by Tom Savage
The Woman Who Knew Too Much is a work of fiction. Names, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
An Alibi Ebook Original
Copyright © 2017 by Tom Savage
Excerpt from The Spy Who Never Was by Tom Savage copyright © 2017 by Tom Savage
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Alibi, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
ALIBI is a registered trademark and the ALIBI colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.
Ebook ISBN 9780425286197
Cover design: Caroline Johnson
Cover image: © Mark Owen/Arcangel Images
randomhousebooks.com
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Author’s Note
Dedication
Acknowledgments
By Tom Savage
About the Author
Excerpt from The Spy Who Never Was
NINA: Why do you say you kiss the ground I walk on? I ought to be killed. I’m so tired. If I could rest…rest. I’m a seagull. No, that’s not it. I’m an actress.
Anton Chekhov, The Seagull
translated by Stark Young
Chapter 1
She was nearly asleep when she heard the sound again.
The first time had been just a few minutes ago, when she was switching off her brand-new e-reader. A Christmas gift from her daughter, it was perfect for sitting up in bed with the pillows propped behind her. It weighed much less than the hardcover edition of the novel she was reading, a sprawling family saga set in Ireland from the 1800s to the present. As a fifth-generation Irish-American, she was enjoying the history lesson of her people, and with the type-enlargement feature she didn’t have to wear her dreaded reading glasses.
She’d been here for nearly three hours, ever since her solitary dinner in her empty seaside home, with a winter storm outside that whistled in the bare trees and pelted the bedroom windows with icy rain. At eleven o’clock, she’d electronically bookmarked her page and shut the reader down. That’s when she’d first heard the sound, a faint tapping from a remote distance.
She’d paused a moment in her warm bed, listening, but she could hear only the wind, the sleet, and the natural creaking of the old two-story wood and stone structure at the edge of the dunes above the beach. No, she’d decided; I imagined it. It’s just the storm. It’s nothing.
She’d placed the reader on the bedside table, switched off the lamp, and pulled the sheets, blanket, and down-filled comforter up to her chin. She’d rolled onto her side in the half-empty bed—her husband was staying at the apartment in the city tonight—and drifted off, her mind a comfortable jumble of Irish dynasties and plans for the classes she’d be teaching at the university this semester, after the intercession. Christmas was over, and New Year’s; now she was looking forward to two more weeks of blissful rest and—
Tap tap tap.
She sat up in the bed and switched on the lamp. There it was again, and it wasn’t the wind or the rain. She shut her eyes and held her breath until she determined its origin. The sound was coming from downstairs.
She didn’t think; she merely reacted. First rule: Cover. In a flash, the lamp was extinguished and she was off the bed, crouching on the carpet, the bed between her and the wide-open bedroom door. Second rule: Weapon. She slid the drawer of the bedside table open and reached inside, grasping the handle of her husband’s Beretta M9. Third rule: Backup. With her other hand, she picked up her cellphone from its charging stand beside the landline. Fourth Rule: Engage. She stood and moved to the doorway, listening.
The tapping from downstairs was low and steady, and now that she concentrated on it she began to detect a pattern: Morse code. She’d learned it in summer camp as a girl—but only she and her husband knew that, as far as she was aware. Could that be her husband, tapping out a message on the front door in the middle of the night? She listened intently, translating the sounds to letters.
C-O-M-E T-O D-O-O-R Q-U-I-E-T P-L-E-A-S-E N-O P-R-O-B-L-E-M M-R B F-I-N-E
R-A-L-P-H J-O-H-N-S-O-N.
Ralph Johnson. Her husband’s assistant—but this late night visit wasn’t about her husband, apparently. No problem. Mr. B. fine.
She canceled the 9-1-1 call she’d already punched in and slipped the phone into her pocket. Her vision had adjusted to the dark, so she could see that the upstairs hallway was empty, the other doors shut. She glanced down at her clothes—a faded Broadway souvenir T-shirt from The Phantom of the Opera and the bottom half of her oldest gym suit, baggy gray sweatpants with a drawstring. She picked up her bathrobe and put it on, then pointed the gun straight in front of her with both hands as she moved out of the room and down the hall, barefoot, soft as a whisper.
Her husband had taught her how to use the Beretta; they’d practiced with it at a local target range. It was heavy in her hand and yet surprisingly manageable. She probably wouldn’t need it now, but she held on to it just the same. She wasn’t ashamed of her initial reactions to the sounds, of diving to the floor and grabbing the gun. Better safe than sorry. She’d recently learned these rules from her husband, and they were now her ingrained responses to a potential threat.
