His heart squirmed into a tight knot.
Meeting with Valkyrie in person was rare, and there were no guarantees that you wouldn’t leave the room in plastic baggies.
“And he didn’t specifically say why he wanted to meet?”
“He did not.”
Keith had worked with her long enough to know when she was not being completely forthcoming with him. And if she was lying to him right now, that meant the “state of affairs” was probably a worst-case scenario.
If they were supposed to meet Valkyrie at eight thirty, that gave him just over two and a half hours.
There were some things Keith definitely needed to think through.
He could try to run, but Valkyrie would find him.
He could meet with Valkyrie, but if the man was disappointed in Keith and Vanessa, that was not going to turn out well at all.
However.
There was one other option, a way that he might never have to fear — or work for — Valkyrie ever again.
According to what Vanessa had just told him, he knew where their employer was going to be and when he was going to be there.
It was a risk, yes, of course, but what were the options?
Run and die. Meet with Valkyrie and discuss a “state of affairs” and very likely end up dead.
Or…
He evaluated everything. The FBI would almost certainly have an anonymous hotline, a way of keeping the identity of the caller secret, but what if they didn’t? What if there was a way for them to find out who it really was?
Still, of all the options, that was probably his best bet. Off the top of his head Keith didn’t know how much of a reward they would be offering, but it had to be in the millions.
He might make out with the money and with his freedom, but even if he didn’t, he would fare much better falling into the FBI’s hands than into Valkyrie’s.
Keith decided what he was going to do.
But he would need to be alone — somewhere away from Vanessa — to make the call.
67
Brineesha finished winding the red ribbon into Tessa’s hair and carefully tied it off.
They were in the basement bedroom; Tessa stood in front of the dresser mirror with Brineesha beside her. Lien-hua rested on the bed, leaning against a pile of pillows, her crutches angled against the wall. Two elegant flower arrangements sat on a bedside end table.
Since coming back from the dress shop Tessa had been getting more and more anxious that Aiden wouldn’t think she was pretty at all, no matter what Brineesha did with her hair.
She was fretting about that when Brin mentioned how impressed she was with Lien-hua’s recovery so far.
“I guess God’s not done with me yet,” Lien-hua said softly.
Brineesha made eye contact with Tessa and winked.
“What is it?” Lien-hua eyed them curiously.
Brineesha answered, “On the night you were attacked, when we were all at the hospital, Tessa mentioned to me that she was praying for you.”
“You were praying for me?”
“Yeah.” Tessa couldn’t help but think of her mom, when she was dying, how prayer hadn’t helped at all that time around.
“That means a lot.”
Unsure how to respond, she simply said, “Okay.”
“Well”—Brineesha fussed with Tessa’s hair—“you told me that you didn’t know if God was listening to your prayers. Remember?”
Yes, and you told me how Tony was premature and how you’d prayed for him and nothing happened, Tessa thought, but didn’t say it; she didn’t really want to be talking about any of this at all, it only made her think of losing her mom, and that wasn’t what she needed right now. “I remember,” she told Brineesha. “What do you think? Is my hair gonna be okay?”
But even though Tessa was trying not to think about the inscrutable nature of prayers — answered or unanswered — she couldn’t help but recall her speech ideas, the things she’d been considering saying: If God wasn’t there, if there was just a vast, sweeping, empty universe, then prayer wouldn’t mean anything at all.
Meaningless, meaningless, all is meaningless.
But if God is there and he really does care about his hurting, questioning race of dreamers and fools, then praying would matter — even if it didn’t happen on their time frame or in the ways they expected or wanted.
After all, if we could understand God, then his wisdom would have to be equal to or smaller than ours, and that was logically impossible if he’s all-knowing and we aren’t. The very definition of God required that people would be unable to understand his ways.
Your mom never gave up on believing, even when it didn’t seem to be helping her at all.
“I guess prayer is sort of a rune,” Tessa said.
Brineesha finished up with the hairbrush and set it down. “A rune?”
“A mystery.”
“I think maybe that’s not so bad,” Lien-hua reflected.
“No. Maybe it’s not.”
Brin patted Tessa’s shoulder. “You look fantastic, dear.”
Tessa stared at herself in the mirror and said nothing, because deep down she was trying to convince herself that what she’d just heard was right.
Then Brineesha gave her a small spray bottle of perfume to take with her and Tessa slipped it into the red clutch purse she was going to use for the night.
We were discovering that the airports in India didn’t have the level of video surveillance we needed.
Working with Angela and Lacey, I reviewed the footage, while Ralph compared Tyree’s military assignments with the known terrorist activity that Alexei Chekov, now known as Valkyrie, had been involved with at the time of Tyree’s service, seeing if there was any overlap.
But so far none of us had made any progress.
While Ralph and I were contemplating what to look into next, Kantsos called me back and told me one of the factory workers in Kadapa remembered seeing a “trim and fit” young man and a red-haired woman at the facility.
I contacted the other two agents whom Margaret had assigned to this case and told them what Kantsos had learned. “We need to identify that woman in the photo with Tyree. Cybercrime came up empty on a facial match, so let’s try a different tack. Contact Corey Wellington’s and Natalie Germaine’s neighbors. See if any of them might have seen this red-haired woman or Tyree in the vicinity in the days leading up to the suicides.”
It seemed like a long shot and I knew it would likely keep the agents busy for a while, but I was running out of ideas.
I went back to work, but it wasn’t long before Ralph mumbled, “I might have something.” He rotated his computer so I could see the photos he’d pulled up of the macabre carnage left in the wake of a suicide bombing in Afghanistan. “There’s a covert assignment that Tyree had in Kandahar two months before his contract expired. That same week there was a bombing during a funeral in Kandahar.”
I calculated. That would have been after Chekov left the GRU. “Valkyrie.”
“It was never verified for certain, but yes, it does look like he was behind it.”
I thought things through. “So where does that leave us? Valkyrie connects with Tyree in Kandahar. Maybe Tyree is involved in this bombing, or maybe he isn’t, but either way, Valkyrie somehow recruits him and then orchestrates this counterfeit drug operation, using Tyree as his muscle at the facility?”
Ralph was tracking with me. “For whatever reason, Tyree tortures these two guys, puts ’em in the hospital — apparently working with this unknown woman. I don’t care if you’re into motives or not, Pat, but why would they get this drug to Margaret’s brother, to Natalie Germaine, and then try to cover it up?”