“I don’t hold grudges.”
“They’ll be so pleased to hear it.”
“Section?”
Chaudhury stuck his hands in his pockets. “What?”
“What’s your section?”
“Counterterrorism.”
“Under Bill Ferragamo?”
Another pause. “No.”
“Who?”
“I’m not playing twenty questions. You want to help me find out who abducted your friend, then great. If not, then fuck off. It’s all the same to me.”
“I’ll fuck off, then,” Milo said and walked out of the apartment. On his way to the elevator, he passed a thickset hood that looked less like CIA than like Balkan mafia.
At home, he found Tina dozing on the couch, her head in Penelope’s lap. Penelope was watching a late-night talk show in which an actress with a new film out was showing off her platform shoes. Penelope gave Milo a tired smile as he settled on a chair. “I’m sober now,” she said with something like pride.
“Good for you.”
“Did you uncover all?”
He shook his head, realizing that Tina was wrong—Penelope did trust him. She’d learned her husband was missing and wasn’t rushing off to the police; she was leaving everything to him. “Alan left the place clean,” Milo told her. “He knew what he was doing.”
“He always did.”
“What kind of security did he have in his office?”
“Security?”
“Motion detectors, cameras, that sort of thing.”
“Should he have had something?”
“I’m just asking.”
She grinned. “Well, I hope he didn’t have a camera. You know that great leather chair? We used to have sex on it all the time.” The grin faded. “Before he turned into . . . well, before he started pushing me away.”
Milo stared at her, wondering. “When was the last time?”
“That we had
sex?
”
“In his office.”
She didn’t look like she was going to answer, but finally arched a brow. “Nearly a month ago. I actually remember the date. May 23, a Friday. We finished just minutes before you guys showed up for that roast lamb. Any more intimate questions?”
Milo shook his head. There was no way that Alan would have missed that camera, which meant either that he knew who was watching him or that he had installed it himself. Either way, three and a half weeks ago, on the evening of May 23, the camera wasn’t there; it had arrived after that date.
6
Tina took a vacation day on Thursday, and Penelope showered before joining them for coffee and leaving with Tina, who was off to pick up Stephanie. After they’d been gone a half hour, Milo’s phone rang. It was his father, Yevgeny Primakov. “Misha! Do you know what Monday is?”
Milo had no idea.
“Public Service Day. Every June 23 the United Nations celebrates the value and virtue of public service to the community. It’ll be a festive day.”
“Are you kidding me?”
“Spare me your cynicism, my boy. The true joy of Public Service Day is that I’ll get a rare chance to see your ravishing wife and breathtaking daughter. Perhaps even my infuriating son.”
Milo resisted a smile, though it was difficult. “Okay, I’ll let them know. We’ll have dinner.”
“Not your food. We’ll go out. My treat.”
“Of course it’s your treat, Yevgeny.”
“Listen, Misha, I have an appointment with a foreign minister. I just wanted to make sure you would be there.”
“I try not to travel these days.”
“Not even to London?”
His father seldom wasted a call for purely familial reasons. “You heard?”
“About the Sebastian Hall that wasn’t you? Of course I did. And I made sure you were in good health in Brooklyn before forgetting about it.”
“It wasn’t me, but it was a friend. Can you find out anything?”
Yevgeny hummed a moment, considering this. “Which friend?”
“Alan Drummond.”
“I see.”
“It’s important we find out the details.”
“Who’s we?”
“Me. His wife, Penelope. Tina.”
Another hum. “No one else?”
“A few other people.”
Silence, but Milo didn’t feel up to explaining Dennis Chaudhury. Background voices on his father’s side were speaking French. “Okay, Misha. I’ll bring what I can on Monday.”
“Thanks, Yevgeny.”
Milo ran an online search for miniature cameras, hoping to stumble across the make of the one he’d gotten from Alan’s office. While it looked similar to many, it matched none.
He heard Stephanie stomping up the stairs, and went to open the door for her. He was surprised to find his daughter’s upper eyelids completely black. His first thought was that she’d been beaten. His knees went weak. She was smiling wildly. “What do you think, daddy?”
“I think you look like someone’s punching bag.”
Her smile vanished. “Well . . . it’s pretty,” she said as she walked past him, ignoring his attempt at a kiss.
