“Guilty as charged,” Megan said with a smile. “You know me too well.”
To the boys Conrad said, “How did you know I wanted new clubs?”
“You always want new clubs, Grandpa,” one of them said.
“Well, you got the kind I like and everything.”
A couple of servants were dishing out dinner, which looked like whole racks of barbecue pork ribs and greens and cornbread and something else. A woman was pouring iced tea. It was a Texas barbecue on Wedgwood china.
Then a man entered the room, a bland-looking man in his forties with rimless glasses and hair that was either blond or gray-white, it was hard to tell. Hard blue-gray eyes. I wondered if that was his head of security, Fritz Heston, who was said to be sort of his consigliere. He went up to Conrad and began whispering, his head bowed. Conrad’s rheumy eyes widened, and he turned his head to look directly, and unambiguously, at me.
As if they were talking about me. I caught the old man’s eyes. As he listened and nodded, he squinted and blinked a few times, staring at me the whole while.
I couldn’t suppress a little wriggle of anxiety.
16
Just then there came a loud, blatting noise from outside, like a car with a hole in its muffler.
“Well, let me guess,” Megan said to me, and shook her head, scowling. A little louder she said, “Nice of him to show up.”
There was muted laughter up and down the table.
“In one of his jalopies,” said her father.
I took out my phone and fired off a quick text message, then set it down on the table.
Paul Kimball sat down next to me, while his brilliant girlfriend sat across the table from us. He introduced himself. “You’re with Sukie?” he said.
I nodded, shook hands. “Nick Brown.”
He took the napkin off the table, placed it in his lap, and smiled at one of the servants who came right over with a tray of food.
“Thank you, Andrea,” he said. “I’m starved.”
After he was served his ribs and cornbread, he turned to me and leaned his head in confidingly. “Be careful with that one, please,” he said as he nodded at Sukie.
“She’s in good hands,” I reassured him.
“Not worried about her,” he said. “Worried about you. She’s a tricky one. Complicated.”
“Complicated?”
“Like no one you ever met.”
Then he turned away.
I noticed the pale-haired security chief had left the table and was now lurking in the doorway to the hall, looking in.
I excused myself, got up from the table, left the phone there. At the entrance to the room, Fritz Heston looked at me.
“Excuse me,” I said quietly, as if he were a servant, “where would I find the bathroom?”
He pointed, didn’t reply. Up close I could see he had white hair and was probably around sixty.
I found the small guest bathroom right off the foyer, all black and white tiles and nickel fixtures, like a restroom in a men’s club from the 1920s. Took my time in there. When I came back, I could see at a distance Fritz walking away from the table.
I returned to the table, picked up my phone, and glanced at it. On its screen, and visible to anyone, were a couple of texts. One was from a [email protected], its subject “quick wins.” Another one from [email protected], subject “MECE analysis.” I slipped it back into my breast pocket. I had no doubt that Fritz Heston had taken a peek at my phone. He couldn’t resist. Then I sneaked a glance and saw that he had left the room. Maybe the ruse had worked.
Suddenly a slight blond man in his early twenties burst into the room. He had on ripped jeans and Chuck Taylors and a wrinkled tuxedo jacket worn ironically. “Happy birthday, Dad,” he sang out. “Sorry I’m late. Car trouble.” He laughed delightedly. Cameron was weaving slightly as he approached the head of the table. Accompanying him was a woman I at first saw only from the side, but I recognized her gait before I knew for sure who she was.
I felt my blood jump.
It can’t be.
“The prodigal son arrives at last,” said Conrad, extending his arms. He wasn’t smiling.
I kept staring at Cameron’s date. Everything else fell away.
“The gang’s all here,” Cameron said. “Saving the best for last.”
As the couple came up to Conrad, I could finally see the woman’s face. I startled, jerked my head like a cartoon character.
It is her.
Megan must have noticed me gaping like an idiot, because she said, “Wait, you know her?”
At least I recovered quickly. I shook my head. “No. She just looks like someone I used to know,” I said.
17
Seven years ago
I was still recovering from a gunshot wound I’d gotten in Afghanistan, working on Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling in southwest DC for a covert unit of the Defense Intelligence Agency, when I got an email with an order to report to something called DCIS, the Defense Criminal Investigative Service. No explanation, of course. DCIS was based not in the Pentagon but in a generic office building in Alexandria. They uncovered fraud and corruption within the Pentagon and in the defense procurement system. That sounded cool to me.
Anyway, I went where I was told. When I got there, I went to a conference room, where I was met by a very stern-faced woman around my age who acted a lot older. Major Margret C. Benson looked over my service jacket for a while before launching into a no-bullshit briefing on the operation I was joining. She was running it. The target was a civilian procurement officer in the Pentagon named Harkins who was rumored to be corrupt. Harkins was meeting someone for dinner at the Capital Grille who he believed worked for a big defense contractor. The whole dinner was being choreographed, audiotaped and videotaped, and I was to be one of the lowly techs who sat in a white panel van during dinner, making sure the feed was good, standing by to replace any defective component if need be.
