find that the woman he had seen up here before was standing a few feet away with her hands clasped behind her, as though she had been waiting for him. This time the honey-colored hair was tied in a different, equally complex way, and she was wearing a beige suit that seemed to have come from a shop that no ordinary person was allowed to know about, which made clothes that could never wrinkle or stretch at a seam.
“Good morning, Mr. Walker.” The way she said it gave him the impression that she had been here for hours, long before anybody else was awake.
“Good morning,” he said. He had been right: she had been waiting for him. He was not used to having his arrival be something that was awaited, or even noted.
“Mr. McClaren is ready for you.” She turned and led the way. She opened the big oak door and Walker waited for her to precede him, but she stood aside and nodded to show him she wasn’t going in. He stepped inside and the door closed quietly behind him. The office was enormous, a suite rather than a room. The section where he stood had a big antique partners’ desk with chairs on both sides. He sensed that it probably belonged in a museum, but the broad, shining surface was littered with papers, bound reports, telephone message slips, and yellow legal pads covered with notes in small, tight black script. There was a computer terminal on the far side, and it was the same model as Walker’s.
The voice came from somewhere to his right, the deep, quiet accented sound that Walker remembered. “Come on in here.”
Walker followed it under an arched opening into a larger space dominated by tall bookshelves lined with leather-bound volumes that had come in matched sets, so tightly and uniformly arranged that Walker could not conceive of them ever having been moved. McClaren was in a blue suit today, but it was cut in exactly the style of the gray one he had worn the last time. He leaned forward to shake Walker’s hand. “Thanks for coming.”
“No problem,” Walker muttered.
McClaren sat down on the nearest couch, and Walker sat across a low coffee table from him. McClaren leaned forward. “It seems to me that I ought to apologize to you.”
Walker’s brow knitted. “What for?”
“When I told Stillman he could take you with him, I didn’t know that it was going to be that sort of trip.” He seemed to hear a false note in what he had just said, so he amended it. “I should have. In my own defense, I was sure that Ellen Snyder couldn’t possibly be involved in anything dishonest. I was sure that you felt the same way.”
“How?”
McClaren just raised an eyebrow, but Walker saw what he meant, and rephrased it. “How did you know about her, or about what I thought?”
McClaren looked more uncomfortable. “It’s a fair question. I don’t want you to think that we’re spying on people in the company. We’re not. But small bits of legitimate information come to us as a matter of course. Supervisors evaluate you periodically. And we’ve always held to the old-fashioned policy here that when you produce a piece of paper, you sign your name to it. Not every company does that. Over time, we get to know one another. What we learn sometimes borders on the personal—also for legitimate reasons. In the training program, the instructors don’t just evaluate your memory and your mental capacity. They observe how well new people adjust to the work environment—whether they get along, make friends, and so on. You and Ellen Snyder became . . . close friends. People liked her, people liked you. When she got her transfer to Pasadena, those people were concerned that it might have an effect. It didn’t, so the matter was set aside.” He paused. “That doesn’t mean it was forgotten. When we learned Ellen was the agent on the spot during a crime, and that she had disappeared, we remembered that you knew her well.” He hesitated again, then went on. “I was a big fan of Ellen Snyder’s, although I had never spoken to her face-to-face. So you were acting as my surrogate, the one who held my point of view. Again, I’m very sorry,” he said. “It must have been very painful.”
“Don’t be sorry,” said Walker. “In some ways it’s better for me that I was there.”
McClaren looked at him for a moment, as though he had not really seen him before and realized he had missed something. Then he seemed to incorporate it into his mind, and start on a new basis. “There’s another reason why we needed to talk. I don’t have to tell you we’ve got troubles. I need to find out . . . more: I wanted to say ‘how bad they are,’ but that’s wrong, because having a kid like Ellen Snyder murdered is about as bad as things get. But I want to know if that’s it—if we’ve lost a promising young person and now it’s over—or if we’ve got to worry about other people.”
Walker nodded.
“Don’t just nod at me,” McClaren said. “Give me your guess.” He sounded exactly like a professor.
Walker said, “They got away with it. We didn’t figure it out in time. I don’t know much about criminals, but I don’t know anything that would keep them from trying it again.”
“Stillman thinks that the biggest danger is the possibility that we’ve got a traitor, an inside person. What do you think?”
Walker shrugged. “I think Stillman’s the expert.”
“Too easy,” said McClaren. “You have an opinion.”
“I don’t disagree with him,” said Walker. “That would be the worst case, and it’s possible. It would be difficult to go into an insurance company and collect a death benefit that wasn’t yours unless you knew the procedures in advance. But it must be even more difficult for a criminal to approach somebody inside a company and ask him to do something like this. Are there other ways for a thief to find out enough to be able to do it? Sure. I think—”
He saw that McClaren was distracted. The assistant had come in the door silently, and now she stood like a statue in front of the big desk. McClaren patted Walker’s arm apologetically, muttered, “Sorry, excuse me,” and got up to join her by the desk.
He stood very close to her and listened while she spoke to him just above a whisper. McClaren answered just as quietly, and she turned and disappeared. McClaren returned with a weary expression and sat down again. “Something else to think about. The National Weather Service has just upgraded Tropical Storm Theresa to a hurricane. It’s just passed Guadeloupe. They don’t know yet if it will make Florida, of course.”
Walker said, “They usually don’t.”
McClaren stared down at the coffee table, then seemed to remember something. “That’s right. Yours was one of the names on the vulnerability assessment for Florida last year. There’s a copy on my desk right now.”
“I didn’t do much on it,” said Walker. “Just checked the statistics and made sure the arithmetic supported the recommendations.”
“But you know the problems,” said McClaren. “We live on the business of wealthy individuals. If you won’t insure their houses, they won’t let you insure their lives, cars, jewelry, and art collections and sell them annuities. A bigger company will put together a package and sell it cheaper. You can lay off some of the biggest bets with reinsurers, raise deductibles. But disasters are a matter of time. Sooner or later, you have to pay off.”
McClaren gazed at the table again for a moment, then straightened. “Well, let’s do what we can about the problem we already have. I want you to hand off the routine stuff and stay on this Ellen Snyder business. Joyce knows you’re occupied. Go back through dead files and records. See if there have been any other instances when we might have paid these people. I’ve got to know if this is the first time or the twenty-first.”
“All right,” said Walker.
“The second thing—and this could be harder—is that you’ve got to keep this project to yourself.” He caught Walker’s expression. “Stillman again.”
“I recognized him.”
“Stillman is . . . what he is. If you want his services, you have to make some attempt to do what he says. You can’t get a modified version of Stillman.” He paused. “His ways of thinking sometimes have a special utility in a place like this, where everybody is smart and everybody knows how to keep up a good appearance.”
“I have no objection to keeping what I’m doing secret. If Joyce knows I’m occupied, it shouldn’t be hard. We all generally work alone anyway.”
McClaren stood and began to drift toward the outer office, so Walker knew he was about to be dismissed. “While this is going on, if you want to tell me anything, come directly up here. Now that Sarah knows you, there won’t be any problem.” They shook hands in the doorway, and Walker turned and heard the door close behind him.
As Walker made his way to the elevator, he passed the big desk in the reception area. He glanced at the
