by Adam Brookes
“Hello, Molly. Hi. Goodness. How are you?”
“I’m in the hospital. Sibley.”
“You are? Oh, no. What’s happened? Are you all right?”
“My doctor, he was worried, so they brought me in three days ago. They say it’s stress. But, well, tests, and everything.”
“Molly, I’m so sorry. What can I do for you?”
“I want to see you.”
“Of course. I’ll come tomorrow.”
“Come.”
“I will.”
She put on a bathrobe and looked up the Sibley visiting hours. Eleven till eight. She had a Five Eyes briefing at three. She might make it out of the office by seven. She sat heavily on the sofa, then stood and went to the kitchen and poured a glass of red wine—and then added a little more.
Molly will know, Hopko had said. But she won’t know she knows. So find it in her.
She thought of the woman, shivering next to her, blowing on her soup.
I wonder what I won’t do, thought Patterson, holding her glass. Is there anything?
Molly Monroe had been put in a private room on the fourth floor. There was no one on the door, no cop, no diplomatic security. Patterson tapped and opened the door.
The room had a view of treetops, a park, a lake. Molly lay, partially reclined, her mouth open. She had a nasal catheter and a drip. Patterson went to the bedside. She’d brought chocolates, which she put on the nightstand. Molly’s eyes followed her.
“Molly! Good heavens! Look at you, you poor thing. What on earth has happened?”
It seemed to take a moment for the woman to focus and recognise her.
“Oh. You came.”
“Yes. Of course. What did the doctors say?”
“They can’t seem to find anything wrong. They think it’s just stress, maybe depression. The whole thing. I’m seeing a psych tomorrow. They might do medication.”
Her face was a dreadful yellowish grey.
“I just have these cramps in my stomach and I keep throwing up, and I feel exhausted.”
“Well, you’ve been through such a lot.”
Molly’s hands fluttered on the blanket.
“Thank you for coming.”
“Not at all, Molly; it’s good to see you.”
“I just wanted to ask you if you had talked to the FBI.”
“Yes, I did.”
“And did they tell you anything? About Jonathan?”
Patterson calculated silently for a moment.
“Well, I’ll tell you. I don’t think they’ve reached any conclusions, Molly. But they are interested in some things that happened.”
“What things?”
Patterson frowned, spoke as gently as she could.
“A few months ago, there was, there was something that caught their attention. Your husband was in Baltimore.”
Molly was silent, just listened.
“And he was in a motel. Have the FBI asked you about this?”
Molly shook her head.
“No.”
“Well, there were people with him.”
“Who? Who were they?”
“That’s what the FBI is trying to figure out. Do you know who they were?”
“Was one of them a woman? An Asian woman?”
The question caught Patterson cold. She blinked.
“There may well have …”
But Molly had closed her eyes. In resignation?
“Do you know who that was, Molly?”
Molly sighed.
“Do you know?”
“I met her once. If it’s her.”
Patterson waited.
“Jonathan was … having an affair with her. I’m fairly certain. I mean, he never admitted it, but he was. He’d go off on these trips, and I’m sure she was along, or they met.”
“How are you so sure?”
“Oh, come on. Married people know. He’d come home and he’d be different. Smiling to himself. He’d lean on me less, share with me less. There was some part of his life that was happening without me. You can tell.”
Patterson made to ask another question but Molly held up a quivering hand.
“What happened at the motel? Tell me. Please.”
“They’re not sure. But an Asian woman was there. And there were other people too.” Patterson realised she was wading out a long way, too far, perhaps. “And something happened. The FBI looked at the camera tapes. Something happened that seems to have frightened your husband. He was seen running from the motel, shocked, scared.”
“And this was when?”
“Five months ago.”
“So that was the moment,” she raised a hand feebly, “when everything went so strange. Our marriage just … was like it didn’t exist. I asked him what was wrong but he’d go and hide in his office. He was so anxious. All the time.”
“What did you think it was?”
“I didn’t know! But I thought … I guessed it was to do with her.”
