Alisa Kwitney Read online

  Somehow, it didn’t sound quite so convincing to say, Honey, your dad’s off making a movie, that’s why he doesn’t call.

  As if on cue, the phone rang again. Kat ruffled her son’s soft, dark blond hair, so like his father’s in color and texture. “Get ready now, okay? I’ll go fix your breakfast. Dash? Nod if you hear me.”

  Dash gave a jerky nod. Kat went down the hall to the kitchen and picked up the phone on the fifth ring. “Good morning, Ma, what is it now?” Kat’s mother usually called at least twice a day, once in the morning, when Kat was struggling to get Dashiell ready for school, and once in the evening, when Kat was struggling to get Dashiell through his homework.

  “Good morning, dear, it’s a work call.” It was her agent.

  “Oh, God, sorry, Daphne, I wasn’t expecting you.”

  “Well, I’m sorry to be calling this early, but I have some news. South of Heaven is looking to bring back your character.”

  “They are?” Kat poured herself a cup of coffee. “But Logan’s gone.”

  “Exactly. Hang on a sec, I’m on the train and we’re going through a tunnel. Okay, that’s better. So, with Logan gone the producers need to focus on other people. And the idea they’ve been batting around is to have Helen Jessup return, wanting to avenge Logan’s death and claim her share of her father’s business empire.”

  Kat took a carton of orange juice out of the refrigerator. “Oh, Daphne, that’s great, but I’m not sure…”

  “Are you kidding? Kat, this is just what you need to get your name out there again.”

  “I don’t know, Daphne, it feels a little like going backward.”

  “Well, I can always tell them you’re not interested, but I think you should at least consider it as a stepping-stone. You’ve basically been out of circulation for about nine years. You need to reestablish yourself.”

  Kat stopped fixing her son’s breakfast. She had to force herself to focus on what Daphne was saying, and on what she was not saying, which was, This is your shot, Kat, take it or leave it. Staring at the souvenir Bronx Zoo mug in her hands, Kat realized that there had to be a reason Daphne was calling her this early. She was excited for Kat; Kat ought to be excited for herself.

  “You’re right,” she said, trying to inject a note of enthusiasm into her voice. “Of course you’re right. And it would actually be great to play Helen again.” And who knew, thought Kat as she inserted a Pop-Tart in the toaster, maybe it would be great. It had been a while since she had felt anything but flat or angry. Well, with the exception of when she was with her son. With him, she still felt other things.

  “And remember,” Daphne continued on the other line, “this doesn’t mean you can’t do other work, Kat. In fact, this opens the door to other work. Only one thing, though: They want you to do a test.”

  The coffeemaker had finally finished brewing; God, did she need a cup. “A test? But I originated the character. When I left to have Dashiell, they begged me to come back.”

  “There’s a new male lead, they need to see how you two work together on film. It’s a formality, Kat.”

  “Like being asked to fill out a work history form before joining the family firm.”

  “Exactly. You know you have a home there, so why worry?”

  Kat glanced at the clock over the stove. Even if they hurried, Dashiell was going to be marked late for school, which meant she’d be late to the Persky Language Institute. “I trust you, Daphne. If you tell me not to worry, I’m not going to worry.”

  “You are the most absurdly gorgeous thirty-nine-year-old I know, and so talented I could shake you for not taking on more work all this time. You absolutely do not need to worry.”

  “All right already, I’m not worried. When do they want me there?” But Kat already half knew the answer. They knew she was hungry for the job, and they were going to drive the point home. “Let me guess: They want to see me immediately.”

  “Ten o’clock today, if you can make it,” said Daphne, and Kat thought that her normally imperturbable agent sounded the slightest bit embarrassed. “They’ve just had a big meeting and decided to move up their timetable on this story line, and they want to get going right away.”

  Kat considered making an excuse; it was only the second class of the session, she couldn’t find anyone to sub for her on such short notice. Instead, she forced herself to say, “I’ll need to find someone to teach my class today.”

