“Come home,” Bernard said. “Just come home.”
Rachel, leaning against her wall, eyes closed, said, “This is my home.” She knew how obtuse she sounded, but just because he’d taken a last-minute red-eye to come sit by her side didn’t mean that she had to treat her boss with kid gloves.
She opened her eyes finally and looked at him sitting in the too-small desk chair. He’d aged in the three months since she’d left D.C., his wiry hair gone white around the ears, his paunch taking on an air of permanence, his thick spectacles somehow thicker. But whatever he saw in her was more disturbing. “By rights you should be dead, Rachel.”
“So should that girl,” she told him. “But she’s not.”
He adjusted his glasses and sighed, then looked around her little Mission apartment, unimpressed. She was on her mattress, but not out of disrespect—she just didn’t have any other furniture. Not yet.
He said, “She’s fine, by the way. As fine as she can be. We found an aunt in Montreal who’ll come pick her up.”
“He worked for them,” she said. “He was a plant, wasn’t he?”
“Toby? Seems so.”
“Did they turn him in Moscow?”
“Maybe,” he said, his voice trailing off. “I suppose we’ll never know now that you’ve killed him.”
“But you’re investigating it.”
Bernard pulled at his lip. It was the classic Treptow tell—the man could never hide his anxiety.
“Bernard…”
Another tug. “There’s nothing to investigate, is there? In a couple hours the cleaners will show up to get rid of the bodies. Another crew will repaint and replace all the important things. I’m not sure how we’re going to explain the expenses, but that’s someone else’s problem. Kožul’s story about a Chinese firm buying the house—that, at least, was true, but I doubt we’ll get any trouble from them.”
“And Kožul’s name?” she asked, feeling like she shouldn’t have to be pressing him for information.
He opened his hands in a display of ignorance. “I just know that whoever paid him to do it this way knew a thing or two. Either we buy that these kids did it, and case closed. Or we don’t buy it, and we’re too embarrassed to let the truth get out—that we can’t protect political exiles inside our own borders. They knew we’d clean it up for them.”
“And my cover,” she said.
“There’s that,” Bernard said, nodding. “Toby blew your cover. So, really. The only thing to do is come back to D.C.”
That was the rub, and Rachel knew it. Over three months, she’d just scratched the surface of the subject she’d crossed the continent to study, and to go back empty-handed felt like the worst possible outcome—worse, even, than the deaths of well-meaning but unruly innocents in the Sonoma countryside. That vision she’d had over her divorce papers, of a project that might very well make her professional name and give her a fresh sense of purpose, was too compelling to give up on.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said.
“What?”
“It doesn’t matter if the Russians know who I am. As long as they don’t know I killed Peter and Toby, I don’t care if they know what I’m doing here.”
Bernard took off his glasses and frowned at his knees. “I suppose that’s doable. But once we clean up the house—”
“Don’t clean it,” she cut in.
He put back on his glasses. “Don’t?”
She shook her head. “Don’t.”