Chapter Text
- Where You Hang Your Hat
Centuries later, when the new one asked her how she had come up with the whole plan, Nile had to think about it for a while, to untangle the strands of memory. Eventually, she decided on the afternoon several days after a tangle with Chinese drug smugglers in New York. They had gone to a safe house on Cape Ann to rest from the job and wait for Copley to cover their tracks. By that time, Nile had grown accustomed to the shabby, haphazard safe houses scattered around Europe, and was surprised to see that the Cape Ann safe house was bright, clean, and spacious, perched on the water, the property ringed with beach roses.
Nicky was in the kitchen, boiling and pressing fruit for what he claimed would be a delicious drink later in the week. He seemed content with his work, so Nile didn’t worry about him. Joe had claimed the dining table and had covered it with documents and his laptop, which he occasionally swore at while doing something complicated involving online finance. Nile did wonder about him a little bit, but reasoned that, since Nicky didn’t seem worried, she would wait to worry until he did.
And, really, it was Joe’s own problem that he had chosen to spend the day indoors yelling at foreign banks. Nile knew an opportunity for serious downtime when she saw it, and was perfectly happy to spend an afternoon sprawled on the back deck in a lounger, wearing a tiny yellow bikini and sunglasses, and talking about life with Andy, who lay in her own lounger, wearing her own bikini and sunglasses. Nicky’s fruit concoction wouldn’t be ready for at least another day, and they had helped themselves to beers from the drinks refrigerator in the meantime. The warmth of the sun and the fresh sea breeze caressed them, and they listened to the waves break on the rocks nearby. Idly, Nile turned her head to watch a guided tour boat motoring slowly past, hugging the coastline. She could almost hear the squawk of the PA system on the boat.
“What do you think they’re saying?” she asked Andy.
Andy listened for a moment before she answered. “They’re probably explaining how this is the area where all the rich people are.”
That made sense. Their safe house was located in a neighborhood of ostentatiously simple seaside homes and was part of a small, almost unbearably picturesque town full of wealthy artists. Nile had heard the word “twee” before, but hadn’t really understood it until she had walked into one of the downtown shops in search of a few new shirts. She was enjoying herself thoroughly, and deliberately.
“So we’re living it up with the richies?” she said, a smile creeping over her face.
“Mostly. Some of these places are vacation rentals, but a lot of them are people’s summer homes. That’s how we can be safe here. They expect people to come and go.”
Nile took another swig of her beer. “Now that we’ve come, let’s not go for a while.”
“Sounds like a plan.”
Andy dozed off in the sunshine, and Nile let herself drift for a while as well.
The group relaxed enough over a dinner of delivery pizza and several bottles of good red wine that Nile finally felt comfortable teasing Joe about his epic battle with the banks. “Some of us know what the ‘vacation’ in ‘vacation home’ means,” she told him.
Joe laughed, and rescued an olive that had started to slide off of his slice of pizza. “Oh, I intend to relax,” he said, and aimed a smoldering look at Nicky that was so over the top that Nile realized that he had done it mostly to tease her back. Nicky snorted into his wine, and Andy lobbed a piece of green pepper in Joe’s general direction. Satisfied, Joe took another bite of pizza. “But seriously,” he said. “Most of that financial work will involve you, so we should sit down together soon and discuss it.”
Nile groaned. “Later. Not while it’s so nice.”
“It’ll keep for a bit,” Joe agreed. “Tomorrow’s supposed to be bikini weather again.”
“Or canoeing weather,” Nicky suggested.
“Canoeing in bikinis,” Andy amended.
Nile rolled her eyes and helped herself to another slice of pepperoni.
The next day was beautiful, as Joe had predicted, but the day after dawned gloomy and wet. Joe and Nile left Nicky and Andy curled up on couches with novels, and Joe introduced Nile to the surprisingly complicated world of immortal finance. Each of them seemed to have several different accounts, many held anonymously at Swiss banks, and there were more group accounts buried deep in the layers of several fictitious holding companies.
“That’s a lot of misdirection,” Nile observed, and Joe nodded.
