She was a tall woman, my height, and fit, maybe around one hundred and forty pounds. Her hair had been blond the last time I'd seen her, shoulder length, though in the various photographs now projected on the wall that was constantly changing along with the rest of her appearance. Her eyes, as I remembered them, had been blue. She was deft with the little changes that make recognition difficult, though apparently didn't bother with advanced disguise techniques like latex and heavy makeup. In four of the photographs she wore eyeglasses or sunglasses, never the same pair twice, and the frames helped to hide and alter the shape of her face.
Marietta ran through the slides, finishing with the most recent picture of her, taken just minutes after I'd seen her last. The shot was focused on a fire engine that had parked outside of a building on Broadway, and had been snapped by a tourist who was passing by at the time and merely interested in capturing the FDNY in action. Drama was barely in the frame, walking north up Broadway, and it was clear she didn't know the camera was there, because she wasn't hiding her face.
There was a click, and the slide was replaced with an enlargement of the same, now cropped around Drama. This was the only truly good picture of the batch. The FBI had managed to obtain the negative from the previous shot, and working from that had finessed the current image. She was mostly in profile, looking straight ahead, her right hand coming up with a set of sunglasses ready. She was wearing tan slacks and a black unstructured blazer, and her hair was dirty blond, straight, and to the base of her neck. Her mouth was just a tad open, as if she was speaking, and the corner of her upper lip was tugging back, as if in the first or last moments of a smile.
I'd seen it before, and every time I saw the shot I wondered what her expression meant. She had just tried to kill me and Dale and Pugh with a bomb, and there was a chance that, as she was walking up Broadway, she believed she had succeeded, that we were dead. Maybe it was satisfaction, that she'd done what she'd set out to do. Maybe it was pride in her work.
The laptop chirped and the wall where Drama had been was bathed in white light. There was a pause while Marietta concluded his narration, and then he opened the floor to questions. The woman from Interpol seemed fascinated that I'd spoken with her face-to-face.
"How did that come to pass?" she asked.
"She ambushed me in my apartment."
"Why would she do this? Why did she not merely kill you?"
"She had bugged the apartment, and that was where we'd been planning most of our operation. I was more useful alive."
"And she spoke with you? For how long?"
"About ten minutes."
"Why?"
"My theory is that I'd come home just after she'd placed the bugs and she wanted to distract me, to keep me from noticing that anything was out of place in the apartment. And she wanted to psyche me out. Most of her phone calls were for the same purpose, to gain a psychological edge."
The two Koreans spoke to each other quietly. One of them asked, "Could you determine her national origin?"
"No. Her English was colloquial and fluent. She spoke with a slight mid-Atlantic accent, so it's possible English is her native language."
"Anything about her training?" the other Korean asked.
"She implied she might have been a bodyguard, once. She didn't say where."
"How old would you say she was?"
"I'd put her around my own age, say early thirties. That's a guess."
"Which hand did she favor?"
"The right."
"Would you say she's technology-dependent?" Interpol asked.
"No, I think she uses the best tool at her disposal. If a pointed stick will do the job she wants done, she'll use it. But she's adept with technology, on the cutting edge. The mains transmitters she used to bug my apartment were maybe two millimeters long, half that wide. She also built her own explosives."
Interpol liked that answer and made some notes on her pad. "You spoke with her for ten minutes. Could you comment on her personality?"
"She made a couple of jokes, morbid ones, and she seemed to enjoy engaging in wordplay. At the time we – meaning my associates and I – were operating on the premise that she might have a partner, though that turned out to be mistaken. She had fun with that. She was almost flirtatious."
They all stared at me and I waited it out. It was the word "flirtatious" that did it. Whenever I used it, the people asking the questions would look at me like I was holding out on them, as if something more had happened, though nothing had. The conversation with Drama had ended not with a roll in the hay, but rather with me getting 120,000 volts from a stun gun, which pretty much put me out of the amorous mood until well after her departure.
Marietta cleared his throat, and the questions resumed. This took most of the next hour, and covered everything from the equipment Drama had used and the ways in which she'd used it, to what techniques we'd found effective in combating her and which ones had been failures. The Koreans were very interested in our countersurveillance procedures, and wanted to know all the specifications on the devices that Drama had planted in my apartment.
When that was finished, the lady from Interpol handed Marietta a CD-ROM, and he loaded the new images, then ran them through the projector.
"We have some people we would like you to look at," Marietta told me. "Let us know if you recognize any of them."
"I won't," I said. "I never have before."
"Yes, we know," Interpol said. "Please, humor us."
There were forty-seven pictures, mostly surveillance shots, presumably all of men and women suspected of being members of The Ten. The ethnicities were broadly mixed, though whites seemed to predominate.
As predicted, I didn't recognize a single face.
Interpol took a piece of paper from her briefcase and set it in front of her on the table. "I'm going to read you a series of names we've compiled. Tell me if you've heard of any of them, if, perhaps, Drama mentioned any of them."
"You got it."
"Pontchardier, Claude? Also known as Dupuis, Jean-Claude and Breda, Marlon? Sometimes called The Fireman."
"No."
"Holcomb, Benjamin? He might be referred to as Dancer."
"No."
"Ebbertine, Jennifer or Garza, Teri – it's with one 'r' and one 1' Sometimes referred to as Lilith?"
"Nope."
"Rai, Ravi. Also Munez, Roberto? Called Gomez…"
"You mean from The Addams Family?"
She looked up from the sheet at me. "What?"
"Nothing, sorry," I said. "That's a nope."
"Pallios, Andreas or Ben Havar, Simon? Known sometimes as Lawrence."
"No."
She frowned at Marietta, then replaced the sheet tidily in her attache case. I thought about asking Interpol where they came up with these code names, and if she really thought that The Ten used them amongst themselves. Somehow I couldn't see Drama picking up a phone and, say, giving Lilith a ring to swap tips about neck-snapping and checking the going rate for a car bombing. The code names are used by law enforcement and intelligence, just a way to label people who had lost their true names long ago and now went through aliases the way water passes through coffee grounds.
Everyone at the far end of the table now had their heads together, and were speaking intently. I looked over at where Scott was seated, and he shrugged, so I cleared my throat. The conversation continued, so I did it again, louder. Marietta raised his head.
"Yes?"
"It's been fun," I said. "But I have somewhere to be."
"Of course," he said, getting to his feet. "Thank you for coming in and taking the time to speak with us."
"My pleasure," I fibbed.
Scott rose, and we headed for the door. Just before we exited, I heard Interpol asking Marietta if it was true that I was dating Skye Van Brandt.