Chapter Three
Naomi’s map of Colonial Williamsburg had a faint star penciled on an empty corner across from the Capitol building. At the bottom of the map, there was a list of opening times and a tiny circle had been ringed around ten am .
We were in place by nine forty-five. I’d set my alarm for five—jet lag be damned—and gotten in a jog around the area. I ran as much to get the lay of the land as to stretch my legs. A long, easy loop of two miles took me down a street of buildings full of ye olde charm and around a cluster of pastures where a few draft horses and some fat sheep nibbled on the dewy grass. After a shower, I’d joined the others for breakfast at the hotel coffee shop where Helen picked at some oatmeal, Mary Alice ordered an egg-white omelet, and Natalie ate her body weight in French toast. I stuck with yogurt and fruit, and we dawdled over a third round of coffee until it was time to leave. It was easy to see why Naomi had chosen the Best Western. It was prime real estate if you wanted to approach the historic district on foot, and we weren’t the only tourists making our way over. It was cool but sunny, an early fog burning away in the pink morning light. We walked slowly, carrying our maps and pointing out landmarks to each other like any other visitors. We passed a few workers heading in, and Mary Alice stared after them.
“Can you imagine coming to work in a mobcap and petticoats?”
Before anybody could answer, a gentleman in a frock coat and breeches rode past on a chestnut horse that tossed its head and pranced a little. He tipped his tricorne in our direction. “Good morrow, ladies.”
“Good morrow to you ,” Natalie said, peering over the top of her glasses to watch him ride away. She had a point—he did have a particularly nice rising trot.
“Down, girl,” said a voice behind us. “He’s a prosperous gentleman in colonial times. I smell an enslaver.”
We turned to see Naomi Ndiaye bearing down on us, dressed like any suburban mom and pushing a stroller. She grinned, showing off a smile that was either the result of excellent genes or expensive orthodontia.
“Is that a prop baby?” I asked, nodding towards the sleeping child.
“I wish,” she said.
“She’s beautiful,” Helen said as she peered at the serene little face.
“That’s because she’s asleep,” Naomi said. “Awake, she shrieks like a pterodactyl and takes a bigger crap than her father has ever managed. Y’all keep your voices down if you don’t want to wake the beast.”
She led us to a group of benches tucked under a spreading oak tree. She eased down onto a bench and I wondered if her hemorrhoids were playing up. The last time we’d seen her she’d been heavily pregnant with the baby before this one and suffering from a host of baby-related ailments.
She pushed her sunglasses up onto her head and looked around. “Y’all look good. Mostly. A little jet-lagged, but you’re keeping it tight.”
She seemed a little too pleased by the notion. “You’ve got a job for us.” I didn’t make it a question because I already knew the answer.
Naomi grinned. “I like a woman who gets right down to business. I’ve got passes for Busch Gardens this afternoon and I want to get there before all the funnel cakes are gone.” She paused and looked around again. “Does the name Lilian Flanders ring a bell?”
Memory is a funny thing, especially as you get older. I can remember all the lyrics to “Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)” which came out in 1966, but I have forgotten the faces of half the men I’ve slept with.
It was Mary Alice who suddenly snapped her fingers. “Our first mission. 1979. We posed as stewardesses on a private plane in order to take out Boris Lazarov, a Bulgarian assassin. He had a flair for torture, if I remember. Lilian was the Provenance agent who compiled the dossier on Lazarov.”
Our organization was divided into three departments who took their names from museum nomenclature. Provenance was surveillance and information, collecting data on two kinds of people, the ones we recruited and the ones we killed. Acquisitions folks were in charge of supply and logistics, doing whatever was necessary to make a mission possible. They built everything from fake social media profiles to elegant explosives. Think Q from James Bond and you aren’t far off. The third department was Exhibitions—the actual assassins in the field. Overseeing each department was a curator and overseeing them was a Board of Directors whose votes to recruit or kill had to be unanimous. Pretty simple as far as international crime syndicates go. Naomi had come up through Provenance, and after a conspiracy that ended up with the previous board members dead, she had taken charge as interim director. She had appointed new curators for each department and was still trying to restore the confidence in the organization’s leadership that had been badly shaken.
Natalie was staring at Mary Alice in astonishment after her recitation. “How in the name of Satan’s balls did you remember that?” Natalie demanded.
Mary Alice shrugged. “The first boy I had a crush on was named Flanders. I remember wondering at the time if Lilian might be related to him.” Helen raised a brow at her and Mary Alice rolled her eyes. “I caught the lesbianism in junior high, Helen. After I learned about boy cooties.”
Naomi broke in. “Full marks to Mary Alice. Lilian was a longtime and highly decorated member of the Provenance department before her retirement ten years ago. Now she has died at her home on Mount Desert, an island off the coast of Maine.”
“So?” Natalie asked. “What was she, late seventies? She probably keeled over watching The Price Is Right when she bid closest without going over.”
