Page 57 of The Librarians
The image Hazel had screenshot from her grandmother’s home security video was not high-res enough for Madeleine’s beta-testing app to ID the platinum blonde woman.
But the match Madeleine got with the man in the back of Perry’s picture pointed to Ahmed Khan, the husband of the South Asian couple who came to Game Night, to be the fake Tarik Ozbilgin in disguise.
Which made it likely that his “wife,” Ayesha Khan, who “rescued” Hazel from the Fifty Shades patron’s unwanted attention, might have been following Hazel and did not want her to see the video of the altercation, which showed her partner’s face, even if it’s not “Ahmed Khan’s” face.
The address the Khans gave to Detective Hagerty was an apartment in the complex nearest the library, the residents of which are heavily South Asian, many working for Austin’s numerous high-tech companies.
A young policewoman of South Asian descent ventured into the complex under the guise of an apartment seeker and found out that the Khans in fact lived in a different building, on a sublet that was against the apartment’s rental policy—though that was hardly anyone’s focus.
Theoretically, at that point the police had enough evidence to search the Khans’ apartment and make arrests, but the higher-ups hesitated, as they were dealing with dangerous individuals and the apartment complex is dense with residents.
So the entrapment scheme was given the go-ahead.
Astrid spends the day after the entrapment giving evidence downtown. Then she and Sophie join Jonathan and Conrad in a visit to Detective Jones in his hospital room—thank goodness the officer is recovering well and in good spirits.
When Astrid finally reaches home and turns on her TV, she is assaulted by breathless local news coverage.
“Our reporters are hard at work investigating the midnight shoot-out that resulted in one suspect dead and one APD officer injured—not to mention untold damages to one of the city’s most popular branch libraries! ”
Astrid winces at the shot of the library, covered in black tarp and neon police tape.
Another channel seems to have slightly better sources.
A reporter standing before the apartment complex announces, “It is my understanding that police discovered guns, cash, weaponized narcotics, and a veritable trove of wigs and silicone prosthetics for use in disguises, not to mention a stack of passports for each of the suspects.”
A third channel interviews Sophie. Sophie, looking dignified and authoritative, reassures the library’s patrons that work crews will be in place as soon as the police give the go-ahead and that the library will reopen at the earliest possible date.
The newspaper, thankfully, goes into some actual detail.
The suspects, known as Ahmed and Ayesha Khan while in disguise as South Asians, are said to be Russian nationals from the Caucasus region.
It is highly likely that they worked as FSB (Russian security agency) contractors.
But with funds tied up in the war with Ukraine, they needed an alternative source of income and turned to work as recovery agents, who typically seek stolen artwork and earn a commission when they return the artwork to their rightful owners.
It is also possible that the suspects were lying low in Austin, as sources inform The Statesman that the suspects were, under various aliases, wanted in France, Spain, and the UK.
The same sources assure The Statesman that European authorities will need to be patient: The NSA and the CIA are vying to interrogate the surviving suspect.
But consuming news about the case makes Astrid feel strangely hollow. Perry is gone. Whatever the infotainment sources have to say about the individuals responsible for his death or the circumstances around it, she can never bring him back.
When she and Hazel had their first good talk and she’d confessed a certain numbness where Perry was concerned, Hazel had told her that she might miss that numbness in the days to come.
Hazel was right. Numbness is infinitely easier on the psyche than the hot burn of shame brought on by the indifference she’d felt toward Perry’s fate.
Had she accepted his distressed avowal that there was a reason behind his ghosting, had she let him stay at her place, maybe, maybe he would have been safer. Maybe he’d still be alive.
When the noises in her head and the pain in her heart become too much, she picks up her phone to call Hazel, only to remember that Hazel is currently thirty thousand feet in the air, flying to San Francisco.
Singapore police want to interview her again and local law enforcement, after interrogating her all day, has granted the all-clear for her to leave the country.
But Sophie and Jonathan check in and make her feel less alone—as does Hazel, right before she boards her seventeen-hour San Francisco-to-Singapore flight.
