White Collar Big Bang Fic: Penelope Weaving (PG-13, 78,000 words) Part 8
See Part 1 for art and header information and warnings.
“I have strict instructions to stay with this plane,” Adler’s pilot says, standing in the door as they approach the stairs.
It’s a tiny airstrip and nearly deserted; there’s only the one plane idling at the far end of the single runway. The sky is overcast, pale ash darkening to slate, clouds hiding the sinking sun; the place is starkly flat beyond the hangars and a cold wind tears across it, filling and snapping at a lone orange windsock.
Kate hefts a heavy duffel over her shoulder; she’s uncomfortably warm, wearing a wet suit under her clothes and her wool coat, despite the wind on her face.
“We’ve got our own pilot,” Fowler says, nodding at the man standing beside him; he never did give her a name.
She and Fowler exchange a look; maybe Adler really is that concerned about his airplane. Or maybe he’s just nosy and suspicious. But he’s not someone she’s willing to trust or involve in their plans any more than she has to.
“My employer isn’t about to trust anyone he doesn’t know at the controls,” Adler’s man says, “Your request was for transport. He’s certainly not about to hand over an expensive aircraft to someone of your - background and connections.”
Kate wonders if he can be bribed, either to get off the plane or keep his mouth shut; she’s too tired and nervous even to bristle at Adler’s nerve, sneering at her as a thief.
“Your employer is a wanted fugitive,” Fowler is saying, flipping open his badge. “I’m seizing this plane and anything on board as evidence.” He lets his right hand drop toward his belt. “You can leave quietly, now, or I can arrest you and bring you in for questioning.”
Or that works, too, Kate thinks.
As their own pilot settles into the cockpit a few minutes later, Fowler has him give Kate a thorough description of the controls; she pays special attention to the ones for setting the autopilot and turning off the engines.
“You never did say where we’re going,” the pilot says, once he’s finished.
“You’re making a low pass over Lake Champlain while we jump out,” Fowler says. “Don’t need to pick us up, we’ll be driving back.”
The pilot blinks. “She’s not equipped for -”
“You let me handle that.”
Buckled beside the window, she watches the grey runway fall away, the landscape spread below growing smaller, city blocks and the long snaking curve of the river, thick mats of forest beyond veined with branching roads, dark asphalt running out into dust-tan, bursts of flaming color shot through deep summer-green in a slow-spreading blaze, autumn catching fire below them.
Then mist is tearing past the end of the wing, ripped and fluttering like grey rags, until they bank upwards and a cloud swallows them.
“All right.” Fowler releases his seatbelt and she does the same as they break into clear pale blue sky, shading to white and then red. Up here the clouds form an uneven carpet, stretching in ridges toward the setting sun, touched by streaks of red. “The pilot’s jumped and the autopilot’s set. I’m Caffrey.” He nods toward the crate with the chutes. “You’ve got thirty minutes to get those on both of us and explain what we’re going to do. Go.”
She glances out the window once before standing; the cloud layer looks solid, like some grey alien furze thicket, like the terrain of some harsh, hostile other world. The sun is gone, leaving a shrinking red stain across the darkening surface of the clouds, like a splash of drying blood.
She gets the chute harnesses on both of them without a mistake, and all the while she’s thinking they’ve skipped rehearsing the hardest part. Even so her stomach is coiled into a hard knot, and her heart is too loud and too fast.
Halfway through her explanation, the pilot breaks in on the intercom to say they’re over the lake; Fowler tells him to swing wide around and make another pass because it’s not full dark yet.
“He’s going to have to trust me,” she says. Or he’ll have to jump without trusting her; she can hardly say she trusts Fowler, but she’ll jump tonight when he tells her. She can hardly say she trusts Neal, when she can’t tell him any of this for fear Burke will find out.
She loves him; she can count on his love for her; this will have to take the place of trust as well as honesty. She wonders sometimes if Neal has ever trusted her; she wonders if he’s ever trusted anyone at all, or if what he calls trust is only a willingness to take the fall.
She’s the one who left; she’s barely spoken to him in almost a year. Burke, damn him, has as much trust as Neal gives anyone; Burke believes she never loved him, thinks she’s after Neal’s money. And then, while Neal’s belief in her is still so fragile, she’s going to point a gun at a man while he watches.
She’s going to point a gun at their pilot and force him out of the plane. And then she’s going to ask Neal to trust her, to step out of that door into the night.
She feels the floor tilting as the plane banks. The pilot’s voice comes on the intercom: “Ten minutes.”
Neal will jump when she tells him, she knows, not because he believes she won’t betray him but because he’s willing to let her.
Some part of her heart curls into a hard, sick knot at the thought, but she’s desperate enough to use that, if she has to, if it will keep him alive.
She looks at Fowler, says, “You were in Special Forces.”
Fowler only tilts his head at her, curious. She puts a hand out, grips the back of the seat as the plane banks again; the last light from the window slides away out of sight.
“You’ve done things you can’t talk about.” At his no shit look: “Before - stuff that was classified, I mean. You had to keep secrets.” She can still hear Neal at Grand Central, his voice raw and desperate, calling her name; she can hear Mozzie, if you’d just tell him what’s going on. “From - people not in your unit.”
The sky is a deep midnight velvet when she feels the plane turning again. The cabin is dark, Fowler’s face barely visible in the dim emergency lighting. For a long time there’s no sound but the engines.
Then he says, in a completely unreadable voice, “Did you just ask me for relationship advice?”
A beat of silence, then another. “Oh God, I did, didn’t I?”
Then they’re both laughing; she’s bent over, clutching the back of the seat, shaking quietly; it’s a release of something, she’s not sure what. For a long time she can’t stop, but when she manages a few gasping breaths some of the the frantic, fluttering panic in her gut has eased.
She swipes the back of her hand across her eyes and tastes salt; she looks up as the pilot says, “Beginning descent.”
She says, soft and level, “We will never speak of this again.”
“Agreed,” he says. “You’ve got five minutes to get the draft baffle hooked up to the door.”
Through the window she can see the red light on the end of the wing, blinking steadily, catching and reflecting off the fog; an eerie red halo surrounds it. Then they’re dropping beneath the clouds; she sees lights, white and amber clustered in jeweled array, flung like a heavy necklace around a wide patch of soft grey dark.
The lake, she thinks; toward the edges she can see lights reaching, long docks stretching into the water; it all looks like a landscape of miniatures.
“Five minutes,” he says.
She’s braced for the wind as she wrenches the door open, slamming into her, cold and fierce, buffeting her face and making her eyes water. It’s the noise that surprises her, a sudden roaring, rattling growl.
She’s careful, snapping several pieces of thin steel into the doorframe; the overall effect extends the doorway out from the side. She manages to tighten the clamps in place without anything falling out.
“One minute,” Fowler shouts, behind her. The wind beats at her, grabbing at her hair like a living thing; she holds onto the inside of the door and feels for the ripcord handle at her shoulder with the other, in a sudden fear that it might have blown away.
It’s impossible to judge distance, looking out the door. The world is soft grey smoke, lights seeming to flicker; her eyes struggle to make sense of what she’s seeing. Only the wing seems real and solid, a single red eye winking at her.
They might be drifting slowly, except for the roar of the wind. A thin streamer of mist whips past, up close giving the sudden impression of speed, a breath of fog or a fragment of a ghost.
“When’s the last time you did this?” She turns, looking at Fowler; her voice sounds thin above the engine noise, though she’s shouting.
“Twelve years ago.”
Whatever response she might have given is lost when the plane tilts again; the pitch of the engines on this side changes, sliding down a scale and then dying, leaving only the wind. Fowler gives a thumbs up and nods at the gear.
She cracks the lights attached to the supply crate and the boat (visible for up to a mile, Fowler said, so make sure you’re a couple of miles away from wherever you dropped the pilot); the boat is supposed to automatically inflate on landing in the water.
Fowler says, “Ten seconds,” and she tries to swallow, touches the ripcord handle again. She tries to picture Neal’s face; someday, she thinks, shivering, this will make a great story. Fowler says, “Stand by.”
At his nod she shoves the boat and the supply crate into the air, watches the blinking red lights fade below.
Somewhere warm, in the south of France, her and Neal and Moz sipping champagne while harmless fireworks explode outside and they watch through the windows; she tries to picture their faces but all she can see is a vague image of soft candlelight and shadow -
“Go.”
The command is followed by a sharp tap on her shoulder.
She’d meant to take a deep breath, preparing for the dive, but the muscles in her chest and throat have locked up. Some part of her brain shuts down, then, long enough to allow her legs to move; it’s a small step, a short distance, and then a sudden sharp drop that yanks her stomach into her throat.
The engine noise changes pitch and fades rapidly; all she can hear is the rush of wind past her ears, and after the first wild panic of falling her mind is bracing for water, for an impact within seconds that doesn’t come; she gasps, once, twice, expecting each breath to be her last before there’s no more air.
The world below is fuzzy, sketched in shades of charcoal, smudged and indistinct; she thinks the lights below might be getting nearer but she can’t tell. She might be floating; the wind whistles past her ears but the air beneath her feels like a solid thing; she might be lying on a soft down blanket. The thought comes to her that this is why they call zero gravity “free fall”; she is at once moving and still, falling and floating, suspended in a howling dark.
In a flash of fear she glances at her wrist; she can’t tell how long it’s been; she can’t read the numbers on the altimeter dial, glowing faintly, but there’s a red line drawn at the pull altitude and she can see the needle creeping toward it. The dark and the distance are messing up her depth perception; she fastens on that needle as a fixed reference point, moves her hand slowly to touch the ripcord handle. Her fingers are numb despite the gloves.
She wonders briefly what she’ll do if it doesn’t open.
The lines merge and she wraps her fingers around the handle and pulls, hard (what if she doesn’t pull hard enough? will she break it if she pulls too hard?) and for a timeless suspended moment nothing happens.
Her mind has frozen and she’s skating at the fine edge of panic when the harness jerks against her chest with a force like nothing she remembers from practice, like falling into a brick wall. The lights below waver and dance; she can’t tell if she’s seeing anything below her or if it’s only the illusion of sparks flashing before her eyes.
That sound isn’t the wind, anymore, whistling; her chest is tight and painful and it isn’t from the bruising impact of the straps. Her breath is coming fast and shallow, a high wheezing sound; she feels something squeezing her chest, like she can’t get enough air. She loses track of time again, closes her eyes and tries to slow her breathing.
When she can breathe again she thinks the lights are closer.
She’s upright, now; she can see her feet, still held together thanks to hours of practice as she hangs in midair, with nothing beneath them; she tilts her head back, feels a breeze stroking her hair; she can see the canopy, a dark shape spread taut above her head.
Here goes, she thinks, it seems like much later, as the needle creeps lower and numb fingers work the chest strap loose. She hears a soft shush of waves and feels the familiar tense fear, waiting for the water; she pulls a tab and the life jacket inflates with a soft pop, sudden and startling.
She finds the release for the leg straps; a breeze touches her face and that light is the thin, horned reflection of a waxing quarter moon, broken by rippling water as the clouds shift. She barely has time to recognize it before the water’s surface is shattered by her feet; she pulls the leg straps loose and then water slaps her face, ice-cold and smelling like damp, half-rotted weeds.
The chute flutters down, caught by a faint breeze that pulls it away from her; it lands beside her, puddled like mercury reflecting the moonlight; she surfaces in clear air, kicks her legs and feels the water give back a solid resistance. She’s down.
