Joe Schreiber - Perry's killer playlist

I stared out at the dark mountains.

I thought about my family.

I thought about Gobi.

Of course, my bluff about being able to tell him where she was had been exactly that, a bluff. But I’d gotten out of tighter spots with guys more dangerous than him, and in the end, he couldn’t afford to be wrong about me, even if it was a long shot.

After an hour of driving we came down into a small Swiss village with narrow cobblestone streets and tall church steeples rising up on either side. It was almost midnight, and the whole town seemed asleep or deserted. This place, whatever it was called, made Zermatt look like Manhattan by comparison. The Peugeot stopped in front of a little corner tavern with a few lights burning inside, and Swierczynski got out and gestured for me to follow him.

Halfway through the doorway, I stopped him.

“If this is a setup,” I said, “you’ll never see her again. You know that, right?”

He grunted like he didn’t particularly care about that part anymore and held the door, ushering me the rest of the way inside.

The tavern was sawdusty and desolate, a drafty old-world beer hall with deer and mountain goat heads stuffed and mounted on the walls above a dartboard that no one was using. At the far end of the room, long wooden tables sat in front of a roaring fire. The bartender glanced up at me for the briefest of seconds, then ducked behind a row of taps to finish polishing the stein in front of him with the determined air of a proprietor who knew when to mind his own business.

I looked across the room to where a man in a suit was sitting by himself in front of the fire with a glass of wine. For a second we just looked at each other. Usually when you describe someone, you say he was in his forties, or had silver hair or a pointed nose or whatever. But the thing about this guy was, the longer I looked at him, the less sure I was about any defining physical feature. He could have been twenty-nine or forty-six. In the firelight, his hair might have been gray, or light blond, or even silver-streaked black. The only things that really stood out were the cold indifference radiating from his eyes, and that sense of anonymity that, in itself, was deeply chilling.

“Kaya,” I said.

He snorted. A smile that wasn’t a smile twisted like a thin wire at the corner of his mouth, and he took a business card out of his pocket and handed it to me. It read:

William J. Nolan

Support Integrations Officer

Central Intelligence Agency

“Kaya,” I said, and looked back down at the card. “CIA. Nice touch.”

“Believe it or not,” Nolan said, “it started out as a speech-enabled text error. Hard C, then I, A. The original program didn’t recognize acronyms. In the end, we kept it that way. Kind of a if-it’s-not-broke-why-fix-it sort of deal.”

I don’t know why I was surprised. “So the CIA are the ones running Gobi?”

“Gobi,” he said. “That’s cute. What’s she call you-Pokey?”

“You know she goes by that name.”

“Yes,” Nolan said, “but I prefer Zusane Elzbieta Zaksauskas.” He brought out a thick folder and opened it on the table, next to his wineglass. Inside I saw whole stacks of black-and-white photos, handwritten reports, official documents, and photocopied receipts stapled together, flickering in the firelight from behind us. There were a few pictures of me in there as well, surveillance pictures from our night in New York. Nolan flipped past them without comment until he reached a page of vital statistics. “Born September twenty-third, 1988, Karmelava, Lithuania, twenty-four years old, various aliases, weapons and combat training, blah-blah-blah, whereabouts currently unknown.”

“I know where she is.”

“Right.” Nolan hardly raised an eyebrow. “Not to burst your bubble, junior, but you’ll forgive me if I don’t jump right up and offer to blow you for that information on the spot.”

I frowned. “So… what? If you don’t think I can help you, why did you agree to meet me?”

“First rule of poker, kid. Look around the table for a sucker. If you don’t see him, it’s you.”

“I’ve already figured that out.”

“In fact, the only reason you’re even sitting here tonight is that I wanted to be sure you actually exist. You know, they have a running bet on you back at Langley? None of the analysts could believe one guy could have such spectacularly shitty luck with women.”

He tossed another surveillance photo across the table and gave me plenty of time to look at this one. It was a shot of me and Paula from early October, walking hand in hand outside Film Forum in New York. We’d just come out of a showing of The Getaway, the 1972 Sam Peckinpah original with Ali MacGraw and Steve McQueen. The picture had been taken just as I was leaning in to kiss her, and the camera had captured a look of supremely idiotic happiness on my face. If I survived this, I secretly pledged that I’d never let myself be that happy again.

“Paula Daniels, age twenty-four,” Nolan said, “born Paula Monash, an American citizen who grew up in Dubai.” Paula was twenty-four? And Monash? I was still looking at the picture, trying to figure out where I’d heard that name before, as Nolan kept talking.

“Paula’s father, Everett Monash, was an American financier working alongside George Armitage in the UAE. She turned eighteen and got into the family business.”

“She told me her dad was a record producer.”

Nolan was in the process of sipping wine and almost snorted it out his nose. “My. God.” He coughed and cleared his throat. “How is it you are still alive?”

I looked at the crime scene picture from yesterday-or was it two days ago? — of Armitage’s body splayed across the Venetian piazza in a pile of broken glass and spilled wine. Even in black and white it was pretty gruesome, like a big pan of lasagna had fallen on him.

“Why did you have Gobi kill him?”

“If you’re asking why we picked Zaksauskas for the job, you of all people should know that. The girl’s born to kill. If you’re asking why we targeted Armitage…” Nolan steepled his fingers in front of his lips, parsing information carefully. “Let’s just say that he and his checkered past presented a problem that our government couldn’t afford to deal with publicly-and he did need to be dealt with. We’re talking about a guy who helped sell Stinger missiles to Kurdish separatists for pocket change, and now he thinks he’s Richard Branson? Sorry, no. So back in August, one of our analysts happened to read that college essay you wrote online, and your crazy little European chick seemed like a perfect bet for cleanup duty.”

“Wait.” A wave of nausea rolled over me, and I suddenly felt sick to my stomach. “You picked Gobi because of me?”

“It was a great essay, kid. Vivid prose. Felt like I was there.” He must have seen my face, because he shook his head. “Hey, don’t beat yourself up about it. You didn’t know. Once she takes care of Paula, we’ll be all finished with her.”

“You know she’s got my family.”

Nolan went quiet, all smugness gone. “What?”

“Paula. She’s got my parents and my sister.”

“As of when?”

“Yesterday at least. Paula had pictures of them on her iPad, in some room somewhere.”

“You’re sure that she’s the one who did it?”

“If she didn’t, she’s associated with whoever did.”

“You have any proof?”

“I told you,” I said, “I saw the picture. There’s a video file too, where my mom and dad are talking about her.”

“You have that file?”

“No. It was on her iPad.”

“And where’s the iPad?”