Kate ran down the location of Claire’s charity event while I threw on some old jeans and a pair of ratty tennis shoes, mindful of her caution about listening devices. The breakfast was at the Parker Meridien hotel, on West Fifty-seventh Street. I brought her up to speed on everything I’d been doing with Reggie as we rode downtown in a cab, again omitting the beating I’d given Vinny. Like Claire, Kate wept when I told her what the e-mail Reggie received had said.
The ride to the hotel took us about fifteen minutes. Kate went hunting for Claire in the hotel’s reception rooms while I used a lobby pay phone to try Reggie’s numbers. Both his office and cell kicked to voice mail. Recounting the morning’s events to his machine, I felt my rage mounting again. Forget the eavesdropping-someone had broken into my home. I asked Reggie if he could enlist some forensics guys to dust for fingerprints and do whatever else they did. I wanted to catch whoever it had been, and to make sure they paid the price.
The Meridien was a good hotel, and convenient, so I booked a suite for the week, assuming that would give us enough time to have our apartment swept clean and figure out what had been going on. Kate showed up with her mother as I was pocketing the plastic room keys. Claire had dressed more Park Avenue than Upper West Side for the benefit, in a navy dress, black pumps, and a wide, black, patent-leather belt. Her hair was loose around her shoulders. She looked young, and vulnerable, and frightened. I reached for her hand. She took it and clung tight.
Our rooms were too contemporary for my taste, with odd inversely colored photographs of flowers on the walls, but they were also airy and light, with rooftop views of the southern skyline. We settled at an asymmetric breakfast table beneath an oversized close-up of a pale green rose while Kate reexplained the bugging.
“So, this has something to do with your work?” Claire asked, turning to me when Kate had finished. She looked pale but composed.
“It must, although I can’t imagine what. I don’t want either of you to be concerned, though. I have a call in to Reggie. He and I will figure this whole thing out and take care of it.”
Kate glanced at her mother.
“You and Reggie are going to take care of it. So Mom and I should just hang around here at the hotel and wait. Maybe book a massage and a pedicure.”
“That’s not what I meant,” I said, stung by her sarcasm.
“Isn’t it?” Claire asked quietly.
I hesitated, afraid of getting them involved in anything dangerous, but recognizing that I’d made things worse between me and Claire in the past by being overprotective.
“I’m sorry. This is difficult for me. I worry about you both, and I want to protect you, and I feel guilty for having brought this into your lives.”
“It’s difficult for all of us,” Claire said. “I think we should try to understand it together, as a family.”
I was a little surprised to hear her be so forceful, and more than a little happy to hear her emphasize our being a family. It made me feel hopeful. Kate spoke up again before I could formulate a reply.
“Which brings us back to Mom’s question,” she said, looking at me. “Are we sure this has to do with your work?”
“As opposed to what?”
“As opposed to something to do with Kyle.”
“I’m not following.”
“I was thinking about what you told me in the cab. The e-mail Reggie got was sent through an offshore remailer. Your phone and the repeater in our house were both forwarding information to an offshore server. There’s a similar level of technical sophistication. Maybe the e-mail and the bugging are related somehow.”
I felt light-headed, as if I’d been sucker punched from behind.
“It’s possible,” I admitted.
“Has there been much going on at work?” Claire asked.
“A huge amount. Way more than I’ve had time to tell you about.”
“So, Kate could be correct that the bugging has something to do with the e-mail about Kyle, but we can’t rule work out.”
“Right.” I rubbed my forehead with my hand, trying to think. “Frankly, I have no idea what’s going on.”
Claire tucked her hair behind her ears, looking pensive. Kate slipped a rubber band off her wrist and handed it to her.
“The earliest files on the Cayman Island server were from Sunday night, correct?” Claire said, glancing from Kate to me as she pulled her hair back into a ponytail. “And you got your phone back on Monday morning.”
We both nodded.
“So, it seems likely that the people who bugged us are interested in either something that happened this week or something that’s supposed to happen soon.”
“Probably,” I said. “But I don’t see how that helps. The e-mail and the work stuff all fall in the same time window.”
