Once She Knew

by Sheila Connolly

  She crawled out from under his arm, which produced no further signs of life from him, and made her way toward the kitchen, with a stop at the bathroom along the way.

  Rick eyed her warily then looked away. “’Lo,” he mumbled. He busied himself making coffee.

  “You going to work today?” Claire settled herself into the corner of the banquette, out of the way. “You’re a librarian?”

  “Yeah. It pays the bills.”

  Not exactly chatty. Looking around her, Claire wondered just what he did spend money on. Jonathan had said he’d inherited the house, and he certainly hadn’t invested in furnishings or clothes. “Did you and Jonathan find what you were looking for last night?”

  “Huh.”

  Rick’s inarticulate grunt didn’t tell Claire anything. She wondered if he was frustrated by their lack of results, or if he simply didn’t like her and didn’t feel obligated to share any information with her. But his attitude made her mad.

  “Look, Rick, I know you don’t know me, and you don’t owe me anything. But whatever is going on, I’m in the middle of it now. Can you be a little more specific?”

  He gave her an uneasy glance as he assembled bowl, cereal and milk, which he slapped on the table before sitting down. Claire watched with growing impatience as he methodically poured his cereal, added milk, and spooned up a large mouthful, chewing pensively. Apparently the process helped him to think, because when he swallowed he began to talk.

  “It’s like this. There’s been a bit of chatter on the Web, mostly hints. Conspirators have gotten a lot better at being discreet over the past few years, so you have to know what you’re looking for. Right now the noise points to something big happening this week, but it’s hard to know what, when and where. I can pick up patterns, recurring words or names, but Jonathan knows more about the players.”

  It sounded like a good collaboration. “Uh-huh. Where are you picking up this information?” At Rick’s baleful stare, Claire help up her hands. “Okay, okay, don’t tell me. I’ll assume you’ve got your sources, and I’m probably better off not knowing. But is this coded, or in some foreign language? How are you two supposed to interpret it?”

  Rick shrugged. “Some of each. Some is in English, but a lot of euphemisms, code words. The more you see, the easier it gets to decipher, but there’s still a lot of room for error.”

  “All right.” Claire thought for a moment. “Aren’t the authorities watching the same sources?”

  “Sure, all the time. But they’re shorthanded, they don’t have enough translators, and they’re part of a bureaucracy. And the agencies don’t always talk to each other, share information. Slows down the whole process.”

  “But, if what you’re seeing is serious, shouldn’t you tell someone?”

  “Won’t help.” Rick took another bite of cereal and chewed. “They’d just get bent out of shape about how and where I got my information, and waste a lot of time looking at me instead of the real problem.”

  Which was essentially what Jonathan had said about himself. “So you two agree there’s something happening, but you don’t know what. Did you come up with any sort of plan?”

  “Jonathan gave me a couple of leads, and there’s some more stuff I need to look at. And FYI, from what I’ve seen, the feds weren’t looking at his Internet activity—his accounts are clear.”

  “So what does that mean? That they were looking for him for some reason not connected to the Internet? Or that they were actually looking at Annabeth?”

  “Can’t say. Could be either.” Rick had finished his cereal. He stood up and carried his bowl over to the sink, where he carefully rinsed it out and placed it in the dish drainer. “Coffee?”

  “Please.” Rick’s account hadn’t given Claire much comfort. In fact, they were just about where they had been the day before. Another thought occurred to her. “Did you get any idea of what kind of incident might be in the works? I mean, are we crazy to be heading into New York now, if somebody is planning to set off a bomb or release something toxic?”

  “Doesn’t sound like a bomb to me. Sounds more like a political thing, an assassination or something. Could be wrong.”

  Claire accepted the mug of coffee he handed her and sipped silently. Her expression must have betrayed her concern, because Rick went on, “I think you’re safe enough. Go ahead and meet your friend. I’ll keep working on this, and fill you in when I find anything.”

