Agents of Treachery

by Otto Penzler (ed)

  “Oh—I’m sorry,” Matt said. “I’m Matt Parker. Your, uh, next-door neighbor.” His mind was spinning like a hamster on a wheel, trying to devise a plausible explanation for why he’d been hunched over his neighbor’s car at five in the morning. What could he possibly say? I was curious about your hybrid? Given the Cadillac Escalade in Matt’s garage, whose mileage was measured in gallons per mile, not exactly.

  “Ah,” Nourwood said. “Nice to meet you.” He sounded almost arch. He had a neatly trimmed goatee and a dark complexion that made him look as if he had a deep suntan. Nourwood extended a hand and they shook. His hand was large and dry, his clasp limp. “You scared the living daylights out of me. I came out to see if the paper was here yet. ... I thought someone was trying to steal my car.” He had the faintest accent, though hardly anyone else would have picked up on the telltale traces. Something slightly off about the cadence, the intonation, the vowel formation. Like someone born and raised in this country of parents who weren’t native speakers. Who perhaps spoke Arabic since infancy and was probably bilingual.

  “Yeah, sorry about that, I—my wife lost an earring, and she’s all upset about it, and I figured it might have dropped when she came over to visit you guys yesterday.”

  “Oh?” Nourwood said. “Did she visit us yesterday? I’m sorry I missed her.”

  “Yep,” Matt said. Did Kate say she’d gone over to their house yesterday, or was he remembering that wrong? “Pretty sure it was yesterday. Anyway, it’s not like it’s fancy or anything, but it sort of has sentimental value.”

  “I see.”

  “Yeah, it was the first gift I ever gave her when we started going out, and I’m not much of a gift-giver, so I guess that makes it a collector’s item.”

  Nourwood chuckled politely. “Well, I’ll let you know if I see anything.” He cocked a brow. “Though it might be a bit easier to look after the sun comes up.”

  “I know, I know,” Matt said hastily, “but I wanted to surprise her when she woke up.”

  “I see,” Nourwood said dubiously. “Of course.”

  “I notice you have Mass plates—you from in-state?”

  “Those plates are brand-new.”

  “Uh-huh.” Matt noticed he didn’t say whether he was or wasn’t from Massachusetts. Just that the license plates were new He was being evasive. “So you’re not from around here, I take it.”

  Nourwood shook his head slowly.

  “Yeah? Where’re you from?”

  “Good Lord, where aren’t I from? I’ve lived just about everywhere, it seems.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Well, I hate to be rude, but I have some work to do, and it’s my turn to make breakfast. Will we see you tonight at the Kramers’ party?”

  * * * *

  “I thought I heard voices outside,” Kate said, scraping the last spoonful of yogurt and Bran Buds from her bowl. She looked tired and grumpy.

  Matt shrugged, shook his head. He was embarrassed about what had happened and didn’t feel like getting into it. “Oh yeah?”

  “Maybe I dreamed it. Mind if I finish this off?” She pointed her spoon at the round tub of overpriced yogurt she’d bought at Trader Joe’s.

  “Go ahead,” he said, sliding the yogurt toward her. He hated the stuff. It tasted like old gym socks. “More coffee?”

  “I’m good. You were up early.”

  “Couldn’t sleep.” He picked up the quart of whole milk and was about to pour some into his coffee when he noticed the date stamped on the top of the carton. “Past the sell-by date,” he said. “Any more in the fridge?”

  “That’s the last,” she said. “But it’s fine.”

  “It’s expired.”

  “It’s perfectly good.”

  “Perfectly good,” he repeated. “Ever notice how you always say something’s ‘perfectly good’ when something’s actually not-quite-right about it?” He sniffed the carton but couldn’t detect any sour smell. That didn’t mean it hadn’t begun to turn, of course. You couldn’t always tell from the smell alone. He poured the milk slowly, suspiciously, into his coffee, alert for the tiniest curds, but he didn’t see any. Maybe it was okay after all. “Just like the Nourwoods. You said they were ‘perfectly nice.’ Which means you know something’s off about them.”

  “I think you drink too much coffee,” she said. “Maybe that’s what’s keeping you up nights.”

  The Boston Globe was spread between them on the small round table, a moisture ring from the yogurt container wrinkling the banner headline:

  FBI: Probe Possible Local Terror Plot

  Security heightened in high-rises, government buildings

  He stabbed the paper with a stubby index finger. “See, that’s what’s keeping me up nights,” he said. “The Nourwoods are keeping me up nights.”

  “Matt, it’s too early.”

  “Fine,” he said. “Just don’t say I didn’t warn you.” He took a sip of coffee. “Why’d they move into the neighborhood, anyway?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Was it for a job or something? Did they say?”

  Kate rolled her eyes in that way that always annoyed him. “He got a job at ADS.”

