Monday's Lie (16 page)

Nothing ventured, nothing nothing, much less gained. I led with bravado I felt only in my feet. Everything above the ankles was quaking. “So. Brian Menary. Long time, no see. But not quite as long as you'd intended, yeah?”

I watched him try not to react to the use of his name.

“Pardon me?” he said again.

“Please don't do that. It's annoying. I mean, unless you really are hard of hearing, and in that case I apologize. I'm ready to talk a whole lot louder if you'd like.”

He relaxed just the slightest. Maybe we'd passed the part where I was supposed to pull a gun or something. “Have we met? I don't remember ever giving you my name.”

“I read it on a name tag once.”

He laughed. I didn't. “Come on,” he said.

“Yeah. What was it? Nineteen years ago. We never did get formally introduced that night, but I never forget a face.” It was only a little white lie of omission. I forgot faces all the time, but I never forgot a face that I had inadvertently studied upside down. It worked just as she had said it would. Three points for me.

“What are you doing here?” I said. “Please tell me you live right down the street.”

“I was just checking in on you, of course.”

“Of course.” The trembling started all over again, with more rattle in it this time. I clamped down, at some expense to my ability to breathe, so that it wouldn't show.

He continued, “But I would have bet my next ten paychecks that there wasn't anything for me to actually find with you. Joke's on me, huh? Were you going for the Tag Site just now?”

“Tag Site?”

“You weren't going for the Tag Site?”

“I give up. What's a Tag Site?”

“Seriously?”

“I don't know what a Tag Site is. So what? And I don't know why you're here or what you want after nineteen goddamned years, but you can start filling in the blanks anytime you'd like.” The daring zoomed through me. “Or I could just scream and see how badly I can mess up your day with security guards and any stray hero-types who happen to be sitting out there at the tables. I'm sure Paul Rowland would be thrilled to come pick you up and iron out all the shit that goes down when someone like you gets filmed from ten different angles by the security cameras. Or did you Silly String all of them on your way in?” My quaking had calmed to a heady buzz. I was beginning to enjoy this. “Not that Paul couldn't talk his and your way out of it, I'm sure. But still, there'd be anyone who took a video on their phone of the scene I'm about to cause. . . .”

Brian offered a palms-out surrender. “Okay, okay, hang on. Who do you work for?”

“Traynor and Associates.”

“Well, I know that, but—really? That's it?”

“What is going on? I am just about out of patience and it's going to get very loud in here very fast.”

“Okay, first off, that's a Tag Site.” He pointed at the plain beige door across from the restrooms. A card swipe was next to the doorknob, but otherwise it was unmarked and, therefore, completely unremarkable.

“Yeah, that doesn't help as much as it could.”

“A Tag Site is kind of like, I dunno, a covert-ops broom closet.” He shrugged. “A few agencies use them. They're all over—in airports and hospitals. Sometimes shopping malls. You can get in by swiping your ID tag—hence
Tag
Site—or they can be unlocked for you remotely with a phone call. That's assuming you know who to call and how to ask.”

“What are they for?”

“I guess it's not for anything if you weren't going in there in the first place.”

“Yeah, that's not going to cut it. What's inside?”

“Secure communications. Supplies. Stuff.”

“What stuff ? Prove it,” I said. “Show me.”

“I can't do that!”

“No? Well, why are you telling me all about it then?”

Brian laughed, a warm, amazed chuckle. “Agh! Because you asked.” He raked exasperated fingers through his hair.

“Other people don't ask?”

“What other people?”

“Nobody ever asks you to explain yourself when you're skulking around?”

“
Other people
don't ask me things because it doesn't occur to
other people
to corner me by the restrooms. I happen to be good at my job. Other people don't even know I'm there in the first place.” The gap in the back-and-forth fell uncomfortable in seconds. “Speaking of, can we—” Brian's sentence was interrupted by a mother and a potty-dancing little boy hop-pulling past us to the ladies' room.