“You don’t want to see what happens when Barclays figures out that an account’s been active since it was founded.”
Nile looked the date up on her phone – 1690. Okay, Joe had a point there.
He showed her a series of account pages and financial spreadsheets, and she gave a low whistle at the size of the accounts. “That’s a lot of money there. That’s, like, Jeff Bezos money. Or Bill Gates.”
Joe grinned. “The twin miracles of compound interest and a couple of lucky investments. Anyway, the thing I’ve been working on is making sure that enough of the group assets are liquid so that we can set up a few accounts for you.”
“Me?” Nile blinked. “I already have an account. Fifth Third Bank in Chicago.”
“Not for long,” Joe said. “Copley put your KIA papers through, and your family will have to close that account. Don’t worry, I had him double-check. You put your brother down as beneficiary, so he’ll get the money and any residuals from your service.”
“It’s not much, but it’s something.” Her brother had been saving up for DePaul, and Nile hoped that her money might help, at least a little.
Joe smiled at her. “You’re a good sister,” he said. “You look out for your family, and your other family will look out for you.”
It turned out that there was only so much that they could do online, from Cape Ann, but it was easy enough to grant Nile access to two of the group accounts and to set up what Nile privately thought of as Baby’s First Mutual Fund. By the time Nicky wandered in, soft and sleepy from a nap, Nile had control of more money than her mother had ever made in her life, and her head spun just thinking about it.
Nicky leaned over the back of Joe’s chair and draped himself over Joe from behind. He pressed a kiss into the crook of Joe’s neck and blinked owlishly at Nile. “It’s a lot to handle at once,” he said. “But it looks like you’ve been doing pretty well in here.”
Joe pulled on Nicky’s arms. “It’s been better than pretty good. Nile picked this up right away.”
“Mmm. That’s good.” Nicky glanced at Nile. “Booker and Joe used to do the accounts together. If you got through that much in just a few hours . . .”
Nile blew out a breath and thought about that. She hadn’t ever thought of herself as being suited to high finance, but maybe that was just because she’d never been around serious money. “I could learn to do this,” she said. “I mean, I’ve got time.”
“And the head for it.” Joe reached up and rubbed Nicky’s hair. “This one has tried many times, but his talents lie elsewhere.”
“I peaked in the fourteenth century,” Nicky explained happily. “I was back in Genoa for a while, and I learned double-entry bookkeeping. It may have been a descendant of my infant niece who taught it to me.”
“The one who kept the Messari accounts?” Joe asked.
“His son, I think.”
Nile considered this for half a minute, and then she could have sworn that she actually felt her brain snap. High finance was one thing, but deep finance was something else entirely. “Okay,” she said. “I think I need to go lie down about this now.”
Joe chuckled, and Nicky snuggled a little closer into the crook of his neck. “I warmed up the couch upstairs just for you,” he said.
Nile actually went up to her bedroom and settled into the chaise longue there. She tried to nap, but her racing thoughts wouldn’t allow it. Joe had promised to take her to Switzerland very soon so that she could set up her very own numbered Swiss bank account – and how crazy was it that she, Nile Freeman, would soon own a numbered Swiss bank account, like some swanky villain in the old black-and-white movies that her mother had watched while she did the ironing when Nile and her brother were little?
In the meantime, she had access to far more money than all of them together could ever spend in . . . she had almost thought “a lifetime,” but that didn’t really apply any more, so she settled on “a very long time.” There was a steady income as well, mostly from investments but also, as it happened, from some old rental properties that Nile suspected that at least Andy and Nicky had completely forgotten about. Four years’ tuition at DePaul wouldn’t even make a dent in that amount. Even if her brother decided to go to law school or something like that, somewhere pricey like Harvard or Yale, the group investments would make that money back in only a few years.
Really, it seemed as though the hardest part would be hiding the source of her brother’s “sudden windfall” scholarships. Nile had never been particularly interested in finance before, but here was the perfect opportunity to learn something completely new to her. Joe needed an assistant, and Nile needed someone to teach her how to take care of her family from beyond the grave. She was sure that they could work something out.