  “In Hopkinton?” ADS was the big tech company that used to be known by its full name, Andromeda Data Systems. They made—well, he wasn’t sure what they did, exactly. Data storage, maybe. Something like that.

  “That what he told you?”

  She nodded.

  “There you go. If he really got a job at ADS, why didn’t they move somewhere closer to Hopkinton? That’s the flaw in his cover.”

  She looked at him disdainfully for a long moment and then said, “Can you please just drop this already? You’re just going to make yourself crazy”

  Now he saw that he was upsetting her, and he felt bad. Softly, he said, “You ever hear back from the doctor?”

  She shook her head.

  “What’s the holdup?”

  She shook her head again, compressed her lips. “I wish I knew.”

  “I don’t want you to worry. He’ll call.”

  “I’m not worried. You’re the one who’s worried.”

  “That’s my job,” Matt said. “I worry for both of us.”

  * * * *

  The engineering firm where Matt worked was right in downtown Boston, in the tallest building in the city: a sleek sixty-story tower with a skin of blue reflective glass. It was a fine, proud landmark, a mirror in the sky. Matt, a structural engineer by training and an architecture nut by avocation, knew quite a bit about its construction. He’d heard stories about how, shortly after it was built, it would shed entire windowpanes on windy days like some reptile shedding its scales. You’d be walking down the street, admiring the latest addition to the Boston skyline, and suddenly you’d be crushed beneath five hundred pounds of glass, a hail of jagged shards maiming other passersby. You’d never know what hit you. Funny how things like that could happen, things you’d never in a million years expect. A flying window, of all things! No one was ever safe.

  A Swiss engineer even concluded, years after it was built, that in certain wind conditions the tower might actually bend in the middle—might topple right over on its narrow base. How strange, he’d often thought, to be working in such a grandiose landmark, this massive spire so high above the city, and yet be so completely vulnerable, in a glass coffin.

  He eased his big black Cadillac Escalade down the ramp into the underground parking garage. A couple of uniformed security guards emerged from their booth. This was a new procedure as of a few days ago, with the heightened security.

  Matt clicked off the radio—his favorite sports-talk radio show, the host arguing with some idiot about the Red Sox bull pen—and lowered the tinted window as the older guard approached. Meanwhile, the younger one circled around to the back of the Escalade and gave it a sharp rap.

  “Oh, hey, Mr. Parker,” the gray-haired guard said.

  “Morning, Carlos,” Mat
t said.

  “How about them Sox?”

  “Going all the way this year.”

  “Division at least, huh?”

  “All the way to the World Series.”

  “Not this year.”

  “Come on, keep the faith.”

  “You ain’t been around here long enough,” Carlos said. “You don’t know about the curse.”

  “No such thing anymore.”

  “When you been a Sox fan as long as me, you’re just waiting for the late-season choke. It still happens. You’ll see.” He called out to his younger colleague, “This guy’s okay. Mr. Parker is a senior manager at Bristol Worldwide, on twenty-seven.”

  “How’s it going?” the younger guard said, backing away from the car.

  “Hey,” Matt said. Then, mock-stern, he said, “Carlos, you know, you guys should really check everyone’s car.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Carlos said.

  Matt wagged his finger. “It only takes one vehicle.”

  “If you say so.”

  But it was true, of course. All someone had to do was pack a car—not even a truck; it wouldn’t have to be any bigger than this Escalade—with RDX and park it in the right location in the garage. RDX could slice through steel support pillars like a razor blade through a tomato. Part of the floor directly above would cave right in, then the floor above that, and pretty soon, in a matter of seconds, the whole building would pancake. This was the principle of controlled demolition: The explosives were just the trigger. Gravity did the real work for you.

  It always amazed him how little people understood about the fragility of the structures in which they lived and worked.

  “Hey,” Matt said, “you guys ever get the CCTV cameras at the Stuart Street entrance fixed?”

  “Hell didn’t freeze over, last I checked,” said Carlos.

  Matt shook his head. “Not good,” he said. “Not in times like these.”

  The senior guard gave the Escalade a friendly open-handed pat as if sending it on its way. “Tell me about it,” he said.

  * * * *

  The first thing Matt did when he got to his cubicle was call home. Kate answered on the first ring.

  “No word from the doctor yet?” he asked.

  “No,” Kate said. “I thought you were him.”

  “Sorry. Let me know when you hear something, okay?”

  “I’ll call as soon as I hear. I promise.”

  He hung up, checked his online office calendar, and realized he had ten minutes before the morning staff meeting. He pulled up Google and entered “license plate search,” which produced a long list of websites, most of them dubious. One promised, “Find Out the Truth about Anyone!” But when he entered Nourwood’s license plate number and selected Massachusetts, he was shuttled to another page that wanted him to fill out all kinds of information about himself and give his credit card number. That wasn’t going to happen. Another one featured a ridiculous photo of a man dressed up to look like someone’s idea of a detective, right down to the Sherlock Holmes hat and the big magnifying glass, in which his right eye was grotesquely enlarged. Not very promising, but he entered the license plate number anyway, only to find that Massachusetts wasn’t one of the available states. Another site looked more serious, but the fine print explained that when you entered a license plate and your own credit card information, you were “assigned” to a “private investigator.” He didn’t like that. It made him nervous. He didn’t want to be exposed that way. Plus, it said the search would take three to five business days.

