“Mostly I want to piece together what she knew about the day and night before we left Russia, when the station chief was killed.” He picked up his phone and started swiping through the ebook. “First, you’d better tell me what she wrote or told you, and what you made up. Some of it I can guess at but…”
“Up until the body is found, it’s mostly her story, minus a few layers of details. After that, I had to put things together. She set up the mystery, I had to resolve it. We were saving the reveal of what actually happened in the safehouse until last, but by that time…”
“Thispart was obviously her doing,” he said, pausing at chapter seventeen. The sex scene.
“No incriminating secrets in there, well not of the legal kind.” Alice reached over his shoulder to the phone. “Safe to skip past.”
He pulled the phone out of her reach. “I like this part. There are some good jokes. Yours, I’m guessing.”
“I did edit it. Nika had used some unusual mixed metaphors to describe the … mechanics.”
“Themechanics?”
Alice sat back and hugged her knees, grateful he was facing away. “You know, the functionality. Tab-A to slot-B.”
“What kind of metaphors?”
“I’m so not saying. I was worried the book might end up in those awards for the worst sex scenes in literature. Though more than seventy-three people would have had to have read it before it reached that kind of infamy.”
“Pretty sure more than seventy-three people have read it. Think I’ll get my own fan club? Team Holt? You might need to apologize to my mom, though. Last I heard, all the women in herbook club were sharing screenshots of this chapter. Dunno how I’m going to look them in the eye.”
“Screenshots? It’s not like the book is expensive. Why is it people will happily hand over four bucks for a coffee, but steal a four-dollar book? Why would you even give it to your mom?”
“Other way around. She found it and alerted me.”
“How didshefind it?”
“Her book club—they’re kinda obsessed with spy thrillers. Mom said her friend got an alert when it dropped on some ebook site. Keyword shit, I dunno. And then I very quickly started to hear about it from my intelligence contacts.”
“Is that how you ended up in the CIA? You grew up with spy thrillers?”
“Something like that,” he said, in the same tone he usually reserved for ‘long story.’ “I’m glad it seems to have been a happy memory for Nika,” he said, swiping through the scene. “We argued the next morning, like it says. I stormed off to have a shower, and, well, you know what happened after that.”
“I get the sense it was averyhappy memory—now that I know itwasa memory.”
“I wondered afterward if I’d taken advantage of her. The whole job was about using people, lying to people, but I’d never gothatfar. I had no idea she was actually…” He frowned.
“In love with you?”
“She told me as much, afterward, and I … I could have handled it better.”
“I can’t believe that scene was real. We used to joke about how we had a crush on our book boyfriend.” She reached over him and flicked ahead in the book. “There’s not much more after that which would be relevant. The hotel raid was the last part she wrote. The rest was me.”
“Back up, back up,” he said, twisting to face Alice. “Wehad a crush?”
“What? Who did?”
“You saidwe.Wehad a crush.”
“I saidshedid.”
“Then why areyoublushing?”
“I’m not! Okay, maybe a little, but it’s because you’re accusing me of…”
“Of…?”
“He was a fictional character. It’s not real.”
