Page 25 of 56 Days
But now he’s seen this vaguely familiar woman swinging her little space shuttle bag in the supermarket across from his office every day for five days in a row, at a slightly different time each day, and it’s got him paranoid.
Who is she, really?
Whatis she?
When Oliver gets outside, he ducks into the nearest doorway and takes out his phone again. Opens the browser and types his name into the search bar. His actual, given one. Nothing comes up except the same old stuff. He checks Twitter by using twitter.com/ireland as a URL. It loads the @ireland page and, crucially, a search bar; he doesn’t have an account himself but this lets him search while also bypassing signing in. The laws that govern reporters and the publications they work for don’t seem to apply to this apparent cesspool of a site, but he finds nothing there either. Maybe heisjust being paranoid.
That’s when it happens.
He looks up and sees her, just about to walk past him, swinging that damn bag.
He isn’t planning to do it. There’s no premeditation at all on his part—and that, right there, is the problem, the same thing that got him into trouble the last time, in London, and the first time, all those years ago.
He doesn’t think, he justdoes.
He opens his mouth and the words, “Nice bag,” come out.
She stops dead, blanches. “My...?”
He’s already regretting it. He shouldn’t speak to her. He knows that, he’s not stupid. But the only thing worse than her being a journalist is her thinking he’s too stupid to see that she is.
And he’s done it now.
“Your bag,” he says, pointing.
She looks down at it, then back up at him.
“Thanks,” she says. “It’s from the Intrepid. It’s a museum in—”
“New York,” he finishes. This one must really have done her homework. “The one on the aircraft carrier, right?”Let’s see how much of it she’s done. “Have you been?”
“Yeah. Once.”
That’s smart of her. It won’t take much detail to make that story sound convincing because, hey, she was only there the one time.
“Was it good?” he asks.
“Ah...”
And it’s this, her hesitation, that does it. That’s what convinces him that his suspicions are correct.
In this moment, the fear of what that might mean for his future is dwarfed by the high of the win, by the smugness of having smoked her out. But he can’tsaythat he has, can’t tell her that he knows. If he confronted her, that would only give her the confirmation she seeks and the fodder whatever rag she works for desperately wants.
So he opts for the next best thing: playing dumb and watching her squirm.
Because why should he suffer?
Why the hell can’t they just leave him alone?
Yeah, okay, the space shuttle thing was clever—theT-shirtwith the NASA logo was one of the mostreported-onpieces of evidence all those years ago—but there’s no way she’s as prepared as she thinks she is. She can’t be. This is all just a thin layer of cover and he’s sure he won’t have to dig too deep to find the bottom of it, to expose her for who—and what—she really is.
“Yeah,” she answers finally. “But not as good as Kennedy Space Center.”
Oliver blinks in surprise. This one has come toplay.
He steps closer to her, watching for the telltale flinch or ripple of unease across her face. But not only does she fail to react, she actuallytakes a step closerto him.
“You know,” he says, “I’ve never met someone who can name all five space shuttles.”
