was probably the only person in the house awake at this hour, other than Blake and Steph, if they were still up. I was badly rattled and wanted to get a start on finding Konstantin now, but as urgent as it felt to me, I knew it wasn’t reasonable to be waking anybody up before six. Whatever Konstantin had planned for me, it would take days, weeks, maybe even months to develop, and letting Leo get another couple hours of sleep wouldn’t endanger anyone.
I was just turning to go back to my room when the door behind me opened.
When I first caught sight of Leo, I was sure I’d rousted him out of bed. He was wearing a fluffy white bathrobe over blue and white striped pajamas. A second glance showed me that his mousy brown hair was slightly damp and his cheeks were freshly shaven. He smelled of drugstore aftershave and Listerine, and I came to the inevitable conclusion that I hadn’t woken him up after all. His eyes widened when he saw me.
“Nikki?” he said. “What are you doing here?” He reached into the pocket of his robe and pulled out a pair of wire-rimmed glasses, shoving them onto his face in a gesture that looked almost nervous. I realized I’d never seen him without the glasses before.
I think Leo has a good heart, or he wouldn’t be working for Anderson, but he’s about as socially awkward an individual as I’ve ever met. He has an obvious aversion to eye contact, and he always seems a bit nervous and distracted, like only a fraction of his attention is actually focused on whoever he’s talking to. I suspect when he heard the knock on his door, he assumed it was Anderson, and finding me there threw him for a bit of a loop. His shoulders hunched as if he were expecting a blow, and his gaze dropped to the floor.
He was nervous with everyone, but more so with me, the newcomer to the house. I wondered if I should have explained what was going on via email instead of coming to his suite, but it was too late now.
“Hi, Leo. I’m sorry to bother you so early in the morning. I hope I didn’t wake you.” I knew I hadn’t, but it seemed like the polite thing to say, and I found Leo’s nerves and awkwardness contagious.
“I was awake,” he told my left shoulder. “The European markets start opening at four.”
Geez, and I’d thought I was an early riser. I’d never known anyone else in the house was up at this hour, which I guessed meant Leo didn’t venture out of his rooms in the morning. Actually, Leo didn’t venture out of his rooms much at all. Sometimes he had to be reminded to step away from his computers and eat. It didn’t seem like much of a life to me, but what do I know?
With anyone else, I probably would have tried a little small talk before launching into my request, but I figured Leo wouldn’t blame me—hell, he probably wouldn’t even notice—if I skipped the social niceties.
“I forwarded you an email,” I told him. “It’s supposedly from Konstantin. I wonder if you’d be able to trace it or something.” I honestly didn’t think Konstantin was stupid enough to send me a trail of bread crumbs that would lead right to him, but I figured it would be foolish not to at least check it out. Not to mention that Konstantin was centuries old and might not be as computer literate as a modern man.
“I’ll see what I can do.”
Leo didn’t beckon me to follow as he retreated into his room, but he didn’t close the door, either. I assumed that was an invitation to come in, so I stepped inside.
All of the suites Anderson’s Liberi inhabited consisted of two rooms. For most of us, one of those rooms was the bedroom, and one was some version of a sitting room. I supposed with his fanatical attachment to the stock market and his lack of socialization, a sitting room would have been useless for Leo. Instead, the first room of his two-room suite was what I imagined the inside of a NASA control room might look like, only less tidy.
A huge L-shaped desk took up about half the room, and practically every inch of that desk was covered with computer equipment, bristling with tangled cords and surge protectors. I saw laptops and desktops, Macs and PCs, shiny new