CHAPTER 9
Eliza
◆
The phone rings at oh-three-hundred and I am awake before it finishes the first ring.
The phone is the burner Cora bought me last March in a fit of paralegal paranoia, after she watched a documentary about doxxing and went out the next morning and put two cheap flip phones on her credit card.
One for her. One for me. One programmed number per phone.
Whitlock on mine. Quinn on hers. I have not used it. I have not had to.
It lives in the bedside drawer of the guest suite with my passport and a half-roll of breath mints, and at oh-three-hundred on a Tuesday morning the cheap plastic chirp of it cuts through the bar of corridor light on the cream wall above my head like a knife through a column footer.
I have the phone open at the second ring.
"Eliza. " She is not breathing right. "Eliza, listen.
I am one floor down. I was going to water your plants because it is Tuesday and I am responsible.
Someone has just kicked your door. I am behind my own door and I can hear them in your kitchen.
They are in your kitchen, Eliza. They are opening drawers. "
The wool of my trousers is cold under my hand. I slept four hours tonight in my clothes, on the duvet of the guest-suite bed, door open six inches. Now I am barefoot on the cold-oak floor and my body is moving the way bodies move when the mind has gone forensic-clinical and the rest is autonomic.
"Cora. Listen to me. Do not open your door. Get to the lobby on the service stair, not the front. Go to the night doorman at the brass desk. You will say to him, exactly, barge-nine-lima. Three words. Phonetic. Say it back."
"Eliza, what the entire fuck."
"Say it back, Cora."
"Barge-nine-lima. Eliza."
"Say it once to him and he will take you into the back office.
You will sit on the bench against the wall.
You will not call your mother. You will not call your firm.
You will wait for a man named Sebastian Crowe.
He is six-foot-four. He is wearing a charcoal henley.
He will say the word Whitlock before he says anything else.
You do not move until he says Whitlock. Do you understand. "
"Eliza, what the entire — yes. Barge-nine-lima. Whitlock. The bench. I am putting shoes on."
"Cora. Listen. Don't run. Walk the stair like a girl who has forgotten her wallet. Down. Not up. Don't go past my floor."
"I am not stupid."
"I love you. Go."
She hangs up.
I am already in the corridor.
Henrik is in the kitchen when I get there.
He is in black tactical wear and he is holding the landline copper handset to his ear with two fingers the way a man holds a coffee cup, calm.
The Sig is at his shoulder. He sees me come around the corner of the Carrara island and nods once, the nod that means received.
"Ma'am. " Three words: "Sebastian descending now."
"Cora is one floor below my apartment," I say.
The kitchen is bright after the bar of corridor light, the brass pot rack throwing its dim shine the way it does, the Lacanche humming its one low pilot note.
I do not put my hand on the marble. I am keeping my hands where I can see them.
"She is going to the lobby. I told her barge-nine-lima and to wait for Sebastian. Tell me I told her the right thing."
"Yes, ma'am. " He puts the handset back in its cradle.
"Sebastian is in the lobby at oh-three-eighteen.
He will collect Ms. Whitlock through the loading-dock door.
Town car at the dock by oh-three-twenty-two.
Safe apartment in the rail district by oh-three-forty-five.
Two of mine will be with her. She will not be alone. "
"I want to see it."
"Yes, ma'am. " He is already moving. "Floor thirty-six. Come."
He does not put his hand on my elbow. We take the public elevator down nine floors and the descent is the slowest ten seconds I have lived.
Henrik palms a panel I have not seen before at the rear of the cab and we step out into a corridor I have not seen before either — black tile floor, white walls, fluorescent tubes recessed flush. Henrik's team lives on these floors.
The gun lockers are behind the wall to my left; I can hear the low hum of the dehumidifier. There is a door at the end of the corridor and Henrik palms that too.
The ops desk is the size of a small library and lit only by its monitors.
Six of them. A bank of two-by-three in matte black, mounted on a steel frame, each one a quartered grid of feeds.
Lobby, loading dock, the elevator banks, the side stairs, the Hawthorne intersection, the Foundry Square coffee cart at oh-three-hundred (empty; the cart is empty, the lions ringed in frost, the granite blue).
