Page 58 of The Librarians

She would have been. She thought she would die of fright that night, hidden above her utility room, but being left all alone with only her imagination to fill in the void would have been just as bad.

“So there he was,” continues Conrad. “He’d hurt you, he despised himself, he was still out three million pounds—and he couldn’t even drink himself to oblivion. I forced him to take a shower, take a walk, and get some essentials in his fridge, and then I had to leave for work.

“But before I left, I made him promise that he wouldn’t go back to the library again. If someone wanted Kit’s money badly enough to threaten you, then they could just as well harm Perry.”

Astrid bites the inside of her lower lip. “But he came back anyway.”

“He came back anyway.” Conrad excuses himself, leaves the dining room, and returns a minute later with a manila folder and a tablet. He pulls out three sheets of paper from the folder and hands them to Astrid.

“These are from the Notes app on his phone. He’s been trying, on and off, to compose an apology slash explanation to you.”

Some of the drafts are quite short, others are much longer. On a quick scan, Astrid sees a sea of “I’m sorry,” “I wish I hadn’t,” and “I don’t know how to explain everything without sounding like a complete idiot—maybe because I have been one.”

Anguish and gladness collide inside her, a bittersweet vortex of emotions. She’s desperate to read Perry’s words more closely, but maybe not with Conrad looking on.

“I’d like to draw your attention to the final note,” says Conrad.

Astrid switches to the last sheaf of paper and skips to the very bottom.

Or have I been mistaken all along? Maybe the warning had nothing to do with Kit’s hoard but was simply some crazy ex of Astrid’s, in which case—

Astrid’s heart sinks, even though the worst has already happened.

Conrad rounds the dining table to stand before a large black-and-white canvas on the wall. Earlier Astrid thought it was an art print; now she sees that it’s a portrait of a nearly unrecognizable Hazel, her hair short and spiky, her gaze brooding.

“I think that was the reason Perry came back,” says Conrad, “this new belief that maybe he conflated the causality of two unrelated things. That and the fact that he probably kept tabs on Hazel’s grandmother’s social media, which I’d shared with him as part of our collective scrutiny of Kit Asquith and everyone around him.

He would have interpreted Hazel’s arrival at the library as an unmistakable sign that Kit had indeed left something there. ”

And so he rushed back…to his end: Those who had threatened and later killed him had rushed back too, for the exact same reason.

Conrad touches a corner of Hazel’s portrait. “Until this morning, these notes were all I had to share with you. But then I heard from Perry’s dad—a private detective Perry was working with contacted him.

“It would seem that after Perry came out of his funk, he became determined to find out who had threatened him. He engaged the PI. The number that was used to text him the threats didn’t yield anything.

He turned over all the photographs he took in Austin; the PI didn’t get anywhere with those either.

“Until the PI met with an old friend a few months later. The old friend has a flat in central London. In the same block lived a defected former Russian spy. The friend only learned about this neighbor after the spy died under suspicious circumstances. As he was talking to the PI, the topic came up and he showed the PI the CCTV footage that was sent around to all the residents of the flat block in the hope that they might be able to help with the investigation.”

Conrad next hands Astrid the tablet he brought. A video is on the screen, ready to play. She presses the button.

A man emerges from a door in a long corridor. He wears a fedora, its brim pulled low. The video cuts to footage from a different camera inside an elevator. It is located much lower and manages to capture a full-frontal image of the man’s face.

Recognition hits Astrid with a flash of prickly heat in the centers of her palms. “But that’s the fake Tarik Ozbilgin! So—so he really was a Russian agent.”

“He and his partner were mercenaries who took commissions from the FSB, most likely. Maybe they were cut loose, maybe they also acted as recovery agents on the side. I’m pretty sure they weren’t going to surrender Kit’s crypto fortune to the art fund he embezzled from—they were looking to swallow the whole thing themselves and did not want Perry’s fingers in the pie. ”

Conrad hands her another two pieces of paper. One shows two pictures of her, along with If you don’t want anything to happen to her, leave Austin within twenty-four hours.

The next was her again, standing forlornly in the children’s area, a stack of books in her hands. And the text that accompanied it reads, Do we really have to repeat ourselves?

