Crossfire in the Rain #2
The coffee shop door opened behind us, a barista propping it wide with a rubber wedge.
The smell of brewing coffee drifted out onto the sidewalk, rich and ordinary, a reminder that the world was still turning, that people were still going to work and buying lattes and checking their watches.
I wanted to be one of them. I wanted to go back to my apartment and wait for a phone call that would never come and pretend that none of this had happened.
But that woman was gone. She'd disappeared somewhere between the warehouse on 43rd Avenue and this corner, and I didn't know if she was ever coming back.
Jackson set her briefcase on the ground and crouched to open it, her movements efficient. She withdrew a manila envelope, thinner than the one Julian had hidden in my luggage, and handed it to Harding.
"Inside is a list of secure channels. Phone numbers that change every forty-eight hours.
A post office box in Vienna that forwards to wherever I am.
If I agree to take this story, we use these channels and nothing else.
No direct calls. No meetings in person unless I initiate them.
If you see me on the street, you don't know me. "
"Understood," Harding said.
"I'll review the documents tonight. If they're authentic, if they confirm what I've already been tracking, I'll run the story within the week.
But I need you to understand something." She straightened, her briefcase back under her arm, her face as composed as when she'd crossed the street.
"Once this breaks, you will be targets. Both of you.
The agencies will disavow any knowledge of the operation, but they will not let you walk away.
You'll need to disappear, and you'll need to do it before the first headline hits the wire. "
"We're already targets," I said. "We've been running since the warehouse."
"Running is different from being hunted.
" Jackson looked at me with something that might have been respect, or might have been pity.
"You've survived so far because they didn't know how much you had.
Once this story publishes, they'll know exactly what you're carrying.
The full weight of two intelligence agencies will come down on you, and they won't stop until they've buried every copy of those documents and everyone who's seen them. "
Harding tucked the envelope into his jacket. "We're not asking for protection."
"Good. Because I can't offer it." She stepped back, her heels finding the edge of the curb.
"I'll contact you through the channels in forty-eight hours.
If you don't hear from me, assume I've been compromised and destroy everything.
Don't try to find another journalist. Don't try to go public on your own.
The only thing keeping you alive right now is the fact that they don't want to confirm what you have by killing you. The moment that changes, you're dead."
She turned and walked away, her figure disappearing into the flow of commuters heading toward the office towers on Central.
I watched her go, the pale linen of her blouse catching the morning light, and I tried to hold onto the certainty I'd felt when I told her I wanted to finish what Julian started.
It was harder now. The weight of what she'd said, the casual way she'd listed the bodies and the disappearances, settled into the space behind my ribs and made it difficult to breathe.
"She'll run it," Harding said. "She wouldn't have taken the meeting if she wasn't going to."
"How do you know?"
"Because she's still alive." He said it the same way he'd said it before, but this time I understood what he meant.
Jackson had survived twelve years in a business that killed people.
She'd survived because she was careful, because she didn't take unnecessary risks, because she didn't meet sources on street corners unless she was already planning to use what they gave her.
She'd met us. That meant she'd already made her decision.
The barista was arranging pastries in the display case, her back to the window.
A delivery truck rumbled past, its brakes hissing as it stopped at the light.
The city was waking up around us, indifferent to the transaction that had just taken place on its sidewalk, and I stood there in the growing heat and tried to remember what it felt like to be a woman who didn't know the names of dead intelligence operatives.
"We should move," Harding said. "She gave us forty-eight hours. We need to be gone before they run out."
I nodded, but I didn't move. I was thinking about Julian, about the last time I saw him on the cruise ship, his dark leather bag with its brass fittings resting on the table between us.
He'd promised to call in two or three weeks.
He'd smiled when he said it, that easy, magnetic smile that had made me believe in second chances.
And all the while, the papers were already in my luggage, the secrets already planted, the trap already set.
I'd spent weeks wondering if any of it had been real.
The dinners. The whispered promises. The way he'd looked at me across the table in the ship's dining room, his sharp, calculating eyes softening for just a moment.
I'd wanted it to be real. I'd needed it to be real, because if it wasn't, then I was just a mark, a convenient widow with an empty suitcase and no one waiting for her at home.
But standing on that corner, watching the light climb the sides of the buildings, I realized the question didn't matter anymore.
Whatever Julian had felt for me, whatever I had felt for him, the only thing that remained was the truth he'd hidden in my luggage.
The truth I was about to hand to a journalist who might be dead before the week was out.
The truth that would either set us free or get us killed.
"Eleanor." Harding's voice was quiet but insistent. "We can't stay here."
I turned away from the coffee shop, away from the barista and the pastries and the ordinary morning that wasn't mine to have.
The heat was already pressing down on the asphalt, the promise of another hundred-degree day, and somewhere in the city three Russian-speaking men were probably still looking for us, and somewhere in Vienna a journalist was waiting for a story that would change everything.
"I know," I said. "Let's go."