Critical Space

by Greg Rucka

  "There's not much to tell."

  "I would like to hear it."

  "I'd rather not talk about it, actually, Alena. I'd rather get some sleep."

  She understood what I meant, shifting her weight to the cane and using it to rise. Her walk was quicker than it had been before I'd left, but I suspected that the pain was as bad, maybe worse. She made her way to the open door, then stopped and turned back to face me.

  "And how are you sleeping?"

  "Not very well. Any suggestions?"

  She just shook her head.

  * * *

  We did yoga together the next morning, and after breakfast I took one of the cars and drove into Mahwah, using a different pay phone on the Franklin Turnpike to call Scott. I told him we were on and that I'd call him back in an hour, and he told me that was fine and I hung up. There was a comic book shop on the street nearby, and I went inside and looked at the glossy covers and remembered I'd bought the pen for Erika, wondered when I'd be able to give it to her. Hopefully soon.

  It occurred to me then that I wasn't going home again, no matter what happened. Even if everything worked, if Oxford could be bought -- or, more precisely -- blackmailed off, I could no longer imagine a way to fit into my old life. Too much had happened to me, to the people around me, I wasn't going to just slip back in as if I'd never been gone.

  I wondered where I'd go, and I didn't see anything that gave me an answer.

  I left the shop without making any purchases and got back into the car, driving another few miles along Franklin until I found another pay phone. I checked my watch and killed another fifteen minutes in the car, watching the traffic and my mirrors. When the hour was up I used the phone.

  "They can't make a meeting until tomorrow morning," Scott told me. "Seven A.M., the Holiday Inn on Times Square. I told them I'd found a connection between Havel and Drama. They seemed eager."

  "But not eager enough to make it today."

  "No. Could be trying to buy Oxford more time."

  "They suggest the place or you?"

  "They suggested an out-of-the-office meeting. I suggested the Holiday Inn. This'll work for you?"

  "It'll do," I said. "You've taken care of everything else?"

  "The SAIC has my report, and it'll go to Washington today. I fudged some of the details, but most of what Alena told me checked, and it didn't take much digging to find corroborating facts. I took some flak for not registering my CI, but the stuff I've turned up is enough to keep that a minor concern for the time being. As long as what she told us can be independently verified, I think I can keep her out of it."

  "You don't have a choice. She won't play ball."

  "I've explained that to my supervisor. He doesn't accept it. But, like I said, it's not an issue right now."

  "Just see that it doesn't become one."

  He got testy. "Stop badgering me, Atticus. I'm on top of this. You know I've got your back, I always have."

  "You always have," I agreed. "See you seven A.M. tomorrow."

  * * *

  Natalie and I moved Alena to Allendale that afternoon, another two-story house, off Crescent Avenue. It was a relatively new neighborhood, and the house itself had gone up perhaps twenty years ago, in what had once-upon-a-time been a celery field.

  "It's a rental property," Natalie said. "We've got it for the winter."

  "Florida?" I asked.

  "Bermuda," she said.

  The alarm system was much the same as on the Mahwah house, but without motion detectors. The backyard spilled down a slope to a fence that abutted a still-intact wetland, and neither Natalie nor I liked the exposure, but once again we had to work with what we were given. There was a covered swimming pool in the yard, and Miata ran out onto the cover, then raced back to the deck when water began creeping around his paws. Either it brought back bad memories for him or, like us, he knew it was too cold to swim.

  We spent the rest of the day getting the guards into position, and it took a while before Natalie and I could agree on how to protect the front. Here, there was no clear border to the street, no fence, just a short strip of grass that met with the asphalt, the driveway coming up on the left side of the house as one faced it. In the end we put one of the guards in the front room, behind the curtains, with orders to watch the street and nothing else, and, to cover the back, another in one of the bedrooms on the second floor, with a similar directive. I took the master bedroom again, Alena the one beside it, and Natalie the one across the hall.