Descending the staircase in the dark, she ran the message through her head again, trying to figure it out. As she came off the bottom stair onto the wood floor of the front hall, she heard the tapping again; the message was being repeated. She stared at the oak door. The doorbell was in plain sight, not to mention a brass knocker centered in the wood, so why was Ralph—if it really was Ralph—tapping Morse code? And where had he come from? She hadn’t heard a car in the driveway.
She approached the door, careful not to stand directly behind it. From the side, she reached out with her free hand and switched on the porch light. The curtained window beside her lit up, but she didn’t hazard a look outside—that would make her visible, vulnerable, a potential target if this was some sort of trap. She almost called through the door before she remembered the tapped instructions: Quiet, please. Grasping the gun in one hand, she tapped softly on the door with the other. V-O-C-A-L I-D.
The male voi
ce that replied through the door was soft but clear. “It’s Ralph, ma’am. Ralph Johnson. I work for your husband.”
She relaxed. She’d never met Ralph Johnson in the seven years she’d known of him, but she’d spoken on the phone with him many times, and this was definitely his voice. She switched on the front hall light, disabled the alarm, unlocked the two locks, released the dead bolt, and opened the door. A tall, thin young black man stood there in a gray parka and gray wool cap, and he wasn’t alone. Behind him was an older, imposingly handsome man, also African-American, in a gray wool coat and a fedora. Both men were wet and shivering. Coats, hats, gloves, even the older man’s close-cropped hair: all gray. Oh yes, she thought, these men are the real deal. Gray was the preferred color of their profession.
“My husband isn’t here,” she told them. “But I suppose you know that.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Ralph whispered. “We know where he is. This is Mr. Green, your husband’s boss. Mine, too. He doesn’t want your husband. He wants to talk to you, ma’am.”
She looked at Ralph, then at his employer. She peered out at the rain and the wet landscape, then back at the two men. They were staring down at her hand. She followed their gaze to the Beretta and produced a weak smile.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ll put this away, and—”
Ralph raised a gloved finger to his lips, reached into a coat pocket, and produced a boxy silver object somewhat larger than a cellphone.
“Keep your voice down, please,” he murmured as he stepped silently past her into the house. He moved off through her downstairs rooms, holding the device up in front of him.
She looked back at the other man on the porch. He was studying her appearance, and she wondered what he made of what he saw: a tall, slender, forty-nine-year-old white woman with green eyes and shoulder-length chestnut hair, in a full-length blue terry robe, barefoot, clutching a big black gun. She opened the door wider and waved him inside. As soon as he’d passed by her, she shut the door, relocked and bolted it, switched the porch light off and the alarm back on, and turned to face her distinguished, unexpected guest.
“Hello, Mr. Green,” she whispered to the director of the New York City field station of the CIA. “I’m Nora Baron.”
Chapter 2
Most people would be surprised by the late-night arrival of two relative strangers in their home, but Nora Baron took it in stride. When she considered who she was—more specifically, who her husband was—she half expected anything to happen at any given moment. This hadn’t always been the case. It was a recent development, but she was getting used to it.
She watched as the young man made a complete sweep of her house with the device in his hand. He moved quickly through the living room, dining room, den, kitchen, even the garage beyond the kitchen and the powder room under the stairs. As he proceeded upstairs and disappeared down the hall toward the bedrooms, Nora took Mr. Green’s coat and hat and silently indicated that he should follow her.
She led him into the kitchen, switching on the lights before moving a chair to the radiator in the corner and draping his wet coat over it, close to the heat. Then she went to the windows that looked out on the back patio fronting the dunes and Long Island Sound, and drew the curtains. She waved him into a chair at the breakfast table and proceeded to the work area, slipping the gun into a drawer. She’d retrieve it later.
“Coffee or tea?” she asked him. “Or would you prefer something else?”
“Coffee, please. Johnson will want coffee, too. We don’t need cream or sugar.”
She wasn’t surprised to discover that his voice was low and resonant, or that his speech was perfectly articulated. Nora was an actor and acting teacher, and she suspected that he’d undergone vocal training similar to her own, as many politicians and high-ranking military types often did.
Nora set up the coffeemaker, then filled the teakettle for herself and placed it on the stove. She found a box of Jeff’s favorite chocolate chip cookies and arranged them on a plate, aware that the man at the table was studying her once more. In her line of work, she was used to scrutiny from audiences. She allowed him time to assess her, not to mention her brown-and-gold kitchen with butcher-block counters, tiled floor, and hanging pots and pans above the central island. She reasoned that he’d tell her his business in his own good time, but there was one thing she wanted to know immediately.
