“Of course.” Ryan folded the note and put it in his pocket. “I’ll call right away.”
“Good.” William beamed. “It was a pleasure to meet you,” he added, taking the pills from the maid as Ryan showed himself out.
He waited until he was in the cab to look at the paper, and when he did, he saw a litany of random words filling in the boxes. THECATANDTHEHAT. SUN. ONLY. And on and on and on.
But there was a phone number at the top, and that had to mean something. William had made such a point of not only keeping his crossword books, but of keeping them neat. He’d made an exception for Ryan, and the only reason Ryan could deduce was that he was delivering a message.
The number, however, was out of service.
“Fuck.”
Maybe it was a safe combination. Maybe it was a code. Maybe it was nonsense from a confused old man. Double fuck.
Whatever it was, he’d have to figure it out later.
As the cab pulled up in front of the Stark Century, he folded the paper and shoved it back into his pocket. Then he went inside and settled in at a two-top in the bar. It was still half an hour before noon, and he usually didn’t drink at lunch anyway, but today he needed one, and he sipped on a Scotch as Baxter slid into the chair across from him.
“Club soda with lime, thanks,” Bax told the waitress. “And a whole slew of ice cubes.”
“No problem.”
“It still won’t be enough ice,” he told Ryan as soon as she was out of earshot. “I grew up in Florida. I like a cold drink. And here you go,” he added, plunking a cell phone onto the middle of the table without pausing for breath or changing his tone.
“Good work.”
“We got lucky. She tossed it in the bin on the corner just one block over. Odd, though.”
“What’s that?”
“I expected it to be a cheap burner phone, considering the nature of what she was sending you and what we suspect about her. And since I couldn’t trace those texts back to anyone. But it seems to be her actual cell phone. Gabriella Anderson’s, I mean.”
“That is surprising,” Ryan said.
“That’s not the strangest part.” Baxter leaned forward, like a kid sharing a juicy secret about the teacher. “She has a burner app on the phone. That’s how she was texting both you and Jamie. One of those apps that lets you have several virtual numbers. And, in the kicker to end all kickers, she didn’t pull her SIM card.”
“Really?” Ryan leaned back, considering that. He’d told Baxter to find out what he could learn from the phone’s card, but he hadn’t actually expected they’d get their hands on it. After all, this was a woman who’d been clever enough to fool him as to her role in a coup, then fake her own death and disappear. Why the hell would she leave behind her SIM card?
“What do you think it means?” Baxter asked.
“I wish I knew. Why the hell would a woman who was a spook leave a traceable device for us to find?”
“That’s the question of the hour,” Baxter agreed. “She had to have known.”
“Was there anything unusual embedded in the card?”
Baxter shook his head. “I thought of that—that she was leaving the SIM card on purpose, I mean. But I didn’t find anything that could be a message or, well, anything.” He swallowed. “There is one other possibility…” He trailed off, leaving Ryan to finish the sentence.
“That she wasn’t a spook.”
Baxter shrugged. “Could be.”
“It could,” Ryan agreed. “But I doubt it. To survive that fall? She’d have needed a full-on med-evac team. And the Felicia Cartwright I knew wouldn’t have the first clue how to get a fake identity. Not unless they sold it at Harrods.”
Baxter considered that, then nodded. “This whole situation’s bizarre.”
“That it is. Since you mentioned the burner app, I assume you unlocked her phone.”
“Hacked her password,” Baxter acknowledged. “The phone was mostly stripped. She saw this coming—you said it was her idea to ditch the phone, so she must have been planning it. All photos and files deleted. Her cloud service account deleted. Emails deleted. Just the burner app, the native apps, and a few game apps.”
“Gaming? Can we find a handle? We might be able to communicate through one of the apps.”
He shook his head. “No, I mean the single-player kind. And not gaming. Games. Well, puzzles, really. Crosswords. Sudoku.”
“Crosswords?”
“Yeah. Is that important?”
Ryan thought of William. But how the hell could there be a connection? He shook his head. “Probably not.” He sighed. “Well, at least we know one thing for certain.”
“What’s that?”
“That I have no way to contact her now.”
“What’s the next step?”
“I’d like you to track down the attorney who handled the probate of Randall’s will,” Ryan said. “William mentioned that Felicia should have inherited the house, and of course that’s true. We should confirm that she would have been the primary beneficiary if she’d survived, and then see if any other Felicias have popped up out of the blue. For that matter, we should see if there’s DNA. Randall was wealthy and a little eccentric. Did he freeze sperm? Blood? Brain tissue? Let’s find out. This girl says she’s Felicia? I want a way to prove it one way or the other.”
“Already on the probate question,” Baxter said. “I figured you’d ask. Of course, it’s Saturday, but I’m making some calls. Hopefully we can get an answer through unofficial channels, because the official ones are locked up tight for the weekend.”
“Perfect.”
“As for the other, I’ll see what I can find out.”
“Good man.” He swallowed the last of his Scotch, then pushed back his chair.
Baxter cleared his throat, and Ryan hesitated in the act of rising. “Something on your mind?”
“Just, ah, parameters.”
“Parameters?” Ryan repeated, hiding his amusement.
“Right. Are we entirely aboveboard on this, sir? Or are you kicking this matter over to Stark Security?”
He knew what Bax was asking. Stark International’s security team was very transparent. Very corporate. And very, very aboveboard. Not a lot of Tom Clancyesque maneuvers going down in the hallowed halls of Stark International.
The Stark Security Agency, on the other hand, had been created for a different type of problem. The kind that needed to dig a bit deeper, to cut corners and slice through red tape. The SSA did what was needed to get the job done, and that was okay because the SSA also had a very limited clientele and had the luxury of being extremely selective with its clients.
But still, corners would be cut. And Ryan knew that Baxter had already turned down one offer to join the SSA for exactly that reason. He’d been burned once before, and he was leery of digging himself into another hole so soon after climbing out of one. Ryan respected that. He honored Baxter’s request to limit his work to the corporate side of Stark International.
One day, though…
Well, one day, Ryan hoped to convince Baxter to join the SSA. With his particular skills, he’d be a hell of an asset.