  At eight that night Dan arrived with replacements for the boys who'd been on post during the day, and they each entered the house with a rucksack over their shoulder and a pizza box in their hands. After we ate, the old guards departed, the new guards dug in, and I took Alena back upstairs. She did not ask me to time her.

  I checked her room and found it as secure as the last time I'd looked, then checked on the guard on the floor, and found him sitting in a straight-backed chair, in the dark, watching the yard through a pair of infrared goggles. I left him alone and went downstairs, where Dan and Natalie were talking in the kitchen over cups of coffee.

  "Dan," I said. "The I.R. goggles. Nice touch."

  "Thank you," he said, and honest to God he looked pleased.

  I told them I was going to bed, went back upstairs and looked in on Alena once more.

  * * *

  Either Gracey or Bowles had ordered up a pot of room-service coffee, and there was a tray with three cups and a pitcher of half-and-half, and a bowl stuffed with packets of sugar and artificial sweeteners on the coffee table by the couch. Bowles, at the desk with the laptop in front of him, squinted at me as if trying to place my face, and the expression hid any surprise he might have been feeling. Gracey recovered by indicating the coffee service with a sweep of his empty hand.

  "We only have three cups," he said.

  "It's all right," I told him. "We're not staying long. You guys taping this?"

  Bowles frowned. Gracey just shook his head. "We didn't think we'd need to. You've been getting around, Atticus. We heard you were in Europe."

  "Not me. I haven't been to Europe in years."

  " Someone who looks like you, then." Gracey poured himself a cup of coffee, added cream, then two packets of sugar. He used one of the spoons to stir, then licked it clean before setting it down again on the tray. It took him almost a minute to get everything the way he wanted it, and I knew the wheels were spinning, but he was doing a fine job of keeping his thoughts and feelings to himself. Bowles turned back to the laptop and began typing lightly on the keyboard.

  When Gracey had tasted the coffee and satisfied himself that it was palatable, he targeted Scott. "You've been fucking us around, Special Agent Fowler. You told us you didn't know where Atticus here was at. That wasn't very nice of you. A thing like that, it could come back and bite a big chunk out of your ass."

  "Gosh, I hope that's not a threat, Mr. Gracey." Scott settled his briefcase on the bed and snapped it open. "Especially since I've already written up everything Mr. Kodiak here is going to tell you, and my supervisor found it interesting enough that he's forwarded it to Washington. It's probably going to the Director as we speak."

  Gracey pulled out the big, amused grin he'd used so much when we'd first met almost five months earlier, and gestured with his pen at the folder Scott was now offering to him. "Is that copy for us?"

  Scott waited, and Gracey didn't take the folder, so he spun it out of his hand onto the bed, closer to where Bowles was seated. Bowles leaned forward from the desk and picked it up, began leafing through it as if it could only hold minor amusement for him, at best.

  "Cash flow," Bowles told Gracey.

  "No kidding?"

  "No kidding," Scott confirmed. "Looks like person or persons unknown tried to make it appear that Ms. Christian Havel was paying Mr. Atticus Kodiak over three hundred thousand dollars for a variety of unspecified services. Oddly enough, all of the money moving between the two seems to have done so withou
t either of the participants' knowledge."

  Gracey glanced over his colleague's shoulder, then to me. "Who knew you were so flush?"

  "I've been saving for a rainy day," I told him.

  "Looks good and cloudy outside right now. I guess we'd better hear it, then. Don't you think we should hear it, Matthew?"

  "I suppose we should, yes, probably," Bowles replied, closing the folder and extending it back to Scott.

  "You can keep it. I've got copies," Scott said.

  Bowles set the folder beside his laptop. "Yes, I think we'd better hear it."

  "I'll start with the hypothetical," I said.

  Gracey laughed and sat back on the couch beneath the window, bent to refill his cup. Past him I could see the neon and billboards over Times Square, the pedestrian traffic increasing as the workday began. There were new ads up for Broadway shows I'd never heard of before, reminding me that I'd been away for a long time. Bowles turned the laptop slightly so he could see me over the monitor, still tapping away.

