“Listen to me, Kat. Hear what I’m saying . . .”
“No, you listen. Suppose Suzy’s right?” She walks into his space. “Suppose she’s found out that my dad was murdered, and suppose the same people killed her? What are you going to do, Mr. Detective? Ignore two murders because they interfere with your real investigation? Just close the file and send me home like nothing’s happened?”
Lightning fast, Grachev’s finger is on Kat’s chest, pushing her back hard. “Stop right there.” He holds her chin between his fingers. “I made a mistake last night, sending you to the lecture. I’ve learned since then how dangerous this case is. I’m sorry.”
There’s no waver in his eyes. “If you hunt your sister’s killers, you will die. Period. Go to Nate Sayer and ask him to get you back to the States. After this, you won’t see me again.”
He walks away. Kat doesn’t follow. She watches him go, fast and purposeful, then loses sight of him as he turns onto the street outside the park.
Alone, she tears off the scarf. Her hands tremble as she fumbles for a tissue. Her eyes are moist, and her throat is tight. She walks toward the edge of the grass, screwing the tissue into a ball. She pulls out a compact, a thing she never otherwise uses, opens it, and uses the mirror to look around her.
Two women, looking like mother and daughter, have fallen into step behind her, chatting, laughing, alert. The Muslim women have finished their circuit and come out on the path in front. She spots a camera in a tree, its wire trailing. Two white guys, one in denim, the other wearing a leather jacket, sit on a bench, leaning back, legs outstretched, ankles crossed, staring at her. She sees another lens in a streetlight.
She closes the compact and walks quickly along the path toward the road. One of the white guys gets up, cuts across the grass, and jumps a flower bed toward the same exit.
Kat starts walking quickly, not caring who sees, turns, her glance catching a jogger coming right up behind her. She gets to the sidewalk before the white guy, and she’s out of the park, hand raised, about to shout for a taxi, but then she drops it.
Kat runs.
TWENTY-TWO
Monday, 5:23 p.m., BST
She runs south, past the Chinese embassy, a church on the left, a luxury hotel on the right. She concentrates on her breathing. Fresh rain falls on the sidewalk. The air is damp again.
Pedestrians slow her down at Oxford Circus, a big shopping area. She jogs in place until the lights change. Once across, she cuts down a side street on the right, where there are fewer people.
She recognizes the streets where she and Nancy walked on Saturday night. Too close to Sayer’s apartment. She breaks out into a wide street, the Ritz Hotel up to her left and a park on the other side.
Inside the park, she falls into a walk. She’s run a mile, maybe more. The whole time, she hasn’t stopped thinking about her father. New details are falling into place, starting with the day her father died.
Kat was working at a coffee shop on M Street. Business was quiet. She had finished a year of law school, but she knew it wasn’t working. Her mom and dad were fighting, or rather Mom was angry at Dad most of the time. Suzy’s career was flying.
A shadow stretched across the sidewalk, and two Lincoln Town Cars drew up in the “No Parking” area in front of her workplace.
Kat remembers a TV on the coffee shop wall showing Jim Abbott launch his first campaign for the presidency. Abbott was talking about his slogan for global security—Safety for All. For some reason that Kat never fully understood, her dad would barely allow Abbott’s name to be mentioned in the house.
From the front car, Nate Sayer stepped out with a couple of the bodyguards he’d hired after getting threats from a cattle company.
He came in alone. “Kat, can you turn that off for a minute?” he said, glancing up at the screen.
Sayer was the last person she wanted to see on any day. “Why?” said Kat. “You can’t just walk in here and tell me what to do.”
Sayer shrugged. He wasn’t angry. Kat and Sayer hadn’t talked much in the three years since she’d seen him with her mom. But now, he wore an expression Kat hadn’t seen before. He wasn’t scoring points; he was devoid of arrogance, devoid of that chip he carried around, devoid of agenda.
“Kat, your dad. He’s dead.”
