The Widow File

by S. G. Redling

  “Not a thing. Where’s the beer?”

  “Coming,” Choo-Choo said, sounding remarkably relaxed. “So we were throwing around some ideas while you gone. The international flavor of the situation lengthens the list of possible suspects, doesn’t it?”

  “Tell me about it.” Ev sat back as the waiter arrived with three more bottles. She waited until he was out of earshot to speak again. “We’ve got the usual monitors in place for the big players, the usual thugs, but you know how it is. For every big baddie there are a hundred smaller wannabe copycats.”

  Dani struggled to match Ev’s casual tone. “Sure, there’s no end to it, is there? But is it possible that someone even bigger targeted us? I mean, this was a really clean hit.”

  “Not that clean. You two got away.”

  Choo-Choo tipped his bottle toward Ev. “Good point, but whoever it was had the clout to erase the evidence or at least keep it off the news. Is there a possibility the goal wasn’t to get a prisoner out but to stop the interrogations altogether?”

  “Who would want to do that?” Ev asked.

  “Gosh, I don’t know. Maybe the long arm of someone’s law? Just spitballing here. Maybe Mossad? MI6? Hell, the CIA?”

  Dani started to remind him that the CIA didn’t operate domestically but Ev cut her off with a harsh laugh.

  “Right, Choo-Choo. Like we’re going to hit ourselves.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  It took more than a minute for Dani to realize that ringing she heard wasn’t just in her head. She checked her phone and gasped out a little laugh. “Oh look, it’s Tom.”

  “Of course it is.” Choo-Choo’s eyes were wide and Dani knew he was as close to cracking as she was. “You should probably get that.”

  “Yeah, excuse me.” She didn’t know how her legs worked but she managed to get up from the table and head toward the door. She didn’t know why she felt she had to take the call outside. She wasn’t entirely sure how to even answer a call so she just let her mouth decide what it wanted to say.

  “Santa? Is that you?”

  “Dani?” Tom’s laugh sounded warm. “You’re having a long day, aren’t you?”

  “Yeah, I am and it just keeps getting weirder.” She shook her head. “What can I do for you, Tom?”

  “It’s more what I can do for you.” He waited through her semi-crazed giggle. “I’m serious. I know a little bit more about what the client is looking for.”

  “The client.” Dani felt an expansiveness afflicting her thoughts, as if she had nothing but time and no desire for anything other than small talk with the man on the phone. She knew shock did that to people. By this point, Dani knew more about shock than she ever thought it possible to know. “Do you mind if I ask you a question, Tom? Will you tell me the truth?”

  “Sure, if I can.”

  “Who do you work for?”

  “Me?” He sounded like he was smiling. “I’m an independent contractor.”

  “Yeah, I get that. You know what I’m asking.”

  “I do,” he said. “And you know I can’t answer that. Professional ethics.”

  “Ethics.” Dani tipped her head back and stared at the dark, heavy sky. A fine mist was starting to fall.

  “Besides, don’t you think I should be asking you that question?”

  She straightened up. “What do you mean?” She hadn’t even decided if she believed Ev’s story. Did Tom know something she didn’t? Besides, well, everything.

  “I’m no expert, Dani, but I’d say that sounds like genuine surprise in your voice.”

  “Well this is certainly the day for surprises.”

  He said nothing for a moment and Dani felt a strange comfort in hearing him breathing. Chalk another one up for shock, she thought.

  “I’m really sorry you’re having such a bad day.”

  “I know what you can do to make it better.”

  “Oh, Dani.” She heard the sounds of traffic behind him. At least he wasn’t in her apartment. “This job is a mess. I should have walked away.”

  “I agree.”

  “No, I mean it.”

  “So do I.”

  His laugh was low and it sounded to Dani just like the kind of laugh a man made during pillow talk or phone sex. What felt even stranger to her was that the sound didn’t seem out of place. “This is a weird city, don’t you think?” he asked. “How do you like living here?”

  Okay, she thought, chit-chat. “I don’t think much about it, I guess. It’s a place. I work here. It has its upsides and downsides.”

