She looked away. “You’ve already done a nice job playing on my gets-around rep.”
“Sorry, I didn’t have much time to come up with a plan to get you alone, and that was before I realized Clay Harken was your date.”
“Come on, Clay’s older than my father. He’s my security guard.”
“Oh.” Thornton hid his satisfaction that he’d been wrong. “So how about New York?”
She backed away. Then, no doubt remembering the inherent danger in distancing herself from the radar unit, she stopped. “Why wouldn’t I just go to the local police station? That way the device can be entered into a chain of evidence and tested without our having to watch our backs.”
“Because we can’t find out who implanted the devices without two of them. Anyway, most cops hearing our story would tell us to take a place on line behind the folks with the tinfoil hats. And if our listeners realize we’re onto them, they’ll deactivate the devices.”
“Okay, why not write up a statement of the case on your secret-agent dissolving paper and take it straight to the FBI?”
“The same risks in going to the police station apply to going to the Bureau — or to any other government agency.”
Mallery focused on a wave rolling in, progressively larger until reaching the beach, at which point its top curled and turned silver in the moonlight. Her shivering, he suspected, had nothing to do with the cold. He extended a steadying hand.
She sidestepped it. “I know a good bar in New York,” she said. “And I’m going to need it.”
18
They devised a cover story, a romantic hookup tonight, to add credibility to a “spontaneous decision” to go to New York together tomorrow morning. Then they took their act to the Rose & Crown, a dark Nantucket tavern decorated with a colorful array of antique model ships. Save for the televisions broadcasting games, the establishment had changed so little since the eighteenth century that each time the front door groaned inward, Thornton half expected a man with a peg leg to clomp in.
Thornton liked the tavern because it removed them from any prying eyes on Muskeget. And the large, boisterous bar crowd precluded the conversation that a romantic hookup cover demanded. Conversation of any sort was problematic. As he had learned the past few days, it felt like trying to read with someone staring over your shoulder. Also Mallery seemed to be struggling to come to terms with the news that strangers had opened her head, implanted a machine, and been listening to her private conversations for months. Or maybe she blamed the messenger. Fortunately she had no trouble when the act called for drinking too much.
Ascending Main Street several rounds later, Thornton sensed that she would have clung to him even if it hadn’t been in the script. The oceanside resorts had closed for the season, but the village still offered plenty of places to stay, principally two- and three-story townhouses from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that had been converted to bed-and-breakfasts. At Captain Orster’s, constructed in 1743 according to the sign swinging above the door, a fittingly ancient innkeeper answered the buzzer. While lighting the way to the room with an oil lamp retrofitted with an LED bulb, he told them that “revelers”—evidently his euphemism for late-night drunks — sustained the inns during the off-season.
As soon as the innkeeper left them alone, Mallery said, “Sorry, Russ, I need to pass out.” A line straight out of their script, alleviating the need to generate R-rated sound effects.
He knelt to steady the wooden stepladder to the antique four-poster bed. She started to unzip her gown before abruptly climbing the steps with it still on. He read her lopsided grin as a blithe decision to trash a $20,000 designer original rather than expose another inch of flesh.
During the night, if someone had planted a video camera in the room, he would have seen Thornton frequently shift positions, unable to sleep in spite of the comfortable bed. Mallery slept on her back on the side of the bed by the window, graceful even in the simple act of breathing. As compelling a woman, he thought, as he’d ever known — or known of. He felt like an interloper. He’d long since learned that a press credential was a golden ticket, able to gain a journalist access to almost anyplace in the world or anyone, but not as a part of the action, not as a doer like Beryl Mallery. Just as a chronicler. The thirty inches between them now might as well have been thirty miles.
He spent most of the night using his police scanner app, which ran transcripts of the radio communications between various New York metro dispatchers and patrolmen. Eventually the black sky dissolved to a slate gray; the dark shapes outside transformed into gables and chimneys and, with the first flecks of dawn, individual cedar shingles. At sunup, a ray landed on the leaded-glass window, which sprayed a checkerboard of light across the bed. Mallery’s eyes opened.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” Thornton said. “Beryl Mallery in the flesh, as it were.”
Apparently reminded of their audience, she gritted her teeth before rolling across the bed and planting a loud kiss on his stubbly cheek. “Russ Thornton,” she said enthusiastically, without a trace of corresponding emotion on her face. “I thought I’d dreamed it, but here we are in bed together, and with a nice long time until checkout.”
“Unfortunately, I need to run.”
“Hangover?”
“No, I need to get back to New York.”
“For the usual reasons men need to skedaddle at seven on a Sunday morning?”
“For work, actually.”
“Work? I would have expected something more creative from you.”
“At around three thirty this morning, two men were seen trying to steal a two-hundred-foot-long section of eight-foot-high chain-link fence in White Plains.”
“And there has been a dramatic surge in the value of fences?”
“If you’re a couple of two-bit crooks with nothing but a used pickup truck, that much stainless steel is gold, practically. They could get twenty grand for it.”
She yawned. “Stop the presses.”
“That part of the story should put you off. Good cover does that. The real story is that the fence is part of Westchester County Airport’s perimeter. Terrorists have been focusing on secondary targets, and Westchester Airport’s high on the list. The police caught the thieves red-handed, but what if the theft was just a diversionary tactic? What if, sometime between when the two guys began cutting the wire and the arrival of the police, a third guy slipped into the grass alongside a runway and readied a surface-to-air missile?” Thornton didn’t add that if there had been even a remote possibility that the thieves were anything more than bozos who, in the dark, failed to notice that the fence bordered a runway, Westchester Airport would have been locked down within seconds.
“Wow,” Mallery said. “You need an assistant?”
“Depends on what the assistant brings to the party.”
“A newfound lust for journalism. And a jet.” As if nudged by humility, she added. “Fuel-efficient, as jets go.”
“Is it a Sino Swearingen SJ-30-2?”
“How did you know?”
“I have a whole fleet of them. But I have to get my car out of the parking lot on the Cape; I’m going to need it in New York.” Thornton would rather take Mallery’s jet, but he was concerned about her people, at least one of whom had been protecting her while a subminiature electronic eavesdropping device was injected into her head. “For what it’s worth, the drive down the coast is spectacular this time of year.”
“The truth is, I want to be with you,” she said, bringing their scene to a close, “even if we just circle a block all day.”