Kat looked straight at the TV as if her head had been jerked up there by some fishing line. She saw Jim Abbott’s face, then let her eyes rest on spilled cappuccino on the counter.
“The Cessna went down, just after takeoff. He was heading back after seeing your grandma.”
Kat had been up in the Cessna with her dad. She tried to picture it; how it worked when a plane fell out of the sky.
“The weather wasn’t too good. A guy at the airfield said he advised your dad against flying, but he wanted to get home. He told them he could handle it.”
Sayer swallowed hard. His eyes were shining. He looked away; too much history with Kat for him to be the right person to tell her. Suzy was in New York. Her mom was with her family at Great Falls.
Sayer’s eyes went sharply to the screen. Kat followed them and found herself looking head-on at her father on TV talking outside a courthouse, the camera tight on his face; plenty of lines, but not an ounce of fat, same deep blue eyes as Kat, high cheekbones that he got from his own father, and a stubborn forehead, creased in the lights from the stage.
“What are you saying?” she told Sayer. “There he is, there on the screen. He’s fine.”
Sayer, looking down, made out that he was rubbing a scratch off the counter with his fingernail. “Some people are saying he was murdered. Some people are saying he took his own life. Most are saying it was just damn bad luck.”
Kat tried to call her mother at home and on her cell phone, but got only voice mail. Suzy had taken a plane straight from New York to Ohio to identify the body.
“I’ll find out what happened,” Suzy said. “I’ll be back later tonight. You going to be all right?”
“I’ll be fine,” said Kat. “Mom’ll be here.”
“Look after Mom, okay?” asked Suzy.
Kat was closer to their mom, Suzy to their dad. John Polinski had groomed Suzy for his work. She was a crusader like him. Kat had tried to follow Suzy into law, but she was no good at it.
“It may be that you’re not suited to do what Suzy does,” her dad had told her only a couple of days earlier. “It may be you have a different personality. It doesn’t matter a dime what someone is—lawyer, farmer, senator, truck driver. What matters is the character of a person, so you’ve got to know, Kat, that there’s nothing wrong with walking on the opposite side of the street from everyone else.”
Sayer gave Kat a ride to her house on R Street. Kat didn’t want to be with her mom and Sayer at the same time. When the car pulled up outside the house, Kat said, “I’m fine here, Nate. Thanks.”
Sayer nodded and let her out.
Even if her mom hadn’t gotten back yet, Angela, the housekeeper, would be there. Much of Kat’s childhood had been spent rattling around the big house with Angela while everyone else was out.
In the past years, her mom’s mood swings had become more unpredictable. One day her face would stream with sunshine; another it would be filled with so much anger that Kat needed to run.
Her mom came from a landed and wealthy family in Great Falls, Virginia, about 20 miles northwest of Washington, D.C. John Polinski was the only child of penniless Polish immigrants who’d settled in Lancaster, Ohio, after World War II. He became a pilot, then a Washington attorney, and made his name taking on corporations that mistreated migrant workers. Mom had fallen for John Polinski’s idealism.
One day, after they fought, Suzy told Kat that their mom’s parents never accepted their dad, and ultimately, neither did their mom. Suzy tried to make sense of it like a legal brief, as if that would make it okay.
“It’s like this,” said Suzy. “Mom thinks Dad puts his causes before the family. Dad says he’s the luck
iest man to have married Mom, and he would walk across broken glass for her. But Mom doesn’t want that. She wants Dad to love her like a soul mate, someone who’s flawed, human, and knows about limitations. But Dad won’t do that. He wants to save the world all the time, and it drives her mad. That’s why she cheats on him.”
Kat walked across the lawn, around the flower beds her mom tended, and opened the door with her own key. She heard a cry from Angela and saw her, on her knees, looking up the stairwell.
Kat looked where Angela was looking, but didn’t know what she was seeing at first. Even now, there’s no image in her mind of that precise moment.
Like an automaton, Kat went to the kitchen, got a knife, gave it to Angela, and asked her to go up the staircase with it. When she had a good grip on her mother’s legs, Kat told Angela to cut the rope.
