White Collar Big Bang Fic: Penelope Weaving (PG-13, 78,000 words) Part 5
See Part 1 for art and header information and warnings.
“What does Caffrey want with a bakery?”
Kate looks up from her fifth solitaire game of the afternoon, which she’s currently losing; she shifts cards randomly back and forth while her mind is elsewhere, wondering about the best routes out of the country and what the going rate is, these days, for bribing prison guards. Neal has been back behind bars for almost three days and Kate’s mind is spinning over in futile circles like a rat trapped on a wheel.
Neal planned and executed a jailbreak with far less resources and freedom of movement than she has now.
Of course, getting him out is only half of it; keeping him out - and alive - will be harder.
“He loves those almond bear claws,” she says absently, over the hum of the shredder at the other end of the room; they’ve been shredding transcripts of Burke’s phone calls all morning, since Neal’s lawyer put in a request for all his files. And, at Fowler’s impatient scowl, “I’m serious. Can’t get enough of ‘em. Why?”
“Apparently he just bought one.”
It takes her a moment to realize he means a bakery, and not a bear claw; she sits up, then, peering at the stack of papers he’s dropped on the coffee table. The address has been blacked out, but at the bottom of the lease she can see Neal’s signature. And next to it, the signature of his attorney.
D. Haversham.
She blinks.
Several thoughts run through her mind at once; so they made Moz, finally. Followed by, when did he become a lawyer? Relief, that he’s not alone on the inside, that Moz can visit, now.
And a sudden, sharp, inexplicable sense of loss, and a twist of something like jealousy, that visiting him is what she does, that something which was hers has been stolen.
The arraignment is two days later; Fowler has gone out and she’s sitting alone in the hotel lounge, sprinkling cinnamon into her cappuccino, when a breaking news alert flashes onto the TV screen above the bar. The announcer’s voice, faint over the whir of the coffee grinder, is saying “… on the lookout for a fugitive,” and she’s looking at Neal’s mug shot.
She doesn’t stop, doesn’t think; rising smoothly, she takes her coat from the back of her chair and walks out of the lounge toward the hotel lobby. She recognizes Maurice by the door; he can’t see the lounge TV from there; he doesn’t know. He’ll follow her as he always does, but he won’t think to call for backup, won’t suspect she’s running and not coming back.
Neal is out, with no tracker, somewhere in Manhattan. This is their chance. They can run. Together.
First she has to find him.
She walks briskly outside and sprints up the street, ducking into an alley and behind a neighboring restaurant before Maurice can make it to the door.
***
She doesn’t get the details until six hours later, hunched over a public library computer with her hat pulled over her face, reading the brief Yahoo! News account of the escape and reminding herself over and over that she, too, is a fugitive and that triumphant laughter or high-pitched squeals of delight would very likely attract attention she can’t afford right now.
He bought a bakery.
She stares for a moment at the image on the screen, a side view of a bright orange awning stenciled with “The Greatest Cake” (oh, God, was that Neal’s pun or Mozzie’s?), both hands pressed over her mouth to hide a grin that might crack her face wide open. Then she hits “print”, tells the print dialog box hell, yes, she wants to print in color and she doesn’t care if it’s thirty cents extra and tries not to dance on her way over to the line of printers along the wall of the computer lab.
He bought a bakery.
She pulls the picture out of the printer, folds it carefully in quarters and presses it to her lips. God I love you. Then she tucks it into the inside pocket of her coat next to her heart.
He bought a bakery and used it in a jailbreak.
“Moz. You guys are brilliant. Where are you?”
She leaves messages on all three cell phone numbers she has for him; she doesn’t know what number Neal’s using now.
“Oh. My. God. I will never forgive either one of you for leaving me out of this one. Never for as long as I live. Call me, this number.”
Keller can have his guns; Keller can eat his fucking heart out; anyone can use a gun. Neal has something better. Neal has style.
“Guys, where are you? What’s the plan? Please tell me you haven’t stopped using this number. Call. Me.”
It’s late at night and she’s alone in a subway car, finally, when she allows herself a single whoop of triumph, punching the air; this turns into a flood of laughter as she sinks into a seat, exultation and relief edging into high-pitched hysteria and for a long time she can’t stop, can’t breathe, bent over and rocking back and forth.
He’s still got it. Eventually, she can draw her knees up to her chest, hide her face against her knees; she’s still breathing hard, and she can feel tears drying on her face, but the three women who get on at the next stop are too deep in their own conversation to pay much attention. He’s still him.
She breathes out a long, shaky sigh; she can almost see him, half-hidden by the glare on that glass, talking about a bakery in Paris. She’d been so afraid they’d taken something vital from him; she’d been terrified that prison had broken him in ways that could never be healed, stolen his nerve and crippled his spirit and ripped away the joy he once took in life, in a heist coming together or an intricate painting or an afternoon at the park. She hadn’t known how scared she was, all those years, that the man who came back to her wouldn’t be Neal anymore, that a cage would crush everything that made him who he was, until she heard of him back in action today. And relief hits her like a hammer blow, leaving her stunned and overwhelmed.
He is not broken. They can’t break him; they will never break him.
He is brilliant. He is amazing; he is glorious and he is hers, all hers.
Her phone is buzzing.
“Moz!” she hisses, looking up, cautiously checking that no one is listening. “That was amazing. You guys are - where is he? What’s the plan?”
“Kate.” Mozzie sounds tense and unhappy. “Where are you?”
“I don’t - I’m on a subway, somewhere. I shook off the feds this morning as soon as I heard, but I can’t stay ahead of them forever. Tell me you’ve got a plan to get us out of here.”
“Well, if you hadn’t -” He stops. “Look, I don’t know what you think is going on, but it’s not going to be that easy.”
She sighs. “Moz, come on.” He’s upset; she gets that. He probably blames her for Neal being stupid, and she’s not certain he’s wrong to do so, and Mozzie has never been the most trusting person to begin with. But they don’t have time for this now. “I know -” She stops. “Things have been complicated,” she says, quietly. “And I’m sorry I had to keep you guys out of the loop. I am.” She pauses again, waits, and when he doesn’t answer, she says, “Please. Just tell me where he is, Moz.”
She hears him sigh. “Right now he’s probably still in the suit’s kitchen.”
“The - who? What?” He’s not making sense.
“Last time I heard from him,” and the words are clipped and angry, “he was in the kitchen at the Burkes’ house. Where he’d been all afternoon, after Mrs. Burke helped him sneak past the detail posted outside.”
“What?” For a moment there’s only the hiss of the open line, and the rattle of the car along the tracks. “I don’t understand.”
“He went out a fourth story window into a bakery awning - do you know how much it costs to buy a bakery in downtown Manhattan these days? - distracted pursuit with a van while he escaped into the sewers, disappeared off the radar of every law enforcement agency in the city and then voluntarily showed up at the house of the suit who arrested him in the first place.”
Mozzie isn’t pissed at her, she realizes abruptly. He’s furious at Neal.
As he should be. “Moz!” she wails, then quickly drops to a whisper as another passenger turns around. “How could you -” she starts.
At the same time as he says, “If you only -”
They both stop; there’s no time for this, and nothing to gain by it. “What’s going on, Kate?” he asks, finally.
She sighs. “I’m trying to figure that out.” The lights flicker as the train picks up speed; she’ll have to go back, she realizes. The brief thrill of freedom is gone as abruptly as it appeared. Neal is back in custody and so is she; she can’t be free as long as Fowler can get to him.
And this, too, is Neal - glorious, brilliant, and at times so utterly, blindingly stupid.
Mozzie says, “Neal’s suit thinks you and your suit are in this together to get ahold of his stash and split it between you.”
“Oh, ask me if I give a damn what Peter Burke thinks of me.” But something twists painfully in her chest as she asks, “What does Neal think?”
“Neal doesn’t know what to think. I mean, you tell him you’re breaking up with him with five months left, then you disappear and the next thing he hears from you is where is all the loot? What are people supposed to think?”
His voice softens. “Look, he knows you’re in some kind of trouble but you won’t tell him who or what or where you are and so he can’t do anything to help. He’s out of his mind worrying about you. And, you know, he might not be the only one. Who’s a little bit concerned, here.”
“Awww, Moz.” She has to blink several times before she can see properly.