Behind her, Tina came slowly up the stairs. “Did you see?” she asked.
“Makeup?”
“Magic fucking Marker,” Tina grumbled.
Milo grinned. “Sarah, too?”
Up on their floor now, Tina leaned against the banister and raised an eyebrow. “You’d think so, wouldn’t you? Sarah thought Stephanie needed to bring out her eyes a little more.”
“What did her mother say?”
“She said,
I think it looks cute
. And laughed. Stef’s not staying there ever again.”
While Tina made more coffee, he found Stephanie in her room, examining herself proudly in the mirror. When Milo hovered in her doorway for too long, she said, “You really think I look like a punching bag?”
“Now that I’ve had a moment, no. It’s kind of interesting.”
“In a good way?”
Milo stared at her, as if thinking this through. His daughter’s disheveled hair, her pudgy nose, her big ears, her habit of double-blinking when she wanted a serious answer, her pursed, thin lips—all of this was absurdly beautiful to him. It was a face, like his wife’s, that he would never be able to see objectively. “Good, sure, but maybe it was a bad idea to use a marker.”
“It’ll wash off.”
“I don’t think so.”
She turned from the mirror to frown at him; she looked nothing like a six-year-old. “It’s
water
based. That means it’ll wash off.”
“Good,” he said. “Why don’t you wash it off so that when we go out for lunch people won’t think we’re abusing you?”
She didn’t laugh.
He wandered back to the kitchen and found Tina sulking in the corner with her cup. “So you didn’t find anything at Alan’s?”
“Not much. The computer was blank, but there was a camera.”
“A camera?”
“It’s been there less than a month.”
He showed Tina the device, and as she turned it in her hand she said, “You’re sure someone else didn’t put this there?”
“It was out of the way, but it wasn’t hidden. If someone else put it there, it wasn’t a secret from him.”
She handed it back. “So he put it there in case someone came to search his office?”
“Maybe, but that doesn’t make much sense. Anyone searching his place would run across it as easily as I did.”
“He should’ve used a nanny-cam. They put them in clocks now, so babysitters have no idea.”
“Do they?”
“How can you not know about these things?” she asked.
“What about Penelope?”
Tina came out to the living room; he followed. “She’s messed up. The last time they talked, she was kicking him out of the house. She needs to know what’s going on.”
“I’m working on it.”
“Does that mean you’re going to London?”
“I don’t need to. Yevgeny will be in town on Monday, and he’s bringing information.”
“Little Miss will be happy. She likes him. I do, too.”
“Don’t bring all this up to him. I’ll take care of it.”
“Why can’t I ask him?”
“Because he’s not supposed to know what he knows, and you’ll put him in a position of having to lie to you. There’s no reason for that.”
“I bet I could get him to talk.”
“I bet you could, too, but don’t.”
They both looked up as Stephanie walked in, her face red and wet from washing, but the black coins of her eyelids hadn’t lightened at all. “Sarah
lied
to me,” she told them. “This isn’t water based at all!”
It was over pizza at La Bruschetta that Milo noticed Chaudhury on the opposite side of Seventh Avenue, under the awning for Rite Aid, staring through the window at him.
“Sorry, ladies,” Milo said, patting his lips with a napkin. “There’s someone I need to talk to. Be right back.”
As he rose, Stephanie craned her neck to peer out the window. “The dark guy?”
“Yeah.”
“He’s got eyes like mine.”
It was overcast but still warm out on the street when Milo waited for the traffic to ebb and jogged across to join Chaudhury, who first said, “You haven’t been beating up on that kid of yours, have you?”
“She said your eyes look like hers.”
“Maybe it’s because my dad
did
beat up on me.”
Milo stared at him, wondering if it was a joke. There was no way to tell. “You find anything on the drive?”
“I’m not here about that. I need you to give me that camera you took.”
“Is it yours?”
“Everything’s mine.” In answer to Milo’s look, he softened and said, “No, man. I just want our technicians to take a look at it. See if we can find out who was spying on your friend.”
“You want to tell me how you knew it was there?”
“No,” said Chaudhury. “How about two o’clock? Give you time to eat your pizza. I’ll drop by your place to pick it up.”
“You don’t come near my place,” said Milo. “We’ll meet here. And in the future, if you want me, call me. Don’t ever show up when I’m out with my family.”
