“What?”

  “She said, ‘Well, then, I’ll do it for Kate.’”

  Kate’s knees nearly buckled. “I have to sit down,” she said, and she found a couch. Patrick sat beside her.

  “Here’s the weirdest thing,” said Patrick. “When Liu pushed Olga off the building, he said the same thing. ‘I did it for Kate.’ How could he possibly have known that’s what your mother said to me—‘I’ll do it for Kate’?”

  “He got it from the note my mother left: ‘I did it for Kate.’”

  “Don’t take this the wrong way, but that’s a really strange suicide note.”

  Kate’s expression turned very serious. “That’s because it wasn’t actually a suicide note.”

  “Then what was it?”

  “I think my mother wanted it to look like a suicide note. But she chose those words so that you would recognize them and know that it wasn’t.”

  “Why?”

  Kate hesitated to say it, but it was where her thoughts had led her. “Maybe it was her way of letting us know her death wasn’t really a suicide.”

  “Whoa.”

  “Yeah. Whoa.”

  Kate rose. Patrick joined her in the walk to the elevator, and they rode up together.

  “When’s the last time you showered?” she asked.

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Get cleaned up in Enrique’s room. I’m sure he has clean clothes that will fit.”

  The elevator doors parted, and they stepped off at the seventh floor.

  “You’re acting funny,” said Patrick.

  “I just discovered my mother may have been murdered. How do you expect me to act?”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Call my father. He needs to know all this.”

  They stopped outside Patrick’s room, next to Kate’s.

  “What if he already knows?” asked Patrick.

  “Knows that she was murdered?”

  “Yeah. I mean, what if—”

  “I know exactly what you mean.”

  “Don’t be mad. I’m just thinking out loud.”

  “My head is spinning.”

  “Mine, too,” said Patrick. “I’m going to shower. If you need anything, I’m in the next room.”

  “Thanks. Be ready to leave for the airport at five a.m.”

  “No problem. I’m dead tired, but I’ll be shocked if my mind shuts off long enough for me to actually fall asleep.”

  “You and me both,” said Kate.

  Patrick disappeared into his room. Kate dug her key from her purse, the light on the electronic lock flashed green, and she opened the door.

  Kate knew perfectly well what Patrick had meant, and the thought of her father having some connection to her mother’s death—her murder—had her stomach in knots. It seemed impossible and contrary to everything she believed about him. But what if her mother’s call to 911 wasn’t a revenge call? What if Patrick knew something she didn’t? It was too much to think about. She closed the door and stepped inside.

  The room was a typical hotel layout with a short entrance hallway, and Kate passed the bathroom on her right and the closet on her left before entering the bedroom and living area. She switched on the light and froze. The sliding glass door to the balcony was open, and the way the lace curtain moved in the breeze was eerily reminiscent of that horrible moment of discovery in her parents’ penthouse.

  A hand came over her mouth, and she felt the cold barrel of a pistol beneath her chin.

  “Not a peep,” a man said.

  Chapter 67

  Kate recognized his voice as the one she’d heard through Diego’s phone while circling the block around Club Siloé. It was the man who’d shot Jeremy Peel, his bodyguard, and Enrique. The man who’d pushed Olga off the roof and said, “I did it for Kate.” The man Patrick called Liu.

  “Is that your mother’s perfume I smell?”

  Kate wasn’t wearing any, and she knew he was messing with her, but she returned the volley. “How do you know my mother’s perfume?”

  “She just couldn’t leave well enough alone, could she, your mother?”

  The anger wasn’t just in his voice, but in the way he shoved the gun up under her chin. Kate was afraid to say the wrong thing and set him off.

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Even Sandra Levy stopped at the point of finding out that the CIA was behind Naïveté. Your mother got dangerously close to finding out that Peel was about to sell it to the Chinese. Sandra got jail. Your mother, of course, got worse.”

  “My mother took her own life.”

  “Did it ever occur to you how easy it is to climb from the balcony of your apartment to the balcony of your parents’ penthouse?”

  It was two stories. And a way to avoid security.

  “What are you saying?”

  “You know what I’m saying. I brought my own vodka, which was totally unnecessary. That should have been clue number one to you that something wasn’t right—that she was dead drunk and hadn’t touched the vodka from her florist.”

  “You made her drink?”

  “I didn’t make her. I gave her a choice. She could drink up and jump. Or the two of us could sit there and wait for you to show up. And then I’d toss you both over the railing. She made the right choice. I even let her leave a note.”

  Kate nearly gasped at the realization.

  I did it for Kate.

  “What do you want from me?”

  “The code on Peel’s flash drive turned out to be shit. So you’re going to text Patrick and tell him to come over.”

  “He won’t give you the code you want.”

  “He risked his life to save a whore. Imagine what he’ll do to save you. Where’s your phone?”

  “In my purse.”

  “I want you to remove it, nice and slow. And then you’re going to text exactly what I say. Got it?”

  Kate swallowed her fear. “Got it.”

  Chapter 68

  Patrick stared at his image in the bathroom mirror.