Kat lowered her mother to the floor. The marble tiles in the hallway were cold and hard—she remembered that clearly. Angela grabbed a cushion.
Helen Polinski’s collar was askew, and she had bruise marks around her neck. Kat found a note in her sleeve. “I loved my husband. I cannot live without him. I have no more life to live.”
Later that night, Suzy called and said the Cessna’s wreckage was scattered all over. There was no body, just flesh, clothing, burned-out things.
Kat finds herself sitting on a park bench and realizes her cell is vibrating. She gets up, walks, and listens. It’s Cage. “The FBI is looking into the Kazakh embassy. They’ve questioned me. They want to question you.”
TWENTY-THREE
Monday, 6:06 p.m., BST
A surge of anger twists through her. “You said it was fixed.”
“It’s internal. And it’s getting nasty.”
“Did you give them the file I got?”
“No.”
“Don’t.”
“It erased.”
“What do you mean?”
“Thirty seconds into looking at it, and the whole thing was wiped clean.”
“Did you see the woman, the dead guy?” she asks.
“Yes.”
“People are being killed for that file.”
She’s standing on wet grass next to a line of deck chairs abandoned because of the rain. A guy, closing up a burger stall, glances at her. Two cops are talking by a bandstand, too far to hear what she’s saying. One looks toward her.
A thought shoots through her mind. That morning, without thinking, Kat used Suzy’s laptop to check the Kazakh file. The computer might have had trouble handling that much data in a single file. It would have fixed the problem by copying the data into a temporary file on its hard drive. Kat needs to go back and erase it.
“I need a few hours,” she says calmly.
“How are you holding up?” says Cage, stumbling on his words. “I mean physically. Everything.”
“Good,” she says tightly. “Get me more on Max Grachev and his sister, named Yulya. She’s with RingSet. And I need one more thing.”
“Go ahead.”
“Can you set up that countersurveillance again in Suzy’s apartment?”
“Don’t go back there.”
“I have to.”
A pause. “It’ll work for five, maybe ten minutes before they realize,” says Cage. “Text message me when you’re going in. I’ll tell you when to leave.”
As she approaches Suzy’s apartment, Kat stays out of sight of a policeman leaning against the river wall. A V-formation of geese fly parallel to the path, and the evening breeze, coming against the current, makes the river water chop up white.
She goes into the alley that runs behind the apartment building. The door she unbolted in the morning seems untouched. A vine has fallen onto it from a tree branch. She pushes open the door and goes into the patio. She steps across puddles of rainwater. Leaves clog the patio drain. She keeps to exactly the same route, moving along the angle of the wall, onto the fire escape. She texts Cage, waits a minute, and then lets herself in with the back-door key.
No one’s been in. Nothing seems to have been touched. She rests her head against the glass of the roof-terrace door. She never imagined how quickly paranoia could eat into someone.
She boots up the computer. Temporary files don’t have names, just long numbers. The only way she can identify the Kazakh file, if it’s there, is by the time of activation and the size reference.
It’s there, right at the top. But the time puts it at 2:01 today, Monday. Kat checks the computer’s clock and sees that Suzy had it set on Washington, not British, time. It must be the right file. Kat used the computer just after seven that morning.
She opens it. The picture of the woman with the gun comes up. Erasing it won’t do any good. An imprint might remain on the computer. Kat flips out the hard drive.
In Suzy’s bedroom, she undresses. She stuffs her laundry into her suitcase, takes out a fresh set of clothes, dresses in jeans, a beige shirt, and sneakers. She puts another set of clothes in a waterproof bag. She checks her software and tool kit and slips Suzy’s hard disk into the same bag.
She untapes the Kazakh embassy SIM card from the small of her back. It’s damp with sweat, but the polyethylene and plastic wrap has held. She tapes it back again. She puts her passport, money, Suzy’s ID, credit cards, and makeup case into a waterproof pouch, which she straps around her waist and pushes down the front of her pants.