Henrik takes the chair. I stand at his right shoulder.
I can smell the cold-machine of the room and the faint salt of Henrik's neck where he has not yet had time to put on his coat.
"There," he says.
Lobby cam. Three-fifteen on the time stamp. The night doorman at the brass concierge desk, a thin man in a forest-green livery coat who I have walked past four times and not looked at, stands up. His chin lifts. He has heard a girl come through the service door behind him.
Cora.
She is in jeans and a grey hoodie pulled up and the running shoes she keeps by her own door for the same reason I used to keep mine by mine.
Her hair is sticking out the back of the hood in a honey-brown spike.
She is, I see across the cold-screen, breathing in through her nose and out through her mouth the way she taught me to do it five years ago in the corridor outside the surgical ICU, where my mother was.
She walks to the desk. She says something. She says it once. The doorman's face does a small clean re-arrangement — not surprise, recognition — and he lifts the brass hinged counter that separates the public side of the desk from the staff side. He gestures her through.
"He has her," Henrik says.
The doorman walks her into the back office.
The back-office camera takes over. She sits on the bench against the wall.
She puts her hands flat on her thighs. She does not call her mother.
She does not call her firm. She is, on the small screen, every inch of the paralegal who can pull a deposition out of the air on a Sunday at nine and not break the cap on her pen.
"He will hold her until Sebastian arrives," Henrik says. "Three more minutes."
I watch the lobby camera. The clock ticks. Oh-three-seventeen. Oh-three-eighteen.
The lobby doors open.
He comes through the way he came through the fire-stair door yesterday morning — not fast, no wasted motion, the body of a man who has been on the deck of a ship in a gale.
Sebastian Crowe in the charcoal henley under the black sport coat, the shoulder holster, his pale-fair face a small clean shape under the lobby chandelier.
He does not run. He nods at the doorman.
He goes around the brass desk and through the same hinged counter Cora went through, and the camera on the back office catches the moment he steps inside and Cora looks up.
He says one word.
I cannot hear it. The ops desk feeds are silent. But I see her face register the word, and I know — because I told her — that he has said Whitlock.
She stands.
He turns his shoulder to her, indicating the back of the office; she follows him.
They go through a door I had not noticed in the back wall of the back office, a door painted to disappear into the wood paneling.
The loading-dock cam picks them up forty seconds later.
The black town car is already at the dock.
Sebastian opens the rear door for her the way a man opens the door for a woman he has known for twenty years.
She gets in. He gets in the front. The car pulls out into the alley at oh-three-twenty-two on the dot, just as Henrik said, and the alley camera catches the tail-light blink twice as it turns east toward the rail district.
I do not realize I have stopped breathing until Henrik says, "Ma'am," and I exhale.
"Thank you," I say.
"It is the job," he says.
He hands me a cordless handset from the cradle on the ops desk.
"Ms. Whitlock at the safe apartment will be on this line in twenty minutes. The line is clean. You may speak freely."
The twenty minutes are the longest twenty minutes since the surgical waiting room.
I stand at Henrik's right shoulder and I watch the apartment cameras come up.
He has put them up because of course he has put them up.
My apartment is on screen four, the second from the left in the middle row.
The lens is in the corner of the living-room ceiling, behind what I would have thought was an old fire-alarm. The footage is live.
The three men are gone. The door is hanging on one hinge.
The sage-green velvet armchair has a cushion pulled out and dropped on the bleached oak floor.
The writing desk by the harbor window is a small wreck — papers scattered, the desk lamp on its side, the green-glass shade cracked across one panel.
Above the desk, the two photographs of my mother are still on their nails, the glass of the 2018 frame catching the streetlight from the window in a long pale rectangle.
I look at the iron hook by the door.
My peacoat is still on the hook.
The right shoulder is pulled lower than the left.
The left lapel is folded back wrong, the underside of the lining catching the corridor light from the hall, the way a coat sits when somebody has pushed past it in a hurry and not bothered to set it right.
The collar is folded under. The brass apartment-key is still in the inside breast pocket.