"All clear," I said. For what, though? A Swiss bank account withdrawal? Rerouting planes over Kennedy?
Owen pulled a flash drive from his pocket, sliding it into a USB port and pulling up a video file. Immediately, I recognized the image. The beige carpet, the beige walls, the seamless tunnel of blandness …
Once again, I was back at the Lucinda Hotel.
The angle of the video-looking down-was from the end of the hallway on the seventeenth floor. My first thought was that Owen had tapped into a feed from a surveillance camera, albeit a color one with a super-crisp picture. Why would the Lucinda spring for that? They wouldn't.
"I attached the camera above the exit sign by the stairs," said Owen, all but reading my mind. "It's wireless."
He interrupted the live feed to cue up the footage from the beginning, back when he first checked into the hotel. He had recorded everything. Every second of every minute of every person who wanted to kill first him and then, later, me.</ol>
He was fast-forwarding through it all, but it was all right there, surreal as hell. Claire's killer arriving. Owen leaving. My showing up, followed by the duo from Bethesda Terrace, who, after wielding their magic pliers, indeed pulled double duty as the world's fastest cleanup crew, complete with removing Claire's killer wrapped in a blanket. Perhaps the most unsettling part about that detail was how nonchalant they were carrying a dead body toward the stairwell. Just another day at the office.
Next came the arrival of the police and me again. Or, at least, it would've been. Owen had paused the recording, rewinding slowly before stopping on a clean shot of one of our would-be assassins. With a crop, cut, and paste, Owen fed the image into what I gathered was some kind of restricted personnel file of the CIA. But nothing was happening.
"Shit," he muttered under his breath. "So much for the front door."
That was when things got a bit freaky.
Owen reached into his other pocket, pulling out a small contact lens case. Before I could even ask what the hell he was doing, he'd put a red-tinted lens in his left eye and stared directly into the tiny camera above the MacBook Pro's screen.
Now, suddenly-open sesame-everything was happening. Pixelated fragments of the guy's facial features were bouncing from one photo to the next at the speed of a strobe light while charts and graphs measured the similarities. Seizure alert. The screen looked like the love child of a PowerPoint presentation and a pinball machine on tilt.
"This might take a while to get a match," said Owen, removing the lens from his eye with a quick pinch.
"You just hacked your way into the CIA, didn't you?" I asked.
He looked at me and flashed the quickest-and guiltiest-of smiles. "Hacked is such an ugly word," he said.
CHAPTER 35
OWEN WATCHED the screen and waited. I waited and watched Owen. He was doing that thing again, washing his hands under an imaginary faucet.
And me? What was I doing?
From the get-go, the very beginning, I'd been playing catchup. Who killed Claire? Who was the source she was going to see, and what did he know?
Now I knew. So what next?
It seemed pretty obvious to me. Of course, that should've been my first red flag.
"Owen?" I said.
"Yeah?"
His eyes remained locked on the screen. He was barely even blinking. That was fine. He didn't need to look at me so long as he listened.
"We need to go to the police," I said.
"Yeah, I know. That makes sense."
"Good."
"But we're not going to."
"Why not?"
"Because it doesn't work that way," he said. "They can't help us."
"They can at least protect us."
He threw me a look. "You really think so?"
It had occurred to me. Maybe I wasn't seeing the big picture, or at least how it looked from his point of view. "You want to go to another paper, is that what you're saying? Maybe a news network?" I asked.
Finally, he stopped rubbing his hands and turned to me. The words were calm and measured, but the meaning was anything but. To hell with whistle-blowing. This was no longer about going public. This was now personal.
"A decision was made to kill my boss … then Claire … then me … then you," he said. "And if you can make a decision like that, you're not worried about the law. You're above the law."
Attorneys, especially former prosecutors, generally bristle at the idea of anyone being above the law. Then again, I'd been disbarred.
"What exactly do you have in mind?" I asked.
"The only way to smoke them out is to remain their target," he said. "Think about it. As long as they're coming for us … "
"It's a path right back to them," I said.
