Firebreak

8

A little after seven that morning, when it would be nine a.m. in New York, Parker phoned Claire at the hotel. She should still be in the room, finishing her coffee, putting on her face.

She was. "I'm glad you called," she said, and he could hear the tension in her voice.

"Something happened?"

"I called Louise," she said, Louise being the woman who cleaned the house by the lake every Thursday. "I called her yesterday, to make sure everything was all right, and she said the lock was broken on the lakeside door."

"Nobody there?"

"Not when she was there, not that she noticed. And it didn't seem to her anything had been taken."

Or left, Parker thought. That was the more important question. Had anything been left there, maybe to blow up, or maybe to signal people waiting. He said, "I was calling to say I'm coming back east, I'd see you in the city, we could have dinner."

"I'd like that."

"But I think I better look at the house first, then call you again."

"All right. Today?"

"I'm gonna be on too many planes today," he said. "I'll call you tomorrow."

"All right."

'The other thing I wanted," he said. "In the city, see if you can find somebody who reads Cyrillic."

"You mean like Russian?"

"Russian. Yes."