“No, she didn’t.”
“Okay, I guess that’s it, then.” Heroe thought a minute. “By the way, Mrs. Cowan, did Naomi mention where she was going after she left you?”
“Work, she said.” Rachel shrugged. “That’s typical of her; work is where her head always is.” She said this without rancor.
Heroe looked up, her inner radar suddenly on high alert. “So she wasn’t going home.”
“No, I told you. Work, work, work.” Rachel bit her thumbnail, her eyes turned inward. “Something I’m quite certain I’m going to have to look into now.”
Heroe nodded and moved toward the entryway. “Okay, thank you, Mrs. Cowan. You’ve been very helpful.”
The compliment appeared to stir Rachel out of her dark ruminations, and she turned toward the chief detective. “Really?”
Heroe knew when to turn on her smile, whose wattage was considerable. “Really.” She paused. “By the way, did Naomi by any chance tell you where she was going, specifically?”
Rachel wrinkled her brow. “She did, actually. Now what was it?”
“You mean where she was going, specifically.”
“I said what and I meant what.” Rachel clicked her fingernails on the crown of her diamond-studded gold watch. “Let me see. What were she and I discussing? Oh, yes. The secret bank account my husband keeps. The moment I mentioned that her face lit up.” She laughed, and for a moment the years, and with them the care and worry, seemed to slip off her face. “I knew that look. I knew it would be useless to ask her to stick around.” Then she pointed. “Now you’re doing it.”
“What?”
“Lighting up like a beacon.”
With good reason.
“A bank, you say.” And Heroe thought, Middle Bay Bancorp. Bingo!
TWENTY-SIX
“JACK, I need to talk to you.”
Alli came and sat next to him. The 737 had been in the air for forty minutes. It would be less than twenty until they set down at a secured airstrip outside Vlorë. Since speaking with Chief Detective Heroe he had been sunk deep in thought. His mind wanted to go to his upcoming reunion with Annika, but it kept slipping back to Naomi. He felt her loss acutely. She had been of great help to both the FLOTUS and Alli after the accident in Moscow that had killed Edward Carson, proving herself quick-witted and unflustered by even the most grievous of events. Afterward, she had kept in touch with him. She always asked about Alli’s emotional state. He could still remember how genuinely happy she’d been by the news that Alli had decided to go to Fearington. “Finally,” she’d said, “she’s on a path that will serve her well.”
In addition, he was concerned by the widening gyre of the conspiracy he found himself investigating. The mission given Dennis Paull and, by extension, him, was on the surface a simple one: Track down and terminate Arian Xhafa. And yet, now, only days later, it wasn’t simple at all. If Naomi was dead, it was at the hands of her partner. McKinsey had been extracted from the Metro police by Andrew Gunn, not McKinsey’s boss, who had somehow been neutralized. McKinsey and Naomi had been pulled out of Secret Service and seconded to Henry Holt Carson. Why them? Was McKinsey secretly working for Carson, as Gunn seemed to be? The odds seemed to favor that theory. But how did these people tie in to Arian Xhafa and his American representative Mbreti? And then there was Annika’s involvement.
Every investigation had a trajectory, but Jack’s mind worked in three dimensions. He saw the layers at work here: Carson, Xhafa, Annika. He now knew Annika’s connection with Xhafa, but not what she had been doing in D.C. For the life of him he couldn’t see the connection between Carson, Gunn, McKinsey, and Xhafa. Was it the Stem? The sex trade? And who the hell set out to frame Alli? The puzzle, complex as it seemed, had nevertheless taken on dimension and feel. It was the context that was missing. He was too close to the trees to see the forest. He needed to pull his perspective back and look at the disparate pieces as a whole.
At the same time, another part of his mind was busy working on the name equation he suspected would lead to Mbreti’s real name. Grasi = Thatë; Mbreti = X. Despite his best efforts, it remained unsolved. And yet, he couldn’t help believing that the solution was right in front of his face. If only he could see it.
