Twenty Years Later(77)

Walt reached for his breast pocket. This time he did not just feel for the small, thin box that was there, he removed it and held it in his hand. His heart rate picked up. Simply holding the listening devices caused a visceral reaction inside him. The past three years of his life had been tormented by deceit. By the ravages of loving a woman who had kept secrets from him and betrayed him in a way that was nearly unforgiveable. As he stared at the listening devices, he wondered if he were any better than Meghan Cobb. His gaze roamed the room, moving from the nightstand that held the telephone and alarm clock, to the closed bathroom door, and back to the coffee table in front of him. As the analytical part of his mind calculated the most strategic places to secure the listening devices—one under the lip of the nightstand, one under the coffee table, and one in the bathroom in case Avery used her cell phone there—some other part of his mind screamed for him not to do it.

Walt took a deep breath, rubbed the back of his neck, and set the metallic box on the edge of the coffee table. He was lost in conflicted thought when he noticed the postcard among Avery’s research. It looked to have been ripped to shreds and then painstakingly taped back together. The pieces mostly fit, at least to return continuity to the postcard, but the edges were poorly opposed and uneven. He lifted it off the table and inspected it. A short message was written on the back of the card:



To the one-and-only Claire-Voyant, Just hanging out and watching the Events of America. Could use some company.





On the bottom of the card Walt saw three numbers scrawled innocuously. Almost as if they were an afterthought:



777





Walt flipped the card back over to inspect the front. Pieced together and taped over was a picture of a wooded cabin set among trees whose leaves had been turned ginger by autumn. The handle of the bathroom door clicked. The noise startled him and the postcard slipped from his grip and fell to the floor. Its momentum took it under the couch. Before he had a chance to retrieve it, Avery appeared in the vestibule outside the bathroom.

“You ready?” she asked.

Walt stood quickly. “Yeah.”

His heart pounded and the perspiration returned to his forehead. As he walked across the hotel room and toward the door, he passed Avery and headed out into the hallway. She closed the door behind them and checked that it was locked.

“You want to head back to the Rum House?” she asked.

Walt nodded. “Sure. Sounds good.”

They stepped into the elevator and Avery pressed the button for the lobby. As the doors closed, Walt again saw his reflection in the clear metal. It was then that he realized he’d left the thin metal box, and the listening devices it held, on the edge of the coffee table.





CHAPTER 49


Manhattan, NY Sunday, July 4, 2021

A TWO-MAN BAND—PIANIST AND VIOLINIST—PLAYED IN THE CORNER of the bar. After they ordered drinks Avery headed over to put in a request. Walt sat alone at the bar sipping a Worthy Park single estate reserve and contemplating the predicament he’d found himself in. It felt like weeks, not days, since he’d sat in this tavern and met Avery Mason for the first time. Back then he was anxious to get back in the saddle of an operation, get his mind off the wallowing thoughts of Meghan Cobb’s betrayal, and work his way out of the funk of self-pity and anger he was in. When he sat in this bar on Tuesday night, Walt was excited to have been tapped by the Bureau to play such an important role in a case that had stumped them. That Jim Oliver had gone to such lengths to find and recruit him had given Walt a sense of purpose. A sense of being needed. It was a feeling that had been absent from the past three years of his life. Now, he couldn’t help but make the comparison to when he was a twenty-eight-year-old kid tapped to run a high-profile homicide investigation. The thought crossed his mind that he was being manipulated today in much the same way he had been twenty years earlier. He’d fallen for the romanticism of it all—a delicate case, a top target, and the glory that would come from a successful operation. That he’d have to put his ethics aside and quell any moral objections that arose was simply part of the job, Jim Oliver had convinced him. And now Walt had gone and made a goddamn mess of things. He was sleeping with the woman who was under his surveillance. Worse than that, he was feeling something for her.

The crushing burden of guilt had sat heavy on his shoulders on the walk over from Avery’s hotel. Walt worked hard to convince himself that he had not slept with Avery out of any hell-bent effort to obtain information from her. It was spontaneous and unplanned. It had happened in the heat of the moment. But that was then and this is now, he thought. The way the rest of tonight had to play out put him in knots. He’d left the listening devices on the coffee table in her hotel room, and had no choice but to return there to retrieve them. Once there, the inevitable would likely follow. It would be then that Walt Jenkins, in his own mind, would have crossed the line.

On top of his guilt was a combination of curiosity and confusion about how his relationship with Avery could end in anything other than disaster. He was on an operation sprung by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and choreographed to intentionally set his life on a collision course with Avery Mason, aka Claire Montgomery, the express purpose of which was to deceive her into believing he was interested in her story about Victoria Ford. All the while, his true goal would be to burrow his way far enough into her personal life so that he might find a scrap of evidence that would shed light on the whereabouts of her father. The entire scenario begged the question of whether Walt was any better than Meghan Cobb.