“Where are you now? What are you doing?”
She sighs. “On my way back to where I was before all this.”
“If you’re with who I think you’re with, this guy is bad news.”
“Moz.” Her voice is sharp. “This is me. I don’t know what the hell kind of screwed up Stockholm thing is going on between Neal and Burke, but I know better than to trust a fed. I know he’s not on my side.”
He doesn’t say anything for almost a minute. Then, “You still have my DVD.”
“I know. I’m sorry. You’ll have to steal another one.”
“So you’re really going back to him.”
“I don’t have a choice. If Neal hadn’t gone back -” She stops; they can’t change what happened.
Now his voice is grave. “Is that safe?”
“As safe as any other options I’ve got right now.” She sighs. “I don’t know. He’ll probably kill me in the morning.”
“Funny.” Mozzie snorts. “Well, while you’re off playing Dread Pirate Roberts, I guess that leaves me to watch the princess.”
She smiles in spite of herself. “Stay close to him, Moz.” Their positions have reversed; now he gets to see Neal, while she’s the one who has to stay away. “God, I don’t know how you made it through four years -”
“Look, Kate, if you’d just tell him what’s going on -”
“Can you honestly swear to me he won’t tell Burke everything I tell him?”
Mozzie sighs, sharp and frustrated; after a long silence, he says, “No.”
“Then you know I can’t.” And she hears him make a noise like he’s about to protest, but he doesn’t. “I need you both to trust me on this one.”
“Kate,” Mozzie says, and there’s another long pause. Then, finally, “I really hope you know what you’re doing.”
She swallows. “So do I.”
***
Back at the hotel, she lets the door slam behind her; half a dozen agents look up from their laptops in identical comic startlement.
Fowler is on the phone; he sees her, and says slowly, “I’ll call you back.”
“Miss me?”
His frustrated look shifts into something still and hard; he stares at her for a moment and she watches him, wary but not about to back down. Then he looks away long enough for a sweeping glance around at the other agents. That’s all the signal they need to clear out.
You want a fight, you’ve got one, she thinks; she’s been quietly fuming all the way back to the hotel, forced by Neal’s inexplicable surrender at the moment of victory to come slinking back here with her tail between her legs; she’s been furious all night and looking for a target.
“I suppose you’re going to tell me you went out for coffee, last night.”
“Please.” She leans against the back of the couch and doesn’t take off her coat. “I did exactly what anyone with half a brain handed such an opportunity would have. You know damn well why I left and you know why I’m back, and if it’s all the same to you we can assume whatever threats you’re about to make are understood and we can skip that part, too. I’ve had a long night and I imagine so have you, and I’d just as soon get some sleep.”
“As long as we understand each other.” He gives a cold shrug. “I’ve got time. He dodged a bullet this time around, but he’s in a bad position, still.” He leans forward, the next words slow and patient and precise. “Is there anything you’d like to tell me?”
“I can’t give you a location if you won’t tell me what you’re looking for.” She glares at him. “I don’t remember every single thing he ever stole.” Neal had a long career before she met him, after all. “For all we know he could have stashed whatever it is in Europe, or -” They’d spent nearly a year apart, when -
She stops, staring at Fowler.
No. No, it can’t be.
She walks over to the balcony doors, closes her eyes and barely restrains herself from putting her fist through the glass.
It’s the one thing that could explain all this. The greatest treasure Neal ever stole, the prize he went after without her. What was supposed to be the big one, their last score, all their dreams come true.
It can give us the life we want, Neal had said. Instead it had torn them apart.
And it isn’t done with them yet.
She wishes she’d never heard of the damn thing.
The last piece falls in with a click like a bullet sliding into the chamber; she looks up and the fury is gone, replaced by something weary and heartsick and cold.
“You’re after Catherine the Great’s music box.”
It’s not a question. Fowler freezes for a half a second, looking at her, and it’s all the answer she needs.
His eyes close briefly; something unreadable crosses his face, and when he looks at her again he’s not angry, only resigned.
“Do you know where it is?”
She flings up her hands in helpless frustration; she has no idea. And she can’t do this right now. She doesn’t answer, walking past him into her bedroom and slamming the door, staring at the wall and fighting tears.
She wants to kick a hole in the wall, she wants to shake both their younger selves for being blind and stupid. They’d been so young, spending time like it was other people’s money. And now they’ll never get it back.
***
She calls Neal, three days later after he’s officially cleared of all charges. She’s not sure what she’s going to tell him; she knows as soon as the operator picks up (”FBI, this call is being recorded”) that she can’t mention the music box on this line. But she has no other number for him, and she needs to hear his voice.
He says her name like it’s a lifeline.
She can’t tell him anything.
It’s for his own protection. (I’m doing this for us, Neal had said, before he left for Copenhagen.)
She says he’s close to you; she says you can’t trust anyone. She doesn’t say what were you thinking?, doesn’t say we could be halfway to Paris by now.
***
She tells Burke about the music box. It’s the one thing that might come out of that disastrous meeting; against her better judgment she takes Keller’s gun. It’s a bluff and a stupid one, and Burke sees through it two seconds flat and she’s off balance for the rest of the meeting.
She can’t tell if he’s protecting his asset or if there’s genuine affection for Neal, there.
He looks in her eyes as he’s leaving; she holds her face blank, doesn’t let any of her fear for Neal show when he says did you ever love him?
That’s something, at least. Better if Burke thinks she doesn’t love Neal; she won’t give him anything he can use against her.
***
For nearly a week after Neal is officially cleared of all charges, she doesn’t leave the hotel; the other agents have apparently been ordered to keep her in the building. So, with nothing else to do and with solitaire growing less and less amusing, and an itch under her skin to run and the feeling that the longer she waits to do something the more reckless and stupid that something is going to be, she sneaks into the hotel’s business center and prints off another copy of the picture from that news article. A quick search reveals the bakery has a website - Mozzie was thorough - with several pictures of the interior and a copy of the menu. She prints those, too, along with a copy of Neal’s mug shot, and asks the clerk at the front desk to send them out to the copy shop down the street, to have them made into “the biggest damn posters you’ve got”.
“Have them charge it to our room,” she says brightly.
She picks up the posters in the lobby the next day and covers an entire wall of her bedroom, and spends half an hour staring at her handiwork before she decides drawing pink sparkly hearts all over everything would probably be overkill.
Probably.
The look on Fowler’s face, the first time he sees it, will keep her warm on cold nights for years to come.
After that no tries to stop her going out; the agents go back to tailing her not-so-discreetly, and she’s careful not to disappear on them for a little while, at least. Two days after that, Fowler leaves for DC and doesn’t come back for almost a month.
About a week after he gets back, she gets a text from an unknown number: park 12 PM tomorrow by the pond MK.
***
“Have you turned completely suicidal or is Sergei mellowing in his old age?”
Keller sits on a park bench, shaded by a tree; he throws something at the water and four brown and white ducks converge on the ripples, heads darting underwater and coming up with a shake.
“Beautiful day,” he says, gesturing at the empty space beside him and handing her a slice of stale bread. “Peaceful out here, don’t you think? Just us and the ducks.”
She sits, balancing a cup of coffee on the arm of the bench and watching the shadow of a branch shifting back and forth with the breeze across the gravel path. “What are you doing back in the country? Last I heard, the Russians are still looking for you here; they think you’ve gone to ground somewhere in New York.”
“I’m about to solve that problem.”
“Oh, I can’t wait to hear this.” She tears off a bit of bread, tosses it toward the path with a flick of her wrist. Two ducks and an enterprising squirrel rush the spot where it lands.
“Neal’s going to help.” He leans back, arms crossed behind his head, with half a smile at her skeptical look. “He doesn’t know it yet.”
Skepticism edges into alarm. “What are you dragging him into?”
“Nothing dangerous. Just a little friendly competition. For old times’ sake.” A full smile, now, and she sits up straight and glares at him. “A chance to finish an old chess match.”
She draws her arm back and barely misses knocking over her coffee cup, flinging another bit of bread at the water. Her voice is quiet and clipped. “We had a deal.”
“Katie.” He turns his best approximation of a hurt look in her direction. “Katie. You think I’d run out on our deal? After everything we’ve shared?”
“Cut the crap, Keller.” And then, as his expression turns faintly smug again, she realizes, “You found something.”
