Reflex (9 page)

Immediately on the other side of the barrier one of the diners, a woman, was staring at her with her mouth open, a glass of water lifted halfway off the table, but frozen. Her companion, a man facing away from Millie, was saying, "What's the matter, Paula. You look like you'd seen a ghost."

Millie tried to reassure her with a smile but she was still shaky and the expression on her face felt strange. Apparently it looked strange, too, for the woman flinched and dropped her glass on the floor. It wasn't a loud noise among the din of the diners but the Monk turned his head just as Millie turned back to check on him.

His eyes widened slightly and he turned back away from her, casually. "Would you give my best to Portia and the gang and tell her I can't wait to see her?" He listened for a second. "That's right." He was walking away as he talked, moving across the concourse toward the gift shop.

Millie fought back an urge to plant her toe firmly up his ass and turned, walking as quickly as she could toward the West Building. If she understood the Monk's conversation, there wasn't anybody covering this end of the concourse. Well, not yet. There might be someone running across, at the Mall level, right now.

She paused at the end of the shop, just before she turned right toward the stairs. The Monk had turned and was walking briskly after her, still back by the restaurant, but closing. He was talking on the phone again.

She ran up the stairs but shied away from the door at the top. It was straight across to the East Building and she could see a figure sprinting toward this door but still quite a ways away. She ducked into the gallery at the top of the stairs and stopped, unable to move, before Whistler's
The White Girl.

"Oh my God." She said it out loud. The girl, clad in a long white gown and standing on a wolf skin, was life size, the painting itself almost seven feet tall. White drapes behind, shining with light, an oriental carpet below the wolf skin. The woman's eyes, her dark brows, her dark brown hair, and red lips stood out against a sea of varying hues of white conveying a surprising amount of detail, but the thing that stopped Millie in her tracks, that captured all of her attention, was her stillness. Not an artificial stillness, but a calm stance.

Serenity. She's serene.

She wasn't running away from strangers. Whatever she was doing, she was facing it calmly, with poise.

I can do this.
She reached into her blouse and pulled out the tracking bug. Since talking to Sojee she'd disabled the microphone pickup but now she slid the back off and pushed the slide switch to its full-function position.

There was a museum guard standing at the entrance to the next gallery, but she was watching a group of children instead of Millie. Millie turned and said conversationally, "I'm being tailed, guys, and, unless it's you, you better get your ass over here. I'm going to stay in the National Gallery, West Building, main floor, but going from gallery to gallery."

She tucked the bug back into her bra and took the scarf off her head, then knotted it loosely around her neck like a tie. She took one more look at
The White Girl
and summoned resolve.
Share some of that serenity, please.

There were steps in the east foyer, at the head of the stairs, and she left, moving to the next gallery. Her head twitched as she passed five Winslow Homer paintings.
This is that sort of place. Get over it.
She summoned mental blinkers and moved on.

Many of the galleries had multiple doors leading from them, making the place a maze. She worked her way toward the middle of the building, settling in Gallery 56 before a six-foot-high portrait of Napoleon in his study. There were four entrances to the room and two museum guards.

She thought it was time to settle, to let her chasers find her, but Napoleon was staring at her a bit too directly. She moved around the bench in the middle of the room and studied instead
Portrait of a Lady
by Vigée-Lebrun: a woman portrayed by a woman. While this subject wasn't as serene as
The White Girl,
she seemed to know what she was about. When she looked out of the frame at Millie it was as if they were sharing something. Millie didn't feel studied and judged as she did by Napoleon. The scale helped, too.
Portrait of a Lady
was only three-and-a-half feet high. She didn't loom over Millie like the Emperor did.

She stood and moved close enough to read the note card. "—was under threat of the guillotine after the revolution. She was forced to flee Paris in disguise in 1789."

Maybe that's what you have to share with me—you are another woman pursued.
Millie licked her lips.
And you survived.

