“Don’t feel bad. He was like that as a boy, too.”
“I know. I didn’t take it personally. But then he stopped calling, and the few times I came by to see how he was doing, it was like he couldn’t get rid of me fast enough. After years together, suddenly it was the cold shoulder. I was afraid it was another woman or something, but that wasn’t Keith. He was a good guy. Quirky, but he wasn’t a cheater,” she pronounced with certainty.
Jeffrey hesitated, unsure of how to best respond. “No, I don’t think so either. But where does that leave us? Can you think of anything else he said?” he asked.
“Well, I didn’t tell anyone this, but he was freaking me out the last time I saw him.” She paused and her face changed to a look of annoyance. “Damn. I almost forgot. He gave me something to give to you.” She fished around in her purse. “Here. This is for you.” She handed him a paper stub.
“What… what’s this?”
“That’s what I mean by he was acting all weird. The last thing he did before he left my place that last time, about a week and a half ago, right after getting back from Europe, was give me that. It was one of the things that made me really uncomfortable. It was like he knew he was going to die.” Becky seemed to run out of steam. “Which is crazy. I’m sorry I told you. It sounds completely nuts. Unless you believe in psychic ability or whatever, which I don’t. But now I’m not so sure…”
Jeffrey studied the slip of paper. At the top, in green ink, was the name of a pawn shop in Washington, D.C. It was date-stamped two weeks earlier. But the rest was unintelligible to Jeffrey, mainly because it was in Chinese, the characters meaning nothing to him.
“I’ve never seen a pawn ticket before, but that’s what it looks like.”
“That’s my guess. Anyway, he made a big deal out of making sure you got it, so it was pretty important to him. Which reminds me — I have a box of his stuff at my place that you might want. Odds and ends. And there’s his condo that needs to be cleaned out. I have a key to the place, but Jeff… I can’t do it. I just don’t have it in me. I hate to lay it on you, but there’s nobody else.”
“No problem, Becky. I completely understand. I don’t really want to do it, either, but I’m his brother, and he would have done it for me.”
“There might be some insurance from his work, or maybe a will… although he never discussed it. You’d know more about that than I would, being a lawyer and all.”
Becky was doing the best she could, he could see, but she was barely holding it together. Keith’s death had hit her hard. She meant well, but she wasn’t equipped to deal with the details. Neither was he. But ducking it wasn’t an option. Becky was the girlfriend, not the wife. Which left him.
Her coffee refill arrived and she sipped at it as he retreated into his thoughts, mentally making a list as he considered what would be involved in arranging his brother’s affairs. He leaned back in his chair and eyed the sky.
“I’ll have to get a death certificate and then go through his stuff to see where he banked, what broker he used, who holds his mortgage,” Jeffrey said, thinking out loud.
“I can help, Jeffrey. Only… not right now. I need some time. This has changed my whole life, and I don’t know what I’m going to do…”
“Of course. You’ve done way more than enough organizing this service, Becky. This has put you through the wringer. Don’t worry about anything — I’ll deal with whatever needs to be done.”
“I wish I could tell you more about those last weeks, Jeff. But there just isn’t much to tell. Except… well, how close were you two? Really? He didn’t talk about you a lot, and I only met you that one time…”
“We used to be pretty close. It’s just that when we both grew up, things got complicated. Between school and work, and him moving across the country, we sort of got wrapped up in our own lives. I guess that’s my way of saying that we didn’t see each other nearly as much as we should have. But it happens,” Jeffrey said in a low voice, and then gazed off at the trees across the street, some of them hundreds of years old, he could tell by their height and girth.
They both sat silently for a few minutes, and then she spoke again, calmer now.
“I have a couple of photo albums too. He left them at my place one night and never bothered to pick them up. About six months ago. I’d been bugging him about his childhood for a while, and one night he showed up with a bottle of wine and the photos. I suppose you’re right. He was a little odd…”
“I’ll tell you what. I’m going to need some time to deal with his estate. I can’t see any way of doing it without flying back out here at least one more time. Hold on to everything until I return, and we can sort things out then. This is going to take a while, so there’s no rush.”
She nodded and finished her coffee, then looked around as if lost. “I can’t believe this is happening…”
“I know, Becky, I know.”
He walked her to her car and declined the offer of a ride, preferring to walk back to the hotel. He needed to move, to cover ground, to have some silence after the grim discussion with Becky. There was a lot to mull over. And the logistics of dealing with his brother’s affairs weren’t going to be simple, he could already see that. He hadn’t thought about it until then, but there would be a lot of things to handle, and nobody but him to do it.
Jeffrey watched her little Ford disappear around the corner, and then he set out the way he’d come, back to the hotel, more questions in his mind than answers.
A dark gray sedan pulled away from the curb a block down the street and followed Becky’s car, its windows tinted dark, mud obscuring part of the license plate. Jeffrey didn’t notice, nor did he register the nondescript man who took up a position a hundred yards behind him, just another working stiff carrying a briefcase and a newspaper, on his way to a tedious day of monotony.
SIX
The Agency
“What did he know?”
George Thorn, the deputy director of the CIA, shook his head and shrugged at the question, deliberately taking his time with his answer. The questioner was not a man to be trifled with — enormously powerful, and one of the richest men in the nation. Thorn had been summoned to New York to meet with him rather than addressing the entire group to which he and the man belonged. It was better if some things were kept away from the others, although the two generals in their clique knew, and in fact had helped orchestrate the latest operation.
“We’re not completely sure. We do know he was poking around in areas that were sensitive. Restricted. Top secret, and not in any way related to his work.”
“Yes, yes. I’m aware of all that. How he was able to gain access is another troubling matter.”
Thorn looked around the room — the sitting room of a penthouse suite in the most exclusive building in Manhattan, the cost per square foot more than if it had been cast in pure gold. Two Picassos adorned the walls, along with a Renoir that belonged in a museum. The questioner, Reginald Barker, was old, old money — the kind of money that had prospered during the Second World War from funding both sides of the conflict, in addition to now owning the largest investment bank on Wall Street and having its tentacles in oil, real estate, military contractors, and Big Pharma. It was the kind of money that would never show up on any Forbes list — the sort that ran nations, and Barker had been actively doing just that for at least fifty of his seventy-nine years, after inheriting the mantle from his father, a hard-nosed industrialist who had taken the billion-dollar legacy he’d been handed when Barker’s grandfather had died and built it into a mega-empire.