Prince Charming

by CD Reiss

  “Now that’s the first time I’ve seen you laugh in days,” my grandmother says. “Sweetheart, what happened to you makes me very sad and very angry. I mean, you can’t even trust a man to live long enough to marry you.”

  I laugh again, dizzy with the release of my pain and sorrow. I want to rest my head on her lap. I want her to stroke my hair the way she used to. But she’s too frail, and even after everything I’ve been through, she needs me to be strong more than I need her to comfort me.

  “Eventually you’re going to have to move in with me. I’ll want you to. Can you understand that? I want you to come live with me when living alone is too much.”

  “Sure, kid.”

  Nana pats my knee with one hand and grabs for the remote control with the other, wincing with pain when she stretches.

  “I have it.” I turn on QVC, where a pair of sparkling earrings looks like the most beautiful thing in the world. “Are you settled?”

  “Bernie and Grace are coming by.”

  “I’m going to run some errands.”

  I wheel her puzzle tray over to her. Half of the kittens are pieced together. I wonder if she’ll remember her hip or my black eye whenever she sees this one. I’ll think of how I started my search for Keaton.

  Will I remember the disappointment of not finding him? Or finding out he’s dead?

  Or will he be by my side?

  54

  cassie

  I learned Taylor is in the habit of eating dinner at the Barrington Mansion—Harper’s family home—right across the river from the factory. It was where we first met, the day I flashed my badge and demanded to talk to Keaton Bridge. The day I met the love of my life at the factory and brought him in for questioning.

  Harper’s sister, Catherine, opens the door. She is the patron saint of Barrington, selling all of her possessions for over ten years to support the people of a dying town. The house has been refurnished with new things, and she has a sunny smile when she opens the door.

  “Hello,” I say. “My name is Cassie Grinstead. I’m with the FBI.” I hold up my ID and badge. “I’m here to talk to Taylor. Is he here?”

  “Come on in,” she says, standing to the side. “We’re eating. Can I make you a plate?”

  “No, thank you, I won’t be long.”

  She leads me into the dining room, which is richly furnished, newly painted, and populated with two men. I only recognize Taylor. The other is a handsome man in his thirties in a button-front shirt and expensive watch.

  Taylor stands when he sees me.

  “Cassie,” he says by way of greeting. We shake hands.

  “This is Chris,” Catherine says warmly, introducing the other man.

  We shake also, and silence follows. In the chaos around the accident, the kidnapping, the blizzard, and the search for a body that I believed was walking on the face of the earth, not at the bottom of a river, Taylor and I have given each other condolences. But seeing him, it still feels raw.

  “Can we talk in private? I’m sorry to interrupt dinner, but this won’t take long.”

  Taylor leads me onto the back porch. The backyard is spotted with garden lights, and over the evening horizon, the scaffolding and cranes around the factory are outlined against the sky.

  I don’t sit, and neither does he. “I’m sorry about Keaton. Again. I know you guys were close.”

  I gauge his reaction carefully, because no matter how many times I say it, the wound is still fresh and his expression will tell me what he knows.

  The way his face drops a little and he blinks twice quickly lets me know that he believes he has lost his friend. I can’t disabuse him of this until I’m sure. Hope isn’t a worthy partner in death.

  “I know that you’ve talked to some of our agents about Keaton’s death.”

  “The other half of that team is still at large,” he says, gritting his teeth. “It’s taking a lot of effort not to go hunting for them myself.”

  “Yeah, but I want to tell you that even though I came here flashing my ID, I’m not quite here as an agent. Not one hundred percent.”

  “Really?”

  “Well, in one sense I am. I want them to find Keyser. That’s the federal agent part. But I’m appealing to you as someone who loved the same person.”

  “Go on.”

  “Did you ever know his real name?”

  Taylor shoots out a little laugh, taps his fingers on the porch railing and looks into the darkening sky. “No.”

  “Are you lying?”

  “I’m not fucking lying. What would be the point of lying? What would I be protecting?”

  “Your company? Your factory?”

  “You know what, lady? Fuck this.” He’s about to walk back into the house.

  “He gave me a code.” Taylor stops to listen, so I finish. “He never said what it was for, but he said if I lost him, I should use it. He didn’t say what to do with it, where to put it, or who might know what it means.”

  “What is it?”

  “You don’t have such a code?”

  “No.”

  I can see the question annoys him, and maybe that’s a good thing. I want him to be a little on edge. I hand him the code handwritten on a yellow Post-It. He takes it.

  “Seventeen digits. Alphanumeric.” He cracks his neck and looks at it again. “I have a list of shit it isn’t. Not octal. Not hex. Obviously not ASCII.”

  “Obviously.”

  “Where did you get it? Did it come up to the top of your bowl of alphabet soup?”

  “Keaton gave it to me. He didn’t say what it was. Maybe it’s a path to Keyser. Maybe it’s a map to buried treasure.”

  He thinks, pressing his lips together, casting his eyes downward as he wrestles with a question I cannot imagine. “You know who you need to talk to? And I’m not really enthusiastic about suggesting this, but I promised Keaton that if you ever needed anything, I would give it to you.”

