Disavowed
The Desert's Reach
The phone rang four times before he picked up.
I had dialed the number on the card Detective Harding left me three nights earlier, my fingers moving across the keypad before I could talk myself out of it. Outside, the white sedan had vanished sometime around noon, but I didn't believe it was gone. I believed it had simply found a better angle.
"Harding."
His voice was rougher than I remembered, as if I'd pulled him from sleep. I glanced at the clock on the cable box. Still 12:00. The kitchen window showed a sky going purple at the edges, the last light draining into the flat sprawl of Phoenix.
"It's Eleanor Vance." I kept my voice low, though no one else was in the apartment. "I have something you need to see."
A pause. The sound of fabric shifting, a chair creaking. "The items we discussed."
"More than we discussed."
Another pause, longer this time. I heard him exhale, a sound that was not quite a sigh. "Where are you now?"
"My apartment."
"Stay there. I'll come to you."
"No." The word came out sharper than I intended.
I thought of the white sedan, the way it had sat in the far corner of the parking lot like a patient animal.
I thought of the eighteen sheets of paper hidden beneath my silverware tray, each one a name and a designation and a thread in a web I couldn't see the edges of.
"Someone's been watching the building. I don't know who.
I don't know if they're still out there. "
Harding didn't ask for details. He didn't ask how long or what kind of car. He just said, "There's an alley off Van Buren, behind the old print shop on Seventh. You know it?"
"I can find it."
"Thirty minutes."
The line went dead.
I stood in the kitchen with the receiver still pressed to my ear, listening to the dial tone hum. Thirty minutes. I set the phone back in its cradle and walked to the bedroom.
The suitcase was where I'd left it, pushed to the back of the closet behind a row of shoes I hadn't worn since Richard's funeral.
I pulled it out and unzipped the main compartment.
The false bottom gave way under my fingernails, and the papers were still there, the thin sheets cool and dry against my fingertips.
OPERATION NIGHTSHADE. ASSET INVENTORY. Q3 1987.
I didn't read the names again. I had memorized enough of them already: Webb, Orlov, a dozen others whose allegiances had been bought and sold by a man who called himself KESTREL.
I slid the papers into a manila envelope I'd taken from the kitchen drawer, then sealed the flap and pressed it flat.
The envelope went into my purse, a leather bag large enough to hold it without folding.
I didn't bring the suitcase. Whatever Harding wanted from it, he could come back for. The papers were what mattered.
My keys were on the counter. My hand closed around them, and I felt the small brass key from the leather pouch press into my palm. I hadn't told Harding about that either. I still wasn't sure why.
The parking lot was empty when I stepped outside, the asphalt still radiating the day's heat even as the air cooled.
My car sat alone under a streetlamp that flickered once, twice, then steadied.
No white sedan. No idling engine. I unlocked the door and slid behind the wheel, and the envelope went onto the passenger seat beside me, close enough to touch.
The drive downtown took twenty minutes. I took Van Buren east, past strip malls and gas stations and the kind of bars where the neon signs buzzed louder than the conversation inside.
The city thinned out as I went, the buildings growing older, their brick facades stained with decades of sun and exhaust. Seventh Street intersected Van Buren at a light that stayed red for what felt like a full minute.
I sat through it with my hands at ten and two, watching the rearview mirror for headlights that lingered too long.
Nothing followed me. Or nothing I could see.
The print shop was a two-story building with boarded windows and a sign so faded I could only make out the word PRINTING in chipped gold letters.
I turned down the alley beside it and killed the engine.
The alley was narrow, lined with dumpsters and stacked pallets, the walls on either side close enough to touch if I stretched out both arms. A single bulb burned above a steel door at the far end, casting a pool of yellow light that didn't reach the street.
Harding's car was already there, a dark sedan pulled tight against the brick wall, its lights off. I saw the shape of him behind the wheel, and then the door opened and he stepped out, and the alley swallowed him up to the shoulders.
I got out of my car. The envelope was heavy in my hand. The air smelled of old grease and something sharper underneath, a chemical tang I couldn't place.
"You found more than a key," Harding said. It wasn't a question.
