Rachel was in the house’s spacious pantry when he arrived, sitting straight, her scratched hands resting on a scratched chopping-block table, beside a now-empty Smith & Wesson M&P pistol. Sixty years ago, this had probably been a servants’ dining room, but that time, and that America, were long gone. She looked at the sleeve of her shirt, at the splatter of blood that she’d been able to wash off her skin but not her clothes. The knees of her jeans were stiff and heavy from it. Vertigo swelled again.
There were tricks, she knew, ways to focus the mind on little things, to grab onto pickle jars and rusty hinges and the girl who was still passed out in the upstairs bedroom, and use them as life rafts to keep yourself afloat. But sitting in the semidarkness she couldn’t remember quite how those tricks worked.
She’d heard his car roll up and knew that he would have parked next to Layla’s Subaru and Peter’s Jeep. She imagined his first move would be to check inside both cars, just to be sure they were empty. No doubt he wondered why Rachel wasn’t outside waiting for him—she, after all, had called him—and by now he’d probably taken out some inconspicuous pistol before entering the house.
“Hello?” she heard, his voice echoing in the grand foyer. “I’m looking for Susan Hill.”
“Back here,” she called. But it was a big house, and she wasn’t sure he could hear her. So she raised her voice. “In the back, off the kitchen!”
When he eventually appeared, a Bureau-issue Glock hanging from his fist, she was finally able to put a face to the voice on the phone she only knew as “Toby”: blond mustache, sideburns, blue eyes—so damned California. “You hurt?” he asked.
She shook her head.
“Where are they?”
“Basement.”
He thought a moment, then disappeared and returned with a bottle of Evian. He cracked it open for her. “Hydrate.”
As he watched, she drank the cool French spring water and followed him into the expansive kitchen. The air was stuffy and sweet, stinking of cigarettes, so she opened the back door and stepped out onto the gravel. She looked but couldn’t make out the vineyards in the darkness. They went on for acres and acres. To the east, Sonoma was a mild glow on the rolling horizon, but here there was only soil, vines, and dead bodies in a mock-gothic monstrosity at the end of a long private lane. Soon, the sun would be rising.
“Let’s go downstairs,” she heard. He was standing behind her in the doorway, his Glock now in a conspicuous shoulder holster.
“Do I need to?”
He considered that, then shrugged and stepped outside to join her. “You’ll have to go down eventually.”
“But not yet.”
“Not yet.”
Together, they slowly walked around the enormous house, crunching gravel, and when they reached the east side they were battered by fragrant wind from across the fields. To get the ball rolling, Toby said, “Headquarters filled me in on the important points. You’ve been based in San Fran for three months under a legend: Susan Hill. A research project on the left-wing underground. I have it right?”
“Yeah,” she admitted, even though the purpose of her move from the East Coast to the West sometimes escaped even her. It was nice to have an objective reminder.
“Pretty far on it?”
She shrugged. “It’s coming together.”
“And it involves … what?”
She looked at him, at first unsure what he was asking. Then she got it. “Infiltration.”
“Right,” he said, and she wondered if the judgment she heard in his voice was really there, or if her insecurity was inventing it. He wouldn’t be the first—back in D.C., she knew, her old colleagues in the Hoover Building, trapped behind desks and stacks of money laundering reports … well, they all thought Special Agent Rachel Proulx had finagled a paid, six-month vacation out of them. Toby looked like he was thinking the same thing.
Well, fuck them, and fuck him.
She said, “You don’t learn anything real from the outside.”
“You can learn a lot,” he countered.
“You can learn what, and you can learn when. But you can’t learn why.”
Toby wasn’t having any of that. “We know why—they’re a generation that’s been coddled and spoiled, and they’re still too young to accept that hypocrisy is the human condition.” He shrugged. “But you’re a bigger person than me: I wouldn’t last five minutes without slapping them upside their skulls.”
Rachel halted, and it took him a couple more steps to realize he was alone. He turned to face her. “Did I say something wrong?”
Though he had—this kind of wild simplification was precisely why she had grown to believe in the necessity of her report—she said, “No,” then nodded at him. “Did headquarters give you any directive?”
“Just make sure your cover isn’t blown.”
“It already is,” she said.
“This? Anything can be cleaned up.”
This particular mess wasn’t what she was thinking of, but there was time to get to that explanation.
Toby looked up at the starry sky, as if watching out for drones. “So why don’t you tell me what brought you to this fancy-ass house? Then we’ll see where we are.”
Rachel peered out into darkness, and when she reached back in her memories was surprised that it had only started yesterday.