Next to
Portrait of a Lady
was another work by the same artist, two woman sitting next to each other while two children hung on one of the women.
The Marquise de Pezé and the Marquise de Rouget with Her Two Children
read the card. They watched Millie kindly, even the very young boy with his head in his mother's lap.

My allies are everywhere.
Millie laughed quietly, causing the female guard to look her way. Millie smiled at her, then looked up, at the security cameras.
And not just in the paintings.

She thought about her jump on the concourse level. Was she under the eye of a security camera then? Would anyone check it if she was? She shook her head. What mattered for now was that her followers were walking past countless video cameras as they searched for Millie in the museum. If the NSA couldn't get access to the recordings, then she would be very much surprised.

She nodded at the two women in the painting and moved on, out the west door, to consort with several more allies, several portraits by Goya, particularly
Señora Sabasa Garcia.

Here, finally, they seemed to catch up with her. The Monk passed by the door to the East Sculpture Hall, and moved on without pausing, but shortly thereafter, a brunette, her hair pulled tightly back in a bun, wearing heavy makeup, a tailored jacket, jeans, and knee-high boots came in and began studying the
Still Life with Figs and Bread
on the wall behind Millie.

Millie smiled at
Señora Garcia
and left by the north door, moving west through the main hall and into the rotunda where a bronze Mercury dominated the center. She eyed the main entrance to the south but wanted to stay under the eyes of the security cameras, near the museum guards, in the public eye.

She moved into the West Sculpture Hall and took the second left, chosen because it was empty for the moment, except, of course, for the ever-present guard.

She stopped, blinking.
Why is no one here?
It had to be an abnormal ebb in the tide of patrons—the room was filled with Rembrandts. She turned slowly in the middle of the room, then froze opposite another ally—
Saskia van Uylenburgh, the Wife of the Artist.
Millie felt the connection again, the sense of shared problems, of shared strengths.

A couple came in through the east door and started moving around the gallery, studying a gorgeous rendition of a European man in turban and robe. Millie eyed them. They weren't very convincing. The woman hung on the man's arm but her posture was wrong, not relaxed. If they'd walked into her office like that she would've thought,
impending divorce, they're going through the motions.

Now she gave it another interpretation.
They don't have an existing relationship that calls for touching each other. That's camouflage, for me.

Millie took the west door and turned sharply, to put her out of sight of the couple. She counted to three, then stuck her head back around the door. The couple was moving toward her, walking apart, no longer touching. The instant they saw Millie they each swerved toward the other, then paused to study another Rembrandt.

Gotcha.

Millie turned and walked. She was scared but she was also smiling.
Come on, guys, it's time for the NSA to put in an appearance.
She moved through the gallery, a roomful of Dutch painters who were
not
Rembrandt, and into a roomful of Flemish work, notably, Rubens. She paused before a giant painting over ten feet wide and seven feet tall.

Ouch—that's a little too close to home.

It was
Daniel in the Lions' Den
and, while Daniel's eyes were on heaven, several of the life-sized lions looked out at Millie with startling intensity.

She only had one other exit from this room, besides the direction she came in. She took it and found herself in a smaller room with more Rubens. She cut through it into a larger gallery and paused before yet another Rubens,
The Assumption of the Virgin.

She paused again. "That's the ticket," she muttered. Angels and cherubs carried the Madonna toward heaven while onlookers either stared up in awe or touched the discarded shroud.
Where are you, Angels?

She took deep breaths and turned from
The Assumption
to
Marchesa Brigida Spinola Doria,
the only other Rubens in the room. The woman wore an enormous Elizabethan collar but she looked out at Millie with impish merriment.

Right, another ally. If she can look amused in
that
collar, perhaps I can relax under these circumstances.
She decided to settle for a moment, to let them present themselves again, to give her someone to point at, when the NSA finally showed up. Fifteen minutes went by while the
Marchesa
and she communed, during which the only people to enter the room were a woman shepherding seven pre-teen girls.

