Natalie snorted. “Well, it wouldn’t be the first time you poached a target.”
“No, Natalie, it wouldn’t. I have occasionally taken point on a job when it wasn’t my responsibility because—” I looked at the naked, broken anguish in Helen’s eyes and swerved from what I was going to say. “Because I made a judgment call. He was planning on eliminating all four of us. He only delayed because he was trying to get me to tell him where the rest of you were,” I finished.
“You didn’t have a choice,” Mary Alice said firmly.
“Poor dumbass Sweeney,” Natalie murmured.
Helen looked down at the ground and continued to say nothing.
Akiko roused herself when I finished. “Shorthand this for me,” she said. “Please. I want to understand.”
I wiped my mouth on a napkin and put it aside. “When we realized the organization we work for—”
“The Museum,” Akiko put in.
“The Museum.” I nodded. “When we realized the organization we work for targeted us for termination, we contacted a former associate of ours to find out why.”
“And that was this Sweeney person?” she asked.
“Correct. Our rendezvous with him was supposed to give us information about what was going on. We were careful enough to meet him in a neutral location, but it turns out we shouldn’t have trusted him at all. He came to kill us, Akiko.”
“So what happens now?” she asked. “They tried to kill you and they failed. I mean, they don’t just say, ‘Fair enough, our bad,’ and let you go home? Right?”
I heard the note of hope in her voice, and so did Mary Alice, who winced a little as she spoke. “We can’t go home again.”
“Ever,” Natalie said.
Akiko turned to her wife. “Are you shitting me? Mary Alice.”
Mary Alice was rubbing her hands together, the knuckles white and then red. She was one of the most accomplished killers I knew, but sitting next to her wife, she looked small, crushed down by the weight of the secret she had carried and what it was doing to them now.
Akiko persisted. “Mary Alice, look at me. What happens now?”
Mary Alice took a deep breath. “We need more information.”
“You have information,” Akiko countered. “You said they wanted you dead because you broke some code—you were killing people for money instead of on assignment.”
“But we weren’t,” Helen said in a patient tone. “That means they have bad intel on us. Somebody is setting us up.”
“So tell them the truth,” Akiko shot back. “Tell them. They will listen. They have to listen.”
Natalie sat forward, her expression sympathetic. “I know you’re having a bit of trouble with this, but they won’t listen, actually. It’s not really what they do.”
Akiko turned on her. “A bit of trouble with this? I’m having a goddamned nervous breakdown. The woman I love most in the world has—after five years of marriage—decided to finally tell me the truth about what she does. That’s five years of lies. That’s a shit-ton of lies.”
“I was trying to protect you,” Mary Alice said feebly.
“I think,” Akiko said in a voice like acid, “that ship has sailed. I am on the run for my life with a cat who hates to travel, and I don’t know when I can go home again. So fix this, Mary Alice.” She got up, Kevin struggling in her arms, and leaned close to Mary Alice. “I mean it. Fix this.”
She left us then and Mary Alice blew out a slow breath.
“She’ll come around,” I said.
Mary Alice gave me a doubtful look as Helen cleared her throat. “Alright, we need to make a plan.”
“Maybe Akiko had a good idea,” Helen said. “Maybe we should try to talk to them.”
That bought us half an hour of arguing over how exactly we were supposed to approach an organization that was actively trying to kill us. We discussed each board member at length before deciding it was pointless.
“What about the curators, then?” Mary Alice suggested. “I know we discussed it before, but maybe it’s time to circle back to the idea.”
“Not Naomi,” Natalie said. “If they’ve got bad intel about us, it must have come through Naomi’s research. She does the briefings for the board and she would have been the one to tell them we were on the take.”
“Not Naomi,” Mary Alice agreed. “But Martin?” She raised her voice hopefully.
“Martin,” I agreed. The others nodded along, and Helen produced her address book, where his number was neatly written in pencil. We drew straws to see who would call him and I lost. I ripped open a new burner and punched in his private cell number. I halfway expected it to go to voicemail, but he answered on the second ring, a little caution in his voice.
“Martin,” I said. “It’s Billie Webster.”
There was a sharp intake of breath, almost a gasp but not quite. “Oh my god,” he said, “give me a second. I’m in public.”
There was a muffled sound as he must have clapped a hand over his phone. Eventually I heard clinking and distant chatter, restaurant noises, and then a shift to honking horns and a faint siren.
“I’m on the street now,” he said finally. “Holy shit, Billie. Are you okay?”
“I’ve been better,” I told him. “I assume you know why I’m calling.”
“Yes, and I know better than to ask questions. Just tell me, are the others okay too?”
“Yes.”
He breathed a deep sigh into the phone. “Good. Listen, I can’t talk long. I don’t think they monitor my calls, but if they do—”
“I’m not asking you for anything except a bit of information,” I promised him. “A little bird told me the board had intel we were taking jobs on the side. What do you know about that?”
“Nothing,” he told me. “The board has been extremely close-lipped. You know how paranoid they are about secrecy. They’ve locked this down tight.”
“Martin,” I said, sweetening my tone to something warm and coaxing. “I know how good you are. That board doesn’t order so much as a paper clip without you knowing about it. The last thing I want is to get you into trouble,” I assured him.
He pulled in a breath. “All I know is there is a dossier that somebody in the Museum compiled on the four of you and submitted directly to the board. It didn’t come through the usual channels.”
“So it didn’t originate from Provenance?”
“If someone in Provenance put it together, it was sent up without going through the regular protocols or I would have known about it.”
“And you have no idea where it came from?”
“None,” he said grimly. “And believe me, I’ve dug. Nobody is supposed to be able to do an end run around Naomi or me, but it looks like they did. Billie, I can’t tell you anything more—”
He was winding down, so I cut in quickly. “Is there any chance of calling this off?”
“Billie—”
“We’re not dirty, Martin. You know that,” I said.
“Of course I know it,” he said, indignant. “But you know what the board is like. If they rescind an order, it would be admitting they’re wrong. And you know how much they hate being wrong. Besides”—his voice dropped and he sounded regretful—“they would want proof that the four of you are clean.”
“There’s my word,” I told him.
“Billie, that’s not good enough.”
“It would have been forty years ago,” I said. He didn’t respond to that, but he didn’t have to. Times had changed and I could swear on a stack of Bibles but it wouldn’t make a difference. “So what now?”
He hesitated. “I shouldn’t be telling you this, but they know you’re in New Orleans. It will be more than my job if they ever find out I warned you, but they’re sending Nielssen. If you can, you have to get out of there.”
“Our paths have already crossed,” I said. “And Sweeney decided to pay us a visit too. I guess he thought he could collect on that bonus.” I didn’t mention that we’d called Sweeney ourselves. It wouldn’t do much for Martin’s confidence at that point.
He drew in a shaky breath. “Shit, shit, shit. And you’re sure you’re okay?”
“For now.”
“And Sweeney and Nielssen?”