Fidelity Page 13

  Kay laughed. What was Andrew? He was handsome and he was extremely smart, a rising star within his own organization, obvious from the way they had treated him that day in D.C. Obvious just from meeting him, really. He gave off a strong impression of competence; of certainty, even; of a person who was going somewhere. He had taste and he had style, there was something cultured and almost grand about him. No, Kay had to admit, he had gotten to her.

  Perhaps that was why Kay changed the conversation swiftly, rather than admit to any hint of softness. “I meant to ask you about something that you said on our last date: about that FBI Agent who came around after my parents were killed.”

  Justyna flinched, and immediately Kay regretted not putting the matter more tactfully. She had come, over the years, to be able to discuss the deaths of Paul and Anne Malloy with the detachment of someone whose job was intimately involved with death, and sometimes she forgot that other people did not have her professional discipline. “Can you remember what they asked about?”

  Justyna sighed and poured herself another glass of wine. “It was a rough time, Kay, I don’t need to tell you that. Those first few months we were so busy trying to set up a home for you and your brother that we barely had time to grieve. There were always people coming in, offering condolences, not to mention the practical aspects of it. Flying the . . . bodies home, all the logistics of the funeral. Honestly, it’s been twenty years since I thought of that FBI Agent. As to the specifics of our conversation . . .” Justyna shrugged. “Not much. Sorry.”

  “Do you think it’s possible that my father might have . . . contacted the FBI for some reason?”

  Justyna narrowed her eyes. “Why?”

  “I don’t know why. I’m just wondering.”

  “Your father wasn’t doing anything illegal,” Justyna informed her. “He wasn’t involved in money laundering, or racketeering, or smuggling endangered species. I’m sure I have no idea why he would have contacted the FBI, assuming that’s what happened.”

  “Maybe something to do with his new job?”

  Justyna wiped her upper lip with her napkin, then set her hands at her side. “What is this about, Kay? What are you getting at?”

  Except that Kay still wasn’t sure, didn’t have anything firm. For that matter didn’t have anything shaky, only the vague smell of malfeasance, an uncomfortable itch that there was more to the matter than seemed clear to her at this point. But then, suspicion is not evidence, and there was no point in worrying Justyna unnecessarily.

  “Don’t worry about it, Auntie,” Kay said, smiling and trying to change the subject. “Shall we split the crème brûlée, or do you think one dessert alone is insufficient?”

  “We can split it,” Justyna said, unsatisfied with Kay’s answer, but knowing she wasn’t going to get a better one.

  28

  TORRES PICKED Kay up at Baltimore’s Penn Station, drove her east out towards the city line, stopped in front of a strip mall just past Canton that housed a Dollar Store, a Vietnamese nail service, a takeout joint advertising pizza/subs/Chinese food, and a restaurant that Torres informed her confidently served “the best goddamned crabs that ever got steamed to death in service of my stomach.” Hard-shell crabs were a specialty of the Chesapeake Bay region, and the best of them were inevitably found in seemingly unhygienic holes-in-the-wall, the sorts of places a person would drive past swiftly and not think twice about. Torres, needless to say, had an encyclopedic knowledge of the best dives and takeout places in the greater Baltimore area, and in this as well as many other things Kay trusted him implicitly.

  They sat at a booth in the back, started with a dozen extra large and some Natty Boh, both of which were brought out swiftly. Half the crabs and all of the beer were spent without touching on anything serious. Mostly sports news. Did the Ravens have a chance this year? Was it possible that the Jets suffered from some sort of curse, and if so, could it be removed? They argued for a time over the virtues of soccer, Kay being an early convert to the sport by way of Aunt Justyna, who was a mild obsessive, Torres adamantly asserting he would rather be beaten about the face and neck with a claw hammer than forced to sit through any game allowed to end in a tie. It was an old argument, and progressed in the standard fashion.

  “How’s your wife?” Kay asked.

