Chapter 2 #2
He didn’t reply. After some time, she glanced behind, half-expecting him to have vanished.
He was staring at the ceiling, as if seeking redemption from the heavens.
Relief? Regret, maybe? If he wasn’t telling the truth about all this, he was either a damn good actor or insane.
Neither seemed to fit, but nor did the possibility that this could be real.
The classroom door swished open. Alice gasped, planting her hand on her chest. Two sophomores wandered in—carrying takeout coffees, damn them. Six minutes until the bell—though it would no longer ring in a return to normalcy, would it?
“Sorry, ladies, I have an appointment with your teacher,” the guy said in a suggestive growl—there really was no other word for it. “Give us a minute?”
As he ushered the girls to the door, Alice realized she was still clutching his phone.
She could call someone. But who? Hello, Security?
Looks like I may have defamed a congressional candidate, pinned a murder on an innocent man and revealed state secrets.
Either that, or I have a nutcase in my classroom.
He locked the door, lowered the blind and turned. The killer smile (so to speak) he’d used on the girls lingered for a moment before resetting to his square-jawed resting bitch face.
Bastard face? Jerk face?
In the hallway, the girls whispered. One giggled. Yep, Alice would have considered him hot if she were a teenager, despite the eau de trash. But these days she preferred fictitious men—the ones who didn’t leave the pages of their books.
“Did Nika give you any indication of who really killed the station chief?”
“No. I asked her many times but I figured she was weighing up the options and hadn’t yet plotted it out. So many characters had motive—not to mention the possibility that the Russian FSB had ordered it, or even the CIA. I picked the least likely person—”
“Anderson Holt.” He wandered across the room and held out a hand for the phone. After a second’s hesitation she handed it over.
“Yes. And added some signposts and clues earlier in the plot, changed a few continuity issues so it made sense. I tried running it by her but by then…” Alice’s eyes stung.
He gave a curt but sympathetic nod. “The text message and the scarf—these were the clues you added?”
She swallowed. “Exactly.”
“And the meeting at Gorky Park was your invention? The SD card built into the matryoshka dolls? The old guy at the souvenir stand?”
“It all sounds so corny when you say it.” Oh God, he had to be telling the truth.
How else would he know which parts of the story were Nika’s contributions and which were hers?
“I wanted to do justice to her ideas, her story. And sure, I felt a little bad about making you—er, Holt—the killer but you’ve got to admit… ”
He was eyeballing her with those deep, glossy Anderson Holt eyes. Eyes a woman could dive into. Maybe that was the solution. She’d dive into his eyes like a character in a fantasy graphic novel and resurface in her regular day with its regular classes and regular hassles.
“You gotta admit what?” he said.
“You were the perfect fall guy,” she said weakly.
“Well, thanks for pointing that out to whoever required one. You laid it all out there—literally a narrative for them to follow.”
“Oh, come on, no one would seriously believe that you were a murderer just because of this.”
“There was already suspicion on me. It would be convenient for a lot of people if they could pin this on a rogue former U.S. spy—especially for the real killer.”
“I can tell them I made up that part.”
“You could try that, sure.”
“Why do you sound doubtful?”
“Because my very reliable sources tell me this is all being driven by someone in a position of power. Someone who has seized on this narrative and is right now finding the ‘facts’ to back it up, while making inconvenient truths disappear. But you said there were recordings of Nika. Transcripts. Notes. Where are they now?”
“The transcripts are on my laptop—not that one,” she added, as he stepped toward her work laptop. “Another one, at home.”
He picked up Alice’s purse and passed it to her, though her phone remained in his pocket. “Then we’d better get this computer before someone else does.”
The bell buzzed, and she gave a little shriek. “I have a class right now. I can’t…” She straightened. “What do you mean ‘before someone else does?’”
“First we get the laptop, then we figure out our next step.”
“Our next step?”
He studied the whiteboard, on which half an hour ago, in her previous existence, she’d written: Secrets and Lies: Conveying Subtext Through Body Language. “It’s the end of the year. They won’t give a shit. After you, Ms. Thornton.”
“I can’t just walk out. You’ll have to wait until after school. Hold on, no, I have an English department meeting. I could get away maybe four, four-thirty?”
His focus locked on something over her shoulder, through the outside windows.
His jaw tightened. “I’m gonna tell you straight.
You’re a witness in a conspiracy that many dangerous, powerful people would like to find a scapegoat for.
You may well be the only person alive with a clue to the real killer’s identity, aside from the real killer, who’d rather you weren’t in a position to tell.
You could be dead before your departmental meeting. ”
“You’re not … overthinking this?” Her voice came out squeaky.
“That’s a question I’m gonna refer to those guys.” He pointed outside. The basketball court was emptying as students drifted to class. Beyond the chain-link fence, a van had pulled up, a Daisy Sparkles logo splashed across its side. Two men were unloading buckets and mops.
“The window washers?” Okay, maybe he was a fantasist. One of those paranoid conspiracy-theory types.
“You recognize them?”
“Sure. They’ve been coming here for years. Every month like clockwork—the last … Thursday.”
“It’s the first Monday,” he said, needlessly. “And I’m guessing your window washers don’t usually carry.”
She squinted. A big guy with a bushy gray beard passed a squeegee to a taller guy, who had his back to her. “Actually, no, they’re not the usual people. Who are they?”
“Not the cops, or the FBI. More likely the Russians.”
“The Russians? The actual Russians?”
“Now, these guys with the squeegees may be a coincidence but we in the Intelligence Community don’t believe in coincidences.
We who were in the I.C.,” he added, to himself.
The door handle rattled, making her jump.
He planted a hand on her lower back. “Time to go, Ms. Thornton.” It sounded like an order.
“Are you … kidnapping me?”
He used just enough pressure on her back to compel her to walk. “Of course not.”
She twisted to look up at him. “Can I choose not to come?”
The corner of his mouth quirked in that Anderson Holt way she absolutely shouldn’t find sexy in these circumstances. “I would feel compelled to prevent you from making that choice, since it’d be such a bad one.”
“For you or me?”
“For you. Which also, right now, means me. Looks like we’ve been dumped in this together, like it or not.
” By the tone of his voice, she guessed he joined her in the “not” category.
He leaned down and murmured into her ear: “And, in case it influences your decision, I am not a man to be underestimated.” He unlocked the door but held the handle still, caging her between his arms. His body wasn’t touching hers, but it might as well be for the heat it generated.
“Not gonna pretend—this is a hundred percent about my self-preservation. Maybe ninety-nine, now that we’ve bonded, and you seem like a good person who’s gone and stumbled into this.
You want to preserve your own life? That’s up to you.
But first I need to know what you know, and I need that computer.
So I’m gonna go ahead and give you the hall pass.
” He turned the handle a fraction, and stilled.
“Don’t worry, Alice,” he said, dropping the teasing tone and becoming deadly serious—and honestly, she wasn’t sure which one she found more unsettling.
“I won’t let anything bad happen to you. But I can’t speak for anyone else.”
Alice let out a noise that sounded annoyingly like a whimper.
“Are you ready?” he said.
“For what?”
“No idea. But it’s guaranteed to be interesting.”