Джозеф Файндер - House on Fire

Natalya was quietly crying as we drove away. But I kept staring out the window, because I had to double-check on something.

It took me a moment, but quickly I confirmed it. My stomach knotted as I recognized someone in the crowd. It was a swarthy man with a scar cut through his right eyebrow, and I knew for sure I had seen him before.

But where?

It wasn’t in Boston that I’d seen the guy with the eyebrow. It had been recent, in the last couple of days. Then I called to mind the image of that same guy — close-shaved black hair, swarthy complexion, scarred right eyebrow — looking at Detective Goldman and me and ordering something at the Dunkin’ Donuts, a mile or so from the Bedford police station yesterday. A fit man in his thirties who moved with athletic confidence.

He looked like private security to me. Ex-military, probably. There’s a look the private security guys have — the watchful, distrustful eyes, visibly fit, short hair or a shaved head, clothing that attracts no attention. I assumed he worked for Fritz, but if he did, why was he in the middle of a crowd of anti-Kimball protesters? It didn’t quite make sense.

Or maybe it did. Maybe Fritz planted his security people in the middle of protests against the company, as moles. Gathering intelligence on the protesters. But that wouldn’t explain how his people had found me with Detective Goldman. I was being followed, but I couldn’t quite figure out why. Or how.

Had Detective Goldman leaked my real identity to him? I doubted it. He said he wouldn’t, and I trusted him.

That left a more disturbing explanation — that Fritz had checked out my cover and found a hole. That was possible.

Nothing’s ever perfect.

I had to get back to Boston. I wanted to talk to the eldest brother, Paul, who lived in Cambridge. I said goodbye to Sukie, which was a lot less awkward than I expected, and grabbed a cab to the parking garage south of Central Park where I’d left the Toyota. I did a quick check for GPS trackers, didn’t find any. I’d do a more exhaustive search later.

From New York to Boston the drive is around five hours. I wasn’t followed, that I was certain of. I arrived in Boston in the early evening and checked in with Dorothy. No news.

Back at my loft, I disassembled the GPS tracker from Natalya’s Bentley and took pictures of it with my phone and sent them to Merlin.

He called me that evening from his boat in Chesapeake Bay. “This is an interesting one,” he said. “It’s not domestic. Not US. It’s made by Azur in Israel, for the Israeli army, the IDF, and Mossad and Aman, the Military Intelligence Directorate. Not for export.”

“Why would someone use an Israeli device when you can have good old American, made-in-China products? You can buy whatever you want on the internet. Why Israeli?”

“Because it’s what they’re used to working with. And it’s what they have.”

“So we’re talking Israelis who might have planted this?”

“Possibly. Are you doing something that would attract the interest of the Israeli government?”

“Not at all.”

“There’s always Israeli private security. One of their private intelligence firms.”

But if that’s what it was, who had hired them? To me, the most obvious culprit here was Fritz Heston, Conrad’s protector. I could imagine Conrad pulling his security director aside and saying, “I want to know everywhere she goes. Is she cheating on me? Is she up to something?”

And in response the Israelis would put a tracker on her car. And maybe question the driver. Conrad would keep a close watch on the woman he was about to marry, because that was his way.

But why would Fritz outsource security to an Israeli firm? He had his own team. I didn’t get it.

In the morning I called Paul Kimball, using the number Sukie had given me.

He sounded preoccupied when he answered the phone. “Nick Brown,” I said. Then, to remind him, “Friend of Sukie’s.”

“Oh, God. She told me what happened. The arsonist. Like someone out of Princess Casamassima . She said you wrestled the guy to the ground. Thank you for doing that.”

“I’m worried about Sukie and thought maybe we could have a chat.”

“Of course,” he said.

Cambridge, Massachusetts, is the home of a couple of great universities, Harvard and MIT. It’s a city in its own right that happens to be next to Boston, a much larger city. It has its own character. Very fair-trade coffee, very quinoa grain bowl, and a wide range of wealth. It’s a city of large, rambling houses off Brattle Street occupied by Harvard professors with trust funds, but also seedier places like Cambridgeport, where Gabe lived, and Central Square, where he worked.

I actually passed Paul’s house several times, because I thought I’d somehow gotten the street number wrong. It was a modest brown shingled house on Franklin Street, just a few blocks from the main drag, Mass. Ave., which took you back to Boston. This house was a step up from the triple-decker where Gabe lived, a few blocks away — but not a big step.

It was not the house of a billionaire’s son. But people with a lot of money don’t always flaunt it. The founder of IKEA lives frugally and takes the bus everywhere and brings home salt and pepper packets from the store. Some who were raised in wealth sometimes prefer to live modestly. To not stick out from the crowd.

Still, for a very rich man who was raised in a mansion to live like a graduate student was... Well, something about it appealed to the contrarian in me. It made me like the man a little more.

Paul Kimball was Conrad’s oldest child, the son of his first wife, Barb, a squat fireplug of a woman whom he divorced as soon as he started making real money. She had no interest in the family business and never remarried. But she was well taken care of by a generous settlement.

I checked the number again and rang the bell, and sure enough, Paul Kimball came to the door.

He had on horn-rimmed glasses and wore a loose-fitting gray cardigan sweater over a green polo shirt and ill-fitting ragged jeans and battered, unstylish sneakers. He could have been an adjunct professor at some local college. “Come on in,” he said. “And thank you again for being so helpful to my sister.”

Inside the house was dark and not just cluttered but jammed with books and magazines and papers. Sloppy piles of the New York Review of Books . In the center of the first room we came to was a long, beat-up, splintering wood dining table that was being used as a desk, covered with tall stacks of books interspersed with several laptops. I wondered if his brilliant MIT professor girlfriend lived here too. Some of the books appeared to be on something or someone called Adorno.

I reminded myself that I was Nick Brown to him, I worked for McKinsey, and all that. If he thought it was strange that a relatively new boyfriend of Sukie’s was worried about her mental health, he didn’t let on. He was probably worried himself about what might happen to him — all the Kimball kids had to be — so his safety was surely a subject that was very much at the front of his mind.

“I was about to make a pot of Lapsang souchong — can I pour you some?”

I accepted just to be agreeable. I followed him into the kitchen, which was low-ceilinged and had an old linoleum floor, spiderwebbed with cracks, and appliances that looked thirty or forty years old. The kitchen smelled faintly of cooking gas.

He poured water into a kettle and lit a gas burner by turning the knob. “It’s terrible what happened to Sukie,” he said, his back to me. “It could happen to any of us, I suppose. Though the protesters have left me alone so far, thank God.”