“It’s quiet down here; it’s a rainy night,” Rashaad said. “It’s perfect.”
Nagib eased back. “Okay. We wait a little. Then I’ll go in again.”
SIXTEEN
Alex was about to change and shower for bed when her doorbell rang. It gave her pause. Normally, visitors didn’t show up at the door unexpectedly, and they never did this late. Her friends normally knew better to drop in on her unannounced.
She glanced at her watch. It was a few minutes past 11:00 p.m. Who was in the hall?
An emergency of some sort? She wondered. A problem in the building?
She stood and walked to the door. She thought of taking her weapon with her. One could never be too careful in her line of work, but she decided against it, maybe out of pure laziness.
She arrived at the door and looked through the peephole. A little wave of relief swept across her. It was her neighbor, Mr. Thomas, the older gentleman she affectionately called “Don Tomas,” the retired diplomat. He was definitely a friend.
With him stood a young woman, a girl maybe a third his age.
Alex suppressed a mischievous smirk. Maybe the old boy wanted to borrow a bottle of champagne. Then she suppressed her smile, undid the latch, and opened the door.
Immediately, before Alex could speak, Don Tomas held up a finger to his lips to indicate silence. Then he spoke in a barely audible whisper.
“Good evening, Alex,” he said. “I hope I’m not disturbing you.” His tone was serious. She picked up on it right away.
She shook her head to indicate that, no, he was not disturbing her at all.
“I have some new music that I downloaded,” he said, continuing a low tone tinged with a conspiratorial air. “I wondered if you’d like to come over and take a listen. Some of them might be of interest to you. I’d be glad to lend you a few of my bootleg CDs if you’d like to rip them.”
Alex was about to open her mouth to respond softly when Don Tomas moved his firm finger from his lips to a few inches in front of Alex’s. At the same time, the young woman held forth a note scrawled on the open pages of a writing tablet.
Alex glanced at it and her eyes widened. Her heart skipped as she read. The note said,
I used to work for the CIA
I once planted a listening
device in your apartment
I think it’s still there
Alex raised her gaze and looked into the girl’s eyes. The girl looked frightened and agitated, hunted, like a doe in deer season. Her appearance also rang a distant bell to Alex. It took a second, but Alex realized that she was Don Tomas’s niece. Her name was Janet; Alex had seen her from time to time in the building and had even been introduced briefly once in the hallway.
Abruptly, Janet turned the page of the writing tablet and presented a second written message.
I used to work for Michael Cerny
We need to talk
Alex blinked in surprise and looked back up. She saw more fear in the girl’s eyes.
Alex raised her own finger to indicate they should wait for a moment. She ducked back into her apartment, found her pistol, and clipped it to the right side of the belt on her jeans. Then she returned to her door and followed her neighbor across the hallway to his place.
As she crossed the hall, Alex saw no one other than Don Tomas and Janet. The corridor was as quiet as a tomb, although there was a strange scent of something cooking, or, more accurately, overcooking.
“Mrs. Rothman down the hall has gone complete daffy,” Don Tomas said as explanation. “Poor old woman burns food at all hours. Puts stuff in the toaster and forgets. One of these days an onion bagel is going to turn this whole place into an inferno.”
They entered Don Tomas’s apartment and closed the door.
SEVENTEEN
Alex hadn’t been in this apartment for some time, not since having had a pleasant brunch there almost a year earlier with Robert. Now her presence keyed the bittersweet memory. For a moment she struggled to get past it.
Don Tomas threw a second bolt on his door. Alex looked at the bolt. It was newly installed and top-of-the-line with steel plating underneath which would make a push-in almost impossible.
“I’ve stepped up my own personal security in here,” he grumbled. “One of those blue-haired old ladies downstairs got burgled the other day, did you hear?”
“No, I didn’t,” Alex said.
“Or she said she did anyway,” he said. “Who knows? She’s as deaf as a haddock and as senile as I’ll be in another few years. But at least now it will take someone a full minute to break in, as opposed to the ten seconds it probably would have taken before. You might consider doing the same.”
