Abbey rolled over in bed and wondered what time it was. Without even opening her eyes, she sensed the brightness of the room and knew it had to be deep into the morning hours. They’d stayed up very late talking to Peter Chancellor, and the writer had invited them to stay overnight. He’d offered them two bedrooms, but Abbey had interrupted to say that they only needed one. She wanted Jason with her. She wasn’t going to sleep alone after what they’d done to her.
Lying there now, sensations of the night with him came back to her mind. She remembered the complete darkness of the house, not a light anywhere outside. The feel of Jason in bed beside her. His strength as he held her. Their bodies molded together, skin on skin. But they hadn’t had sex. She’d made it clear that if he wanted her, she was his, but two years hadn’t changed him. He was an enigma, a riddle, still desperate to keep his distance. She’d felt desire from him, maybe even love, but there was also that infuriating reluctance he’d had with her from the very beginning. As if his first instinct was always to push her away.
But they were together again. That was what mattered. When she opened her eyes, she saw him by one of the windows that looked out on the Allegheny forest. He was already dressed.
“Good morning,” he said.
She softened at the sight of his smile. “Hi. What time is it?”
“It’s after ten.”
“You should have woken me up,” Abbey chided him. “When did you get up?”
“Six. It doesn’t matter when I go to bed, I’m up at six.”
“Hardass,” she told him. “Is there coffee?”
He pointed to an urn on a silver tray, which was placed on a table near the bed.
“Thank God,” Abbey said.
She got out of bed. She wore nothing but skimpy cotton panties, and she was pleased to see the look that Jason stole at her body as she dug in his backpack and found a T-shirt she could wear. She poured herself coffee, then joined him at the window. The green trees of the forest, underneath a cloudy sky, stretched over the hills without any visible break. Peter Chancellor had chosen a remote location for himself and Alison.
“Do you like my hair this way?” she asked. “Black, not red. Short, not long.”
“I think you’d look good no matter what you did with it.”
“Yeah, yeah,” she murmured as she sipped her coffee, but she had to suppress a smile, because she was extremely pleased with that response. “I mean, it was my hair you were looking at just now. Right? Nothing else?”
She smirked at the flush on Jason’s face.
“Sorry,” she went on. “I’m a bitch when I first get up.”
“Only then?”
Abbey punched him in the arm, then got on tiptoes and kissed his cheek. They were quiet for a while, standing close to each other by the window, her hips brushing against his. It was a little respite from everything they’d faced, but she knew it wouldn’t last.
Gently, he touched her face under her chin, where the skin was still bruised and discolored. “How’s your neck? Are you in pain?”
“It stings a bit, but that’s all.”
“We should get you a scarf or turtleneck to cover it up. It’ll attract attention wherever we go next. People will remember.”
She cupped her coffee mug in her hands and frowned. “So where do we go next? What’s the plan? We know more about the Pyramid now, and we know Varak is this so-called Genesis. We know that Deborah Mueller was actually someone named Louisa, but we don’t know where she came from. As a journalist, I’d say we still know almost nothing.”
Jason nodded. “I agree.”
“You saw Saira Kohli with Darrell Forster, but you said you didn’t think she was involved. Could we talk to her? She has credibility. If people hear from her, maybe they’ll listen.”
“Maybe, but what would we tell her? There’s no reason for her to believe us right now. We need to get inside the Pyramid. Find out how they work. Find a weakness. If we do that, then there may be a way to expose them and tear them down.”
“I’ve been thinking about that,” Abbey said.
“And?”
“Well, the Pyramid is basically about media, regardless of whether it’s traditional or online. That’s what Varak is trying to influence. And that’s my world. There’s somebody I think we should talk to. I don’t know if he can help, but if there’s anybody who would have heard something about the Pyramid, I think it’s him.”
“Who is it?”
“Walden Thatcher.”
Jason shook his head. “I don’t know him.”
“Walden was one of my journalism professors at McGill. Actually, he was a visiting professor on loan from Columbia that semester, so I was lucky to get him. He’s one of the legends of the business. His textbook Principles of Journalism is sort of like the bible for media grad students. He’s taught an insane percentage of the leading editors in newspapers around the world. I can’t believe something hasn’t bubbled up to him about the Pyramid. He might be able to give us names. Or some insights on how it may work.”
Jason nodded. “Is he still at Columbia?”
“No, no, he’s long since retired. But I’m sure he keeps his fingers in the business. He’s got a place in New York State outside Bedford. I was there once for a reunion of Walden’s students. I know it’s a long way to go, but I want to see what he has to say about all this.”
“Okay. Let’s go.”
“Just like that?” Abbey said.
“Like you say, this is your world. And the road back to Lennon leads through the Pyramid, so that’s the road we need to follow.”
Abbey liked hearing him say we. She didn’t know if it would last, but she wasn’t about to let go of it. Meanwhile, a ray of sunshine broke through the clouds and lit up the green hills. She stared at it as she sipped her coffee.
“Or we could stay here for a while,” she said. “I think Peter Chancellor would let us. Take a little break from reality.”
Bourne shook his head. “It sounds nice, but that doesn’t work, believe me. You can’t hide. Sooner or later, reality always finds you.”
Saira Kohli read the article in the New York Times for the third time.
The headline was shocking enough—death, chaos in high line shooting—but the details of the incident alarmed her. The woman who’d been killed was identified as Kenna Martin, a publicist with the Forster Group. Darrell’s agency! The police believed that Martin had been lured to the High Line and targeted, but they offered no hints of a possible motive. However, they described a person of interest, wanted for questioning, who bore a striking resemblance to the man Saira had met in Darrell Forster’s office only two days before the shooting.
