Chapter 2
Wallace had in fact left a change of clothes at the drop, and by the time I landed in California, my gratitude for the yoga pants, hoodie, and sneakers was overwhelming. My head ached; my body craved sleep. Or caffeine. Whichever I could get my hands on first.
The DSA didn’t fly anyone first class unless the covert occasion called for it.
I had spent the past six hours wedged in a middle seat, head bobbing between a guy with a man bun who smelled like patchouli and a woman who somehow managed to read a book with her whole body.
She sighed, gasped, jerked in surprise, bent the poor spine until it broke, and laughed out loud more than once.
Great to know it was such a good book, but did it need to be read at the crack of dawn on a cross-country flight beside someone who hadn’t had a decent night’s sleep in a decade?
No. No, it did not.
The full-body read-a-thon paired with the patchouli-scented hippie who had to be returning to his yurt in the weed-growing California redwoods left me in a spectacularly foul mood.
You pulled out all the stops for this one, I planned to tell Wallace as soon as I saw him.
I did my best. It was last minute, he would say and maybe mean it but probably not because he would have flown in on something chartered. Or maybe he had already been here when he called me last night, I couldn’t say.
I also intended to ask him the reason for the last-minute move, and fully expected him to grumble something about urgency and DSA priority, which I knew was less the reason and more a reminder, again, that I was at his mercy.
That day ten years ago when my father had gotten arrested by the FBI and I, his accomplice, had been intercepted by an agency so off-the-books no one knew about it, I had no idea what I was walking into.
I had fled the hotel room where our job had gone terribly wrong and ended up on a stormy street in the pouring rain with blood on my adolescent hands and a gun pointed at me.
I may well have made a deal with the devil.
Desperate and completely alone, I’d handed over my life to the government rather than follow my father to prison.
Sometimes, I wondered if prison would have been the better option.
No one even knew the DSA existed. I certainly hadn’t until working for it became my life.
The Directorate of Secret Affairs was the interstitial tissue between organizations the likes of the FBI and CIA but with fewer rules and more secrets.
It filled gaps the others couldn’t. Sidestepped funding pipelines and operated invisibly other than to those in the know.
I was more in the know than I ever wanted to be but still often in the dark.
Wallace doled out only the necessary information to me, which was why I had to trust he knew what was going on when he told me what to do.
I usually got a break between jobs. A spell of reprieve to get out of Dodge after whatever hammer I’d been helping to lower dropped.
I’d ditch the disguise—wigs, contacts, whatever wardrobe fit the role I’d been playing—and go back to being me, Erin, whoever that was.
Wallace would set me up in a small apartment or house with some flat-box furniture and the occasional bloodstain under the rug from whatever DSA purpose it had previously served, but never for long enough to feel like home.
I hadn’t had one of those since my mother died when I was twelve.
I really wasn’t sure what the rush was all about this time, but ever faithful, I made the drop and caught my flight.
Once I deplaned, I exited the airport like every other wearied traveler. I toted only the backpack Wallace had stuffed with the essentials: ID, new phone preloaded with accounts in my new name, address, the key to whatever new set of four walls would serve as my living quarters.
Would it kill him to pack me a snack?
The coffee cart near the exit caught my eye, and seeing I had no idea how far a drive it was to the rendezvous point, I decided to fuel up.
“Name?” the bouncy barista asked from behind the counter, pen hovering and ready to ink.
A tangle of identities pulsed and retracted inside my mind. My trained tongue patiently waited for permission to shape around the correct choice. I had gone to bed in New York as Vivian and arrived in California as someone else.
The fleeting moment in between I had spent as myself, when Wallace uttered my real name before ending our call, had stuck like a seed in my teeth.
I wasn’t sure why he’d done it; maybe another reminder of the girl I once was, that day in the hotel and the choice I made.
I couldn’t be sure, but hearing it was a haul back to memories that haunted my plane ride as I slipped in and out of consciousness.
Promises, lies. The sweet smile my father trained me to wield as a weapon, which would ultimately lead to my downfall.
I shook the thoughts away and gave the barista a smile.