“And, wait, you said you met her?”
“I’m fairly sure. That was earlier, a year ago maybe. It was at some reception, some diplomatic thing, I forget what. And we were there and there were a lot of Taiwanese there, Singaporeans. Taiwan National Day, or something. I forget. Anyway, Jonathan was mingling, soaking up the limelight, and I caught sight of him across the room and he was talking to this girl. Very striking girl, really something. Chinese-looking, tall and leggy. She was wearing this sort of halter top with a Chinese collar in red silk, and her shoulders were bare, and this long silk skirt and she was just, just …”
She paused, exhaled, as if trying to regain control.
“Anyway, I saw Jonathan approach her and she just lit up, and she reached out and touched his arm and gave him a look. Such a look. Really perfectly done. And he just glowed. It was obvious they were … obvious to me they were intimate. And then he said something to her, and she sort of scanned the room and clocked me. It was all so obvious. Jesus. Anyway, later I approached her, and she really worked me. Told me what a genius my husband was, how he’d given her all this help in her academic life—she was Taiwanese, she said, some sort of academic, a post doc or something.”
Her breathing was accelerating, coming fast and shallow.
“Molly, what was her name?”
“Nicole.”
“Surname?”
“I don’t know.”
She was struggling to sit up.
“Do you know where she was an academic?”
But Molly was starting to retch and Patterson reached for a plastic basin on the nightstand and thrust it under her and she retched again and heaved a hot spume into the basin.
When she’d finished and spat, Patterson wiped her mouth with a tissue and gave her water to rinse with. She lay back and closed her eyes, exhausted. Patterson waited. Molly seemed to be dozing. A nurse came in and Patterson gestured to the vomit-filled basin and the nurse made a face and took it away. Patterson walked to the window and looked out. She began formulating her report to Hopko. A woman. A name. A betrayal. All the human frailties on parade.
She wondered again why Hopko was using her this way—having her creep about, going behind the backs of the senior Station officers. Hopko was, she was coming to understand, manipulative to a monumental degree. And she just allowed herself to be manipulated. Hopko pointed, she marched. Why this pathological need to please her? Even as she didn’t trust her. She screwed her eyes shut and swore through her teeth.
Molly stirred. Patterson went back to sit by the bed.
“How do you feel?” she said.
Molly blinked slowly, then spoke.
“I’m … I don’t know. They don’t know what’s wrong with me.”
She looked as if she might cry, the lines in her face deepening, lips working. Then she just took up where she’d left off.
“He had been seeing her for a year, maybe,” she said.
“And did you know, all that time?”
“No. I wondered. It to
ok time to know. I think he even took her to Wachapreague.”
Patterson leaned in to her.
“I’m sorry. Where?”
“We have a little cottage on the coast. At Wachapreague. We used to go, often, when Blake was little. It was our place. So beautiful. Very simple, just a clapboard cottage, a deck, a little jetty. But then Jonathan didn’t want to go any more. Too busy. Too … done up. Too self-important.”
“But you think he went there with this Nicole?”
“I don’t know. I think so.”
“What makes you think that?”
“I used to go down by myself occasionally, when he was away. And things would be, you know, moved around. And I found—and I know this sounds ridiculous—I found hair in the shower. Black hair.”
Safe house, thought Patterson.
“Just a few strands. But there it was.”
“Did you tell the FBI this?”
“No. No, I didn’t.”
“Really? Why not?”
“Because it’s ridiculous. What am I, some sleuth? Anyway, they’ve been so callous. I wonder why I talk to them at all.”
“The house, Molly. Where is it? Tell me again.”
There was an address, and Molly described the place. Somewhere down on Virginia’s Atlantic coast, hours of driving from Washington. She was getting tired, and visiting hours were almost over. She asked for a drink. Patterson poured water into a paper cup and helped her sit up, her hand at the top of Molly’s back. When Molly lay down again, Patterson noticed on her own hand loose strands of Molly’s grey hair. Just a few, but there they were.
