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Natalie’s eyes went wide. “You were after Martin?”
“For two, almost three years now, I’ve been watching him. He ingratiated himself with the board, taking on extra work, making sure he always saved the day. It was a little too perfect. It got on my tits,” she said. “So I started paying attention.”
Mary Alice spoke up. “How did you manage to keep tabs on him?”
Naomi smiled. “Every quarter when the board met for me to brief them, Martin was there too. I installed a keystroke logger on his computer and spyware on his phone. Tenminutes’ work and I was able to see everything he did, every search, every email, every nasty little move he was planning. I know his level onAngry Birds, I know his bank account is way higher than his pay grade, and I know he had a case of athlete’s foot that his doctor was concerned about because it took so long to clear up.”
“Nasty,” Natalie muttered.
Naomi grinned. “I won’t tell you about his fanfic. It’s pretty out there.”
“So you were able to see everything he did,” I said slowly. “Including setting us up.” I held her stare, but she didn’t back down.
“Yes, I was. And I knew I had no way to prove it. Anything I showed the board, he could turn around and say I had installed on his devices in order to frame him for whateverIwas doing. Besides, you think they were going to listen to me? They were in this up to their hairy eyebrows.” She took one last gulp of ginger ale and slowly exhaled a low burp. “This baby is killing me by inches.”
Minka spoke up. “You need more ginger.” She pulled a tin of ginger chews from her pocket and passed it over. Naomi took one and started to suck.
“I am nice to you as long as you are nice to my friends,” Minka said sternly.
“Minka, sit down. Your Ukrainian is showing,” I told her.
Naomi looked up. “Ukrainian?” She rattled off a few phrases and Minka brightened, answering her in a chirpy voice I’d never heard her use before.
“You speak Ukrainian?” Helen asked.
Naomi shrugged. “I speak seventeen languages. Most for work. Ukrainian was just for fun.”
“Your Duolingo score must be the absolute shit,” Natalie said.
Naomi smiled. “So yes, to answer your thinly veiled accusation, Billie, I watched while Martin set you up and the board issued the termination order. I considered sending a warning, but in the end, I chose not to. The board thought four old broads—their words, not mine—wouldn’t be a match for Brad Fogerty, so they only sent one assassin on the cruise. They assumed you’d never see him coming. But I thought they were wrong. You have experience and instinct. You knew to keep your eyes open and you saved yourselves. I was betting you would.”
“You wagered with their lives,” Akiko put in suddenly.
Naomi didn’t bat an eye. “I took a calculated risk. We do that in this line of work.” She went on. “When they realized you made it off the boat, the board was divided. Paar was inclined to let it go. He had been the most reluctant to issue the termination order in the first place. But Gilchrist and Carapaz pressured him and he agreed to let the order ride. They thought you might turn to a friend for answers, so they were already onto Sweeney.”
“They tapped his phone and sent Nielssen to finish the job in case he buggered it to hell,” I guessed.
“Exactly. And when that failed, they assumed you left New Orleans, but they couldn’t get a line on where you were. It drove Gilchristnuts. Carapaz decided he would just hole up in Paris and double his bodyguards. Paar never thought you’d be ballsy enough to come out to find them, so he wenton with his spa trip. I guess he thought wrong,” she said, saluting us. “Paar was a creature of habit. I’m not surprised you found him, but Carapaz must have been trickier. How did you manage that?”
We took her through the process and she looked impressed. “And you grabbed the dossier off the bed without knowing what it was?”
I shrugged. “Maybe subconsciously I recognized it as Museum business. I don’t know. It was instinct to take it. And when I read it, I saw the code in the margin and realized it had been compiled by Martin.”
“Of course, Martin didn’t realize Billie was onto him when he left her the message about Tollemache’s,” Mary Alice put in.
“He thought he was being subtle,” I said with a smile.
“And he needed some way to get you to figure out the painting was at Tollemache’s to draw you into Vance’s trap,” Naomi said, putting the pieces together.
I filled in the rest. “We didn’t know where the plot started, but we knew at that point that Vance and Martin were sharing information. And that any plan to take them out would only work if we could turn the tables and get them here.”
“So you strolled into Tollemache’s bold as balls and offered yourself up,” Naomi said, giving me an approving look. “You’ve got brass ones.”
I shrugged. “The goal for them was the four of us. I figured I was safe until we were all together. Vance has been holding a grudge against me for forty years. Making me watch him kill my friends would be a nifty little bonus for him.”
Naomi sucked harder at the ginger chew and rolled hereyes. “I don’t know if this is the best thing I’ve ever had or the worst.”
“I say the same about tequila,” Minka said.