She’s landed.
She arches her back and slips out of the shoulder straps, keeping one hand wrapped around the harness as she tilts her head back; she can’t see the plane. She can’t see Fowler, though she hears a distant splash somewhere behind her.
She draws in a breath, blows it out slowly, deliberately, fighting exhilaration and giddy laughter. She jumped out of a goddamn airplane.
And now she’s floating somewhere in the middle of a miles-wide lake and there’s a boat around here somewhere and she needs to find it.
***
Find the boat first. She shakes her head, trying to get water out of her ears, squinting in all directions; she’ll have to talk to Fowler about different colored lights. They all look the same at this distance.
Then find your partner. This had been another argument, one night when she was already worn out from dragging that damn mannequin onto that little raft, her mind spinning like a rat on a wheel over all the different reasons she might have to know how to get a hundred sixty pounds’ dead weight onto a tiny rubber platform without tipping the whole thing over.
Your partner can’t get you to shore, Fowler said and it sounded like quoting a manual and she really did almost hit him, then, thinking of everything that might happen to Neal that she can’t fix. Without the boat there’s not a damn thing you can do for him if he’s in trouble and that shut her up, though it didn’t calm her in the slightest.
The water is colder than she expected, even with the suit. She lets out a breath, kicking her legs in a scissor motion, more to keep warm than anything else; the vest holds her securely at the surface. After a few moments she can see a larger shadow behind the furthest red light, bobbing in a gentle swell.
(Of course it would be the furthest one.)
She kicks toward it, with a vigorous stroke meant more to warm her up than conserve energy, still grasping the harness in one hand. The distance is further than she expected. The boat fell straight down, she thinks, while the chutes are made for gliding; the weather tonight is calm, if overcast, and the lake’s surface is broken only by gentle waves.
Her arms and legs are burning by the time she reaches it, what feels like much later; she tries not to think how far away the boat might be carried by waves in the Atlantic, or how far high winds might carry her and Neal before they even land. She hauls herself over the side with a last effort, feeling like a shipwrecked sailor clinging to driftwood; the lake is wide and flat, and there are few other lights visible, and she’s alone.
It’s larger than the raft they practiced with in the pool but it’s still only inflated rubber; she crawls into the stern and finds the motor, resisting the urge to lie down and close her eyes just for a second; she’s this close to crashing down from the adrenaline spike and the gentle rocking motion of the waves could lull her to sleep far too fast.
The motor coughs, changing pitch as she grips the throttle; a silver-green wake trails quiet ruffles behind her as she picks a light and steers toward it. She’s shivering, hard, now; the hood on her suit slipped somewhere during the swim and her hair is soaked, trickling cold water down her back, and the wind on her face is colder as her speed increases. But she has something solid beneath her, and the motor responds easily to her hand. The next time the moon peeks through a thin patch of cloud she can see another chute floating, crumpled, a little ways off, like a thin silver lily pad or the translucent, amorphous cap of some enormous jellyfish.
“About time.” Fowler doesn’t move toward her, turning lazily instead to float on his back as she eases up on the throttle, lets momentum carry her slowly alongside.
“Are you seriously going to make me drag you -” She sighs, short and explosive, holding up a hand. She doesn’t think she can take listening to him go over all the reasons Neal might not be able to get himself into the boat.
Easing the boat closer, she leans over to grab the cables trailing like creeping vines from the canopy. She’s tired and this boat is different from the raft they practiced with; she barely has time to let out a startled squeak before she overbalances and goes headfirst into the water.
She coughs, inhaling water; the cold is a shock in her throat and the muscles in her chest freeze up for a moment; she holds onto the side of the boat for a moment, gasping, before she can drag herself on board.
Eventually she manages to tow him by the chute cables over to the side, wrapping increasingly numb fingers around his shoulder harness. She falls in at least three more times, once landing on top of him and dragging him underwater as well; this earns her a glare and a comment on how she’ll need to do this fast and they won’t be on a flat lake when it’s for real.
Sometime much later they’re both in the boat, with the chutes piled like a mess of sodden cobwebs in the bow. In the thin moonlight Fowler looks almost as exhausted as she feels; she swam to the boat while he waited where he fell, but he must have been treading water the whole time to keep warm.
“You’ve had some basic first aid training, I hope?” he says eventually, as she wraps her hand around the throttle and steers for the last floating red light. “In case -”
“Yes, I am familiar with the principles of rescue breathing,” she cuts him off, because she doesn’t want to think about Neal floating face down when she finds him. Her voice is rough, like she’s been screaming. “No, I am not practicing that on you.”
A quiet snort. “Good.”
They retrieve the crate with the supplies; all the lights on shore look faint and distant. “Now where are we going?”
“Make for the old water tower.” Fowler points at the shore; she squints for maybe half a minute before she can make it out, a pale shape against the darker line of trees.
“Have you trained up here before?” she asks; she’d never have been able to pick out the landmark if he hadn’t pointed to it.
He doesn’t answer.
They stow the lights inside the supply crate, going for as much realism as possible; she and Neal will be approaching the shore without lights to give away their presence.
Mist hangs in clumps just above the water, fuzzy grey shifting to silver when the clouds part and the moon slips through. Above the low growl of the motor she can hear thick weeds brushing the underside of the boat. She keeps to a moderate speed, slowing as they come in closer; doubtless they’re breaking all kinds of water traffic laws running with lights out.
The houses are dark, along here; Fowler points further down without speaking and she eases the throttle back, steering parallel to the shore. The houses give way to a line of trailers, each at the end of a long wooden dock, small but neatly kept.
These are vacation homes, she realizes, summer retreats closed up and deserted for the winter.
She blinks, her eyes rough and gritty, as Fowler takes the throttle from her. As he cuts the engine and lets them drift in, she sees a bench at the end of the nearest dock, wood weathered silver-grey facing the lake, and a darkened lantern beside it.
There’s a place along the shore where we can pull the boat up, he said, get dry clothes and spend the night. The trailer at the end of this particular dock is as dark as the rest of them.
“Are we going to break into someone’s summer house and steal their clothes?” she demands, twisting to look at him as he throws a rope around the nearest support pole. She presses a fist against her mouth to stifle bubbling, stress-soaked laughter. “Fowler, I underestimated you.”
“We are not breaking in.” He inclines his head toward a ladder at the end of the dock, wooden rungs slippery with brown weeds or algae. “I have a key.”
Her legs are weak and rubbery; the dock sways gently, making it hard to balance as they drag the boat up, securing it with the rope. Wet oak leaves gather in slick patches on the wooden slats, covered in a faint layer of frost. The clouds are thinning out, now; she can see a wide patch of stars through the fingers of a bare branch, arching out over the water.
A gravel walkway leads up to the back of the trailer, neatly lined with a brick border; a stone birdbath sits beneath the oak, empty and choked with dead leaves. The boat shed at the edge of the bank is chained shut; beside it a shape that might be a gas grill is carefully covered with a tarp.
A patch of ground beside the door has also been carefully edged with bricks, but any dead flowers are buried under dying weeds. Kate says, “Dibs on the shower.”
If she has to wait, she thinks, she’ll fall asleep before she gets a chance.
The door opens and she gropes for a light switch as she follows him inside; the one she finds does nothing, flips on and off and back on again with no effect.
“Power’s turned off,” Fowler says, passing her a flashlight; twin beams cast cold blue circles on beige carpet. The words are oddly flat. “No one’s been up here since -”
He doesn’t finish the sentence. Kate sweeps her flashlight around a tiny sitting room, covers a jaw-cracking yawn. Two armchairs face a cabinet that must hold a TV; the cabinet is closed, the top covered with a thick layer of dust. Beside it a low bookcase is stuffed with battered paperback novels.
The nearest chair pulls at her with a nearly irresistible gravity; she stares at it, at the throw pillow on the seat covered with a cross-stitched cardinal on a dogwood branch; she reminds herself she’s dripping lake water.
A doorway opens into a kitchen; she can see an empty counter, the cupboards closed, and a window covered with cheerful flowered print curtains. The air is cold and still; she can see her breath, a plume of frost picked out and shining white in the flashlight beam.
Somewhere outside she can hear a branch creaking. The fear and the thrill of the jump have by now thoroughly drained away; she looks at the armchairs again and decides that they might be the most comfortable chairs she’s ever seen but they’re too far away.
She could sit down here, on the carpet in the entryway; she could sleep here. It’s a wall to lean against and shelter out of the wind and she’s not sure she’s capable of thinking or moving or doing anything further right now.
Fowler stops on the other side of the sitting room, in the open mouth of a black hallway; he doesn’t turn.
“Can you drive right now?”
She stares, blankly, at his back; the words take a second to process. Shivering, she wraps sore arms around herself, shaking her head against a slow-burning frustration. Her eyelids drag shut like sandpaper curtains, falling over her eyes; it’s an effort to open them again. She’s still groping for words to express how completely done she is for today; what happened to spending the night and driving back in the morning and it dies on her lips when he turns and looks at her.
His face is half-drowned in shadows but there’s a stunned, haunted look in his eyes like he’s been hit over the head and hasn’t figured out, yet, how to fall, a look that says he’d rather chew his own arm off than spend another minute in this place.
“You’re buying the coffee,” she says at last, breaking the long frozen silence, “first rest stop we see.” She offers nothing so useless as sympathy, straightening with an effort and scrubbing a hand over her eyes. “Can we at least get dry clothes first?”
She follows him down the narrow hallway; he keeps his flashlight trained on the floor, switches it off as they enter the bedroom.
“First closet on the right.”
She finds the knob, lets the door swing shut behind her. Nothing here but summer clothes, light blouses and t-shirts that do nothing to stop the chill air, but it’s all dry. She peels out of the suit, pulls on a pair of jeans that mostly fit. The only shoes are light, open sandals. There’s no faint lingering perfume, as she pulls a shirt on over her head, only the smell of mothballs.
A framed photo sits on the nightstand beside the bed; Kate recognizes Fowler’s wife, sitting on that bench at the end of the dock with a book on her lap, dark hair streaked with blonde highlights catching the sun. Looking up at the camera with a fond smile, thick black-framed reading glasses on the end of her nose.
And of course she looks familiar; Kate has been staring at crime scene photos for weeks, now. Still there’s something new teasing at the edge of her mind, a thread she’s too exhausted to follow right now; it’s the glasses that tug at an older memory. She wasn’t wearing them in any of the other pictures Kate saw.
She finds Fowler at the end of the dock, deflating the boat; he’s already folded the chutes and stowed everything in the supply crate. He holds out an FBI windbreaker and a set of keys without looking up. The jacket must be his; it’s about three sizes too big for her and the sleeves fall down over her hands.
A long gravel drive runs out to the road; a grey SUV is parked at the far end, frost sparkling on the hood and fogging the windshield. Kate twists the key, turns the heat all the way down and cracks the window an inch, rubbing her eyes hard enough to see gold and purple fireworks. The dashboard clock swears it’s only 10 PM.
Up ahead between thinning clouds she can see more stars, scattered above the horizon, winking like ice crystals or broken glass.
“Switch off in thirty minutes?” Her voice is scratchy and sleepless; the thought comes to her that this is stupid, and dangerous, but she doesn’t much care. “I’m not gonna last much longer than that.”
Fowler nods once beside her; cold air knifes through the open window as the car starts moving, an edge of ice that might keep her awake for a little while.