  "Once upon a time, someone wrote a book about a professional assassin," I said. "The author got a lot of attention for it. The book did very well. It hit bestseller lists. People talked about it. And the more people talked about it, the more people read it. Before this book, people never thought much about professional killers and murder-for-hire and things like that; they thought it was all Hollywood. Sure, most of them would admit that they believe governments have people killed; this was the first time they began to see how it is really done.

  "Other books had come before, of course, but those had been dismissed. For some reason this book wasn't. Maybe because the killer, the subject, was a woman; maybe because it had better press. It doesn't matter.

  "What matters is that people began asking questions. They wanted to know how this killer could exist. They wanted to know how she was trained. How she worked. How she was funded. And they wanted to know if there were others.

  "Now other people are taking notice, and they're getting worried, because these other people, they're the killer's employers. And they're getting nervous.

  They're remembering things like Iran-Contra and phrases like 'oversight committee.' They don't want that. They need this problem to go away.

  "So they hire another killer, one who is like the assassin in the book, but different. This killer has a specialty, and he can make the problem disappear. He can discredit the author of the book, the subject of the book, even another one of the players. And once they're all discredited, once they're dead and the sordid details of their relationship emerge, the book will be forgotten. Business will continue as before."

  Bowles stopped typing, his eyebrows rising slightly. Gracey set his empty cup down on the tray and began twirling his pen, poking the inside of his cheek with his tongue.

  "You couldn't stand a cotton ball on that crap," he told me. "Even if you got someone to sit still and listen to this, no one would buy it. It's impossible to prove."

  "It's a theory," I said. "I don't have to prove it."

  "You came here to give us that piece-of-crap theory?"

  "Not really." I looked at Bowles. "You got all that?"

  "I'm fine."

  "Good, because I really want you to get the next part."

  Gracey fell back against the cushions on the couch, spreading his arms with a shrug.

  "Three years and two months ago," I said, "the Undersecretary of Housing and Urban Development authorized four million dollars deposited to a fund to study how better to assist children suffering from autism and their families who live in public housing in the United States. Over the following six months that four million was distributed to A&M Consulting in Bethesda, Maryland, and Corsair Industries in Providence, Rhode Island. Four months after the final payment was made, both companies returned a forty-eight-page joint report to HUD."

  "Sounds about right," Gracey said.

  "In reality, and without the Undersecretary's knowledge, the four million was diverted to a Mr. Simon Freidich..." and here I spelled out the name "...as payment for the murder-for-hire of Alexander Akhmetov, then Kazhaki Minister of Energy. Akhmetov -- a hard-line Muslim with ties to groups in Afghanistan and Libya -- opposed the construction of an on pipeline that, in part, would allow light sweet crude to be sold to Israel at below-market cost. His murder ensured the delivery of that oil, and as such made good on promises made by the then Secretary of State, in essence assuring the success of the U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, at least for the next year and a half.

  "Simon Freidich is, of course, known to everyone present as Oxford."

  Beside me, Scott adjusted his glasses. Gracey stopped playing with his pen.

  I added, "If you'd like, I can tell you all about the CIA-financed murder of General Augustus Albertus Usuf Kiwane Ndanga in Uganda, as well."

  "You have proof?" Gracey asked.

  "I don't need it. You heard Agent Fowler. Enough people know that if they want to find it, they will."

  Gracey made a snorting sound, as if halfheartedly clearing his nostrils, then moved forward to the edge of the couch, glancing at Bowles. Bowles closed the top of his computer and then removed a small and sleek cellular phone from inside his coat. He pressed a button and almost immediately got a connection.

  "Mr. Harris?" Bowles said. "Yes, your order has arrived."

  He hung up, replaced the phone in his coat, and took the laptop off the desk, tucking it beneath his arm as he rose. None of his previous jitters were evident. He looked at me, he looked at Scott, and then he looked at Gracey. Gracey sighed and pulled his coat from the back of a chair, slipping it on, adjusting the lapels. Bowles headed to the door.