Turning his mind away from these conundrums, he smiled at Alli, grateful for the distraction. Let another part of his brain unravel them, he thought, while she engaged him in conversation.
“You’ve done extremely well with Edon,” he said. “I’m proud of you.”
She seemed stunned, and sat back in the seat. “Huh! No one’s ever said that to me before.”
“I’m sorry I’m the first,” he said with a wry smile, “but I’ll have to do.”
Impulsively, she left her seat to give him a kiss on the cheek. “Thanks for believing in me.”
“Always.”
Alli returned his smile, but almost immediately she became serious. “Are you going to tell me about Annika?”
“She’s in Albania, that’s where we’re going now. The plane will drop us off, refuel, then take Paull and the children back to the States.”
“You said you’d never see her again.”
“No, honey, she said that.” He made a vague gesture. “She says she’s involved in this situation with Xhafa.”
Alli’s eyes rose to engage his. “Do you believe her?”
“I wasn’t sure—until I saw the scars on Edon’s back.”
“Yeah, they’re just like the ones on Annika’s back.” Alli licked her lips. “She’s after Arian Xhafa, isn’t she?”
He nodded. “I wouldn’t bet against it.”
“But you weren’t thinking about her when I sat down here.”
Jack sighed. “Alli, Naomi Wilde is missing. I spoke to a chief detective who thinks she’s been murdered.”
Alli’s gaze dropped to her hands, which fidgeted in her lap. “I liked Naomi,” she said after a time.
“Me, too.”
“D’you really think she’s dead?”
“No way to say at this point.”
She picked at her nails, which were already bitten short. “What’s gonna happen to Thatë?”
Jack shrugged. “That will be largely up to him.”
“You don’t have a plan for him? You have a plan for everyone.”
“I think you’re giving me too much credit.”
“Do you have a plan for Annika?”
He remained silent for some time. “It’s not just me who has a connection with her.”
When she gave him a startled look, he said, “What, did you think I wouldn’t notice?”
Alli was back to staring at her hands.
“Alli, talk to me.”
She heaved a sigh and shook her head as if to clear it. “Last year, when we were in the Ukraine, it was almost like…” Her words grew fainter and fainter until they faded out altogether.
Jack waited a moment, then leaned forward. “Like what?”
Tears grew in Alli’s eyes, glittering and fragile-seeming. “There were moments—at that awful restaurant, at the apartment—when we were like … like a family.” She almost winced when she said the last word. “Is that a horrible thing to say?”
He took her slim hands in his. “Why would it be horrible?”
She gave a tiny sound that was as much a sob as a bitter laugh. “Because, Jack. Because of so many things.” Her voice was a whisper. “Because she lied to both of us, because she murdered an American senator, because…” Her nails dug into his palms. “… oh, Christ, don’t make me go on.”
“Alli, look at me, we’re all of us angels and demons. We choose our paths, but there are forces, vast and hidden, that compel us into situations, sometimes against our will—”
“Are you excusing what she did?” It was less accusation than plea.
“I’m saying that when it comes to Annika the truth is always hidden, and when it does come to light—if it ever does—it’s far more complex, and conflicted, than we can imagine.
”
She nodded. “That I can understand.”
He smiled. “I know.”
She withdrew her hands from his. He knew from experience that there was only a certain amount of physical contact she could tolerate.
“Where are we meeting her?” she asked.
“In Vlorë.”
Alli risked a glance over her shoulder. “There’s something I want to ask you. It’s about Edon. Her sister, Liridona, is in Vlorë. Edon doesn’t know what’s happened to her, but she’s deathly afraid that Xhafa’s people will get ahold of her; maybe they already have.”
“Alli, much as I feel for Edon and her sister, we can’t spare the time to—”
“You can’t,” Alli said. “But I can.”
