Chapter 7
CHAPTER SEVEN
The Blackridge Public Library felt different at two in the morning.
Quiet, yes, but no longer hallowed in the way Katherine had felt it to be.
Tonight, every dark aisle looked like a place someone could hide.
Every window reflected too much of the room behind her.
Every settling creak in the old building made her bandaged hand tighten around the strap of her document bag.
It had seemed like a safe place and had been Agency-approved. But that was before someone had attacked her. Someone who knew she was an archivist at the CIA.
Margie had given her after-hours access with the key, but Katherine doubted the librarian had imagined four men from Shadow Point Security moving through the rear corridor like a tactical unit while Katherine stood in the meeting room doorway with a cut on her cheek and Priss yowling from Jasper’s truck.
The former Secret Service agent, Sebastian, had taken the exterior before Katherine ever stepped inside, circling the building once, then positioning himself near the front with a view of the street and parking lot.
A tall bear of a man, unmistakably CB from Garrett and Jasper’s description, stood at the rear exit, big enough to make the doorway look smaller.
Garrett and Jasper moved boxes. Jasper had handed her a heavy flashlight before she’d exited the truck, showing her the second switch that delivered enough electrical charge to ruin someone’s day.
A stun baton, he’d called it. It felt wrong in her hands that had just held Priss, but it also brought a kind of relief.
No one said they were arranging themselves around her. They didn’t need to.
The oak table where she’d spent six weeks of her life was already half bare, but at least nothing was missing. The intruder hadn’t come here.
Yet. Her mind supplied the image before she could stop it: black ski mask, dull brown eyes, the gun lifting through the crack in her bedroom door. She gripped her bandaged palm around the stun baton ignoring the pain.
Jasper appeared in the doorway. “Ready?”
She turned off the lights, locked the rear exit of the library behind them. She dropped the key through the metal Returns slot and climbed into the truck without looking back.
She didn’t know what to say on the drive to the compound. Jasper kept his eyes on the road, as if the silence didn’t bother him. As the darkness slid by the window, she felt a few of her muscles unwind.
Until they reached the compound. They passed through an open gate that closed behind them. Gravel crunched under the tires, and the main building materialized out of the dark, a few lit windows making it look like a ship at anchor.
Dr. Montgomery met them at the entrance. She stood in the foyer in slacks and a dark sweater, her hair pulled neatly back. She looked like she’d never gone to bed. Katherine doubted that.
“Katherine.” Vivi stepped forward and took her hand briefly. “I’m glad you’re okay. Come in. I’ve set up a guest room in the private quarters wing for you and your cat. Would you like some tea to calm your nerves?”
Tea sounded wonderful, but Katherine didn’t want to put the doctor out any more tonight. “No, I’m fine.”
Vivi turned to Garrett and Jasper. “The conference room has plenty of space for the boxes.”
Katherine trailed after them, keeping a firm grasp on Priss’s carrier. The room had panels along one side and an interior window facing the corridor. She could see the long table inside, the rolling chairs, and a whiteboard. It was a professional space. Clean, well-lit, accessible.
Accessible was the problem that tugged at her now. The library had been a safe place. Katherine’s rental had seemed safe, too. “Is there anywhere more secure?” she asked.
Vivi paused. “This is one of the most secure compounds in the state. No one on this property is going to touch your boxes. You have my word.”
Katherine believed her. She did. Vivi Montgomery was former NSA.
She headed this private security group. She’d opened her doors in the early morning hours without hesitation and was now standing in a hallway offering reassurance to a woman she barely knew.
Nothing about the doctor warranted distrust.
Katherine still couldn’t make herself say yes to the conference room.
“My office,” Jasper said from behind her. He was carrying one of the archival boxes. “There’s room for all of this along the far wall. There’s a table you can spread papers on, and a couch if you want to stay near the documents. The door has a biometric lock.”
Vivi looked at him, and something passed between them that Katherine couldn’t read, and then Vivi nodded. “That could work. Katherine? Is that suitable?”
It was as close to CIA parameters as she was going to get tonight. Katherine turned to Jasper. “Does it open only for your biometric data?”
“Yes, if I lock it, but I never do.”
