Dominic's POV
The phone is in my jacket, and my jacket is on the back of a chair, and I know whose ringtone it is before I touch it.
It's three notes, a descending scale, like a doorbell in an empty house.
I set it years ago.
"Cho," I say.
"Mr Hale."
Her voice is dry and flat and exhausted, a Midwestern voice with all the corners sanded off. I have heard it on a phone on a pier, saying are you still there? I have heard it once a month for three years, in car parks and motels and at a bus stop in Hoboken, saying not yet.
"I saw the news," she says. "A fire in Astoria. A man in a suit carrying a woman down a fire escape. Somebody filmed it."
"Of course they did."
"Is she alive?"
I look at the bed.
Serena's sitting up against the pillows with the sheet drawn to her chin, watching me with an expression of grave, cool curiosity. Her hair is a rat's nest. She has a smudge of soot on her cheek. She's the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.
"She's alive," I say.
There's a pause on the line.
"I'd like to talk to her."
"Why?"
"Because I've been looking for her for three years, Mr Hale. And I'd rather not have found her on a YouTube video." A dry rustle. "She's not the first woman I've lost in this case. I'd like her to be the last."
I cover the phone.
"It's Hannah Cho," I tell Serena. "The FBI agent."
Her chin lifts.
"The one on the pier."
"Yes."
"The one you took the pages to."
"Yes."
"Put her on speaker."
I do.
I set the phone on the bedspread between us.
"Agent Cho," says Serena. Her voice is low and cracked and quite steady. "This is Serena Hale."
The line is silent for a very long time.
I think she's gone. I think the call has dropped.
Then, very faintly, a long, shaky breath, like a woman putting down something heavy.
"Mrs Hale," says Hannah Cho. "It's good to hear you."
***
She talks for twenty minutes.
She tells us what I already know, and a great deal I don't. How she took the pages I gave her to the Bureau's Manhattan field office on the thirteenth of October three years ago. How her supervisor said leave it with me. How, forty-eight hours later, a yacht blew up off Owls Head and she stood in a motel room in Rockland with the phone in her hand and a cold, flat certainty in her stomach.
Somebody told.
How the case was closed in November. Insufficient evidence. A note on her file. A reassignment to a desk in Newark.
"I've been working it on my own time," she says. "Weekends. Annual leave. I've used up four years of vacation. My husband thinks I've got a girlfriend."
"Have you?"
"Don't be funny, Mr Hale."
I almost smile.
"What have you got?" says Serena.
"Rourke Mercer."
I feel her go still.
"I've been through his financials. All of them. Private accounts, credit cards, burner phones. It took three years. He was careful." A pause. "But he had a sister."
"Dawn?"
"Dawn Mercer. Dawn Pettigrew, now. She lives in Bayonne with two kids and a husband who drives a truck. She's been very scared for a very long time." The voice softens. "She never told anyone that her brother left a storage unit in her name."
I look at Serena.
Her eyes have gone very bright.
"What's in it?" she says.
"I don't know. I haven't opened it."
"Why not?"
"Because she wants to give it to someone who'll use it." A long, dry sigh. "I told her about you, Mrs Hale. Not by name. I said there's a woman who nearly died. She asked me to bring you."
Serena puts her hand over her mouth.
"What else?"
"A voicemail." Cho's voice is very dry. "He called his sister from a payphone the night before he died. Four minutes. She never deleted it. He didn't say much. He said he'd been told he was a loose end. And he said a name."
"Whose?"
"Dawn will play it for you herself."
"When?"
"Tonight. Newark. There's a diner on Raymond Boulevard, called the Starlite. Six o'clock." Cho clears her throat. "Don't bring your car. Don't bring your phones. And don't bring anyone on your security staff."
"Marcus is..."
"Marcus Bell is a good man. He's also the sixth person who knew you'd be at Odile Park's apartment this morning."
Silence.
I hear Marcus, in the doorway, draw a breath through his nose.
"I'm not saying it's him," says Cho. "I'm saying that someone in your house is talking. A Bureau analyst saw your boss's server logs three weeks ago. They came to my supervisor's desk. And my supervisor eats lunch every Thursday with a man named Vance."
Marcus has gone grey.
"Agent Cho," he says, in a low, stiff voice. "I'd lay down my life for this family."
"I believe you."
"Then..."
"I believe you," says Cho, "and I still want you to stay home. Because if I'm wrong, I'll have a dead witness. And if I'm right, I'll have a dead one anyway."
I look at Marcus.
He looks at the floor.
It's the hardest thing I've ever asked of him, and I haven't even said it.
"I'll stay," he says.
"Marcus..."
"It's the sensible thing, boss." He swallows. "I'll watch the Tower. I'll check every log. I'll find whoever it is."
"Thank you."
"Don't thank me." He turns for the door. "Just come back."
***
At noon, Serena stands in the bedroom doorway in a pair of my trousers, rolled at the ankle, and one of my old sweaters, with her hair damp from the shower and the tin box from Abel Thorne held against her chest.
I stand up.
I can't help it.
She looks about nineteen.
"I need to ask you something," she says.
"Anything."
"If I tell you what I want to do. Will you tell me it's insane?"
"Probably."
"Will you help me anyway?"
"Obviously."
She smiles.
It's small. It's tired. It lights the whole room.
"Then listen," says Serena.
She sits on the arm of the sofa and lays out the plan in six sentences. The Starlite Diner. The storage unit. Whatever's inside it. And then, whatever it is, the evidence taken straight to a federal prosecutor in Brooklyn she trusts, a woman Odile knows from her SEC days.
"Before Brandt and Vance have time to reach her," she says.
"They'll know you're alive."
"They already know."
"They'll know where."
"Then we'll be somewhere else."
I look at her.
"You're not afraid."
"I'm terrified." She puts her hand flat on her sternum. "I've never been so frightened in my life. But I've been dead for three years, Dom. I've spent them hiding in a woman's spare room and learning how to eat. And that man..." Her voice shakes. "That man held my hand at my father's funeral. He told me my father was a good man who'd made a terrible mistake."
"I know."
"I'm not hiding any more."
I cross the room.
I put my arms round her.
She leans into me, with the tin box between us, hard and cold against my ribs, and I rest my cheek against her wet hair.
"Then we'll go together," I say.
"You'll need a disguise."
"I'm a billionaire. I'm very good at disguises."
"You're six foot two with a face that was on the cover of Forbes."
"I'll wear a hat."
She laughs against my chest.
I feel the whole of it go through me, through my arms and my ribs and the soles of my feet, like a tide coming in over cold sand.
She's here.
She's laughing.
I'm holding her.
Then she goes still.
"Dom."
"Yes?"
"If it's him on that voicemail. If it's Augustus." Her voice is very small. "Will you be able to hear it?"
I think of a hand on my shoulder. A voice at my christening. A man who taught me to tie a bowline.
"I'll have to," I say.
She nods against my chest.
"We both will."
I hold her, and in the quiet I hear the wind against the glass, sixty-one floors up, and the faint, far-off sound of a city that has no idea what is about to be taken from it.