“You didn’t think I’d come back with nothing?” A squad of ducks pass slowly in a line, stippled brown and iridescent green, dawdling hopefully beside the bench then moving on, quacking sadly. He pulls a folder out of his backpack, taps it against his knee. “Your fed’s a piece of work.”
“Coming from you, that is truly frightening.”
“You wound me.” A hand over his heart and a sad shake of his head; she rolls her eyes.
“Ask me if I give a damn.” She waves at the folder. “What did you find?”
“Fowler arrives on the third and checks in here.” He opens the folder across his knees, hands her a photo of a hotel, a picturesque ski-resort in the off-season; a few well-dressed tourists are visible on the manicured lawn and snow on the mountains against the horizon. “Nice place. Make sure you try the port, if you ever get a chance to visit. He stays here four nights, catches a cab out front for the airport on the morning of the seventh.”
“So he stayed in the same hotel the whole time?”
Keller nods. “As far as anyone there can recall. And a bartender remembers him watching this guy.” He pulls out another photo, this one with the grainy look of security camera footage; she sees a man in his mid-thirties, casually dressed. The face is unremarkable but alert, his head cocked to one side as if he’s just heard something. The image is dark, but she can see shapes that look like cars parked in a line behind him. “Alan Mulvany. He checked in three days before. Night of the fourth he and Fowler were both in the bar; bartender remembers them both. Says Fowler took a seat in a corner, ordered one drink and stayed about three hours, watching Mulvany the whole time.”
She taps the photo. The name is unfamiliar, but on closer examination she’s almost certain she’s seen his face before. “Who is he?”
“Name’s an alias. He flew into Oslo from Baltimore, but there’s no record of him anywhere before that. Wasn’t able to trace his real name.”
“I’ve seen him before.”
Keller frowns at her, surprised. “No one I’ve ever worked with.” He hands her the photo, and she squints at it; it’s there, tugging at the back of her mind, just out of reach; she’s seen that face. “They’ve got cameras covering every inch of the hotel parking garage; some pretty fancy cars in there. This is him coming into the garage around eleven, maybe half an hour after he leaves the bar.” He points to the timestamp in the corner. “And then there’s a ten minute gap in the tape.”
“Someone erased the tape?” She blinked. “Or turned the cameras off?”
“Erased, I’d guess, but thoroughly. Next thing you can see is this.”
He hands her another photo; the image quality is poor enough she might think she’s looking at a pile of old clothes. But she’s pretty sure she isn’t. She can see a dark spot spreading out across the cement beneath it.
“Dead?”
He nods. “He’d been beaten severely and his neck was broken in two places, according to the medical examiner.”
“Did they find prints?” She leans forward, peering at the folder; the coroner’s report is on top, a hasty, skewed photocopy. “Evidence? Did you get a copy of the police report?”
“Oh, no, this is where it gets interesting.”
“More interesting than a dead body in a parking garage?”
“Official police report said death was by natural causes.” He shakes his head. “Morning of the fifth, just after this -” he points at the photo “- is discovered, five hundred thousand dollars gets deposited in the local police commissioner’s account.”
“Someone paid him off to bury this. And got him to erase the tape, too, probably.”
Keller grins at her, and there’s a light like the thrill of the hunt in his eyes. “Ask me where the money came from.”
“You traced - ?” Her eyes widen. “Where’d the money come from?”
“Washington, DC.” He hands her the folder, now. “From an account linked to the Department of Justice.”
“OPR.” It’s a whisper. She lets out a long breath, turns away and leans back against the bench. Stares at the grassy bank on the other side of the path, sloping down to the pond, at the surface of the water, ruffled and creased into folds by the breeze, throwing back a shaky reflection of the cloudless sky.
“If Fowler got paid for this - besides the promotion into OPR - it didn’t go to any account I could link to him.”
“Who was this guy?” She stares at the first photo again. “Terrorist? Drug dealer?” She still can’t shake the feeling that she’s seen him before. “This doesn’t even sound like an FBI operation. I mean, covert assassinations? In a foreign country? Shouldn’t that be CIA, or something?”
Keller shrugs. “Whoever’s behind this, they’ve got connections in very high places.”
She doesn’t look at him, asking, “Do I want to know how you found out all this?”
“Probably not.”
“So there’s a good chance I’m sharing a hotel suite with a contract killer working for the US government.” She laughs, high and shaky.
“Argentina’s nice, this time of year. You sure you don’t want to disappear?”
She wants to crawl in a hole and hide. But that won’t help anything. She makes herself breathe deeply, then takes a slow sip of cold coffee. “I’ve uncovered my very own government conspiracy,” she says, finally. “Mozzie would be so proud.”
Keller barks a laugh at that. “Oh, Katie. We could have been something.” He shakes his head. “Let’s get out of here. You don’t belong with Neal. You’re like me.”
“No.” She stands up, closing the folder and zipping it carefully under her jacket. “No, I’m not.”
“You’d better be.” He stands with her, looking grim. “These people don’t mess around. If you two are both gonna survive this, one of you has to be as ruthless as they are. And I think we both know Neal can’t be. He never could do what’s necessary.”
She shivers, thinking, beaten severely and his neck was broken in two places and he’s waiting for her at the hotel, he’ll be suspicious if she’s not back soon. The Russian mob is afraid of this man, and with reason.
And now he’s going after Neal.
***
She stops again at the library on her way back, just long enough to borrow a scanner and email Mulvany’s picture to Hale. If he’s anyone she or Neal ever worked with, Hale will remember him.
She owes Mozzie an apology.
This is the thought running through her mind as she pushes through the revolving doors in the hotel lobby. Every time she rolled her eyes, or sighed, or shared a secretly amused glance with Neal while he went on about conspiracies and the men in black and the truth being out there, the sinister nature of The Man and all the things the government doesn’t want you to know.
Maybe he really is onto something about the moon landing. She should watch that DVD, next time, instead of snarking through the whole thing. If she makes it out of this alive, she’ll never laugh at his theories again.
There’s an agent pretending to read a newspaper in the lobby; she sees him touch his shirt cuff and adjust his hair as she walks past, doubtless alerting everyone she’s back. Her hands are cold; she twists them together as she waits for the elevator. She’s shivering all over, she realizes; she closes her eyes once the elevator starts to rise, forces herself to breathe slowly.
They’re on the top floor, and so she has time to compose herself by the time she gets back to the room.
“Your boy’s awfully fond of Burke,” Fowler snaps at her, like she hasn’t just dropped off the radar for more than an hour.
He’s alone in the living room, pacing through and around the crisscrossing power cords, wheeling to glare at her as if this is her doing, somehow.
“Oh?” She stops, wary.
“How else do you explain this?” He flings something down on the glass coffee table; it bounces with a clinking sound and skids to a halt by the table’s edge.
It’s a miniature videocassette tape. She picks it up, turns it over and stares at it. “What’s on here?”
“Nothing.” The words are clipped and sharp. “Absolutely. Nothing.”
Her eyebrows go up. The right kind of magnets will do that, she knows. “Was there supposed to be something on it?”
“Evidence. Which could take him down, if that wasn’t the only copy.”
“Evidence of what?”
“Burke accepting a bribe.” He shakes his head. “More likely Burke trying to set a trap and then turning around and catching his own leg in it, but it all looks the same to a jury.”
The image of Peter Burke caught in a trap of his own making is more satisfying than it probably should be.
And Fowler thinks Neal somehow erased it? She grits her teeth, staring at the tape; she’d like to think Neal took a calculated risk, weighing his chances of going back inside if Burke lost his job compared to the chances of getting caught tampering with evidence. But she’s no longer certain he won’t take risks for Burke simply out of misguided loyalty.
A third felony conviction would mean twenty-five years. And all to protect the man responsible for the first two. She wants to shake Neal until his teeth rattle.
She drops the tape and retreats to her bedroom, shrugging out of her coat and stowing it and the folder out of sight under a pile of blankets. Her phone lights up with an incoming text as she’s about to hide it, too: No one I know.
Hale.
She stares at the phone before slipping it into her coat pocket. She’s seen that man; she’s sure of it.