Saira didn’t believe in coincidences.
Her first instinct was to pick up the phone and call Darrell and demand an explanation. What was going on? Who was Kenna Martin, and what was her role in his agency, and why would anyone have wanted to kill her? And who was the man in his office? But she remembered Darrell’s odd behavior in the taxi to LaGuardia and his defensiveness about the stranger and about the institute’s office in Frankfurt. She didn’t think her questions would get any answers from him.
She got up from her desk. She went to the window of her fourth-floor faculty office in Regents Hall at Georgetown, which looked out on Cooper Field, where the lacrosse team was currently practicing. In fifteen minutes, she had to give a lecture in her class on global patterns of disease, but she was having trouble concentrating on her work. Lately, all she could think about was the girl she’d met in Oslo who called herself Louisa. The girl who’d delivered a warning to her and then wound up dead in West Potomac Park under another name.
I work at the institute in Frankfurt. It’s not what you think! It’s evil!
Could that really be true?
Saira looked around her office at some of the personal items she kept there. There was a leather drum made for her as a gift by an Ethiopian tribesman after her work to eradicate HIV in his village. A fountain pen that had once belonged to her scientific hero, Albert Sabin. A wooden lattu, a spinning top with a coiled string around it, that had belonged to her youngest sister before the malaria took her away. These were the little things that defined who she was, more than her academic credentials and degrees, more than the honors and awards. They were tangible reminders that science wasn’t about research in a laboratory. It was about bettering the daily lives of real people.
But Saira was beginning to fear that she’d betrayed those people.
Two years ago, she’d been approached by Darrell Forster to join the Varak Institute, to lend her name and reputation to an effort to put science ahead of politics and facts ahead of misinformation. The pandemic had been raging, and she’d signed on gladly. But ever since, her uneasiness had grown. It had started a year ago. A chemist in France she’d once respected—a friend—had published a paper that raised doubts about one of the important new treatments for the disease. Stupid! Irresponsible! His conclusions had been wrong! But to the deniers, he became a hero. Saira had criticized his study and spoken out against his findings, but that was like holding back the ocean with nothing but her hand.
Then a front-page story broke, accusing her friend of academic fraud, of falsifying his research in return for a huge payout from a competitor of the company that had developed the new treatment. Other, uglier rumors piled on, too. A former grad student accused him of sexual assault. Her friend had called Saira, delirious with despair, to deny everything, to beg for her help in salvaging his reputation. She’d turned him down. She’d said he was getting what he deserved for selling his soul.
A week later, he shot himself in the head.
Not long after that, Saira discovered that the grad student who’d made the accusation of assault had drowned in a strange accident while on vacation near Palermo. A forensic accountant looking into the alleged bribe determined that there were irregularities in the handling of the money and that there was no actual evidence that her chemist friend had ever even known about the account that was opened in his name. But none of that information got more than a one-sentence mention in the newspapers that had blared his guilt around the world.
That was when Saira had begun to wonder. To doubt. When she met the woman who called herself Louisa, those doubts grew.
What had she done by signing on with the institute?
What was really going on in Frankfurt?
Saira went back to her desk. She checked her watch and saw that she had only five minutes before her lecture was scheduled to begin. Even so, she grabbed her phone and dialed a number from memory.
“Reese Security,” a familiar voice answered. She’d used Evan Reese to install and monitor security systems at her home, and she’d often used his guards to supplement her personal security when she traveled overseas. The profile of her position was such that she had to be cautious. She often received death threats, and although most were frivolous, she couldn’t afford to take chances.
“Evan, it’s Saira Kohli.”
“Dr. Kohli, how are you?” the man replied in a voice like steel wool. He was in his forties, with a cold, analytical mind when it came to risk. He was former military and still tough as nails.
“I’m good, thank you. I was wondering if you’d had a chance to make inquiries about that matter I mentioned.”
“The Deborah Mueller murder? I’m still looking into it. I talked to one of my contacts in the park police, and they claimed that the matter was straightforward. There was nothing that raised any red flags with them. However, I’ve unearthed a couple of anomalies that I’d like to investigate further.”
“Anomalies?” Saira asked. “Like what?”
“Well, there are rumors about a witness who claimed that three men were involved in the murder. She made it sound more like an assassination than a drug-related homicide. I’ve heard that there was a video of her accusations, but I haven’t been able to locate it online.”
“Who was this woman?”
“I’ve only got her first name. Retha. She was homeless. She used to hang out in West Potomac Park when she wasn’t at a shelter, but she disappeared from the area shortly after the murder of Deborah Mueller. Nobody saw her after that, and I just found out why. Retha turned up dead a week ago inside a closed storefront in Anacostia. Her body had been there for a while. No word yet on homicide, overdose, natural causes, whatever. But if you ask me, it’s kind of an odd coincidence.”
Saira frowned, and her stomach lurched. “Yes, it is. Please keep at it, Evan, and let me know if you find anything else.”
“I will. Oh, there’s one other thing. It sounds like you’re not the only person looking into this case.”
“What do you mean?”
“Seems like everywhere I ask questions, somebody else has been there ahead of me,” Evan told her. “A freelance journalist. You probably know who she is, because she’s been in the headlines the last couple of days over a racist post she supposedly made on Twitter. Her name’s Abbey Laurent.”