Excerpt
The Woman Who Knew Too Much
Chapter 1
She was nearly asleep when she heard the sound again.
The first time had been just a few minutes ago, when she was switching off her brand-new e-reader. A Christmas gift from her daughter, it was perfect for sitting up in bed with the pillows propped behind her. It weighed much less than the hardcover edition of the novel she was reading, a sprawling family saga set in Ireland from the 1800s to the present. As a fifth-generation Irish-American, she was enjoying the history lesson of her people, and with the type-enlargement feature she didn’t have to wear her dreaded reading glasses.
She’d been here for nearly three hours, ever since her solitary dinner in her empty seaside home, with a winter storm outside that whistled in the bare trees and pelted the bedroom windows with icy rain. At eleven o’clock, she’d electronically bookmarked her page and shut the reader down. That’s when she’d first heard the sound, a faint tapping from a remote distance.
She’d paused a moment in her warm bed, listening, but she could hear only the wind, the sleet, and the natural creaking of the old two-story wood and stone structure at the edge of the dunes above the beach. No, she’d decided; I imagined it. It’s just the storm. It’s nothing.
She’d placed the reader on the bedside table, switched off the lamp, and pulled the sheets, blanket, and down-filled comforter up to her chin. She’d rolled onto her side in the half-empty bed—her husband was staying at the apartment in the city tonight—and drifted off, her mind a comfortable jumble of Irish dynasties and plans for the classes she’d be teaching at the university this semester, after the intercession. Christmas was over, and New Year’s; now she was looking forward to two more weeks of blissful rest and—
Tap tap tap.
She sat up in the bed and switched on the lamp. There it was again, and it wasn’t the wind or the rain. She shut her eyes and held her breath until she determined its origin. The sound was coming from downstairs.
She didn’t think; she merely reacted. First rule: Cover. In a flash, the lamp was extinguished and she was off the bed, crouching on the carpet, the bed between her and the wide-open bedroom door. Second rule: Weapon. She slid the drawer of the bedside table open and reached inside, grasping the handle of her husband’s Beretta M9. Third rule: Backup. With her other hand, she picked up her cellphone from its charging stand beside the landline. Fourth Rule: Engage. She stood and moved to the doorway, listening.
The tapping from downstairs was low and steady, and now that she concentrated on it she began to detect a pattern: Morse code. She’d learned it in summer camp as a girl—but only she and her husband knew that, as far as she was aware. Could that be her husband, tapping out a message on the front door in the middle of the night? She listened intently, translating the sounds to letters.
C-O-M-E T-O D-O-O-R Q-U-I-E-T P-L-E-A-S-E N-O P-R-O-B-L-E-M M-R B F-I-N-E
R-A-L-P-H J-O-H-N-S-O-N.
Ralph Johnson. Her husband’s assistant—but this late night visit wasn’t about her husband, apparently. No problem. Mr. B. fine.
She canceled the 9-1-1 call she’d already punched in and slipped the phone into her pocket. Her vision had adjusted to the dark, so she could see that the upstairs hallway was empty, the other doors shut. She glanced down at her clothes—a faded Broadway souvenir T-shirt from The Phantom of the Opera and the bottom half of her oldest gym suit, baggy gray sweatpants with a drawstring. She picked up her bathrobe and put it on, then pointed the gun straight in front of her with both hands as she moved out of the room and down the hall, barefoot, soft as a whisper.
Her husband had taught her how to use the Beretta; they’d practiced with it at a local target range. It was heavy in her hand and yet surprisingly manageable. She probably wouldn’t need it now, but she held on to it just the same. She wasn’t ashamed of her initial reactions to the sounds, of diving to the floor and grabbing the gun. Better safe than sorry. She’d recently learned these rules from her husband, and they were now her ingrained responses to a potential threat.
Descending the staircase in the dark, she ran the message through her head again, trying to figure it out. As she came off the bottom stair onto the wood floor of the front hall, she heard the tapping again; the message was being repeated. She stared at the oak door. The doorbell was in plain sight, not to mention a brass knocker centered in the wood, so why was Ralph—if it really was Ralph—tapping Morse code? And where had he come from? She hadn’t heard a car in the driveway.
She approached the door, careful not to stand directly behind it. From the side, she reached out with her free hand and switched on the porch light. The curtained window beside her lit up, but she didn’t hazard a look outside—that would make her visible, vulnerable, a potential target if this was some sort of trap. She almost called through the door before she remembered the tapped instructions: Quiet, please. Grasping the gun in one hand, she tapped softly on the door with the other. V-O-C-A-L I-D.
The male voice that replied through the door was soft but clear. “It’s Ralph, ma’am. Ralph Johnson. I work for your husband.”
She relaxed. She’d never met Ralph Johnson in the seven years she’d known of him, but she’d spoken on the phone with him many times, and this was definitely his voice. She switched on the front hall light, disabled the alarm, unlocked the two locks, released the dead bolt, and opened the door. A tall, thin young black man stood there in a gray parka and gray wool cap, and he wasn’t alone. Behind him was an older, imposingly handsome man, also African-American, in a gray wool coat and a fedora. Both men were wet and shivering. Coats, hats, gloves, even the older man’s close-cropped hair: all gray. Oh yes, she thought, these men are the real deal. Gray was the preferred color of their profession.
“My husband isn’t here,” she told them. “But I suppose you know that.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Ralph whispered. “We know where he is. This is Mr. Green, your husband’s boss. Mine, too. He doesn’t want your husband. He wants to talk to you, ma’am.”
She looked at Ralph, then at his employer. She peered out at the rain and the wet landscape, then back at the two men. They were staring down at her hand. She followed their gaze to the Beretta and produced a weak smile.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ll put this away, and—“
Ralph raised a gloved finger to his lips, reached into a coat pocket, and produced a boxy silver object somewhat larger than a cellphone.
“Keep your voice down, please,” he murmured as he stepped silently past her into the house. He moved off through her downstairs rooms, holding the device up in front of him.
She looked back at the other man on the porch. He was studying her appearance, and she wondered what he made of what he saw: a tall, slender, forty-nine-year-old white woman with green eyes and shoulder-length chestnut hair, in a full-length blue terry robe, barefoot, clutching a big black gun. She opened the door wider and waved him inside. As soon as he’d passed by her, she shut the door, relocked and bolted it, switched the porch light off and the alarm back on, and turned to face her distinguished, unexpected guest.
“Hello, Mr. Green,” she whispered to the director of the New York City field station of the CIA. “I’m Nora Baron.”