  “But you don’t work here. You work in Virginia. You’re probably one of the few people who work in the suburbs and commute into the city to go home. Why? You moved up here for the job, right? Why pay twice the rent for half the space and no parking?”

  “National Geographic.” She spoke before she thought, unable to filter herself. “When I first came up here I got lost driving around and I saw the National Geographic Center and I thought it was coolest thing I’d ever seen, that it was a real place, not just the magazine with the yellow border. I don’t know why but I just thought it would be cool to live near the National Geographic Center. I guess that makes me a hick.”

  “Hardly.”

  Dani leaned against the brick front of the restaurant, bowing her head out of the mist. She didn’t think it was possible to be this tired. Tom’s voice felt warm in her ears. She couldn’t say she wanted to keep talking to him, but she wanted it more than she wanted to go inside and face crazy Ev and her insane declarations. What she wanted was for this all to be a dream.

  “Hey, do you need to watch the time?” He sounded genuinely concerned. “Are you going back to keeping these calls under ninety seconds?”

  “Have you decided to start tracing my calls?”

  “Nah,” he said with a laugh. “I’m kind of a low-tech guy. So, uh, who’s your favorite president?”

  “What?” Dani squeezed her eyes shut, not wanting to dwell on what low-tech aspects Tom might be referring to. “I don’t think I have a favorite president.”

  “You must. They’re everywhere here in D.C.” A horn honked over Tom’s shouted threat to someone. “Sorry. Taxi. But the presidents, yeah, they’re everywhere. But just the biggies, you know? Lincoln, Washington, Jefferson. You don’t see anybody lining up to see a memorial to Taft, for example. And he brought the cherry trees to Washington.”

  “Well, actually his wife did. She was the one who originally supported the idea.”

  There was that laugh again. “Brainiac. God, I wish we’d had the chance to meet under different circumstances. I wish you were the client. How come my clients are never like you?”

  “Because I don’t pay to have people killed?”

  “That’s all I am to you?”

  Dani sighed. “Give me a reason to think of you as something else.”

  “You’re surrounded by killers, Dani. You’re in Washington, D.C. Do you know how much work I get from this city?”

  “You take the job. That makes you the killer.”

  “Hmm. Look at it this way, Dani. You can have a linen napkin and a steak knife or a pair of rubber boots and sledgehammer—really doesn’t make much difference to the cow.”

  “Now I’m a cow? Gee Tom, you really know how to sweet-talk a girl.”

  “Come on, you know what I’m saying.”

  The horrible part was she did know. She understood his point and it made perfect sense. She also knew she had to be insane to be standing here in the middle of the night listening to semi-flirtatious small talk from the man who had been hired to kill her. Her other option was to go back into the restaurant and face the possibility that she had spent the last five years working for the Central Intelligence Agency.

  “You said you have more information about what they think I have.”

  He sounded relieved. “They think you have a file. Maybe a computer file or photograph that has information they’re looking for. It could be microfiche.”

&
nbsp; “Microfiche? Really? Do people still use that?”

  “You’d be surprised where people hide things, Dani. It’s got something to do with a widow. A widow file, something marked for widows.”

  Dani had gone over everything in that pouch. She couldn’t think of anything that hinted at widows, but then she hadn’t been looking for anything like that. “They don’t even know what they’re looking for? Or are they just not telling you?”

  “Little bit of both, I think. From what I can gather, this guy stole some important information—maybe a formula, who knows? He was a scientist. The client mentioned looking for his widow when they targeted him but the guy was never married.”

  There was little street noise around her but Dani pressed her finger into her ear to hear him more clearly. “Are you talking about Dr. Marcher? You killed Dr. Marcher?”

  He hesitated. “Yes. Did you know him?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “I guess not. It’s the job, Dani. I tampered with his brakes.”

  She swayed through the rush of heat, struggling to keep her voice level. “That’s how my dad died.”