She washes her face and brushes her teeth. She leaves the suitcase open on the bed, as if she plans to come back—which she doesn’t.
She’s been inside the apartment 30 seconds under five minutes and is moving through the kitchen when the doorbell rings.
The apartment has two intercom video screens, one by the front door and the other in the kitchen, exactly where Kat is. It takes a moment for her to read clearly the digital color picture.
Whoever’s there has their head down. It’s a woman, but she’s too close to the lens to identify. Kat zooms the lens to wide angle. Across the street is clear. She sees the policeman at the edge. No other cops are around. Her cell phone’s silent; no text message from Cage.
The buzzer goes off again, this time with a voice. “Kat. Kat. Are you there?” The woman steps back. She has a red hat in her hand.
Kat isn’t like her father, who believed that everyone had some goodness in them. Nor is she like Suzy, who distrusted everyone until they proved themselves good. Kat’s fault is that she suffers from curiosity, and from the moment she identified the woman at the buzzer, she knew she would have to confront her.
Kat doesn’t respond. She leaves the way she came in, across the patio, through the door, then around the river pathway.
Yulya Gracheva’s hand is back on the buzzer. Kat walks straight past. “If you want to talk, we have to keep moving,” Kat says, not looking at her.
“Other way,” warns Yulya. “They’ve got a zone control going on up ahead.”
Two police cars are on the entrance to the bridge. Cars and pedestrians are being checked. Kat turns and keeps walking. Yulya falls in beside her. She’s dressed the same, but her expression is tight, her lips pursed.
“I thought you had an evening of meetings,” says Kat.
“Nothing will be agreed. They’re all idealists fighting among themselves.”
“So you just happened to drop by my sister’s place?”
“Max told me exactly what happened to her. He’s upset by it and worried about you, but there are limits to what he can do.”
They’re moving briskly down the center of a narrow road with cars parked half on the sidewalk. The houses are set back, up steps, with gates to protect them from tidal flooding.
“So?” Kat keeps the pace fast to put distance between herself and Suzy’s apartment.
“He can’t help you. But maybe I can.”
“How?”
“Max is a cop, so he has to do what he’s told. I don’t. He explained the background, that your sister may have uncovered something to do with the CPS. I can help with that.”
“I’m no good at walking and talking.” Yulya stops. “We’re far enough away from them.” She gestures back toward the bridge.
They slow, but Kat doesn’t stop.
“Max told me the river was pretty safe,” continues Yulya. “Especially in light like this. No camera across the river can get lip-readable images. And private residents don’t like cameras on their property.”
She stops, smiles, and blows a kiss into the air. “Don’t you love England? When it comes to being watched, there’s no place in the world like it.”
They’re surrounded by a blue twilight deep from the sky, lit by the afterglow of the sun. The river is high, lapping against the wall. Kat stops and leans on it, looks across to boats anchored in the middle and trees and scrub on the far bank. “All right,” she says, not quite trusting Yulya, but even more curious than before. “I could do with some help.”
Yulya leans next to Kat, elbows on the wall, not worried about dirt on her sleeves. “Those meetings I dipped into,” she says. “They were about the CPS. That’s why I’m here. My family company’s actually pretty big. We’re setting up joint ventures along CPS guidelines. Mom’s the big hitter, and she’s coming over for the signing ceremony on Saturday. I’m learning the ropes. From what I can work out, no one wants any problems before Saturday. So if Suzy’s murder is really to do with the CPS, then nothing will be done before then.”
“And afterward?” says Kat.
Yulya pushes herself off the wall, wipes grit from her hands. “Who knows?” She adjusts the shoulder strap of her briefcase. “But we’re already looking into it and hope to know the answers before Saturday. We have a whole department whose job is to know what’s going on with our competitors. If people are getting killed over the CPS, we need to know why.”
Kat’s listening, staring into swollen water, murky from the changing tide. If Yulya can be trusted, what she says makes sense. Private, commercial intelligence agencies are becoming better than government ones. And they’re often more motivated.
The History Book Page 10