All the lights were on — on every floor — and the interior of the house seemed to glow with rose and the half-seen reflections of polished brass and antique silver. The heavy wooden door opened before Dalton could touch the gilt handle and one of the station heavies — a black man in civvies whose name he could never recall and who looked in silhouette like an industrial freezer — snapped out a Marine Corps salute, which Dalton returned so crisply that the neck wrench brought his headache right back.
“They’re all upstairs, sir,” he whispered, as Dalton came into the center hall and stood under the glow of a Tiffany chandelier. He looked up at it and remembered all the fine times that he had been a part of in the years that the Naumann family had lived here. Porter had brought the Tiffany chandelier back for Joanne in the third year of their marriage. The interior of the town house was frigid, as if the air-conditioning had been turned on to Full and left that way for days.
“Thanks, Barney,” said Dalton, the name coming to him from some recess of his brain where such things were imperfectly stored. He dropped his briefcase on the black-and-white marbled floor and threw his topcoat over the Duncan Phyfe chair that he had once tripped over while backing away from one of Naumann’s predatory daughters during a New Year’s party. That seemed like a century ago. He went up the curving staircase into a breathing silence, aware of Barney’s placid equine stare on the back of his neck.
Mandy Pownall, one of the Agency’s Vestal Virgins — one of those frighteningly efficient female staffers without whom there would be no Agency at all — was waiting for him outside the master bedroom. Mandy, a long-necked, fine-boned, and aristocratic-looking woman with a slim but nicely rounded shape, was wearing a gray pinstripe jacket-and-skirt affair, black ballet flats, and, intriguingly, charcoal-tinted 1940s-era silk stockings with seams.
She glided forward to him as he walked down the hall and took him into her body, wrapping her arms around him and burying her face in his neck. He held her there for a moment, breathing her in, aware that she had been into the gin but not recklessly and that her perfume, though floral, was not cloying.
Her unsteady breathing slowed in a while and she pushed him back, holding him by the upper arms as she gave him a look-over, her eyes a little black around the lower edges and her lipstick slightly smeared.
“Jesus, Micah. Are you all right?”
“No. Not in the slightest. How are you?”
“Ghastly. What happened to Porter? Do we know?”
“Not yet,” he said, glancing at the closed bedroom door. “They’re all in there?”
Mandy shuddered — a whole-body tremble — and sighed.
“All three of them. Joanna. The girls.”
“Who’s seen them?”
“Only our medics.”
“What about the police?”
“So far we’ve managed to paper it over. There were only eight messages on Joanne’s voice mail, three of them from Jack Stallworth’s assistant, Sally Fordyce. The last one is only six hours old.”
“What about the girls?”
“No voice mail. We’ve gone over their computers. We broke their passwords and sent out a general e-mail to everyone listed in their books, saying that they were all going away for a while and hinting obliquely at a detox issue, which I’m sure all their friends would find totally convincing.”
“What about the neighbors?”
“This is Belgravia. The last thing the people of Belgravia do is show the slightest interest in anything. It’s terribly non-U.”
“You talked to Stallworth?”
She rolled her eyes. “No. I have listened to Stallworth. I didn’t get the chance to talk.”
“Who’s getting this detail?”
“Stallworth says you are.”
“What about Rowland? He’s the station chief here.”
“Our sector was always independent. Stallworth wants to keep it that way. Anyway, Rowland doesn’t want it. I don’t blame him.”
“What resources do we have?”
“Removals. All the cleaning staff you need.”
“Where do you fit in?”
“Whatever I can do.”
“I guess Forensics has already been in?”
“Yes. Not that they found much. It was as if no one had ever lived here. The place had been thoroughly scrubbed. No prints. No fibers. No fluids. Forensics did say that a fire had been lit in one of the wastebaskets. It looked like—”
“A fire? Where?”
She inclined her head toward the bedroom door. “In there. Where they are.”
“Didn’t the fire alarm go off?”
“The internal system logged it. But then someone in the house pressed the cancel button—”
“They’d have to know the PIN number.”
“They did. Otherwise the fire brigade would have come around to check it out. The security company saw the cancel order and called them off.”
“What about the perimeter alarms?”
“They weren’t activated.”
“Porter had internal cameras everywhere. What do they show?”
“That’s hard to describe.”
“Try.”
“Well, the hard disk can only store about a week’s worth, and the program dumps the data every Sunday, so all we had was from Monday, the first of October. The film looks normal, Joanne moving around the house, the girls coming and going; the cleaning lady came in on Tuesday. The usual domestic activity, until…”
“Time marker?”
“Fourteen hundred thirty-nine hours on Thursday. October four.”
“Okay. What happened then?”
“That’s the thing, Micah. The images all went dark.”
“You mean one of the cameras failed?”
“No. They all failed.”
“They just… flicked off?”
“No. It started at the one covering the front door. You can see the street, see people going up and down Wilton, crossing the coverage area. Everything normal, and then the picture seems to fog up. No, more like cloud over.”
“Cloud over?”
“Smoke, it looked like. Or a dark fog. Anyway, first that camera goes. Then, in the downstairs hallway camera, you see Joanne going to the door, and she opens it — and everything goes dark on that camera as well. The rest go one by one. Same thing happens to all of them.”
Dalton let that sink in for a time.
“Have they been checked?”
“Yes. All of them. They’re… fried, I guess is the word. They’re all digital, and the receptor has been… corrupted somehow. Almost like some sort of magnetic pulse.”
“What about the remote disk?”
“Well, it would only show what it was receiving, wouldn’t it?”
“Jesus, what could cause that? Do we have anything like that?”
“I wouldn’t know. You’d be more likely to get that sort of gadget. The Langley boffins don’t share well, especially with the foreign stations.”
“I’ll ask Jack about it. Pull the remote disk. I’ll take it with me. You said there was a fire?”
“In the wastebasket. Someone burned something.”
“Burned what?”
“It was odd. String. A section of string. That brown cord that they use to tie up packages. It had a bunch of little knots in it.”