  His silence stretched even longer. “I’m sorry, Dani.” She heard him breathing and it sounded less comforting now. “Look, I’m sorry about a lot of things. I’m sorry I took this job. I’m sorry I ignored my instincts. But none of that matters right now. You have to save yourself. You know that, right? I can’t save you. The police can’t save you. You have to find the tools to save yourself.”

  “What do you suppose the odds of that are?”

  “What are the odds if you curl up and hide? Come on, Dani, you know you’re smarter than that. I know you’re smarter than that.”

  She banged her head against the brick. “You already said you’re going to kill me.”

  “Prove me wrong. Do it, Dani. Prove me wrong.” He hissed the words. “And even if you can’t, even if you can’t get away, do what you can to bring down the bastards who killed you.”

  “That would be you, Tom.”

  “Steak knife or sledgehammer, Dani. How much a difference does it make to you at this moment? Whatever it is that you’ve got, you find it and you get it into the public eye. Take it to the Washington Post. Put it online. Whatever it is, they’ve killed over a dozen people to keep it under control. You may die but that doesn’t mean you can’t do some killing yourself.”

  “Why are you telling me how to bring down the people who pay you?”

  “Because I hate these bastards. I hate the way they do business. I’m sick of assholes like them pulling strings and making deals, thinking they can buy their way out of any problem with a few stacks of money they probably stole in the first place. I hate the position they’ve put me in and I hate that they have the audacity to think they can hit me.”

  “You? They’re going to kill you too?”

  His chuckle had none of the dirty allure of earlier. “They’re going to try and they’re going to fail. Bring them down, Dani. You’re smart enough.”

  His phone beeped. “Hang on, Dani.” He didn’t recognize the local number. “Let me take this. Find what they’re looking for. Will you do that?”

  “Yeah, Tom. But hey, don’t take it personally if my sledgehammer takes you out too.”

  He laughed and promised he wouldn’t. He answered the incoming call still smiling.

  “Listen to me very carefully. I only have a minute.” The client whispered, his voice reedy and tremulous. “This is all going very wrong very fast and I need your help.”

  Booker rolled his eyes. So predictable. “I’m listening.”

  “These people, these people I’m working for, my God. I hired them and now I’m working for them.” Booker couldn’t tell if the client was panicked or drunk or both. “It’s all been a setup. Every bit of it. Nobody was stealing tech from Swan, nobody was spying on us. The file they’re looking for, it’s one of theirs. It’s a Rasmund file. Marcher wasn’t stealing our tech; he was helping move information out of Rasmund.”

  “Calm down,” Booker said, and he could hear the old man wheezing through the phone.

  “They’re going to kill me. They’re not going to stop. They’re going to kill me and you or send us to prison. Once they get that file—”

  “What is the file?”

  The client let out a wet cough. “I thought it was a design file. They told me it was the file of patents we’re waiting to submit. It’s not. It’s not our file at all. They set me up to think Marcher was stealing designs but he was working with their man, a Rasmund employee, to steal their classified information. It’s a list of names.”

  “Whose names?”

  “I don’t know. They don’t talk around me now. They’re running the show. I’ve had to pick up what I could.”

  Booker started walking nowhere in particular. He just needed to move. “Why did Marcher have this file? What did it have to do with Marcher? Anything?”

  “Yes, Marcher. He was the key, what tipped them off. His brother was on the list.”

  “What is the list?”

  “They’re calling it the Widow File. I think it’s men who have disappeared. Who have been made to disappear. Permanently.”

  “How did Marcher get this file?”

  “The man from Rasmund. Hickham or Hickman or something. He and Marcher knew each other before this job. They’re saying that he used Marcher to smuggle the file out of Rasmund. Once they realized what he had taken, they needed to reach Marcher, to find out if he had moved the file or shown it to anyone. That’s why they needed me to hire them, to get them access to Marcher. When they get that file, they’re going to kill me.”

  Booker bit back a sound of disgust. Wasn’t that just typical? The client had been more than willing to take Marcher’s life, had spent the money with no more anguish than he’d have felt tearing open an envelope. But the instant his own life was at risk? Suddenly the moral thunder of injustice pounded across the universe.

  “Do you have any idea what the plan is?”

