He pulled his hands away, leaned forward. He looked not sad or even angry but eager. Ready to pounce. “What does that mean, exactly?”
Don’t do this. She couldn’t play this game. Did he want her to confess? And to what, exactly? I had dinner a few times with the Ranger who runs the case? Because in reality she’d done nothing else.
Or, closer to the truth: That I found someone who makes me feel the way you used to?
And this: I’m sorry you never found anything you like the way I like my job, but that’s not my fault. Maybe we can try to make our lives more about you, but you have to ask.
“It means I know I’ve spent a lot of weekends away. I know I care too much about this case.” The safe answer. The true lie. “I can’t stop thinking about it.”
“Do you think you can solve it, Becks?”
He still called her Becks. Still used her nickname. A good sign, right? Except that being so desperate for hope in your marriage that you ticked off good signs was a bad, bad sign.
No. “I know I have to try.”
“Uh-huh. Interesting people down there?”
She realized at that moment she wasn’t cut out for an affair. If she felt this guilty without having done anything, what would she feel if she did?
They stared at each other over their yellowtail rolls. Until her purse buzzed.
* * *
“You can look,” Brian said. “It’s okay.”
“What?” She feigned surprise. Badly.
“I know you want to check, just go ahead.”
Don’t. It’s your anniversary—
She pulled out the BlackBerry. Not the office. Todd Taylor. Call me. Please.
“Sorry. The office. I have to call.”
* * *
She stood beside the valet stand, where two Ferraris shared space with a Rolls. Quiet wealth was not the Houston way. “Todd? Everything okay?”
“You know it’s been a month since we had dinner?” His voice was low, urgent, a tone she’d never heard. “I miss you, Rebecca.”
“You must be bored down there.” Her voice was light. False.
“Don’t pretend you don’t know.”
She knew.
“Come down here. No—I’ll come up.”
A new life waiting. All she had to do was blow up the one she had. She thought of Brian, inside, alone, staring at an empty seat. Her children, waiting for her. Kira. Tony. “I need to think about this.” Though she had her answer.
The dream had turned real and destroyed itself.
“I’ll drive up tomorrow.”
“Don’t do that. Don’t.”
A long pause.
“You sure?”
The night blurred and the headlights on the avenue streaked, and she realized she was crying.
She wiped her face and went back to her husband.
* * *
She went down to Weslaco one more time. As soon as she saw Taylor she knew she couldn’t be part of the case. He was friendly and polite. They had nothing to say to each other, and much too much. Even in May, when border patrol officers stumbled across two more corpses, the Bandit’s first victims in more than a year, she stayed away.
And a month later, when a counterintel job on the Russia desk opened up in D.C., she put up her hand and grabbed it.
15
Washington, D.C.
In Washington the stakes were high. Rebecca had a safe in her office where she locked away files stamped TOP SECRET/SCI/NOFORN/NOCON. She talked about SIGINT and HUMINT and ELINT in windowless conference rooms swept weekly for bugs. She met once a quarter with the CIA’s Russia desk officers—mostly at Langley, the agency’s way of pulling rank over the bureau.
Yet for a while she couldn’t help feeling the job was more of a game than her work in Houston and Birmingham had ever been. Move and countermove. The Russians recruited army colonels who were angry they didn’t have stars on their collars, blackmailed scientists with drug problems, caused trouble wherever they could. The FBI tried to limit the damage. In Moscow the CIA and the FSB played the same game in reverse.
She had arrived in D.C. at the right time. The terror threat was waning, while the American effort to improve relations with Russia had gone nowhere. In fact, the Kremlin was becoming more openly anti-Western. Her ability to speak Russian made up for her lack of espionage experience. Within months, she’d been anointed a rising star. For the first time she felt as though her career at the bureau was assured.
The pace at headquarters surprised her, too—not because it was harder than the field. The opposite. In Houston, even before she became involved in the Bandit case,