  "For the record, we have no flicking idea what you're talking about," Gracey said.

  "Of course you don't," Scott said.

  Gracey came closer to me. He looked pointedly at Scott.

  "He stays," I said.

  Gracey sighed. "Off the record?"

  "Sure."

  "We've pulled the plug. Whatever he does now, he does alone."

  "I figured."

  "He wants his money back."

  "Then he can talk to me about it."

  "He says you were with her for four months. Says that she trained you."

  "You sure you can trust him?"

  "You took out his eye."

  "I was going for his brain."

  "We're done with this. It was a stupid flicking idea in the first place. Shit like this happens every ten, fifteen years, it always ends up the same. Nothing changes. You understand that."

  "Sure."

  Gracey hesitated, then grinned. "You're either a lunatic or a zealot."

  "Why can't I be both?"

  He moved to join Bowles at the door. "It'll be a while, but we'll be in touch."

  After they'd gone, Scott moved to the desk and picked up the file Bowles had left behind, stowing it inside his briefcase. "Did he just try to recruit you?"

  "I already have a job," I reminded him.

  "Sounds to me like you maybe have another one," he said, and then his cell phone rang and took the last word for the time being. He answered it, saying his name, then fell silent. After a couple of seconds he made an affirmative noise, then another, then glanced at me. I took the opportunity to move to the window and close the drapes; Gracey or Bowles had left them open, and there was a good line of sight from across the street, on the Seventh Avenue side, and I didn't like the idea of anyone trying a long shot on us.

  Although, if Gracey was telling the truth, it wouldn't be Oxford; without two eyes, he'd be useless as a sniper.

  Scott finished the call with a "thanks, detective," and that brought my attention to him fully. He put his phone away.

  "What?" I asked.

  "That was a detective at the Seventeenth with a very good memory. When you vanished, I had a notice put out to your precinct that I wanted to be contacted if anything happened at your apartment. Trying to look out for Erika, you know."

  "My
apartment's been tossed," I said. It made sense; Oxford was looking for his money, he'd gone through my home. I found it vaguely insulting that he didn't give me more credit.

  Scott shook his head. "Do you know a Margaret Horne?"

  "Midge? She lives in the apartment below mine."

  "She's dead. Someone broke into her place and stabbed her to death, did a number on the body with a knife. They can't tell if there was a sexual assault involved."

  A bubble of panic was inflating in my chest, pressing against my lungs, making it hard to breathe.

  "I'm going to head over there, talk to the detectives, see if I can find out what happened," Scott said. "Give me a couple hours before you call."

  "Oxford," I said.

  "Could be random."

  I wanted to scream at him that it wasn't random, that nothing here was random anymore, that everything had a reason and a purpose, and that Midge dead in the apartment below where I had lived for four years wasn't just a message. So what if I had Oxford's money: he knew there were things more precious to me than that. He had come to my home and failing to find me had settled for the next best thing, someone I knew. He'd come to my home to commit murder, and maybe it hadn't even been me he was after.

  I thought of Erika and her stupid dorm room door wide open to the hall, her back presented to anyone who came walking by with a gun or a knife or a club.

  I ran for her life.

  Chapter 9

  The door was closed and the sign on it had changed and now read K.C. & ERIKA and NO WE'RE NOT BUT WE COULD IF WE WANTED TO.

  I knocked hard, kept pounding on it until it was opened, and I'd started to say her name when I realized I wasn't looking at Erika but at another young woman entirely, one who was about Erika's height but whose hair was electric blue and shaggy, with a piercing below her lip and another just above it.

  "Fucking knock it fucking off!" she yelled at me and then took a quick step back, probably realizing that I wasn't a student. Then she reached for the door and started to close it again.

  "Where's Erika?"

  "Get the fuck out of here or I'll start screaming," the woman said, and she put her weight against the door and tried to slam it in my face.