The roads are narrow and dark and nearly deserted; she follows the signs for the highway and every few minutes rolls the window down another inch. It’s barely 10:15 the first time she wakes abruptly at the shuddering vibration of the rumble strips along the shoulder.
The second time, she’s just steadied the car when Fowler touches her wrist. She starts violently, a sudden last-ditch surge of adrenaline and the car swerves into the oncoming lane before she rights it again; her heart is pounding and there’s a sour taste in her mouth.
The window is all the way down and the cold wind makes her eyes water, blurring the lines on the road; she’s already twisting the wheel to the right when he says, “Pull over.”
Her hands are locked onto the wheel; it’s an effort to pry them off. If anything it’s gotten colder, clouds massing again overhead. She slides into the passenger seat, fumbles for the lever to recline it and pulls the jacket cuffs down over her hands, wrapping her arms around herself. The next thing she knows he’s shaking her awake and they’re parked under bright lights at a gas station.
The memory is there; she catches the last lacy cobweb-edge of a dream, fading like frost on glass under the morning sun as she sits up. Her old desk just outside Adler’s private office. Raised voices on the other side of the door, and a dark-haired woman in black-framed glasses walking out with a tight, angry expression, stalking past Kate’s desk toward the elevator.
***
A few trucks idle at the edge of the lot; traffic lights cycle through at a silent intersection across the way, casting warped reflections in the curved metal side of a tanker truck parked beside the convenience store. On the other side of the gas station a visitors’ center is closed up tight; faded posters of green summer lakeshore hang in the windows, bleached by the sun.
She’s reminded of too many nights on the run, in rest stops like this one when the night took over and the place became a different world than in the daylight.
The diner is quiet; it’s close to midnight and there’s only a few customers here.
“Coffee,” they tell the waitress in unison, before she has a chance to speak.
“Long night?”
Kate says, “You have no idea.”
They’re in a booth where they can both see the door, cracked red vinyl seats and a retro glass-and-chrome tabletop; water drips from her hair onto the paper placemat, blurring the words on the menu. She tugs an errant strand of some aquatic weed out of her hair, drops it on a napkin.
Fowler says something and then the waitress is looking expectantly at her; Kate says, “Make it two,” and hopes he ordered something good.
The whole scene feels somehow fragile and unreal. The real world is held outside, wrapped in darkness and banished behind wide glass windows. The lights are harsh and too bright, and she imagines they’re no kinder to her than to Fowler; he looks as worn and wrung-out as she feels.
She wraps both hands around her mug when it arrives, closes her eyes and sips slowly and tries to stop shivering.
“How did I do?” she asks finally, because someone needs to start a conversation or she’s going to fall asleep again before the food arrives.
“You got down and you’re alive,” he says. “It’s a start.”
“I did good,” she says, and maybe he’s too tired but he doesn’t contradict her. Bells ring as the door opens, letting in a blast of cold air; Kate glances impatiently toward the kitchen. She thinks she’s passed through exhaustion to some vague, dazed state on the other side; she remembers this, too, the point past which her mind shut down and instinct took over, some part of her more concerned with survival shutting down thoughts of self-pity or fatigue, all mental and physical reserves devoted to moving a little bit farther ahead.
But instinct only got her so far, and it won’t serve her here. She tugs down the braids that are slipping loose, rakes her fingers through wet hair, spraying cold water against the side of the booth.
She needs to think, now.
The waitress refills their mugs and Kate watches her walk away, picking up a red plastic stirrer and twisting it between her fingers. Finally she looks up at Fowler and says, “Why are you doing this?”
Both eyebrows go up. “’This’ being … what, exactly?”
“Tonight. Well, not just -” She waves a hand, describing vague circles in the air and nearly knocking over the menu stand. “All of it. The parachutes. The pool, the jump - helping us.”
“We made a deal.” He sounds patient and tired, stifling a yawn. “And I’m not doing anything for free, either. You’re still not going anywhere until I get the music box.”
“The deal was two clean passports and a plane.” She stares at him, doubt and suspicion warring with plain, honest curiosity. They’ve spent hours on this, nearly every night for the past few weeks; he’s almost as worn out as she is. The amusement value of dropping her on her head can only account for so much. “You’ve gone way beyond that. Not to stick my head in a gift lion’s mouth, but what’s in it for you?”
He rakes a hand through his hair, sighs before looking at her. “What may be my only chance to screw whoever -” He stops; there’s something cold and resigned in his eyes, and she waits while he drains the rest of his coffee.
“I don’t know what’s so special about the damn box,” he says finally. “I don’t care. Once I have it I’m going to get whoever’s behind this or die trying.” He offers half a shrug. “We both know which of those is more likely to happen.”
The silence stretches as the waitress approaches; she sets down two plates piled with hot pancakes, a cup of warm apple butter and a tiny pitcher of maple syrup; she asks if they want more coffee. Kate says, fervently, “Please.”
“He’ll want you and Caffrey both dead as soon you’re no longer useful,” Fowler says at last. “Anything he wants that I can deny him is a victory.” The words are soft and blunt. “This may be the only one I’ll get.”
He’s not getting out of this; he knows that. They stare at each other for another long moment, and then at the same time realize that the pancakes smell delicious and are only going to get cold.
Kate nods once, accepting.
She spoons a generous portion of apple butter onto her plate, dumps half the little pitcher of syrup over the pancakes and practically inhales them. It’s not until they’re both finished, sticky plates stacked at the end of the table and a (third? fourth?) coffee refill in front of them, that she looks up.
“Did she work with rare manuscripts?”
Fowler blinks, surprised. “She was in archives.”
“I met her, once.” She’s sure of it now; she can half remember phrases of that conversation. It had been a heated one, and Kate’s job had often been damage control after Adler pissed off someone in a meeting; it was practically her duty to eavesdrop.
“When?” A sharp frown and a sudden focus.
“Seven years ago. When I worked for Adler.” And she’s suddenly awake, the memory coming clearer. “She was at his office for a meeting. She had something he wanted -”
She stops. She puts her head down on the table, laughing softly. It’s all clear, now, everything that went straight over her head at the time, Adler’s oblique suggestions and the tight outrage he got in response. Kate wonders, briefly, if she really was that naive all along, or if she’d only chosen, on some subconscious level, to blind herself to who and what Adler really was.
She shakes her head, looking up at Fowler’s impatient glare. “He wanted her to steal something for him.”
“She would never -”
“No.” Kate shakes her head again, slowly, but something in the back of her mind is frantically putting pieces together and she doesn’t like the picture she’s starting to see. “No, he was pretty pissed when she left.”
“How pissed?” His voice is soft, flat and dangerous.
“I don’t suppose you remember what she was working on seven years ago. Or what she might have had access to.”
“She was helping with translations for a local historical society upstate,” he says, thoughtful and suspicious. “They’d just unsealed a collection of letters, some guy who was on a German sub in the Baltic -” Slowly, looking up at her, “- in 1945.”
“The year the music box was -”
He frowns. “It was never on a sub.”
“That we know of.”
“You ever been on a submarine?” He’s shaking his head, slowly, but he doesn’t look convinced. “They’re tiny; they’re not cargo ships.”
“I think it’s pretty obvious the music box isn’t just any cargo,” she says. “And it wouldn’t take up that much space.”
“You think he’s involved in this?”
“Could be a coincidence. It was seven years ago,” she says, but she’s not convinced either; this, too, is familiar, the cold sick thrill that says she’s miscalculated badly, she’s tired and she’s starting to make mistakes. “Lot of those piling up lately.”
***
She’s strangely calm, walking back to the car; her eyes are dry and gritty but this is familiar, like pulling on a pair of worn, scarred old boots. It’s startlingly easy to fall back into just keep moving push on a little farther, blanking out all thoughts of fatigue and dragging herself forward, past doubt and exhaustion and common sense.
Something in her mind has shifted, back to some lizard-brain knowledge of flight.
She takes the keys. It’s starting to snow as they merge onto the highway, wet heavy flakes sliding down the windshield. She remembers this, too, the feeling that her mind is clearer and sharper than it is; she’s so tired she doesn’t realize she’s tired. Some distant part of her registers that this is dangerous.
She wonders how far back this goes; maybe Adler was involved seven years ago and then wanted out. Maybe he wasn’t running from the feds, when he fled to Argentina.
(Then why did he come back?)
Seven years is a long time. (Adler is patient, meticulous, neat.) This might be a coincidence. (Whoever they’re running from doesn’t like loose ends.)
They switch off after thirty minutes; the next time Kate wakes the snow is heavier, falling in thick folds, surrounding the amber streetlights with dancing halos. The yellow center line is fading, blurred beneath soft fuzz.
She wonders if the ten million she might get for the Raphael could buy the pilot’s silence about this practice jump, if Adler decides to find him and ask why she really wanted to borrow the plane.
(Probably not. Adler has resources she doesn’t; she can’t outbid him.)
She slides back into the driver’s seat and turns on NPR, holding it to a soft murmur and hoping for a weather report as she pulls away from the shoulder. At least the snow held off until after they jumped.
She has to assume Adler will find out about this trip.
How high up he is in all this, if he’s even still part of it, and whether he can be bribed to keep his mouth shut - she doesn’t think she has anything he needs that he can’t get any other way.
Brake lights glow through dancing white and she slows; she’s behind a snowplow. A slow scraping sound ahead plays counterpoint to the rhythm of the wiper blades; a wet black ribbon of asphalt opens in the thickening white carpet ahead.
Adler was at the reception where they met the contact who pointed them at Reilly; he might have been standing close enough to overhear their conversation. He’d been there and now that contact and Reilly are both dead.
A faint buzz startles her; Fowler’s cell, muffled slightly by his jacket.
Fowler is asleep, his head fallen against the window; when he doesn’t wake immediately she slips a hand into his pocket and lifts the phone.
Unknown number.
Red brake lights flare again up ahead and she slows further, still in the plow’s shadow. Snowflakes dance like dust motes, turning the headlight beams into something swirling and solid. The small, still voice telling her what she’s doing is reckless and stupid is acknowledged, not argued with, and then quietly ignored.
She answers without speaking, holds the phone to her ear; no sound comes, only the hiss of an open line and the loud thumping of her heart. She counts five long seconds and says, neutral, “Agent Fowler’s phone.”
The answering voice is electronically distorted, artificially deep with all emotional inflections ironed flat. “Put him on, please.”
“Do you know what time it is?” She blinks as the clock on the dash blurs: 2:14.
Fowler is sitting up, wide awake as soon as he sees the phone in her hand. She holds it out to him, wordless.
“Fowler,” he snaps, and she forces her attention back to the road, eases the wipers back a notch. “Sir. Like I said -”
Silence again, and she can’t read his face and keep the car going in a straight line, not when the lines in the road are nearly invisible. She’s almost brought her breathing back to something approaching normal; she’s almost resigned herself to hearing nothing interesting from his half of the conversation when he says, “You never mentioned the submarine angle.”
His tone hasn’t changed, but her heart is suddenly beating like some frantic winged thing at the base of her throat.
“Never mind how I know.” He sounds irritated, now, but a quick glance at his face catches a flicker of surprise, like he tried a stab in the dark and didn’t expect it to connect. “But if I’d known sooner I could have skipped chasing down half a dozen dead ends -”
At this rate she’s going to run into the damn snowplow.