And then, because there’s still no one else in the living room and she’s still terrified and that’s starting to make her angry, she leaves the bedroom and half-slams the door and goes over to where Fowler is making coffee in the dining nook, plants both hands on the counter beside the coffee pot and waits until he looks at her and demands, before she can think better of it, “Who was Alan Mulvany?”
He’s good. His face freezes for maybe half a second before he covers his reaction, turning smoothly away to pour water into the back of the coffee maker. His expression is cool when he looks at her again, but she can almost see him running through and discarding possible responses, from I have no idea what you’re talking about to where did you hear that name?
“Someone who had it coming,” he says at last, without any expression at all. The coffee maker gurgles in the sudden silence, coming alive as he turns it on. “Someone who pissed me off.” And she recognizes the familiar edge of annoyance. “I suggest you avoid doing the same.”
“Why did Department of Justice want him dead?” She plunges on as he retrieves his mug from the table across the room; her heart is racing, thumping hard in her throat, but she can only lean recklessly forward or run away shrieking and the latter isn’t an option. “What did he do? Did they pay you? Or was it just for the promotion?”
He blinks, coming back to stand at the counter, tilting his head at her; faint surprise gives way to something that’s almost amusement, and the chilling recollection comes to her of a street in San Diego, the casual way he pulled the gun like the cameras meant nothing. She has no proof and he knows it, and the people who paid him are the same ones who should punish crimes like this; the weapon she’s holding isn’t even loaded. He has nothing to fear from her knowledge of this.
He says, mildly, “That’s a fascinating theory.” Turns to watch the carafe filling slowly, and she thinks he’s not looking at an unloaded weapon at all. No, he looks like a man who just watched a bullet go past his ear. A near miss.
She still doesn’t have all the pieces. There’s something else here.
Another text is waiting that night when she checks her phone. This one’s from Burke:
Got a message for you. From Neal. Tomorrow same place 8 AM.
***
Hale texts her again a few hours later: Alex is back in town. Looking for something.
She frowns, replies, looking for what.
Same thing she’s been looking for for eight years now.
She stares at the phone, shakes her head and thinks this could never be easy for them.
***
Midnight comes and goes and she’s still awake, though by this time fear is almost eclipsed by frustration. She’s seen Mulvany. But if neither Keller nor Hale recognize him, she can’t think where; between them she thinks they must know everyone she’s ever worked with.
She’s afraid to risk putting Neal on this scent, but she wonders if Mozzie could get into the FBI servers somehow; she’s snatched five or ten minutes on various agents’ unattended laptops before, but it would take a lot more time undisturbed for her to run this guy through the FBI’s entire facial recognition database …
It was a mug shot.
The sudden cold certainty washes over her, and she sits up in bed, staring at the pattern cast on the wall by moonlight through the blinds. She’s seen a mug shot of Mulvany. She can practically see the height markings on the wall behind him now.
One of Fowler’s old case files. She flings the blankets back, grabs her coat and the folder; it won’t take long to check. There aren’t very many of them; the majority are sealed, leaving only the cases from the last year and the police report from -
She stops, frozen, and almost drops the folder. Her hands are shaking, fine tremors shivering up her arms, but her mind is clear and cold and calm, a swift certainty as still and hard as glass.
Someone who had it coming.
She knows.
She shuts the bedroom door behind her, crosses the living room to where her laptop sits charging on the coffee table; she moves quickly and quietly, but with no attempt at stealth.
Fowler is on the balcony; she can see the glow from his laptop screen, the reflection on the sliding glass door, cracked slightly to allow the cord through. Wind sighs against the outside walls, stirs the Venetian blinds with a soft clatter. The other two agents here tonight - she can’t remember their names - have long since gone to bed.
Fowler’s head moves, turning slightly; he’s heard her. She doesn’t care. She opens her own laptop and inserts the flash drive, crouched on the floor in front of the coffee table and drumming her fingers on the glass top as she waits for it to load.
It’s not a government conspiracy at all. Sorry, Moz. This has nothing to do with the government.
She knows who he is.
This is personal.
She clicks open the file. Scrolls quickly past a series of gruesome crime scene photos, past the notes from the investigating officer, until she finds the picture.
It’s him. The security camera photo is less clear, but the features are unmistakably those of this man, captured head on and in profile, height markings and the logo of the DC Metro Police on the wall behind him.
Chief suspect. Prior conviction for armed robbery. Prints at the scene. Arrest warrant still outstanding, whereabouts unknown, never caught.
Except he was. Beaten severely and his neck was broken in two places.
She closes the laptop. Shrugs into her jacket and crosses to the dining nook, pulling a glass and a bottle of wine at random from the minibar and fumbling for a corkscrew. Moonlight slides in slanted bars across the carpet, growing brighter and fainter as clouds pass, bending over and around the table and the various cases of equipment on the floor. The cork comes out with a pop and she pours a glass of what turns out to be a passably decent red.
Fowler doesn’t even turn as she comes out on the balcony, sliding the door shut behind her. He says, “I hope you’re up because you’ve had some flash of insight about the music box.”
She leans back against the balcony rail and swirls the wine in the glass, takes a slow sip and watches him until he looks up.
“Of course not. You’re still playing amateur conspiracy theorist, trying to figure out why DOJ was after Mulvany.” He sounds worn and exasperated. “We really don’t have time for -”
“DOJ wasn’t after him. You were.” She tosses the photo at him; he catches it by one corner before it falls to the concrete floor. “That’s the guy who killed your wife.”
A truck rumbles through an intersection far below; a sleepy pigeon coos from somewhere under the roof of the neighboring balcony. A warm breeze catches at the photo, drags a cloud in front of the moon, quicksilver bleeding through soaked cotton. Fowler has gone absolutely still.
“What I still don’t understand,” she goes on finally, “is why DOJ spent half a million to cover it up. Who was she to them?”
“Nothing.” He laughs, short and harsh, crumpling the photo in one hand. “Less than nothing.”
“These are the same people who want the music box.” She can feel the pieces sliding into place. “Was that the deal? They get the box, you get him?”
“It started with an anonymous tip.” One shoulder lifts in half a helpless shrug. “Alias he was using and the flight number out of Baltimore.” He sets the computer aside, leans back in his chair with an expression she can’t read; his voice is soft, flat and distant.
“But then how -” That makes no sense; why give him everything he wants before they have anything?
His eyes on hers are steady, watching her; he inclines his head slightly, go on and a weary, detached curiosity to see if she can put it all together.
What assurance do they have, now that the guy’s already dead, the police paid off and the evidence …
“They made a copy.” She sets the wineglass on the railing as the last piece falls in with a sharp click. “Before they wiped the tape.” Ten minutes. Erased, I’d guess, but thoroughly, Keller said. “They’ve got you on camera.”
“Aren’t you clever.” The words quiet, edged; he is pinned, here, as surely as she is.
That makes him more dangerous, not less, she knows. Compassion is a luxury she cannot afford.
“So, what?” she asks, when the silence seems about to snap. “They get the box, they make the tape go away?”
He stares at her for a beat, then looks away as his cell phone buzzes.
Lit by the display, his face is transformed by a flash of absolute loathing; a fraction of a second and it’s gone, wiped like it never existed. His voice is tense but controlled as he answers. “Yes, sir.”
She picks up the photo, smooths it flat and tucks it back in the folder. Then she moves past him into the room, lifting the corkscrew from the counter and walking out the door into the hallway.
There’s one elevator bank on this floor; she hooks the corkscrew under the plate around the call buttons, pries it up in a single sharp jerk. Reaching inside, she seizes a handful of wires and yanks, hard, until some half a dozen come loose in a shower of bright sparks, a stinging fall along her wrist.
No one’s getting ahead of her that way. She dashes for the stairs. They’re on the thirtieth floor; she can’t tell if anyone is following or if her footsteps only echo against the narrow walls. She reaches the hallway on the ground floor; he’ll have an agent on watch in the lobby, most likely called him to look for her.
She ducks into the dining room, through the swinging doors into the darkened kitchen, feeling her way toward the back exit; a minute later she’s sprinting past a line of dumpsters, down a narrow alley toward the next street.
It’s not until she’s on the subway, heading east, that she realizes she’s wearing silk pajamas and slippers under her coat.
Ah, well. If Burke is going to request a meeting on such short notice, he can’t expect her to stand on formality. She pulls out her phone and checks the time: 3:15.
