grinned at the other and they walked past her and toward the lobby. She didn’t get into the elevator. She just stood there, rocking back and forth and stamping her feet. It struck Gage that the fidgeting might have been less from cold than from agitation or urgency.
After scanning the floor, Gage came around the van and walked toward her. She turned at the sound of his footsteps.
It was Vicky, her eyes bloodshot and her face raw red.
She took two steps, intercepted him, and then grabbed his upper arm with her gloved hands.
“I need to talk to you,” she said, peering up at him. Tears glistened on her checks. “I’m sorry about how I acted today.” She leaned her forehead against his chest. “Please. If I don’t tell someone, I’ll go crazy.”
Gage reached for her shoulders and turned her so he could see her face.
“Tell me what?”
“I think I killed my father.”
Gage recognized that this was the voice of guilt, not of fact, but that it needed to be heard nonetheless.
“What makes you think so?” Gage asked.
“I told them where he was.”
“Who is ‘them'?”
Vicky looked down and sighed. “I don’t know.”
Gage pointed toward the glass double doors leading to the lobby.
“Let’s go inside,” he said, and then led her into the hotel and toward the coffee shop.
“Can we talk in your room?” she asked, as they passed the reception desk.
Gage shook his head. “I don’t want to be seen taking a girl your age up there.”
His real reason was that she was too erratic, and maybe too delusional, for him to risk being alone with her. Her self-accusation could easily mutate and turn outward, and he didn’t want to become the target.
He guided her to a table along the wall opposite the bank of windows facing the night-lit State Street.
A middle-aged waitress walked up, glancing back and forth between the two of them. Her eyes held for a moment on Vicky’s flushed face, then her brows furrowed, as though she’d decided that Gage was responsible for the distress on Vicky’s face.
When Vicky looked down at the menu, Gage mouthed the words “boy trouble” to the waitress.
She nodded, then rolled her eyes as if to say she’d been through the same thing with her own kids, then took his order for two teas.
“Tell me what happened,” Gage said, after the waitress walked away.
“A year ago an FBI agent stopped me as I was leaving school. He told me that he was worried about my father, afraid that he might get hurt because of his obsession with Hani Ibrahim, and asked me to spy on him.”
Vicky reached for her napkin and smoothed it out on the paper placemat.
“At first I didn’t want to do it. But then I watched my father get more and more frantic, so I called the agent and began to pass on to him things I overheard my father say or whatever I found in his office.”
Gage saw that the napkin was damp with sweat.
“I only learned about the places my father traveled after he got back.” She swallowed hard and crushed the napkin in her hands. “Except Marseilles.”
The waitress arrived and set down two pots of hot water and a selection of tea bags. She slipped Vicky a pocket-sized packet of tissues and then turned and walked away.
“And you think the FBI has something to do with his death,” Gage said, “by having him killed or badgering him into suicide?”
“That’s what I was afraid of, and I’m too terrified to tell my mother what I did.” She shrugged and her eyes went blank. “But now I don’t know what to think.”
“What changed?”
She focused again on Gage. “I started to worry when you showed up and what you might know or tell my mother, so I tried to call the agent earlier tonight, but he didn’t answer his cell phone. Then I called the FBI’s emergency number.” Vicky’s eyes again filled with tears. She stifled a sob. “And they told me they’d never heard of him.”
“What name had he given you?”
“Anthony Gilbert.”
CHAPTER 18
If you think they’re tailing you, then why’d you show up here?” Abrams said to Gage, reaching to close the living room drapes of his Central Park West apartment.
“Don’t bother,” Gage said. “Enjoy the sunrise. I’m not telling them anything new. They began following me from here. They probably followed us from the airport. Somebody might even have been with me on the plane out here.”
Abrams turned back. “Which means?”
“That you’re the real target, not me. And it’s somehow because of Hennessy.” Gage surveyed the room, then walked up next to Abrams and whispered. “How often do you have this place swept for bugs?”
“What?” Abrams said, also in a whisper. “I bought it from a former defense secretary. He would’ve checked. Anyway, nobody could get in to do it.” He pointed downward. “There’s a concierge at the door twenty-four hours.” He spread his hands. “And there are cameras on every floor.”
“Let’s go into the kitchen.”
“Aren’t you being a little paranoid?”
Gage stepped back, pulled up his shirt, and exposed the bruises where Strubb’s partner had punched him.
Abrams’s eyes widened.
“Paranoia doesn’t come in black and blue,” Gage said.
Gage led him down the hall to the kitchen, turned on the water, set the nozzle to spray, and tuned to a local television news show to cover their voices.
Over coffee at the table, Gage recounted the previous twenty-four hours.
“If the point was to kill Hennessy before he talked to me,” Abrams said, “then why would Gilbert still be interested in what I’m doing? ”
“We don’t yet know whether Hennessy was murdered, and if he was, whether it was related to you or-”
“Then I’ll rephrase it. Once Hennessy was dead for whatever reason.”
“Maybe someone is trying to determine whether you’re acting on something that Hennessy might’ve told you ahead of your meeting.”
Abrams thought for a moment. “And that would be why they followed you, thinking that I had hired you to follow up on whatever that was.”
Gage shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe not. They were interested in what his wife gave me, and that could go either way. It could be that they’re only afraid that you asked me to take up Hennessy’s search for Ibrahim.”
“Or for who or what caused Hennessy to be dead.”
“I suspect that they think-or maybe know-that it’s the same thing.”
Gage’s cell phone beeped with an incoming text message. It was from Faith.
I’d like to find a way to stay. Things are calm up here and the kids are helping the villagers and learning more about Chinese culture than if they’d actually done the research project. So am I. Love you.
Gage wrote back.
Love you too. Be careful. Let me know if you need anything.
Abrams rose and walked to the window and looked out toward the gray-fogged Central Park West. He took in a long breath, and then exhaled and turned back.
“I appreciate you coming out here,” Abrams said, “but I think I should just let the thing go. My record in the world of intrigue isn’t so good.”
Neither of them had to say what that record was. Twenty-five years earlier, Abrams had gone on a
