Chapter 3
CHAPTER THREE
He said yes.
The next morning, Katherine read the same page of Walter Vance’s correspondence three times without retaining any of it. It was Jasper’s fault, specifically the fault of the phone call he’d made to her last night.
He’d said yes to her case in roughly four sentences and then left her holding her phone in surprise.
She’d spent the entire evening telling herself she was relieved.
She was, but not only because now she had help.
She was relieved that she would see him again.
Just the thought of it made her cheeks heat.
And then, she hadn’t stopped reorganizing her notebooks and making more notes in them until well after midnight she was so flustered.
Since it was Sunday, the library was only open for a few hours in the afternoon.
Katherine had the whole place to herself for a while longer, at least until Jasper showed up.
If he showed up. She’s told him he could officially start on Monday.
She normally worked weekends at home if she wasn’t babysitting or at one of the girls’ piano recitals or soccer games, and had been doing the same here.
But she didn’t expect him to do the same.
“Ugh.” She set down the paper in her hands and wished for a fresh cup of coffee.
The eleventh page of Vance’s 2001 personal correspondence file was a string of words she could neither absorb nor quite see past. She tugged the cotton gloves higher on her wrists and tried again from the top of the page.
Agency paper told its own story if you knew how to read it. Certain offices used specific stocks, fibers, and watermarks—not for aesthetics, but for provenance. A memo could be copied, misfiled, or stripped of context. Paper stock was harder to lie about.
Jasper appeared in the meeting room doorway a moment later. Hoodie, leather bag over his shoulder, two paper cups balanced in his free hand. He set one of the cups on the table within her reach without asking.
He looked…good. Less hostile and more open. Her cheeks warmed just like they had the previous night. She glanced from him to the cup and back. “You brought me coffee?”
“Cream, no sugar, right?”
She took a careful sip. He’d remembered from yesterday morning.
He seemed to be waiting for her reaction. “It’s good,” she said. “Thank you.”
“Good?” He snorted. “Sanctuary Coffee is the best coffee in town. The place is a mile from here. The owner, Holly, makes sandwiches at lunch, and the cookies are worth the calories.”
She wished he’d brought some of those cookies, but calories were the last thing her hips needed. She filed the cookie information for later and chose not to acknowledge it. “Have a seat, Mr. Perault.”
“Jasper.”
“Jasper.”
He set the bag on the table and pulled out the chair opposite her, then thought about it and pulled out the chair next to her instead. She raised an eyebrow.
“We’ll be passing papers back and forth,” he said. “It’ll be more efficient.”
“We will not be passing papers. Vance’s materials don’t leave my hands—it’s my policy. I’ll read aloud what I want you to consider, and you can show me your screen.”
“Then the chair next to you is even more efficient.”
She didn’t have a counterargument that didn’t involve admitting that his sitting so close was a problem for her pulse, not the assignment.
“Before we start,” he said, “we need to settle one thing.”
She set down her coffee. “The NDA?”
“The NDA is ninety percent fine. The final-decision clause isn’t.”
She’d been waiting for this. She folded her hands on the papers. “I told you yesterday what the terms were.”
His hair was still damp from a shower, making it appear even darker.
“You did. I’m offering a small revision.
Final say stays with you. I’m not asking for veto power.
I’m asking for a vote, which you don’t have to take, but I hope you will.
I also want the right to lay out my position when I disagree with any of your decisions.
You make the call. I just get to be honest with you when I think the call is wrong. ”
Her back stiffened. “A vote. What we’re doing here isn’t a democracy.”
“A voice. Your final-decision clause, as drafted, means I sign on to whatever you decide without comment. I’m not okay with that.”
He held his cup, leaning forward slightly, brown eyes steady on her face. He was setting a line that, on examination, she found difficult to call unreasonable.
“Fine,” she said. “You get a voice. The vote isn’t binding.”
“Understood.”
“I’m grateful you didn’t insist on a veto.”
“I thought about it.”
The corner of his mouth moved. He set aside the coffee and pulled a laptop out of his bag. “Let’s get started.”
She established the method: She would work through the boxes she’d already partially cataloged, reading carefully for anything that possibly connected to Cinder, to Vance’s known postings, or to anomalies in the official record.
