by Anne Stuart
There was no money—she searched the place thoroughly. She found a small cache of what was presumably cocaine or heroin—she didn’t give a damn which, but not cash. Not a cent to get her to the opposite side of Paris. It was easy enough to orient herself, with the Eiffel Tower to her left, the Seine snaking its way through the shadowy city. It would be a hike through the back streets and alleys to her apartment in the Marais, but anything was preferable to staying here. She grabbed his coat—a long, black cashmere trench that felt butter-soft in her hands. The faint trace of his scent teased her, enough so that she almost threw it down again, rather than wrap herself in the smell and feel of him.
But now was not the time for dramatic gestures. She ran a hand through her hair, feeling the uneven lengths, the scorched ends. There was nothing she could do about it now, but when she made it back to her apartment she could get Sylvia to fix it.
He’d told her it was too dangerous to go back to her apartment, but then he’d told her a great many lies, and he was the only recognizably dangerous thing in her life. Besides, no one knew where she lived. Sylvia sublet the tiny apartment from one of her former lovers, and neither of them were on record as tenants. Chloe’s mail arrived at the Frères Laurent, her cell phone was billed to the United States and there was really no way they could find her without trying very hard indeed. And she didn’t think they’d consider her worth the effort.
That didn’t mean she wasn’t going home to America. She didn’t trust Bastien for one moment, but she’d seen enough in the past twenty-four hours to know that she’d inadvertently gotten mixed up with some very dangerous people, and if he was one of the good guys she really didn’t want to see the bad ones. The safest place for her was back in the mountains of North Carolina, surrounded by her overprotective family. For some reason Paris and the surrounding countryside had lost its allure.
Slogging through the cold, wet street, head down, with Bastien’s coat wrapped around her, didn’t do much to improve her mood. Her feet were numb from the cold, but at least the shoes fit. Funny that he’d stop long enough to buy her a pair of shoes on their escape back to Paris. She couldn’t even begin to understand what went through his mind, and she didn’t want to try. All she wanted to do was get far enough away from him and the others that no one could find her.
She was hungry—starving, in fact, and even remembering Hakim wasn’t enough to distract her. She couldn’t remember how long it had been since she’d eaten, and there was only so long she could go on nervous energy. There’d be food at her apartment, food and a warm bed. Tomorrow she’d fly home, on the first plane she could get. And maybe next time she’d listen to her family when they told her to stay put.
She was right—the rain was turning to snow. She stopped for a moment, leaning against a building to catch her breath. No one paid any attention to her as they moved quickly through the streets, their own heads down, intent on their own business. After a moment she pushed away and started forward again. It was growing dark, and even on the well-lit streets of Paris she didn’t want to be out alone any later than she had to be. Yanking the coat closer to her body, she strode forward again, trying to ignore the faint scent of his cologne.
It took him longer than he’d expected. Franc had been agreeable, particularly when Bastien had demonstrated how generous he was prepared to be, and promised to have the papers ready by 6:00 p.m. They could stop on the way to the airport and it would only take a few moments to add the right photograph. He was sending her out on Air France just before midnight, and after that he could breathe a sigh of relief, pay attention to business. Hakim was dead a little earlier than planned but that was no great disaster, and Christos hadn’t even shown up. There was a good chance of salvaging the mission once Chloe was out of the way. He wasn’t quite sure why he couldn’t wait until then—he was seldom distracted by sentimentality. Just one more piece of unexpected behavior that he would have a hard time explaining to the Committee. Except that he had no intention of telling them the truth.
He stopped at a café and ordered a whisky and soda. The rain was coming down steadily, turning to snow, and he sat in the window, looking out into the dismal streets, waiting.
The man who sat down opposite him looked like a British civil servant—stuffy, unimaginative, middle-class and middle-aged. His name was Harry Thomason, and he was, in fact, a ruthless, soulless automaton who ran the Committee like a well-oiled machine. He shrugged out of his wet raincoat, put his newspaper on the table and ordered a cup of coffee before he finally looked at Bastien.
“What have you done, Jean-Marc?” he demanded.
Bastien lit a cigarette, his first in the last two days, milking the action of all its drama. Harry probably had as good an idea of his real name as anyone, but he went along with the Jean-Marc alias, not knowing that that particular name had come from his aunt Cecile’s pet pig.
That Jean-Marc had been a very elegant pig, of course. A family with their bloodlines would have nothing less, and Cecile enjoyed carting around her Vietnamese potbellied pig into the finest hotels in Europe and Asia. An elegant, bad-tempered pig, Jean-Marc had finally disappeared while Cecile and his mother were touring Burma. He’d always wondered if he’d ended up in someone’s kitchen, cosmic payback for the time he’d taken a chunk out of Bastien’s backside. It had been his fault—he was twelve at the time, bored, defiant, tired of being dragged from one end of the globe to the other, an adjunct to Cecile and Marcie’s renegade behavior, and as the pig received more attention and affection than he ever had, he’d decided to annoy Jean-Marc as he dozed on his fur-lined bed.
Jean-Marc had taken exception to it, and bitten Bastien on the butt, earning his grudging respect. At least the pig didn’t ignore him.
