didn’t find out he wasn’t until I was standing in Prager’s offices. Remind me again who’s responsible for that triumph of intel.”
“Fuck you,” Tina says, without much conviction. “You think this will fly?”
Carr shrugs. “The bigger question is whether Greg Frye will last until the party.”
“It’s not much longer.”
“Yeah, but Dennis tells me Rink’s been busy. She’s poring over what was on the flash drive, Googling like mad.”
“Doing it herself?”
“Apparently.”
“I’ll call Singapore-make sure our guy remembers his lines.”
Carr nods. “If he does, and if Rink stays focused on the info on the flash drive, Frye might last. If she starts digging deeper into his criminal record-trying to talk to arresting officers or prosecutors-we’re hosed.”
Tina’s jaw clenches. “Just a few days more,” she says, and she jabs her fish with a fork.
Carr has a laptop open and aerial photos of Prager’s property spread out on the coffee table. He’s looking at a floor plan of Prager’s house when Howard Bessemer walks in. Bessemer is fresh from the hotel spa, wrapped in spa terry cloth, shod in spa slippers, and admiring his new spa manicure. He stops when he sees Carr and stares at the coffee table.
“That doesn’t look like packing, Greg,” Bessemer says.
“Don’t worry, Howie, we’re going home-right after the party.”
Bessemer’s spa glow vanishes, replaced by a nervous pallor. “You said we were leaving before then.”
“Change of plans.”
Bessemer looks down at his terry-cloth slippers, and then at the tabletop again. “That can’t be good.”
“It’ll be fine, Howie,” Carr says, and he returns to his work.
“What do we-”
“It’ll be fine,” Carr says again. “Just think about what you’re going to do afterward. It’ll be fine.” Bessemer looks at him skeptically and Carr ignores him until he goes away.
Carr isn’t lying to Bessemer. An uncharacteristic calm settled over him the night before, as Dennis delivered the news, and it hasn’t abandoned him yet. The adrenaline started pumping as he began laying flesh on his skeletal fallback plan, and it’s built with every detail he’s added, but it hasn’t jangled him. In fact, there’s something oddly comforting about it.
He studies the photos and drawings, memorizing points of entry and egress, camera fields and blind spots, alternate routes and dead ends, and it reminds him of his training days at the Farm. His heart rate is up, his fingers are drumming on the table, and there’s a hum in his gut that he recognizes as eagerness. Carr can almost hear the rough brogue and smiles to himself. Roller coasters -after all this time, here, on his last job, he’s finally developed a taste for them. Declan would be proud.
The call comes in the empty night, when it seems even the ocean is still. The voice on the other end is held together with tissue paper and trembling breath, and Carr almost doesn’t recognize it as Eleanor Calvin’s. When he does, he’s certain she’s calling to report a death, but he’s wrong.
“He is… I don’t know… I can’t find him anywhere. I came over this afternoon and… the ambassador was gone.”
37
Carr ignores the phone twitching in his pocket for the third time in ten minutes, for the hundredth time since dawn, and focuses on the Stockbridge cop shifting nervously on the porch steps. He’s young and earnest, and every time he speaks his Adam’s apple jumps behind the collar of his uniform shirt. He reminds Carr of Dennis.
“There’s nothing new since the Lenox PD called this morning, to say they found his Volvo in the town lot. They haven’t found anyone who saw the ambassador park it yet.”
Carr bites back the reflexive correction and nods. “My mother is buried in Lenox. He may-”
“Mrs. Calvin told us. Lenox has a man doing drive-bys in case he shows up there, but they haven’t seen him yet.”
“Did they check the local inns?”
“Lenox checked the inns in town, the Staties checked the motels along Route Seven. Nobody’s seen him.”
“How about the car? Did it look like he’d slept in it? Did it look broken into?”
“Broken into?”
Carr sighs. “Is it possible it was stolen from someplace else and dumped in Lenox?”
The cop reddens. “I… Lenox didn’t say anything special about it, but I can ask them.”
“I’ll ask myself, when I go up there. What about the temperature last night?”
“The temperature?”
“How cold did it get up there?”
The cop squints, and then it dawns on him. “No, no-he would’ve been okay. It was in the low sixties last night.”
Carr nods. “You’ll tell the Lenox PD I’m coming up?”
“Sure, Mr. Carr,” he says. “Did you have any luck finding his cell phone, sir? Because if it’s turned on-”
“It was in his sock drawer. The battery is dead.”
The cop’s Adam’s apple leaps, and he shakes his head regretfully. “We’ll be in touch then,” he says, and he walks down the path to his cruiser.
Carr rubs his palms over his face, which feels thick and numb. His eyes are sticky and he smells like airports and rental cars.
Eleanor Calvin is inside, red-eyed, sniffling, smaller. “Tim Binney,” she says. “He’s a nice boy. I just wish he had more to tell us.”
“Uh-huh,” Carr says. Even with the shades up and all the windows open, the house is gloomy, and it reeks of food and heat and mildew. Carr swallows hard, tries not to breathe too deeply or to look too closely at anything.
He fishes his phone from his pocket and scans through a long list of missed calls. Mike, Bobby, Bobby, Mike, Valerie, Valerie, Valerie. He turns the ringer on, and as soon as he does the phone burrs. Valerie again. He turns the ringer off.
“Your phone is always ringing.”
“Work,” Carr says. He looks up at Eleanor Calvin. She’s crying again. “Mrs. Calvin, it’s not your fault.”
“Yes, it is. I knew he was upset. I knew he was confused. I just never thought he would… I lost patience with him.”
“He has that effect on people.”
She shakes her head. “No. I was stupid. He was upset and confused and frustrated, and I shouldn’t have argued with him. I didn’t know that Volvo still ran. I didn’t think he had the key.”
“I took it away last year, but he must’ve had a spare. He was upset even before he found out that you were moving?”
She nods. “He’s been agitated for weeks, on and off.”
“About anything in particular?”
“He’s been talking about your mother.”
“Why?”
An embarrassed look crosses her face, and she looks away from Carr. “Her birthday is coming up, dear-next Tuesday. She’s always on his mind, this time of year.”
“What does he say?”
Eleanor Calvin’s cheeks redden. “He curses sometimes, the way he cursed at me-but I don’t think he means anything by it. Other times, I can tell he misses her. Just a few days ago he was talking about… I don’t know, I suppose it might’ve been a vacation the three of you took. And there was something about a fairy tale-King Midas, I