“Lauren,” I said, using the name on my new fake ID stuffed in the bag.
The double espresso scorched my tongue when I impatiently sipped it.
I waited at the curb for my rideshare as a never-ending stream of cars passed like different shaped beads on a string.
Wallace sent me to Silicon Valley, where the ratio of electric vehicles to standards was truly something to behold.
My own driver pulled up to collect me in a nondescript gray Prius and returned to the stream of curbside traffic as smoothly as a raindrop into a river.
I gazed out the window as we navigated a complicated knot of freeways and exits.
My knowledge of the local geography was basic at best, but I knew I was at the bottom of the bay, and San Francisco waited somewhere to the north with its foggy shores and impossible hills.
And just north of that, clung to a picturesque shoreline, was the prison housing my father.
I hadn’t seen him since that hotel room ten years ago and had no intention of getting near, regardless of whatever reason Wallace had brought me to the area.
Still, I could feel his presence pulsing like a wound in the distance.
Thankfully, we weren’t heading up the peninsula, but rather across the lower belly, down by where its appendix would be.
After nearly an hour, my driver stopped on a street lined with more electric cars, hedgerows, and giant oaks swaying in the breeze.
The trim lawns shone a deep shade of emerald and the flower borders popped like colorful confetti.
We’d pulled up outside a small apartment complex sitting at the top of a T intersection, and diagonally across the street from some of the most beautiful houses I’d ever seen.
“Ma’am?” the driver awkwardly asked. “This the right spot?”
I caught myself gaping in a daze. I had no idea how long we had been idling at the curb.
“Yes, it is,” I said, trying to sound like Lauren, the woman who had been driven home from the airport and not like the informant in a hoodie who had landed in Pleasantville with a fake name.
“Thank you,” I told the driver. I climbed out into the air, which smelled like freshly clipped lawn and baking bread.
The driver pulled away as I spun in a slow circle, taking it all in.
It was a street from a storybook. Charming homes, each similar but unique, as if they came from the same cookie factory but had been stamped with a different cutter.
Shiny cars, dogs on leashes, strollers, children’s laughter on the air.
The apartments were spitting distance from the mansions, and yet seamlessly blended into the neighborhood.
It was a far cry from the places Wallace had sent me before.
I’d seen dumps, hovels, crack houses with bullet-riddled walls.
My last job landed me in the lap of Manhattan luxury, and I had been a few similar places before, but this place, this street, was like nowhere I had ever been.
Standing on the sidewalk beneath a mighty oak felt like a warm, protected embrace, and I couldn’t imagine what lurked beneath that warranted Wallace sending me here.
I stopped spinning and matched the address in my file to the apartments.
The boxy beige building was U-shaped with two stories, outdoor staircases, and front doors that opened to outside.
Based on the apartment number in the file, I’d be living in the first-floor corner space.
It was nothing like the Manhattan apartment I’d spent last night in, but it still looked upscale and welcoming.
The espresso in my veins and my lack of sleep had me jittery—more jittery than usual when I began a new job.
I never knew what Wallace had in store for me, what file he would slap down on the table to lay out the plan: the targets, the stakes, the goal.
It was my job to get information he couldn’t.
I slipped into cracks where he didn’t fit.
We could help each other, he’d said to me that night so many years ago.
At the time, it sounded like a good deal: Go undercover or risk going to prison until I was forty.
If only I had known how imbalanced the each other part of that deal was.
If only I had known how much more help I would be providing than receiving.
Although Wallace had kept his word. I hadn’t ever seen the inside of a cell.
But in exchange, I had become a nomad informant. A true specter in the wind.
The truth was, when he’d looked at me that night my father and I got caught, he not only saw someone desperate, but he also saw someone useful. A blond, doll-eyed key with a sweet smile who could fit into locks a middle-aged man with a mustache that screamed Authority couldn’t.
Exploited, would be a proper description.
I followed the little sidewalk bisecting a trim green lawn and leading to the building, and pulled out my key. Right as I reached for the door to my new place, the neighboring door swung open.