“I have an idea,” Kate said. “Maybe we should go through your entire week minute by minute and do what you do when you’re working on a big project-write everything down on note cards, and tape it all up on the wall, and see if any connections pop out.”
I didn’t have any better suggestion.
“Sounds good,” I said. “Let’s get to it.”
I took the creepy photographs down while Kate and Claire ran out for supplies. They came back with coffee, bacon-egg-and-cheese sandwiches, and enough note cards, poster paper, colored markers, and Scotch tape to document the entire Civil War. Our goal was to lay out everything that had happened by event, time line, and people involved. Two hours later we’d created a flow chart from hell, with dozens of boxes connected by lines and arrows that intersected everywhere. If there was a pattern in the data, it was well hidden. Pushing my chair back from the table, I leaned forward and rested my elbows on my knees. Tired and frustrated as I was, I felt buoyed by working together with Kate and Claire-particularly Claire. Her transformation was nothing short of incredible, a testament to the rejuvenating power of having something to do other than brood. It made me wonder if it had been a mistake all those years ago not to insist more forcefully that she accompany Kate and I on our leafleting. Maybe the activity would have taken her out of the moment she’d felt trapped in.
“I’m going to have to go soon,” I said, rubbing my eyes. “I promised Rashid I’d meet him at eleven.”
“Did Rashid know the Venezuelan guy who got murdered?” Kate asked.
“Maybe. I haven’t asked him.”
She drew a dotted red line from Rashid’s name to Carlos Munoz’s and labeled it with a question mark. I looked at the line and shook my head.
“Any relationship the two of them might have had is ancient history. We have to be careful of cluttering the picture with extraneous facts.”
Kate glanced at Claire.
“It’s hard to know what might be important,” Claire said, shrugging.
“The problem here is that the only obvious link between everything and everybody is me,” I said, circling my head to stretch my shoulders. “I broke the Nord Stream story, I received the Saudi data, I’m the one who was bugged, and Kyle was my son.”
“My God,” Claire gasped. “What if that’s the connection?”
“What if what’s the connection?” I demanded.
“You. You just said it. Kyle’s your son.”
My heart skipped a beat.
“Meaning?”
“Meaning we’ve always assumed Kyle was kidnapped randomly,” she said tremulously. “That’s what made things so difficult for Reggie and the other police, right from the beginning, because they didn’t have any motive to work from.” She rose unsteadily and took the marker from Kate’s hand. “But look at the facts. Kyle was supposedly last seen in a car belonging to an OPEC diplomat, and that same diplomat was in trouble with his own people because he’d turned down a bribe of shares in an oil company.” She touched Kate’s written words with the tip of the marker as she spoke. “Don’t you see? It’s all your world. Maybe the connection we’re looking for is you.”
I couldn’t breathe.
“We don’t know enough to reach any conclusions,” Kate protested vehemently. “It’s not fair to blame Dad.”
“This isn’t about blame,” Claire said, visibly struggling to stay composed. “There’s more than enough blame to go around. This is about finding out what happened to your brother, and about protecting our family.” I could feel her looking at me, but I couldn’t meet her eyes. “What do you think, Mark?”
Thinking was beyond me. Claire reached across the table and took my hand.
“Stay with us on this,” she pleaded. “We really need your help.”
“You might be right,” I managed, drawing strength from her touch. “Kyle might have been deliberately targeted…” My voice faltered, and I began again. “Kyle might have been deliberately targeted because of something I was involved in…”
“Why?” Kate asked.
“I don’t know. But if we’re right, those same people might still be out there, and they might be interested in me again for some reason. They could even be the people who broke into our home and bugged us.”
There was a horrified silence as we all considered the possibility.
“I need to talk to Reggie,” I said.
Claire squeezed my hand hard and then let go.
“No. I’ll talk to Reggie. You have to go meet with Rashid.” She leaned back and touched his name card on the flow chart. “He knows everybody and everything in the oil world. That’s what you’ve always told me. You have to go ask him if he knows who took our son.”