“She was eighty-one,” Naomi acknowledged. “But that’s not the point. She was extremely active in her local needlework guild and line-dancing group, and she passed her last physical with flying colors. At first, the medical examiner chalked it up to a heart attack, but somebody decided to poke around and have a closer look. They found fibers in her mouth and nose from a needlepoint pillow. Lilian Flanders was suffocated.”
Mary Alice gave her a narrow look. “What does that have to do with us?”
“Lilian provided all the information for that mission in 1979,” Naomi explained. “Nobody knew more about Boris Lazarov than she did. The hit would never have been possible without her. And I think somebody is settling the score.”
“After forty-four years?” Natalie asked. “My god, get over it already. Assassinations happen.”
“And who would care enough about Boris Lazarov to avenge him?” Helen put in.
“He had kids,” Mary Alice said quietly. “I remember that from the briefing. Three?”
“Two,” Naomi corrected. “A boy, seventeen. A daughter, aged eleven. The daughter was killed with her mother in a car accident six years later.”
“You think Lazarov’s son, at the ripe old age of”—Helen paused to do the math—“sixty-one, has finally decided to take revenge on the people responsible for killing his father more than forty years ago?” Helen was frankly skeptical.
Before Naomi could answer, a seven-and-a-half-foot-tall shadow loomed over us. It was a long-legged, muscular man with a toddler perched on his shoulders. He was wearing cargo shorts and a pair of round, tortoiseshell glasses. The girl had cornrows, each tiny braid finished off with a bumblebee barrette. Her hands were twisted in her father’s hair and she was pulling on it while she drummed her little heels into his pecs.
“Babe, I’m taking Layla to the bathroom. You got any fruit snacks for her?” He smiled at us as Naomi rummaged in her bag and tossed him a pack of gummy sharks.
“Only one,” she told him. “And only if she does both.”
“Potty now, Dadddddddyyyyy,” the little person demanded, kicking him like a pony.
“Ladies.” He smiled again at us and left at a jog, the child giggling as he ran. We were all quiet for a minute, just enjoying the view as he moved.
“He looks like a nerdy Winston Duke,” Natalie said in a reverent voice.
“Mmmmhmmm.” Naomi’s voice was a purr.
“What does your husband do?” Helen asked politely.
“Dennis is a theoretical physicist,” Naomi replied. “I never understand a damned word he says, but I do like to listen to him talk. And he’s very good with his hands.”
Nobody said a word, but Mary Alice cut her eyes around to me and I gave a little cough. “The Lazarov mission?” I nudged. “You think Lazarov’s son is behind Lilian Flanders’s death.”
Naomi got right back to business but Natalie kept watching until the cargo shorts turned the corner. “I do. There was something clutched in Lilian’s hand when she died—a figure of a black wolf.”
Naomi reached down to pull a ziplock snack bag from her diaper bag and handed it over. Inside was a tiny wolf, rudimentary to the point of being crude. But it was clear what the thing was meant to be. “Obsidian,” I said, turning it over in my palm.
Mary Alice peered over my shoulder. “What does that have to do with Boris Lazarov?” she asked.
“The name ‘Boris’ means ‘wolf’ in Russian,” I told her. I turned the wolf over again. There were characters roughly carved into the belly—Cyrillic characters. One looked like a squared-off six, the other looked a little like pi. “Those are Boris Lazarov’s initials,” I said. I turned to Naomi. “You think the killer left it behind as a message?”
“I do,” Naomi said.
“Maybe it’s a coincidence,” Helen put in. “Maybe it was a little tchotchke Lilian picked up on her travels.”
Naomi shook her head. “The neighbor who visited her every day said she’d never seen it, and Lilian’s place was neat. We’re talking Shaker neat. No knickknacks or clutter of any kind.”
“Like Marie Kondo,” Natalie said, nodding.
“Who?” Helen asked.
“Marie Kondo,” Nat explained. “You know, the woman who declutters? She wrote a whole book about it. She had a Netflix series? She’s from Japan?” she prodded.
Mary Alice shrugged. “Never heard of her.”
Natalie rolled her eyes. “The point is, if you use her method, you tidy your stuff once and never have to clean again.”
“Natalie, that’s sociopathic,” Mary Alice said. “People who actually live their lives acquire clutter. It’s inevitable.”
“It’s not inevitable,” Nat protested. “It’s lazy. All it takes is a little discipline and the proper method. You simply go through everything in your house and hold it in your hands and you ask yourself, ‘Does this spark joy for me?’ If it does, it can stay. If it doesn’t, out it goes.”
“Like you did with your husbands,” Mary Alice replied.
To my surprise, Natalie didn’t rise to the bait. She just laughed before turning back to Naomi. “I agree with Billie. There’s something more.”
“There is,” Naomi admitted. “I had a friend in a government agency do a little digging for me. Off the record.”
“Government agency? Like the CIA, which happens to be just up the road?” Helen asked, nodding in the general direction of the Farm, the CIA’s training ground and Virginia’s worst-kept secret.
“You don’t need to know what you don’t need to know,” Naomi said calmly. “Wherever I got the information, you can trust me when I tell you the source is impeccable. And this source tells me Pasha Lazarov is in the U.S.”
