and twisted its smooth cotton length through one loose fist, silver threads flashing in the deep violet. Memory or fantasy? She’d been living in her head so long...
Either way, it was unfair to force Latif’s fading ghost to compete with the all-too-vivid memory of Jamie. And futile. Both were entombed in her past and would stay there. She hadn’t replaced Latif with Jamie. Jamie had been a...what? Fling? Escape? Lapse of judgment? All of the above? It might as well have happened in her imagination, except for the scarf he’d bought her from the market below the Château de Langeais and the voice in her head, and the very real confusion twisting beneath her ribs. If it wasn’t grief over Latif, it was guilt over what she’d felt for Jamie. Still felt.
Was that really a year ago?
Her phone alarm trilled through the Bluetooth speakers. The A-Team theme. She caught the phone as it vibrated off the wrought iron table, and swiped it silent, her heart skipping. The music restarted. The scooter had turned onto her road—a dead end she shared with a boutique family vineyard and an organic farm—triggering the first of her motion sensors. She threaded the scarf around her neck and knotted it. The engine tapered from a hum to a chug as it neared her long driveway. Probably nothing, but she gathered up the file and the coffee cup.
The scooter disappeared behind a strip of strutting cypresses, its engine slowing, the sound sharpening as it turned. Samira’s pocket jumped. The second alarm—MacGyver. The scooter was in her driveway. With a few more swipes, she muted the alarm and Carole, midclimax of “It’s Too Late.” She grabbed her backpack from where it leaned against a whitewashed wall just inside the French doors—packed, always packed. She hadn’t left as much as a toothbrush out in a year. The scooter whined as it climbed the gravel drive. Breath catching, she drew the doors closed from the outside, coaxing them flat with her fingernails, and stole behind the fat trunk of an oak across the courtyard.
Probably just mail for a previous tenant, but the fewer locals she encountered, the better. The only people who could feasibly mail her anything—and only through a trusted, off-the-radar intermediary—were her parents and the journalist who’d broken the story a year ago about Hyland’s connection to the LA attacks, Tess Newell. Her friend Tess Newell. Because she was seriously short of those. And they knew not to contact her unless it was vital. Too many ways to tip off the enemy.
She leaned against the trunk, tracking the scooter’s progress by its noise as it rolled into the turning bay and idled. Over the fence, several white cows stopped chewing and stared at Samira. She made a face but they didn’t get the hint. Footsteps crunched. A knock on the thin door frame, rattling the glass inserts. A pause. Another rap. More footsteps. The hiss of the rider reclaiming the seat, and then the scooter decrescendoed down the drive. Samira waited several minutes then pushed off the trunk, strands of her hair pinching as they caught on the bark. A white stamped envelope lay beside the door.
The alarms triggered in the opposite order as the scooter resumed its rounds. Oh, for a life that simple. Deliver the mail in the morning, idle away the afternoon and evening eating panzanella and drinking Chianti...
Huh. Was any life really like that, or was this a case of greener grass in the other field—or whatever that English saying was? Her English was getting rusty. Heck, her native Amharic was rusty. Even her Italian wasn’t getting a workout.
The letter was addressed to her—at least, to one of her aliases. She scraped her teeth over one side of her lower lip as she crouched over the plain business envelope. Typewritten label, Helsinki postmark. Her shoulders settled. The trusted friend of her mother who was acting as her emergency contact—a retired former diplomat who had no sympathy for Samira’s enemies but was comfortably off their radar. Samira sent the woman a breezy postcard in a fake name every time she changed address. Laughably old school, but the irony of the twenty-first century was that every government, agency and criminal organization was too busy tracking electronic communication to bother with opening people’s mail. If it didn’t require a cryptographic exchange, who gave a damn?
Samira perched on a courtyard chair and tore open the envelope. Inside was another envelope, plain and brown. Inside that, like a nest of matryoshka dolls, a thick postcard and an unaddressed and unsigned note in her mother’s handwriting, in Italian, for good measure. Always thinking of you. Kisses. It would have killed her mother to leave it at that but Hyland would be a fool not to have her parents under surveillance, even at the Ethiopian Embassy in Ottawa, and their diplomatic protection went only so far. Her mother would have had an aide drop it in a distant mailbox. Sudbury, according to the postmark. Samira had been there once—it had to be a five-hour drive from Ottawa. She ran her thumb over the familiar looped handwriting, the bonded paper thick and rough.
The postcard showed a gleaming Arc de Triomphe. Who did she know in Paris? She flipped it. It was also unsigned, the handwriting unfamiliar, addressed to her mother at the embassy.
Hey, Janis, it began. Samira frowned. She hadn’t used that avatar since grad student days at Brown. Three scrawled lines followed. I have a gift that will change your life. Just what Jagger was looking for. Can’t wait to see your face when I give it to you. A good excuse for you to visit—soon! Luv, Vespa.
Samira tapped the edge of the postcard on the table. Vespa was the avatar of Charlotte Liu, her English university roommate from Brown—the Latin name for her favorite British football team. Jagger was Latif. The aliases they’d used playing “Cosmos” during all the late nights they should have spent studying.
It could only be Charlotte. No one else knew those names. Samira’s mother must have guessed the postcard was for Samira, that it was important enough to forward.
When had she last heard from Charlotte? Not since Latif had turned whistle-blower and the two of them had dropped off the earth, but Charlotte had to know he was dead—she worked for Britain’s biggest spy agency. Why contact Samira now? And why the secrecy?
The oxygen seemed to thin. Only one “gift” would change Samira’s life for the better—the elusive evidence that would secure Hyland’s prosecution. Then he’d have nothing to gain from her death—the cat would be out of the cage. Box. Crate. Whatever. Just what Jagger was looking for. The additional evidence Latif was chasing when he died? If anyone could get access to damning evidence, a GCHQ surveillance analyst could, but she’d have to be very careful how she shared it.
The card was postmarked in Paris two months ago. The white envelope was stamped a week later in Helsinki. It’d probably spent the seven weeks since stacked in some postal holding center in Italy. Charlotte could have delivered it on foot in that time—though when she’d mailed it Samira had been holed up in... Denmark? Had Charlotte crossed the Channel from London just to post it, assuming that Samira’s parents would know her whereabouts?
Whatever she’d found, it had to be big. Charlotte could be jeopardizing her job—and her life—and she was as cautious as Samira. Latif had been the risk-taker of their geeky trio.
Samira rubbed her thumb over the glossy Paris street and leaned back. The scooter was out of sight, its engine a faint hum. Suddenly that view looked a whole lot less suffocating. Can’t wait to see your face when I give it to you. A good excuse for you to visit... Meaning, Samira had to collect it in person from Charlotte’s London flat. But going to London meant crossing a border—with an untested fake passport. Having it as a precaution for an emergency was one thing. Using it to break into Fortress Britain?
Could Samira get Tess to collect the “gift,” seeing as Samira would only be handing it along, assuming it was the evidence they needed? Charlotte would know who Tess was, after all the coverage about her scoop on Hyland. Tess would know what to do. She was in contact with the special counsel investigating Hyland, she had the media at her bidding, she was a folk hero in certain circles in the United States—and public enemy number one in others—and she had ten times Samira’s courage. Like that was hard.
Not forgetting that Tess had a bulletproof French Foreign Legion boyfriend backed up by a squad of Legionnaire friends who’d do anything for each other. Like escort a stranger into hiding. And look after her a little too well.