She gives up pretending to pay attention to the road and pulls onto the shoulder, shifting into park and turning to stare at him. The wiper blades thump back and forth, showing the road ahead through overlapping arches windows, lit up by cold orange lights. The plow scrapes on ahead, a solid shadow fading and losing substance, dissolving in gauzy curtains of snow; the wet black strip behind it slowly lightens, tiny flakes draping a translucent veil over the right lane.
Fowler looks at her. “Perhaps we should discuss that in person.”
She’s not the only one feeling reckless and stupid tonight.
They’ve stumbled onto something, but how far he can push with it before it blows up in his face she’s afraid to guess. It’s a delicate balancing act, she knows. His eyes don’t leave hers as he says, “I want a meeting.”
She wonders if she can wrestle the phone away from him long enough to hit speaker without alerting whoever’s on the other end.
“I want to see your face.”
The trick is to not look down. She realizes abruptly she’s holding her breath. Fowler’s face reveals only the same tense uncertainty she feels.
His voice drops. “Do not push me too far.”
He hangs up. They stare at each other for a few heartbeats after he lowers the phone.
“Well?” she demands, as the silence lengthens. “You’re killing me, here.”
They both start at the buzz of an incoming text. He glances at the display, his face blank, and then passes her the phone. The message is short.
JAN 15 12TH & WATERSHED MIDNIGHT.
“January -” It’s low and bitter and frustrated. “That’s more than two months away.”
Fowler lets out a slow sigh and scrubs a hand over his face. “It’s a start.”
“You rattled him.” She stares at the thickening snow; she almost can’t tell the right lane was ever plowed. “We’re onto something.” But what? “What do you know about this guy, really?”
“I know if he’s willing to meet me in person he’s not the one behind it all.”
“If we’re working together, I need to know what we’re dealing with.” She clicks the wipers back another notch, listens as the rhythm slows, long enough to allow a lacy filigree to settle over the glass, backlit in orange, between beats. “How about you fill me in on what I don’t already know?”
He shifts enough to give her a look, and she waves a hand at the windshield.
“You really think we should keep going in that?”
“You first,” he says finally, with a sharp frown. “Tell me how you found out -” He trails off, tilting his head at her.
Fair enough. Since we’re blowing right past all boundaries of caution and common sense tonight -
She wonders if Neal and Burke have these conversations, what were you really up to when …
“An … acquaintance … needed to get out of the country. Fast.” She takes a deep breath, lets it out slowly. Keller is behind bars, now, and she can’t say she was sorry to hear it; it’s not like she’s giving up an asset that might be useful later. “I gave him a clean passport and plane tickets to Oslo, in exchange for poking around and seeing what he could find.”
“Why Oslo?”
“It was the first trip you’d taken out of the country in ten years? And then all your files were sealed the minute you got back. Seemed like as good a place to start as any.” Half a shrug, leaning her head back against the seat. “Sometimes you take a stab in the dark and you hit something.”
She reaches out and clicks the wipers off. Stares at the windshield as tiny feathers of ice form and stick, crowding the glass, sharp crystals locking together and gradually filtering out the lights outside. The highway is nearly deserted.
The lights on the dashboard glow faintly; the radio is only a low murmur, and the silence is sudden and loud when she turns it off.
She doesn’t look at him. “Your turn.”
A slow-moving truck rumbles past, muffled and invisible; Kate imagines they are a soft white hump along a soft white road in the dark; the snow has covered the windows as well, by now. She reaches out to flick the hazard lights on and stares at the dashboard indicators blinking on and off, on and off.
“I thought we were at the wrong house.”
The snow moves in like a soft-footed cat, settling in silently and wrapping a long tail of white around the highway. The sound of the truck changes pitch and fades, slowly, ahead of them. She waits.
“We got called out to a home invasion in Georgetown. Me and my partner, we’d just come off an all-night stakeout. We’d been up since before midnight. It was bad.” His voice is expressionless, his face turned away from her, staring at the opaque wall of snow covering the window. “One victim, female, late thirties. Place was smashed, furniture all -” He stops, and for a long time there’s only the sound of the engine idling and the breath of warm air from the heater vents.
“Whoever the bastard was, she gave him one hell of a fight. It - wasn’t quick. Or easy.”
His tone doesn’t change but the words come faster, like he’s trying to finish this quickly. “We walk in the door and I realize I left something at home. To this day I can’t remember what.” He shakes his head slightly, still without looking at her. “So we get back in the car to go get it. I’m driving. And we get there and I walk in the front door and I swear to God my first thought is ‘we’re at the wrong house’.”
If she stares hard enough at the darkened windshield, she might almost imagine she sees light filtering through from an approaching dawn; that, too, is an illusion.
“I’d been up all night,” he continues softly. “I’m still wired from the stakeout and I’m thinking I was so out of it I somehow got turned around and drove right back to the crime scene.”
Kate says nothing. There’s nothing to say. She plays with the closest air vent, adjusting the aim, her fingers twitching and restless.
“Metro had the case for three months. Didn’t find shit.” The words are clipped, flat and a little breathless, aiming for matter-of-fact and coming out half-strangled. “Not like they didn’t know who to look for. They had his prints all over the place, and -” a brief hesitation, a convulsive swallow “- you read the file. The guy had a rap sheet. Priors for assault and B&E, suspected in two armed robberies. Nine o’clock in the goddamn morning.” One hand makes a quick, disgusted slashing motion. “Disappeared.”
“Probably had help,” she says quietly; it’s not even a guess, at this point.
A fraction of a nod. “The Bureau took over after he turned up in Maryland. Same MO, then he vanished again. I was on leave by then, but it was DC Violent Crimes working the case. They kept me in the loop. As long as there was a -” The silence stretches thin. “Three months after that they start avoiding my calls. Beginning of March they tell me their last lead dried up a month ago and they’re moving on to other cases.”
His eyes close briefly. “It’s early August when I get the phone call.”
That would have been almost a year and a half ago, now. Kate wonders, again, how far back this all goes; whoever this is, he’s playing a long game.
“It’s an unknown number, and the voice - you heard him. Gave me an alias and a flight number. British Airways 1539.” His voice is steadier now, precise, though he still doesn’t look at her. “I got to Oslo three days after he landed, tracked him some fifty miles north to a hotel. Sat in the bar half the night - you know it doesn’t get dark until 11 up there, that time of year? Waited for him to show and followed him when he left.”
She knows what comes next; she’s not at all sure she wants to hear this. She keeps her voice carefully blank, says, “I read the coroner’s report.”
“He died quicker than -” He stops. “He died quicker than he deserved.”
She has no response to that.
“I went back to the hotel and waited for the cops.”
Another plow scrapes by outside. Kate closes her eyes and she wants Neal, her Neal who flinches at the sight of guns and would never hurt anyone.
“Waited four days until it hit me I’d have to go down and turn myself in or go home. No one was coming and the hotel reservation was only through the end of the week.”
“You didn’t know they got paid off?” Half a million from a DOJ account; whoever set this up has powerful connections.
He shakes his head. “The package with the tape came two days after I got back.”
She wants to see Neal, and hold onto him, and watch him and know he’s safe. She wants to be anywhere but here in a snowed-in SUV on a deserted highway wondering when (if) she’ll ever see him again. Wondering what she’ll have to do to see him again, what she’ll do to save him, and what she might do if she fails.
“He arranged the transfer to OPR,” he says, and it’s soft, defeated, distant. “Said he’d destroy the tape in exchange for the music box.”
“And you believed him?”
“No.” A short laugh. “But he wants that box enough to kill for it, and once I’ve got it I’ll have some leverage.”
“He’ll have planned for that.”
“Most likely.”
He knows he’s not getting out of this.
Kate gets out of the car. Caked snow cracks and falls from the window as she slams the door. It’s dark, still, and the snow is slackening.
Snaking lines of tire tracks weave unsteadily across the lane beside them. A car approaches from the south, going too fast; she looks down to avoid being blinded by the high beams, but she can hear tires sliding before it slows.
The engine noise fades and they’re alone. She finds an ice scraper in the trunk and goes to work on the back window first.
She’s finished knocking snow off the front windshield when she hears another vehicle approaching; it’s a slow-moving truck, this time, dumping sand along the road. She leans back against the hood, feels the vibration of the engine warm against her legs. Her feet are slowly going numb, thin sandals soaked with muddy slush.
She watches the truck approach and she’s already calculating whether she could jump on the back, gauging the speed and the darkness and the likely distraction and fatigue of the driver. There’s no cameras out here and she could hitch a lift and be fifty miles from here, at least, before she was noticed.
It won’t help. But she spent months on the run, months after that held leashed and afraid and it’s worn grooves into the back of her brain, in the pattern of her thoughts, that years of peace and safety (if they ever get those) might never sand down or erase.
She knows the speed of it, the distance from the shoulder, she knows the moment she could dart out and seize the handles at the back; she breathes out slowly, nails biting into her palms as she watches, still and frozen. She can’t run from this.
It isn’t Fowler she’s afraid of, right now.
She wonders if he knows that.
She wonders what she’d do, if she had ten minutes alone in a locked room with Ryan Wilkes. Or that Agent Rice. Or even -
She starts, whirling, before her conscious mind even registers the sound of the passenger side door opening.
“Where’s Neal?”
She keeps her voice level and hopes it doesn’t come out sounding as small and lost as she feels. She doesn’t look at Fowler.
When there’s no answer right away, she says, “You’ve got the tracking signal on your phone. Where is he?”
Fowler touches the phone display and passes it to her. It’s almost three AM; that green dot glows steadily, unmoving, on Riverside Drive. She stares at it, shielding the phone from the sparse flakes still coming down.
She thinks about watching Neal sleep; he doesn’t snore, he doesn’t make a sound even waking from a nightmare; she can see him, his face soft and blurred in shadows, his mouth slightly open. He always knew; some sixth sense always told him; if she watches long enough he’ll come awake as thoroughly and silently as a cat.
It’s a sentimental indulgence, staring at that green dot, thinking she can wake him, thinking he can feel her watching still.
Finally she looks up; her eyes meet Fowler’s briefly as she gives the phone back. She says, low and raw and fierce, “If anything happens to him -”
It’s barely more than a whisper and her voice breaks at the end of it; she can’t finish the sentence. She doesn’t have to.
“Get in the car,” Fowler says at last, taking the ice scraper from her hands. “Get some sleep.”
The last thing she remembers, he’s twisting a dial on the dash and then warm air is blowing on her feet as they pull back onto the highway.
Pale light slices through the cloud layer when she wakes; there’s a blanket piled on her feet and her head is resting on his shoulder. If he’s noticed he makes no sign.
“Where?”
He’s on the phone again. She sits up abruptly, blinking; the snow has stopped and the clouds are patchy, revealing a band of light at the horizon, pink and yellow pastels bleeding together in a watercolor sunrise.
“Oh, that’s helpful.” He sounds annoyed. “Did he say when?”
“Was that -?” she asks, rubbing her eyes and squinting against the daylight, trying to read the green signs flashing by as he hangs up.
He shakes his head. “Maurice.” The road is mostly clear, except for clumps of wet sand and piles of snow heaped against the guard rail; where the pavement has dried she can see salt stains, irregular patterns of white on grey. “Caffrey called while we were out. Says he has a lead on the box. He wants a meeting at midnight.”
Her phone buzzes in her pocket, interrupting any reply she might have made. Fowler glances at her, eyebrows raised, as she pulls it out and frowns at the message on the screen.