She finally did fall asleep on the chaise longue, and dreamed of money and college degrees until Andy came to wake her for dinner.
Several days later, Nile reluctantly packed her bags. Their stay on Cape Ann had been amazing, culminating in an evening spent at a waterside lobster shack where Andy taught Nile how to disassemble a whole boiled lobster while Nicky dined on fried clam strips and Joe dug into a fried haddock sandwich. Nile could easily have spent another week in that house by the sea, but Andy thought that another job might be on the horizon, and Joe suggested that they go to Europe early to establish Nile’s first Swiss bank account.
By now, Nile knew enough about their methods of operation that she had no illusions of simply driving to Logan Airport and flying coach on Lufthansa to Zürich. Instead, Andy had booked them a side job escorting a shipment of pharmaceuticals on a UPS flight. The accommodations were nothing to write home about, but, as Andy pointed out, they were off the grid, they were making money instead of spending it, and as cargo escorts, they could wear their own clothes instead of UPS uniforms. Nile had to concede that last point, and Andy promised to treat her to a significant amount of Swiss chocolate to make up for bedding down in a cargo hold.
Once in Switzerland, Andy drove them to a safe house just outside of Lugano, as dusty and dilapidated as Nile had expected it would be. Nicky immediately went back out to go food shopping while Andy, Joe, and Nile removed dust covers from furniture and freshened up the living space.
“So far, that’s safe houses near Paris, London, Boston, and here,” Nile said, as she wiped down the kitchen counter. “How many of these places do you have?”
“More than a few,” Andy said, rooting through a silverware drawer. “We try to have at least one within four hours of most major cities in the world. Easier to keep our gear in a house like this than in a hotel or hostel.”
Nile looked at the house, which clearly had not seen life in years. “Where do you get places like this?”
Andy shrugged. “Depends. We own a couple of them outright, mostly the ones in the Americas. I don’t know the details. Joe can tell you more. Honestly, a lot of the ones in Europe we just sort of . . . found. Abandoned, after wars. We claimed quite a few places in 1946.”
Nile decided she didn’t want to think too closely about how those houses had come to be abandoned. “Do I even want to know what you did in World War Two?”
“Different things,” Andy said. “We split up for a few years. I flew with the Night Witches for a while. That was where I learned to fly a plane. I think Booker might have been with the French Resistance.”
“Nicky and Joe?”
“You’d have to ask them. But they don’t like to talk about it much.”
Nile tried to work up the courage to ask Joe about the Second World War as they drove into the city the next day, but only got as far as asking him about the safe houses. Joe described a trust, buried within several shell companies similar to those that protected some of their liquid financial assets. “All this, I’m happy to teach you,” he said. “But first, let’s get you set up.”
He brought her to a bank called Edmond de Rothschild, explaining that he knew the family who had founded it. “They were Jewish, and wealthy, which was not an easy thing to be in Europe in those days,” he said. “They were strange people, but kind, and they treated me with as much respect as they gave to Nicky, so I knew that I could trust them.”
Nile and Joe stayed at the bank for just over an hour. When they emerged into the afternoon sunshine, Nile had an account listed discreetly under a number instead of her name, filled with a generous portion of money from the group account at the same bank. She worried about paying it back, but Joe assured her that it was a grant and not a loan.
“The money will replenish itself sooner or later,” he said, “and we can afford to wait for later. It’s more important that you have your own money and your own bank cards. After all, you may not always want to travel with us.”
Nile had to smile at that. “It’s not that you and Nicky don’t give adorable PDA,” she admitted. “But sometimes a girl just needs to find her own entertainment.”
Joe poked her in the shoulder, and she laughed at him. Still giggling, they made their way through broad streets and a lovely green park to a small ice cream café on the lake shore. Andy and Nicky waited for them there. Andy was licking an ice cream cone that featured at least three different bright pastel colors of gelato, and she waved as she saw them approaching.
“Kiwi, raspberry, and passion fruit,” she said. “Go get something good, and then come join us.”
