The Garden of Betrayal - Lee Vance [43]
I stepped back into the doorway, hiding in the shadow as they passed. I knew Reggie was right about telling them, but it wasn’t time yet. I’d needed to see them, though, if only to remind myself that I hadn’t lost everything. I watched until they disappeared into the crowd before turning and heading east, back to my office. It would be hours before I was physically exhausted enough to sleep. In the interim, I thought I might as well get some work done.
13
The alarm on my cell phone woke me at seven-thirty. I was sleeping on the couch in my den, where I’d bedded down a few hours before so as not to wake Claire. My head ached, and my stomach felt bloated—whiskey, beer, and cold pizza are a miserable combination. Scrabbling blindly on the floor by my head, I found the phone and pressed the central button, knowing it would give me another five minutes to snooze. A cricketlike chirping replied, announcing a low battery. I rolled onto my back, swearing. The phone had been in the charging cradle for hours before I left the office to meet Reggie, and the battery was practically new. I typed a semiliterate e-mail to Amy, asking her to pick up a replacement on her way to work. My phone was too important to me to risk having it give up unexpectedly.
I groaned as I sat upright. It had taken me until four to finish loading numbers into the depletion model. A dialogue box had popped up when I pressed the go button, estimating the run time at ten hours. I was impatient for it to get done quicker. A number of things in the raw data were disconcerting, and I was anxious to see the results.
There was a note on the coffee table in front of me. It was in Kate’s handwriting: You snore. Phil coming to dinner tonight. Can you make it? Please? I smiled, glad she seemed excited and that she wanted Claire and I to get to know him better. I picked up the note, crumpled it into a ball, and tossed it toward the garbage can ten feet away, scoring an improbable basket. I hoped it was an omen—it had been a confusing couple of days, and I desperately needed some things to start falling into place.
• • •
The lobby of the Four Seasons Hotel in New York is done up like a memorial chapel, with soaring stone columns, a backlit onyx ceiling, and an altarlike dais at the far end. I climbed a flight of steps to the reception desk and told a clerk I was there to see Rashid al-Shaabi. He checked my identification against his computer and summoned a liveried security guard to escort me to the fifty-first floor. A Middle Eastern–looking man I didn’t recognize was waiting when the elevator doors opened. He escorted me down a short hall, tapped on the only visible door, and then swiped a key card to unlock it. His jacket swung open as he extended his arm, and I caught a flash of a gun in a holster.
“Mr. al-Shaabi is supposed to be taking it easy,” he said to me in a Brooklyn-accented whisper. “Don’t let him overexert himself.”
The door swung open to a suite that was all blond wood and earth-tone carpets, with sweeping views of Central Park and the Manhattan skyline. Rashid was sitting behind a desk in an alcove, talking on the phone in Arabic. He gestured for me to come in and then pointed to a silver butler’s tray laden with coffee and Middle Eastern pastries. The coffee and pastries were for me—I knew he was allowed only tiny quantities of diuretics or sweets. I draped my coat over a chair, poured coffee for myself, and settled in front of his desk