“Sometimes, yes. She thrived on that part, too. Cynthia had courage, but it was more. A focus. A singularity of purpose that saw her through everything. Preparation, contingency, execution. She covered all the bases and left nothing to chance.”
He fumbled for his water cup. Nikki got up and helped him sip from his straw. “Thanks.” He waited for her to sit back down. “Of course, all good things come to an end. She met your dad, got married, and quit to go back to the U.S. and raise you.” His lips, moist from the water, drew into a sly grin.
“What?” asked Nikki.
“Of course, you never do retire from this business. The world was no less volatile in the mid-eighties. Just like Paris, New York City was definitely a fertile ground for intelligence-gathering. I came to Manhattan and re-recruited her in 1985.”
“1985 …” Nikki turned her head at an angle and studied him, reaching for the same familiar connection she had tried to make but couldn’t when she first saw his photograph the day before.
Tyler Wynn smiled again, but it wasn’t sly this time. It was purely nostalgic. “I remember you, too, Nikki. You were five when I visited your mother, and you played the allegro from Mozart’s Fifteenth Sonata for me. I even videotaped it.”
“We just watched that video the other night,” said Rook. Heat nodded, her affirmation not so much to agree with Rook as to acknowledge to herself the comfort she felt at being able to draw yet another line to her past.
“I can still see it now,” said the old man.
“So you’re saying you re-upped her mom to infiltrate people’s homes in New York?”
“And thereabouts, yes.”
“But you were CIA,” he said. “Isn’t domestic spying illegal?”
“It is if you do it right.” Tyler Wynn enjoyed his own joke until his laughter made him wince. He reached on the covers beside him for the morphine button that connected to an IV bag, and thumb-pressed it twice. “Don’t know if it even works on me anymore.” He concentrated on deep breathing and, once he settled, finished his thought. “I have to say, your mother was just as effective in her second go-round.”
Heat, at last delivered to the point she had been so eager to reach, asked him, “Tyler, was she spying for you up to the end? I mean, at the time of her murder?”
His face sobered at the memory. “She was.”
“Can you tell me specifics? Anything at all that would help me find out who killed her?”
“Cindy had several projects she had been working on at that time.” He raised an arm, dragging along his drip lines, tapped his temple with a forefinger, and grinned mischievously. “I still have them all right here. I’ve been out of the game a lot of years, but I haven’t forgotten a thing. I shouldn’t tell you what she had going, but I will. First of all, because time is slipping by and I may be one of the few who could help you. Or would. A lot’s changed, and not for the better. The trade’s lost its human factor. Nobody wants the talents of men like me, not when you have drone aircraft.
“But mostly, I’ll tell you because we’re talking about my Cynthia. I don’t know who the son-of-a-bitch is, but I want you to fucking nail him.” The surge of emotion animated him but took its toll. He pressed the oxygen tube closer to his nostrils and sucked it in while Heat and Rook waited, full of anticipation.
“I think what happened is that your mother found something sensitive and someone burned her before she could report it.”
“Something like what?” Nikki asked.
“That, I don’t know. Did you notice if she acted differently? Changed daily routines or patterns, like have meetings at unusual hours?”
“Right before, I can’t say. I had been away at college. But she had meetings at unusual hours a lot. It became kind of a sore subject in our home.”
“Occupational hazard, I’m afraid.” He looked thoughtful and asked, “Did you see her try to hide something, or did you come across a key that didn’t fit anything, did she get a new storage locker, anything like that?”