The next afternoon, an unexpected text comes from Conrad. He is house-sitting for Hazel’s grandmother, who is on a tour of California wine country with her book club. Would Astrid care to come for tea? He has some information about Perry that she might like to have.
The drive to Hazel’s house is short, but it’s long enough for all kinds of dire possibilities to cross Astrid’s mind.
Conrad welcomes her to a dining table laid out with tea and scones. He pours her a cup of tea and nudges a cream-and-sugar set toward her. “I’m not quite sure how to begin—”
He isn’t as gregarious as Ryan, or as naturally embracing as Jonathan, but there is a stillness to his presence—reminiscent of Hazel’s—which convinces Astrid that she would have to fuck up far worse than she ever has to incur his disapproval.
That he’s seen too much to be bothered by blunders like hers, however stupid and unforgivable they may seem to her.
“I really loved him,” she blurts out. “Being with him felt like opening a window in a room that was boarded up for ages. It was all sunshine and spring breezes. But when he left, it was as if that window became bricked over. Then, when he came back, made a beeline for Hazel, and asked her all the same questions he asked me when we first met—even now, knowing why he did that, I still feel this scalding mortification. I really hated him at that moment and wished he would disappear forever.”
Her voice catches. “And he did—and now I keep thinking about everything I could have done differently.”
Conrad, seated across from her, bows his head.
“With regard to Perry, I will always carry a measure of guilt. The moment I found out that Hazel was married to Kit Asquith, I threw everything I had into digging up everything about him—and her. And I had far more connections at my disposal than Perry did—I made my friend in cybersecurity stop everything he was doing and put his entire team of hackers on this. Without that we wouldn’t have found the footage of Kit at the library, and without that , Perry would have never set foot in your workplace. ”
She tries to imagine what that would have been like—her spring without him, her summer without heartbreak—and cannot.
“But at the time I had no idea how that information would change his life—all our lives. I was away from Austin on his first visit and didn’t pepper him with questions—I figured if he found anything he’d let me know; otherwise I could ask after I returned.
But I got a text from Ryan instead. Ryan hardly saw Perry for a week and then came back from work one day to find a note on the kitchen island from Perry saying he’d already packed up and left. ”
Perry’s abrupt departure has long been a debilitating secret for Astrid; it’s disorienting to hear it brought up from the perspective of a puzzled friend.
“I texted and rang and got no response. Two weeks later I kicked down the door of his London flat and found him, well, not quite depressed but highly dejected.
“He’d gone teetotal eighteen months before and that was the only occasion I wished I could just pour a few pints down his gullet.
It must have taken the two of us gallons of soda water, six different kinds of chaat, and forty overs of cricket on telly before he confided that he’d received an anonymous text that threatened your safety if he didn’t vacate Austin immediately.
The sender included photos taken of you leaving home and arriving at work. ”
Conrad’s voice seems to come from a hundred miles away. Here it is, at last, the legitimate reason Astrid has always hoped for. Legitimate and terrible. All the fear and frustration Perry must have felt crowd into her airway. She can barely breathe.
Conrad sighs and pours himself a cup of tea.
“That was the first I heard of you. I was not thrilled with his decision to leave you in the dark, but to explain the matter would have involved telling you about the money he lost to Kit Asquith, and that was a sore point with Perry—he hated that he was exploited, especially since his family and friends had been telling him for years that he was a little on the gullible side.”
“Did you also think of him as gullible?”
Astrid can’t help but feel defensive on Perry’s behalf. Maybe he was gullible, but he was also open and curious. And what is the point of human interaction without at least a modicum of faith?
“I didn’t think of him as overly credulous, more…
untested,” answers Conrad, his voice low, his tone contemplative.
“He was generous by nature, and from time to time an acquaintance might take advantage of that. But Kit was someone he’d known since he was in nappies.
Their mothers served as bridesmaids for each other.
He wasn’t conned by Kit; he was betrayed.
And he had a really hard time working through that.
“Also, he believed you’d be spooked if you knew someone had locked in on you as a target.”