“Yeah. Just too bad you can’t talk to him.”
When his name came up three weeks ago, Heat and Rook had discovered that Dr. Ari
Weiss had died of a blood disorder. But Nikki felt energized now and wasn’t giving
up. There still might be a way to get more information about the dead doctor. Even
while she paced, she was looking through her notes for the number of the person
whose family Ari had stayed with. Maybe he would know if Weiss had any connection to
Tyler Wynn or his accomplices. Then, to make sure the sound of her gratitude for the
new lead carried across the Atlantic, she repeated, “Hey, Rook? This is very big.”
“Thanks. It’s kind of a whirlwind. I haven’t even been to bed since I left New
York, but I feel so pumped.”
“Well ya done good. This Kuzbari stuff is a coup. He’s so hard to pin down, how
did you manage to make contact?”
“Professional courtesy, I guess. You know, the spy quid pro quo. Like most Mideast
governments, Syria’s heading for the rocks, and I think he’s trying to make nice
with our intelligence in case he needs an escape hatch.”
Nikki stopped pacing. “Don’t you mean Russian intelligence? I thought Kijé set
this up.” Sounds of traffic and a distinctly European siren rose up and filled Rook
’s long pause. “Who set this up for you?… You there?”
During his hesitation she heard a female voice she recognized in the background.
“Rook, come out here and see, it’s a car fire.”
Heat said, “Really? She’s there with you?—in Nice?”
FOUR
Nikki fought the urge to hang up on Rook and instead listened to him squirm. He
hemmed. He hawed. He backed. He filled. And then had the nerve at the end of her
silence to ask, “Is everything OK?” She told him she had to get to work and left
him to hold a dead phone in his stupid hotel room overlooking the stupid
Mediterranean. Then she cranked the shower as hot as she could stand it and stood
under the jet. “Fucking Nice,” she said to the steam. “Fucking stupid.”
Shouldering the glass door of the bodega open, Heat burst out onto the sidewalk on
Pearl Street ripping at the orange Reese’s wrapper with extreme prejudice. She
stood by a trash can near the curb, shook one of the two peanut butter cups out,
tore away the brown paper enfolding it, and popped the entire disk into her mouth.
She closed her eyes and tilted her head to the sky while she chewed, feeling the
tiny sharp ridges of the chocolate coating scrape the roof of her mouth while the
salty, grainy succulence of the peanut butter center mixed with the melting sugars
on her tongue. Bastard, she thought. Stupid boy. Her breath whistled through her
nostrils as she munched, eating not for pleasure but as an act of aggression. That
part done, she swallowed, feeling the delicious indulgence tamp out the fires of her
rage.
She looked at the package. Still one peanut butter cup left. Nikki decided to save
it and shoved it in the side pocket of her blazer. She might need it later, if the
idiot called again.
Heat elbowed aside her anger at Rook for going to France with his ex-girlfriend and
walked on. She had better things to dwell on. For the first time in weeks Nikki felt
like she found a real trail that could lead her to Tyler Wynn, and as she strode
along, she started rolling everything she knew. If Fariq Kuzbari’s version of
events were true, was it possible that her mother used the Syrian as cover to get
into that symposium in the Berkshires to spy on Ari Weiss? Following that premise,
could that be the same reason her mom got herself a tutoring gig later in the home
of the brewing magnate Carey Maggs—to keep tabs on Weiss while he stayed with his
former Oxford classmate and his family? She hoped to find out in a few minutes when
she met with Maggs.