Page 112 of The Librarians
She clutches the Glock in her hand as if it were the last flower in a desert world.
“You’d think, given my certainty that I had not seen the last of you, that I would have been better prepared to come across your wedding photos. But I was…shell-shocked. Perry sat next to me, theorizing endlessly about why Kit did what he did, and all I could think was that you finally became what you were running away from.”
She bites into her lower lip. She had, hadn’t she? Where had all the secret determination to remain herself gone? Certainly on the day of her wedding she had been completely subsumed by her identity—and performance—as Bartholomew Kuang’s granddaughter.
“I thought that glossy version of me was your ideal woman.”
“I was—obsessed with her. But…”
Is their underwater wreckage so tricky that he’s not even sure where to attach cables? He sighs. In the darkness, with him close enough to touch yet somehow unreachable, she has the sensation that he is speaking to himself, and she is only the accidental eavesdropper.
“But I was also obsessed with my father after his scandal came to light.I went through every single record he left behind—much as I did with everything I could find out about you.”
Was he engaged in emotional forensics—piecing together all the evidence so he could figure out how to feel? Or had he already decided how he felt and was simply looking to shore up his beliefs?
She clips her Glock back into the holster strapped across her chest. “Why are you telling me all this?”
She hears a shrug, a push-and-pull of fabric against weapons, ammo, and communications equipment. “Isn’t the moment before mortal danger the time to lay out stuff like this?”
Her phone is on the floor beside her, counting down. Ten seconds remain before “she” discovers the yearbook, which Madeleine found in her deep dive on Hazel’s life in Austin—all part and parcel of Conrad’s quest for information earlier in the year.
“Are you expecting a response before mortal danger hits?” she asks, after the countdown disappears from her phone screen.
“No need. It’s enough that you know.”
But what does she know, exactly? And why doesn’t he want a response?
Because it is an end, rather than a new beginning, warns the fatalist part of her.
“If we survive tonight…” she says—and doesn’t know how to continue.
“Someone’s approaching,” comes Jonathan’s abrupt whisper.
Hazel is light in the head and heavy everywhere else.
Conrad turns on his microphone. “Roger. Be careful out there.”
Then he turns off the microphone, pulls Hazel close, and kisses her on the forehead. “You’ll be fine.We’llbe fine.”
Jonathan’s feet went to sleep a long time ago. The rest of him is jumpy and over-caffeinated.
The recording has just finished playing. “Hazel” is about to call the hacker she worked with before, to “verify” whether the made-up sixty-four-character string could be the private key to Kit Asquith’s blockchain fortune.
It’s now or never.
In the infrared view on his phone, a figure dashes out from the apartment complex, its heat-emitting windows brightly lit against dark cold bricks. There are no walls or fences around the cluster of generic three-story buildings. The moving figure, face and hands losing the most heat, swerves around a clump of blackish trees, leaps down a low retaining wall, and runs over the small depression that serves as storm drainage between the apartment complex and the library.
“Someone’s approaching,” Jonathan whispers into his headset.
He darkens his phone. It has served its purpose and is best put away so that it won’t give away his location. But without it, he, on his stomach atop the extended front porch of the library, is blind.
Footsteps come to a stop directly below him. Silence, then the front entrance opens with a pneumatic hiss as loud as a train whistle.
Jonathan’s heart pounds. This would be the moment aStar Warscharacter declares,I have a bad feeling about this.
The operation isn’t set up quite the way Jonathan wants it. Not that he is an expert on police maneuvers, but he would have allocated both more manpower and more equipment. Maryam wanted the same. But Detective Hagerty insisted that the entrapment be conducted with as few personnel as possible, to avoid alerting those they wish to catch. And he got his way thanks to his seniority and pull within the department.
So Hagerty and his partner are staking out the suspects’ apartment. Leaving only Maryam and Detective Jones, her partner, to face an extremely dangerous individual.