  By then it would be too late.

  He clicked on yet another website, which instantly spawned a dozen lewd pop-up ads that took over his whole screen.

  And then Matt noticed his manager, Regina, approaching his cubicle. Frantically he looked for a power button on his monitor but couldn’t find one. That was the last thing he needed—for Regina to sidle into his cubicle asking about the RFP, a Request for Proposal, he was late on and see all this porn on his computer screen.

  But when she was maybe six feet away, she came to an abrupt halt, as if remembering something, and returned to her office.

  Crisis averted.

  As he restarted his computer, he found himself increasingly baffled: How could this guy, this “James Nourwood,” not appear anywhere on the Internet? That was just about impossible these days. Everyone left digital grease stains and skid marks, whether it was phone numbers, political contributions, high school reunion listings, property sales, corporate websites . . .

  Corporate websites. Now there was a thought.

  Where was it that “Nourwood” worked again? Ah, yes. The big tech company ADS, in Hopkinton. Or so he had told Kate.

  Well, that was simple to check. He found the ADS main phone number. An operator answered, “Good morning, ADS.”

  “I’d like to speak with one of your employees, please. James Nourwood?”

  “Just a moment.”

  Matt’s heart fluttered. What if Nourwood answered his own line? Matt would have no choice but to hang up immediately, of course, but what if his name showed up on Nourwood’s caller ID?

  Faint keyboard tapping in the background, and then absolute silence. He held his index finger hovered just above the plunger, ready to disconnect the call as soon as he heard Nourwood’s voice.

  Then again, if Nourwood really did answer the phone, then maybe it wasn’t some cover name after all. Maybe there was some benign explanation for the fact that he couldn’t be found on the Internet.

  His finger hovered, twitched. He stroked the cool plastic of the plunger button, ready to depress it with the lightning reflexes of a sniper. There was a click, and then the operator’s voice again: “How are you spelling that, sir?”

  Matt spelled Nourwood for her slowly.

  “I’m checking, but I don’t find anyone with that name. I even looked under N-O-R-W-O-O-D, but I didn’t find that either. Any idea what department he might be in?”

  Matt’s twitchy index finger couldn’t be restrained anymore, and he ended the call.

  * * * *

  After the staff meeting, he stopped by Len Baxter’s office. Lenny was the head of IT in Bristol’s Boston office, a bearded, gnomelike figure who kept to himself but had always been helpful whenever Matt had a computer problem. Every day, no matter the season, he wore an unvarying uniform: jeans, a plaid flannel shirt, and a Red Sox baseball cap, no doubt to conceal his bald spot. Everyone had something to hide.

  “Mattie boy, what can I do you for?” Lenny said.

  “I need a favor,” Matt said.

  “Gonna cost you.” Lenny flashed a grin. “Kidding. Talk to me.”

  “Can you do a quick public-records search on LexisNexis?”

  Lenny cocked his head. “For what?”

  “Just a name. James Nourwood.” He spelled it.

  “This a personnel matter?”

  “Oh, no. Nothing like that. He’s just some sales guy at ADS who keeps trying to sell us a data recovery program, and I don’t know, I get this funny feeling about him.”

  “I can’t do that,” Lenny said gravely. “That would be a violation of the Privacy Act of 1974 as well as the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act.”

  Matt’s stomach flipped over. But then Lenny grinned. “Just messing with you. Sure, happy to.” He crunched away at his keyboard, squinted at the screen, tapped some more. “Spell it again?”

  Matt did.

  “Funny. Not coming up with anything.”

  Matt swallowed. “You’re not?”

  Lenny’s stubby fingers flew over the keyboard. “Very peculiar,” he said. “Your guy isn’t registered to vote and never got a driver’s license, hasn’t purchased any property. . . . You sure he’s not a figment of your imagination?”

  “Know what? I must have gotten his name wrong. Never mind. I’ll get back to you.”

  “No worries,” Lenny said. “Anytime.”

  * * * *

  Matt was hardly a party animal. He disli
ked socializing, particularly with the neighbors. Wherever he lived, he preferred to keep a low profile. Plus, he didn’t much like the Kramers. They had the biggest house in the neighborhood and a lawn like a golf course, and every year they resealed their driveway so it looked like polished onyx. They were throwing a party tonight to show off their latest renovation. Matt found this annoying. If you could afford to spend half a million dollars remodeling your house, the least you could do was keep quiet about it.