Cecile had lost interest in the pig by the time he’d disappeared, just as his mother had lost interest in her only child years ago, possibly days after he’d been born. She’d made it very clear that his presence on this earth was not by her choice—her possessive lover had refused to let her abort the child until he found out that he wasn’t the father, and by the time he took off it was too late. Marcie was in some quack’s office begging for a late-term abortion when she went into labor, and he was born three hours later.
He always wondered why she hadn’t simply strangled him and tossed him in a Dumpster or garbage can. Or not even soiled her hands by doing that much, but left him to die of starvation and cold on that November night thirty-two years ago. Maybe she’d been momentarily sentimental. Maybe it was the fact that she’d been very ill, so ill she’d almost died, so ill that they’d had to operate, removing her uterus and ovaries, making certain she’d never go through the indignity of pregnancy again. At one point he used to speculate that she’d been lying in that hospital bed, afraid of dying, and she’d made a bargain with the god she professed to believe in. If her life would be spared, she’d raise her child and be a good mother.
Well, she’d fucked that up. She’d been a lousy mother. He’d been raised, if you could call it that, by a series of hotel maids and houseboys, until he’d finally taken off at the age of fifteen, leaving with an old friend of his mother’s, a woman twice his age with the body of a teenager and the heart of a…
Well, she had had a heart, and she’d loved him. Maybe been the very first person to do so. He’d left her in Morocco when he was seventeen—just walked away one day when she was out shopping, buying him presents. When they weren’t in bed she liked to dress him in elegant clothes, and he’d learned to appreciate silk suits early on. She’d died a few years later, he’d heard, but by then he was well past any feelings of regret.
He’d been recruited in his early twenties, by a man very much like Harry Thomason. A cold-blooded, heartless son of a bitch who knew exactly what someone like Bastien could be capable of, if properly trained. And they’d seen to his training.
Politics, morals meant nothing to him. He was ostensibly working for the good side, but as far as he could tell there wasn’t a wh
ole lot of difference between the two. The body count on both sides piled high, no one even noticed the innocent lives that got caught in between, and for that matter, neither did he. Chloe Underwood was an aberration, one he planned to take care of before people like Harry found out about her.
“So what happened at Hakim’s?”
That was one of the things Bastien hated about Harry—the man wouldn’t say shit if his mouth was full of it. “Things got fucked. What can I say?” He stubbed out the cigarette. He’d lost the taste for them, another annoyance.
“You can tell me what happened to the girl. Who was she?”
“Girl?”
“Don’t play me, Jean-Marc. You weren’t the only operative at Château Mirabel this weekend. The little American secretary—who was she working for? What happened to her?”
Bastien shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine. I’m thinking she was on the baron’s payroll, though she may have been there for recreational purposes. You know how the baron likes to watch, and he’s always enjoyed Monique with another woman.”
Harry wrinkled his nose with the distaste of a born celibate. “And you didn’t bother to find out?”
“I did my best, boss,” he drawled, knowing Harry hated being called “boss.” “I couldn’t get her to admit to anything.”
Harry looked at him for a long moment. “If you couldn’t get anything out of her then I doubt there was anything to find out. If I can say one thing about you, it’s that you’re the best interrogator we’ve got. Better than anyone on the other side, even the late Gilles Hakim. He always tended to enjoy his work a little too much. So tell me, what happened to our old friend Gilles, and what happened to the girl?”
“Dead.” He lit another cigarette. He didn’t want it—even Gitanes were tasteless, but it gave him something to do.
“You kill them both?”
“Just Hakim. He’d already done the girl.”
“What happened to her body?”
Bastien looked at him through the drifting smoke. “There wasn’t much left of her by the time Hakim got through.”
“I see.” Harry took a drink of his coffee. The man didn’t smoke, didn’t drink, didn’t fuck as far as Bastien could tell. He was a machine, nothing more. Just as Bastien was trained to be. “A little premature,” he continued, “but it should be salvageable, as long as there are no loose ends. Hakim was disposable, but Bastien Toussaint is not. The others will be coming to Paris to finish the discussions, and the dilatory Christos will be joining them. You’ll be waiting for them.”
“You don’t think they’ll be suspicious? Wonder why I killed Hakim?”
“They know you and they knew Hakim. Why should they wonder? All that matters is they cement the arrangements, divide up the territory and choose a new leader. They might have chosen Hakim because he was a hardworking SOB, but with him out of the picture I’m guessing that Christos has a clear shot. And you’re going to stop it.”
“They may be willing to overlook Hakim’s death, but Christos has a great many more people in his organization. There are bound to be repercussions.”
“And so you’ll die,” Thomason said.
Bastien didn’t even blink. “Will I?”
“It’s very simple—you’ve done this sort of thing before, and even if you hadn’t I wouldn’t put anything past you. Once they choose Christos you’ll make a fuss, put a bullet in his head, and someone we’ll already have planted will shoot you. You’ll be wearing a dummy blood patch, and once you hear the gun go off you drop like a stone. Which means you only have one shot at Christos—you need to make it count.”
“I’ve never had any trouble hitting my target.”