Her phone rang and Millie jumped. The guard glared at her and she scrambled to silence the ringer.

"Hello?" It was the first time the phone had rung and she seriously expected it to be from someone who'd read the flyer.

"Millie, do you recognize my voice?"

It was Anders, the NSA agent.

"Yes. Thought you were still in the Sooner State?"

"We can gossip later, girlfriend. Right now we'd like you to leave the building on the Sixth Street and Constitution Avenue side. By the north door—the one that faces away from the Mall? There'll be a white cab waiting. The driver is wearing a red baseball cap. He's one of ours. Get in."

"What about my, uh, companions?"

"We'll be watching and recording. Trust us. This is what we do."

"All right." She stared at the impish face of the Marchesa. "Now?"

"Now."

"On my way." She hung up the phone and put it in her purse. The fastest route was through the Main Gallery to the Rotunda, then down the stairs. She walked quickly, looking straight ahead, fighting not to stare into every doorway she passed. She continued to hold her allies in her mind, the images of women throughout the Gallery.

Serenity. That's the ticket.

It was raining again, with a nasty wind that ripped at her clothes. Her raincoat was still in the bag, but she didn't want to take the time to put it on, so she held the bag over her head and sprinted for the street.

The cab was there, as promised, but she felt a stab of dismay as she saw someone sitting in the back.
Did someone grab it first?
In this rain, cabs would be eagerly sought. But the person in the seat handed the driver something, then opened the door and got out as she approached, leaving the door open for her.

"Thanks," she said as she ducked into the cab, but the man was walking briskly away, toward the museum. The car left the curb before she'd finished shutting the door and turned hard across two lanes of traffic to make the Sixth Street turn. She twisted in the seat to watch the museum door, but parked cars already blocked it, and then buildings as the driver whipped right onto Pennsylvania.

"Where are we going?" She dabbed at her glasses with her handkerchief.

The driver grunted. "We're meeting up with my boss but first we're feeling for ticks." He continued on down past the reflecting pool and entered the traffic circle near the Capitol building. He stayed in the circle three times around, then spun off south on First, spun around the next traffic circle twice, then took Maryland Avenue toward the south side of the Mall.

The traffic circles made Millie carsick and she leaned back and closed her eyes, taking deep breaths. When she opened them again, they were running down the far side of the Mall, behind the Air and Space Museum on Independence Avenue, south of the National Gallery but out of sight.

"Looks like we're clear," the driver said.

Millie looked at him for the first time. He was bearded and looked somewhat middle-eastern, though his accent was pure Boston. He was wearing dark glasses despite the gray rain.

"I'm going to stop in a second. There'll be a Verizon phone van. Hop out and into it, quick as you can."

He turned sharply on Seventh, north again. The phone company van was parked illegally on the corner, orange cones set out, front and back. One of the van's back doors swung open as the cab braked and she was out the door and inside. She heard the cab's tires squeal on the rain-slicked pavement as it accelerated away and then the van door was slammed behind her.

The inside of the van smelled of ozone and mildew. It was like the surveillance van they'd used in Stillwater, cabinets of electronics and monitors and a pivoting workstation seat. Anders was the one who'd opened the door for her and he moved back, now, threading his way between the operator in the workstation chair and the sliding door. He sat in the backwards-facing bench seat behind the driver's seat and gestured her forward.

The console operator, a woman with short gray-streaked hair, moved, too, and patted the console seat. "Here, dear. We'd like you to look at some pictures."

Millie set the bag with her coat in it on the floor and edged onto the chair. It was warm in the van but she'd gotten wet in her run for the cab. She unknotted her scarf and pulled it across her shoulders, like a shawl.

"This is Becca Martingale," said Anders, indicating the operator. "She's our liaison with the Bureau."

"FBI?"

Becca nodded. "Yes, Counter-intelligence."

Millie groped for something polite to say, but settled for a tired nod. She looked at Anders and bit her lip. "Is she
fully
briefed?"