“Not as much as me. You just announced to the world that I’m a killer and suggested you have evidence of such a thing.”
“So how about my idea of turning up to the police? I don’t even need to mention that you’re involved.”
“Oh, I’m involved. And so are you, whether you want to be or not. There are certain people who would like to know exactly what else Nika has told you, for purposes that might not be wholesome, and certain people who’d prefer you weren’t in a position to disclose that information. I get that this is a shock, so I suggest you take some time to think about that. Meantime, I’m just going to go ahead and protect you from yourself. And I think we should take a trip up to Baltimore.”
“But that’s where this Randolph guy is.”
“Exactly.”
“You want to go and see him? He’s suing me. What if he calls the authorities or whoever on us?”
“We’ll take precautions. We need to assemble a picture, and we don’t have much to work with.”
“I’m not sure about this ‘we’ you keep talking about. I’m a wanted woman, or something. Won’t running get me in even worse trouble?”
“You’re not wanted, not technically. Neither of us is, yet.”
“Yet?”
“You can quite honestly say you left town because you freaked out when some strange, scary people came after you—or because amodern-day Steve McQueenswept you off your feet.”
And there went the hot cheeks again. That was another description she’d added to the book—she’d had to explain to Nika who Steve McQueen was, show her photos, and Nika had immediately agreed to the comparison. “And if I say no?”
“Don’t say no.”
She waited a second, but he didn’t elaborate. “That’s all you’ve got?”
“I’m not gonna force you to do anything. But without those files, you’re only useful to me for what’s in here.” He tapped her head. “And I’d like a little more time to download that.”
“I don’t know what I can tell you. I don’t want to be mixed up in this. I’m a very ordinary woman, you know.”
He raised an eyebrow, as if her ordinariness were a point of contention. “I’d rather not be mixed up in this either. But until we know the truth, we’re not safe. Run now, explain later. Always been my motto.”
“That’s a terrible motto. We should sit tight, explain now.”
“You are so institutionalized.”
“Me? You work for one of the most notoriously institutional institutions in the world.Worked.”
“When you do what I do—did what Idid—you’re on both the inside and the outside of it. I was paid to make it up as I went along. It’s what I’m good at—one of the many things.”
“I don’t get why you can’t just go to the authorities and explain too. Honesty’s the best policy, right? I’ll tell them I made up the ending. What’s the problem?”
“The problem is that we don’t know what they know, and we don’t know what Nika knew. That puts us on the back foot, and trust me, you don’t want to go into an interrogation on the back foot. We could be playing into the hands of whoever is pushing the narrative that I was the trigger man. As it stands, we only have an eyewitness account from Nika, as detailed in the book, that puts the gun in my hand.”
“Which isn’t true. If I tell them that I made the part up about you being the murderer, that would mean there’s no evidence against you, right? Wouldn’t you then be covered by reasonable doubt?”
“Sure, if it went to trial, if it was a fair trial, if they didn’t find ‘alternative’ evidence, if we even stay alive long enough to get that far. Far too many ifs. Look,” he said, sitting on a post beside her, “we are not in a powerful position here, and I would like to change that. The information I have points to someone of influence on the inside orchestrating this—and potentially being the mole or the real killer or both. I’d like to fill some gaps in the timeline in those last days in Moscow and when we got to the States. Because it’s obvious that someone thinks Nika did know something—the way the path suddenly cleared for her to come to the U.S., the way all this went away, the fact there’s so much interest in her now… Plus, you just said she had something she wanted to give me. I know all this is not your thing, and believe me, I would normally avoid asking people for help. I know you might be finding this all hard to take in…”
She snorted.
“But you need my help, even if you don’t quite grasp that yet. Well, you need someone’s help, and I’m the only one offering. Right now we have a strong mutual interest, more so than anyone else in this shitstorm. Alice, I don’t have much in my life, but of the things I do have, my freedom is important. Survival comes a close second. I’m over this limbo—the limbo of having been kicked out of the career that was everything to me, the limbo of not knowing what’s happening in Russia. Though I’ve gotta say, I’m glad to know Nika wasn’t alone at the end.” He stared into a glade of flowering dogwood, rubbing his lips together thoughtfully. “The night before she died, you held her hand, you read to her?”
“No one should leave on that journey alone.”
“And you’d known her for how long when she died?”
“Seven months.”