  “You can call us safely? Or we can call you?”

  “Sure.” Rick did not elaborate.

  “How long have you known Jonathan?” Claire was honestly curious.

  “Long time. High school.” Rick didn’t seem to be comfortable volunteering personal information, but then he added, “You can trust him. He’s not jerking you around.”

  “Hmm.” Claire decided to reserve judgment about that.

  Jonathan stumbled his way into the bathroom, and Claire heard the sound of running water. Then he came into the kitchen and fell heavily into a chair. “Man, I need more than three hours sleep.”

  Silently Rick filled another mug with coffee and handed it to him. Jonathan drank greedily. Gradually his eyes focused, and he took in Claire sitting across the table. “Hey, lady, you look like you slept in your clothes.”

  “That’s because I did. And you could use a shave.”

  “Huh.” He rubbed his hand over his chin. “I keep forgetting about that. Rick, you headed out?”

  “Yeah. When you leave, just pull the door shut behind you.”

  “All that computer equipment, and you don’t worry about getting robbed?” Claire asked.

  “Nah. Alarm system. I can activate it remotely when you go. You can use the computer and stuff up until then without setting off any alarms—and without anybody noticing. What time you leaving?”

  “Three o’clock?” Jonathan sounded unsure. “The bus is still our best bet, but there’s no point in getting to the city too early and having to hang around in a public place. I don’t want to get picked up.”

  “Yeah, well, take care, man. If there’s something nasty happening, you don’t want to get caught in the cross fire.” Rick took a coat from a hook behind the kitchen door and pulled it on.

  “I’d rather stop it before it starts,” Jonathan replied, “but that’s going to be tricky if we don’t even know what we’re looking for. I’ll call you when we get there, okay? That should give you some time to check out the stuff we talked about.”

  “Sure. And I gave you my cell number, right? That’s safe too.”

  “Great. And, Rick? Thanks. I don’t know what we’d do without you.”

  “No problem. Talk to you later.” Without looking at Claire again, Rick turned and went out the back door. Claire heard the car start up and pull out of the driveway.

  Alone now in the kitchen with Jonathan, she said, “Well, now what?”

  “I don’t know about you, but I’m hungry. And, as you so tactfully pointed out, I should get cleaned up, as far as possible.”

  “Does Rick have anything resembling clean towels?” Claire hadn’t wanted to examine the bathroom too closely the night before, but she had the feeling that two more showers would exhaust Rick’s meager resources.

  “I’ll find something.” Jonathan was rummaging through the refrigerator. “God, doesn’t this guy eat anything?”

  “Try the freezer. Or cans. I’ll eat anything.”

  “Aha. Eggs. Cheese, only slightly moldy. Bread. We are in business.”

  Claire watched as Jonathan set about assembling an omelet. Clearly he knew what he was doing. “What did you tell him about me?”

  “Nothing. He didn’t ask.” Jonathan popped some bread into a toaster that looked retro—until Claire realized it was probably an original.

  “What? You show up with a strange woman you’re supposed to have kidnapped, and he isn’t even curious?”

  “The way he sees it, there’s stuff he needs to know, and stuff he doesn’t need to know. Gue
ss which category you’re in?”

  Claire watched as he efficiently assembled a meal, fuming all the while. Men! Wasn’t Rick supposed to be a friend? The unannounced appearance of Claire, supposedly kidnapped by his friend and the focus of an FBI hunt, didn’t inspire any comment from the laconic Rick? Apparently not; in his eyes she was of no importance.

  Jonathan laid a full plate in front of her. “Here. Eat.”

  Claire realized she was hungry and dug in. “You really don’t know anything more than you did yesterday?”

  “Not a lot. Except that I’m right: something is happening.”

  “So what are we supposed to do?”

