Under a Watchful Eye
The Summons
I had been back in Phoenix for fifteen days.
The cruise felt like something I'd watched through a window, a film projected onto seawater, and Julian's face had already begun to blur at the edges when I tried to recall it.
I remembered the dark leather bag more clearly than I remembered his voice, the weight of it against my leg in the taxi, the brass fittings cool under my thumb.
I had not opened it. It sat now in the back of my closet, behind a box of Richard's sweaters I still could not bring myself to donate, and I had not touched it since the afternoon I came home.
I made coffee. I watered the aloe on the balcony, which had turned brown at the tips. I sorted the rest of the mail, a catalog and a credit card offer and something from the HOA about the gate code changing. Then I sat down at the kitchen table and opened the letter.
The seal was official. The paper was heavy.
The words "Federal Bureau of Investigation" sat at the top in a typeface that left no room for ambiguity, and below them, in a smaller font, my name and the address of this apartment and a date and time, which was tomorrow morning at nine, and a case number that meant nothing to me.
The letter did not say what the case was about.
It did not say I was accused of anything.
It said my presence was requested, and it said that failure to appear could result in further action, and it said nothing else.
I read it three times. The coffee went cold in the mug. The mourning dove stopped calling.
Julian Smith had promised to call in two or three weeks.
It had been two weeks and one day, and I still hadn't heard from him.
I had not expected to, not really, not after the way he'd walked away from the breakfast table in Stockholm, his kiss already retreating before it landed, his eyes already somewhere else. But I had not expected the FBI, either.
I called the number on the letterhead. A woman answered on the second ring and confirmed that yes, the summons was legitimate, and yes, I was expected at the Phoenix field office at the stated time, and no, she could not provide additional information over the phone.
Her voice was polite and entirely empty.
I thanked her and hung up and sat with the dial tone until it turned into an automated scolding and I set the receiver back in its cradle.
The dial-up connection took forty-three seconds to resolve.
I searched for Julian Smith and found nothing useful, a few LinkedIn profiles for men who were not him, an obituary for a Julian Smith who had died in Ohio at the age of seventy-two.
I searched for the case number and found nothing at all.
I searched for "FBI Phoenix questioning summons" and closed the browser when the results made my hands unsteady.
That night I did not sleep. I lay in bed and listened to the air conditioner cycle on and off and thought about the bag in the closet.
I thought about opening it. I thought about driving out to the desert and burying it somewhere no one would look.
I did neither. At some point the sky outside the blinds turned from black to grey to the flat white of another Phoenix morning, and I got up and showered and dressed in the most respectable clothes I owned, a navy blouse and a pair of slacks I had not worn since Richard's funeral.
The FBI field office was a low building off the I-17, beige and windowless and surrounded by a parking lot that had been designed to hold twice as many cars as were actually there.
I parked near the back and sat in the driver's seat for a full minute, the heat already pressing against the windshield, before I got out and walked toward the entrance.
Inside, the air was cold and smelled of floor wax and photocopier toner.
A security guard checked my identification and directed me through a metal detector and handed me a visitor's badge that clung to my blouse with a weak adhesive.
I waited in a hallway on a plastic chair until a woman in a grey suit appeared and led me down another hallway and opened a door and gestured for me to go inside.
The room was small and square. A metal table bolted to the floor.
Two chairs on one side, one chair on the other.
A mirror that ran the length of the wall to my left, and I knew what it was the moment I saw it, the glass slightly darker than glass should be, the sense of a space behind it where someone was standing.
No windows. A fluorescent light in the ceiling that buzzed almost inaudibly.
The air was colder than the hallway had been.
I sat in the single chair and folded my hands on the table and waited.
The door opened again six minutes later.
The man who came in was in his forties, with a face that looked like it had been left out in weather it hadn't asked for, lines at the corners of his mouth and a weariness around the eyes that seemed less like exhaustion and more like a permanent condition.
