Ordinary Things

6:40 a.m. Blackthorn, Long Island. Three weeks later.

The first sign that she was in trouble was the toast.

Vega stood in the kitchen in one of Roman's shirts, barefoot, watching a pair of bread slices turn golden in the toaster, and realized that she had been standing there for a full minute with an expression of idiotic contentment. There was nothing in it. It was toast. It had no exits.

Get a grip, she told herself. You are a professional.

The toast popped. She jumped.

"You are laughing at the appliance," said a voice from the door.

"It startled me."

"It is a toaster."

"It's an aggressive toaster." She turned. Roman leaned in the doorway, in gray trousers and a white shirt with the cuffs undone, and the cane the doctor had issued with a stern lecture on the proper way to hold it. He had shaved. He had lost seven pounds. He looked, as of that morning, exactly as dangerous as the day she met him, with the single exception of a small smear of shaving cream under his left ear.

"You've got—" She touched her own jaw.

He frowned and wiped the wrong side.

"Other side."

He wiped the other side. It did not help.

"Come here," said Vega, with a sigh.

He came. She took a corner of the dish towel and dabbed it off, and he stood perfectly still for it, like a horse being groomed, and when she finished he caught her wrist and kissed the inside of it. It was quick. It was warm. It sent a bright bolt of heat directly to the soles of her feet.

"Good morning," said Roman.

"You're not allowed to do that before eight."

"Is there a rule?"

"I'm making one."

"I shall file an objection." He released her. "I have a call at nine. Reyes wishes to review the Florida accounts. After that I thought we might drive."

"Drive?"

"There is a diner in Sea Cliff. I am told that the pancakes are exceptional. I have not eaten a pancake since the nineteen-nineties."

She stared at him. "You want me to take the Foundry's boss to a diner."

"I want you to take a man to a diner."

"There are cameras in a diner."

"There are cameras in a bank." He smiled slightly. "I will wear the plain coat. I will say nothing. I will behave in a manner that attracts no attention whatsoever."

"You're six-foot-three and walk like a funeral."

"That is the plain coat's job."

…

The diner had a blue neon sign, a cracked vinyl booth, and a waitress named Doreen who called them both hon.

Roman ordered pancakes, a side of bacon, and black tea. He asked for it in a voice so formal that Doreen paused with her pencil in the air, looked at him, looked at Vega, and said, "He from the government?"

"Insurance," said Vega.

"Figures." Doreen wrote it down. "Poor thing."

When she had gone, Roman said, with great dignity, "I do not believe that I look like an insurance adjuster."

"You look exactly like an insurance adjuster."

"I look like a man who has been to Rome."

"You look like a man who's going to deny my claim."

He stared at her for a moment, and then, quite suddenly, put his napkin to his mouth. His shoulders shook. It took her a second to understand that he was laughing, silently, with the fierce discipline of a man trying not to disgrace himself in public.

She watched him do it, and felt her chest go tight and warm and absurd.

Three weeks, she thought. Three weeks, and I have never once counted the exits in here.

She hadn't realized it until that moment. Her eyes, which had searched every room since she was twenty, had walked into this one without a flicker. The door behind her, the side window, the swinging kitchen door with the dented panel. They had registered, and filed themselves, and let her go.

It frightened her a little. It frightened her a great deal.

The pancakes came. He ate them with the quiet concentration of a man performing an experiment, cutting each wedge precisely, and when he finished the first bite he sat back and looked at the plate for so long that she thought something was wrong.

"Roman?"

"Eli," he said, "used to say that you could judge a man by whether he cried at pancakes."

"Do you?"

"I have not decided."

"I'll let you know if you do."

"I would appreciate it." He picked up his fork again. His eyes were very bright, and he did not look at her. "It is a very good pancake."

…

Juno arrived on the second Thursday.

She came up the drive in a black SUV, with a suitcase the size of a coffin, and jumped out before it had stopped. She was five-foot-two and wore a lime-green cardigan and enormous round glasses, and she hit Vega at a full run, wrapping arms and legs around her like a koala.

"You idiot," said Juno into her neck. "You absolute—you went down in a plane—"

"I'm fine."

"You were in the jungle—"

"I'm fine."