Texts Burke: 7 AM rooftop of Marriott near FBI building DON’T BE LATE.
Part 6
“What does Caffrey want with a bakery?”
Kate looks up from her fifth solitaire game of the afternoon, which she’s currently losing; she shifts cards randomly back and forth while her mind is elsewhere, wondering about the best routes out of the country and what the going rate is, these days, for bribing prison guards. Neal has been back behind bars for almost three days and Kate’s mind is spinning over in futile circles like a rat trapped on a wheel.
Neal planned and executed a jailbreak with far less resources and freedom of movement than she has now.
Of course, getting him out is only half of it; keeping him out - and alive - will be harder.
“He loves those almond bear claws,” she says absently, over the hum of the shredder at the other end of the room; they’ve been shredding transcripts of Burke’s phone calls all morning, since Neal’s lawyer put in a request for all his files. And, at Fowler’s impatient scowl, “I’m serious. Can’t get enough of ‘em. Why?”
“Apparently he just bought one.”
It takes her a moment to realize he means a bakery, and not a bear claw; she sits up, then, peering at the stack of papers he’s dropped on the coffee table. The address has been blacked out, but at the bottom of the lease she can see Neal’s signature. And next to it, the signature of his attorney.
D. Haversham.
She blinks.
Several thoughts run through her mind at once; so they made Moz, finally. Followed by, when did he become a lawyer? Relief, that he’s not alone on the inside, that Moz can visit, now.
And a sudden, sharp, inexplicable sense of loss, and a twist of something like jealousy, that visiting him is what she does, that something which was hers has been stolen.
The arraignment is two days later; Fowler has gone out and she’s sitting alone in the hotel lounge, sprinkling cinnamon into her cappuccino, when a breaking news alert flashes onto the TV screen above the bar. The announcer’s voice, faint over the whir of the coffee grinder, is saying “… on the lookout for a fugitive,” and she’s looking at Neal’s mug shot.
She doesn’t stop, doesn’t think; rising smoothly, she takes her coat from the back of her chair and walks out of the lounge toward the hotel lobby. She recognizes Maurice by the door; he can’t see the lounge TV from there; he doesn’t know. He’ll follow her as he always does, but he won’t think to call for backup, won’t suspect she’s running and not coming back.
Neal is out, with no tracker, somewhere in Manhattan. This is their chance. They can run. Together.
First she has to find him.
She walks briskly outside and sprints up the street, ducking into an alley and behind a neighboring restaurant before Maurice can make it to the door.
***
She doesn’t get the details until six hours later, hunched over a public library computer with her hat pulled over her face, reading the brief Yahoo! News account of the escape and reminding herself over and over that she, too, is a fugitive and that triumphant laughter or high-pitched squeals of delight would very likely attract attention she can’t afford right now.
He bought a bakery.
She stares for a moment at the image on the screen, a side view of a bright orange awning stenciled with “The Greatest Cake” (oh, God, was that Neal’s pun or Mozzie’s?), both hands pressed over her mouth to hide a grin that might crack her face wide open. Then she hits “print”, tells the print dialog box hell, yes, she wants to print in color and she doesn’t care if it’s thirty cents extra and tries not to dance on her way over to the line of printers along the wall of the computer lab.
He bought a bakery.
She pulls the picture out of the printer, folds it carefully in quarters and presses it to her lips. God I love you. Then she tucks it into the inside pocket of her coat next to her heart.
He bought a bakery and used it in a jailbreak.
“Moz. You guys are brilliant. Where are you?”
She leaves messages on all three cell phone numbers she has for him; she doesn’t know what number Neal’s using now.
“Oh. My. God. I will never forgive either one of you for leaving me out of this one. Never for as long as I live. Call me, this number.”
Keller can have his guns; Keller can eat his fucking heart out; anyone can use a gun. Neal has something better. Neal has style.
“Guys, where are you? What’s the plan? Please tell me you haven’t stopped using this number. Call. Me.”
It’s late at night and she’s alone in a subway car, finally, when she allows herself a single whoop of triumph, punching the air; this turns into a flood of laughter as she sinks into a seat, exultation and relief edging into high-pitched hysteria and for a long time she can’t stop, can’t breathe, bent over and rocking back and forth.
He’s still got it. Eventually, she can draw her knees up to her chest, hide her face against her knees; she’s still breathing hard, and she can feel tears drying on her face, but the three women who get on at the next stop are too deep in their own conversation to pay much attention. He’s still him.
She breathes out a long, shaky sigh; she can almost see him, half-hidden by the glare on that glass, talking about a bakery in Paris. She’d been so afraid they’d taken something vital from him; she’d been terrified that prison had broken him in ways that could never be healed, stolen his nerve and crippled his spirit and ripped away the joy he once took in life, in a heist coming together or an intricate painting or an afternoon at the park. She hadn’t known how scared she was, all those years, that the man who came back to her wouldn’t be Neal anymore, that a cage would crush everything that made him who he was, until she heard of him back in action today. And relief hits her like a hammer blow, leaving her stunned and overwhelmed.
He is not broken. They can’t break him; they will never break him.
He is brilliant. He is amazing; he is glorious and he is hers, all hers.
Her phone is buzzing.
“Moz!” she hisses, looking up, cautiously checking that no one is listening. “That was amazing. You guys are - where is he? What’s the plan?”
“Kate.” Mozzie sounds tense and unhappy. “Where are you?”
“I don’t - I’m on a subway, somewhere. I shook off the feds this morning as soon as I heard, but I can’t stay ahead of them forever. Tell me you’ve got a plan to get us out of here.”
“Well, if you hadn’t -” He stops. “Look, I don’t know what you think is going on, but it’s not going to be that easy.”
She sighs. “Moz, come on.” He’s upset; she gets that. He probably blames her for Neal being stupid, and she’s not certain he’s wrong to do so, and Mozzie has never been the most trusting person to begin with. But they don’t have time for this now. “I know -” She stops. “Things have been complicated,” she says, quietly. “And I’m sorry I had to keep you guys out of the loop. I am.” She pauses again, waits, and when he doesn’t answer, she says, “Please. Just tell me where he is, Moz.”
She hears him sigh. “Right now he’s probably still in the suit’s kitchen.”
“The - who? What?” He’s not making sense.
“Last time I heard from him,” and the words are clipped and angry, “he was in the kitchen at the Burkes’ house. Where he’d been all afternoon, after Mrs. Burke helped him sneak past the detail posted outside.”
“What?” For a moment there’s only the hiss of the open line, and the rattle of the car along the tracks. “I don’t understand.”
“He went out a fourth story window into a bakery awning - do you know how much it costs to buy a bakery in downtown Manhattan these days? - distracted pursuit with a van while he escaped into the sewers, disappeared off the radar of every law enforcement agency in the city and then voluntarily showed up at the house of the suit who arrested him in the first place.”
Mozzie isn’t pissed at her, she realizes abruptly. He’s furious at Neal.
As he should be. “Moz!” she wails, then quickly drops to a whisper as another passenger turns around. “How could you -” she starts.
At the same time as he says, “If you only -”
They both stop; there’s no time for this, and nothing to gain by it. “What’s going on, Kate?” he asks, finally.
She sighs. “I’m trying to figure that out.” The lights flicker as the train picks up speed; she’ll have to go back, she realizes. The brief thrill of freedom is gone as abruptly as it appeared. Neal is back in custody and so is she; she can’t be free as long as Fowler can get to him.
And this, too, is Neal - glorious, brilliant, and at times so utterly, blindingly stupid.
Mozzie says, “Neal’s suit thinks you and your suit are in this together to get ahold of his stash and split it between you.”
“Oh, ask me if I give a damn what Peter Burke thinks of me.” But something twists painfully in her chest as she asks, “What does Neal think?”
“Neal doesn’t know what to think. I mean, you tell him you’re breaking up with him with five months left, then you disappear and the next thing he hears from you is where is all the loot? What are people supposed to think?”
His voice softens. “Look, he knows you’re in some kind of trouble but you won’t tell him who or what or where you are and so he can’t do anything to help. He’s out of his mind worrying about you. And, you know, he might not be the only one. Who’s a little bit concerned, here.”
“Awww, Moz.” She has to blink several times before she can see properly.
“Where are you now? What are you doing?”
She sighs. “On my way back to where I was before all this.”
