The Peripheral

103

The tunnel to Sushi Barn was less a tunnel than a giant hamster run. Madison had built two seven-foot walls of shingle bags, with a walkway in between, from a hole in the wall in the back of Coldiron, across the vacant store next door, through another hole in its far wall, across the next empty store, and finally through another hole, into Hong’s kitchen.

Coming in from the alley, Flynne had seen Burton, looking pale, under one of the white crowns. Conner was under another. “Want to switch jobs?” Clovis asked Tacoma, seeing her. “Neither of these guys are home much.”

“They’re making Burton work?” Flynne asked.

“Nobody’s twisting his arm,” Clovis said. “Glad to get out of his body. Conner just comes back to be fed and sleep.”

Griff didn’t seem to have any idea what Flynne might have on her mind. She wasn’t sure what Lowbeer might have heard, or what Griff might know. She wanted to look at his hands now, but he had them in his jacket pockets.

Hong’s kitchen was humid with cooking rice. He led them out to the front room, where the seating was at secondhand picnic tables, painted red, and over to an alcove, a sheet of red-painted plywood forming one of its walls. The alcove had its own picnic table, and a framed poster of the Highbinders on the inside of the red wall, a San Francisco band she’d liked in high school. She put the Wheelie Boy down on the scuffed, red-painted concrete floor, under the seat, and sat, facing the Highbinders poster. Griff took the seat opposite. A kid she recognized as a cousin of Madison’s brought them glasses of tea.

“You need food, just let somebody know,” Hong said.

“Thanks, Hong,” she said, as he turned back to the kitchen. She looked at Griff.

He smiled, raised a tablet, consulted it, looked up from it, met her eyes. “Now that we know that a safe house elsewhere isn’t an option for your mother, we’re looked into maximizing security for your family home. With a view to keeping it as low key, as transparent really, as we possibly can. We don’t want to disturb your mother. We think a compound might be in order.”

“Pickett had a compound,” she said. “Don’t want that.”

“Exactly the opposite. Stealth architecture. Everything remains apparently the same. Any new structures will appear to always have been there. We’re speaking with specialist architects. We need it done yesterday, largely at night, silently, invisibly.” He scrolled something with a fingertip.

“Can you do that?”

“With sufficient money, absolutely. Which your firm most certainly has.”

“Not my firm.”

“Partially yours.” He smiled.

“On paper.”

“This building,” he said, “isn’t paper.”

She looked out at the front room of Sushi Barn. Noticed four members of Burton’s posse, men whose names she didn’t know, seated two-by-two at different tables, black Cordura rifle bags tucked under their seats. The rest of the customers were in KCV county outfits. “Doesn’t feel real to me,” she said. She looked back at him. “Been a lot lately that doesn’t.” She looked down at his hands.

“What doesn’t?”

“You’re her,” she said, looking up, meeting his pale eyes. Not that crazy cartoon blue. Not blue at all, but widening now. A woman laughed, tables away. His hand lowered the tablet, came to rest on the table, and for the first time since the end of the ride back from Pickett’s, she thought she might be about to cry.

He swallowed. Blinked. “Really, I’ll be someone else.”

“You don’t become her?”

“Our lives were identical, until Lev’s first communication was received here. But this is no longer their past, so she isn’t who I’ll become. We diverged, however imperceptibly at first, when that message was received. By the time she first contacted me, there were already bits of my life she was unfamiliar with.”

“She mailed you?”

“Phoned me,” he said. “I was at a reception in Washington.”

“Did she tell you she was you?”

“No. She told me that the woman I’d just been speaking with, a moment before, was a mole, a deep-cover agent, for the Russian Federation. She, the woman, was my American equivalent, in many ways. Then she, Ainsley, this stranger on the phone, told me something that proved it. Or would, when I’d used classified search engines. So it was rather a gradual revelation, over about forty-eight hours. I did guess,” he said. “During our third call. She told me, then, that she’d made a wager with herself, that I would. And won.” He smiled slightly. “But I’d seen that she had knowledge not only of the world, but of my exact and most secret situation in it. Knowledge no one else could possess, not even my superiors. And she’d continued to identify other foreign and domestic agents in my own agency, and in the American agency I liaise with. In her time, they’d gone undetected for years, one for over a decade, and at very serious strategic cost. I’m unable to act on most of them, else I attract too much attention, become suspect myself. But possession of that information has already had a very beneficial effect on my career.”

“When was this?”

“Thursday,” he said.

“It hasn’t been very long.”

“I’ve barely slept. But it was nothing professional that convinced me. It was that she knew me as no one else could. Thoughts and feelings I’ve had constantly, all my life, but had never expressed, not to anyone.” He looked away, then back, shyly.

“I can see her now,” Flynne said, “but it didn’t strike me until Wilf told me about the tray, this morning.”

“The tray?”

“Like the one at my house. Clovis has one, in London. She’s an old lady there. Has a store that sells American antiques. Lowbeer’s friend. Took Wilf there when she needed Clovis to refresh her memory about something. When he told me, I remembered your hands, hers. Saw it.”

“How utterly peculiar it all is,” he said, and looked down at his hands.

“You’re not named Lowbeer?”

“Ainsley James Gryffyd Lowbeer Holdsworth,” he said. “My mother’s maiden name. She was allergic to hyphenation.” He took a blue handkerchief from a jacket pocket. Not Homes blue but darker, almost black. Dabbed his eyes. “Pardon me,” he said. “A bit emotional.” He looked at her. “You’re the first person I’ve discussed this with, other than Ainsley.”

“It’s okay,” she said, not sure what that even meant now. “Can she hear us? Right now?”

“Not unless we’re in range of a device of some kind.”

“You’ll tell her? That I know?”

“What would you prefer?” He tilted his head then, reminding her more than ever of Lowbeer.

“I’d like to tell her myself.”

“Then you will. Ash just messaged me that they need you back, as soon as possible.”