“The books are available on Amazon dot com,” I said. “The computer contains private information. Unless you have a specific warrant, I’d like to take it with me. I’m not under suspicion, am I?” I gathered up my few clothes and pointedly thrust them back into the travel bag, flopping over and pressing down sleeves and legs.
“We need to establish relationships and circumstances,” she said.
“Am I a suspect?”
“No,” she admitted.
“Do you have a warrant that lets you . . .” I looked for the right legal words, then gave up. “Fumble through private documents?”
“No,” she said, eyes lidded with sublime nonchalance.
“I’ll keep it neat and tidy, and I’m sure you’ll let me know if things change,” I said, shaking a little at my presumption, and at hers. I tossed the computer and the books into the bag and zipped it shut.
I passed Nadia in the corridor as I rolled the bag on its wheels to the gangway. She was smoking a cigarette and looked dead on her feet. She glanced my way, then sharply looked aside and stubbed out her cigarette in a little can.
I had not seen her smoke before.
“I won’t say it was a pleasure,” she said.
I stopped and regarded her sadly, still buzzing from my anger in the cabin. I switched the bag handle to my right hand. “I feel like a goddamned Jonah,” I said, and realized my eyes were watering. “Christ, what did I do?”
“Nothing,” Nadia said.
“I have no idea why Dave went crazy in the sub, or why Mauritz wanted to kill me. I really don’t.”
She kept her face pointed toward the shadows and bleak gray concrete planes of the dock. I flashed on all the women who had ever stubbornly tried to put me aside or pigeonhole me, or blame me, with or without cause.
“This is nuts,” I said, and tugged my ridiculous little bag toward the gangway.
“Betty Shun wants to talk with you,” Nadia said, biting off the information like an insult. You’re being called to the principal’s office.
I looked back, eyes wide. She was lighting up another cigarette.
Our generation had taken up Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra, reading cheap paperbacks, wearing black suits, and smoking cigarettes, like all the war-weary lemmings of the 1950s, but without their excuses.
I felt sick.
13
After a bad night’s sleep on the fourth floor of the Homeaway, just blocks from the Genetron Building and my rented lab, I opened the curtains. Across Lake Union, morning fog slid over the rusty tanks and pipes and broad lawn of Gasworks Park. I stood there for five minutes, feeling fortunate.
I was no Jonah. It wasn’t me that was hexed. I had survived, and that meant I was lucky, maybe even on the right track in this great scheme of things. Only the FBI and a couple of murders were in my way, and that pissed me off.
Rob would have recognized my mood instantly. Prince Hal was not getting his way.
A cell phone rang on the nightstand. Data phones in the U.S. had been screwed up for weeks with viruses. I carried four with me, on four different systems, just to make sure: a PalmSec, an InfoBuddy, and two standard Nokias.
It was the PalmSec that was beeping. The pert little a.m. triple-tone told me two things: that I had a call, and that it was before noon. I flipped open the jacket, keyed in my unlock, and answered. “Cousins.”
“Dr. Cousins, Betty Shun. How are you?”
“Dandy,” I said, and regretted the flippancy.
“We’re very sad here,” she said. “We’ve lost a lot of friends.”
“Yes. I know.”
“We need to get together. I’ll bring along a man who also works for Owen. He wants to talk with you.”
“When?” I asked.
“We’re in a car in front of your hotel. We’ll take you to the Crab Cart for breakfast.”
I had been given my marching orders. But I wanted to find out about my specimens. Time was running out.
As always.
14
Betty Shun stood in the lobby, dressed in a green-leather coat and green slacks. I turned and saw a blocky, balding man in his late forties push through the men’s room door, blowing on his hands. He made sure they were dry before he offered to shake.
“Hal Cousins, this is Kelly Bloom,” Betty introduced. Shun, Bloom, Press . . . I was seeing a pattern here, all members of the Monosyllabic Verb club. Bloom wore denim all over—denim pants, denim jacket with brass buttons, a blue-denim shirt. And Air Jordans, old but scrubbed clean.
“Dr. Cousins, first off, congratulations,” Bloom said. “Let’s get out of here and go someplace quiet.”
They escorted me to the drive. I had expected a limousine or at the very least a BMW, but the car parked in front of the hotel lobby, beaded with rain and speckled with mud, was a mid-nineties Ford Taurus, conspicuously purple, with a dented right fender and scrape marks all along the driver’s side.
“Yours?” I asked Bloom. He grinned.
