“You’re telling me that my tenant was a former Russian spy?”
“For the CIA, yes. For me. I was her handler. Like the book says.”
And with that the world tipped. This was it—the moment she lost her grip on reality and slid down a chute into a parallel universe. She planted a hand on her desk. How was her desk even still here—papers, water bottle, hole punch—all the same as they’d been mere minutes ago when her biggest concern was whether to take her espresso single or double, and even then the answer was obvious?
“I don’t believe it,” she declared, in one last attempt to retain her sanity.
“Believe it.”
“I just thought she had a good imagination and had read too many Robert Ludlum novels. So you’re suggesting our book is—what—hermemoir? If that were true, why would she lie to me, and tell me it was fiction?”
“She signed a non-disclosure agreement, a condition of her exfil to the U.S. Maybe once she knew she was dying, she figured it was safe enough to put her real name on it. It’d get far more attention that way.”
“So you’re serious about being Anderson Holt? This isn’t a prank?”
“Serious. As. Hell,” he said, his eyes locked on hers. The skin around them flinched, like he’d gotten a sudden headache. “You know, I always had my doubts about Randolph, but Nika thoughtIwas a murderer?”
Alice swallowed. “No, she didn’t. And as far as I know she didn’t think Rober—Randolph—was a traitor, either.”
“It’s right here in chapter twenty-five.” He tapped the phone.
“Noooo. See, most of the book was her story, down to the word. But toward the end, she was so weak, so confused. Shewas frantically trying to tell me her big plan for the ending, but she’d go off on tangents about characters who weren’t even in the book. And she’d start talking in Russian and I had to remind her to speak English. When I couldn’t be with her during chemo, she would dictate her thoughts—she became obsessive about it, she’d dictate for hours—but when I got the recordings transcribed, they didn’t make sense, they were all over the place and yo-yoing between the languages. Even when I was sitting by her hospital bed, I had a harder and harder time getting her to focus, getting anything intelligible out of her, though she insisted we keep going. It seemed to be the only thing keeping her … alive.” Alice drove a hand into her hair, a sense of panic rising up her chest. “But, oh wow, those peoplewerein the book? She wasn’t babbling, she was inadvertently using real names instead of character names—however real any of the names were, since half the people would have used aliases. I am so confused.”
“Alice, to be absolutely clear,” he said, in that overly patient tone people used when they were losing patience, “Nikadidn’ttell you I killed him?”
“No.” Alice let her hair spring back, stood and walked to the window. She followed the path of the basketball as it bounced, flew, bounced, flew… “I realized I’d have to finish the book myself. She’d been so passionate about getting the story out there—I didn’t want to let her down. I added a bunch of stuff, including the ending.”
He didn’t reply. After some time, she glanced behind, half-expecting him to have vanished. He was staring at the ceiling, as if seeking redemption from the heavens. Relief? Regret, maybe? If he wasn’t telling the truth about all this, he was either a damn good actor or insane. Neither seemed to fit, but nor did the possibility that this could be real.
The classroom door swished open. Alice gasped, planting her hand on her chest. Two sophomores wandered in—carrying takeout coffees, damn them. Six minutes until the bell—though it would no longer ring in a return to normalcy, would it?
“Sorry, ladies, I have anappointmentwith your teacher,” the guy said in a suggestive growl—there really was no other word for it. “Give us a minute?”
As he ushered the girls to the door, Alice realized she was still clutching his phone. She could call someone. But who?Hello, Security? Looks like I may have defamed a congressional candidate, pinned a murder on an innocent man and revealed state secrets. Either that, or I have a nutcase in my classroom.
He locked the door, lowered the blind and turned. The killer smile (so to speak) he’d used on the girls lingered for a moment before resetting to his square-jawed resting bitch face.
Bastard face? Jerk face?
In the hallway, the girls whispered. One giggled. Yep, Alice would have considered him hot if she were a teenager, despite the eau de trash. But these days she preferred fictitious men—the ones whodidn’tleave the pages of their books.
“Did Nika give you any indication of who really killed the station chief?”
“No. I asked her many times but I figured she was weighing up the options and hadn’t yet plotted it out. So many characters had motive—not to mention the possibility that the Russian FSB had ordered it, or even the CIA. I picked the least likely person?—”
“Anderson Holt.” He wandered across the room and held out a hand for the phone. After a second’s hesitation she handed it over.
“Yes. And added some signposts and clues earlier in the plot, changed a few continuity issues so it made sense. I tried running it by her but by then…” Alice’s eyes stung.
He gave a curt but sympathetic nod. “The text message and the scarf—these were the clues you added?”
She swallowed. “Exactly.”
“And the meeting at Gorky Park was your invention? The SD card built into the matryoshka dolls? The old guy at the souvenir stand?”
“It all sounds so corny when you say it.” Oh God, he had to be telling the truth. How else would he know which parts of the story were Nika’s contributions and which were hers? “I wanted to do justice to her ideas, her story. And sure, I felt a little bad about making you—er, Holt—the killer but you’ve got to admit…”
He was eyeballing her with those deep, glossy Anderson Holt eyes. Eyes a woman could dive into. Maybe that was the solution. She’d dive into his eyes like a character in a fantasy graphic novel and resurface in her regular day with its regular classes and regular hassles.