She heard what he was really saying--he never used the lock because he trusted the people around him.
She was sure he dealt with confidential information regularly, but didn’t worry about anyone snooping.
He was offering it to her because she needed it, and he wasn’t making her feel ridiculous about it.
She was aware of how she must look to them.
A woman in wrinkled sweats clutching a cat carrier and asking for biometric security in a building staffed by security operators who had better things to do than rifle through boxes of a dead man’s memoirs and correspondence. She knew she was being paranoid.
She also knew that someone had tried to kill her, and the part of her brain that had spent ten years handling classified material was not going to calm down unless the papers were under a secure lock that she controlled.
Dr. Montgomery would no doubt surmise that it wasn’t so much the papers Katherine was trying to secure as her own safety and well-being. But Katherine didn’t feel like psychoanalyzing herself at the moment.
“That will work,” she said to Jasper. “If I won’t be in your way.”
He gave her a slight smile that suggested she’d been in his way since the moment they met.
She lifted her chin. His smile grew and he gestured with a tilt of his head for her to follow him.
She’d imagined his workspace as a dark room full of screens. She was half right. The room was larger than she’d expected. Three monitors sat on a long desk against the far wall, all currently dark. A set of six more was mounted on a wall, each showing views of the grounds from security feeds.
Equipment she couldn’t identify lined a shelf near those, mostly black boxes with small indicator lights.
Two bookshelves flanked the door, and she stopped when she saw them.
Actual books. Not manuals or reference guides, but novels and histories and what looked like a battered copy of Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea wedged between a naval tactics textbook and a volume on cryptography.
A leather couch sat along the opposite wall, soft and broken in, the kind of furniture that had absorbed a lot of late nights.
A floor lamp and a coffee table with a single mug ring on the surface sat beside it.
The room smelled faintly of him, the clean woodsy scent she’d been trying not to notice since yesterday.
She set Priss out of the way while Jasper and Garrett carried in the boxes and stacked them along the wall in the order she directed. She pointed, they placed. They worked quickly, and when the last box was set down, Garrett clapped Jasper on the shoulder, said goodnight to Katherine, and left.
Jasper closed the door. He pressed his palm against a small panel beside the frame, tapped through a menu on the tiny screen, and stepped back. “Give me your hand.”
“Why?”
“So you can come and go and lock the door as you please.”
Right. He needed her biometric data. She extended her right hand. He turned it palm-down, and placed it flat against the panel. His fingers were warm as he positioned her hand, and she kept her eyes on the panel rather than his face. He was so close, she could feel the heat coming off his body.
The panel beeped, and she nearly jumped, so lost in thoughts of him and his proximity. He released her hand. “Again, to verify.”
She pressed her palm to the panel on her own. It beeped again.
“That’s it,” he said. “The door opens for me and for you,” Jasper said. “No one else. If you want to remove my access in the morning, I can show you how.”
Katherine studied the panel, then the bookshelves and couch. This was his space. His screens, his books, his quiet, controlled room inside a building built to keep danger out. He’d given her access without hesitation, and now he was offering to lock himself out of it if she asked.
“I won’t be removing your access,” she said. “It’s your office, and you’re helping me with this project.”
“It’s your workspace now, too. I want you to feel comfortable with it.”
She didn’t trust her voice for a second.
People had given her desks, assignments, access badges, temporary offices.
No one had ever given her space like this—as if what mattered to her mattered to him, too.
The thought was too large for how tired she was, and the room blurred for one embarrassing second before she blinked it clear. “Thank you, Jasper.”
He looked at her face, then at her bandaged hand. “You’re about five minutes past done. You need rest”
“I’m not sure I can sleep.”
“I didn’t say sleep.” He nodded toward the couch. “Sit. Just for a minute.”
She should have said no. She should have gone to the guest room, shut the door, and begun the work of being fine.
Instead, she sat on the couch that smelled faintly of him and watched while he dimmed the overhead lights and turned on the floor lamp.
The room softened around them, boxes stacked safely along the wall, and the biometric lock on the door.
For the first time since the bedroom doorknob had rattled, Katherine felt the air reach the bottom of her lungs.