  Torres shrugged. Torres didn’t like to talk about Eileen, and when he did he liked to paint her as a shrew. Neither of which did anything to fool Kay, of course. She had seen him slip away from too many stakeouts to call her before she went to sleep; did not have any trouble recognizing the clear signs of affection that her ex-partner tried so hard to hide. “She’s fine.”

  “How’s the office?”

  Torres inserted his thumb into the carapace of a bright red crustacean, split it neatly in half, poured some butter on the meat and wolfed it down happily. “We muddle along without you, Kay, though the warmth has gone out of summer.”

  “How poetic.”

  “Thank you. I’ve been thinking it up for most of the afternoon.”

  “And the job?”

  Torres shrugged. “It’s the job. We’re hot on the trail of the next Williams, based out of the west side, but other than that, essentially identical. Not quite so nasty, maybe, but very nearly. The drug war continues, Kay, us on one side, them on the other. How about your end? How’s counterintelligence?”

  “Kind of the same,” Kay said, “except that the enemy is better trained and meaner.”

  “You enjoying it?”

  Kay thought this over for a moment. “I think ‘enjoy’ might be a bit too strong. Some days involve staring at a computer screen until your eyes start to freeze over.” Kay shrugged. “Hard not to miss the day-to-day excitement of gangs. But I’m good at it; that’s something. It’s necessary.”

  “How’s Frowny?”

  “We don’t really call her that, up in New York.”

  “I’d hope not. She’s not one who minds cracking the whip now and again, our Jeffries.”

  “No indeed.”

  “She cracked the whip on you at all, Ivy?”

  Kay laughed. “We’ve come to an understanding, Frowny and I.”

  Torres laughed also. “So what are we here for? Because that train ride from New York to Baltimore is a long one, and I don’t imagine it’ll go any easier with a bushel of crabs in your belly.”

  “Look, Marc . . .” Kay began, then fell silent.

  “Oh, shit,” Torres said, smiling, “this must be serious if we’re using first names.”

  “I need a favor.”

  “I’ve got two kidneys, Ivy, and you’re welcome to one of them, if that’s really what you’re interested in.”

  “It isn’t,” Kay said, but then fell silent again. Asking for help had never been her strong suit. Quite the opposite.

  Torres came to her assistance. “I don’t really need to remind you, do I, Ivy, that you literally saved my life last year?”

  Kay blushed. “Don’t make so much of it. You’d have done the same as I did if I’d been the one who caught that bullet.”

  “It was my leg, Kay, and it was your pistol that saved the rest of me. So tell me what you need and I’ll see if I can do it.”

  But it took Kay a moment to get started. “Did I ever tell you about what happened to my parents?”

  “No,” Torres said, setting his crabmeat down on the newsprint covering the table. “Not in detail.”

  Kay did then, flatly and without any excess of emotion. The straight facts as she knew them. Paul and Anne ­Malloy met as residents at Johns Hopkins. Specialized in global health, trying to cure those pesky third-world diseases that seem old-­fashioned, even rather quaint, here in the Western world: tuberculosis and polio, things our grandparents or great-­grandparents used to die of. True believers, the two of them, gallivanting all across the planet, trying to do some small measure o
f good. Namibia, Cambodia, Colombia. During a seemingly routine visit to the last, they were both killed in a robbery gone wrong, some thug losing his cool or just reveling in sadism. A few words about the godparents who took her in: good people, people who kept her on the straight and narrow. The story recounted as if it had happened to someone else, as if Kay were just repeating something she had heard, rather than trauma that she had experienced.

  “I’m sorry,” Torres said afterward.

  Kay grunted. “You did some work down in Colombia as part of some joint task force, right?”

  “Years back. Maybe you’ve heard this rumor, Ivy, but they actually have some cocaine in Colombia. Hard to believe, I know.”

  “You make any friends while you were down there?”

  “Like, how friendly?”

  “Friendly enough to get their hands on the file relating to my parents’ death.”

  “Why?”

