It was crumpled when he found it, crushed in such a way between two of the bank statements he was re- examining that Burcher didn’t think it had been extracted for copying. It was a paid-in-cash receipt for access time upon a computer at a cybercafe named Space for Space.
Despite the well-remembered rehearsal of her first hacking expedition it still took Alice most of that day and well into the night to duplicate her IRS evidence, herding her Trojan Horses through the computer system of a Hertz car-hire outlet in Des Moines, Iowa. By the time the physical tiredness of unremitting concentration forced her to stop, just before nine, Alice was still short of her original trove and unsure if she might need any more.
Not a decision that needed to be made tonight, Alice thought, carrying her drink, more gin than tonic, to their once-shared chair. Time enough tomorrow. The following day. No hurry, now that she was safe. The refusal came at once. She wasn’t safe, she was hiding: curling up like a baby, trying to make herself too small to be seen. To be found. There was more than enough in what she’d already downloaded to illustrate how accounts had been padded from subsidiary to subsidiary and from state to state and country to country. All she’d achieve by obtaining more – apart from postponing her committing, physical approach to the FBI – would be unnecessary repetition.
What if it wasn’t enough, evidentially? Sufficient, maybe, for an IRS investigation but not for one by the FBI? It was an income-tax prosecution that nailed Al Capone, she reminded herself. But that had been in the 1930s, not now. Now she needed a Witness Protection Programme and only the FBI provided that. If only she’d had… Alice didn’t complete the thought, her mind racing beyond it.
She hadn’t been thinking properly, completely. Just selfishly, knowing that she was being pursued for her computer intrusion and desperate only to save herself. What about Jane? Jane was the one – the only one – who could get to whatever John had in the safe deposit at Citibank. And therefore the one at risk, as Northcote and John and Janice Snow had been at risk. All of whom were now dead.
Twenty
‘I’m all right,’ insisted Jane, relieved her voice hadn’t wavered, because she wasn’t, not as all right as she would have liked to be. But she didn’t want anyone around her to realize it. There were still too many moments when her mind blanked, mid-sentence, and others when she suffered the audible and visual receding sensation that was the most disconcerting of all.
But she was sufficiently in control of herself and her surroundings to comprehend what she had been told the previous day and to prepare herself for what was going to happen today. John was dead. Today there was to be his funeral, in the same cathedral in which the ceremony for her father had been conducted, and after that the wake at the same hotel in which her father’s had been held. And John’s burial, later, when she’d decided upon where the interment was to be.
But most important of all she believed herself sufficiently free of the drug, now down to its one dose a day minimum, to understand – although perhaps not properly, fully, to comprehend – that she didn’t have John any more. Didn’t have anyone any more. That she was all alone. She’d never imagined being entirely by herself. Not having anyone to turn to, rely upon. She’d sat on charity committees – chaired some of them – and raised money to help people bereaved by tragedy or catastrophe and believed she’d had some conception of their loss. But now, despite the response-dulling effects of the medication, Jane accepted that she had no conception whatsoever. At this precise moment – probably for some time to come – it was too overwhelming for her to conceive, to rationalize in any way. Which was the easiest explanation for why she hadn’t collapsed and wept the previous day or wept today, although she had awakened early, before it was fully light, with total recall of the conversation with Paul Newton and Peter Mortimer, and lain there for more than an hour, trying to envisage a future. And failed, remaining there mummified, thoughts, images, feelings, tears, refusing to come. It went blank again at that moment, so that she was not immediately aware of Geoffrey Davis talking to her.
‘I said we could do away with the formal receiving line,’ repeated the firm’s lawyer.
‘I don’t want that,’ said Jane, freshly insisting. ‘Everything will be done properly, as it should be done.’ John would have wanted that, for everything to be done properly. It was important to remember what John would have wanted. Expected. He would have come round soon enough to wanting a baby as much as she did. Had wanted, she corrected herself. Robbed of John and robbed of having his baby. Or was she robbed? Had he provided the specimen Rosemary Pritchard had asked for? She couldn’t remember – there was still too much she couldn’t remember – but if he had there was surely a possibility of it being used, to impregnate her, once the gynaecologist had corrected her problem. Something she had to call Rosemary about as soon as possible: today even, when she got back from the wake.
‘We’ll be there with you,’ reassured Newton.
‘I don’t want everyone around me!’ exclaimed Jane irritably, sweeping her hand to encompass the overcrowded East 62nd Street drawing room. ‘I want you all to understand that I can manage by myself.’
‘Jane, you can’t stand there entirely alone,’ protested Davis.
She couldn’t, Jane at once conceded: it wouldn’t be the proper thing to do. ‘You,’ she decided, looking at the lawyer. ‘You should represent the firm, with the most senior partner…?’
‘Fred Jolly,’ identified the lawyer, indicating a balding, stooped man beside him whom Jane did not recognize, although she knew that she should.
‘Sorry. Of course, with you, Fred.’ She continued looking around the room. ‘If my having some personal support is so important, Hilda can stay close to me: tell me whom I’m meeting, as often as possible. That all right, Hilda?’
‘Of course,’ said Carver’s matronly personal assistant, who had organized this second funeral and who hoped at the actual service she’d manage the control Jane was showing. The reflection reminded her of the sobbing Janice Snow and she had to swallow heavily, tensed against breaking down.
Jane accepted that she might have difficulty retaining some of her thoughts but hoped the receding, blurred images or words were diminishing. ‘But I don’t think I need any support. Certainly not any further nursing, now that you’ve almost stopped those damned drugs.’
‘ I do. I really do,’ challenged Newton, too quickly.
‘What do you think?’ Jane asked the psychiatrist, well enough aware of the bedside disagreement between the two men.
‘You’re nearly off the chlorpromazine now,’ agreed Mortimer. ‘You sure there aren’t any lingering effects?’
‘You’re watching me, listening to me. What’s your professional opinion?’ demanded Jane, as the faces of those looking at her blurred. She was only distantly aware – but aware, which was all that mattered – of the psychiatrist.
Mortimer said: ‘This isn’t a consulting session.’
Jane’s vision cleared. ‘I’ve got live-in staff. And they have all your numbers. This is how I want it to be. How it will be. I appreciate all your care and all your concern. From now on I want to handle things by myself. And by now I mean just that. Now.’ It had been an effort to finish, but she was sure no one had detected her difficulty. She wasn’t being stupid or arrogant. They’d weaned her off the medication because they’d decided she didn’t need it, as she hadn’t needed medication for her father’s funeral. And if she didn’t need medication she didn’t need nurses to sit around and hold her hand. She didn’t need anyone to hold her hand when she said goodbye to the best husband it had been possible to have. Which was the way to think, Jane told herself. Not to sink into a slough of self-pity but to think how lucky she’d been having him as a loving, caring husband for as long as she had. She’d need to spend a lot of time and effort having John’s crypt designed: ensure it was a monument to him. And speak to Rosemary Pritchard. That was the first priority.
As they left the apartment Newton told Mortimer: ‘Now it’s you who’ve made the mistake.’
‘We’re going to be there, keeping an eye on everything,’ said the psychiatrist. ‘There can’t be any problems.’
Alice hadn’t tried to download any more evidence of cross-border invoice padding. She’d filled the intervening day tidying the cabin, eating properly for the first time since she couldn’t remember when – but shunning alcohol – and driving yet again into Paterson to buy what she thought she needed for the funeral. If those hunting her knew her name she had to assume that they also knew what she looked like: had a photograph, even. Which made the