  To me, that’s just another hint that he always knew he was going to have to disappear.

  “I need this,” I say. “Whatever you can do, I need—”

  “You need to talk to Harper. If there’s anyone who can figure out what a random string of numbers is supposed to be, it’s her. But you have to promise me that you won’t bring her any trouble. If anything happens to her…”

  “No one outside of the bureau will know that she and I spoke.”

  He nods. “If you find anything out about Keaton that you can tell me, let me know. Because some days I feel like I never even knew the guy.”

  “You may have not known his name, but you knew who he was.” I tap my sternum.

  Taylor clears his throat. “Are you sure you don’t want something to eat?”

  “No, thank you. I’ve been transferred to San Francisco. I think I might take a trip to California to find an apartment.”

  “Good luck. You’re going to need it.”

  55

  cassie

  I see a couple of apartments, and they are utterly, ridiculously expensive. Especially because I constantly have to think about my grandmother moving in eventually, which requires space. I also have a nagging hope that there will be a six-foot-four British male in the house.

  I meet with my new boss at Cyber Crime. She’s tall and graceful, with a long curl of lavender hair and ears full of silver piercings. She gives me my assignment.

  I give myself my own assignment. Find Keaton before I go undercover.

  After the meeting, I take the train and slip into crowds so that I’m harder to follow. I don’t know where Keyser is. I don’t know if he’s after me, but I did promise Taylor I wouldn’t put Harper in danger. So when I get to Stanford, I’m pretty sure I’m alone. I check freshman classes for computer science majors, peeking my head into the lectures. She’s not there. I check the second-year classes. Finally, I find her in a huge auditorium, learning a version of math I will never understand.

  She’s sitting in the center, away from the goof-offs in th
e back and the brownnoses at the front. I sit next to her, taking out a little notebook as if I’m a student late for class.

  When she sees me, she seems a little startled. I’m out of context. I flip to a page in my notebook with Keaton’s code written in the center and tap it as the professor runs through math functions well beyond my capacity.

  She takes the book, putting it in front of her, thinking. She slides it back to me without a word, and I wait. I don’t get up, and I don’t give up.

  The class goes on for another hour. There’s a shuffle, a shouted assignment, and we’re out in the hallway. I walk beside her.

  “Your eye looks better.” She flew out to Barrington after the accident to be with Taylor, and we saw each other briefly.

  “Time’s the best doctor in the business.”

  “What’s the code?” she says, flicking my notebook.

  “I was going to ask you.”

  “It’s nonsense. Did you dream it? Did it appear in your alphabet soup?”

  “Taylor didn’t tell you?”

  We’re outside now. Harper doesn’t slow down to talk, or turn, or do anything. She walks as if she’s running a race.

  “Taylor told me, but he doesn’t know much. He said Keaton gave it to you, but he didn’t tell me the circumstances. You know that’s important, right?”

  “He was fucking me and he made me memorize it before he let me come. Happy now?”

  She doesn’t slow down to be shocked. But she should be. I would be. She just laughs and shakes her head.

  “All right,” she says. “That means this is personal. I’m happy to help.” She makes a sharp turn through a narrower campus alley. “Let’s go back to my place. The fucking computers in the lab have more leaks and holes than…” She waves as if her mind is on other things. “They’re not secure.”

  The alley spits us out into a parking lot. She bloops the alarm on a black Tesla.

  “Thank you.” I say.

  “You kidding? Keaton was the most mysterious guy on the planet. I’m going to figure this out if it’s the last thing I do.”

  56

  cassie

  I order in for Harper and pay cash. She barely eats. She types as if she’s trying to break her keyboard. She asks me to get her some white tape from the bathroom drawer. I almost ask her which drawer, but each of her bathroom drawers has tape.

  She loops it around her knuckles and types faster.

  Her apartment is a massive loft overlooking the Bay. The rest of the loft has such an underused, untouched feel that I can’t even tell if she lives in the whole thing, or if she just lives in the path between the front door and this room. It is banked with computers on shelves that line three walls with wires and circuits and soldering irons everywhere. She has flatscreen monitors ranging in size from “I’d like to watch an action movie,” to “I think I need glasses.”

  “Okay,” she says. “From what you told me, I had to open up a tunnel through an allied nation with bad monitoring and use the protocol to—”

  “I’m sorry, Harper. I know you work hard to understand all this stuff, but I don’t care. Just give it to me.”

  “I got into an MI6 cache, and I found him.”

  I leap from the couch to her desk and look over her shoulder.

  I found pictures of him on Google, mostly from his time with QI4, but I looked at them so much, trying to spear him into my memory, that they wore thin. This one is new. It isn’t recent, or candid, but every time I see a new picture of him, my heart opens up a little wider.

  Harper’s not as impressed. She flicks to the next page. “It’s all stuff we already know, more or less. I don’t know what to do anymore”

  “There has to be something. He wouldn’t have given me the code for kicks.”

  “Have you considered it was just a sex game?”

  “No. He kept mentioning it. He said it was important, and if he says it was important, then it was important.”