A young woman stepped out backward, humming a soft tune and bouncing. She pulled her door shut, and turned to reveal a baby attached to her chest by a complicated tangle of fabric. Two pudgy brown legs sprouted from the bottom of the little sack, softly kicking against her abdomen.
“Oh!” She stopped short but instantly smiled a row of shockingly white teeth.
“You must be the new neighbor!” Her cheeks pulled like rounded plums toward her dark eyes, setting her whole face aglow with welcome.
She wore running leggings and a bright yellow band in her hair, which matched her sneakers.
She marched over, managing not to break stride with the bouncing, and held out a determined hand. “I’m Alisha. I’m so happy to meet you!”
I spent enough time lying to know when people were telling the truth, and Alisha’s welcome was nothing but genuine.
“Hi. I’m … Lauren.”
The name took a moment to recover, perhaps because of the disorienting kindness radiating off my new neighbor, or perhaps due to my lack of sleep and the espresso drilling a raw hole in the pit of my stomach. I hoped Wallace stocked the fridge.
“It’s so nice to meet you!” Alisha squeaked. “And this is Jeffrey!” She leaned forward, holding her hand to the back of the tiny head bobbling inside her harness. From inside her pouch, enormous brown eyes blinked up. A tiny bubble popped from Jeffrey’s bow lips.
I had precisely zero experience with babies, and very little interest to be honest, but even I couldn’t deny Jeffrey was cute.
“He’s sweet.” I dutifully smiled.
“Yes, we just eat him up!” Alisha’s voice turned into something between a dog’s squeaky chew toy and a feral animal in heat.
“Anyway, we saw them bringing in new furniture the other day, so the girls and I assumed we’d have a new neighbor soon.
” She paused to look up and down the street for signs of a moving van as I made note of the new furniture comment and sent a silent thanks to Wallace.
I gave her a tight smile. “The girls? Do you have more than just Jeffrey?”
She tilted her head in confusion before nodding in understanding. “Oh, Jeffrey is not mine. I’m his nanny,” she said, still bouncing, and waved one hand over her head in a loop. “I meant the other girls in the complex. This is basically nanny central.”
I blankly stared at her, unsure how to respond.
Luckily, she kept the conversation flowing.
“I work for the Wilson family.” She pointed over my shoulder, back down the storybook street.
“Jeffrey and I were out for a walk, and I remembered I’d left something at home, so we stopped by.
I’m glad I ran into you! Welcome to the neighborhood! ”
“Thank you,” I said, hoping she wasn’t about to ask me more about my reason for being here.
I could lie, sure I could—and I was really good at it—but I usually never had to until after Wallace briefed me on my new identity. All I knew about Lauren was her address and that she had a very friendly neighbor named Alisha.
Alisha kept smiling at me. “I’m sure you’re excited to get started with—”
“Ms. Thomas?” someone said from the sidewalk.
We both turned to see a tall man in a suit with a leather messenger bag looped over his shoulder. I immediately clocked the telltale but discreet bulge at his hip.
“Lauren Thomas?” the man said as if it were a statement and a question at once.
“Yes,” I said, recognizing my new name and feeling more certain this man had arrived to help me.
“Hi. I’m Age—nt.” He caught himself with a deep blush, glancing at Alisha.
“The agent. I’m the real estate agent.” He recovered with a smile that wobbled at the edges and gave him a boyish look.
The sun glossed his wavy brown hair into a shine.
An eagerness rolled off him, which I could feel from a distance.
Alisha looked between the two of us, confused, and I silently begged her to go away.
“Right, yes. I forgot we had a meeting this morning. Please, won’t you come in,” I said to the man on the sidewalk.
Alisha, mercifully, took her cue to leave. “I’ll see you later, Lauren. It was so nice to meet you.”
I gave her a small wave as the man in the suit approached with wide steps in shiny shoes, which softly clicked on the pavement. When he arrived on my doorstep, I smelled soap and mint and realized he was a lot taller than I had thought.
My key was suddenly sweaty in my hand, and I hoped I was right about the man with a gun I was about to let into my new apartment.