  “Well, call me if you have a problem. Otherwise, just go be your wonderful self.”

  Kat hung up the phone, took a deep breath, then phoned Marcy, who said she’d be happy to take her morning class. Then Kat raced back into her bedroom, where she exchanged her sports bra for something that gave her a better shape. Searching frantically through her closet, she settled on a pair of low-cut jeans that flattered her legs and backside. Yanking on a clingy dark red top, Kat stuck her head into her son’s room. “Dash, are you dressed?” He was exactly as she’d left him. Grabbing the Game Boy out of his hands, she ordered, “Bathroom, clothes, late, now!”

  He finally looked up at her with his father’s startlingly green eyes. “Aw, Mom.” Movie star eyes. Hero eyes. “You didn’t give me a chance to save it!” Maybe he’d become an actor like his parents. Horrible thought.

  “I have an audition in just over an hour, please Dash, make it easy on me today.”

  A slow, pleased grin spread over her son’s handsome face. “You’ve got a job? Cool!” He grabbed her in a bear hug, too hard, but instead of correcting him, Kat just held his thin, gangly body close, inhaling the musty, slightly sour childhood smell of him for one good, long moment.

  “Watch me get ready, Mommy, I’m going to be supersonic.”

  “You’re my good boy.”

  “I like that shirt. The color is nice on you.”

  Kat laughed. “Hurry up, you!”

  “You have to let me go first.”

  But suddenly, paradoxically, Kat did not want to relinquish this embrace, did not want her son to have to head off to fourth grade where his teacher might ask him questions he knew but couldn’t answer easily, where his classmates might not be kind to him at recess. “I love you, you know that? I love you.” Enough for two parents, she did not say.

  Reaching up to tickle her neck, Dash said, “I love you more.”

  “No way. Mothers always love you more than you love them.”

  “And fathers,” Dash said easily.

  Kat hesitated, thinking of all the years she had said “your father and I,” because that’s what you did when you were married. Her mother had done it, too. Your father and I love you. Your father and I are proud of you. Your father and I bought you this lovely doll-house for your birthday. Before he left on his business trip, of course. He wanted to be here, honey, and if there weren’t such a big time difference, he’d call.

  And if there was a gap between what was said and what you perceived to be true, you learned to live with it, the same way you learned to live with all the traditional lies adults told you about how the world works.

  Kneeling down, bringing her face on a level with his, Kat tried to think of something to say that was neither painfully honest nor reassuringly false. There wasn’t a lot to work with. “You’ll be the kind of father who loves his children more, Dash. You’ll be a wonderful dad.”

  And then Ms. Nibbles skittered across the wood floor, and Dash shouted, “Cannibal mom on the loose! Shut the doors! Dangerous animal at large!”

  This was the problem with real life, Kat thought: Scenes never ended where you wanted them to, promising plotlines fizzled out, and nobody ever revealed the big secret that makes everything else fall into place.

  chapter five

  m agnus had learned one new fact about Katherine Miner this morning. She had perfectly proportioned breasts: full, with a slight, natural slope, and small, dark pink nipples at the precise angle to most tempt a man’s mouth. She had the kind of breasts that made a man want to spend the best part of a d
ay just learning their shape and taste.

  Or, at least, she’d had them back in the late eighties, when she had filmed Zombie Prom Queen. For sheer sexiness, though, he preferred the early nineties love scene in The Lying Time, where she played the role of a pregnant widow who takes in a boarder. Pressing rewind, Magnus let the scene play out again, admiring the way Katherine turned and looked over her shoulder, acknowledging that she’d known she was being watched all along; the delicious, wary tension in her eyes when the drifter reached out and touched her cheek; the sudden ferocity of her response when he kissed her.

  You couldn’t see her bare breasts in this scene; they were pressed up against her co-star’s chest.

  Magnus pressed pause on the DVD player and stretched out on the cheap floral sofa bed, which had come with the rental apartment, along with two chipped duck lamps, a paint-by-numbers landscape, and a small, unsteady table surrounded by folding chairs.