“If you’re with who I think you’re with, this guy is bad news.”
“Moz.” Her voice is sharp. “This is me. I don’t know what the hell kind of screwed up Stockholm thing is going on between Neal and Burke, but I know better than to trust a fed. I know he’s not on my side.”
He doesn’t say anything for almost a minute. Then, “You still have my DVD.”
“I know. I’m sorry. You’ll have to steal another one.”
“So you’re really going back to him.”
“I don’t have a choice. If Neal hadn’t gone back -” She stops; they can’t change what happened.
Now his voice is grave. “Is that safe?”
“As safe as any other options I’ve got right now.” She sighs. “I don’t know. He’ll probably kill me in the morning.”
“Funny.” Mozzie snorts. “Well, while you’re off playing Dread Pirate Roberts, I guess that leaves me to watch the princess.”
She smiles in spite of herself. “Stay close to him, Moz.” Their positions have reversed; now he gets to see Neal, while she’s the one who has to stay away. “God, I don’t know how you made it through four years -”
“Look, Kate, if you’d just tell him what’s going on -”
“Can you honestly swear to me he won’t tell Burke everything I tell him?”
Mozzie sighs, sharp and frustrated; after a long silence, he says, “No.”
“Then you know I can’t.” And she hears him make a noise like he’s about to protest, but he doesn’t. “I need you both to trust me on this one.”
“Kate,” Mozzie says, and there’s another long pause. Then, finally, “I really hope you know what you’re doing.”
She swallows. “So do I.”
***
Back at the hotel, she lets the door slam behind her; half a dozen agents look up from their laptops in identical comic startlement.
Fowler is on the phone; he sees her, and says slowly, “I’ll call you back.”
“Miss me?”
His frustrated look shifts into something still and hard; he stares at her for a moment and she watches him, wary but not about to back down. Then he looks away long enough for a sweeping glance around at the other agents. That’s all the signal they need to clear out.
You want a fight, you’ve got one, she thinks; she’s been quietly fuming all the way back to the hotel, forced by Neal’s inexplicable surrender at the moment of victory to come slinking back here with her tail between her legs; she’s been furious all night and looking for a target.
“I suppose you’re going to tell me you went out for coffee, last night.”
“Please.” She leans against the back of the couch and doesn’t take off her coat. “I did exactly what anyone with half a brain handed such an opportunity would have. You know damn well why I left and you know why I’m back, and if it’s all the same to you we can assume whatever threats you’re about to make are understood and we can skip that part, too. I’ve had a long night and I imagine so have you, and I’d just as soon get some sleep.”
“As long as we understand each other.” He gives a cold shrug. “I’ve got time. He dodged a bullet this time around, but he’s in a bad position, still.” He leans forward, the next words slow and patient and precise. “Is there anything you’d like to tell me?”
“I can’t give you a location if you won’t tell me what you’re looking for.” She glares at him. “I don’t remember every single thing he ever stole.” Neal had a long career before she met him, after all. “For all we know he could have stashed whatever it is in Europe, or -” They’d spent nearly a year apart, when -
She stops, staring at Fowler.
No. No, it can’t be.
She walks over to the balcony doors, closes her eyes and barely restrains herself from putting her fist through the glass.
It’s the one thing that could explain all this. The greatest treasure Neal ever stole, the prize he went after without her. What was supposed to be the big one, their last score, all their dreams come true.
It can give us the life we want, Neal had said. Instead it had torn them apart.
And it isn’t done with them yet.
She wishes she’d never heard of the damn thing.
The last piece falls in with a click like a bullet sliding into the chamber; she looks up and the fury is gone, replaced by something weary and heartsick and cold.
“You’re after Catherine the Great’s music box.”
It’s not a question. Fowler freezes for a half a second, looking at her, and it’s all the answer she needs.
His eyes close briefly; something unreadable crosses his face, and when he looks at her again he’s not angry, only resigned.
“Do you know where it is?”
She flings up her hands in helpless frustration; she has no idea. And she can’t do this right now. She doesn’t answer, walking past him into her bedroom and slamming the door, staring at the wall and fighting tears.
She wants to kick a hole in the wall, she wants to shake both their younger selves for being blind and stupid. They’d been so young, spending time like it was other people’s money. And now they’ll never get it back.
***
She calls Neal, three days later after he’s officially cleared of all charges. She’s not sure what she’s going to tell him; she knows as soon as the operator picks up (”FBI, this call is being recorded”) that she can’t mention the music box on this line. But she has no other number for him, and she needs to hear his voice.
He says her name like it’s a lifeline.
She can’t tell him anything.
It’s for his own protection. (I’m doing this for us, Neal had said, before he left for Copenhagen.)
She says he’s close to you; she says you can’t trust anyone. She doesn’t say what were you thinking?, doesn’t say we could be halfway to Paris by now.
***
She tells Burke about the music box. It’s the one thing that might come out of that disastrous meeting; against her better judgment she takes Keller’s gun. It’s a bluff and a stupid one, and Burke sees through it two seconds flat and she’s off balance for the rest of the meeting.
She can’t tell if he’s protecting his asset or if there’s genuine affection for Neal, there.
He looks in her eyes as he’s leaving; she holds her face blank, doesn’t let any of her fear for Neal show when he says did you ever love him?
That’s something, at least. Better if Burke thinks she doesn’t love Neal; she won’t give him anything he can use against her.
***
For nearly a week after Neal is officially cleared of all charges, she doesn’t leave the hotel; the other agents have apparently been ordered to keep her in the building. So, with nothing else to do and with solitaire growing less and less amusing, and an itch under her skin to run and the feeling that the longer she waits to do something the more reckless and stupid that something is going to be, she sneaks into the hotel’s business center and prints off another copy of the picture from that news article. A quick search reveals the bakery has a website - Mozzie was thorough - with several pictures of the interior and a copy of the menu. She prints those, too, along with a copy of Neal’s mug shot, and asks the clerk at the front desk to send them out to the copy shop down the street, to have them made into “the biggest damn posters you’ve got”.
“Have them charge it to our room,” she says brightly.
She picks up the posters in the lobby the next day and covers an entire wall of her bedroom, and spends half an hour staring at her handiwork before she decides drawing pink sparkly hearts all over everything would probably be overkill.
Probably.
The look on Fowler’s face, the first time he sees it, will keep her warm on cold nights for years to come.
After that no tries to stop her going out; the agents go back to tailing her not-so-discreetly, and she’s careful not to disappear on them for a little while, at least. Two days after that, Fowler leaves for DC and doesn’t come back for almost a month.
About a week after he gets back, she gets a text from an unknown number: park 12 PM tomorrow by the pond MK.
***
“Have you turned completely suicidal or is Sergei mellowing in his old age?”
Keller sits on a park bench, shaded by a tree; he throws something at the water and four brown and white ducks converge on the ripples, heads darting underwater and coming up with a shake.
“Beautiful day,” he says, gesturing at the empty space beside him and handing her a slice of stale bread. “Peaceful out here, don’t you think? Just us and the ducks.”
She sits, balancing a cup of coffee on the arm of the bench and watching the shadow of a branch shifting back and forth with the breeze across the gravel path. “What are you doing back in the country? Last I heard, the Russians are still looking for you here; they think you’ve gone to ground somewhere in New York.”
“I’m about to solve that problem.”
“Oh, I can’t wait to hear this.” She tears off a bit of bread, tosses it toward the path with a flick of her wrist. Two ducks and an enterprising squirrel rush the spot where it lands.
“Neal’s going to help.” He leans back, arms crossed behind his head, with half a smile at her skeptical look. “He doesn’t know it yet.”
Skepticism edges into alarm. “What are you dragging him into?”
“Nothing dangerous. Just a little friendly competition. For old times’ sake.” A full smile, now, and she sits up straight and glares at him. “A chance to finish an old chess match.”
She draws her arm back and barely misses knocking over her coffee cup, flinging another bit of bread at the water. Her voice is quiet and clipped. “We had a deal.”
“Katie.” He turns his best approximation of a hurt look in her direction. “Katie. You think I’d run out on our deal? After everything we’ve shared?”
“Cut the crap, Keller.” And then, as his expression turns faintly smug again, she realizes, “You found something.”