Major Benson was small and lithe, almost wiry. Her uniform always seemed a size too big. She was cute but serious as all hell, never cracked a smile. She thanked the DIA for providing much-needed manpower. Then she drilled us on how the op was going to proceed.
When she was finished, I made an attempt to get out of tech duty. I suggested that I could, instead, play the defense contractor executive. After all, I’d just served a couple of combat deployments, yet no one knew who I was. I could talk armaments knowledgeably. It was a ballsy suggestion, for a neophyte, and she cut me right off. “I got dibs on that, Sergeant Heller,” she said with a slight smile. I reminded her I was no longer “sergeant,” since I was now a civilian, but that didn’t stop her from calling me Sergeant Heller.
A few hours later, I was sitting in the van watching our target, Harkins, the greedy procurement officer, sip his water and gnaw at his bread, waiting. The broadcast quality was excellent.
Then a big, blowsy woman came up to the table, all big hair and French manicure and copious makeup. She spoke in a strong Texan twang, ordered a Cosmo, and soon they were laughing and drinking and making deals. He was drinking bourbon, and she was inhaling Cosmos. Her accent dripped sugar syrup. I wondered about this woman. Either she really was Marjorie Cairns of Irving, Texas, or she was Meryl Streep.
“Who the hell is that?” I asked one of the other techs in the van.
“You don’t know? That’s Major Benson.”
“That’s Maggie Benson? Underneath the big shoulders and all that hair?”
“Yeah.”
“Man, she’s good,” I said.
“Oh, you have no idea.”
18
Now the slight blond man in the dinner jacket and his date were standing before me. He offered his palm, a touch and a slide, barely a handshake at all.
“Cameron,” he said to me.
The woman had
copper-red hair and blue eyes, and she was dressed in a black, off-the-shoulder sheath. Her eyes gazed directly, defiantly at me. “I’m Hildy,” she said, almost daring me to acknowledge her.
“Nice to meet you, Hildy,” I said, “I’m Nicholas Brown.”
“Nicholas.” She smiled politely but barely glanced at me, as if she didn’t know me. Well played.
I played it the same way. Whatever she was up to, I wasn’t going to derail it. Nor did I want her to mess up my cover.
But what the hell was she doing?
Cameron said, “You with somebody?”
“Sukie,” I said.
From across the table, Sukie flapped a hand. “Nice of you to make it,” she said to Cameron.
He grinned, cocked an eyebrow. He looked at Sukie, then back at me. “Huh,” he said after another beat. “Huh. Well, enjoy. Welcome.” He half-sauntered, half-stumbled his way down the table to his place at the far end near the kids.
Maggie Benson went around to the other side. She was far enough away that I couldn’t talk with her, yet close enough that I could watch her interact with Cameron and the others. She was either a little drunk herself or plausibly acting that way. She took a sip of wine.
Maggie was wearing a reddish wig and probably contact lenses. I hadn’t seen her in seven years, and she was even more beautiful than she was back then. She also had to be a dozen years older than Cameron, though she didn’t look it.
But my thoughts were interrupted by Megan, on my right. “So how long have you and Sukie been together?” she said.
“Just a couple weeks,” I said, gnawing on a rib, and I came right back: “So you’re the senior VP for Europe, right?” Most people like talking about themselves.
“Right,” she said.
I glanced at Maggie and saw her take another sip of wine, though the level in her glass didn’t seem to be dropping.
Then I turned back to Megan. “It’s surprising, if you don’t mind my saying so, that you haven’t been made CEO already. I mean, with your smarts and experience? I’d think a lot of companies would feel very comfortable with you in the cockpit. So what am I missing?”
I could see her flush a little before she replied, smoothly, “My father’s sharp as a tack. And as long as he stays that way, we’re in the best possible hands.”
Conrad Kimball was not in listening range, and besides, he was busy berating the waitress who kept refilling his coffee. “I get the goddamned cream and coffee proportions just perfect and you come along and splash more in and screw it up,” he was scolding the terrified young woman.
Lowering my voice a bit, I said to Megan, “The man’s eighty years old. How long is this arrangement going to last?”
A sort of giggle escaped her. “Could be forever.” Hastily she added, to cover her slip, “If we’re lucky. My day will come.”
Maggie took another sip from her wineglass and laughed whoopingly about something.
While our dinner plates were being cleared away, someone started clinking a glass with a spoon or something, and the table quieted down except for loud whispering from the kids’ table.
“And now,” Conrad Kimball said, “as is our custom, we move to the library for coffee, cake, and champagne!”
The kiddie end of the table erupted in cheers. Chairs scraped against the stone floor.
Conrad and his fiancée got up from the table.
I got up and came around to join Sukie. We trundled through an arched doorway into a warm, amber-lit room lined with books, antique leather-bound volumes in sets, all color coordinated. More marble busts here, posing in spotlit niches, every ten or twelve feet. Several waiters and waitresses were holding aloft trays of champagne flutes, all full. The kids were given what looked like apple juice in champagne flutes. One of them said something to Sukie that made her laugh, then pulled her over to the other kids.