  Even in periods of raging hormones, he had about as much facial hair as a teenager, but he hadn’t shaved since setting foot in Colombia. The last time he’d needed a shave this badly he was a teenager with a caterpillar on his upper lip. He borrowed Enrique’s razor and hoped he wouldn’t mind.

  Kate’s room was directly on the other side of the bathroom wall. He didn’t mean to eavesdrop, but the hotel was far from soundproof. He couldn’t make out what was being said, but he definitely heard voices—male and female, not just Kate’s. If she was talking to her father on speakerphone, it was none of his business. But to be curious was human, and Patrick’s time in captivity had made him an expert at overhearing conversations in the next room. He leaned closer to the wall and listened. The man was talking, and the voice chilled Patrick so deeply that he nicked his chin with the blade. It sounded strangely like Liu.

  No way.

  Patrick wondered if this was the first sign of PTSD and of many sleepless nights to come—hearing the voice of his captor when it couldn’t possibly be him.

  As he dabbed away the blood, his burn phone chimed with a text message, which was odd, since the only person who had his prepaid number was Kate. He checked the display:

  Need to talk now. No phones. Come to the hotel. IMPORTANT.

  Another chill came over him, but it was no harbinger of PTSD or other psychological trauma from the kidnapping. This time, the fears were grounded in real and present danger. Kate was in the next room. Why would she text him? Why would she tell him to come to the hotel? Why wouldn’t she just knock on the door that connected their rooms?

  Why did that man’s voice on the other side of the wall sound like Liu?

  Patrick hurried from the bathroom, went to the door that connected his room to Kate’s, and stopped. The lock on his side of the door was bolted. He assumed there was also a bolt lock on the other side, allowing either occupant of the adjoining rooms to keep the other out. Patrick stared at the doorknob and wondered:

  Did Kate have the bolt on?

  As things stood, Liu was expecting Patrick to come to the hotel and knock on Kate’s door. The side door offered the element of surprise, but all advantage would be lost if his entry weren’t sudden and overwhelming. There could be no fiddling with locks to tip off Liu.

  Quietly, Patrick stepped to the opposite side of the room and braced his foot against the baseboard. His last attempt at busting down a door had not gone well, but this was not a steel-encased warehouse door with a kickass padlock. Even so, he grabbed a pillow from the bed for the benefit of his shoulder.

  The risk was high, and the probability of success was low, but the options were few. He was certain Liu was in the next room. He’d stood and watched as Liu threw Olga off the building. He wouldn’t make the same mistake twice. Liu might have something even worse in store for Kate, as witnessed by his fascination with burning flesh and his homemade napalm concoction. Kate had put everything at risk to come to Colombia and help him. He had to act, and quickly.

  On the mental count of three, he pushed away from the wall and charged at the door with all the force he could muster.

  Chapter 69

  The side door flew open. Splinters of wood from the shattered doorframe sailed into Kate’s room. It sounded like an explosion, and almost simultaneously, Kate felt Patrick’s body slamming into her side. The impact took her down and Liu with her.

  A gunshot rang out, shattering the full-length mirror on the wall. Kate wasn’t hit, and she managed to extricate herself from the tangle of flailing arms and legs rolling across the carpet. The two men were suddenly on their feet, and in a sudden burst of motion, Patrick slammed into the flat-screen television and Liu pointed his pistol. Maybe the gun had jammed, or maybe Kate had actually reacted that quickly, but before Liu’s trigger finger could squeeze off a shot, Kate kicked the pistol from his hand and sent it flying out of the open sliding glass door onto the balcony.

  The men sprinted to the gun, pushing and shoving each other, and knocking the sliding door from its track on their way out. Shattered glass showered over them, as the struggle for the gun continued out onto the balcony. Kate felt like she was watching in slow motion, but even in her surreal frame-by-frame view, the two men only seemed to gain speed, like a boulder rolling downhill, as their momentum carried them across the balcony and into the aluminum railing.

  Kate screamed as the railing gave way.

  Liu went over the edge with the first section of battered aluminum balusters. Then Patrick.

  “Patrick!” Kate cried, and she ran to the balcony’s edge.

  Patrick was hanging on by one hand to a piece of metal railing that was still fixed in the concrete floor of the balcony. His feet dangled in the air, high above the motor court below. Patrick had managed to grab Liu on his way over the railing, and his left hand clung to Liu’s forearm.

  Kate was standing at the balcony’s edge, looking down. Liu looked up, and their eyes met. He was twisting in midair like a kite tail, his life literally in Patrick’s grip.

  “Tell him to pull me up!” shouted Liu.

  Kate said nothing.

  Patrick said something. He spoke in a soft voice, as if his words were not intended for Kate, Liu, or any other living person. It was possible, Kate would later tell police, that Patrick was running out of strength and said something like “I can’t hold on any longer.” But the more likely scenario would forever remain a secret between her and Patrick.

  “I did it for Olga,” was what Kate heard.

  Liu slipped from Patrick’s grip, his scream piercing the night until his body slammed into the pavement below.

  Chapter 70

  January. A blanket of white covered Washington, D.C. Kate had butterflies in her stomach. Giant butterflies. Pterodactyls, even. She hoped that snow on opening night was the theatrical equivalent of rain on a wedding day, a sign of good luck.