  “Rick says the FBI wasn’t looking at me, at least not electronically. So the ball’s back in Annabeth’s court. The big question is, why would Susie go ballistic? She’s a college kid, at an obscure women’s college in the middle of nowhere. Why did she have a gun, and why did she use it? The best person to give us those answers is Annabeth. We know she’ll be in New York this weekend. So we find her, and then we figure out a way to have a private conversation with her.”

  “How are we supposed to find her? And even if we do, what if she doesn’t know anything? What then? And won’t the FBI be keeping an eye on her?”

  “Claire, I don’t know. Maybe. Probably. Eat, will you?”

  Claire ate. She didn’t know what else to do. She felt helpless, and she didn’t like that feeling. She liked order, control. She liked assembling her facts, lining them up, putting them together in a way that cast new light on a subject, and polishing her prose until it shone. That was why she was a college professor. As she munched on toast, she wondered why she couldn’t apply the same process to the mess they were in. For starters, she didn’t have the facts, and it was damn hard to get hold of any. But all of her academic training warned her not to theorize ahead of her facts, not to assemble a thesis based on insufficient information. Without information, all she could do was sit here paralyzed, doing nothing. And that wasn’t an option.

  Why was Jonathan so untroubled by their precarious situation? He appeared downright chipper this morning, now that he’d had some coffee. Did he enjoy being the object of a national manhunt? Did it feed his ego, inflate his sense of self-importance? Did he really have any clue what they were doing?

  “Jonathan,” she began tentatively.

  “Mrphg?” His mouth full of eggs, Jonathan was scanning the newspaper Rick had left.

  “What’s your theory about what’s going on—I mean, the terrorist stuff?”

  He gave her a wary look, and swallowed. “I’d call it a skeleton right now—needs fleshing out.”

  That gave Claire little comfort. “Nothing you’d want to see in print yet?”

  “Is that your benchmark? Yeah, I know, you’re academic—you want to footnote everything, sometimes twice. I’m a journalist, so you think my standards are lower. Well, the short answer is, no. I don’t have a coherent story yet. I see glimpses of possibilities, but I need more facts.”

  Another nonanswer. “Jonathan, talk to me. You’ve got to have some idea. And I think you owe me that much.”

  He swabbed his empty plate with his toast. “Maybe. The way I see it, the less you know, the safer you are.”

  Claire was getting mad. “Will you stop saying that? Don’t you mean, the safer you are? You’re keeping me out of the loop to protect your own ass, so if we get picked up, I can’t rat on you! But whether you like it or not, I’m hip deep in crocodiles here, so I think I deserve some information. Talk!”

  He gave her a long look, then nodded, once. “Fair enough. When I was in the Middle East, and I’m not going to tell you where, I was there long enough that people began to know me. I made some friends—at least, the closest thing to a friend that you can have in the middle of unsettled areas when you’re obviously a foreigner and not a soldier. But I didn’t push, and I listened a lot. Eventually people started to trust me.”

  “You speak the languages?” Claire interrupted.

  “No. I traveled with a translator, a local guy. That helped, because he could introduce me to people. Anyway, I started hearing hints that there was something big in the works, but either people didn’t know a lot about it or they weren’t willing to talk about it. You know, dropping hints to the fancy American journalist made them feel important, but when it came down to spilling the details, they got scared and shut up.”

  “Why did you believe they weren’t just making things up to impress you? What about that woman you said you talked to?”

  “I thought about that, but I heard the same thing from enough people, including her, and I began to believe it. But all I could piece together was that it would be on American soil, and it would be political and it would be something that would really make a statement.”

  Claire shivered. “Not another major bombing?”

  Jonathan shook his head. “I don’t think so—it sounded more subtle than that. Last night Rick and I were sifting through what he’s collected, trying to find something useful. And all we came up with was that it was most likely going to happen in New York, and soon. I know, that’s not a lot to work with. That’s why I need to find Annabeth and talk to her. I can’t be hiding out from the FBI and trying to piece together a terrorist plot at the same time, and things are moving fast. So at the moment, Annabeth is my best bet. Maybe my only bet.”