21
On the Friday night, Patterson hired a car at a rental place on M, parked it in the street and left in a clear half-light the next morning. She wore hiking pants and a T-shirt and took a backpack with a torch, phone charger, mask and gloves, and an ASP baton that sprung open to two feet in length to wield a lethal weighted tip. The District was quiet and she took 50 the whole way out of town, through Washington’s slatternly eastern edges, its weed-strewn strip malls and battered overpasses, towards the Chesapeake Bay.
At seven, the city far behind her, she reached the Bay Bridge in cool, clear sunlight. She’d never seen it before, and had had no idea of its scale, its sheer bravado, its vast arc across the water. She couldn’t even see the other side, and experienced a momentary pleasing thrill as she accelerated up its curvature. She came down on the eastern shore amid marinas and mansions half glimpsed along the water’s edge. She stayed with the highway for a while, then pulled off, meandering south along silent wooded roads, checking her back.
Just past eight, she stopped. A sign said COUNTRY STORE. She got out and stretched. The morning was still bright, but cooler here than in the city. She climbed wooden steps and pushed open a squeaking screen door. The place was almost empty. Two old white men in plaid shirts and trucker caps sat eating pancakes amid shelves of tinned goods, cans of motor oil, boxes of ammunition and humming refrigerators. She went to the counter, where a teenage girl shovelled eggs and sausage onto a styrofoam tray and poured her a cup of weak black coffee. The city fell away so quickly, she thought, and silent, rural America was always waiting, its vast blankets of trees, its creeks and craggy waters, its endless highways.
She spattered her eggs with hot sauce and ate, watching the door.
She came to Wachapreague a little before ten and drove once through the town, past the Volunteer Fire Department, a white clapboard church, down still streets lined with weather-beaten cottages. It had the feel of an old fishing village, a lost, salty place, generations of its men heading out to trawl on the grey water. Its harbour was surrounded by sandbars and barrier islands. A marina held stubby fishing boats, a few yachts. Welcome to Wachapreague—Flounder Capital of America! She circled back, looking for familiar vehicles. Nothing.
The house was just beyond the town. Patterson ground down a gravel track, through trees and scrubby undergrowth, towards the water. She parked, meaning to approach the house on foot, took her pack, and as she stepped out of the car into the warm air, she was swarmed by mosquitoes, hordes of the things. She swatted and slapped at them. Dear God. Flapping her arms, she knelt, looking at the track, searching for tyre indentations, but could make out nothing recent.
She walked on, then started to jog, the mosquitoes coming at her relentlessly. They were on her neck, her eyelids. The house came into view. It was two storeys, pretty, built of blue clapboard. It stood in a rocky inlet, looking out over the sandbars and winding channels, but mostly shielded from view. She wondered how she’d get in, but even as she approached the steps, she saw the broken window pane, smelled the chemical reek of fire.
Someone had tried to burn the place. The interiors of the kitchen and living room were blackened. The burn pattern in one corner looked like accelerant had been used, the floors charred. But the thing hadn’t caught. The windows were sooty. They must have dropped the match and run. No one called the fire department, so no one saw it. Perhaps it was at night, and they botched it. Their search had been quick and dirty. Every kitchen drawer had been yanked out and dropped, smashed crockery all over the place. A sofa was ripped open, a desk overturned. They’d worked on the fireplace, ripped out the mantle, though God knows why you’d hide anything there.
She knelt, took the surgical gloves and mask from the backpack, slipped them on and climbed the stairs. The bedrooms were a wreck: mattresses slit open, drywall torn out, the bathroom trashed. Fewer mosquitoes in the house, at least. The smell was very strong.
Was there a basement?
She went back down the stairs, stopping halfway to peer from a round window up towards the gravel track. What was that? Something skittering across the corner of her eye. She stood still, watching and listening for a good minute. Just the breeze, and the chatter of the cicadas. More bloody mosquitoes.