* * *
THERE WAS a police boat waiting to take Heroe to Roosevelt Island when she pulled up at the dock in Georgetown. During the short trip over, she thought about Naomi Wilde and her sister Rachel. She herself had three brothers, scattered all over the world. One was a trauma surgeon in Oregon, another a lawyer at The Hague, the third an intel officer in Afghanistan. She had always wanted a sister, someone to help counter the testosterone barrage. She wondered how Rachel would take the loss of her sister. Coming after the betrayal of her husband it wouldn’t be good—by the looks of her she was already unraveling. She made a mental note to keep an eye on her in the coming weeks.
The patrol boat nosed into the island and Heroe hopped off. She turned on the GPS function of her phone.
“Give me a half hour,” she said, “before you come looking for me.”
The officer adjusted the boat’s GPS to home in on her signal. “What are you expecting?”
Heroe grimaced. “I wish I knew.”
“Good luck, Chief.”
Nodding, she pushed into the dense greenery until she found the boardwalk. She walked to her right. Finding nothing, she retraced her steps and continued on. Not long after, she discovered a branching to her right, and took it.
This boardwalk was shorter, ending at a small inlet that meandered off to her right. She took a look around and saw nothing but trees and underbrush. A bird sang in a branch above her head and water spiders skimmed across the surface of the shallow finger of water.
She was about to turn around and go back to the boat when something stuck in the periphery of her vision. Squatting down, she looked more closely. Off to her right there appeared to be a footprint in the black mud beside the water. It was a partial, but still. Slipping off her shoes, she stepped cautiously into the opaque water. It came up to her calves, but the mud was so thick she sunk in another couple of inches. Drawing her service revolver, she headed straight up the inlet. She was surprised that the water wasn’t cold. It was, instead, the temperature of blood. This thought sent a shiver down her spine.
Heroe was not prone to superstition, but from the time of puberty she had been visited by premonitions. They did not come often, but when they did they always proved correct. At first, she hadn’t told anyone about her visitations for fear of being ostracized, but a year after they manifested she could bear the burden no longer and, one night, she confessed to Granny. For a long time after she was finished speaking, Granny said nothing. Her eyes had gone opaque as they sometimes did when she sat in her rocking chair in the evenings or on dark afternoons when rain clouds burst open and lightning forked through the sky.
“You have inherited the gift from me,” Granny said after a time. “I inherited it from my grandmother. That’s how the gift works; it skips generations.” Granny’s eyes cleared and she smiled as she touched Heroe’s cheek. “Don’t be frightened, child.”
“I’m not,” Heroe had said, sounding braver than she felt. “But I don’t understand.”
Granny’s smile broadened. “The world we experience with our five senses is only a sliver of what exists. Remember this, child, as you go through life. You and I have glimmers of what really exists beyond the limits. We are the fortunate ones.”
“But the premonitions—”
“Whispers from the other side of things, whispers from souls whose bodies have already turned to dust. Where they are, time doesn’t exist. Time is, after all, constructed by humans to make sense out of chaos. But in the vastness, past, present, and future coexist, as they must. It’s only that we lack the … tools to experience it the way it really is.”
Now, wading through the swampy water, Heroe was visited by a premonition. She “saw” the water as blood and knew that somewhere up ahead death awaited. And then into her mind swam Naomi Wilde’s face. It was covered in mud, distorted by caked blood. So vivid was the image that Heroe was forced to stop in her tracks. She held on to the branch of a tree, much as Naomi had done days before when Annika had led her to the buried body of Arjeta Kraja. For a moment the world seemed to spin wildly around her and she heard the familiar roaring in her ears. “Someone else’s blood,” Granny had said when she had described the sensation.
“Who are you?” Heroe whispered. “What are you trying to tell me?”
Slowly, she regained her sense of equilibrium. The world, and, with it, her breathing, returned to normal. She stared at her fist, the knuckles white where she held on to the branch as if for dear life. Letting go, she pushed forward through the muck until she came to a large tree with spreading roots. More footprints here—fresh footprints, in fact. And between two of the largest roots the earth had been recently turned over.
The footprints went off into the foliage. She was looking in that direction when a powerful arm snaked around her throat and she felt a terrible pressure on the delicate bone just below her left eye.