  Claire felt a spurt of despair. “And if Annabeth doesn’t pan out, or we never find a way to get together with her, do we turn ourselves in and hope for the best?”

  He looked at her with bleak eyes. “I don’t know. It hasn’t happened yet.”

  Well, she had asked for it. At least he’d been honest. He wasn’t pretending he had all the answers. The problem was, she didn’t have any answers either, which scared her. She looked around, at the sad, shabby house that belonged to some reclusive librarian who spent half his waking life trolling the Internet looking for—what? And he was supposed to provide information that would help them out of this mess? She looked down at herself, in unfamiliar and repugnant clothes. And she looked across the table at Jonathan Daulton, a man she despised. Well, she amended, she despised what he stood for.

  And with something approaching a sob, Claire acknowledged to herself that the main reason she was sitting in this room, in these clothes, with this man, was because of one stupid drunken encounter that she had tried very hard to forget. If that hadn’t happened, she could have turned him in without a second thought. She hadn’t even liked him. It had just been a physical thing, hadn’t it? Men did it all the time, without a second thought. So why couldn’t she have let it go?

  She was losing it, and she knew it. The stress of the last few days, the uncertainty, the fear, was catching up with her, and if she didn’t do something right now, she was going to burst into tears, which was the last thing she wanted to do. She stood up abruptly.

  “I’m going to take a shower,” she announced, in a choked voice.

  Jonathan had gone back to reading the paper, but he looked up again. “Okay. Plenty of time.” Then he looked harder. “You all right?”

  The concern in his voice sent her over the edge. “No.” She turned and fled to the bathroom, locking the door behind her. She turned on the water in the sink, then sat on the toilet and sobbed. Stupid, weak, emotional idiot, letting your feelings overcome your intelligence, your judgment. What’s wrong with you, Claire Hastings? You’re no better than those drippy females in romance novels. Drippy being the operative word, as she wiped tears off her cheeks. Get a grip on yourself! Are you going to sit back and trust Jonathan Daulton to figure this out? Not hardly. Which meant that she had to do something. She stared at her reflection in the dirty mirror: pale skin smudged with the remnants of yesterday’s makeup, dark hair going every which way, bags under her eyes.

  Jonathan pounded on the door. “You okay in there? You’re not sick or anything?”

  Claire took a deep breath. Not sick, no. Just mad. “I’m fine. I’m
going to take a shower, if I can find a clean towel.” She sounded almost normal, she thought. I am the mistress of my fate. Yeah, right. She realized that she needed clothes, if she was going to shower and dress. No way was she going to run around the house with nothing but a towel on.

  She unlocked the door and stepped out to find Jonathan waiting for her, leaning against the wall across from the bathroom door. Claire stopped abruptly. “What?”

  “Claire, I, uh . . .” He fumbled for words. “I wanted to be sure you were all right. Look, I know this isn’t anything you ever expected, and . . .”

  “Jonathan Daulton, if you apologize one more time, I’m going to brain you with the nearest lamp. Okay, you’re sorry. You should be. But that doesn’t fix a damn thing. We’ve got to figure a way out of this, and at the very least, I want to be rested, fed, and clean. Thank you for breakfast, by the way.” He was still looking at her, and Claire was suddenly very aware of the small distance between them.

  He looked as though he wanted to say something more, but then he stepped back toward the kitchen. “I’ll get out of your way and let you shower. I think there are towels in the closet upstairs.” He turned away and started rinsing their plates at the sink. Claire was left with an unsettled feeling that something had gone unsaid. She wasn’t sure she wanted to know what it was.

  19

  They had overlooked the fact that since Rick had taken his car to work, they had no transport to the bus station. They couldn’t exactly call a cab. Or maybe they could, but was it worth the risk, showing themselves to someone who might identify them? Plus they had to conserve their cash. What they did have was time, so after checking the afternoon bus schedule, they set out on foot for the station, which Jonathan estimated to be about five miles away.