  The theater held about two hundred, and every seat was taken. Kate chose to sit among strangers, not with family or friends. She preferred to surround herself with the unvarnished reactions of real theater goers, not the obligatory praise of folks who were kind enough to come but probably hadn’t seen a live play since their middle school’s production of Annie.

  Patrick was seated a couple of rows behind her. He’d brought a date, which Kate was happy to see. Her father was seated on the aisle in the next section over from her.

  Minutes before curtain, she received a text message from Irving Bass.

  Break a leg.

  She smiled to herself and texted back. Wish you were here.

  It was unusual for the director not to attend opening night, but the production of Code 6—she finally had a title—had been anything but “usual.” It had felt rushed from the beginning. A completely rewritten script. Casting before the script was even finished. Irving’s collapse and hospitalization. Hers should have been the first play of the coming season in September, not the first play of the new year in January. Not until December did Irving come clean with her and explain the fast track.

  “I have pancreatic cancer, Kate. There isn’t going to be a next season.”

  At first, she’d refused to believe it. Half joking, she’d even accused him of stopping at nothing to get her to accept his revisions to the script. But he was seriously ill, and the fact that her play would likely be his last became their secret. They drew closer over the following weeks, though disagreements were still intense. Irving had even thrown her out of rehearsal one afternoon in front of the entire cast. And, for the most part, Irving did get his way, including his “non-negotiable” item: one act, ninety minutes.

  Kate watched the first seventy-five minutes with fingernails digging into the armrest. Some of the “humorous” lines she’d absolutely refused to cut from the script had fallen flat with the audience; Irving had been right, after all. Nonetheless, the audience seemed to be enjoying it. The real test was the final scene—the volcanic point of conflict between an aging Thomas J. Watson, Sr., and his up-and-coming son.

  The setting was the 1950s. Watson was grooming his son to replace him as CEO. It was the dawn of the computer age, and IBM was transitioning from electromechanical technology to fully electronic. It was also the height of the McCarthy era, and Tom Junior had made the mistake of speaking out publicly against it. His father had harsh advice for him, leading to another one of their epic confrontations after work at the Watson town house on the Upper East Side.

  “A businessman sticks to business,” said Watson.

  “That’s the most narrow-minded view of the world I’ve ever heard.”

  “‘Shoemaker, stick to your last.’ It’s the best advice I ever got.”

  “Which explains how you kept quiet and just kept making shoes, even as German boots were trampling all over Europe.”

  “You’re such a smart-ass, Tom.”

  “You’re such a coward.”

  “I am not a coward!”

  “You don’t know what courage is. Did you not learn anything from the way Hitler played you? Spineless suggestions that he follow the Golden Rule didn’t exactly do the trick, did they?”

  “I did more than any businessman in America to keep war from coming.”

  “You did more than any businessman to treat Nazi Germany like a business problem. It wasn’t. You can’t appease men like Hitler and just hope they’ll come to their senses.”

  “I haven’t appeased anyone!”

  “If you don’t work against them, you’re appeasing them. A flat condemnation of Hitler could have made a difference.”

  “You have no idea what you’re talking about. One wrong word from New York and the Third Reich would have nationalized Dehomag. What would that have accomplished?”

  “You would have taken a stand. It would have shown the world that ‘world peace through world trade’ wasn’t just a catchy slogan.”

  “You’re never going to let that go, are you?”

  “No. You can retire and turn the page. I have to deal with this for the next ten, twenty—who knows how many years. I’ve only been president since January, and reporters are already breathing down my neck, trying to get records from Europe.”

  “Records of what?”

  “The Nazis’ use of Hollerith machines and punch-card technology.”

  “Why is that a story? Herman Hollerith licensed his patents to Willy Heidinger in 1910. Punch cards were part of the German economy long before the Nazis even existed.”

  “The story isn’t about the German economy. It’s about Nazi concentration camps.”

  “Then it has nothing to do with IBM.”

  Tom paused, his gaze tightening. “Who is Harold J. Carter?”

  “Carter? The name doesn’t ring a bell.”

  “I’m told he visited IBM headquarters in July 1943.”

  “Carver, you say?”

  “Harold Carter. Damn it, Dad. Don’t pretend like you don’t know! He’s an investigator with the Economic Warfare Section of the Department of Justice.” Again he paused, and then he asked in a louder voice, “Did he visit IBM headquarters in July 1943?”

  Watson breathed deep, then answered. “Yes. He was here.”

  “And I have to hear this from a newspaper reporter,” Tom said with an angry chuckle. “You didn’t think to tell me?”

  “Nothing came of it.”

  “What was the Justice Department investigating?”

  “Our German subsidiary.”

  “What about it?”

  “Making sure we played no part in our subsidiary’s support for the German military.”

  “In other words, making sure we weren’t in violation of the Trading with the Enemy Act?”

  “And we weren’t,” said Watson.

  “That’s not the point! Why didn’t you tell me about this?”

  “It wasn’t even an investigation. The Justice Department looked into dozens of companies during the war. Companies as red, white, and blue as Standard Oil.”