* * *
“NO,” JACK said. “I forbid it. For you to go after Liridona alone would be the height of madness.”
“I suspected you would say that,” Alli replied. “That’s why I’ve asked Thatë to go with me.”
At once, he saw the trap she had sprung on him, and while he admired her cleverness, he also knew that what she proposed was out of the question.
“I’m sorry, Alli. Your heart is in the right place, but under no circumstances are you going off on this wild-goose chase.” Even as the words came out of his mouth, he recognized them as what Edward Carson had told him when he assigned Jack to investigate Senator Berns’s death.
Alli’s eyes were blazing. “You have no right to order me—”
“This isn’t a democracy, young lady. In case you have conveniently forgotten, the moment we step off the plane we’re back in enemy territory. An enemy, I might remind you, whose principal business is the enslavement and trafficking of girls and young women.”
She lifted her head. “I’m not frightened of Arian Xhafa.”
“That’s just what I’m afraid of, Alli, because you should be.”
“Well, shit, of course I am, Jack. I’d be an idiot not to be frightened of him. On the other hand, I’m not going to let that fright paralyze me. I mean, who does Edon have except us? Who can save her and Liridona from Xhafa, if not us? Her parents? Her father is the one who sold her and Arjeta to Xhafa’s people to pay off his gambling debts. Do you think he’s going to stop gambling and losing?”
Now it was she who took his hands. “Jack, Edon’s already lost one sister. I can’t stand by and watch her lose another.”
* * *
THE PRESSURE in Heroe’s head exploded behind her eyes like a mortar blast. She gasped as the shock wave drove through her, but her brain was far from paralyzed. She raised her service revolver until the muzzle pointed directly behind her. She pulled the trigger.
The percussion effectively deafened her in her right ear, but the agonizing pressure beneath her left eye vanished. She was released, and she staggered to her knees.
She was staring down, half-dazed by shock, the point-blank percussion, and the violent surge of adrenaline that had surely saved her life. Her knees had not sunk into the muck. They were resting on something hard. Dropping the service revolver, she dug her fingers in the muddy earth, sc
raped it away, and saw two faces appearing. One was of a young girl, very beautiful despite the disfigurement of her nose. Heroe had never seen her before. Feverish with dread, she uncovered more of the second girl and saw that it was Naomi Wilde’s face precisely as she had experienced it in her visitation.
She began to cry. But that release of emotion and tension brought her back to herself, and, bracing herself against the tree, she rose to her feet.
Turning, she saw Peter McKinsey sitting against the bole of a tree. The left side of his head was running red. Where the ear had been was a scorch mark, ragged and bloody.
He looked up at her and snapped his teeth together. In utter shock, she watched him lurch to his feet and come after her. She wanted to run, she wanted to defend herself, but her service revolver was at her feet.
And then he was upon her, and her nostrils dilated with the stench of death. His fists beat her down to the muck, until she was lying with Naomi Wilde and the unknown victim. And in that moment, she understood the nature of her visitation. The water turned to blood—her blood, her death. Nothing to be done, then. The future was already written. Today she would die.
McKinsey was on top of her, pounding her, and then he had her service revolver. He pointed it at her, grinning now, victory in sight. And then the world turned inside out, colors coalesced and collided. She no longer felt pain. There was no sound save the rushing of blood in her ears. Someone else’s blood.
And at that precise instant, she saw the specter of Naomi Wilde rising up behind McKinsey like a twist of smoke, drawing her gaze to the ruined side of his head. No time to weigh a decision, or even for thought.
Lashing out with her left hand, she struck squarely on the gunshot wound. McKinsey howled in pain, rearing up, hands to his head. She struck him a two-handed blow that knocked him sideways. His cheek struck Naomi’s face and he howled again.
Struggling out from under him, she smashed her fist into his right eye. The blow drove the left side of his head into the ground and his eyes rolled up in their sockets. She grabbed her service revolver out of his hand and aimed it at him as she staggered to her feet.
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