He waited until the heavy door had shut them out of our conversation. “Can we take this discussion out there?” He nodded to the bustle and blur of the open food court. “Maybe we could sit down and straighten out this misunderstanding?”

“You'll just ditch me.”

“I'm not Houdini.”

“Okay, so that's who you're not. How about who you
are
?”

I said it easily, with a confidence that felt tapped, and not necessarily by me. Brian Menary had a version of the same contagious boldness that my mother had owned. Confrontation in his hands, as it had been with her, wasn't the powder keg it could have been. They almost encouraged it, made it feel safer than it was, which made a certain type of sense. Information was their business. No gold stars were handed out for their shutting down the person across from them.

What scuttled through my head was of no use to him if it didn't tumble out of my mouth. Intimidation probably wasn't as useful as the spy movies made it look. Like hot-pepper flakes or eye shadow, it was best applied sparingly.

“Let's go sit down,” he suggested again, mildly.

And so we did.

The situation was just as tricky out in the open, but at least sitting down felt less fidgety than standing up. That the air was fresher was a bonus, too. A big, bright window stripped our standoff of most of its clandestine mood, but the light made it more real, too. Brian Menary wasn't a figment of my paranoia, and that was both a triumph and a terror.

He was also better looking than I'd appreciated at thirteen years old or just now in the gloomy corridor. He would have seemed old to me that night if I'd even bothered to notice, but on closer and better-lit inspection now, he wasn't even two handfuls of years older than me.

In surprising candor, he explained to me that I was—and had been—under routine “follow-through” surveillance ever since my mother died. My Internet searches, not the money at all, had rung the bell.

“You're spying on my Internet?”

“No, not really. It's not even your computer, specifically. It's just an open alert, everywhere, an algorithm scanning the search engines and Web pages and whatnot. If enough key words get tripped in a certain way, in a certain span of time, then an analyst takes a look at a scramble of data. Sometimes they make a recommendation that we put eyeballs on the situation. Anything more than that and we'd need a warrant and an army of lawyers.”

“Mmmmmm. I see. You guys are just playing by regular-people rules,” I said. “Sure you are.”

“We do. As much as we can. Seriously. We pick our headaches very carefully, I promise you. For things like this, we just put a very casual watch on the person's day-to-day for a short while to see if they're acting tuned up.”

“And the yoga studio?”

Brian smiled quizzically.

“You owe me six bucks.”

“Huh?”

“Yeah, right.” I rolled my eyes.

“Look, almost every single time, it's nothing. It takes a lot to send us scrambling around for the invisible ink and self-destructing messages. It must feel very weird for you to hear this, I know, but, honestly, there's no one out there watching your every typo and Google search.”

“Except the algorithm.”

“Well, yeah. Look, your mother worked on some very sensitive cases in her time. They're all old news by now, but still, there are occasional developments in the field that call back to the work she did, even way back then. We'd just like to know before anyone else if her friends and family have any knowledge or even curiosities that could draw, you know, unwanted attention.”

“So you're not recruiting me or Patrick?” I remembered Patrick's feeble covering for his conversation with the blue-sedan man. He'd make a terrible field operative. In the interest of national security, I hoped Paul Rowland had noticed that.

Brian looked genuinely surprised. “
I'm
not. And I don't think it's all that likely that anyone else is either. Nobody's looking at my reports for that sort of grooming intelligence. It's not that kind of thing. It's not what I do. I mean, I wouldn't definitely know for sure, but you're not—how do I say this without it sounding insulting? You're not high-desirability material.”

Whatever telegraphed across my face set him backpedaling.

He took the bait and served up an apology, laughing. “Hang on. That's just jargon for ‘not what we're looking for.' If you guys were seeking us out, or working in a field that bumped up against what we do, or, not to put too fine a point on it, if you were younger, then maybe. I mean, I know Rowland's big on pedigree and all that. . . .”

