Page 74 of The Shadow Friends

Rodrigo didn’t answer immediately. He went to the window and gazed down at the plaza below. The afternoon light was fading, and against the autumnal glow, he was a commanding silhouette, lean and broad shouldered. “He wasn’t the only one who escaped,” he said quietly. “There was also the fifth man.”

“What fifth man?”

“We call him that because we don’t know his name. I wasn’t even sure he really existed, even though Ingrid swore there were five men who attacked the safe house that day. Then she told me about the murder of the hotel waitress.”

“Karen O’Brien? What does she have to do with this?”

“It was the way she was killed. Stabbed in the left eye with a stiletto, the way Gordon was killed in France.”

“But that’s not the way Maslov was killed.”

“No, we think Maslov’s murder was meant to look natural, because an assassination on US soil would have stirred up a diplomatic hornet’s nest. Polonium poisoning is a difficult diagnosis. In 2006, when Alexander Litvinenko was poisoned with polonium, his doctors thought he’d picked up a bacterial infection. It took weeks for them to make the correct diagnosis, and that was in a major London hospital. In Maine, the doctors never would have thought of polonium. Except that something went wrong with this perfect murder.”

“Karen O’Brien.”

Rodrigo nodded. “The waitress must have seen something, and the killer had to eliminate her, quickly and silently. When Ingrid saw the stiletto in that woman’s left eye, she immediately thought of how our colleague Gordon was killed, in France. She recognized the fifth man’s signature. But why would a Russian assassin be in Maine? The answer had to be Maslov.”

“And that’s why she joined you? As a chance to catch this fifth man?”

“After all these years, we may have a shot at him. We now know who’s on Moscow’s kill list. We just have to watch and wait for the killers to show up.”

“You think this fifth man will walk into your trap.”

“Eventually. Maybe.”

“Ingrid could have been killed today.”

“We had it all under control. At least we did.”

Until we blundered in, thought Maggie. She sank back in the armchair, suddenly drained. The past few days of uncertainty, of feeling responsible for Lloyd’s safety, had finally caught up with her. She longed to be home on her farm. Longed to walk into Declan’s arms. Perhaps Ingrid and Rodrigo still enjoyed the heady rush of adrenaline that came with their former careers, but it had lost its appeal for Maggie. She knew all too well that a thrilling adrenaline rush often ended in sorrow.

“I’ll leave you and Ingrid to deal with the aftermath,” she said, and stood up. “I’m going home.”

“What about Lloyd?”

“He’s in your hands now. I did what Ingrid asked me to do: I kept an eye on him. She’ll have to decide what happens next.”

“But we still have a job to do.”

“Don’t we all?” she said, and walked out the door.

Chapter 28

Ingrid

Their marriage was at a tipping point. After years of growing older together, years of being us, they now sat at a tavern table, afraid to talk to each other. Afraid of what might come spilling out. She couldn’t deny that this was all her fault, even though it really shouldn’t be her fault. When they were first married and living in Rome, she had often been called away with little warning, for reasons she could not disclose to him, and he had accepted it. He knew her job called for such secrecy, and sometimes he had no idea even which country she was headed to. Her sudden departure from Purity, with no explanation, was hardly new to him, and he should have taken it in stride.

Then why do I feel so guilty?

Was it because she’d enjoyed the thrill of being out in the field again, feeling young and vital and consequential? These past few years in Purity, she’d settled into a sedate retirement, filling her days with gardening and reading and volunteer work for the library and the Stone Coast Conference. She’d almost forgotten the woman she used to be, the operative who could slip silently down dark alleys or swan through embassy ballrooms in an evening dress, the chameleon who could don a wig and a latex mask and transform herself into someone else. Rodrigo, and this assignment, had brought that woman back to life.

But the man sitting across the table from her, this kind and funny man whom she’d so deeply wounded, was also her life.

She and Lloyd were the only patrons sitting in a bar that claimed to be the oldest in Madrid. It looked its age, with its ancient wainscotting and creaking wooden benches. A mounted bull’s head stared down at them from the wall, like a stern judge waiting to pass sentence. Does this marriage deserve to survive? They sipped their wine in painful silence, neither one of them quite ready to broach a subject that could not be avoided much longer.

“You must have questions,” she finally said.

“Will you answer them?”