I held out the envelope. "Twenty-seven pages. Names, designations, operational details. Everything Julian was running."
He took it but didn't open it. His eyes moved from my face to the mouth of the alley, then back. "You read them."
"I had to know what I was carrying."
"And now you know."
"I know enough." I crossed my arms, though the night wasn't cold. "There are people on that list who would kill to keep it quiet. People in your government. People in others."
Harding tucked the envelope inside his jacket. "That's why you called me instead of walking into the field office."
"I called you because I don't know who else to trust."
He looked at me then, and something in his face shifted. The professional mask didn't drop, but it loosened, and behind it I saw a man who was tired in a way that had nothing to do with sleep. "You made the right call."
The shot came from the rooftop.
I didn't hear the gun. I heard the bullet hit the dumpster three feet from my head, a wet slap of metal on metal that sent a spray of rust and paint into the air. Then Harding's hand was on my shoulder, shoving me down, and my knees hit the asphalt hard enough to skin through my slacks.
"Stay down." His voice was flat, controlled, the voice of a man who had done this before. He drew his weapon from a holster I hadn't seen beneath his jacket and pressed his back against the dumpster, eyes tracking the roofline.
Another shot. This one hit the brick above us and showered grit onto my neck. I pressed myself against the dumpster, the metal still warm from the day's heat, and tried to make myself small.
"How many?" I whispered.
"Two on the roof. Maybe more on the ground." He didn't look at me. His focus was on the edge of the building, where a shadow moved against the deeper dark of the sky. "When I tell you to run, you run. Back to your car. Don't stop for anything."
"I can't just leave you."
"You can and you will." He fired twice, the shots deafening in the narrow space of the alley. Glass shattered somewhere above us. The shadow on the roof pulled back. "Go. Now."
I ran.
My legs moved before my mind caught up, carrying me toward the street with the envelope gone from my hands and my purse slamming against my hip.
Behind me, Harding fired again, and someone fired back, and the alley filled with the sound of bullets punching into brick and steel.
I reached the mouth of the alley and turned toward my car, and that was when I saw the second man.
He was coming around the corner of the print shop, a dark figure in dark clothes, the gun in his hand a compact shape with a long cylinder on the end. A suppressor. He saw me at the same moment I saw him, and he raised the weapon with a smoothness that spoke of training.
I dove behind a stack of pallets as the shot cracked past my ear. The wood splintered, and a shard caught my cheek, and I felt the sting of it open a thin line of heat along my jaw. I pressed my hand to the wound and felt blood, warm and wet, and my mind went very still and very clear.
This is real. This is happening. You are going to die in an alley in Phoenix.
Harding appeared at my side, moving low and fast. He grabbed my arm and pulled me up, and we ran together into the maze of streets behind the print shop.
The gunfire stopped. For a moment the only sound was our footsteps and my breathing, ragged and too loud, and then I heard the soft scuff of shoes on pavement somewhere behind us.
"They're following," I said.
"I know." Harding pulled me into a narrower alley, this one barely wide enough for a single car. "Keep moving."
We ran. The alleys twisted and doubled back, and I lost track of which direction we were heading.
Phoenix was a grid, but back here the grid broke down into service roads and loading docks and dead ends that smelled of garbage and old motor oil.
Harding navigated without hesitation, turning left, then right, then left again, and I followed because I had no other choice.
My lungs burned. The cut on my cheek throbbed.
I thought of Richard, of the quiet way he had died in a hospital bed with machines beeping softly around him, and I thought of Julian, who had died alone in a hotel room in Copenhagen, and I wondered if either of them had ever imagined me here, running through the dark with a stranger's blood on my hands from a wound I couldn't remember getting.
Harding stopped at a chain-link fence and pushed it open.
We crossed a vacant lot, the ground uneven underfoot, and came out on a street I didn't recognize.
His car was gone. My car was gone. The print shop was blocks away, and the men with the guns were somewhere in the dark behind us, and I had nothing except the purse still clutched against my side and the small brass key pressed into my palm.
"We need to get off the street," Harding said. His breathing was even, controlled. He might have been discussing the weather. "They'll have vehicles. They'll sweep the area."
"Who are they?"