Everyone gathered around a table on which was a big cake in the shape of Texas. In the northern part of the state was a big red square that I assumed represented the Kimball Ranch, all five hundred acres, where he’d grown up. In the middle of the red square a single candle had been placed. Everyone sang “Happy Birthday,” and Conrad Kimball blew out the candle. A waitress began slicing the cake while Conrad held up a flute of champagne.
He cleared his throat, and the room hushed.
“Everyone has a drink who drinks?” he said. “I’d like to make a toast. Not to myself, but to my family. To all of you. Because right now there’s all kinds of bad things being said about us out there. All sorts of lies. Blaming us for society’s problems. It’s unbelievable.” His champagne glass trembled a bit in his hand. “We have our enemies, no question about it. But you know, a wise man once said, when there’s no enemy within, the enemies outside can’t hurt us. A house divided against itself cannot stand. But we’re not divided, and we don’t have enemies inside the family. We’re all rowing in the same direction. I know it. I know my boys and girls, and we all share a polestar. Because the strength of a family, like an army, is in its loyalty to each other. And thank the Lord, we have ourselves one loving family.” He lifted his glass even higher. “To family.”
Megan said, “Happy birthday, Daddy.”
“Happy birthday,” the crowd raggedly said.
I took a sip of champagne and felt someone grab me by the biceps. I turned. It was Natalya. She caressed my arm.
“Your name is Nicholas?” she said.
Up close I could see that she was a beautiful woman with too much makeup on.
“Nick Brown. Nice to meet you.”
“Have we met before?” She had a thick Russian accent.
“Haven’t had the pleasure.”
“And you and Susan, you have been together long time?”
“No, just met a few weeks ago.”
A waiter handed her a slice of cake along with a fork, then gave me one too. It was an unusual-looking cake, made up of countless thin layers. Natalya forked some cake into her mouth. “Try,” she said. “It’s very special cake. Like a mille-feuille. A thousand layers.”
I tried some. It melted in the mouth. “Very nice,” I said.
“They make this from twenty paper-thin crepes, and in between is pastry cream. Delicious, no?”
“Delicious. I—I saw what you did earlier. With your scarf. That was awfully nice.”
She smiled. “I’m sure Conrad’s children think I am expert at covering things up. Are you?”
“Am I what?”
“You and Susan—you can’t keep hands off each other.”
I smiled. She was being sarcastic.
“Yes,” she said. “I can see chemistry between you two. Please.”
“Excuse me?”
“You are not who you are pretending to be,” she said. Her tone was playful. “You are here for another reason. Did Sukie bring you to investigate me?”
“What’s to investigate?” I said.
“I have always been outsider, all my life,” she said. “One thing people like me very good at is spotting other one.”
“Very good,” I said. “I’d consider myself an outsider too.”
She held up the plate of cake. “You are like this Napoleon cake. Many layers.”
“Thank you,” I said.
She patted me on the arm again as she turned away. “Maybe I will peel back some layers, Nicholas.”
19
Well, I’d been warned. The family was instinctually suspicious of me. I was like a virus invading the bloodstream, and they were sending out their antibodies. I felt sure I’d neutralized the security guy with my fake McKinsey texts. He’d be thinking his source at McKinsey had made a mistake. Not that I was an impostor.
But Natalya surprised me. How suspicious she was. She knew how unpopular she was with Kimball’s kids and what lengths they might go to to expose her i
f possible. So she was right to suspect me, an outsider. She clearly was a survivor and wasn’t going to take any chances. She was someone to keep an eye on.
Which made me wonder whether Maggie was going to cause me problems. What she was here for. Whether she was trying to get into Dr. Kimball’s private files as well. Or maybe she had some other agenda, some other reason for being here undercover. I wondered whether Sukie had any idea her brother had hired a private investigator too.
Fortunately, cake and coffee and champagne were over fairly quickly, and the old man went back to his elevator with his young Natalya. The security chief left. The kids were racing around the room, and one of them broke a plate. Someone hit someone else. Tears were shed. This was so clearly not a house designed for kids. It was like living in a museum.
I was expecting some sort of after party with the siblings, drinks in the game room or whatever, and more opportunities to schmooze with—interact with—the adult Kimball children. Also greater opportunity for my cover to be blown. But the party broke up shortly after the old man departed. Megan left with her brood to go home. She also lived in Westchester County, in a normal, ten-million-dollar house in Chappaqua about a fifteen-minute drive away.
That left us, Hayden, Paul and his brilliant girlfriend, and Cameron—and Maggie.
Now I had two missions, which was not good for focus. I had to get into the old man’s home office files; that was what I’d been hired to do. But now I also wanted to talk to Maggie. I wanted to find out why she was here undercover too, what she was after. I wondered if she was looking for the same thing I was.
And I wondered what had happened to her these last seven years.
But Paul and his MIT girlfriend went up to their room, or rooms, followed by Maggie and Cameron, who seemed bleary and about to collapse after pounding all that booze.
I put my arm around Sukie’s waist and walked with her up the staircase. I thought it was important to keep up appearances. In case anyone was watching. In my other hand I carried my garment bag with my street clothes.
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