, and she waited for the urge to do so. No reaction. Numb. The internal shutdown was complete. She placed the glass back on the desk, lay on the bed with her hands behind her head, and, as she knew they would, waited for the demons to rise.

T
he sky was dark, tinged by the murky haze of city lights, of civilization and pollution. The weather had warmed; even in the predawn, Munroe could feel it, and if the temperature was rising, she would welcome it. The roads were empty, and at 150 miles an hour the wind had a way of rushing through a person.

At three in the morning, she’d tossed the documents from the Burbank case into a backpack and left the hotel. Her head was filled with a cacophony of ancient words and the accompanying attacks of anxiety that prevented sleep. She would ride through the night, and in the dark and the silence her head would clear.

She traveled the winding Texas backcountry, endless lane dividers blending into a solid line, time calculated by the changing colors of the sky and a tugging ache that lurked at the periphery of her consciousness, the result of hours spent on a machine built for speed rather than comfort.

The meeting was set for ten, and now at nine-thirty she moved with the flow of traffic through the tail end of the morning rush hour into the matrix of Houston’s downtown. She found parking and then, gazing up at the building, ruffled her short hair free of the shape of the helmet.

She stretched and pulled the kinks out of her shoulders, locked the helmet onto the bike, and unzipped the riding jacket. Underneath she
wore a tight T-shirt, and the combination of the shirt, blue jeans, and thick-soled boots gave her the appearance of having recently stepped out of the cab of an eighteen-wheeler. Like every decision she made, the choice in clothing was calculated, a statement to the client, a silent “fuck you” to a succession of men in suits who aggressively jockeyed to have their assignments accepted.

To them she provided no decorum, abided by no protocol, and each in turn would accept this because they all wanted the information she would procure that had the potential to turn meager profits into gold.

It hadn’t started out that way. The first assignment had been a fluke and had come at a time when she considered herself marred for life, unhirable in the traditional sense and wondering how to pay off amassed student loans in her own lifetime.

During sophomore year of college, in a period of drink- and drug-induced haze, with the deadline of a research assignment for her comparative-politics class looming, she pulled an all-nighter with a beat-up laptop and four pots of coffee, fabricating a report using Cameroon as her target of study. The sources were fudged, but the information, based on past personal observations, logical conclusions, and in-depth understanding of the demographics, was highly accurate.

The relief of having completed the assignment segued to dread when instead of a grade she received a request from the professor to discuss the paper. He had, as it turned out, taken the liberty of passing her report to a colleague, who after reading it had asked to meet her.

The colleague was an economist for the International Monetary Fund working in the IMF’s African Area, and he in turn introduced Munroe to one of his business partners, a man named Julian Reid. Although it was evident to those who read the report that the material had not been pulled from genuine sources, the analyses and conclusions had piqued their curiosity. Over lunch Reid inquired as to the chances of having her prepare a similar report on another country. He and his partners, he explained, were planning to begin a venture in Morocco, and although the country was fairly stable politically and economically, what they didn’t have was someone on the inside with an innate understanding of the place, the customs, the subtleties, and a map, for lack of a better term, of how to navigate the political hierarchy with its graft and
jockeying for power. It was such underlying information in her report on Cameroon that had caught the eye of those who’d read it. Could she, he wanted to know, replicate the research in a different scenario?

That was how it began.

Morocco was the first assignment; it had taken eight months, and those eight months transformed the direction of her life. The drugs stopped, the drink dried up, the intense focus of the work brought peace, and that one assignment carried her finances into the black. Next was a two-month period in Uruguay on behalf of the IMF. By the time the third project, in Vietnam, had been completed, word had begun to spread. With each assignment her reputation for extracting impossibly accurate information grew, and it was only a matter of time before the law of supply and demand took over. The value of her services increased exponentially, and so did the paychecks. No one questioned how she came by the information or what she had to do to get it; they simply paid.

Now came the possibility of an assignment far outside the area of her expertise, and for that reason it intrigued her—that, and the fact that she had not returned to the continent of her birth since abruptly departing it nine years ago. Munroe pushed the memories away, joined Kate Breeden in the lobby of the building, and in silence rode the elevator to the thirty-eighth floor, where the doors opened onto a wide reception area.

The halls were carpeted, the wooden office doors richly paneled, and the atmosphere hushed and reverent. Titan Exploration was a fascinating specimen of the acme of corporate America, and Munroe observed the goings-on with detached curiosity while she followed Burbank’s assistant across expensive rugs and through well-lit hallways.

With its internal politics and sedate proprieties, the corporate world was as foreign as any of the countries she’d traveled, and it comprised a distinct culture she had yet to internalize. Over the years she’d made several attempts to live as “normal” people did, holding standard jobs and maintaining a permanent residence, each try a more miserable failure than the one before it. The longest stretch of employment had been eight weeks as a bean counter at an auditing firm. It had come to a quick end when the idea of killing the department manager became palpable. Insecure and inept, the woman had been a tyrant set out to destroy talent
before it replaced her, and few would have wept over her passing. But when ideas of how to do it and get away with it danced through Munroe’s head, she had known it was time to get out. And that was the good job.

The assistant brought them to a corner office, knocked gently, and opened the door. Thirty feet of empty space unfurled between the door and Burbank’s desk. The front of the office held a sitting area with a wet bar; framed autographed photos lined the right wall. The left and back walls were solid glass, with a spectacular view of the downtown Houston area.

Burbank sat on the edge of an oversize mahogany desk in front of the wall of windows, a phone to his ear, one leg firmly on the floor, the other dangling over the corner of the desk, and he was in the middle of a heated conversation. He paused, beckoned to Breeden and Munroe, and then curtly dismissed whoever was on the other end of the line.