“Thanks for the tip,” Alex answered.
“Oh, I know, I’m being a cantankerous old goat,” the retired diplomat grumbled, “but my niece has been staying with me recently. You never know who’s hanging around the hallways these days. And the idiot doormen are usually busy getting off on
Don Tomas was a nineteenth-century man trapped in the small quotidian horrors of the twenty-first century. It was what Alex liked about him.
“Anyway,” he continued as he trudged heavily to his living room. “Tonight’s not about me; it’s about my niece. You know each other?”
The two young women eyed each other as they walked.
“Alex, meet Janet. Janet, meet Alex,” Don Tomas said. “There! Now you’re old friends.”
“I think we’ve passed in the elevators,” Alex said.
“Well, thank God the elevator wasn’t plunging from this floor to the sub-basement at the time,” Don Tomas said. “I take the stairs myself. I’d take them three at a time, but I’d give myself a heart attack after one flight. Anyway, the steps are healthier.”
“Healthier,” Alex said as they walked past Don Tomas’s ample bar and impressive collection of cigars inside an elaborate glass humidor. Janet led them to the sitting area in the living room and, with a gesture of exhaustion, eased onto the sofa.
The distinctive prints remained on the living room walls, mostly art deco originals from the twenties and thirties, stylized prints of beautiful women in most cases, including some brilliant works by the French Sapphic artist Tamara de Lempicka. In a further bizarre decorative touch, Don Tomas had added an antique print of a racehorse that bore his name, a gift, he explained, from a friend on his recent fifty-fifth birthday.
“My great-great-great grandfather was a Confederate cavalry captain in the Civil War,” Don Tomas explained. “Those of his men whom he didn’t get killed seemed to be rather fond of him after the war. So they named a racehorse after him.”
“Apparently,” Alex said, eyeing the print.
“It was a gelding,” Janet said.
“It was not!” Don Tomas insisted. “And it must have been a pretty good old nag-it won the 1875 Preakness and was later put out to stud.”
“A little before my time,” Alex said.
“Just a bit before mine as well,” Don Tomas added, “despite what you might think. I can honestly say I’m closer to sixty than a hundred and twenty-five. Would you like a drink, by the way? I have a new bottle of thirty-year-old single Malt Balvenie, speaking of graceful aging.”
“I’d love a short glass,” Alex said. “Where on earth did you find a thirty-year-old Balvenie?”
“Oh, I have my sources,” Don Tomas said, pouring a shot of the single malt into a whiskey glass. “Plus, it’s not where I got it; the amusing detail is what I spent for it. Middle range of three figures.” He poured an ample portion for himself. “Janet? Can I get you something? Or would you like to stick to a carcinogen- laced diet soda or perhaps a beer, I hope?”
Janet had already retrieved a bottle of Budweiser from the refrigerator and plopped down on a chair before the sofa. She swigged from the bottle as Don Tomas and Alex savored the complexities of Caledonia. After two swigs, Janet embarked into some backstory that also had some complexity also.
“Okay,” she said, turning to Alex, “I have a lot of crap that I need to bring you up to speed on.”
“Then let’s start,” Alex said.
According to Janet, she had been one of those pretty but geeky girls in high school who had been a computer and electronics whiz. “My brain was so right-sided that the joke was that I might tip over,” she said. She had parlayed her straight A’s in computer sciences, physics, and math into acceptance with an academic scholarship to Georgia Tech, even though her real interests had been music and composition, the heavier the metal the better. She hung around Savannah for an extra year, picked up a master’s degree in computer science, and then followed a boyfriend to Washington.
The boyfriend didn’t work out and neither did her first couple of jobs. Then she answered a few newspaper ads for techie positions. One thing led to another, and the next thing she knew she was interning in the evenings at a cramped, smelly office in Alexandria, Virginia. There she was trained with surveillance equipment and how to do a quick drop in an apartment.
One more thing led to another one more thing. Janet partnered with a couple of different guys and did a string of trial drops for a local police agency.