  “Can we call it curiosity for the moment?”

  “For the moment,” Torres agreed, less than happy. “You so sure you want to go picking at scabs?”

  “They’re my wounds, Torres,” Kay said. “I’ll pick at them if I want to.”

  Torres nodded. “Fair enough.”

  The waiter came back, and they ordered more beer and more crabs, although they still had a fair quantity of both left. Torres started up again after he was gone. “Shit, Ivy. All that buildup, I was at least expecting you were going to ask me for something a little more substantial than a phone call to an old colleague.”

  “That was part one,” Kay said cleanly.

  Torres cleared his throat loudly. “Then I suppose lunch is on you?”

  “I see how deep your well of loyalty runs. Yes, yes, lunch is on me.”

  “And what do you need?”

  “I ran a search for my father on the Sentinel database.”

  Torres wedged one thick finger into his ear canal, wiggled it dramatically. “I gotta get my ears checked,” he said. “Because it almost sounded like you just told me that you used Bureau resources for a personal matter, which last time I checked is a big no-no.”

  “It came up as a zero file.”

  Torres’s good humor slid right off his face. “Shit,” he said.

  “Yeah.”

  “What else did it say?”

  “Unfortunately, I have no idea. He died just before we started switching our paper files over to digital.”

  “So then the file is located in—”

  “Pickett Street. Exactly.”

  Torres scratched at his jowls.

  “You got any friends down there?” Kay asked.

  Torres thought it over awhile. “Not exactly,” he equivocated. “Friends of friends, maybe. I’ll have to think about it. What you’re asking, Kay, it could get a fellow in trouble. A fellow . . . or a lady.”

  “I know it’s a lot to ask,” Kay said. “If you don’t feel comfortable doing it, I can understand completely. It’s just that—” But before she could say anything else, Torres cut her off with one motion of his thick hand.

  “You think I’d forget the turn you did me so quick? If this is what you need, this is what you’ll get.” He poured half a Natty Boh through a smile. “But I’m ordering more crabs.”

  Kay smiled. “That seems fair,” she said.

  29

  IT WAS something of a shock, having watched him through a telephoto lens for so long, to get a face-to-face view of Mr. Artur Vadim. He looked younger in person, and sunnier, a handsome and well-kept forty. He was even fairly tan for a Slav in late autumn. He wore a suit that was nice-looking but not quite new, and his hair was salt-and-pepper and had started to recede.

  “Mr. Vadim,” Jeffries said, and as always Kay was impressed with her absolute sense of composure, as if this were a routine task in a routine job, a librarian stamping a book, a bank teller examining a check. “Please, have a seat.”

  Vadim looked at Jeffries with something like a smile on his face. He did not seem particularly surprised, although whether that was because he had somehow become aware of their surveillance or he just didn’t display shock easily, Kay was not sure. “I’d just as soon stand.”

  “As you prefer,” Jeffries said, “though this might take a few minutes, and I don’t see any reason that they should be spent with you in discomfort.”

  Vadim shrugged and took a seat. A small victory, Kay thought, one to build on.

  They had arranged a meeting with him on false pretenses, through the auspices of another one of Jeffries’s contacts, a Russian businessman who had long been amongst her stable of assets. The surroundings felt appropriate to the moment, the sort of faceless institutional hotel room that is indistinguishable from a thousand just like it scattered across America. They had made an elaborate security sweep of the premises beforehand, almost certainly unnecessary but then there was that pesky “almost,” wasn’t there? The margin for error in this kind of game was razor-thin; Kay had learned that much already. The smallest mistake, the tiniest detail overlooked, was enough to sink an entire operation.

  “Do not feel overly compelled to say anything,” Jeffries had warned Kay after they had finished setting the stage, in the nervous half hour before Vadim’s arrival. “It can be useful to have several people in the room when you make the pitch. It gives them the vague sense of being outnumbered, of playing against forces with whom they’re overmatched. But I’ll take the lead on everything. Listen, watch, remember.”