"I saw the news! There wasn't any news! That's what scared me! There was no news, and I knew there was news, and I sat in a villa in Zurich eating cheese and you were—" She pulled back. Her eyes were swimming. "I hate you. I hate you so much. Don't ever do it again."

"I'll try."

"Promise."

"I promise," said Vega.

Juno clung to her for another ten seconds, trembling, and then drew back and wiped her face on the cardigan and looked past Vega's shoulder at the house with an expression of deepening alarm.

"It's enormous."

"It's got a sea wall."

"Is that a moat?"

"It's a drainage ditch."

"It's a moat. They have a moat." She lowered her voice. "Is Terminator Ken here?"

"Silas?"

"He glared at me for four hours on the plane. He didn't say a word. He just glared. I think he was programmed."

"He's okay. He's just sarcastic. You'll get used to him."

"I do not want to get used to him. I want to get used to a fireplace."

…

They sat on the roof that night.

It was Vega's discovery: a flat stretch of slate behind the east chimney, reached through a bathroom window, with a view of the whole dark sweep of the lawn and the Sound beyond. She'd found it the second week. She kept a blanket up there, and a bottle of Roman's bourbon, and nothing else.

Juno sat cross-legged on the blanket with her laptop on her knees and a mug of tea steaming in the cold. The screen lit her glasses blue. She had been staring at it for an hour.

"It's a good spoof," she said finally.

"The relay?"

"It's a very good spoof. Whoever built it knew exactly how Blackthorn's firewalls route outbound traffic. They bounced it through a dead printer in the east wing." She tapped a key. "It's like finding a burglar who's broken in through the cat flap and then wiped his feet."

"Can you trace him?"

"I can trace the printer." Juno rubbed her eyes under the glasses. "It takes time. I need access to the badge logs and the switch cabinet records. Reyes keeps giving me half. It's like he doesn't want me to find it."

"He's security. He doesn't want anyone to find anything."

"Maybe." Juno was silent a moment. "That nice Dante guy was up here yesterday, you know."

Vega looked at her.

"He brought pastries. He sat on my desk for twenty minutes and asked how the trace was coming. Very friendly. Very interested. I thought he was sweet." Her voice was careful. "And then he asked how long it would take me to find the name. Like, to the day. And I said Friday, because it's what Roman said. And he laughed and said good luck."

"That's just Dante."

"I know." Juno's fingers had gone still on the keys. "It's probably nothing."

"It's probably nothing."

They sat with it for a minute. A gull cried over the water.

"Vee," said Juno, in a different voice.

"Mm?"

"Are you in love with him?"

Vega did not answer.

She looked out over the lawn, the black grass, the pale line of the wall. Far below, in a lit window on the second floor, a man was standing at a desk with a pen in his hand, and a cane propped against the chair, writing a letter by hand because he did not trust a keyboard. She could see the curve of his shoulder. She knew, without being able to see it, that he'd taken the pen to his lip, and was chewing on the cap.

"Yes," said Vega.

It was very quiet.

"Oh, hon," said Juno.

"Don't."

"I'm not. I'm really not. I'm happy for you." She closed the laptop. "I'm also terrified."

"Of him?"

"Of what it does to you." Juno turned to face her. In the dark, without the screen, her face looked small and fierce and very young. "You've spent your whole life being a ghost. You were so good at it. You never needed anyone, and I know that wasn't because you're cold. It was because you were scared. And now you're sitting on a roof in his shirt, drinking his bourbon, living in his house. And I'm just saying—"

"What?"

"Don't lose yourself." Her voice cracked. "That's all. Don't lose the part of you that gets in the car and drives. That's the part that saved you. If you give that up for a man, even a good one, even this one—you won't have anything left, if it goes wrong."

Vega thought about it for a long time.

"I won't," she said.

"Promise."

"I just promised, like, an hour ago."

"I'm collecting."

"Fine." She put her head on Juno's shoulder. "I promise. I'll keep the car."

"You'll keep the Charger."

"I'll keep Daisy."

"You named it Daisy?"

"Don't tell anyone."

"I'm putting it on a T-shirt," said Juno.

…

The call came on a Sunday.

Silas wanted to meet in the library, which was strange enough. It was a room he never used. It had leather chairs and a dead fireplace and an enormous painted globe that Roman had never let anyone spin. He was standing at the window when she came in, with his cast still on and a manila folder under his arm, and he did not turn round.