“You didn’t think I’d come back with nothing?” A squad of ducks pass slowly in a line, stippled brown and iridescent green, dawdling hopefully beside the bench then moving on, quacking sadly. He pulls a folder out of his backpack, taps it against his knee. “Your fed’s a piece of work.”
“Coming from you, that is truly frightening.”
“You wound me.” A hand over his heart and a sad shake of his head; she rolls her eyes.
“Ask me if I give a damn.” She waves at the folder. “What did you find?”
“Fowler arrives on the third and checks in here.” He opens the folder across his knees, hands her a photo of a hotel, a picturesque ski-resort in the off-season; a few well-dressed tourists are visible on the manicured lawn and snow on the mountains against the horizon. “Nice place. Make sure you try the port, if you ever get a chance to visit. He stays here four nights, catches a cab out front for the airport on the morning of the seventh.”
“So he stayed in the same hotel the whole time?”
Keller nods. “As far as anyone there can recall. And a bartender remembers him watching this guy.” He pulls out another photo, this one with the grainy look of security camera footage; she sees a man in his mid-thirties, casually dressed. The face is unremarkable but alert, his head cocked to one side as if he’s just heard something. The image is dark, but she can see shapes that look like cars parked in a line behind him. “Alan Mulvany. He checked in three days before. Night of the fourth he and Fowler were both in the bar; bartender remembers them both. Says Fowler took a seat in a corner, ordered one drink and stayed about three hours, watching Mulvany the whole time.”
She taps the photo. The name is unfamiliar, but on closer examination she’s almost certain she’s seen his face before. “Who is he?”
“Name’s an alias. He flew into Oslo from Baltimore, but there’s no record of him anywhere before that. Wasn’t able to trace his real name.”
“I’ve seen him before.”
Keller frowns at her, surprised. “No one I’ve ever worked with.” He hands her the photo, and she squints at it; it’s there, tugging at the back of her mind, just out of reach; she’s seen that face. “They’ve got cameras covering every inch of the hotel parking garage; some pretty fancy cars in there. This is him coming into the garage around eleven, maybe half an hour after he leaves the bar.” He points to the timestamp in the corner. “And then there’s a ten minute gap in the tape.”
“Someone erased the tape?” She blinked. “Or turned the cameras off?”
“Erased, I’d guess, but thoroughly. Next thing you can see is this.”
He hands her another photo; the image quality is poor enough she might think she’s looking at a pile of old clothes. But she’s pretty sure she isn’t. She can see a dark spot spreading out across the cement beneath it.
“Dead?”
He nods. “He’d been beaten severely and his neck was broken in two places, according to the medical examiner.”
“Did they find prints?” She leans forward, peering at the folder; the coroner’s report is on top, a hasty, skewed photocopy. “Evidence? Did you get a copy of the police report?”
“Oh, no, this is where it gets interesting.”
“More interesting than a dead body in a parking garage?”
“Official police report said death was by natural causes.” He shakes his head. “Morning of the fifth, just after this -” he points at the photo “- is discovered, five hundred thousand dollars gets deposited in the local police commissioner’s account.”
“Someone paid him off to bury this. And got him to erase the tape, too, probably.”
Keller grins at her, and there’s a light like the thrill of the hunt in his eyes. “Ask me where the money came from.”
“You traced - ?” Her eyes widen. “Where’d the money come from?”
“Washington, DC.” He hands her the folder, now. “From an account linked to the Department of Justice.”
“OPR.” It’s a whisper. She lets out a long breath, turns away and leans back against the bench. Stares at the grassy bank on the other side of the path, sloping down to the pond, at the surface of the water, ruffled and creased into folds by the breeze, throwing back a shaky reflection of the cloudless sky.
“If Fowler got paid for this - besides the promotion into OPR - it didn’t go to any account I could link to him.”
“Who was this guy?” She stares at the first photo again. “Terrorist? Drug dealer?” She still can’t shake the feeling that she’s seen him before. “This doesn’t even sound like an FBI operation. I mean, covert assassinations? In a foreign country? Shouldn’t that be CIA, or something?”
Keller shrugs. “Whoever’s behind this, they’ve got connections in very high places.”
She doesn’t look at him, asking, “Do I want to know how you found out all this?”
“Probably not.”
“So there’s a good chance I’m sharing a hotel suite with a contract killer working for the US government.” She laughs, high and shaky.
“Argentina’s nice, this time of year. You sure you don’t want to disappear?”
She wants to crawl in a hole and hide. But that won’t help anything. She makes herself breathe deeply, then takes a slow sip of cold coffee. “I’ve uncovered my very own government conspiracy,” she says, finally. “Mozzie would be so proud.”
Keller barks a laugh at that. “Oh, Katie. We could have been something.” He shakes his head. “Let’s get out of here. You don’t belong with Neal. You’re like me.”
“No.” She stands up, closing the folder and zipping it carefully under her jacket. “No, I’m not.”
“You’d better be.” He stands with her, looking grim. “These people don’t mess around. If you two are both gonna survive this, one of you has to be as ruthless as they are. And I think we both know Neal can’t be. He never could do what’s necessary.”
She shivers, thinking, beaten severely and his neck was broken in two places and he’s waiting for her at the hotel, he’ll be suspicious if she’s not back soon. The Russian mob is afraid of this man, and with reason.
And now he’s going after Neal.
***
She stops again at the library on her way back, just long enough to borrow a scanner and email Mulvany’s picture to Hale. If he’s anyone she or Neal ever worked with, Hale will remember him.
She owes Mozzie an apology.
This is the thought running through her mind as she pushes through the revolving doors in the hotel lobby. Every time she rolled her eyes, or sighed, or shared a secretly amused glance with Neal while he went on about conspiracies and the men in black and the truth being out there, the sinister nature of The Man and all the things the government doesn’t want you to know.
Maybe he really is onto something about the moon landing. She should watch that DVD, next time, instead of snarking through the whole thing. If she makes it out of this alive, she’ll never laugh at his theories again.
There’s an agent pretending to read a newspaper in the lobby; she sees him touch his shirt cuff and adjust his hair as she walks past, doubtless alerting everyone she’s back. Her hands are cold; she twists them together as she waits for the elevator. She’s shivering all over, she realizes; she closes her eyes once the elevator starts to rise, forces herself to breathe slowly.
They’re on the top floor, and so she has time to compose herself by the time she gets back to the room.
“Your boy’s awfully fond of Burke,” Fowler snaps at her, like she hasn’t just dropped off the radar for more than an hour.
He’s alone in the living room, pacing through and around the crisscrossing power cords, wheeling to glare at her as if this is her doing, somehow.
“Oh?” She stops, wary.
“How else do you explain this?” He flings something down on the glass coffee table; it bounces with a clinking sound and skids to a halt by the table’s edge.
It’s a miniature videocassette tape. She picks it up, turns it over and stares at it. “What’s on here?”
“Nothing.” The words are clipped and sharp. “Absolutely. Nothing.”
Her eyebrows go up. The right kind of magnets will do that, she knows. “Was there supposed to be something on it?”
“Evidence. Which could take him down, if that wasn’t the only copy.”
“Evidence of what?”
“Burke accepting a bribe.” He shakes his head. “More likely Burke trying to set a trap and then turning around and catching his own leg in it, but it all looks the same to a jury.”
The image of Peter Burke caught in a trap of his own making is more satisfying than it probably should be.
And Fowler thinks Neal somehow erased it? She grits her teeth, staring at the tape; she’d like to think Neal took a calculated risk, weighing his chances of going back inside if Burke lost his job compared to the chances of getting caught tampering with evidence. But she’s no longer certain he won’t take risks for Burke simply out of misguided loyalty.
A third felony conviction would mean twenty-five years. And all to protect the man responsible for the first two. She wants to shake Neal until his teeth rattle.
She drops the tape and retreats to her bedroom, shrugging out of her coat and stowing it and the folder out of sight under a pile of blankets. Her phone lights up with an incoming text as she’s about to hide it, too: No one I know.
Hale.
She stares at the phone before slipping it into her coat pocket. She’s seen that man; she’s sure of it.
And then, because there’s still no one else in the living room and she’s still terrified and that’s starting to make her angry, she leaves the bedroom and half-slams the door and goes over to where Fowler is making coffee in the dining nook, plants both hands on the counter beside the coffee pot and waits until he looks at her and demands, before she can think better of it, “Who was Alan Mulvany?”
