Chapter 9
Anna’s legs gave out.
She did not fall. She lowered herself slowly, deliberately, onto her knees on the Persian rug in front of his desk, as if the floor were the only surface in the world that could still hold her.
The phone slipped from her fingers and landed face down beside her.
“Mr. Moretti —”
“Get up, Mrs. Carter.”
“No.”
“Anna. Get up.”
It was the first time he had used her first name. She heard it. It did not move her.
“My husband was Ethan Carter. He was a cryptographer. We built a system called Nightingale together, over four years, in an apartment above a bookshop in Cambridge. It was meant to protect journalists, doctors, people in places where being heard was a reason to be killed.”
Dante did not move. He stood behind the desk with his hands at his sides.
“Helix Nova licensed it. Adrien Cross signed the contract himself. Four months later Ethan found that they were using our architecture to launder weapons, money, and to hide payments to men who make people disappear. He was going to tell someone.”
She did not look up.
“Three days later his car left the road outside Framingham. The brakes were fine. The report said he was driving too fast. He was not driving too fast. He never drove too fast. He had a daughter.”
Her voice did not break. It had the quality of a thing being poured out of a vessel that had been closed for a very long time.
“The last message he sent me was three words and a city. Marco B. Boston. I spent eighteen months finding out who that was. When I knew, I came here.”
She lifted her head.
“I did not come to clean your floors. I came because the man who helped kill my husband sits at your right hand, and I could not reach him from anywhere else in the world. I lied to you. I lied in the application. I lied in the interview. I have lied to you every day for six months.”
Her eyes were wet and steady.
“And now my daughter is in a dark room because I did.”
Dante listened.
He did not interrupt. He did not ask a single question. When she stopped, he waited to be sure she had stopped.
Then he walked around the desk.
He did not help her up.
He went to the whiskey cart. He poured two glasses, two fingers in each. He walked back and set one on the desk beside her shoulder, within reach, and kept the other.
“Mrs. Carter.”
“Mr. Moretti.”
“You should have told me the first night.”
“I know.”
“I would have believed you.”
Her face did not change. But her eyes filled.
And for the first time in two years, Anna Carter cried.
She cried silently, because that was the only way she had learned to cry in the apartment above the bookshop after they had taken her husband. Her shoulders did not shake. The tears simply came and ran down her face and fell onto the rug and were absorbed without a sound.
Dante set the whiskey down.
He crouched in front of her. He placed one hand on her shoulder. It was a careful hand, almost formal — the hand of a man who had not touched another human being in comfort for a long time and was out of practice.
“We will get her back.”
“You do not know what they will do.”
“We will get her back.”
“Anna.”
She looked at him through the tears. She nodded once.
He stood. He walked to the door. He opened it.
“Luca.”
Luca appeared in the doorway within four seconds. He had been standing in the corridor the entire time.
Dante did not look at Anna. He did not look at the phone on the rug. He stepped into the hallway, pulled the door almost closed behind him, and spoke in a voice pitched for Luca’s ear alone.
“Call Marco. Tell him Enzo is missing. Tell him the housekeeper’s daughter is missing. Tell him I am in the study and I want him here in twenty minutes.”
“Yes, boss.”
“Luca.”
“Yes.”
“Nothing in my face when he arrives. Nothing in yours. We do not know.”
Luca’s eyes held his for one beat.
He understood. He had understood two nights earlier, when Dante had told him to watch Marco the same way he watched Anna. He had never asked why. He had never needed to.
“Boss. If I am wrong, say so now.”
“You are not wrong.”
Luca went.
Dante returned to the study and closed the door.
Anna had risen from the rug and was wiping her face with the back of her wrist. He did not look at her either.
“When Marco arrives, you will serve coffee. You will cry in front of him. You will beg him to help find your daughter. And you will give him something of hers, so the men on the street have something to know her by. Not the blue coat she wore to school. They have that one. The other one — the yellow coat she wears at the weekend.”
“Yes.”
“You will also, before you give him the coat, sew something into the lining of the collar. I will have it ready for you in the kitchen in ten minutes. It is the size of a grain of rice. It will not be found. It will transmit for seventy-two hours.”
She took a breath.
“Can you do this?”
“Yes.”
May you like
“Go.”
She went.
