“Andthensomething really interesting happened,” Carter said.
“What, it was boring up till then? Oh I forget—this is your regular day at the office.”
“Silvia got an email from your sister, forwarded from you. All the kompromat, and a webcam photo of the list. It was copied toThe Washington Post, the FBI tips email, the main CIA and White House emails…”
“That was the other thing I did before they caught me—well, I set it to upload. The wi-fi was patchy from the apartment below and it was taking ages to send, and then I heard them coming for me, so I hid the laptop and hoped for the best. Hope you don’t mind. I didn’t have a lot of time to think about it. The tie clip and the pendant were a leap of faith, but I knew Kimberly would be only too happy to get involved. I figured it might be too late to save us, but it might bring some justice.”
“I don’t mind at all.” His deep voice rumbled down her spine. “When I was sitting in that interview room, I was kicking myself for not doing it sooner. I had it in my head that I needed to get the whole picture first, to figure out who I could trust. I thought I could do everything myself. I thought Ihad todo everything myself. Turns out dragging you in was the best move I made. I think Silvia is eager to recruit you, just quietly.”
“Oh, I think my career as an international woman of mystery is well over.”
“So,” Florence said to Alice, with a wide grin, “that stuff you told Tania about sending the kompromat everywhere, that wastrue?”
“Yeah.”
“I wascompletelytaken in—as was she. You told the truth but made it sound like a lie.”
“Reverse psychology, in a sense. The lesson I was just about to teach at school when Carter, uh,arrived, was about subtext in literature and film—reading between the lines of what characters say. People always write teachers off, and I figuredshe would too. Plus, I’d read up on lie detectors when I was researching the book, on the physical giveaways that you’re lying, so I tried to mimic them, which wasn’t hard, given that I actuallywaspanicking. Usually I force this blank face when I’m churning inside, but just now I let my fear show.”
“Oh, I always taught my boy to have a good deal of respect for teachers.”
“She really did,” Carter said, his body shaking with a laugh, which made Alice’s ribs hurt a little, but she was okay with that. “And the security camera footage in your email, from outside the safehouse—where did that come from? We watched it on the way out here. At first Silvia and I thought it was the same footage we’d already seen, but then these other guys came into shot.”
She explained about the dead drop, using as few words as possible, because it even hurt to talk.
“Ah,” Carter said. “And guess which tech at Langley handled the CIA’s version of the video when it first came in?”
“Not Leonard Poole?”
“The man himself. Silvia looked it up.”
“So nothing directly connects Tania to the murder?”
“Ah, I can fill that gap,” Carter said. “Nika’s shoe—the one with the blood on it—was still in the FBI lock-up. It had a photo hidden in the heel—Tania handing something to two men—the same men who were caught on that video entering the safehouse. Combined with the undoctored footage and the things she told you just now…”
“The way you got her talking on tape,” Florence said, shaking her head in admiration, “even though she had just mocked you for thinking you could do exactly that. Pure genius. She wouldn’t have fallen for that if it’d come from me.”
“There was something I remembered from my book research—that people become agents for money, ideology, coercion or ego.”
“That’s right—MICE,” Carter said.
“She struck me as the ‘ego’ type. And I guessed with the need for secrecy she doesn’t get a lot of opportunity to boast. So I figured that if I gave her that, in what she thought was a closed loop, given that she was planning to kill us…”
“You did an excellent job of sounding terrified and desperate,” Florence said.
“Don’t get me wrong—I was both of those things. But I kind of doubled down on them.”
“It’s a shame she destroyed the original list. That would have been a key piece of evidence.”
“Oh, she didn’t,” Alice said. “That was the other thing I did while I was hiding in the apartment downstairs, waiting for the email to Kimberly to go through—I copied it onto another piece of paper, a page out of a notebook I found in your backpack. I scrunched and ripped it to make it look good. I’d only just finished doing it when they found me. I figured they’d be looking for it—and the flash drive—and I didn’t want them searching metooclosely, so I made it easy for them. And it worked, thank God. They opened the closet, saw me clutching the backpack, hauled me out, found the list and the flash drive in the little zip pockets right away and thought they’d hit the jackpot. I’d hidden the laptop at the back of the closet, but I could hear the damn thing whirring and I was so scared they’d look for it, but…”
“But they underestimated you,” Carter finished. “So where’s the original list?”
“Where do you think?” Alice said, lifting up one shoe—Nika’s boot—and then wincing at the effort. Who knew how much you needed your ribs for?
Carter laughed. “You’re a legend.”
“You two take a moment to catch your breath,” Florence said. “I’m gonna go and catch up with Silvia. Haven’t seen her for decades. You think she’d like to be in a book club?” She bent andpatted Carter’s shoulder on the way past. “This schoolteacher of yours,” she said quietly, as if pretending Alice couldn’t hear, “she’s quite a match for you.”