  It felt a bit decadent, lying around in his briefs, watching a twenty-nine-year-old Katherine running around topless. But he’d woken up at five AM, his body clock still adjusting, and this was homework. Intelligence analysis, after all, was a bit like handicapping horses; you accumulated as much information as you needed to make a prediction about how a given individual was going to behave in the future. If he could just watch these images of her long enough, Magnus thought, he might begin to catch a sense of the underlying pattern, see what common element she brought to each role.

  Of course, he’d also gotten a bit distracted by her breasts.

  But upon repeated viewing of the love scenes, Magnus had found that what was below her neck wasn’t as riveting as what was above it. On-screen, Katherine Miner’s face reflected a frank, earthy, open sensuality. In person, however, she came across as one sharp, witty, extremely well defended woman.

  Running the ancient shower until the rust-colored water ran clear, Magnus wondered if this dichotomy had always existed, or whether it was a recent development. Either way, he thought, it wasn’t going to be easy to gain this woman’s confidence.

  He figured he might as well begin by examining his own preconceptions. In Magnus’s experience, when you didn’t look at your own bias, you just wound up convincing yourself that the evidence proved what you’d known all along.

  That was how you wound up with reports that said “Of course the Shah of Iran isn’t in any real danger” or “The only reason the inspectors can’t find Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction is because they’re not really looking.” That was how you bought the story that your wife was always driving along the coast to Hveragerdi and coming back exhausted because she was a dedicated horseback rider, instead of recognizing that she was sore from athletic bouts of sex with other men.

  The shower sputtered and then abruptly the water flow slowed to a trickle. Upstairs, somebody must have decided to run a bath. Magnus stepped out of the stall and filled the sink with lukewarm water. Okay, he thought, splashing water on his face and under his arms, what do I think I know about Katherine Miner?

  Grew up attending English-speaking schools in Spain and Italy. No contact with her father from the age of ten, when her mother brought her back to New York, leaving Miner in Italy. Probably not much of a relationship with her father beforehand, either, since he was usually off on assignment. Extremely close with mother, both literally and figuratively. Had a fairly successful acting career consisting of some off-Broadway and small, supporting TV and film roles, culminating in a three-year stint on a soap opera. No long-term romantic relationships before Logan Dain. Devoted herself almost exclusively to raising the kid, who had an early speech and language delay. Delegated all financial dealings to the husband, who lost their savings in bad investments and then left her to pursue a career in movies. Five months ago, her friend Marcy helped her get a job at the Persky Institute, but finances were still a problem.

  At the present time, no hobbies or sports or extracurricular activities.

  Christ, Magnus thought, how the hell am I supposed to establish rapport with this woman? She makes me look like the life of the party.

  The phone rang and Magnus answered it on the third ring. “Hello?” The caller ID said “out of area.”

  “Good, I got you before you left for class.”

  “What’s up, Fred?” Magnus supported the phone between his chin and shoulder as he pulled on his jeans.

  “News flash: Your potential source is ditching class and heading out for an audition at her old soap on Sixty-fourth and Columbus.”

  Magnus paused. “So you want me to approach her?”

  “It’s a good opportunity to get her on her own, but you’re going to have to figure out a reason why you weren’t in class.”

  Magnus rubbed his hand over his chin, wondering if he needed a shave. “Any suggestions?” Grabbing a razor, he decided not to bother with shaving cream.

  “You could say that you just found out that your ex-wife’s getting remarried.”

  “I’m so upset by that I skip class? Makes me sound a little high strung.” Magnus scraped the blade over his jaw.

  “You also found out that she’s pregnant.”

  “Ouch.” Magnus patted his chin where he’d nicked himself. “This wouldn’t happen to be true, would it?” After twenty years of working in signals intelligence, Magnus was used to interpreting photographs, not people. Still, he wouldn’t put it past his handler to use news like this to his advantage. Fred was a strategist.

  “Actually, it is. Dan just filed a request for married housing, said they were expecting a baby in early February.”

