I raised my eyebrows and nodded positively, though evidently not with a lot of enthusiasm. I mean, by dress number three, I was fresh out. I went with the failsafe response: “They’re all great. Besides, whichever one you choose, you know you’re going to be the hottest girl in that room.”
OK, I knew that wasn’t going to cut it, and it didn’t. Tess just gave me that deadpan look that signaled a lot of hard work ahead for me to make up for it and said, in her best ironic French accent, “You have such a silky tongue, Monsieur Reilly. No wonder women swoon over your ever utterance.”
“It’s my cross to bear,” I replied before heading out to the kitchen. “You want a beer?”
“Monsieur, you spoil me with your exquisite taste.”
“I’m assuming that means you want foreign?”
“Moi?”
I smiled. “One Bud, coming up.”
I hit the fridge, took a long chug, then sat down at the kitchen table and mapped out tomorrow in my mind.
I had to be at Times Square at one. I didn’t think it would be a long meet, and that’s assuming Darth showed up at all. The guy sounded so jittery it felt like anything would spook him.
On the other hand, he could show up and turn out to be the real deal. If so, I might try to convince him to come into custody, which, if he did, would obviously wipe out our little DC excursion. I could already picture how cheerfully Tess would take that.
She was all excited about our mini-break. She’d arranged for her mom, who lived up in Westport, to come down and look after Kim and Alex while we were out of town. It would be just the two of us, shacked up in a nice hotel room in the capital. Which would be great. Having to miss it would be bad. Then again, my covert meeting could go all wrong and morph into something nasty and intense, which was a different worry altogether.
I needed to be at Penn Station at two for our Acela Express down to DC I was already going to be on thin ice with Tess once I told her I’d be ditching her at Union Station and meeting up with her at the hotel later. That would be tight too-I’d be jumping in the rental car that was waiting there for me and driving out to have my chat with my favorite philandering CIA agent before joining her in time for the star-studded Christmas dinner.
That wasn’t a conversation I was hugely looking forward to. I hadn’t felt great about blackmailing Stan Kirby the first time, even though he was a cheating scumbag. It hadn’t exactly endeared me to him either. He’d probably blow a gasket at having me show up again, and at his house for that matter, but I didn’t have any other choice. A phone call wasn’t going to have the full effect, not if I wanted to convince him to look into what the CIA’s servers had on record about my dad. I couldn’t show up at his office. And Kurt had called to tell me that his snoop into Kirby’s digital footprint showed that his Thursday evening trysts with his sister-in-law seemed to have ended, and that he drove home from Langley straight after work pretty much every day. Maybe my little intervention had actually put him back on the straight and narrow. Or maybe his mistress had just got bored with his sorry ass. Who knows. Still, I couldn’t afford not to go out and see him. The dinner invitation to the White House was timely, a great opportunity to slip away and have my little chat with him without raising too many flags.
I decided it wasn’t hugely productive to keep mulling over it any more. I just needed to get out there and see how both events would play out. Right now, the best call was to get back to the bedroom with Tess’s beer and make up for not fawning over her overpriced selection of haute couture.
I didn’t get much of a chance to fawn. Within moments of me handing Tess her exquisite brew, I saw her eyes move away and land on something by our bedroom door.
I followed her gaze to see Alex standing there, his face tense with worry despite clearly being half-asleep.
“Oh, baby,” she said warmly.
She started to get out of bed, but I stopped her and said, “I’ve got this.”
I turned and padded over to him, slowly. He just watched me in silence as I dropped down to one knee in front of him.
“Hey,” I said softly, giving him a kiss on his forehead. “What’s going on, champ? It’s very late.”
He stared at me, his lower lip curled out and quivering a bit, his big brown eyes brimming with anxiety.
He didn’t need to tell me what was going on. This wasn’t the first time he’d had a nightmare.
“Come on,” I said as I lifted him up and hugged him against me. “Let’s get you back to bed.”
I glanced back at Tess. She gave me a pained half-smile and a small, warm nod, and I carried him into his bedroom.
“Story,” he mumbled, clinging to me tightly.
I melted a bit. Despite the anger roaring through me regarding what he was going through, what they’d done to him, at least he was now letting me comfort him, and not just Tess.
It was such a bittersweet feeling-enjoying holding my son tight against me, feeling him cling to me like this, his protector, his dad-but at the same time wanting to pound the guys who did this to a pulp.
“OK,” I told him as we cuddled up in his bed. “What are we in the mood for tonight? Some gobblefunk or that clever mouse and his big, toothy friend?”
Alex smiled.
I melted some more.
“Gobblefunk,” he murmured.
“Good call,” I said, and raised my hand for a high five, which he gently tapped back before rubbing his eyes with tight fists in that glorious way kids do.
We cuddled up and sank together into the wonderful world of the Big Friendly Giant. Alex’s breathing got louder and slower, his little snores a symphony to my ears, a balm to my tired senses.
Once I was sure he was comfortably asleep, it was hard to extricate myself from that lovely cocoon and move back to our bedroom, but I needed to. I had to get some good zees in.
Tomorrow was shaping up to be a day of a complication or two, at best.
THURSDAY
9
Boston, Massachusetts
Dr. Ralph Padley woke at seven, as he did every day since moving into the East Broadway brownstone seventeen years ago.
Until his body had turned on him, he had enjoyed starting his days there. The purchase had proved an exceptionally wise investment, as the area was now quite the equal of the Back Bay or South End-his meticulous research having, once again, paid off. As per his rigid habit, he showered, dressed, scraped a dusting of snow and a thin layer of ice from his windshield, then drove to the Starbucks at the corner of Beacon and Charles. Regardless of what he was going through, regardless of the aches and weaknesses, he would stick to his routine as long as he could. It would be his small revenge over what fate had decreed for him.
He walked under the string of Christmas lights hanging inside the faux-classical entrance and joined the short line. Beyond the Ionic columns that met the plaster-molded ceiling, there was a seasonal warmth, though Padley was entirely oblivious to the imminent holidays. More than ever, he vehemently believed that any feelings of joy generated inside retail outlets was nothing more than a cynical exercise in marketing.
Despite it all, Padley felt good today. Apprehensive, certainly. Fearful, even. But deep down, he felt hopeful. Today, he would trigger a sequence of events that, while highly dangerous, would-if successful-lay the foundation of his quest for salvation.
Handing his Harvard University travel mug to his regular morning barista, he ordered his regular morning drink-an Earl Grey Tea Latte-into which he poured a generous splash of cold half-and-half at the milk station. He noticed that the thermos was running rather low, but by good fortune held the exact amount of milk for his beverage.