Page 77 of The Librarians
The door chimes softly as Jonathan walks in. Amazing what different details you pay attention to when you are committing a crime.
Ryan appears in pajamas—army fatigue green, slightly oversized but soft-looking.
Impossible dreams of domesticity inundate Jonathan. He can do nothing but watch Ryan’s smiling approach.
“Hey. I looked around a bit, but I didn’t see your tracker,” he says.
Right, the tracker, the nominal reason for Jonathan’s presence. He’s never been a great liar and can only hope his body isn’t going to betray him with a horrific white-man blush that turns him into a beet from forehead to collarbone. “It’s—ah—kinda small, but I should be able to find it with my app. And is it okay if I use your bathroom real quick?”
He has one job and he wants it done.
“Sure.”
Ryan sounds amused by the limited size of Jonathan’s bladder but Jonathan is too nervous to be embarrassed. Thankfully he opens the guest bathroom’s window without incident—and almost cries out loud when a balaclava-covered figure, all in black, materializes outside. He thought Hazel would stay in the truck until he texted.
She climbs in and signals him to carry on. So he flushes the unused toilet, washes his hands, and opens the door to reconnoiter. At his gesture of all-clear, Hazel slips out and disappears into the depths of the house like a wisp of smoke.
Ryan is waiting for Jonathan in the soaring living room library. Jonathan feels like a cheap windup toy, his motions herky-jerky. He has his phoneout in his right hand, pretending to use it for guidance. But he knows where he was seated that night: under the double-story bank of windows that would have offered a panoramic view of the lake during the day, there is a smaller, plumper sofa.
He gropes the sofa for a bit, then thrusts his left hand, with the tracker Hazel had handed him earlier held tight between middle and ring fingers, into the space behind the cushions. “Aha! Here it is.”
Then he takes out his wallet and pops the tracker inside.
“Well, that was easy.”
Is there a teasing edge to Ryan’s words? Has he guessed that there are ulterior purposes behind Jonathan’s “search” for this bit of technology? Jonathan’s cheeks scald, but it’s not as if Ryan’s wrong. He’s only wrong in thinking that Jonathan has come all this way to hit on him.
But now Jonathan must. “So…what do you do on a Sunday evening?”
Ryan shrugs. “Look through profiles on Grindr.”
Jonathan wants to chortle, but no sounds emerge.
Ryan laughs. “Just kidding. It’s NBA season; I watch hoops. Want to catch a game with me, since you’re here anyway?”
This isgreat, right? Jonathanwantsto be here. Then why does his heartbeat suddenly feel like a hammer at the back of his head, cracking his skull apart?
His reply barely clears his vocal cords. “Let’s do it.”
Hazel enters Conrad’s office, locks the door from inside, secures the curtains, and proceeds to his desktop.
Last year this time, she would have known nothing about hacking into someone else’s personal computer. But last year, she did not know yet that her husband had committed financial crimes. In the days and weeks immediately after Kit’s death, instead of dealing with loss and betrayal, Hazel gathered up all the devices in his London apartment—and even a couple of derelict CPUs in his mother’s house—and took them back to Singapore.
There she found a hacker to help her break into them. For a little extra money, the hacker taught Hazel the basics and threw in some tools she’ddeveloped herself, in case Hazel would find them useful in the future. Hazel almost didn’t take the offer—she was not planning on having another dubious husband. Or any husband, for that matter. But in the end she did, because the girl seemed to need the income.
After Sophie and Astrid left together this morning, before the library opened at noon, Hazel spent the entire hour on the phone with the girl, reviewing what she’d learned and what she’d forgotten. As she turns on Conrad’s desktop, she dials the hacker again. The phone is picked up right away—it’s the middle of the day over there.
Hazel does not speak, but only shows the hacker what she is dealing with and follows the hacker’s directions carefully. She knows enough about Conrad—name, birthday, parents’ names, etc.—to mount a dictionary attack. But her efforts yield nothing—he must use a strong password even for his own home desktop.
She connects the laptop she brought to the desktop and sets the hacker’s program to a brute force attack. This is not what she hoped for—there’s no telling how long it might take.
She glances at her phone. Jonathan’s latest text is time-stamped five minutes ago.Watching basketball with Ryan. 2 min left in first quarter.
So he’ll be here another hour and a half? She’s tempted to remove the balaclava she found in Nainai’s box of old Halloween costumes—her nostrils are filled with its dusty, musty smell—but she only scratches her face through the itchy material.
Leaving the tool to do its automated hacking, she ends the call and gets up. Behind the desk on the wall is a large, framed image of a sailing catamaran—the one on which Conrad cabin-boyed his way around the world?
The office, like elsewhere in the house, has its share of books, mostly tax and contract law. She locates a filing cabinet, but the documents it contains are paperwork related to the bequest of the property from Romy Lonstein to Conrad’s mother, and plans and contracts for the subsequent renovation.
