His surprise was minor, and quickly concealed. "I can hold off on it until this evening, say that's how long it took me to get clear."
"You won't take it the wrong way if I say I hope never to see you again," I told him.
"Honest to God," Sean Baron said, "I have it my way, I wouldn't have seen you in the first place." In his chair in our room at the Grove Hotel, Nicolas Sargenti opened his eyes.
"The man in Cape Fear," he told us. "He has passed on a message for Mr. Collins four times in the last two and a half years."
"You're certain?" Alena asked.
"Of course."
"The man in Cape Fear?" I asked.
"Nicolas can explain," Alena said, dropping back into her thoughts.
"The man in Cape Fear is named Louis Woodburn," the lawyer told me. "He sells yachts. For the last decade or so, he has received, every Christmas, an annual gift in the form of a porcelain doll of the kind that is popular in France. Upon breaking apart the doll, he has discovered ten thousand dollars for him to spend as he might choose, and a telephone number. The number changes each year, of course. Currently, it is for a private voice mail box run by a singles-matching service in London.
"In return for this annual gift, Louis Woodburn takes a message should anyone ever call his business, asking to speak to Mr. Jacob Collins. Mr. Collins is the name of a schoolmate of Mr. Woodburn's, one he has not had any contact with since he was twelve years old. The caller asks if Mr. Woodburn knows where Mr. Collins might be reached. Mr. Woodburn explains that he has not had any dealings with Mr. Collins since they were in school together, but should he run into him, he can take a name and a number to pass along. Whatever name and number he takes is then forwarded to the voice mail box to be collected by me."
"At which point you do what?"
Sargenti checked on Alena, who gave no indication that she was even hearing us. Taking that as permission, he continued. "Were Elizavet still seeking new clients, I would then call the number that had been left. In every case it is another cutout, and I would leave a message in turn, with a name and a number to be contacted at, and a time. Assuming that I was then contacted as described, Elizavet would direct me to arrange a personal meeting, at the time and place of her choosing. The client would then be collected at the stated time and place, and taken to a location not unlike this one, for a personal interview to be conducted by me. In some cases, Elizavet would attend, though her presence would be concealed or otherwise obfuscated."
I nodded my understanding. If each of the five initial contacts led to procedures as convoluted and insulated as this, there was almost no chance of the communication being traced back to either Sargenti or Alena until they were certain it was legitimate. Whichever of them established the initial contact point certainly had done so under an assumed name, so even should that be discovered, it would lead only to a dead end.
Much like where we were now.
Alena abruptly rose, saying, "Thank you for coming, Nicolas. You have the paper?"
Sargenti straightened in his seat, and if he was bothered by the abruptness with which she was terminating the meeting, he did not, like everything else, reveal it. He took his attache from where it stood beside the chair, moving it onto his lap, then worked the combination on each latch with deliberation before snapping them open. From inside the case he produced a slate-gray mailer, slightly smaller than the standard American business size, bulging with its contents. He offered it to Alena, then closed his case and got to his feet and reached for his overcoat.
"Do you wish me to look into Mr. Collins?" he asked us.
"No," she told him, then added, "You're flying back tonight?"
"I spend tonight in Montreal. I should be home the day after tomorrow."
"We need reservations for a hotel in Wilmington, North Carolina." Alena gestured with the mailer, then tossed it to me on the bed. "In one of these names, please."
"For how long?"
"Three weeks."
"You shall have it before I leave for Montreal," he assured her, then leaned forward and gave Alena a kiss on each cheek, which she returned. He nodded good-bye to me, then went with her to the door. I listened for the sound of the locks falling back into place, then dumped out the contents of the mailer beside me on the bed. There were four identities, two for each of us, and in each set we were husband and wife, and it was the full battery, from driver's licenses to credit and library cards. One set said we were Canadian, from Toronto; the other identified us as Americans, from St. Louis. Passports for each identity had been provided.
Alena returned, stopping at the room service cart to pour herself the last of the orange juice.
"Wilmington?"
"I do not know what else to do, Atticus." She turned to me, draining the glass and setting it back on the cart. Frustration was evident in her voice. "It is a very long shot that the person or persons who has been trying to reach Mr. Collins is the same person or persons who is trying to kill us. But I do not know what else to do."
"Gorman-North uses the Mr. Collins contact?" I asked her.
"I do not believe I have ever done any work for Gorman-North. Of course, I could be mistaken in that. I believe the two jobs I did for the CIA before my retirement came through the Collins contact. Given the relationship between the government and its civilian contractors, the people who move between those two sectors, it is reasonable to believe that someone at Gorman-North knows of it. But that is incidental, perhaps."
"Because it doesn't go back to the White House?"
"It presumes that Gorman-North is the connection with the White House, yes, and we have no evidence of that."
"No reason to think there isn't."
"But no reason to think that there is, either."
"So we go to Cape Fear, and we watch Mr. Woodburn, and we hope that whoever has been trying to reach you through him pays him a call?"
"Or is watching him already, and we can make the surveillance, double back on it."
"And then try to get out of whoever might be watching him what we hoped we'd get from Bowles."
She looked almost stricken. "I didn't have a choice, Atticus."
"I'm not blaming you."
"He was going to kill you, I had to-"
"I'm not blaming you, Alena."
Her mouth closed tightly, and I saw her hands ball into fists. Her expression contracted, filling with her anger and her frustration and her fears.
"Come here," I said.
She shook her head, almost childlike.
I thought for a moment, then said, "You're not who you were. Don't think that you are."
The anger in her voice matched the anger in her eyes, still directed more at herself than anyone or anything else. "You can't say that. You don't know. You can't say that."
"If it had been you," I said. "If it had been you in the snow, half naked and taking that beating, if it had been your head that Bowles was pointing the gun at, I would have done the same thing."
She shook her head, refusing me, saying, "No, no, I cut him, Atticus, do you hear me? I needed to announce myself, I needed to draw them away from you. The two men on patrol-I killed the first one, but the second, I kept him alive so I could cut him, so I could make him scream, so they would know that I was there. I cut him so it would hurt, so they could all hear."
Her voice trailed off. She wasn't looking at me, perhaps she felt she couldn't, and maybe if I was someone else, she'd have been right in that.
I brought myself forward on the bed, wincing as I swung my legs onto the floor. She refused to look at me still, even when I put my hands on her shoulders, brought her around to face me. There were things I could say, things I could offer to try to make her feel better about what she had done, what she once was, what she was afraid she always would be. I could have told her that her guilt was the thing that declared she had changed, that her self-loathing at this moment was the mark of her relearned humanity, that what she had told Dan in Portland had been true, that what she once was wouldn't have batted an eye.