Owen nodded-bingo-before glancing back at the screen. "Now we just need a little background information," he said. "Always get to know better the people who want you dead."
Words to live by.
So there you had it. Why we were standing in the middle of an Apple store playing match-dot-com with the personnel files of the CIA. Let them come after us, Owen was saying. Let's be foolish.
"Can I borrow your phone for a minute?" I asked. "I seem to have lost mine."
Owen ignored my sarcasm. "Who are you calling?"
"No one."
He still wasn't sure, but he handed it to me anyway. Then he watched as I made a beeline to the accessories section, pulling an i-FlashDrive off the shelf.
As I began to open the package, a female blue-shirt with a ponytail and geek-chic glasses came over in a panic. She looked as if I'd just defaced the Mona Lisa.</ol>
"Sir! You can't just-"
"How much is it?" I asked, reaching for my wallet.
She craned her neck to check the price. "Forty-four ninety-five," she said. "Plus tax."
I gave her fifty. Then, before she could tell me she needed to scan the bar code, I removed the drive and handed over the packaging. "I think I'll pass on the extended warranty," I said, walking away.
I returned to Owen while plugging the drive into his phone. "What are the file names of the two recordings you showed me at the Oak Tavern?" I asked.
He gave me the names and I transferred them to the drive. I handed him back his phone. "Thanks," I said.
He motioned to the drive as I put it in my pocket. "What's that for?"
"Just tell me where I can meet you in an hour," I said, taking a couple of steps back.
"Wait. Where are you going?"
I reached for my sunglasses, sliding them on. "Margin of error," I said. "Just in case you get us both killed."
CHAPTER 36
I QUICKLY wrote everything down on the only blank piece of paper I could get my hands on in the back of the cab taking me across town to Eighth Avenue. It was the flip side of a log sheet the driver was using to keep track of fares. He was fine letting me have it, although when I also asked for his pen and clipboard it was clear I was pushing my luck.
"You want to drive, too?" he asked.
After he dropped me off in front of the New York Times Building, it dawned on me how long it had been since I'd last set foot in Claire's office. One reason was that she didn't actually have an office, just a desk out in the open in the very crowded national affairs section. Visiting Claire was like being on the wrong side of the bars at the zoo. No privacy. You were essentially on display.
The other reason was the guy sitting twenty feet from her desk who actually did have an office, a Brit by the name of Sebastian Cole. Before I first met Claire, she and Sebastian had a brief, hush-hush office romance that, according to Claire, "was the second-best-kept secret after Deep Throat."
"You might want to go with a different analogy," I suggested after she told me that, on one of our early dates. "At least for my benefit."
I remembered we both cracked up over that.
Anyway, as Claire described it, she was young and he was her boss, a surefire way to jeopardize your career even before you really have one. After four months, she ended it.
In the grand tradition of the British stiff upper lip, Sebastian handled her breaking up with him with aplomb, sparing her any retaliation such as reassigning her to the obituary department. Good for him. Even better for Claire. As for me, that was a different story.
The true extent of Sebastian's coping abilities was put to the test a couple of years later at cocktail party thrown by another editor in national affairs. The test consisted of seven simple words spoken by Claire. Sebastian, I'd like you to meet Trevor …
So much for the British stiff upper lip. Instead, I got the stink eye along with all the bloody attitude that an Oxford-educated, bow-tie-wearing chap hailing from Stoke d'Abernon could throw my way. Sebastian hated American lawyers and hated even more the idea that Claire would be with one. At least, that was how she explained it later. I was more partial to the adage that guys will be guys, especially when it comes to girls. Jealousy rules the day, and at the end of it we're all just a lyric in a Joe Jackson song. Is she really going out with him?
But that was then. This was now. Claire was suddenly gone, and neither of us would ever be with her again. That was certainly the subtext as I sat down with Sebastian. Let bygones be bygones.
"I'm in shock," he said from behind his desk, slowly twisting a paper clip in his hands. I could tell he'd been crying, as had everyone else I'd passed en route to his office.