The door to the basement was just behind the kitchen, in a musty, empty pantry, the shelves speckled with dead insects. The door wouldn’t shift at first, its bottom rail jamming against the sill. Patterson wondered if they’d got down there, whoever they were. She put her shoulder to the door. It opened abruptly and she had to catch herself. The stairs were dark. She tried a light switch, but nothing happened. She stopped, listened again, took the torch from the pack, paused and thought, then took the baton, too, hefting it in her hand.
She stood at the top of the dark stairway.
She thought of other dark places she’d gone into: a bunker in Afghanistan, near Khost, carved into a mountain, crammed with enough artillery rounds to keep an insurgency in IEDs for a decade. And there’d been a basement in Iraq filled with makeshift concrete cells, the walls stained with God knows what. No one there, just the smell of it, of horror. The squad had stood there, sweating in the echoing dark, trying to make sense of it. Both times she’d gone in first. She hadn’t been afraid. She hadn’t been alone. There’d been soldiers either side of her, hard, driven men and women, people who could handle themselves.
She stood, alone, at the top of the stairway.
My memories undermine my present, she thought. We are exiles.
She turned, looked from the kitchen window, searched the treeline, took a deep breath. Her stomach hummed with adrenalin, her mouth was pasty. Why? What’s here? she thought.
Something.
She started down the stairs, slowly, one at a time, the torch held high, by her shoulder. The steps were of wood, and creaked. She could feel mosquitoes weaving around her again. One step at a time. When her shoe touched concrete, she stopped, ran the torch around. The basement was only roughly finished, the walls whitewashed, pipes criss-crossing the ceiling. There were five wooden chairs in a circle, and at the far side of the space a desk, with drawers. She stayed very still, listened again.
She began to work her way around the wall, slowly, towards the desk, all her senses heightened now. She had been bitten on her face, and her lower lip was swelling. Something was underfoot, a granular crunch with each
footstep. Broken glass? She ran a finger along the wall and felt cables. She turned the torch on them. They were fairly new, and someone had tacked them hastily to the plaster; they ran up towards the ceiling and disappeared, while their other ends lay loose on the concrete floor, attached to phone jacks.
She moved to the desk and bent over, studying it. Dust here, too. No one had touched the desktop in weeks. But there in the dust was a rectangular outline, a shadow. Something had lain there—a box, or a book, or a stack of paper—and had been removed. The desk drawers were empty, but for a paperclip and a small yellow notepad, nothing written on it but several sheets torn off. Patterson put it in her pack.
She ran her torch around the rest of the basement, along the whitewashed walls. Definitely a safe house.
From above, the creak of a floorboard. The footfall tentative, stealthy in a manner that seeks to avoid attention, yet immediately attracts it. The trainers taught that; nothing awakens the ear like the sound of stealth.
Patterson stood stock still, held her own breath, every sense open, alert.
There, again. The old wood shifting and groaning.
The moment fear takes hold is an anti-evolution—a falling away of knowledge and reason, a loss of control, the limbic surge that drags us down to our true, preconscious selves. She was rigid against the wall, up on her toes, her knees quivering, her breathing coming shallow and fast now, the torch flashing pointlessly around her. Then she was lurching towards the stairs, taking them two at a time. She burst out into the kitchen and snapped the baton open and whirled around. No one—but a flicker of movement in her peripheral vision, something black, and she swung the baton hard, clipping a china lamp which fell and shattered on the floor, the broken pieces skidding across the room and the dust rising, and any effort at self-control was gone and she crashed through the house and out of the door and the mosquitoes were immediately on her and she was breathing through clenched teeth. A hundred and fifty metres to the car. She leaped down the front steps and just let the flight response take her, opened up, the baton in her hand, elbows and thighs pumping, and tore away up the track. The keys, where are the fucking keys? And then she had them and her thumb was on the unlock button and she was in, cranking the ignition, ramming the thing into reverse, and she looked back at the house and on the front deck stood a slender, hooded figure, very still, and her foot was on the floor and the car was roaring backwards in a shower of gravel and grit and she was wrenching the wheel around and tearing back up to the main road, the rear wheels fishtailing and tears on her cheeks.