  “I haven’t heard much. They’re getting very quiet around me. They’re waiting for a signal from their agent that the girl has the file.”

  “She’s not just going to turn it over to them.”

  “They have someone on the inside, someone she trusts. They know she’s scared and alone. They keep saying her profile says she’ll come to them.”

  When Dani walked back into the restaurant, she made a decision. If she survived this, she would never play poker with Choo-Choo. He sat with his long legs crossed, his blond hair catching the low light of the restaurant, laughing with ease at something Ev was telling him. Ev spoke with animation, her hands flying, her cheeks flushed, the words pouring from her. Dani almost hesitated to interrupt them until Choo-Choo looked up and his eyes widened just a fraction, just enough to send an unmistakable cry for help.

  “How’s Tom?”

  “Busy,” Dani said, settling back into her seat.

  Ev laughed and Dani could see the redhead was getting drunk. The number of beer bottles on the table had doubled. “I never would have taken you for the slutty type, Dani. I thought you were serious with that guy Ben, but Choo-Choo’s been telling me all about your hot new mystery man.”

  Dani glanced at Choo-Choo, who gave an innocent shrug. He hadn’t told Ev about Tom. “I like to keep my private life private.”

  “No such thing,” Ev said. “Privacy, there ain’t no such creature. I got to pee. Again. Never should have broken the seal, eh Choo-Choo?”

  He laughed with her, his smile dropping the instant she turned her back. “Okay, two things. One, Ev is a bad drunk and a lightweight. Two, she is bat-shit crazy. The only good part about having her with us is that if someone starts shooting, we can use her as a human shield. Tell me you had a better time with Tom than I had going down that rabbit hole.”

  Dani almost admitted she’d had a nice talk with Tom but realized how strange that would sound. “He says I’ve got a file, a widow file is what
he called it. He doesn’t know what it is or what it looks like but he says that I might be able to use it to stop whoever’s behind this. He says it could be a picture, a microfiche—”

  “Microfiche? Do people still use that?”

  “Like I know?” Dani kept watching the hallway to be sure Ev wasn’t returning. “Should we wait until she’s gone to look for it?”

  “Good luck with that. She’s already promised me solemnly, and I do mean solemnly, that she is not going to leave our side until this job is done.”

  “Shit.” Dani unbuttoned her outer shirt and dragged the pouch onto her lap. “Then let’s just do this. Maybe she’ll know what it is we’re looking for. She worked with Hickman. Maybe he gave her some kind of clue.”

  “Let’s not bring up Hickman, okay?” Choo-Choo shook his head. “If she didn’t like him when she was sober, you should hear her with a few beers in her. She’s called him everything but a pedophile. Says he’s a coward and a traitor. Trust me, don’t get her started.”

  “Thanks for the tip.” For what felt like the hundredth time, Dani unpacked the materials, white pages first, then assorted objects. She held up the Tootsie Pop wrapper. “Would this hold a microfiche? How big is a microfiche?”

  “Smaller than a regular fiche?” He took the wrapper from her and held it up to the light. “It could be teensy. Depending on who designed the tech, it could fit under your fingernail.”

  Dani held the Ho Ho wrapper up to the light as well, seeing nothing but printed letters through the shiny paper.

  “You guys got the munchies or something?” Ev dropped down in her chair. “What’s with the snacks?”

  Choo-Choo nodded at Dani. They had no choice but to include Ev in their search. “We think the whole reason we’re being chased is a file and that it’s hidden somewhere in this stuff.”

  Ev squinted at Dani. “You think you’ve got the Widow File?”

  “You know about that?”

  “Of course I do. I work with Maureen, remember?” Her face flushed darker as she leaned in. “I’m the one they called, not you. I’m the one who needs to get that file back to them. Not you. That file is going to save Maureen’s life and if you have it, you better believe it’s mine.” When Dani and Choo-Choo only stared open-mouthed at her rant, she dropped her head. “I’m sorry. It’s just that I’m so worried about Maureen. I’m so worried this is all going to go wrong. I can’t let her down. I can’t. I owe her my whole life.”