Tendrils of cold dread curl around Astrid’s lower limbs, as if a revenant, emerging from underground, hooked its claws around her ankles.

“This second one, it was sent last Monday, the day before Game Night. Did Perry ever get it?”

“No, he left his phone behind because he was afraid whoever sent him the threat would be able to track his movement via his phone—at least he mumbled something about that back in spring.

He must have enabled message forwarding for some people in his contact list—yours were forwarded to his burner phone.

But this one was from an unknown number and he never got it.

“What happens next, unless the accomplice gives a full confession, we can only guess. But given that Perry never saw the text they sent him Monday before Game Night and showed up at the library the next day, it’s more than conceivable he then received an in-person threat to get the hell away.”

Astrid vaguely wonders what the mercenary looked like when he came face-to-face with Perry.

According to Jonathan, the man they fought the night of the entrapment, as befitting the owner of a “veritable trove of wigs and silicone prosthetics,” didn’t resemble either Ahmed Khan or the fake Tarik Ozbilgin.

But no matter what he looked like, the moment he opened his mouth to threaten Astrid, Perry would have connected him to the previous threat, and to the man captured in his camera roll who also happened to slip out of the London flat of a former Russian spy on the day the latter died under mysterious circumstances.

Dear God, what did that sweet fool do next?

“He should’ve left—they only wanted him gone so he wouldn’t find the private key before they did.

” Conrad rubs a hand over his face. “Or he should have gone to whatever security agency that could have hunted down the mercenary and protected him too. But judging by what happened, Perry might have confronted his eventual killer with the knowledge that he is a wanted man, believing that he’d checkmated the man. ”

What did Conrad say about Perry? Untested. The greatest travail he’d ever faced had been his parents’ divorce and Kit Asquith’s theft. He’d been too well sheltered, and had not understood the danger he faced.

“So that was the reason they opted to kill him that day itself,” she murmurs. “Because he’d become a threat to them.”

They found a homeless man to make some trouble.

The mercenary, disguised as an army medic—taking advantage of an ID card likely stolen from the real Tarik Ozbilgin and subsequently altered—used the opportunity to stick a patch of weaponized fentanyl on Perry.

A clever plan: An overdose of fentanyl would scarcely draw any attention and an executed homeless man told no tales.

Conrad gives the entire manila folder to Astrid.

There’s only one piece of paper left and it is a photograph Astrid has never seen.

But she does recognize the setting—atop Mount Bonnell—and she recognizes herself from the back, her hair, with blue streaks in it last spring, and her blue cardigan that she thought to be so cutely matching.

She took Perry to Mount Bonnell to see the sunset.

It was a gorgeous evening and the stony hilltop teemed with tourists and locals alike.

Several drones hovered overhead, lots of toddlers sat on parents’ shoulders, and the entire vibe was relaxed and happy.

Or maybe it was just her, projecting her joy outward onto everyone and everything.

They took several selfies together. She wanted to use the best one as the lock screen on her phone but refrained—she didn’t want to spook him. And then he left and she deleted all their selfies, even her favorite ones.

“This was his lock screen when I was in his London flat last spring. It was still his lock screen when my friend’s hackers accessed his phone last week to download all the data,” says Conrad.

“I won’t make excuses for him—he should have handled the threat to your safety very differently.

But I hope, well, maybe closure is overselling it, but I hope that this is something you would like to know.

That he was loath to leave and never forgot you. ”

Astrid caresses the edge of the picture. She imagines Perry looking at it—looking through it to happier, simpler times. “Conrad, have you ever met any of Perry’s ex-girlfriends?”

Conrad raises a brow at the abrupt change in subject. “Some, yes.”

“Did they ever wish they could hit him upside the head?”

Conrad chortles. “A lot. His friends too, frankly.”

Then mirth disappears from his face, replaced by wistfulness. “But in the end we all remember him fondly, because he was good and decent through and through—a dumbass at times, but our beloved dumbass.”

Conrad leaves, telling Astrid that he has some stuff on the stove.

Alone in the dining room with the contents of the manila folder, Astrid sits for a while with its slender weight in her hands. It’s all evidence, evidence that she didn’t open her heart and love in vain.