Greg Rucka - Critical Space

He got testy. "Stop badgering me, Atticus. I'm on top of this. You know I've got your back, I always have."

"You always have," I agreed. "See you seven A.M. tomorrow."

Natalie and I moved Alena to Allendale that afternoon, another two-story house, off Crescent Avenue. It was a relatively new neighborhood, and the house itself had gone up perhaps twenty years ago, in what had once-upon-a-time been a celery field.

"It's a rental property," Natalie said. "We've got it for the winter."

"Florida?" I asked.

"Bermuda," she said.

The alarm system was much the same as on the Mahwah house, but without motion detectors. The backyard spilled down a slope to a fence that abutted a still-intact wetland, and neither Natalie nor I liked the exposure, but once again we had to work with what we were given. There was a covered swimming pool in the yard, and Miata ran out onto the cover, then raced back to the deck when water began creeping around his paws. Either it brought back bad memories for him or, like us, he knew it was too cold to swim.

We spent the rest of the day getting the guards into position, and it took a while before Natalie and I could agree on how to protect the front. Here, there was no clear border to the street, no fence, just a short strip of grass that met with the asphalt, the driveway coming up on the left side of the house as one faced it. In the end we put one of the guards in the front room, behind the curtains, with orders to watch the street and nothing else, and, to cover the back, another in one of the bedrooms on the second floor, with a similar directive. I took the master bedroom again, Alena the one beside it, and Natalie the one across the hall.

At eight that night Dan arrived with replacements for the boys who'd been on post during the day, and they each entered the house with a rucksack over their shoulder and a pizza box in their hands. After we ate, the old guards departed, the new guards dug in, and I took Alena back upstairs. She did not ask me to time her.

I checked her room and found it as secure as the last time I'd looked, then checked on the guard on the floor, and found him sitting in a straight-backed chair, in the dark, watching the yard through a pair of infrared goggles. I left him alone and went downstairs, where Dan and Natalie were talking in the kitchen over cups of coffee.

"Dan," I said. "The I.R. goggles. Nice touch."

"Thank you," he said, and honest to God he looked pleased.

I told them I was going to bed, went back upstairs and looked in on Alena once more.

Either Gracey or Bowles had ordered up a pot of room-service coffee, and there was a tray with three cups and a pitcher of half-and-half, and a bowl stuffed with packets of sugar and artificial sweeteners on the coffee table by the couch. Bowles, at the desk with the laptop in front of him, squinted at me as if trying to place my face, and the expression hid any surprise he might have been feeling. Gracey recovered by indicating the coffee service with a sweep of his empty hand.

"We only have three cups," he said.

"It's all right," I told him. "We're not staying long. You guys taping this?"

Bowles frowned. Gracey just shook his head. "We didn't think we'd need to. You've been getting around, Atticus. We heard you were in Europe."

"Not me. I haven't been to Europe in years."

" Someone who looks like you, then." Gracey poured himself a cup of coffee, added cream, then two packets of sugar. He used one of the spoons to stir, then licked it clean before setting it down again on the tray. It took him almost a minute to get everything the way he wanted it, and I knew the wheels were spinning, but he was doing a fine job of keeping his thoughts and feelings to himself. Bowles turned back to the laptop and began typing lightly on the keyboard.

When Gracey had tasted the coffee and satisfied himself that it was palatable, he targeted Scott. "You've been fucking us around, Special Agent Fowler. You told us you didn't know where Atticus here was at. That wasn't very nice of you. A thing like that, it could come back and bite a big chunk out of your ass."

"Gosh, I hope that's not a threat, Mr. Gracey." Scott settled his briefcase on the bed and snapped it open. "Especially since I've already written up everything Mr. Kodiak here is going to tell you, and my supervisor found it interesting enough that he's forwarded it to Washington. It's probably going to the Director as we speak."

Gracey pulled out the big, amused grin he'd used so much when we'd first met almost five months earlier, and gestured with his pen at the folder Scott was now offering to him. "Is that copy for us?"

Scott waited, and Gracey didn't take the folder, so he spun it out of his hand onto the bed, closer to where Bowles was seated. Bowles leaned forward from the desk and picked it up, began leafing through it as if it could only hold minor amusement for him, at best.

"Cash flow," Bowles told Gracey.

"No kidding?"

"No kidding," Scott confirmed. "Looks like person or persons unknown tried to make it appear that Ms. Christian Havel was paying Mr. Atticus Kodiak over three hundred thousand dollars for a variety of unspecified services. Oddly enough, all of the money moving between the two seems to have done so without either of the participants' knowledge."

Gracey glanced over his colleague's shoulder, then to me. "Who knew you were so flush?"

"I've been saving for a rainy day," I told him.

"Looks good and cloudy outside right now. I guess we'd better hear it, then. Don't you think we should hear it, Matthew?"

"I suppose we should, yes, probably," Bowles replied, closing the folder and extending it back to Scott.

"You can keep it. I've got copies," Scott said.

Bowles set the folder beside his laptop. "Yes, I think we'd better hear it."

"I'll start with the hypothetical," I said.

Gracey laughed and sat back on the couch beneath the window, bent to refill his cup. Past him I could see the neon and billboards over Times Square, the pedestrian traffic increasing as the workday began. There were new ads up for Broadway shows I'd never heard of before, reminding me that I'd been away for a long time. Bowles turned the laptop slightly so he could see me over the monitor, still tapping away.

"Once upon a time, someone wrote a book about a professional assassin," I said. "The author got a lot of attention for it. The book did very well. It hit bestseller lists. People talked about it. And the more people talked about it, the more people read it. Before this book, people never thought much about professional killers and murder-for-hire and things like that; they thought it was all Hollywood. Sure, most of them would admit that they believe governments have people killed; this was the first time they began to see how it is really done.

"Other books had come before, of course, but those had been dismissed. For some reason this book wasn't. Maybe because the killer, the subject, was a woman; maybe because it had better press. It doesn't matter.

"What matters is that people began asking questions. They wanted to know how this killer could exist. They wanted to know how she was trained. How she worked. How she was funded. And they wanted to know if there were others.

"Now other people are taking notice, and they're getting worried, because these other people, they're the killer's employers. And they're getting nervous.

They're remembering things like Iran-Contra and phrases like 'oversight committee.' They don't want that. They need this problem to go away.

"So they hire another killer, one who is like the assassin in the book, but different. This killer has a specialty, and he can make the problem disappear. He can discredit the author of the book, the subject of the book, even another one of the players. And once they're all discredited, once they're dead and the sordid details of their relationship emerge, the book will be forgotten. Business will continue as before."