Page 37 of The Librarians

In the navy, Jonathan was trained in insertion and extraction. But tonight, his role is eye candy: He is to keep Ryan otherwise engaged while Hazel slips into the house and searches Conrad’s office and bedroom.

They went over their plan several times—or what passes for a plan.

“In movies people usually have an impressive plan at the beginning,” Hazel said at one point, “but as contingencies arise they must improvise. We’ve saved ourselves time by committing to improvisation right away.”

Jonathan wasn’t completely sure whether Hazel was joking. But she was right. They had very little to go on. The house is huge and he failed to pay adequate attention to Conrad’s side when Ryan gave them the tour.

He barely focused on Ryan’s side either, come to think of it, only on Ryan himself, never imagining that he’d need to infiltrate the place the next evening.

Without a good understanding of the terrain, everything is a crapshoot. But Hazel assured him that she remembers the layout of the house very well, especially the approach to Conrad’s private quarters.

She also reassured him that she’s had plenty of training in hand-to-hand combat, but that only makes Jonathan more nervous.

Not that he doesn’t believe her, but if she needs to use those close-quarter fighting skills then they will have failed resoundingly in their goal of stealth information gathering.

He pulls into a cul-de-sac not far from Conrad’s house. After the time change, night comes early and swift. Which is fortunate, as the cul-de-sac seems the kind where residents do not look kindly upon strangers coming into their little cove of exclusivity.

Somewhere nearby someone is grilling—the air is redolent with the aroma of mesquite smoke and searing protein. But tonight these otherwise appetizing smells make Jonathan’s stomach twist into a hard knot.

Hazel gets out of her car and slips into the rather cramped rear seat of his truck.

They’d considered putting on the tonneau cover and smuggling her onto Conrad’s property in the bed of the pickup, but decided in the end not to bother because if there are exterior cameras on the house, she would be caught on film either way—they only need to make sure that she isn’t seen at the beginning, in case Ryan meets them out in front again.

I’m almost there , he texts Ryan.

Ryan replies right away. I’ll open the gate. The front door is unlocked. Just come in.

Jonathan reads Ryan’s text aloud to Hazel, then guides the truck away from the curb. “You okay back there?”

“I’m fine. Thanks.”

He exhales. “I don’t know how you’re fine, Hazel. I’m sweating bullets for you.”

His hands are not clammy yet, but his antiperspirant will be in for the battle of its life tonight. And he wonders whether her apparent calm is as much a facade as his own.

“But we should be okay,” he says, as much to himself as to her. “Even if Ryan kicks me out after a few minutes, he’d still have no reason to check Conrad’s rooms.”

They are out of the cul-de-sac now. In the rearview mirror, Hazel lies down on the back seat.

“My opinion on this hasn’t changed,” she says.

“In case you aren’t invited to stay, you should leave and head home.

I can pass for an ex-girlfriend. An ex pawing Conrad’s things is bad, but I might get away with it, even if the cops show up.

The two of us in this together would look like we’re casing the joint. ”

That is the reason she insisted on bringing her own car. Jonathan understands her rationale, but he won’t be able to leave her behind, not until he knows that she is also safely out of the house, driving away.

They fall silent. He doesn’t need to persuade her. He only needs to do the right thing when the time comes.

His palms do perspire as he parks the truck by the front door of Conrad’s house.

“I’ll let you know when the window is open,” he murmurs, and steps out.

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 phone out 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 is great , right? Jonathan wants to 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’d developed 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.

Through a connecting door she enters the bedroom. The space is large but spare. Instead of books, the faint illumination of her flashlight reveals a whole shelf of vinyl records.

She has yet to get a true sense of Conrad in this house.

According to Ryan, he inherited most of the books that form the backbone of the house’s character.

The vinyls probably belonged to Romy Lonstein, once upon a time—there were piles and piles of them in the background of some of her social media posts.

What belongs to him, then, in this entire place? The ship in a bottle? The jar of tickets?

On his nightstand she finds—what else?—a stack of books. A volume of poetry by Cavafy, another by Margaret Atwood, a paperback copy of The Fifth Season in French, and what looks to be a wuxia epic in complex Chinese.

She picks up the copy of La cinquième saison and gently thumbs the edges. There is something tucked in the pages, acting as a bookmark—a postcard.

Of Madeira. Her fingers tighten.

She sits down on the edge of the bed and presses on her flashlight’s controls for stronger light. The front of the postcard is composed of smaller images: green peaks and gorges, glistening waterfalls, hikers walking alongside narrow, picturesque irrigation channels.

The corners of the postcard are slightly bent. There is a dent along the left side, too. Otherwise the cardstock is still smooth and shiny. She turns it over. To her surprise, there is writing on the back, the handwriting sharp and handsome but not easy to read.

She peers closer.

A click. A cold metallic barrel presses into her temple.

“Don’t move,” says a man.

Says Conrad.