“How did you get here?” she asked, sitting across from him at the round table. She placed the cookies before him, but he didn’t so much as look at them.
“We were dropped off on the road at the end of your drive. I’ll call my driver when we’re ready to leave. If Johnson says it’s okay, the car can come up the drive and collect us. I apologize for the late hour, and for all the caution, but I must be certain this visit is private. Has there been anyone in or near the house lately, aside from your family?”
Nora thought about it. “Only Mrs. Ramirez, my housekeeper, but she’s been with us forever. Jeff’s been staying in town since January second, and Dana’s at NYU. My neighbors on both sides are quite a good distance away, and no one’s been on the beach, not at this time of year. I’m alone here.”
“No drop-in guests or deliveries?”
“No,” she assured him. “That thing Ralph is using is what you people call a zapper, right? For bugs?”
Mr. Green nodded. “He was tapping on the door because a soft noise won’t affect most voice-activated devices. They usually only respond to louder sounds.”
“How did you know I understood Morse?” she asked him.
He merely smiled in reply, and Nora thought, CIA. They probably had a file on her, the agent’s wife. Terrific.
Ralph Johnson appeared in the kitchen doorway. He was still wearing his parka and stocking cap.
“All clear, sir,” he reported, remaining by the door.
Nora began to rise, but Mr. Green indicated that she should remain seated.
“Hat and coat on that chair with mine,” he said to his subordinate. “Then join us here, and bring the thing.”
Without a word, the younger man complied. He was wearing a dark suit and tie not unlike his employer’s but from a whole different part of the store, the discount aisle. He handed an iPad to Mr. Green and dropped into a chair, eyeing the cookie plate fondly. Nora smiled and pushed the plate toward him, knowing that it would soon be empty. In her limited but vivid experience, members of the intelligence community—particularly the young males—were voracious whenever food was nearby.
“Don’t worry about the late hour,” she assured Mr. Green. “I’m used to theater hours—we work at night and sleep in the daytime. I’ve kept regular hours for more than twenty years, since I married Jeff and had Dana, but I function well at this time of night.” She knew he wasn’t exactly embarrassed about his melodramatic—and totally premeditated—arrival. Late night was “good cover,” as they said in his profession, her husband’s profession. She also suspected that the Morse code had been a test of some kind, and she’d apparently passed it. She wondered if she’d been given extra points for arming herself before opening the door. Probably.
Mr. Green fiddled with the tablet, frowning. This was obviously the “thing” he’d requested, and Nora suppressed a smile. Hamilton Green was in his sixties, and clearly as awkward with modern technology as she was.
“Mrs. Baron—” he began.
“Nora,” she supplied.
He nodded. “Nora, Jeff has only been working with us in New York for a year and a half, ever since your, um, adventure in Europe, the mission we nicknamed ‘Mrs. John Doe.’ I’ve read all the reports about that, by the way, and it’s why I’m here. You had quite an eventful introduction to your husband’s profession, and I congratulate you on a job well done—especially considering that it wasn’t your job in the first place. You’re a very brave person.”
Nora was not the blushing type, but she reddened now and whispered, “Thank you.”
The teakettle began to
sing at that moment, and she jumped up from the table, grateful for the interruption. As she poured two coffees and one chamomile tea at the counter, she saw Mr. Green hand the iPad to Ralph, who had to put down his third cookie to take it. The older man muttered instructions; Ralph nodded and searched for something, his fingers flying.
Nora regarded the young man as he worked, thinking, Ray/Roy/Roger. That had been her nickname for him. She had never been able to remember the name of her husband’s assistant at Langley, only that it began with an R. But ever since he’d voluntarily moved here from Washington when her husband had been taken out of the field and reassigned to a desk job in New York, she’d remembered it. Ralph had disrupted his own life to continue helping Jeffrey Baron, so he was welcome in her house anytime. She found more cookies and took them to the table.
“Okay,” Mr. Green said when she was seated again. “As I’m sure you’ve guessed by now, I’d like to recruit you. It would be temporary, a matter of four or five days, beginning just a couple of days from now. I thought of you because of your special skill: You could call it an acting job.”
“An acting job,” she repeated. “For the CIA.”
“Precisely. We would pay you, of course, and we—”
“Mr. Green—” Nora began.
“Ham,” he supplied.
Nora stared at the man. Ham. Her husband always referred to him as Mr. Green, and the young man at this table would only be allowed to call him “sir.” His children probably called him sir too, and his friends probably called him Hamilton. Nora suspected that only Mrs. Green called him Ham. She was being given a rare honor.