He’s good. His face freezes for maybe half a second before he covers his reaction, turning smoothly away to pour water into the back of the coffee maker. His expression is cool when he looks at her again, but she can almost see him running through and discarding possible responses, from I have no idea what you’re talking about to where did you hear that name?
“Someone who had it coming,” he says at last, without any expression at all. The coffee maker gurgles in the sudden silence, coming alive as he turns it on. “Someone who pissed me off.” And she recognizes the familiar edge of annoyance. “I suggest you avoid doing the same.”
“Why did Department of Justice want him dead?” She plunges on as he retrieves his mug from the table across the room; her heart is racing, thumping hard in her throat, but she can only lean recklessly forward or run away shrieking and the latter isn’t an option. “What did he do? Did they pay you? Or was it just for the promotion?”
He blinks, coming back to stand at the counter, tilting his head at her; faint surprise gives way to something that’s almost amusement, and the chilling recollection comes to her of a street in San Diego, the casual way he pulled the gun like the cameras meant nothing. She has no proof and he knows it, and the people who paid him are the same ones who should punish crimes like this; the weapon she’s holding isn’t even loaded. He has nothing to fear from her knowledge of this.
He says, mildly, “That’s a fascinating theory.” Turns to watch the carafe filling slowly, and she thinks he’s not looking at an unloaded weapon at all. No, he looks like a man who just watched a bullet go past his ear. A near miss.
She still doesn’t have all the pieces. There’s something else here.
Another text is waiting that night when she checks her phone. This one’s from Burke:
Got a message for you. From Neal. Tomorrow same place 8 AM.
***
Hale texts her again a few hours later: Alex is back in town. Looking for something.
She frowns, replies, looking for what.
Same thing she’s been looking for for eight years now.
She stares at the phone, shakes her head and thinks this could never be easy for them.
***
Midnight comes and goes and she’s still awake, though by this time fear is almost eclipsed by frustration. She’s seen Mulvany. But if neither Keller nor Hale recognize him, she can’t think where; between them she thinks they must know everyone she’s ever worked with.
She’s afraid to risk putting Neal on this scent, but she wonders if Mozzie could get into the FBI servers somehow; she’s snatched five or ten minutes on various agents’ unattended laptops before, but it would take a lot more time undisturbed for her to run this guy through the FBI’s entire facial recognition database …
It was a mug shot.
The sudden cold certainty washes over her, and she sits up in bed, staring at the pattern cast on the wall by moonlight through the blinds. She’s seen a mug shot of Mulvany. She can practically see the height markings on the wall behind him now.
One of Fowler’s old case files. She flings the blankets back, grabs her coat and the folder; it won’t take long to check. There aren’t very many of them; the majority are sealed, leaving only the cases from the last year and the police report from -
She stops, frozen, and almost drops the folder. Her hands are shaking, fine tremors shivering up her arms, but her mind is clear and cold and calm, a swift certainty as still and hard as glass.
Someone who had it coming.
She knows.
She shuts the bedroom door behind her, crosses the living room to where her laptop sits charging on the coffee table; she moves quickly and quietly, but with no attempt at stealth.
Fowler is on the balcony; she can see the glow from his laptop screen, the reflection on the sliding glass door, cracked slightly to allow the cord through. Wind sighs against the outside walls, stirs the Venetian blinds with a soft clatter. The other two agents here tonight - she can’t remember their names - have long since gone to bed.
Fowler’s head moves, turning slightly; he’s heard her. She doesn’t care. She opens her own laptop and inserts the flash drive, crouched on the floor in front of the coffee table and drumming her fingers on the glass top as she waits for it to load.
It’s not a government conspiracy at all. Sorry, Moz. This has nothing to do with the government.
She knows who he is.
This is personal.
She clicks open the file. Scrolls quickly past a series of gruesome crime scene photos, past the notes from the investigating officer, until she finds the picture.
It’s him. The security camera photo is less clear, but the features are unmistakably those of this man, captured head on and in profile, height markings and the logo of the DC Metro Police on the wall behind him.
Chief suspect. Prior conviction for armed robbery. Prints at the scene. Arrest warrant still outstanding, whereabouts unknown, never caught.
Except he was. Beaten severely and his neck was broken in two places.
She closes the laptop. Shrugs into her jacket and crosses to the dining nook, pulling a glass and a bottle of wine at random from the minibar and fumbling for a corkscrew. Moonlight slides in slanted bars across the carpet, growing brighter and fainter as clouds pass, bending over and around the table and the various cases of equipment on the floor. The cork comes out with a pop and she pours a glass of what turns out to be a passably decent red.
Fowler doesn’t even turn as she comes out on the balcony, sliding the door shut behind her. He says, “I hope you’re up because you’ve had some flash of insight about the music box.”
She leans back against the balcony rail and swirls the wine in the glass, takes a slow sip and watches him until he looks up.
“Of course not. You’re still playing amateur conspiracy theorist, trying to figure out why DOJ was after Mulvany.” He sounds worn and exasperated. “We really don’t have time for -”
“DOJ wasn’t after him. You were.” She tosses the photo at him; he catches it by one corner before it falls to the concrete floor. “That’s the guy who killed your wife.”
A truck rumbles through an intersection far below; a sleepy pigeon coos from somewhere under the roof of the neighboring balcony. A warm breeze catches at the photo, drags a cloud in front of the moon, quicksilver bleeding through soaked cotton. Fowler has gone absolutely still.
“What I still don’t understand,” she goes on finally, “is why DOJ spent half a million to cover it up. Who was she to them?”
“Nothing.” He laughs, short and harsh, crumpling the photo in one hand. “Less than nothing.”
“These are the same people who want the music box.” She can feel the pieces sliding into place. “Was that the deal? They get the box, you get him?”
“It started with an anonymous tip.” One shoulder lifts in half a helpless shrug. “Alias he was using and the flight number out of Baltimore.” He sets the computer aside, leans back in his chair with an expression she can’t read; his voice is soft, flat and distant.
“But then how -” That makes no sense; why give him everything he wants before they have anything?
His eyes on hers are steady, watching her; he inclines his head slightly, go on and a weary, detached curiosity to see if she can put it all together.
What assurance do they have, now that the guy’s already dead, the police paid off and the evidence …
“They made a copy.” She sets the wineglass on the railing as the last piece falls in with a sharp click. “Before they wiped the tape.” Ten minutes. Erased, I’d guess, but thoroughly, Keller said. “They’ve got you on camera.”
“Aren’t you clever.” The words quiet, edged; he is pinned, here, as surely as she is.
That makes him more dangerous, not less, she knows. Compassion is a luxury she cannot afford.
“So, what?” she asks, when the silence seems about to snap. “They get the box, they make the tape go away?”
He stares at her for a beat, then looks away as his cell phone buzzes.
Lit by the display, his face is transformed by a flash of absolute loathing; a fraction of a second and it’s gone, wiped like it never existed. His voice is tense but controlled as he answers. “Yes, sir.”
She picks up the photo, smooths it flat and tucks it back in the folder. Then she moves past him into the room, lifting the corkscrew from the counter and walking out the door into the hallway.
There’s one elevator bank on this floor; she hooks the corkscrew under the plate around the call buttons, pries it up in a single sharp jerk. Reaching inside, she seizes a handful of wires and yanks, hard, until some half a dozen come loose in a shower of bright sparks, a stinging fall along her wrist.
No one’s getting ahead of her that way. She dashes for the stairs. They’re on the thirtieth floor; she can’t tell if anyone is following or if her footsteps only echo against the narrow walls. She reaches the hallway on the ground floor; he’ll have an agent on watch in the lobby, most likely called him to look for her.
She ducks into the dining room, through the swinging doors into the darkened kitchen, feeling her way toward the back exit; a minute later she’s sprinting past a line of dumpsters, down a narrow alley toward the next street.
It’s not until she’s on the subway, heading east, that she realizes she’s wearing silk pajamas and slippers under her coat.
Ah, well. If Burke is going to request a meeting on such short notice, he can’t expect her to stand on formality. She pulls out her phone and checks the time: 3:15.
Texts Burke: 7 AM rooftop of Marriott near FBI building DON’T BE LATE.
Part 6