He wore a jacket that had been pressed recently and a tie that had not.
He set a manila folder on the table and a small digital recorder beside it and sat down in the chair across from me without looking at me.
"Mrs. Vance," he said. "I'm Detective Harding. Thank you for coming in."
His voice was lower than I'd expected, and rougher, as if he'd been using it all morning and hadn't had any water. He pressed a button on the recorder and stated the date and time and the case number from the letter and our names, and then he looked at me for the first time since entering the room.
"Do you know why you're here?"
"No," I said. "The letter didn't say."
"The letter never does." He opened the folder and glanced at something inside it, a page he didn't turn. "I'd like to ask you about a man named Julian Smith."
I had known the name was coming, but hearing it spoken aloud in this room, under this light, still made something in my chest go very still. I kept my hands flat on the table.
"I met him on a cruise," I said. "In the Baltic. I got back two weeks ago."
"When did you last see him?"
"The morning the ship docked in Stockholm. We had breakfast. He left before I did."
"And you haven't seen him since."
"No."
Harding leaned back in his chair. The movement was small, but it shifted the whole weight of his attention, and I understood that everything I had said so far had been preliminary, a warm-up, and that the real questions were about to start.
"Julian Smith is dead," he said.
The fluorescent light buzzed. The air conditioner cycled on and then off again. I heard each of these things separately, as if they had been placed in a line and I was being asked to identify them one by one.
"Dead," I repeated.
"His body was found four days ago in a hotel room in Copenhagen. He'd been dead for approximately a week before that. The Danish authorities contacted us because Mr. Smith was an American citizen and because certain aspects of the scene suggested a professional execution."
He said the last two words without emphasis, as if reading from a file, and I stared at him.
"I don't understand," I said. "What does that have to do with me?"
"You were the last person known to have spent significant time with him before his death.
You disembarked together in Stockholm. You were seen with him repeatedly over the course of a two-week cruise.
And according to the ship's manifest, you were traveling alone, which means Mr. Smith was also traveling alone, which means the two of you formed a connection onboard. " He paused. "Is that accurate?"
"Yes. But I didn't..." I stopped. I had been about to say I didn't know him, but that was not true.
I had known him for fourteen days. I had eaten dinner with him and walked the decks with him and let him hold my hand in the dark of the ship's theater while an orchestra played something I could no longer remember.
I had believed, for a brief and foolish stretch of days, that he might be the thing that pulled me out of the grief I had been drowning in since Richard died.
"We were involved," I said. "Romantically. But only on the ship. When we docked, he said he'd call. He didn't."
"Did he give you anything to carry off the ship?"
The question landed in the center of the table and sat there. I felt my face go hot and then cold.
"A bag," I said. "He asked me to carry a bag for him. He said it was documents for his work. He said he'd collect it when he came to the States."
"Did you look inside it?"
"No."
"Where is the bag now?"
"In my apartment. In my closet."
Harding wrote something on the page inside the folder. The pen made a small scratching sound.
"Mrs. Vance, what did Mr. Smith tell you about his work?"
"He said he was a consultant. International trade."
"And you believed that."
"Why wouldn't I?"
He looked at me for a long moment. His eyes were the color of slate, and they gave nothing back.
"Julian Smith was not a trade consultant.
He was an intelligence operative working for an agency I'm not at liberty to name.
He was also, we believe, selling information to a foreign government.
The bag you carried off that ship contained materials that were never meant to leave his possession, and the people he was selling them to are the same people we believe killed him. "
The room had become smaller. I was certain of it. The walls had moved inward by several inches. I could feel the mirror at my back like a hand pressed between my shoulder blades.
"I didn't know," I said. "I didn't know any of that."
"That's what you're telling me."
"It's the truth."
"The truth," Harding said, and closed the folder, "is that a man is dead, and you were carrying his secrets, and you're asking me to believe you had no idea what was in that bag and no idea who he really was and no involvement in what happened to him after you left Stockholm."