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  “She’s a pro,” Nessuno says. She looks at Wallford, then at Ruiz. “I want to talk to her. Can I talk to her?”

  “You want to go in alone?”

  “Better with a partner.” Nessuno now looks at Bell, and Bell hesitates. What he wants and what he needs are two different things, and for a bitter instant, he resents his duty above all else.

  “Got your back, Chief,” he says.

  Nessuno fills two paper cups with water, and Bell carries a box of tissues. Jordan Webber-Hayden doesn’t look up when they enter, and as soon as they’re through the door they can hear her wheezing, her sobbing hoarse and weak. Bell sets the tissues on the table, and Nessuno sets one cup down, then the other.

  “Jordan,” Nessuno says. “My name is Petra. Have something to drink.”

  The woman doesn’t move, doesn’t acknowledge them at first. Nessuno takes one chair, and Bell takes the other. Nessuno reaches out to him, touches the back of his hand, and Bell looks at her, confused. Nessuno uses her eyes to indicate the woman.

  “I’m Jad,” Bell says. “It’s all right.”

  She lifts her head, looks at him, her eyelashes matted and her eyes rimmed red. A pool of snot has formed on the table; a string runs from it to her nose. She snuffles, but the sobbing subsides. Bell pulls a tissue from the box, reaches out, and wipes her nose. The woman coughs.

  “Thank you.”

  Bell crumples the tissue, tosses it into a corner, pulls another one free. He reaches out again, this time cleaning up the table.

  “Don’t worry about it,” he says. “We all have bad days.”

  She snuffles again, makes a sound as if trying to laugh. He discards the tissue, offers her the box. She takes one, wipes at her eyes, then her nose.

  “You’re not police,” she says.

  “No.”

  “FBI?”

  “Jordan,” Nessuno says. “Who is dorogoy?”

  Jordan Webber-Hayden drops the tissue, takes another. She blows her nose. “My lover.”

  “You mean General Brock?” Bell asks.

  “He was going to shoot me. He was going to kill me and himself, I think.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “Because he loved me.”

  “Strange way to treat someone you love.”

  She shakes her head. “You do not know.”

  Nessuno tilts her head, studies the woman for several silent seconds. Bell, sitting beside her, understands that she’s heard something that he’s missed.

  “How long?” Nessuno asks.

  “What?”

  “How long have you been under, Jordan? Do you even know?”

  The woman won’t look up from the table.

  “Do you remember your name?”

  “Jordan Webber-Hayden.”

  “Your real name, I mean.”

  She doesn’t respond.

  “I’m only starting to remember mine,” Nessuno says. “Sometimes I wake up and I have to actually think about it. It’s getting easier, but I still have to think about it.”

  “You don’t know.”

  “It’ll come back to you. It just takes time.”

  “You don’t know.”

  “I’ll tell you the worst part, though,” Nessuno says. “The worst part is that sometimes I don’t want to be me, I want to be her again. Not the fear, not that. Not waiting to be discovered, not like that. But she was so much…more exciting than me. She was wealthy, she ate in fine restaurants. She wore expensive clothes, not like this, not jeans and a T-shirt and sneakers. She was special. She was loved. Maybe not the way she wanted to be, maybe not really at all, maybe only truly desired. But she could believe that was love. And now I’ve lost her, she’s gone, and I’m trying to be just me again.”

  Jordan Webber-Hayden takes a new tissue, begins tearing at it with her fingernail.

  “Have some water,” Nessuno says.

  The woman hesitates. Then, still holding the tissue, she takes one of the cups in both hands. She empties it, sets it down, takes the second one.

  “I can’t help you,” she says.

  “Sure you can, Jordan,” Bell says. “I know you can.”

  She shakes her head. “I won’t help you.”

  “Is he worth it?” Nessuno asks. “Your lover?”

  Jordan Webber-Hayden looks into the water in her cup.

  “He is everything,” she says.

  They leave her alone for an hour, fall back to the observation room. Ruiz has left, but Heath has arrived, and Wallford has remained.

  “What was that?” Wallford asks Nessuno.

  “That’s called empathy,” Nessuno says. “You should try it sometime.”

  “Her lover is Brock. Was Brock.”

  Nessuno shakes her head. “No way in hell would she do what she’s done for Brock. Kill Steelriver’s family? She’s talking about Echo. She knows him. Tohir didn’t even know him, but that woman in there, she’s been in his bed. She’s in love with him.”

  She points to the glass, where Jordan Webber-Hayden is now sitting upright in her chair, her hands together in front of her. She’s tearing another tissue into tiny fragments, a snowfall of them beginning to pile on the table.

  Heath leans against the far wall, arms folded. “She didn’t limit herself to working General Brock, from what we’ve gathered at her residence. There’s a half dozen lovers at least, and her bedroom is wired for sight and sound, too, feeds into a hard-drive system in the walls. We got a laptop out of her car, and tech has been bashing its head against it for the last few hours, too. We can break the encryption, maybe, but it’s going to take more time than we’ve got. We’re going through everything, but there’s no telling what, if anything, will lead us to Echo.”

  “Echo is secondary,” Bell says. “We need something actionable.”