Nile and Joe headed toward the café, although both of them noticed that Nicky had no ice cream, but was contemplating a small cup of coffee with an oddly pensive look on his face. Joe bought a cone of coffee and hazelnut gelato, and Nile decided on apricot and passion fruit, and they returned to the table. Nicky was still staring resolutely at his coffee.
Andy waved for them to sit down. “We’ve got a job,” she said.
Joe glanced over at Nicky. “Human traffickers?”
“Drug smugglers?” Nile asked.
“Exotic animals,” Andy said.
Nile and Joe blinked at each other. Nile recalled an old cop show she’d seen as a teenager that had featured a tiger, a monkey in a basketball, and two cops in their underwear. Privately, she decided that, if anyone was going to strip down to bra and panties for this job, she was going to make sure it was Andy. “Am I going to need tips on tiger wrestling?” she asked.
Andy smiled. “Not this time. There’s a shipment of slow lorises coming in. We’re going to intercept it, take down the smugglers, and hand off any of the lorises that survived the transport to an animal rescue agency. Copley’s got it all arranged.”
Nile licked her gelato, and took out her phone to Google slow lorises. “They’re pretty cute.”
“And venomous, which is why Copley thought we’d be good for it,” Andy said. “Well, you’ll be good for it. I’ll concentrate on the smugglers, but I’ll leave the lorises to you. Just be careful. Loris venom stings like a mother.”
“Okay, so we’ll wear gloves.” Nile looked at Nicky, who still had not really acknowledged any of them. “We’ll be okay, right?”
Andy sighed. “The lorises are coming in by ship. We’ll intercept them at the port.”
Joe looked pained. “What port, Andy?”
“Genoa.”
It took Nile a minute, but then the implications of what Andy had just said hit her.
“When was the last time you were there?” she asked, carefully aiming the question to the group at large.
“1725,” Joe said softly. He had scooted his chair over closer to Nicky’s, but Nicky remained stubbornly locked inside his own head, refusing to look up from his coffee, which was growing colder by the second.
Andy licked her ice cream again and looked awkward. “We’ll get hotel rooms nearby, spend a day or so after the job,” she said.
No one spoke for a few moments after that. Nile looked at Nicky’s hand, clenched into a fist, on the table beside his coffee cup. Slowly, she covered his hand with her own, waiting a few seconds, as though the warmth of her skin could actually melt his fist open. And, after a moment, he did relax his hand just enough that she could nudge his fingers loose and actually hold his hand. He returned the grip, and finally looked up. Though his face remained as closed off as before, his eyes were wide and haunted.
“I got you,” she said. “We all got you. Semper fi, you know?”
The corner of Nicky’s mouth twitched, and a little bit of the tension left his frame. Joe put his hand on the back of Nicky’s neck and massaged it a little. Slowly, Nicky began to relax.
Andy blew out a breath of her own. “Let’s figure out a plan,” she said. “We should leave in a few hours so we can scope out the port before the ship docks.”
Later, in the car, driving through Northern Italy, Nile glanced around. Nicky was driving, his attention entirely consumed by the other drivers on the road. Joe and Andy, like all good soldiers, were conked out in their seats. Nile slid her phone from her pocket and made sure it was on mute before texting.
Where are you from?
Booker’s reply came fast enough that Nile thought he must be somewhere in the same time zone. Beaumont-en-Verdunois. Northern France. Not too far from Belgium.
Nile considered a moment before she responded. Do you ever go back there?
Booker texted back a skull emoji. As Nile wondered what he meant by that, he explained. It was destroyed in 1918. He followed up with a link to a Wikipedia page about les villages détruits. It was a short enough read, and Nile figured that Booker hadn’t been terribly attached to the place to begin with. Just as she finished the page, another text came through.
Where are you?
Andy hadn’t said that Booker couldn’t know that. He couldn’t come to find them, but there was no reason he shouldn’t know. Driving to Genoa. For a job.
A sad-face emoji came back, once more followed by an actual text. Understood. I wish you the best.
Thanks. Nile slid her phone back into her pocket, curled against the car window, and closed her eyes.