can’t beat ’em, etc.: she tried to pull from the rabble some thoughts of use. For instance: I am alone; I self-sustain; these ideas are ballast for who I am. Bywords she’d relied on for years but that were of no help now. She was afraid. She’d been on Thurlow before they were married and every day since, but really, how long could this go on? How long could she protect him? Her job had been to produce a reason to throw him in jail, and she’d managed not to with remarkable skill. When the Helix didn’t pay taxes. When the Helix had a brothel. One or two or twenty. Whatever the members did in a Bond, Esme made sure no one knew. Or covered the bases when the Helix didn’t. Think Dean actually had permits for all those guns? It hadn’t been easy, but it had been doable. Only now Thurlow was getting reckless.
And it wasn’t like confronting him was easy. You couldn’t talk to a man like that. And you certainly couldn’t have him in your life. He was who he was: monstrous in his disregard for anyone but himself, and if Esme could barely handle it, her daughter couldn’t handle it at all. She shouldn’t even have to; she was just a child.
So, fine, she’d stay away, as always. And do her best. And in the meantime, she’d put together another team. Four people who would have no business being sent on a reconnaissance mission. Who’d come back with snapshots of the Helix House that were out of focus. The house in the snow, and maybe some hooker in the window. Esme would identify the hooker for Jim and then say that was it, nothing else of note to report. Nothing at all, and that would end it until the next time. And the time after that.
She got to her bathroom and sat at a vanity with mirror and bubble lights. “Martin!” she yelled. “Get this thing off me. The face, too. I’m done for the day. The Lynne Five-Oh is great.”
She leaned in close to the mirror, trying to find herself exposed in the silicone vamped to her skin. But she couldn’t. Martin was a genius. He had managed her looks for a decade. Together they had fooled everyone she knew. Even her lovers. Even her parents, though here was cause for regret, because it was hard enough getting your parents to know you in plain face—witness her own child, whom she barely knew at all.
Martin used a butter knife to peel a flap glued to her cheekbone. “Ow,” she said. “Easy.”
“Sorry,” he said, and he knelt to take off her calf plates.
She put her elbows on the vanity. She fit her index under the elastic headband of her wig and pulled. The wig sailed overhead and landed on a couch. Her real hair was tamped under a swim cap seamed to her head with mortician’s wax, which Martin dissolved with acetone. She removed the cap as per the wig and plunged her fingers into her hair to rouse its inclination to chaos. It was dark blond with copper veins, shoulder length and undulate.
“Where’s the case?” she said. She had forty-three different pairs of contact lenses. The blues with the pupil cast in a flax corona were her favorite. Tonight, she wore the hazel taupe. They radiated an unease that itself radiated sorrow. She looked at them in the mirror and wondered if they telegraphed feeling better than her own eyes, which were white grape.
“So it all went okay?” he said. “Anything feel loose?”
“No, just fat. I look like a fifty-year-old hag. Lynne the hag.”
“Anything else I can do?”
“No.”
“Okay,” he said, which was as far as the conversation would go. Martin was not a confidant. Not even a colleague. Their first project, he’d had to regender her face and age it ten years. As he’d applied spirit gum to a hollow in her cheek, he’d asked about the job. Why a man? Why the years? She’d said, “You know how people like to joke around—if I told you I’d have to kill you—you know that joke?” He did. “It’s no joke.” And that was that.
It’s true she wasn’t a case officer. Or even a spook. In the official parlance of human intelligence, the acronym was NOC. Nonofficial cover. Go out into the world, and if you screwed up, no one would bail you out, no one would reel you in, no one would say you were