Anything she flagged she would read aloud.
He would run searches across whatever digital territories he had access to and tell her what came back, including when nothing did, because absence was its own data.
“I’ll keep my own working file,” she added. “What I share with you stays general unless I specifically read it from a document. There are things in Vance’s record I’m not going to allow into your search bar.”
His fingers flew across the keyboard. “Fair.”
“And I have my internal CIA packet on Vance with me. It’s not for your eyes. It’s for cross-reference on my side only.”
He nodded once. “Your packet, your rules.”
“All right. Up first.” She picked up one of the pages she’d put a sticky note on, “Vance references a mission in Sweden in 1993 when he was stationed there. He went into the field to meet with a potential defector. He doesn’t name the operative who set up the meeting, but does give the defector’s last name, Lundgren.
Let’s see if we can determine who this person is. ”
“You think the operative could be Cinder?”
“It could be a dozen different people, but following each of these leads might narrow down who. We can look for anyone in that area on that date who might have ties to Vance or Lundgren.”
Within a few minutes, Jasper had found Nouri Lundgren, a Swedish scientist who’d been selling secrets to the Serbs and had gotten himself into hot water.
After an extensive search, Jasper identified the contact who’d brought Vance and Lundgren together.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t a CIA operative at all—just Lundgren’s sister, who worked for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and was trying to save her brother.
Katherine moved on. She read a passage, named a place or a date or a colleague’s name, and he ran it through his databases and search engines. He typed without looking at the keys. He clicked through results without a lot of scrolling, discerning immediately if something was of value or not.
Every time he leaned over to show her something on his screen, the sleeve of his hoodie brushed the edge of her glove. By the end of the first hour, the air around her chair was warm in a way it hadn’t been when she’d been by herself.
Which made her annoyingly aware of him in a way she hadn’t allowed herself to be aware of any man in a long time. His clean, faintly woodsy soap. The shift of his sleeve against his arm when he reached for his coffee. The richness of his eyes when he turned his head to listen.
She kept her own focus by sheer force.
At one point, Jasper frowned at his screen and tapped the trackpad. “What about a meeting at the Imperial in Vienna, September ’96. Vance mentioned it twice. Can we place anyone there?”
“That was two letters back.” She began digging. “Same envelope of correspondence.”
She pulled the documents, read them in full, and nodded. “Can you trace who attended from the open side?”
He typed for a minute, and she leaned over.
The screen kept refreshing with hits that he scrolled past, then paused on, then dismissed.
He moved into something that looked like a diplomatic registry, then into a news archive, then into an academic paper on European political conferences from the period.
Eventually, he sat back. “Nothing.”
“Nothing at all?”
“The Imperial had its usual share of public guests on those dates. None of them are tied to Vance. There’s no Agency overlap I can find.
If something happened in that hotel in September ’96, it didn’t leave a public footprint, and either the people involved were careful, or someone has been careful with what got into the public record about them. ”
“Wonderful.”
“Your least favorite kind of result.”
“Absence as data.”
He picked up his cup, found it empty, and set it back down. “For what it’s worth, I hate voids like that, too, but it is data.”
By eleven-thirty, she had filled four pages of the burgundy notebook with new flags, and Jasper had a working list of threads he could pull overnight. They kept going, neither of them mentioning lunch. The library’s heating system clicked on, off, on again.
Katherine pulled an unmarked manila envelope from a sub-folder of Vance’s 1995 file and opened it on the table. Inside were three letters and a draft memo, the latter in Vance’s clean block printing. She read the memo through. Stopped. Read the second paragraph again.
“Name,” she said. “Matthew Caldwell. He’s mentioned here as a junior officer assigned to follow-up on a debriefing under Vance’s supervision. Date is March ’95.”
Jasper typed. “Matthew Caldwell.” A breath passed and he said, “Yep, got him. He was a foreign service officer who transferred to a State Department detail in 1993. Left government service in 1996 and married Helen Bristol, and they settled in northern Virginia. He now runs a consulting firm.” More typing and a few swipes on his trackpad.
“Looks unremarkable. His public website lists ten employees, bios for all of them, and contact info.”