“No, you haven’t. So Bastien Toussaint will be dead and if I’m feeling particularly generous I might let you take a little vacation in the south of France until your next mission. There’s a first time for everything.”
Bastien lit another cigarette that he didn’t want. “And the arms cartel?”
“The next obvious choice is the baron, and he’ll be easy enough to control. We have no interest in putting them out of business. Someone’s going to be supplying the arms to the international terrorists, and by watching the cartel we can trace the various splinter groups, tap into their plans.”
“I delivered detonators to Syria last April. Seventy-three people were killed, including seventeen children.” His voice was neutral, but Thomason wasn’t fooled.
“Don’t tell me you’re still sulking about that! The fortunes of war, my boy. Casualties of the fight against terror. You never used to be so sentimental, Jean-Marc. You know the math as well as I do. Seventy-three dead, with the potential of thousands being saved. Sometimes you just have to make the ugly choice.”
“Yes,” said Bastien, watching through the curling smoke of his cigarette.
“I trust you, Jean-Marc. I know you’d never make the mistake of lying to me. If you say the girl is dead then I’m certain she must be. Besides, what reason would you have to lie? In all the years I’ve known you I’ve never seen you show any human emotion, any weakness. You’re a machine. State-of-the-art, finely tuned, indispensable.”
“Even a machine needs to rest,” he said. “Let someone else do the job, and I’ll just disappear. Jensen has already built up a solid cover—he can take care of Christos himself.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m tired.”
“People in our line of work aren’t allowed to get tired. They seldom get time off, they don’t get to rest. There’s only one way to retire, Jean-Marc. The way Hakim did.”
“Is that a threat?” he asked lazily, stubbing out his cigarette.
“No. Only a fact. The cartel will be meeting at the Hotel Denis tomorrow, with Christos arriving the next day. I leave it up to you. I have every confidence you’ll do what needs to be done.”
“Do you?”
“Don’t annoy me, Jean-Marc. You know how much is riding on this.” He rose, folding his newspaper neatly.
“The fate of the free world? Isn’t it always?” He didn’t bother to rise. “I think I’ve heard this all before. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few and all that crap. You’ve been watching too much Star Trek.”
“I thought it was Star Wars,” Harry said.
“I know what’s at stake,” Bastien said.
“See that you don’t forget. Anything.”
Bastien looked up at him. His time was running out, and he simply didn’t care one way or the other. His luck had held far longer than he would have expected, and it wasn’t going to last much longer. He’d be dead by the first snowfall. Except that it was already snowing.
But before they got to him, he just might slit Harry Thomason’s throat. For old time’s sake.
12
She was gone, of course. He knew it even as he rode upward in the tiny elevator, but he went anyway, just to make certain. The place was dark, and she’d left a window open. Icy air was blowing in, laced with bits of snow, and he shut it and pulled the curtains before he turned on the light. He didn’t know whether they were watching, but he wasn’t in the mood to take chances.
There was no sign of forced entry, no blood. Her clothes were left behind, but his coat was missing, and someone had gone through his wardrobe. If they’d come to get her they wouldn’t have bothered dressing her. They wouldn’t have bothered taking her—she’d be lying dead in his bed if they’d found her.
Which meant she’d left of her own accord, and she was no longer his responsibility. He’d warned her, for some crazy, quixotic reason he’d tried to save her life. Even compromised his own cover for her, whether he wanted to admit it or not.
And she’d ignored his orders and disappeared. Good riddance.
She’d searched the place pretty thoroughly, which surprised him. What could she have expected to find here? Maybe she’d managed to fool him after all, maybe she wasn’t the innocent she’d convinced him she was. And then he remembered the look in
her eyes when he’d made her come, and he knew she hadn’t held anything back. Harry Thomason was right about that much. No one could keep the truth from him, not if he was determined to find it.
She’d found the drugs, though she hadn’t touched them. He kept them as insurance—a marketable commodity for some informants who didn’t need money. He pocketed them, just in case, then went through the room with quiet thoroughness, wiping down every surface. It wouldn’t stop a DNA expert, but there would be no reason to go to such lengths. There were no dead bodies, no signs of a crime. Just a mysterious tenant who disappeared, leaving his clothes and toiletries behind, and not a single fingerprint.
If he’d needed to be thorough he could have torched the place. His rooms were on the top floor—most people would escape unscathed. But a fire might call too much attention. Better to just walk away, from the anonymous apartment, from the annoying memory of Chloe Underwood and her well-deserved fate.
He walked out into the damp, chilly night, pulling his jacket around him, cursing his unwanted guest who’d not only disobeyed him, but taken his coat as well. He walked, head down, leaving the car behind as well. Too many people had seen it, and there were no records that would lead back to his real life, or the Committee.
It was almost midnight when he walked into the smoky bar near Rue de Rosiers. It was the third place he’d stopped—he’d had dinner near the Opera, gambled a bit at one of the small clubs his current alter ego frequented, and now he found himself in a dingy little place in the Marais, a holdout from the gentrification that had been going on for the past few decades.
“Étienne!” the bartender greeted him as he made his way through the crowded room. “What brings you here? We haven’t seen you in…how long is it? Two years? I thought you were dead.”