  Kay hadn’t really needed the warning, but she nodded her head all the same.

  “My name is Jeffries. This is Agent Malloy. We’re with the FBI.”

  “I know who you are,” Vadim said.

  “I thought you might.”

  “And I know why you’re here.” Although, to Kay’s mind, this wasn’t a very impressive piece of prognostication. There could be only one reason why two FBI Agents were sitting quietly in a hotel room, waiting for him, and it was not to trade stock tips.

  “Then I suppose my job should be very easy,” Jeffries said cheekily, although her face maintained its inimitable flat affect.

  “I’m afraid I’m not so sure that’s the case,” Vadim said, even though the fact that he was still there—that he hadn’t run off as soon as he’d entered—at least suggested some interest on his part.

  “We’ve been watching you for some time, Mr. Vadim. And in that time we’ve come to recognize you as an individual of taste, of discernment, of class. An individual whose appreciation for the good life, unfortunately, is not adequately being served on his SVR salary.”

  “How kind of the FBI to notice this manifest injustice,” Vadim said. His English was perfect, with just the slightest hint of a Russian accent as garnish. “You have not such a reputation for softness.”

  “The Director’s heart weeps for you,” Jeffries said. “Fat, salty tears. It’s become quite the scandal. We thought it might be wise to do something about it, just so he stops breaking down at meetings.”

  Kay stifled a laugh.

  “And what exactly would I be doing in exchange for this . . . honorarium?”

  “It would seem to us that there might be all sorts of things that an individual in your position would be able to do to ensure that our relationship is a mutually beneficial one,” Jeffries said, keeping her cards close against her vest. “Of course, the reward for any piece of information would need to be assessed on a case-by-case basis, but that assessment, I can assure you, would be generous.”

  This much was true, at least. Good double agents were worth their weight in gold, not only for the information they could provide but for the insight they could provide about it. This was one area where the Bureau couldn’t afford to be tightfisted.

  “Being a double in the SVR is a dangerous occupation these days,” Vadim said. “They have an unfortunate habit of disappea
ring into unmarked graves.”

  Kay’s heart caught in her throat. If Vadim knew that the SVR had rolled up the CIA’s network, what else might he know? The identity of the Black Bear mole, perhaps, or at least information that might lead them to him? After all of these months staring at the matrix, like plowing the desert, Kay literally salivated at the thought of getting something more substantial to work with.

  Jeffries gave no indication that she had heard anything of any particular interest, and Kay cursed herself for her relative lack of self-control. “Being a double in the SVR, Mr. Vadim, is a dangerous occupation, period, I would think.”

  “Indeed!” he said, smiling. “A man would have to be very foolish to consider it.”

  “Or extremely well compensated,” Jeffries added.

  “Or extremely well compensated,” Vadim agreed. “And yet, even the greediest of men would not suggest that a dollar value can be put on life. On their own lives, at least,” Vadim amended. “We are sometimes prone, particularly in our line of work, to estimate the lives of others as a few cents on the dollar.”

  “Some of us are,” Jeffries said noncommittally. “But others of us—and here, to dispense with false modesty for a moment, I would include myself—know the value of a friend and understand that loyalty runs two ways. Should you choose to avail yourself of our assistance, know that it would be wholehearted.”

  “You seem very sure of yourself.”

  “Do you know who I am, Mr. Vadim?” Jeffries asked.

  Vadim laughed. “Who works in our field and does not? You are ASAC Jeffries, the American bogeyman. You have ears on every phone, eyes in every window. The birds sit on your shoulder and whisper the secrets they have heard on the wind. The rats gnawing wires in the bowels of the Kremlin are on your payroll. Russian spies frighten misbehaving children with your name.”

  If this flattered Jeffries, she gave no sign of it. A stray tangle of graying hair came loose over her glasses, but she brushed it back and continued. “Then you would know that I work for the FBI and not the CIA.”