“So, like you said, you don't really know for sure. Paul's asked me before.”

“Well, this is pretty much my job now. In all likelihood, I'd know. What I used to do had me a little more directly involved in operations. Now I mostly follow up on what, these days, crosses those same paths I walked way back when. It's semiretirement. Now I only travel two hundred days a year instead of four hundred and fifty.” He smiled and brackets of fine lines in the hollows of his cheeks made him look comfortable. Harmless even.

I wasn't that easy. “And you can just tell me all of this why?”

“Tell you what?” He smiled at me as if we were friends. Or as if we should be. A bright bubble of curiosity about what that would be like tickled up through my middle. “What have I told you?” he asked.

“That my Internet is being spied on, for one thing.”

“It's really not, but again, what have I told you? Who would you tell? And they'd be able to do what with it? All's well, Mrs. Aldrich. I don't have to kill you just because I told you that stuff.”

“Ugh. Let's just be Brian and Dee, if you don't mind. I mean, since we're such good friends and all.”

“Yes, let's. This has been a very weird day. You scared the hell out of me back there by the bathrooms.” Brian started laughing.

“I did?” The giggles got me then, too.

“Holy shit. Like I said, all of my errands these days—they're nothing. It's always nothing, and nothing is the only thing that ever happens. I get paid for a whole lot of nothing, and that's just fine by me. When I thought you were the one-in-a-million
some
thing, I didn't know what to do. It's been so long since I had to do anything.”

“You keep saying that, but you're a lot younger than I thought you were. You guys retire awfully early.”

“It's a high-mileage job.”

Another lull didn't make the scene less ridiculous. Some sort of chivalry monster made Brian ask me if I wanted something to drink. I declined.

“So that's it, then?” I said. “I just put up with it—and with you—and that's that?”

“Come on. Put up with what? No harm done.”

“You're not even going to give me the satisfaction of admitting that this is a huge invasion of privacy?”

“My idea of privacy is probably a little bit different from yours.” He looked down at the tabletop. “Sorry.”

“Yeah.”

“It's really not a big deal. Amazon, Google, Microsoft, they're all keeping closer tabs on you than we are.”

“This is a little bit different.”

“Yes and no. The world's a big, tangly place and we're all just trying to make sense of it and keep it safe. At least we're not trying to get you to buy anything,” he said.

“Except for the idea that you're completely harmless. And before you know it, I'm standing barefoot in line at the airport with a sandwich bag full of not enough mouthwash or hair gel, waiting for my dose of body-scan radiation—oh, wait.”

“Hey! That's not me. You'll have to tackle that with your vote.”

“Yeah, like you people don't control all the elections. Pfffft.”

“You've got the wrong ‘you people.' ” As much as I'd enjoyed a flare of bravery, he was enjoying having his chains rattled. His smirk was catching. I felt it mirror in my own cheeks.

“Obviously, there's no winning this with you,” he continued. “What, with me being me and all. I can only tell you that this is completely routine and you'll get an A-plus for business as usual on my report. Does that help?”

“Are you going to tell Paul about this little detour?”

“Interesting. Would you prefer that I didn't?”

“Why is it interesting? I guess I'm more wondering if you're allowed to.”

“Allowed to what? Whatever else I may be, I'm still a grown man. Paul Rowland doesn't ‘allow' me to type whatever I want into my reports. And it's only interesting because, in fact, Paul Rowland does take the time to bother with reports on team Vess.”

“Yeah, I'm not surprised to hear that. He'd been looking into some money that my mother left to me and my brother. I don't know what he's up to. Paul's the original bad penny. Except that he's my mother's bad penny, so it's not fair. It seems like I should be able to shake him. Would you get into trouble if he found out that we had talked and you hadn't mentioned it?”

“Well, first of all, unless you're going to be telling him, I can't think of any way he'd know about it. As far as I'm concerned, it won't go any farther than this table if you don't bring it up and—”