The baby made a whimpering noise and started to squirm. Naomi glanced into the stroller. “She’s waking up. You’ve got about thirty seconds before I put her to the boob.”
“Supposing all this is true, that Pasha Lazarov is out to avenge his dad, why involve us?” I asked.
“You’re already involved, whether you like it or not,” Naomi said. “Pasha can’t kill the pilots of that flight, they’re already dead, thanks to Billie.” She paused with a cocked eyebrow, but I refused to feel bad about killing those two, even if they were fellow Museum agents.
“They started it,” I muttered.
Naomi ignored me and carried on. “If Pasha is targeting everybody who had a hand in Lazarov Sr.’s death, then you’re next on the list—mostly because you’re the only ones left alive.”
The kid snuffled again, opening wide eyes and blinking furiously. She balled up her hands and let out a shriek that about peeled the paint off the nearest building. In one deft movement, Naomi scooped her up and pulled the neckline of her top down, settling her to nurse.
Helen gave Naomi a curious look. “Does Dennis know what you do for a living? Does he know who we are?”
“Dennis doesn’t ask questions he doesn’t want answered. I don’t really understand his work, and he doesn’t understand mine. We like it that way.”
“That seems lonely,” Helen said.
Naomi shrugged. “There’s a lot of room left that isn’t about work. That’s where we meet.” She paused, wiping up a stray drop of milk from the corner of the kid’s mouth.
I brought her back to the subject at hand. “It was nice of you to warn us about Pasha Lazarov, but this isn’t official Museum business, is it?”
She shifted, avoiding my eyes. “It might be off the books,” she admitted.
“Hence asking a friend who doesn’t work for the Museum to confirm that Pasha Lazarov is in the U.S.,” Mary Alice surmised.
Naomi’s expression was noncommittal.
“Is that why we got such shitty accommodations?” Natalie demanded.
Naomi leveled her gaze at Nat. “Lyndsay worked hard to find that Groupon for the Best Western,” she said, invoking the name of her assistant.
“What aren’t you telling us?” I pressed.
Naomi put the child up to her shoulder and started smacking her gently on the back, trying to bring up a burp. “I was off for a few months having this one,” she said, jiggling the child as she talked. “When I came back, I realized there had been a security breach. A small one,” she hurried to clarify. “Almost imperceptible unless you knew what you were looking for.”
“How many files were accessed?”
Just then the kid let out a milky belch. “Good job, baby girl,” Naomi crooned.
“Better out than in,” Helen agreed.
“Naomi,” I said in a dangerous voice.
She sighed and put the kid back into the stroller, stuffing a pacifier into her mouth. The baby made sounds that might have been giggles and reached for her toes. Naomi turned back to us. “There were two sets of files accessed. The Lazarov job and one other—a hit two months ago, and nothing to do with Lazarov or you. I’ve already notified the agent responsible and he’s taking a nice long rest in Tahiti until this blows over.”
“Who accessed the files?” Mary Alice asked.
Naomi’s face shuttered. “I don’t know yet. They’ve covered their tracks pretty well. But I will take care of them myself when I find out.”
She stood up, brushing the creases from her linen pants. “Now, I’ve got a funnel cake with my name on it. Anything else you need to know is in a packet I’ve left at a dead drop under a porch on the corner of Duke of Gloucester and Nassau Streets.”
“That’s it?” Natalie demanded. “Why are you handling this privately if it’s Museum business?”
“That’s all she can do,” I said. “Contain the threat and hope word never gets out.” I turned to Naomi. “Because otherwise, your leadership is for shit and you won’t last ten minutes.”
Infighting in any multinational organization can be cutthroat, but when the organization is made up of trained killers, the stakes are incalculably high. I wouldn’t have given a thin Eisenhower dime for the chances of whoever decided to pass on information from the Museum files. Naomi was as ruthless as the rest of us when it came to protecting her position as a director. But if she meant to hold her job, she would have to eliminate the mole and make sure Pasha Lazarov didn’t act on the information he’d received. The death of Lilian Flanders wouldn’t raise any eyebrows in the Museum; the loss of four former field agents would set alarm bells ringing from Belize to Bucharest.
“I’ve done everything I can, and I included a number for a burner. That is the only way I want you to contact me until this is over, and only in an emergency,” she said sternly. She popped her sunglasses down on her nose. “Good luck.”
We watched her walk away to join Dennis, who was just coming back from the bathroom. Layla was still perched on his shoulders, waving a gummy shark in each little fist at her mother and baby sister. They were such a perfect family they could have been in a car ad, something safe and dependable but also sleek and a little sexy. I could have stood there, watching them and thinking about the choices I’d made and the different lives I might have lived. But I didn’t. I liked the one I had too well to go regretting anything I’d missed.
So I turned in the opposite direction from the Capitol, looking towards Nassau Street, almost half a mile away. “Come on,” I said to the others. “Let’s get that packet. We have a Bulgarian to kill.”