  Magnus tried not to imagine Guthrun’s slender belly swelling with pregnancy. “Gee, thanks for breaking it to me gently.”

  “You know a gentle way to tell a man his wife’s knocked up with another man’s kid?”

  He had a point there. Fred waited, and when Magnus didn’t say anything, he added, “Contact me as soon as you’ve got something to report.”

  The line went dead, and Magnus stared at it for a moment, wondering if he had made a mistake in accepting this assignment. He knew a hell of a lot more about nuclear stockpiles than he did about cultivating human sources of intelligence. And no matter how many times Fred had reassured him, Magnus still felt certain that Katherine was going to notice that his English was just a little too good to be a second language. Which, of course, it wasn’t.

  “It’s not a problem,” Fred had insisted. “First of all, you’re not exactly a big conversationalist. Second of all, you’ve managed to pick up a bit of your ex’s accent.”

  I hope he’s right, Magnus thought as he buttoned a pale gray Armani shirt that a team of highly trained disguise experts had distressed until it appeared as if he’d owned it for a decade. Even without the question of whether or not he belonged in Katherine’s class, he had a feeling that she was going to be suspicious of any man who started getting too friendly.

  Ken Miner, on the other hand, wasn’t in the least suspicious. No, he was one hundred percent convinced that everyone was out to get him.

  As Fred had explained it to him, Ken Miner had gone from being one of the Agency’s top field agents to becoming a paranoid recluse who lived in a small apartment in southern Israel, where he chain smoked and worked on a memoir that he never seemed to finish.

  Of course, Magnus thought as he tied the laces on his leather sneakers, that was the problem with the spy business—a certain amount of paranoia went with the territory, but when you got to the point where you assumed everyone you knew was out to get you, you weren’t much use to anyone. Contrary to popular belief, the CIA didn’t snuff out old agents. Either you were important, and they kept you on the payroll, or you weren’t, and they let you get on with civilian life.

  So no one had cared about Ken Miner until about two months ago, when the tiny, central Asian country of Kyrgyzstan underwent a sudden, violent change of government. Scrambling to figure out what was going on, the Agency learned that a fellow by the name of Muhammed Oybek
had emerged, seemingly from nowhere, to become a major political player. It turned out that Oybek hadn’t been on anybody’s radar screen, in part because none of the agents actually spoke the country’s native language. Then Fred had remembered that Miner had actually recruited the man back in 1980. At the time, Oybek had been a low-level Soviet party member. Very low. So low, in fact, that no one had been very impressed with him, and the man was let go, his file permanently closed.

  Now Oybek was a power to be reckoned with, but no Westerner was able to get within spitting distance. Was he loyal to Moscow? Did he want to strengthen ties with the Arab countries, and how did he feel about nearby Afghanistan?

  All of a sudden, Ken Miner was the go-to man. Not only did he know Oybek, but he spoke some Kyrgyz, a language no one else could even pronounce.

  So Fred had gone to Miner’s Eilat apartment, only to find that his man had vanished. Fred had speculated that Miner had spotted him coming, jumped to the conclusion that the Agency was out to get him, and bolted out the back door. For a crazy old guy, Miner was certainly resourceful—Fred hadn’t been able to locate him.

  But going through his computer files, Fred had found a clue as to where Miner might be now. There was an email to the ex-wife, expressing an interest in seeing her and their daughter. Lia’s response had been to threaten Ken with nonpayment of back child support. Which meant the daughter was their only real lead.

  Magnus yawned, stretched his hands over his head, and walked four steps over to the apartment’s tiny kitchenette area. This consisted of a narrow, filthy stove, a tiny refrigerator, and an electric kettle whose heating element was caked with white scale from the calcium in the water.

  Opening the refrigerator, Magnus pulled out a carton of orange juice. He felt a lot more confident about his ability to convince Ken Miner that he was on the level than he did about his chances of impressing a former movie actress. Magnus was used to dealing with brilliant but mentally unbalanced folks—his staff in Iceland had been filled with them. His track record with women, however, wasn’t so great.