  She scrolls, and on the left, a word becomes visible. It’s an evil word, rendered in bold all-caps type, as red as a bloody lip.

  DECEASED

  I pretend I don’t see it. “His parents’ names are here. Charlie and Anna Bridge.”

  “Hang on,” Harper says.

  She works on another screen. Pulls up Charlie Bridge’s name, does some other crap I don’t understand. A blank blue screen comes up with a white field. Nothing else. Just a white box with a blinking cursor on the left.

  “What’s this?”

  “It’s up a level of security. You can’t get in without a password or a hack that’s beyond me at the moment.”

  I lean over her and type Keaton’s code, slapping Enter without pause.

  The life of a family stretches before me.

  A name. A place. A reason for a split-second decision to move across an ocean. It’s all in front of me, including David Webber’s death, which has a date.

  “He’s dead but the file’s active?” I say.

  “I have no idea if that’s normal. Let me check.”

  “I only have a few days.”

  “I have less than that.” She covers my hand with hers, looking at me with an expression of sharp-edged sincerity. “We’ll find him.” She squeezes my hand, and I believe her.

  57

  cassie

  We don’t make it. MI6 is a dead end.

  My despair lasts a few hours, but is replaced by hope. If I’m undercover, I can keep looking, I just can’t expose myself. I have a week before I start, and I know I have what I need in that file. I just have to figure out where the clue is.

  I’m meeting up with another agent three hours outside San Francisco. He’s briefing me on the case, and we’re leaving for Scotland on Tuesday to track Keyser’s last known whereabouts.

  I’m nervous. Nervous about starting a new job, a new city, a new life with the man I love still missing and potentially a target of the criminal I was chasing.

  Trusting he could handle himself was as good as trusting he hadn’t left me.

  It’s foggy here, just west of Yosemite. I wonder if that’s intentional. A signal that I’m close.

  The address here was all I had that I could use, except their real names and the real name of their only child.

  I take it slow up the mountain. Redwood trees slash the sky on each side of me. The sun is just about rising over them. I’m a three-hour drive out of San Francisco.

  I wonder if that’s intentional too.

  The location was more of a suggestion, a piece of land with a lot number, a purchase date, and a shell company as an owner.

  My palms slip against the steering wheel. I’m so nervous I’m sweating. There’s a driveway into the forest, and a wrought-iron gate that’s locked. I pull over to the side and walk to the small opening big enough for a person. I walk a good quarter-mile on gravel winding through the trees. Finally, the house appears.

  Modern. Large windows. Lights still on upstairs.

  A dog barks, then another. I get nervous for a second. I’m not prepared for Rottweilers or guard dogs. But when they appear, one after the other, they’re sheepdogs and they seem happy to see me.

  Sheepdogs. Why sheepdogs?

  Could it be?

  I pick up the pace. The house seems so far away. I don’t know what I’m going to do when I get there. Knock or bang on the window? Sit and wait? No way. I’m bursting through my skin. I’m like an overfull water balloon about to spill all over the Sequoia Mountains.

  The dogs reach me, and I stop to pet them.

  A whistle echoes over the mountains. The dogs spin and run in the opposite direction toward a man in jeans and a pale blue shirt.

  He’s tall.

  He’s as handsome as the devil himself.

  The dimples in his cheeks are a promise. The smile lines are a joy. His voice, his looks, the leathery scent that precedes him as he runs toward me; all of it belongs to the only man in the world I’d lay down my heart for.

  The distan
ce between us seems miles. I’ll walk it, I’ll run it, I’ll fly to this man.

  I leap for him, arms around his neck, legs wrapped around his waist as he holds me up, lips meeting and speaking without words.

  He snaps away, eye to eye with me. We’re both made of breath and fog mingling in the air around us.

  “Cassie, you came.”

  “David,” I say.

  “For now, until we catch or kill anyone who wants to hurt us, I’m still Keaton.”

  “I knew you wouldn’t leave me.”

  “I tried to move back to London and couldn’t. I had to be near you.”

  The dogs circle us, whipping into a barking frenzy.

  I push him a little, but with the same motion, I grab his jacket in my fists. “You made me come and find you. What if I hadn’t?”

  He takes my wrists in his hands but doesn’t pull them away. “That’s why you’re my partner now.”

  My eyes must have gone wide, because the muscles around them hurt.

  “Given the choice, I would have taken care of it myself and saved you the trouble. But I needed to go back to MI6 and by then—”

  “I’d been put on the case.” I jerk him to me then away. I want to shake him, but he’s too big.

  “It’s a cakewalk. Once we get him, you and I are going to get married and have babies.”

  “How long have you been planning this? Since the code?”

  His lips curl into mischief, and his dimples are a promise that he’s going to keep if only I believe in him. “The code was so you’d know what happened. I was going to become my old self, my real self, and live a normal life. This?” He puts his arm around me and extends his arm toward the house and the forest. “I changed plans after my death went so well.”

  “You gave up your dream in order to be with me?”

  “If I’m going to be my real self, I want to be my real self with you.”