Chaudhury opened his hands, patting the air. “Calm down, tiger.”
“Are you going to tell me about the drive?”
He rubbed the side of his nose—one of those awkward, obvious signals that amateurs think looks natural—and Milo noticed Chaudhury’s denim friend crossing the street to their side. “There’s nothing to tell. It was wiped clean. Zeroed out.”
“So what are you going to do now?”
Chaudhury shrugged. “I’ll see what my man in London can find.”
“You’re done with me?”
“Yeah, Milo. I’m done with you. But if you come across some hot tip, I’d appreciate hearing about it.”
“See you at two,” Milo said.
As he returned to his seat, he saw that Chaudhury and his friend had left, and that Stephanie was sucking through a straw, stealing his Coke. “Give that back, kid.”
Smiling, she puffed her cheeks and blew noisy bubbles into his glass.
“Ah, forget it,” he said.
“Was that the Homelander?” Tina asked.
“I’m not sure.”
She stared at him.
“Now he says he’s Company.”
She nodded at that but frowned. “So? Anything new?”
“About who?” asked Stephanie.
“Nothing,” Milo said to Tina. To Stephanie, he said, “Alan.”
“What about Alan?”
Tina gave him a look, and he realized that they hadn’t discussed what they were and were not going to tell her. Procrastination was evidently Tina’s only plan. That, or absolute secrecy. “The fact that someone keeps stealing his Coca-Cola,” he said. “It’s a big mystery. They’re going to have to bring in the army soon, shut down the city, and search each house until they find the person who did it.”
Wide-eyed, Stephanie blinked at him and, very seriously, said, “It wasn’t me.”
When he met Chaudhury on the sidewalk at two, there was no sign of his denim-clad friend. Milo handed over the camera in a paper bag. Chaudhury seemed to want to talk, but Milo didn’t. “Take this,” Chaudhury said, reaching into a back pocket. He produced a blank, white business card with a D.C. 202 phone number and the name “Director Stephen Rollins” handwritten on it. “It’s the office number. I strongly suggest that you leave it alone, but if you find you can’t put down your paranoia and you absolutely must verify that I work for who I say I work for, call that number.”
“Who’s Director Rollins?”
“My Lord and Master.” Chaudhury grinned. “Though I prefer to call him by his proper name. God.”
“Will you get in trouble if I call?”
“Me? I’m a survivor, Milo, I’ve no worries. I just think you’d probably like to stay off my boss’s radar,” he said, then raised a hand in farewell.
At home, Milo found Tina cleaning up the living room. “Looks like we’re getting a permanent guest,” she said.
“What?”
“Penelope. Someone ripped up her apartment.”
“I put everything back,” he said quickly.
“The bedroom?”
“What?”
“Did you slice open her mattress and tear out the springs?”
“Oh.”
“I told her to pack a bag and come back.”
Penelope arrived two hours later, and Milo carried her large, heavy suitcase up their narrow stairs. She seemed more put out than scared, and while Milo grilled chicken breast for a Caesar salad, the two women drank wine in the kitchen doorway and berated the Central Intelligence Agency. “It was them, wasn’t it?” she asked Milo.
“I think so.”
“They could have just asked me. Knock on the door, say,
Mrs. Drummond, may we please look around?
I would’ve said yes.”
“They don’t always think so directly.”
“What does that mean?” Tina asked.
At first, he wasn’t sure what he had meant. Then he knew. He turned to face them. “The Company spends as much time anticipating disaster as it does collecting intelligence. If someone says,
Let’s go ask Mrs. Drummond if we can look around
, someone else at the table certainly says,
She’s upset. What if she says no?
Then they all have a think—okay, if she won’t let us in, what happens next? Because operational planning is about staying five steps ahead. If you aren’t, then things go wrong. If Mrs. Drummond is upset, and says no, maybe she’ll be sure not to leave the apartment so that no one can come in to look around. Or maybe she’ll hire someone to keep the place secure.”
“But I wouldn’t do that. Christ, Alan worked for the Company. He loved the bastards.”
“You would do that if you had something to hide. You would do that if you thought Alan had something he was hiding from them. That’s what they’re thinking. So, logically, the only thing they can do is break in when you’re not there, then get out as fast as they can. Which means leaving a mess.”