  Nessuno shakes her head. “She’s not going to know.”

  “We have to ask.”

  “Feel free, but I’m telling you she’s not going to know. That woman in there, she’s me. She’s purpose-built, she was trained for this. She ignored me initially and responded to you. That’s not because you’re nicer. It’s because she’s trying to bond with you, she’s trying to work you.”

  “She killed three people.”

  “That we know of, yes, and maybe more. But that’s not her primary mission. Her place was wired, Jad, and she had a list of lovers. She’s asset acquisition for Echo—that’s her primary, to gather intel and feed it back to him. If it weren’t, if she were an assassin, she’d have killed me with her bare hands. She had the drop on me, she had me cold when I came around that corner. Someone taught her how to shoot and how to fight, but that’s not her MOS, it’s not her job. I know what I’m talking about here. I’m fucking looking in a mirror.”

  “It’s a distorted reflection,” Bell says.

  Wallford clears his throat. “How long you want to let her cook? Because there is a time constraint, you may be aware.”

  “She needs to stew,” Heath says. “The chief’s right about this. We give her a bathroom break, we ask her if she needs anything, we give her something to eat. We need to make friends with her.”

  “Not us,” Nessuno says. She points to Bell. “Him.”

  “Because she’s trying to work me?”

  Heath puts a fingertip to her nose.

  Bell waits and finds it difficult. Nessuno and Heath go in and unchain her and take her to the shitter, bring her back, lock her up again. They bring her a cup of tea, and a sandwich, then leave, and the door to the observation room opens and Nessuno comes in. Wallford has left for the moment, and they’re alone.

  “That’s not you,” Bell says.

  “I don’t need a pep talk.”

  “There’s a difference between her and you.”

  “You think so? Why? Because I did what I did for God and country and she’s doing it for Echo?”

  “That’s not it.”

  “Look, you can dress it up however you want to, Master Sergea
nt. You can make me your battered damsel or you can make me a victim, but the fact is she and I are the same, just with a different coat of paint.”

  “That’s the difference,” Bell says. “You’re not a victim.”

  “No?”

  “No, and you know it. You’re battered and you’re maybe even broken, but so am I, because nobody gets out of combat unharmed. But in spite of everything you’ve been fighting since coming up for air, you still own yourself, and she’s owned by him. I believe everything you’re saying about her, Chief, right down to the rivets. But you do yourself dishonor if you think what she is and what you are match.”

  Nessuno fingers the small medallion on its chain, stares through the glass at Jordan Webber-Hayden. “I think I’m falling for you,” she says.

  “Thank God.”

  “Did you mean what you said? Outside the Hilton?”

  “Every word. I was never any good at talking dirty.”

  “Maybe I can help you with that.”

  “Maybe you don’t need to.”

  “You should get back in there.”

  “She gets her claws into me,” Bell says.

  “I’ll rip ’em right out,” Nessuno says.

  “A lot of people are going to die,” Bell says.

  “I’m sorry,” Jordan Webber-Hayden says. “I don’t know anything about it.”

  “But your lover does?”

  She nods slightly, leans forward so she can bring her hands up and brush hair away from her face. The dress draws tight against her chest when she moves, and Bell makes a point of not looking.

  “So tell me about him.”

  “You’re nothing like him.”

  “Does he have a name?”

  She smiles. “I don’t know it. Do you believe that?”

  “No.”

  “But it’s true. He never told me his name, and I understood that I was never to ask. So I gave him one.”

  “Dorogoy.”

  Her smile brightens. “Yes, exactly.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Jordan.” Her eyes shift past him, to look at the window, the one-way glass that only shows their reflections. “Zoya.”

  “Russian?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is he Russian?”

  “I don’t know.” She shrugs, smiles again. “It doesn’t matter.”

  Bell shifts, leaning forward. She copies him, coming closer.

  “Jordan, you need to listen to me, because I’m trying to help you now. But you’re not helping yourself. I don’t care about your lover, you understand? This isn’t about him. But people are going to die, and if you can help me keep that from happening, anything you can say, anything you can do or offer, that’ll go a long way.”

  “You want to be my friend?”

  “I’m the only friend you have.”

  “You’d probably be a good friend to have,” she says. “I could make something up, I suppose. Try to tell you what you want to hear. But I don’t know anything about that; I told you the truth. That wasn’t what I did. That’s never been what I do.”

  “You understand what’s going to happen to you?”

  “I imagine I’ll go to prison,” she says. “Prison doesn’t frighten me.”

  “It could be worse than prison.”

  “You don’t understand,” she says. “You’ve already done the worst you can to me. You’ve taken me from him. I’m already dead.”

  Bell doesn’t know what to say, is spared the silence by a tapping on the glass over his shoulder. He slides his chair back.

  “Anything you can give us,” Bell says. “Maybe you can see him again.”

  “Don’t you think if I could make that arrangement with you I already would have tried?” she asks.

  Bell leaves, enters the observation room. Nessuno and Heath are there, and he can feel that something’s wrong the moment he steps inside. Nessuno holds out his phone.

  “Just came,” she says.