Something in her gut twists, curling into a lump of ice. “Adler’s inviting me to dinner.”
Part 9
“I have strict instructions to stay with this plane,” Adler’s pilot says, standing in the door as they approach the stairs.
It’s a tiny airstrip and nearly deserted; there’s only the one plane idling at the far end of the single runway. The sky is overcast, pale ash darkening to slate, clouds hiding the sinking sun; the place is starkly flat beyond the hangars and a cold wind tears across it, filling and snapping at a lone orange windsock.
Kate hefts a heavy duffel over her shoulder; she’s uncomfortably warm, wearing a wet suit under her clothes and her wool coat, despite the wind on her face.
“We’ve got our own pilot,” Fowler says, nodding at the man standing beside him; he never did give her a name.
She and Fowler exchange a look; maybe Adler really is that concerned about his airplane. Or maybe he’s just nosy and suspicious. But he’s not someone she’s willing to trust or involve in their plans any more than she has to.
“My employer isn’t about to trust anyone he doesn’t know at the controls,” Adler’s man says, “Your request was for transport. He’s certainly not about to hand over an expensive aircraft to someone of your - background and connections.”
Kate wonders if he can be bribed, either to get off the plane or keep his mouth shut; she’s too tired and nervous even to bristle at Adler’s nerve, sneering at her as a thief.
“Your employer is a wanted fugitive,” Fowler is saying, flipping open his badge. “I’m seizing this plane and anything on board as evidence.” He lets his right hand drop toward his belt. “You can leave quietly, now, or I can arrest you and bring you in for questioning.”
Or that works, too, Kate thinks.
As their own pilot settles into the cockpit a few minutes later, Fowler has him give Kate a thorough description of the controls; she pays special attention to the ones for setting the autopilot and turning off the engines.
“You never did say where we’re going,” the pilot says, once he’s finished.
“You’re making a low pass over Lake Champlain while we jump out,” Fowler says. “Don’t need to pick us up, we’ll be driving back.”
The pilot blinks. “She’s not equipped for -”
“You let me handle that.”
Buckled beside the window, she watches the grey runway fall away, the landscape spread below growing smaller, city blocks and the long snaking curve of the river, thick mats of forest beyond veined with branching roads, dark asphalt running out into dust-tan, bursts of flaming color shot through deep summer-green in a slow-spreading blaze, autumn catching fire below them.
Then mist is tearing past the end of the wing, ripped and fluttering like grey rags, until they bank upwards and a cloud swallows them.
“All right.” Fowler releases his seatbelt and she does the same as they break into clear pale blue sky, shading to white and then red. Up here the clouds form an uneven carpet, stretching in ridges toward the setting sun, touched by streaks of red. “The pilot’s jumped and the autopilot’s set. I’m Caffrey.” He nods toward the crate with the chutes. “You’ve got thirty minutes to get those on both of us and explain what we’re going to do. Go.”
She glances out the window once before standing; the cloud layer looks solid, like some grey alien furze thicket, like the terrain of some harsh, hostile other world. The sun is gone, leaving a shrinking red stain across the darkening surface of the clouds, like a splash of drying blood.
She gets the chute harnesses on both of them without a mistake, and all the while she’s thinking they’ve skipped rehearsing the hardest part. Even so her stomach is coiled into a hard knot, and her heart is too loud and too fast.
Halfway through her explanation, the pilot breaks in on the intercom to say they’re over the lake; Fowler tells him to swing wide around and make another pass because it’s not full dark yet.
“He’s going to have to trust me,” she says. Or he’ll have to jump without trusting her; she can hardly say she trusts Fowler, but she’ll jump tonight when he tells her. She can hardly say she trusts Neal, when she can’t tell him any of this for fear Burke will find out.
She loves him; she can count on his love for her; this will have to take the place of trust as well as honesty. She wonders sometimes if Neal has ever trusted her; she wonders if he’s ever trusted anyone at all, or if what he calls trust is only a willingness to take the fall.
She’s the one who left; she’s barely spoken to him in almost a year. Burke, damn him, has as much trust as Neal gives anyone; Burke believes she never loved him, thinks she’s after Neal’s money. And then, while Neal’s belief in her is still so fragile, she’s going to point a gun at a man while he watches.
She’s going to point a gun at their pilot and force him out of the plane. And then she’s going to ask Neal to trust her, to step out of that door into the night.
She feels the floor tilting as the plane banks. The pilot’s voice comes on the intercom: “Ten minutes.”
Neal will jump when she tells him, she knows, not because he believes she won’t betray him but because he’s willing to let her.
Some part of her heart curls into a hard, sick knot at the thought, but she’s desperate enough to use that, if she has to, if it will keep him alive.
She looks at Fowler, says, “You were in Special Forces.”
Fowler only tilts his head at her, curious. She puts a hand out, grips the back of the seat as the plane banks again; the last light from the window slides away out of sight.
“You’ve done things you can’t talk about.” At his no shit look: “Before - stuff that was classified, I mean. You had to keep secrets.” She can still hear Neal at Grand Central, his voice raw and desperate, calling her name; she can hear Mozzie, if you’d just tell him what’s going on. “From - people not in your unit.”
The sky is a deep midnight velvet when she feels the plane turning again. The cabin is dark, Fowler’s face barely visible in the dim emergency lighting. For a long time there’s no sound but the engines.
Then he says, in a completely unreadable voice, “Did you just ask me for relationship advice?”
A beat of silence, then another. “Oh God, I did, didn’t I?”
Then they’re both laughing; she’s bent over, clutching the back of the seat, shaking quietly; it’s a release of something, she’s not sure what. For a long time she can’t stop, but when she manages a few gasping breaths some of the the frantic, fluttering panic in her gut has eased.
She swipes the back of her hand across her eyes and tastes salt; she looks up as the pilot says, “Beginning descent.”
She says, soft and level, “We will never speak of this again.”
“Agreed,” he says. “You’ve got five minutes to get the draft baffle hooked up to the door.”
Through the window she can see the red light on the end of the wing, blinking steadily, catching and reflecting off the fog; an eerie red halo surrounds it. Then they’re dropping beneath the clouds; she sees lights, white and amber clustered in jeweled array, flung like a heavy necklace around a wide patch of soft grey dark.
The lake, she thinks; toward the edges she can see lights reaching, long docks stretching into the water; it all looks like a landscape of miniatures.
“Five minutes,” he says.
She’s braced for the wind as she wrenches the door open, slamming into her, cold and fierce, buffeting her face and making her eyes water. It’s the noise that surprises her, a sudden roaring, rattling growl.
She’s careful, snapping several pieces of thin steel into the doorframe; the overall effect extends the doorway out from the side. She manages to tighten the clamps in place without anything falling out.
“One minute,” Fowler shouts, behind her. The wind beats at her, grabbing at her hair like a living thing; she holds onto the inside of the door and feels for the ripcord handle at her shoulder with the other, in a sudden fear that it might have blown away.
It’s impossible to judge distance, looking out the door. The world is soft grey smoke, lights seeming to flicker; her eyes struggle to make sense of what she’s seeing. Only the wing seems real and solid, a single red eye winking at her.
They might be drifting slowly, except for the roar of the wind. A thin streamer of mist whips past, up close giving the sudden impression of speed, a breath of fog or a fragment of a ghost.
“When’s the last time you did this?” She turns, looking at Fowler; her voice sounds thin above the engine noise, though she’s shouting.
“Twelve years ago.”
Whatever response she might have given is lost when the plane tilts again; the pitch of the engines on this side changes, sliding down a scale and then dying, leaving only the wind. Fowler gives a thumbs up and nods at the gear.
She cracks the lights attached to the supply crate and the boat (visible for up to a mile, Fowler said, so make sure you’re a couple of miles away from wherever you dropped the pilot); the boat is supposed to automatically inflate on landing in the water.
Fowler says, “Ten seconds,” and she tries to swallow, touches the ripcord handle again. She tries to picture Neal’s face; someday, she thinks, shivering, this will make a great story. Fowler says, “Stand by.”
At his nod she shoves the boat and the supply crate into the air, watches the blinking red lights fade below.
Somewhere warm, in the south of France, her and Neal and Moz sipping champagne while harmless fireworks explode outside and they watch through the windows; she tries to picture their faces but all she can see is a vague image of soft candlelight and shadow -
“Go.”
The command is followed by a sharp tap on her shoulder.
She’d meant to take a deep breath, preparing for the dive, but the muscles in her chest and throat have locked up. Some part of her brain shuts down, then, long enough to allow her legs to move; it’s a small step, a short distance, and then a sudden sharp drop that yanks her stomach into her throat.
The engine noise changes pitch and fades rapidly; all she can hear is the rush of wind past her ears, and after the first wild panic of falling her mind is bracing for water, for an impact within seconds that doesn’t come; she gasps, once, twice, expecting each breath to be her last before there’s no more air.
The world below is fuzzy, sketched in shades of charcoal, smudged and indistinct; she thinks the lights below might be getting nearer but she can’t tell. She might be floating; the wind whistles past her ears but the air beneath her feels like a solid thing; she might be lying on a soft down blanket. The thought comes to her that this is why they call zero gravity “free fall”; she is at once moving and still, falling and floating, suspended in a howling dark.
In a flash of fear she glances at her wrist; she can’t tell how long it’s been; she can’t read the numbers on the altimeter dial, glowing faintly, but there’s a red line drawn at the pull altitude and she can see the needle creeping toward it. The dark and the distance are messing up her depth perception; she fastens on that needle as a fixed reference point, moves her hand slowly to touch the ripcord handle. Her fingers are numb despite the gloves.
She wonders briefly what she’ll do if it doesn’t open.
The lines merge and she wraps her fingers around the handle and pulls, hard (what if she doesn’t pull hard enough? will she break it if she pulls too hard?) and for a timeless suspended moment nothing happens.
Her mind has frozen and she’s skating at the fine edge of panic when the harness jerks against her chest with a force like nothing she remembers from practice, like falling into a brick wall. The lights below waver and dance; she can’t tell if she’s seeing anything below her or if it’s only the illusion of sparks flashing before her eyes.
That sound isn’t the wind, anymore, whistling; her chest is tight and painful and it isn’t from the bruising impact of the straps. Her breath is coming fast and shallow, a high wheezing sound; she feels something squeezing her chest, like she can’t get enough air. She loses track of time again, closes her eyes and tries to slow her breathing.
When she can breathe again she thinks the lights are closer.
She’s upright, now; she can see her feet, still held together thanks to hours of practice as she hangs in midair, with nothing beneath them; she tilts her head back, feels a breeze stroking her hair; she can see the canopy, a dark shape spread taut above her head.
Here goes, she thinks, it seems like much later, as the needle creeps lower and numb fingers work the chest strap loose. She hears a soft shush of waves and feels the familiar tense fear, waiting for the water; she pulls a tab and the life jacket inflates with a soft pop, sudden and startling.
She finds the release for the leg straps; a breeze touches her face and that light is the thin, horned reflection of a waxing quarter moon, broken by rippling water as the clouds shift. She barely has time to recognize it before the water’s surface is shattered by her feet; she pulls the leg straps loose and then water slaps her face, ice-cold and smelling like damp, half-rotted weeds.
The chute flutters down, caught by a faint breeze that pulls it away from her; it lands beside her, puddled like mercury reflecting the moonlight; she surfaces in clear air, kicks her legs and feels the water give back a solid resistance. She’s down.
She’s landed.
