Minka tipped her head. “Explain.”
The table was covered with oilcloth that had seen better days. The previous owners had left it behind, probably after taking one look at the dark, unappetizing stains and cigarette burns. I motioned for Minka to bring me something to write with. She found a marker, bright blue and smelling like fruit, the sort of thing My Little Pony would use to sign a slam book. I sketched out three boxes at one end of the cloth and jotted a name in each one.
“?‘Thierry Carapaz, Provenance. Günther Paar, Acquisitions. Vance Gilchrist, Exhibitions,’?” she read aloud.
“Correct,” I told her. I drew a bracket to collect the three together and labeled it Board of Directors. Above that I wrote, Museum.
“The Museum has a board of three directors, each overseeing their own department.” I touched a finger to the first. “Carapaz is in charge of Provenance. Those are the computer geeks. They do research, deep dives into government databases. They also do digital surveillance. Their only job is intelligence gathering.”
“For what purpose?” Minka asked.
“To identify two types of people who are of interest to the Museum,” Helen told her. “Potential targets and potential recruits.”
Minka nodded and I moved on, tracing a line from Provenance to the board. “Provenance briefs the board at quarterly meetings, introducing dossiers on people they think need to be killed or to be trained to become field agents. The board debates and discusses in closed-door sessions and then they vote. It takes all three agreeing, a unanimous vote, in order for either a kill order or an offer of employment to be issued.”
I pointed to the next box. “Once the kill order has been issued, Acquisitions—under the direction of Paar—is responsible for supply and logistics. They can do everything from creating fake social media profiles to building bombs. They provide weapons, wardrobe, travel arrangements. Whatever we need in order to make the mission successful. With me so far?”
Minka nodded and tapped the last box. “Exhibitions. These are field agents who kill? This is you?”
“This is me,” I told her. “This is all of us. We work under Vance Gilchrist and we are responsible for carrying out the missions.”
“You forgot the curators,” Helen said, peering at the sketch through her reading glasses.
I squeezed three small boxes underneath the directors. “The directors each have a curator who deals with the day-to-day working of their department.” I filled them in. “Naomi Ndiaye works under Thierry Carapaz in Provenance. Martin Fairbrother is Günther Paar’s second in Acquisitions.”
I hesitated over the empty box under Vance Gilchrist’s name.
“Who works there?” Minka asked.
“Nobody now,” Natalie told her. “The last one died six months ago and they haven’t gotten around to finding a permanent replacement. Vance can be persnickety.”
“Only women are ever called persnickety,” Mary Alice said. “Men get to be ‘detail oriented.’?” She pushed her empty bowl away, letting the spoon rattle. “Moving on. We need a plan. And fast.”
It wasn’t like Mary Alice to be quite so brusque, but I knew she was thinking of Akiko. The sooner we cleared up this mess, the sooner she could find her wife and figure out how to patch things up.
“Agreed,” I said. “We’ve bought ourselves some time but we can’t stay here forever. We have to figure out why we’ve been targeted.”
“I can’t believe the board would turn on us,” Natalie said with real bitterness. “After all we’ve done.”
“Maybe it’s because of what we’ve done,” Helen said. “Maybe we killed someone we weren’t supposed to. Or maybe we saw something we shouldn’t have.”
“There are a thousand possible reasons for the board to decide we’re a problem,” I said. “They’re the only ones who can issue a termination order and they would have done it unanimously. We have to find out exactly why they sent this one.”
“Too bad we can’t ask,” Natalie said.
Mary Alice spoke up for the first time. “Why can’t we?”
It was an audacious idea, and I was glad Mary Alice was the one to suggest it. She hadn’t completely lost her nerve if she was thinking so far out of the box.
“But ask who?” Helen ventured. “We can’t very well go straight to the board. They’re the ones who ordered the hit.”
Minka picked up the blue marker and drew a thin line over the names of Gilchrist, Paar, and Carapaz.
“The curators?” Mary Alice suggested.
“No way,” Natalie said flatly. “I don’t trust Naomi as far as I can throw her,” she added, poking at her name. “She’s in charge of Provenance, which means she was responsible for briefing the board. Whatever she told them is why they’re after us.”
“We don’t know that,” Mary Alice began, but Natalie cut her off.
“When have you ever known the board to do anything that wasn’t suggested by Provenance? It’s literally their job to propose targets,” Natalie argued. “Besides, I try to stay away from Provenance as much as possible. They give me the creeps, spying on people through their keyboards like that. It’s weird.”
I had met Naomi a handful of times and even liked her a little. She was thirty-something with a couple of kids and a foot firmly on the next rung of the career ladder. Every board member mentored the curator under them, which meant she was in line for Carapaz’s job when he retired, and she made no bones about wanting it. She didn’t make bullshit conversation just to hear herself talk, and I could see how that would make Natalie uncomfortable.
I crossed her off the list. “Martin?” I asked.
“Do we really want to do that to him?” Helen put in. “I feel sorry for the boy.” Martin Fairbrother wasn’t a boy. Like Naomi, he was mid-thirties, but that was about all they had in common. Where she was confident and took no bullshit, Martin was diffident and preferred his gadgets to conversation. We’d once sat next to each other at a daylong conference on hydro-explosives and he had said exactly one word to me. Pen? His had exploded, leaking ink all over his cuff. I’d given him my ballpoint and gone back to sleep. But he was very good at his job, ensuring we had everything we needed for each mission, no matter how small. If Mary Alice wanted peppermint L?rabars or Helen requested hollow-point ammunition with Chinese manufacturing stamps, Martin was the guy.
“He put some calcium chews in my work bag because he heard me complain about my last bone-density scan,” Helen added with a smile. “Chocolate macadamia.”
“And he got me the sweetest little yawara the last time he was in Nagasaki,” Natalie put in.
They looked at me and I shrugged. “He got me a slapjack from a leathermaker in Texas.” It was a nice little weapon. It looked like a Bible bookmark but it had enough lead in either end to crush a man’s temple. “He’s good at details and he’s thoughtful.”
“See? A nice kid,” Helen said. “Look, the board obviously believes we did something wrong, wrong enough to kill over. And by now they know the first attempt to take us out didn’t work. They’ll realize the natural thing for us to do is ask questions, and whoever we ask is at risk.”
“And Martin is the first person we’d ask since Vance’s curator is dead,” I finished. I rubbed a hand over my face. “Helen’s right. Contacting Martin could put him in danger.”
“We don’t know that,” Mary Alice argued.
I held up a hand. “Let’s call Martin Plan B. There has to be someone else who might have a line on what’s going on. Someone less vulnerable than Martin but with an ear for gossip.”
We were silent a moment, thinking. I tipped back in my chair, balancing on two legs as I considered. Natalie picked up the marker and started to doodle on a corner of the tablecloth while Mary Alice plucked at her paper napkin, tearing little pieces off and putting them into a pile. Helen simply sat, staring into the middle distance, and Minka finished off the last of the beignets.