  Bell reads the text message from his daughter.

  “Who is this?”

  “Master Sergeant Bell?”

  “Yes. Who is this?”

  “You sound alarmed. Don’t be. Your ex-wife has a shotgun pointed at my head, and it’s very clear she knows how to use it. Very clear your daughter does as well.”

  Bell looks at Ruiz, who has a phone of his own pressed to his ear.

  “You’re wondering about the security team on your house,” the man says. “They won’t be coming.”

  “They’re dead?”

  “That’s not relevant, and I am not going to waste time while you try to get a response to your house. Listen carefully. I am going to tell you something, and then I am going to ask a question, and then you will tell me if we can deal. If we can deal, I am going to walk out of your house and leave my phone behind for you. If we cannot deal, your wife will have to kill me.”

  “Let’s hear it.”

  “In just under eighteen hours, a group of armed men are going to enter a very public location and open fire. These are trained, motivated men. It’s going to make what happened in Mumbai look like a parlor game. I can give you everything you need to stop them before they begin. Now the question. Is Jordan Webber-Hayden alive?”

  Bell looks to Ruiz. Ruiz nods.

  “She is.”

  “Then I have something you want, and you have something I want. I’m leaving your house now, Master Sergeant. I’ll contact you in four hours.”

  Bell hears Amy’s voice, the clatter of the phone as it’s picked up. “Jad? Jad? What the hell—”

  “Let him go, don’t let anyone in until I get there.” He hangs up, already rising, says to Ruiz, “We willing to do this?”

  “I’ll know by the time you get there,” Ruiz says. “For this to work he’s going to have to offer himself up.”

  “We give her up to get him and shut this down, I can live with that,” Bell says.

  “Wait a fucking second,” Heath says. “You really think Echo’s willing to lay it down for his piece of tail in the interrogation room? Why in fuck’s name would he do that?”

  “Here’s a crazy thought,” Nessuno says. “Maybe he loves her back.”

  Chapter Thirty

  THE ARCHITECT HAS a horrible moment, walking out of the house, when he fears that he has miscalculated and that Amy Kirsten Carver-Bell is going to shoot him in the back. Then he steps out into the Vermont night, and the door closes behind him, and he hears the locks being thrown. He stops on the lawn and sees the ten-speed bicycle that he presumes Bell’s daughter had been riding before coming home. He walks it to the garage, props it against the front, then heads back down the sidewalk and around the bend, through the trees to where he left the car from which the CI men had been watching the house. The car smells of their blood and other fluids.

  He had taken their weapons and their phones and wallets before disposing of their bodies. He collects them all now, including his own laptop bag. On each phone, he can see multiple missed calls, no doubt attempts to raise them while he was speaking to Bell.

  He leaves the car and starts walking, checks his watch, and sees it’s nearly midnight. With military transport and all the stops pulled, he expects Bell to be at his wife’s home by two thirty in the morning at the latest, but he tells himself he’ll wait until three to make the next call. That’s as late as he’s willing to push it; time is enemy and ally at once in this, for both Zoya and himself, and for Bell.

  He walks in the darkness and sees nobody. He takes his time, mindful, ducks out of sight when the glow of headlights rises in the night. Once, a police car passes him by, but he had warning as it came around the bend, and he is certain no one saw him.

  He makes it to the Church Street Marketplace by one in the morning and is pleased to find lights shining and people about, and then he remembers that it’s a Friday night. He stops at a food stand and buys himself a kebab and a soda, finds a place to sit and people-watch while he eats. By the time he’s finish
ed, the night is catching up with his surroundings. He resumes walking, heading back toward Lake Champlain, and he’s at the shore and listening to the water when his watch tells him it is three.

  He uses one of the two dead men’s phones and dials his own number.

  “Bell.”

  “Neither of us has much time if this is going to work,” the Architect says. “Obviously you do not trust me, and I would be foolish to trust you. What I propose is that you come and meet me. I passed a preschool on my walk on Lake Street, called Heartworks. Meet me in the parking lot there and we can get this process under way.”

  The Architect throws the phone into the water without bothering to disconnect. Then, one after the other, he sends the collection of wallets and weapons in after them.

  He waits until almost three thirty before heading toward the preschool. In the silence, listening, he can hear the sound of the car arriving, stopping, the door opening and shutting. It makes the Architect wonder what he isn’t hearing, if there aren’t a dozen other men closing on his position right now, if a black helicopter isn’t silently watching from above. This isn’t paranoia; this is, to him, only logical.

  Security lights illuminate the preschool parking lot, creating an orange sodium-vapor glow that catches the moisture in the air and refracts it, making it all seem brighter. He can see the man waiting, light in a pool around him. He’s a big man, wearing jeans and a jacket, hands in his pockets. The moment the Architect moves, the man’s head turns, finds him almost immediately. But his hands remain in his pockets, and he says nothing as the Architect approaches.

  “Jonathan Bell?”

  “Yes.”

  “I want it noted,” the Architect says. “I did nothing to your family. I went to them because it was the quickest way to reach you.”

  “You think that buys you something?”

  “I think it’s something for you to consider. Let’s walk.”