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“So let me get this straight.” Deborah Seabrook folded her hands on a stockinged knee peeking from the hem of a conservative tweed A-line dress. “You won’t tell us who you are or what you do. You won’t tell us your last name. You want to talk with our nineteen-year-old daughter to help solve the murder of her brother in response to an ask for help she made a year ago on FlipFlop—”
At this her husband stirred. “TikTok.”
Deborah refused to lose steam. “—and we’re supposed to facilitate this?”
Evan had to concentrate in order not to fidget on the upholstered settee. They were in the family room or living room—he’d never figured out how rich people named their spaces of leisure. Deborah leaned forward in her armchair with beautiful straight-backed posture, but Mason was looser-limbed, on a slightly slumped thoughtful recline that—from Evan’s limited engagement with popular culture—seemed proprietary to therapists. Bearded, with glasses, he stayed silent and paid attention.
Evan said, “Yes.”
A cramped doorway revealed the breakfast seating area of the kitchen, above which CNN murmured from a mounted TV. A fan-shaped graphic of blue and red dots depicted the deadlocked Senate vote on the president’s trillion-dollar environmental bill above a split screen of talking heads, their muted mouths flapping. A good half of the kitchen table had been overrun by an abandoned jigsaw puzzle, its thin frame completed and little else. A jumble of loose pieces were mounded in the middle for long-term storage. Beyond several items of abstract art he failed to decipher and a central staircase, Evan couldn’t make out much more.
California open-concept floor plans to which he’d grown somewhat accustomed served as a rebuke to the distinct rooms of New England houses like this one. Specified spatial purpose, increased privacy. But formality didn’t seem primary in the Seabrook household; they’d invited him right in and listened to his macabre sales pitch. They were serious people who understood the utility of a light touch. And now Deborah was leading the charge right to the heart of the matter.
“Are you … what’s the word? Official?” Deborah asked.
“Sanctioned,” Evan said.
“That one.”
Evan took a moment to consider the question. In the kitchen the news had moved on to another dreary commissioning of another combat ship in a Wisconsin shipyard, the military-industrial complex feeding itself.
“In a manner, yes,” he said. “At the highest level.”
“Why should we believe that?” The left side of Deborah’s face bore the faint memory of a stroke, her handsome features slightly reluctant to follow the lead of her expressions, though her speech was barely impeded. She was unnervingly poised. “It’s not like you’re a door-to-door brush salesman. Given the gravity of the situation and the vagueness of your claims, how should we be expected to trust anything you say?”
Evan took a moment to think about it. There was little sound aside from the susurration of the television. A former vice president droned on at a lectern, Secret Service doing their best to stand at attention among the crisp rows of sailors.
“Would you mind if I made a quick call?” Evan asked.
Mason dipped his head in the affirmative.
Evan dialed the familiar number, reaching the main switchboard. When the featureless voice answered, he said, “Dark Road.” A pause while he was transferred to a security command post, and then he said, “Extension thirty-two.”
The line rang and rang.
Deborah and Mason watched him, motionless.
The voice, flattened out in annoyance. “What?”
“It’s me,” he said.
A terse half-second pause and then, “Do you have any idea the kind of response your actions will draw?”
“I’m on the mission as you requested.”
“You can’t justcall meas if I’m some—”
“I’m going to put you on speakerphone. Tell the nice people I’m sitting with that I’m sanctioned so they’ll trust me.”
“You’renotsanctioned. Not anymore.”
“Should I stop?”
A longer silence. And then, slightly muffled, “Tell the Latvian president to hold.” Back to Evan. “Go.”
He hit speaker, held the phone aloft.
President Donahue-Carr’s voice lifted from his RoamZone, rendered in 3-D sound waves. It asked, “Do you recognize my voice?”