She arches her back and slips out of the shoulder straps, keeping one hand wrapped around the harness as she tilts her head back; she can’t see the plane. She can’t see Fowler, though she hears a distant splash somewhere behind her.
She draws in a breath, blows it out slowly, deliberately, fighting exhilaration and giddy laughter. She jumped out of a goddamn airplane.
And now she’s floating somewhere in the middle of a miles-wide lake and there’s a boat around here somewhere and she needs to find it.
***
Find the boat first. She shakes her head, trying to get water out of her ears, squinting in all directions; she’ll have to talk to Fowler about different colored lights. They all look the same at this distance.
Then find your partner. This had been another argument, one night when she was already worn out from dragging that damn mannequin onto that little raft, her mind spinning like a rat on a wheel over all the different reasons she might have to know how to get a hundred sixty pounds’ dead weight onto a tiny rubber platform without tipping the whole thing over.
Your partner can’t get you to shore, Fowler said and it sounded like quoting a manual and she really did almost hit him, then, thinking of everything that might happen to Neal that she can’t fix. Without the boat there’s not a damn thing you can do for him if he’s in trouble and that shut her up, though it didn’t calm her in the slightest.
The water is colder than she expected, even with the suit. She lets out a breath, kicking her legs in a scissor motion, more to keep warm than anything else; the vest holds her securely at the surface. After a few moments she can see a larger shadow behind the furthest red light, bobbing in a gentle swell.
(Of course it would be the furthest one.)
She kicks toward it, with a vigorous stroke meant more to warm her up than conserve energy, still grasping the harness in one hand. The distance is further than she expected. The boat fell straight down, she thinks, while the chutes are made for gliding; the weather tonight is calm, if overcast, and the lake’s surface is broken only by gentle waves.
Her arms and legs are burning by the time she reaches it, what feels like much later; she tries not to think how far away the boat might be carried by waves in the Atlantic, or how far high winds might carry her and Neal before they even land. She hauls herself over the side with a last effort, feeling like a shipwrecked sailor clinging to driftwood; the lake is wide and flat, and there are few other lights visible, and she’s alone.
It’s larger than the raft they practiced with in the pool but it’s still only inflated rubber; she crawls into the stern and finds the motor, resisting the urge to lie down and close her eyes just for a second; she’s this close to crashing down from the adrenaline spike and the gentle rocking motion of the waves could lull her to sleep far too fast.
The motor coughs, changing pitch as she grips the throttle; a silver-green wake trails quiet ruffles behind her as she picks a light and steers toward it. She’s shivering, hard, now; the hood on her suit slipped somewhere during the swim and her hair is soaked, trickling cold water down her back, and the wind on her face is colder as her speed increases. But she has something solid beneath her, and the motor responds easily to her hand. The next time the moon peeks through a thin patch of cloud she can see another chute floating, crumpled, a little ways off, like a thin silver lily pad or the translucent, amorphous cap of some enormous jellyfish.
“About time.” Fowler doesn’t move toward her, turning lazily instead to float on his back as she eases up on the throttle, lets momentum carry her slowly alongside.
“Are you seriously going to make me drag you -” She sighs, short and explosive, holding up a hand. She doesn’t think she can take listening to him go over all the reasons Neal might not be able to get himself into the boat.
Easing the boat closer, she leans over to grab the cables trailing like creeping vines from the canopy. She’s tired and this boat is different from the raft they practiced with; she barely has time to let out a startled squeak before she overbalances and goes headfirst into the water.
She coughs, inhaling water; the cold is a shock in her throat and the muscles in her chest freeze up for a moment; she holds onto the side of the boat for a moment, gasping, before she can drag herself on board.
Eventually she manages to tow him by the chute cables over to the side, wrapping increasingly numb fingers around his shoulder harness. She falls in at least three more times, once landing on top of him and dragging him underwater as well; this earns her a glare and a comment on how she’ll need to do this fast and they won’t be on a flat lake when it’s for real.
Sometime much later they’re both in the boat, with the chutes piled like a mess of sodden cobwebs in the bow. In the thin moonlight Fowler looks almost as exhausted as she feels; she swam to the boat while he waited where he fell, but he must have been treading water the whole time to keep warm.
“You’ve had some basic first aid training, I hope?” he says eventually, as she wraps her hand around the throttle and steers for the last floating red light. “In case -”
“Yes, I am familiar with the principles of rescue breathing,” she cuts him off, because she doesn’t want to think about Neal floating face down when she finds him. Her voice is rough, like she’s been screaming. “No, I am not practicing that on you.”
A quiet snort. “Good.”
They retrieve the crate with the supplies; all the lights on shore look faint and distant. “Now where are we going?”
“Make for the old water tower.” Fowler points at the shore; she squints for maybe half a minute before she can make it out, a pale shape against the darker line of trees.
“Have you trained up here before?” she asks; she’d never have been able to pick out the landmark if he hadn’t pointed to it.
He doesn’t answer.
They stow the lights inside the supply crate, going for as much realism as possible; she and Neal will be approaching the shore without lights to give away their presence.
Mist hangs in clumps just above the water, fuzzy grey shifting to silver when the clouds part and the moon slips through. Above the low growl of the motor she can hear thick weeds brushing the underside of the boat. She keeps to a moderate speed, slowing as they come in closer; doubtless they’re breaking all kinds of water traffic laws running with lights out.
The houses are dark, along here; Fowler points further down without speaking and she eases the throttle back, steering parallel to the shore. The houses give way to a line of trailers, each at the end of a long wooden dock, small but neatly kept.
These are vacation homes, she realizes, summer retreats closed up and deserted for the winter.
She blinks, her eyes rough and gritty, as Fowler takes the throttle from her. As he cuts the engine and lets them drift in, she sees a bench at the end of the nearest dock, wood weathered silver-grey facing the lake, and a darkened lantern beside it.
There’s a place along the shore where we can pull the boat up, he said, get dry clothes and spend the night. The trailer at the end of this particular dock is as dark as the rest of them.
“Are we going to break into someone’s summer house and steal their clothes?” she demands, twisting to look at him as he throws a rope around the nearest support pole. She presses a fist against her mouth to stifle bubbling, stress-soaked laughter. “Fowler, I underestimated you.”
“We are not breaking in.” He inclines his head toward a ladder at the end of the dock, wooden rungs slippery with brown weeds or algae. “I have a key.”
Her legs are weak and rubbery; the dock sways gently, making it hard to balance as they drag the boat up, securing it with the rope. Wet oak leaves gather in slick patches on the wooden slats, covered in a faint layer of frost. The clouds are thinning out, now; she can see a wide patch of stars through the fingers of a bare branch, arching out over the water.
A gravel walkway leads up to the back of the trailer, neatly lined with a brick border; a stone birdbath sits beneath the oak, empty and choked with dead leaves. The boat shed at the edge of the bank is chained shut; beside it a shape that might be a gas grill is carefully covered with a tarp.
A patch of ground beside the door has also been carefully edged with bricks, but any dead flowers are buried under dying weeds. Kate says, “Dibs on the shower.”
If she has to wait, she thinks, she’ll fall asleep before she gets a chance.
The door opens and she gropes for a light switch as she follows him inside; the one she finds does nothing, flips on and off and back on again with no effect.
“Power’s turned off,” Fowler says, passing her a flashlight; twin beams cast cold blue circles on beige carpet. The words are oddly flat. “No one’s been up here since -”
He doesn’t finish the sentence. Kate sweeps her flashlight around a tiny sitting room, covers a jaw-cracking yawn. Two armchairs face a cabinet that must hold a TV; the cabinet is closed, the top covered with a thick layer of dust. Beside it a low bookcase is stuffed with battered paperback novels.
The nearest chair pulls at her with a nearly irresistible gravity; she stares at it, at the throw pillow on the seat covered with a cross-stitched cardinal on a dogwood branch; she reminds herself she’s dripping lake water.
A doorway opens into a kitchen; she can see an empty counter, the cupboards closed, and a window covered with cheerful flowered print curtains. The air is cold and still; she can see her breath, a plume of frost picked out and shining white in the flashlight beam.
Somewhere outside she can hear a branch creaking. The fear and the thrill of the jump have by now thoroughly drained away; she looks at the armchairs again and decides that they might be the most comfortable chairs she’s ever seen but they’re too far away.
She could sit down here, on the carpet in the entryway; she could sleep here. It’s a wall to lean against and shelter out of the wind and she’s not sure she’s capable of thinking or moving or doing anything further right now.
Fowler stops on the other side of the sitting room, in the open mouth of a black hallway; he doesn’t turn.
“Can you drive right now?”
She stares, blankly, at his back; the words take a second to process. Shivering, she wraps sore arms around herself, shaking her head against a slow-burning frustration. Her eyelids drag shut like sandpaper curtains, falling over her eyes; it’s an effort to open them again. She’s still groping for words to express how completely done she is for today; what happened to spending the night and driving back in the morning and it dies on her lips when he turns and looks at her.
His face is half-drowned in shadows but there’s a stunned, haunted look in his eyes like he’s been hit over the head and hasn’t figured out, yet, how to fall, a look that says he’d rather chew his own arm off than spend another minute in this place.
“You’re buying the coffee,” she says at last, breaking the long frozen silence, “first rest stop we see.” She offers nothing so useless as sympathy, straightening with an effort and scrubbing a hand over her eyes. “Can we at least get dry clothes first?”
She follows him down the narrow hallway; he keeps his flashlight trained on the floor, switches it off as they enter the bedroom.
“First closet on the right.”
She finds the knob, lets the door swing shut behind her. Nothing here but summer clothes, light blouses and t-shirts that do nothing to stop the chill air, but it’s all dry. She peels out of the suit, pulls on a pair of jeans that mostly fit. The only shoes are light, open sandals. There’s no faint lingering perfume, as she pulls a shirt on over her head, only the smell of mothballs.
A framed photo sits on the nightstand beside the bed; Kate recognizes Fowler’s wife, sitting on that bench at the end of the dock with a book on her lap, dark hair streaked with blonde highlights catching the sun. Looking up at the camera with a fond smile, thick black-framed reading glasses on the end of her nose.
And of course she looks familiar; Kate has been staring at crime scene photos for weeks, now. Still there’s something new teasing at the edge of her mind, a thread she’s too exhausted to follow right now; it’s the glasses that tug at an older memory. She wasn’t wearing them in any of the other pictures Kate saw.
She finds Fowler at the end of the dock, deflating the boat; he’s already folded the chutes and stowed everything in the supply crate. He holds out an FBI windbreaker and a set of keys without looking up. The jacket must be his; it’s about three sizes too big for her and the sleeves fall down over her hands.
A long gravel drive runs out to the road; a grey SUV is parked at the far end, frost sparkling on the hood and fogging the windshield. Kate twists the key, turns the heat all the way down and cracks the window an inch, rubbing her eyes hard enough to see gold and purple fireworks. The dashboard clock swears it’s only 10 PM.
Up ahead between thinning clouds she can see more stars, scattered above the horizon, winking like ice crystals or broken glass.
“Switch off in thirty minutes?” Her voice is scratchy and sleepless; the thought comes to her that this is stupid, and dangerous, but she doesn’t much care. “I’m not gonna last much longer than that.”
Fowler nods once beside her; cold air knifes through the open window as the car starts moving, an edge of ice that might keep her awake for a little while.
