Disavowed #2
"I don't know yet." He looked at me, and his eyes were the same tired gray they had been in my apartment three nights ago, but something else was there now. Something sharper. "But they knew about the meeting. They knew where and when."
The implication landed between us like a third presence. Someone had known. Someone had told them. And the only people who knew about the meeting were Harding and me.
"I didn't," I said.
"I know." He said it without hesitation, and the certainty in his voice was more unsettling than suspicion would have been. "But someone did. Someone is listening."
He started walking, and I followed because standing still felt like waiting for a bullet.
We moved through the streets of downtown Phoenix, staying close to the buildings, avoiding the pools of light beneath the streetlamps.
The city was quiet, the kind of quiet that settles in after the office workers go home and before the night crowd comes out.
A few cars passed, their headlights sweeping across the pavement, and each time I tensed and waited for the shots to come.
They didn't. Not yet.
"The papers," I said. "Do you still have them?"
Harding touched his jacket. "They're here."
"They were willing to kill us for those papers."
"They were willing to kill us for what's in them." He glanced at me, and his expression was unreadable. "You said you read the names. You know what KESTREL was."
"A network. Double agents. People inside the CIA and the KGB, all reporting to Julian."
"Julian Smith was the controller. The man at the center." Harding's voice was quiet, but it carried something hard beneath the surface. "He managed assets on both sides of the Cold War. He knew secrets that could destabilize governments. And someone killed him for it."
"You think it's connected. The ambush tonight, Julian's death."
"I think the same people who wanted Julian dead want those papers destroyed. And they want anyone who's seen them eliminated." He stopped walking and turned to face me. "That includes you, Mrs. Vance."
I met his eyes. The cut on my cheek had stopped bleeding, but I could feel the dried blood tightening on my skin, pulling at the edges of the wound. "Then why are you helping me?"
He didn't answer right away. The street was empty, the buildings dark, and somewhere in the distance a siren wailed and faded. When he spoke, his voice was lower than before, as if he were confessing something he hadn't meant to say.
"Because you didn't ask for any of this. You got on a cruise ship to grieve your husband, and a man you trusted used you to carry his secrets across an ocean. You're not a spy. You're not an operative. You're a widow from Phoenix who happened to fall in love with the wrong person."
The words hit harder than I expected. I looked away, down the empty street, at the darkened windows and the locked doors. "I keep thinking about the last morning on the ship. He promised to call. Two weeks, maybe three. He said he wanted to build something real."
"He was lying."
"I know." I swallowed. "But I believed him.
I wanted to believe him. And now people are shooting at me in alleys, and I don't know if I'm going to survive the night, and all I can think about is how stupid I was to trust a man who smiled at me across a dinner table and told me I deserved to be happy again. "
Harding was quiet for a long moment. Then he said, "You're not stupid. You were lonely. There's a difference."
I looked at him. His face was half in shadow, the streetlamp catching the gray at his temples and the lines around his mouth. He looked like a man who had been lonely himself, once, and had learned to live with it.
"We need to keep moving," he said. "There's a place we can go. It's not far."
"What kind of place?"
"A safe house. Off the books. No one knows about it except me." He paused. "And now you."
I thought about the white sedan in my parking lot.
I thought about the men on the rooftop, the suppressor on the gun, the bullet that had missed my head by three feet.
I thought about the eighteen pages of names now tucked inside Harding's jacket, and the small brass key still pressed into my palm, and the fact that I had no idea what it unlocked or why Julian had hidden it in my luggage.
I thought about going home, and I knew that home wasn't safe anymore. It might never be safe again.
"All right," I said. "Take me there."
We walked. The streets grew quieter, the buildings lower, and the sky opened up above us in a vast black sweep dotted with stars the city lights couldn't drown.
Phoenix stretched out around us, a desert metropolis of stucco and asphalt and air conditioning units humming on rooftops, and I walked through it like a stranger in a city I had lived in for years.
The cut on my cheek throbbed. The blood had dried to a crust I could feel cracking when I moved my jaw.
I didn't ask Harding where we were going.
I didn't ask what would happen when we got there.
I just kept walking, one foot in front of the other, while the man beside me scanned the streets with the alertness of someone who had spent his life expecting ambush.
Behind us, somewhere in the labyrinth of alleys and loading docks, the men with the guns were still searching.
I didn't know who they were or who they worked for.
I didn't know if they were CIA or KGB or something else entirely, some third player I hadn't seen on the board.
But I knew they wouldn't stop. The papers were too important.
The names were too dangerous. And I was a loose end that needed to be tied off.
We crossed a street and turned down another, and the city fell away behind us, and the desert opened up ahead, dark and vast and full of shadows that moved in the wind.