"Callahan."

"Silas."

"Close the door."

She closed it.

"Sit."

"Am I in trouble?"

"If you were, I would not have asked you to sit. I would have asked you to stand." He turned. He looked tired. There were gray hollows under his eyes, and a day's stubble on his jaw, and he held the folder like something that might go off. "I have been thinking about what you said in the council. That you could trace the leak."

"Juno could."

"Juno cannot trace what she is not shown." He crossed to the desk, set the folder down, and opened it. "Reyes has not been forthcoming. I am not accusing him. I am saying that every time I request a record, it arrives late, incomplete, or in the wrong format. I have known him eleven years. I would trust him with my life, and I do not trust him with this."

"Why are you telling me?"

"Because you are the only person in this house I have not suspected." His eyes were flat gray. "Which is an uncomfortable thing to say about someone you spent a month trying to scare."

She almost laughed.

"You didn't scare me."

"I know. It was infuriating." A flicker of his dry humor. "I would like you to look at these. Not as a driver. As a mind. You see patterns. It is a rare gift. I have watched you do it in the car."

He pushed the folder across.

She opened it.

Inside was a stack of old ledgers, scanned and printed, a column of numbers in a small cramped hand. Dates. Locations. Quantities. Codes. At the top of the first page, in faded blue ink, someone had written the words Voss — Newark — 2009–2014.

"It's the old books," said Silas. "The ones Roman inherited when Harlan Voss died. They go back before the Foundry. Before the name. They have never been digitized, because Roman will not allow it." He paused. "He gave me the key to the safe last night."

She looked up sharply.

"He did what?"

"He said that if I wished to trust you, I should do so completely." Silas's expression did not change. "I think it was the nearest he has come to telling me what you are."

"What am I?"

"Family," said Silas, after a moment, as if the word were an unfamiliar flavor. "I believe that is the term. I have been a long while without one."

She sat there with the folder in her lap, feeling her face go warm and her eyes go hot. She did not say anything. After a moment he looked away, with the expression of a man who has said something he cannot take back, and does not wish to.

"There are thirty years of records," he said gruffly. "Find me a pattern. Find me where the leak began. Anything that does not look like honest crime."

"Honest crime."

"The kind with a shape."

"Okay." She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. "I'll look."

…

She looked until two in the morning.

It was dull work. It was hunched, squinting, pencil-between-the-teeth work, and for most of it she found nothing but what she expected: shell casings, scrap steel, small arms for small wars. Roman's hand appeared in the margins from 2009, spidery and young. Check weight. Short by 40. Do not trust Tuesday. Call E. In the margin of one page, in a childish scrawl, someone had drawn a small crooked picture of a car.

Her throat closed.

She turned the page.

She read for another hour. The numbers swam. She made tea. She made more tea. At twenty minutes to three, rubbing her eyes, she turned a page from 2012, a shipment manifest for a depot in southeast Georgia, and the pencil stopped.

Depot 14. Ft. Benning district. 200 crates, M4-pattern rifles. Routed via E. Marr.

She read it.

She read it again.

The room had become very quiet. The radiator ticked. She could feel her heartbeat in her ears, a slow, heavy thud, like a hammer on a tin roof.

Eleven years ago somebody put two hundred rifle crates on the manifest that never existed.

A broker named in the report, but the name was a dead end.

She knew the name.

She had known it for eleven years. She had said it aloud to herself at night, in motel rooms in Memphis and Tulsa, a mantra, a curse, a scrap of dead-end paper she had memorized the way a prisoner memorizes the crack in a wall. She had never found a face for it. She had never found a house. She had followed it into every shadow in the south, and each time it had folded in her hands like smoke.

E. Marr.

And it was here, in black pencil, in a ledger in Roman's own handwriting, beside a number that matched the one in her father's court record to the last digit.

Vega sat very still.

On the desk beside her the lamp burned. Outside, down the lawn, in the dark, the Sound lapped the sea wall, one slow wave at a time.

She thought of a man in a hollow under a tree, looking at her across a thin blanket. A coincidence, he had said. I will think on it.

She closed the ledger.

It made no sound at all.