The roads are narrow and dark and nearly deserted; she follows the signs for the highway and every few minutes rolls the window down another inch. It’s barely 10:15 the first time she wakes abruptly at the shuddering vibration of the rumble strips along the shoulder.
The second time, she’s just steadied the car when Fowler touches her wrist. She starts violently, a sudden last-ditch surge of adrenaline and the car swerves into the oncoming lane before she rights it again; her heart is pounding and there’s a sour taste in her mouth.
The window is all the way down and the cold wind makes her eyes water, blurring the lines on the road; she’s already twisting the wheel to the right when he says, “Pull over.”
Her hands are locked onto the wheel; it’s an effort to pry them off. If anything it’s gotten colder, clouds massing again overhead. She slides into the passenger seat, fumbles for the lever to recline it and pulls the jacket cuffs down over her hands, wrapping her arms around herself. The next thing she knows he’s shaking her awake and they’re parked under bright lights at a gas station.
The memory is there; she catches the last lacy cobweb-edge of a dream, fading like frost on glass under the morning sun as she sits up. Her old desk just outside Adler’s private office. Raised voices on the other side of the door, and a dark-haired woman in black-framed glasses walking out with a tight, angry expression, stalking past Kate’s desk toward the elevator.
***
A few trucks idle at the edge of the lot; traffic lights cycle through at a silent intersection across the way, casting warped reflections in the curved metal side of a tanker truck parked beside the convenience store. On the other side of the gas station a visitors’ center is closed up tight; faded posters of green summer lakeshore hang in the windows, bleached by the sun.
She’s reminded of too many nights on the run, in rest stops like this one when the night took over and the place became a different world than in the daylight.
The diner is quiet; it’s close to midnight and there’s only a few customers here.
“Coffee,” they tell the waitress in unison, before she has a chance to speak.
“Long night?”
Kate says, “You have no idea.”
They’re in a booth where they can both see the door, cracked red vinyl seats and a retro glass-and-chrome tabletop; water drips from her hair onto the paper placemat, blurring the words on the menu. She tugs an errant strand of some aquatic weed out of her hair, drops it on a napkin.
Fowler says something and then the waitress is looking expectantly at her; Kate says, “Make it two,” and hopes he ordered something good.
The whole scene feels somehow fragile and unreal. The real world is held outside, wrapped in darkness and banished behind wide glass windows. The lights are harsh and too bright, and she imagines they’re no kinder to her than to Fowler; he looks as worn and wrung-out as she feels.
She wraps both hands around her mug when it arrives, closes her eyes and sips slowly and tries to stop shivering.
“How did I do?” she asks finally, because someone needs to start a conversation or she’s going to fall asleep again before the food arrives.
“You got down and you’re alive,” he says. “It’s a start.”
“I did good,” she says, and maybe he’s too tired but he doesn’t contradict her. Bells ring as the door opens, letting in a blast of cold air; Kate glances impatiently toward the kitchen. She thinks she’s passed through exhaustion to some vague, dazed state on the other side; she remembers this, too, the point past which her mind shut down and instinct took over, some part of her more concerned with survival shutting down thoughts of self-pity or fatigue, all mental and physical reserves devoted to moving a little bit farther ahead.
But instinct only got her so far, and it won’t serve her here. She tugs down the braids that are slipping loose, rakes her fingers through wet hair, spraying cold water against the side of the booth.
She needs to think, now.
The waitress refills their mugs and Kate watches her walk away, picking up a red plastic stirrer and twisting it between her fingers. Finally she looks up at Fowler and says, “Why are you doing this?”
Both eyebrows go up. “’This’ being … what, exactly?”
“Tonight. Well, not just -” She waves a hand, describing vague circles in the air and nearly knocking over the menu stand. “All of it. The parachutes. The pool, the jump - helping us.”
“We made a deal.” He sounds patient and tired, stifling a yawn. “And I’m not doing anything for free, either. You’re still not going anywhere until I get the music box.”
“The deal was two clean passports and a plane.” She stares at him, doubt and suspicion warring with plain, honest curiosity. They’ve spent hours on this, nearly every night for the past few weeks; he’s almost as worn out as she is. The amusement value of dropping her on her head can only account for so much. “You’ve gone way beyond that. Not to stick my head in a gift lion’s mouth, but what’s in it for you?”
He rakes a hand through his hair, sighs before looking at her. “What may be my only chance to screw whoever -” He stops; there’s something cold and resigned in his eyes, and she waits while he drains the rest of his coffee.
“I don’t know what’s so special about the damn box,” he says finally. “I don’t care. Once I have it I’m going to get whoever’s behind this or die trying.” He offers half a shrug. “We both know which of those is more likely to happen.”
The silence stretches as the waitress approaches; she sets down two plates piled with hot pancakes, a cup of warm apple butter and a tiny pitcher of maple syrup; she asks if they want more coffee. Kate says, fervently, “Please.”
“He’ll want you and Caffrey both dead as soon you’re no longer useful,” Fowler says at last. “Anything he wants that I can deny him is a victory.” The words are soft and blunt. “This may be the only one I’ll get.”
He’s not getting out of this; he knows that. They stare at each other for another long moment, and then at the same time realize that the pancakes smell delicious and are only going to get cold.
Kate nods once, accepting.
She spoons a generous portion of apple butter onto her plate, dumps half the little pitcher of syrup over the pancakes and practically inhales them. It’s not until they’re both finished, sticky plates stacked at the end of the table and a (third? fourth?) coffee refill in front of them, that she looks up.
“Did she work with rare manuscripts?”
Fowler blinks, surprised. “She was in archives.”
“I met her, once.” She’s sure of it now; she can half remember phrases of that conversation. It had been a heated one, and Kate’s job had often been damage control after Adler pissed off someone in a meeting; it was practically her duty to eavesdrop.
“When?” A sharp frown and a sudden focus.
“Seven years ago. When I worked for Adler.” And she’s suddenly awake, the memory coming clearer. “She was at his office for a meeting. She had something he wanted -”
She stops. She puts her head down on the table, laughing softly. It’s all clear, now, everything that went straight over her head at the time, Adler’s oblique suggestions and the tight outrage he got in response. Kate wonders, briefly, if she really was that naive all along, or if she’d only chosen, on some subconscious level, to blind herself to who and what Adler really was.
She shakes her head, looking up at Fowler’s impatient glare. “He wanted her to steal something for him.”
“She would never -”
“No.” Kate shakes her head again, slowly, but something in the back of her mind is frantically putting pieces together and she doesn’t like the picture she’s starting to see. “No, he was pretty pissed when she left.”
“How pissed?” His voice is soft, flat and dangerous.
“I don’t suppose you remember what she was working on seven years ago. Or what she might have had access to.”
“She was helping with translations for a local historical society upstate,” he says, thoughtful and suspicious. “They’d just unsealed a collection of letters, some guy who was on a German sub in the Baltic -” Slowly, looking up at her, “- in 1945.”
“The year the music box was -”
He frowns. “It was never on a sub.”
“That we know of.”
“You ever been on a submarine?” He’s shaking his head, slowly, but he doesn’t look convinced. “They’re tiny; they’re not cargo ships.”
“I think it’s pretty obvious the music box isn’t just any cargo,” she says. “And it wouldn’t take up that much space.”
“You think he’s involved in this?”
“Could be a coincidence. It was seven years ago,” she says, but she’s not convinced either; this, too, is familiar, the cold sick thrill that says she’s miscalculated badly, she’s tired and she’s starting to make mistakes. “Lot of those piling up lately.”
***
She’s strangely calm, walking back to the car; her eyes are dry and gritty but this is familiar, like pulling on a pair of worn, scarred old boots. It’s startlingly easy to fall back into just keep moving push on a little farther, blanking out all thoughts of fatigue and dragging herself forward, past doubt and exhaustion and common sense.
Something in her mind has shifted, back to some lizard-brain knowledge of flight.
She takes the keys. It’s starting to snow as they merge onto the highway, wet heavy flakes sliding down the windshield. She remembers this, too, the feeling that her mind is clearer and sharper than it is; she’s so tired she doesn’t realize she’s tired. Some distant part of her registers that this is dangerous.
She wonders how far back this goes; maybe Adler was involved seven years ago and then wanted out. Maybe he wasn’t running from the feds, when he fled to Argentina.
(Then why did he come back?)
Seven years is a long time. (Adler is patient, meticulous, neat.) This might be a coincidence. (Whoever they’re running from doesn’t like loose ends.)
They switch off after thirty minutes; the next time Kate wakes the snow is heavier, falling in thick folds, surrounding the amber streetlights with dancing halos. The yellow center line is fading, blurred beneath soft fuzz.
She wonders if the ten million she might get for the Raphael could buy the pilot’s silence about this practice jump, if Adler decides to find him and ask why she really wanted to borrow the plane.
(Probably not. Adler has resources she doesn’t; she can’t outbid him.)
She slides back into the driver’s seat and turns on NPR, holding it to a soft murmur and hoping for a weather report as she pulls away from the shoulder. At least the snow held off until after they jumped.
She has to assume Adler will find out about this trip.
How high up he is in all this, if he’s even still part of it, and whether he can be bribed to keep his mouth shut - she doesn’t think she has anything he needs that he can’t get any other way.
Brake lights glow through dancing white and she slows; she’s behind a snowplow. A slow scraping sound ahead plays counterpoint to the rhythm of the wiper blades; a wet black ribbon of asphalt opens in the thickening white carpet ahead.
Adler was at the reception where they met the contact who pointed them at Reilly; he might have been standing close enough to overhear their conversation. He’d been there and now that contact and Reilly are both dead.
A faint buzz startles her; Fowler’s cell, muffled slightly by his jacket.
Fowler is asleep, his head fallen against the window; when he doesn’t wake immediately she slips a hand into his pocket and lifts the phone.
Unknown number.
Red brake lights flare again up ahead and she slows further, still in the plow’s shadow. Snowflakes dance like dust motes, turning the headlight beams into something swirling and solid. The small, still voice telling her what she’s doing is reckless and stupid is acknowledged, not argued with, and then quietly ignored.
She answers without speaking, holds the phone to her ear; no sound comes, only the hiss of an open line and the loud thumping of her heart. She counts five long seconds and says, neutral, “Agent Fowler’s phone.”
The answering voice is electronically distorted, artificially deep with all emotional inflections ironed flat. “Put him on, please.”
“Do you know what time it is?” She blinks as the clock on the dash blurs: 2:14.
Fowler is sitting up, wide awake as soon as he sees the phone in her hand. She holds it out to him, wordless.
“Fowler,” he snaps, and she forces her attention back to the road, eases the wipers back a notch. “Sir. Like I said -”
Silence again, and she can’t read his face and keep the car going in a straight line, not when the lines in the road are nearly invisible. She’s almost brought her breathing back to something approaching normal; she’s almost resigned herself to hearing nothing interesting from his half of the conversation when he says, “You never mentioned the submarine angle.”
His tone hasn’t changed, but her heart is suddenly beating like some frantic winged thing at the base of her throat.
“Never mind how I know.” He sounds irritated, now, but a quick glance at his face catches a flicker of surprise, like he tried a stab in the dark and didn’t expect it to connect. “But if I’d known sooner I could have skipped chasing down half a dozen dead ends -”
At this rate she’s going to run into the damn snowplow.
