Fantastic. The whole scene looked fantastic. As in fantastical. The apartment, the view,him. They ate in silence while he concentrated on the laptop screen. As Alice was winding up her last thread of pasta, he swore under his breath.
“I just found a deposit receipt for a wire transfer. Recipient: Tyler Gregory Wade. $120,000. Not a bad day’s work for a security guard.”
“Who’s it from?”
“Corepoint Services, Geneva. They’re a registered company, but—” He tapped some more. “No website, no other internet presence. Probably a funnel. There’s no Tyler Wade on Nika’s list, unless it’s one of the names we can’t read.”
Alice pulled the list toward her and smoothed out the plastic bag. “But there is this ‘Leo,’ right here where the paper disintegrates. Maybe it’s not the guy in Vladivostok you were thinking of. Maybe it’s ‘Leonard’—does that look like the beginning of an ‘n’ to you?”
“Could be.” His phone beeped, and he checked it. “Well, shit. Text from Mom. That blue car—it’s registered to Randolph’s campaign.”
“What?Randolphtried to kill us? Then why did he escort us out of the hotel?”
“Straight into the sights of Leonard Poole.” He rubbed his forehead with the heel of his hand. “Nah, that makes no sense. Randolph would have higher standards in hired assassins. Uh, this is all swimming together in my head.”
“Welcome to my world. Why don’t you take a nap? I can keep looking, for what that’s worth. See if I can find anything else thatconnects the list to the files. Obviously, I won’t be as much help as you would be, but I can flag anything obvious that jumps out.”
“No, I’m good.”
“You don’t have to do everything yourself, you know. I’ll come and wake you in an hour.”
“I’m fine!”
“In my experience, people who say ‘I’m fine’ like that usually aren’t.”
He scoffed quietly, but then after a few seconds, he said: “Twenty minutes. You don’t mind?”
“Who knows? I might get lucky and find some more gay porn.”
“Stay in incognito mode on the laptop, if you search anything. It’s connected to the apartment wi-fi, which is secure, but the fewer chances we take the better.”
By morning, after taking it in shifts to flick through the files and sleep, they’d built firmer profiles of the names on the list and had drawn several links with the kompromat blackmail, but it was all sketchy. Nothing even close to a smoking gun.
“I just get the feeling we’re not even scratching the surface here,” Carter said, as Alice emerged from the shower, wrapped in a towel. “Like this—it’s a photo of a woman in what looks like a business meeting with several men, taken surreptitiously, by the look of the angle. She bears a strong resemblance to the woman on this website, don’t you think?”
“Definitely. Who is she?” Alice said, pulling out the chair beside him and sitting.
“She works at the American Embassy in Russia, some relatively lowly assistant on the diplomatic staff. But I have no idea who these guys are, or the significance of the meetings. And that’s like everything we’ve found so far. Take Gay Porn Star here. Could be this guy on the list, who used to work as an officeassistant at the American embassy in Paris, but I’d have to see him naked and from behind to be sure.”
“I know, right? I found a series of emails that mentions a meeting with someone called ‘Annelise,’ and there’s an Annelise on the list who works for a multinational finance company, but so what?”
“Nothing at all seems to reference the station chief, let alone his murder. And I haven’t even started on the documents that are in Russian. Every single one of these documents is a three-hour trip down an internet rabbit hole—the ones that hold any obvious clues at all—and even then I end up with a whole lot of meaningless garbage. Oh, here, I made you coffee.” He slid it across to her.
“The common thread is that these people were obviously being bribed or blackmailed. But by who? And to what end? What did they get out of it?”
“Right? Like, being blackmailed is probably not a crime in itself. But there’s gotta be a reason someone would go to that effort.” Carter pulled his neck to one side and the other, wincing. “Ah,Alisa, this could take weeks, and we could still end up short of any killer evidence.”
Alice stared at him, rubbing her lips together. “Alisa.”
“It’s what Nika called you, on the tape. You don’t like it?”
“That’s the Russian version of ‘Alice,’ right? She called me it sometimes, especially when she was getting confused.”
“What are you thinking?”
“If she was calling me ‘Alisa’ on the tape, then what about the ‘Tatiana’ and ‘Yakov’ she talks about? Could she have been getting confused between the Russian and English equivalents?Dothey have English equivalents?”
Carter pulled the laptop toward him and tapped. “Well, Tatiana’s name is on the list, or at least part of it, so I don’tknow about that, but it says here that Yakov is Jacob or James, in English. Tatiana is…” He typed. “Tanya, or Tania.”
