Persuader

had done it to her. She probably thought she was doing me a favor. By keeping my stuff dry. By keeping it from rusting.
    She was just a dumb naive kid from Ireland, trying to help me out. And I had killed her, as surely as if I had stood there and butchered her myself.
    "I'm responsible for security," I said. "I should have suspected her."
    "You're responsible only since last night," Beck said. "So don't beat yourself up over it.
    You haven't even got your feet under the table yet. It was Duke who should have made her."
    "But I never would have suspected her," I said. "I thought she was just the maid."
    "Hey, me too," he said. "Duke, also." I looked away again. Stared at the sea. It was gray and heaving. I didn't really understand. She found it. But why would she hide it so well? "This is the clincher," Beck said.
    I looked back in time to see him lifting a pair of shoes out of the bag. They were big square clunky items, black, the shoes she had been wearing every single time I had seen her.
    "Look at this," he said.
    He turned the right shoe over and pulled a pin out of the heel with his fingernails. Then he swiveled the heel rubber like a little door and turned the shoe the right way up. He shook it. A small black plastic rectangle clattered out on the table. It landed facedown. He turned it over.
    It was a wireless e-mail device, exactly identical to my own.
    He passed me the shoe. I took it. Stared at it, blankly. It was a woman's size six. Made for a small foot. But it had a wide bulbous toe, and therefore a wide thick heel to balance it visually. Some kind of a clumsy fashion statement. The heel had a rectangular cavity carved out of it. Identical to mine. It had been done neatly. It had been done with patience. But not by a machine. It showed the same faint tool marks that mine did. I pictured some guy in a lab somewhere, a line of shoes on a bench in front of him, the smell of new leather, a small arc of woodcarving tools laid out in front of him, curls and slivers of rubber accumulating on the floor around him as he labored. Most government work is surprisingly low-tech. It's not all exploding ballpoint pens and cameras built into watches. A trip to the mall to buy a commercial e-mail device and a pair of plain shoes is about as cutting-edge as most of it gets.
    "What are you thinking?" Beck asked.
    I was thinking about how I was feeling. I was on a roller-coaster. She was still dead, but I hadn't killed her anymore. The government computers had killed her again. So I was relieved, personally. But I was more than a little angry, too. Like, what the hell was Duffy doing? What the hell was she playing at? It was an absolute rule of procedure that you never put two or more people undercover in the same location unless they're aware of each other. That was absolutely basic. She had told me about Teresa Daniel. So why the hell hadn't she told me about this other woman? "Unbelievable," I said.
    "The battery is dead," he said. He was holding the device in both hands. Using both thumbs on it, like a video game. "It doesn't work, anyway." He passed it to me. I put the shoe down and took it from him. Pressed the familiar power button. But the screen stayed dead.
    "How long was she here?" I asked.
    "Eight weeks," Beck said. "It's hard for us to keep domestic staff. It's lonely here. And there's Paulie, you know. And Duke wasn't a very hospitable guy, either."
    "I guess eight weeks would be a long time for a battery to last."
    "What would be their procedure now?" he asked.
    "I don't know," I said. "I was never federal."
    "In general," he said. "You must have seen stuff like this." I shrugged.
    "I guess they'd have expected it," I said. "Communications are always the first things to get screwed up. She drops off the radar, they wouldn't worry right away. They'd have no choice but to leave her in the field. I mean, they can't contact her to order her home, can they? So I guess they would trust her to get the battery charged up again, as soon as she could." I turned the unit on its edge and pointed to the little socket on the bottom. "Looks like it needs a cell phone charger, something like that."
    "Would they send people after her?"
    "Eventually," I said. "I guess."
    "When?"
    "I don't know. Not yet, anyway."
    "We plan to deny she was ever here. Deny we ever saw her. There's no evidence she was ever here."
    "You better clean her room real good," I said. "There'll be fingerprints and hair and DNA all over the place."
    "She