She gives up pretending to pay attention to the road and pulls onto the shoulder, shifting into park and turning to stare at him. The wiper blades thump back and forth, showing the road ahead through overlapping arches windows, lit up by cold orange lights. The plow scrapes on ahead, a solid shadow fading and losing substance, dissolving in gauzy curtains of snow; the wet black strip behind it slowly lightens, tiny flakes draping a translucent veil over the right lane.
Fowler looks at her. “Perhaps we should discuss that in person.”
She’s not the only one feeling reckless and stupid tonight.
They’ve stumbled onto something, but how far he can push with it before it blows up in his face she’s afraid to guess. It’s a delicate balancing act, she knows. His eyes don’t leave hers as he says, “I want a meeting.”
She wonders if she can wrestle the phone away from him long enough to hit speaker without alerting whoever’s on the other end.
“I want to see your face.”
The trick is to not look down. She realizes abruptly she’s holding her breath. Fowler’s face reveals only the same tense uncertainty she feels.
His voice drops. “Do not push me too far.”
He hangs up. They stare at each other for a few heartbeats after he lowers the phone.
“Well?” she demands, as the silence lengthens. “You’re killing me, here.”
They both start at the buzz of an incoming text. He glances at the display, his face blank, and then passes her the phone. The message is short.
JAN 15 12TH & WATERSHED MIDNIGHT.
“January -” It’s low and bitter and frustrated. “That’s more than two months away.”
Fowler lets out a slow sigh and scrubs a hand over his face. “It’s a start.”
“You rattled him.” She stares at the thickening snow; she almost can’t tell the right lane was ever plowed. “We’re onto something.” But what? “What do you know about this guy, really?”
“I know if he’s willing to meet me in person he’s not the one behind it all.”
“If we’re working together, I need to know what we’re dealing with.” She clicks the wipers back another notch, listens as the rhythm slows, long enough to allow a lacy filigree to settle over the glass, backlit in orange, between beats. “How about you fill me in on what I don’t already know?”
He shifts enough to give her a look, and she waves a hand at the windshield.
“You really think we should keep going in that?”
“You first,” he says finally, with a sharp frown. “Tell me how you found out -” He trails off, tilting his head at her.
Fair enough. Since we’re blowing right past all boundaries of caution and common sense tonight -
She wonders if Neal and Burke have these conversations, what were you really up to when …
“An … acquaintance … needed to get out of the country. Fast.” She takes a deep breath, lets it out slowly. Keller is behind bars, now, and she can’t say she was sorry to hear it; it’s not like she’s giving up an asset that might be useful later. “I gave him a clean passport and plane tickets to Oslo, in exchange for poking around and seeing what he could find.”
“Why Oslo?”
“It was the first trip you’d taken out of the country in ten years? And then all your files were sealed the minute you got back. Seemed like as good a place to start as any.” Half a shrug, leaning her head back against the seat. “Sometimes you take a stab in the dark and you hit something.”
She reaches out and clicks the wipers off. Stares at the windshield as tiny feathers of ice form and stick, crowding the glass, sharp crystals locking together and gradually filtering out the lights outside. The highway is nearly deserted.
The lights on the dashboard glow faintly; the radio is only a low murmur, and the silence is sudden and loud when she turns it off.
She doesn’t look at him. “Your turn.”
A slow-moving truck rumbles past, muffled and invisible; Kate imagines they are a soft white hump along a soft white road in the dark; the snow has covered the windows as well, by now. She reaches out to flick the hazard lights on and stares at the dashboard indicators blinking on and off, on and off.
“I thought we were at the wrong house.”
The snow moves in like a soft-footed cat, settling in silently and wrapping a long tail of white around the highway. The sound of the truck changes pitch and fades, slowly, ahead of them. She waits.
“We got called out to a home invasion in Georgetown. Me and my partner, we’d just come off an all-night stakeout. We’d been up since before midnight. It was bad.” His voice is expressionless, his face turned away from her, staring at the opaque wall of snow covering the window. “One victim, female, late thirties. Place was smashed, furniture all -” He stops, and for a long time there’s only the sound of the engine idling and the breath of warm air from the heater vents.
“Whoever the bastard was, she gave him one hell of a fight. It - wasn’t quick. Or easy.”
His tone doesn’t change but the words come faster, like he’s trying to finish this quickly. “We walk in the door and I realize I left something at home. To this day I can’t remember what.” He shakes his head slightly, still without looking at her. “So we get back in the car to go get it. I’m driving. And we get there and I walk in the front door and I swear to God my first thought is ‘we’re at the wrong house’.”
If she stares hard enough at the darkened windshield, she might almost imagine she sees light filtering through from an approaching dawn; that, too, is an illusion.
“I’d been up all night,” he continues softly. “I’m still wired from the stakeout and I’m thinking I was so out of it I somehow got turned around and drove right back to the crime scene.”
Kate says nothing. There’s nothing to say. She plays with the closest air vent, adjusting the aim, her fingers twitching and restless.
“Metro had the case for three months. Didn’t find shit.” The words are clipped, flat and a little breathless, aiming for matter-of-fact and coming out half-strangled. “Not like they didn’t know who to look for. They had his prints all over the place, and -” a brief hesitation, a convulsive swallow “- you read the file. The guy had a rap sheet. Priors for assault and B&E, suspected in two armed robberies. Nine o’clock in the goddamn morning.” One hand makes a quick, disgusted slashing motion. “Disappeared.”
“Probably had help,” she says quietly; it’s not even a guess, at this point.
A fraction of a nod. “The Bureau took over after he turned up in Maryland. Same MO, then he vanished again. I was on leave by then, but it was DC Violent Crimes working the case. They kept me in the loop. As long as there was a -” The silence stretches thin. “Three months after that they start avoiding my calls. Beginning of March they tell me their last lead dried up a month ago and they’re moving on to other cases.”
His eyes close briefly. “It’s early August when I get the phone call.”
That would have been almost a year and a half ago, now. Kate wonders, again, how far back this all goes; whoever this is, he’s playing a long game.
“It’s an unknown number, and the voice - you heard him. Gave me an alias and a flight number. British Airways 1539.” His voice is steadier now, precise, though he still doesn’t look at her. “I got to Oslo three days after he landed, tracked him some fifty miles north to a hotel. Sat in the bar half the night - you know it doesn’t get dark until 11 up there, that time of year? Waited for him to show and followed him when he left.”
She knows what comes next; she’s not at all sure she wants to hear this. She keeps her voice carefully blank, says, “I read the coroner’s report.”
“He died quicker than -” He stops. “He died quicker than he deserved.”
She has no response to that.
“I went back to the hotel and waited for the cops.”
Another plow scrapes by outside. Kate closes her eyes and she wants Neal, her Neal who flinches at the sight of guns and would never hurt anyone.
“Waited four days until it hit me I’d have to go down and turn myself in or go home. No one was coming and the hotel reservation was only through the end of the week.”
“You didn’t know they got paid off?” Half a million from a DOJ account; whoever set this up has powerful connections.
He shakes his head. “The package with the tape came two days after I got back.”
She wants to see Neal, and hold onto him, and watch him and know he’s safe. She wants to be anywhere but here in a snowed-in SUV on a deserted highway wondering when (if) she’ll ever see him again. Wondering what she’ll have to do to see him again, what she’ll do to save him, and what she might do if she fails.
“He arranged the transfer to OPR,” he says, and it’s soft, defeated, distant. “Said he’d destroy the tape in exchange for the music box.”
“And you believed him?”
“No.” A short laugh. “But he wants that box enough to kill for it, and once I’ve got it I’ll have some leverage.”
“He’ll have planned for that.”
“Most likely.”
He knows he’s not getting out of this.
Kate gets out of the car. Caked snow cracks and falls from the window as she slams the door. It’s dark, still, and the snow is slackening.
Snaking lines of tire tracks weave unsteadily across the lane beside them. A car approaches from the south, going too fast; she looks down to avoid being blinded by the high beams, but she can hear tires sliding before it slows.
The engine noise fades and they’re alone. She finds an ice scraper in the trunk and goes to work on the back window first.
She’s finished knocking snow off the front windshield when she hears another vehicle approaching; it’s a slow-moving truck, this time, dumping sand along the road. She leans back against the hood, feels the vibration of the engine warm against her legs. Her feet are slowly going numb, thin sandals soaked with muddy slush.
She watches the truck approach and she’s already calculating whether she could jump on the back, gauging the speed and the darkness and the likely distraction and fatigue of the driver. There’s no cameras out here and she could hitch a lift and be fifty miles from here, at least, before she was noticed.
It won’t help. But she spent months on the run, months after that held leashed and afraid and it’s worn grooves into the back of her brain, in the pattern of her thoughts, that years of peace and safety (if they ever get those) might never sand down or erase.
She knows the speed of it, the distance from the shoulder, she knows the moment she could dart out and seize the handles at the back; she breathes out slowly, nails biting into her palms as she watches, still and frozen. She can’t run from this.
It isn’t Fowler she’s afraid of, right now.
She wonders if he knows that.
She wonders what she’d do, if she had ten minutes alone in a locked room with Ryan Wilkes. Or that Agent Rice. Or even -
She starts, whirling, before her conscious mind even registers the sound of the passenger side door opening.
“Where’s Neal?”
She keeps her voice level and hopes it doesn’t come out sounding as small and lost as she feels. She doesn’t look at Fowler.
When there’s no answer right away, she says, “You’ve got the tracking signal on your phone. Where is he?”
Fowler touches the phone display and passes it to her. It’s almost three AM; that green dot glows steadily, unmoving, on Riverside Drive. She stares at it, shielding the phone from the sparse flakes still coming down.
She thinks about watching Neal sleep; he doesn’t snore, he doesn’t make a sound even waking from a nightmare; she can see him, his face soft and blurred in shadows, his mouth slightly open. He always knew; some sixth sense always told him; if she watches long enough he’ll come awake as thoroughly and silently as a cat.
It’s a sentimental indulgence, staring at that green dot, thinking she can wake him, thinking he can feel her watching still.
Finally she looks up; her eyes meet Fowler’s briefly as she gives the phone back. She says, low and raw and fierce, “If anything happens to him -”
It’s barely more than a whisper and her voice breaks at the end of it; she can’t finish the sentence. She doesn’t have to.
“Get in the car,” Fowler says at last, taking the ice scraper from her hands. “Get some sleep.”
The last thing she remembers, he’s twisting a dial on the dash and then warm air is blowing on her feet as they pull back onto the highway.
Pale light slices through the cloud layer when she wakes; there’s a blanket piled on her feet and her head is resting on his shoulder. If he’s noticed he makes no sign.
“Where?”
He’s on the phone again. She sits up abruptly, blinking; the snow has stopped and the clouds are patchy, revealing a band of light at the horizon, pink and yellow pastels bleeding together in a watercolor sunrise.
“Oh, that’s helpful.” He sounds annoyed. “Did he say when?”
“Was that -?” she asks, rubbing her eyes and squinting against the daylight, trying to read the green signs flashing by as he hangs up.
He shakes his head. “Maurice.” The road is mostly clear, except for clumps of wet sand and piles of snow heaped against the guard rail; where the pavement has dried she can see salt stains, irregular patterns of white on grey. “Caffrey called while we were out. Says he has a lead on the box. He wants a meeting at midnight.”
Her phone buzzes in her pocket, interrupting any reply she might have made. Fowler glances at her, eyebrows raised, as she pulls it out and frowns at the message on the screen.
Something in her gut twists, curling into a lump of ice. “Adler’s inviting me to dinner.”
Part 9