by Tom Savage
When she saw his face, she froze, clutching the fence rail in front of her. She blinked and looked again, peering more closely at the figure on the porch down the hill. No, she hadn’t been mistaken. Everything inside her went numb.
In that moment, kneeling at the fence above the distant house, Nora Baron realized that she’d been conned. From her arrival in England four days ago—no, before that. From the phone call at her home, when she’d been standing on the widow’s walk. That’s when it had begun, and now the game was complete. The dizzying, wrenching shock overwhelmed her, blurring the scene before her eyes.
The man who now stood in the doorway of Laurels was its owner, Bill Howard. He wasn’t dead; he was far from dead. He was smiling as he greeted the other men. It couldn’t possibly be happening, and yet it was. Then, of course, the second, even bigger shock arrived, as inevitable as it was unexpected. Beside her, Craig Elder the younger turned his head to face her, and he began to laugh softly in her ear.
Bill Howard. Craig Elder. Not Maurice Dolin of the SDAT, not an international plot, not a nefarious, extended gang of fanatics and traitors and mercenaries. Merely two men—that man on the porch down there and this one, his apprentice, his young recruit, his partner in crime, laughing at her. Everything else had been pure theater. Smoke and mirrors. And she—the trained, professional actor—had fallen for it.
She willed herself to move. Automatically, as if of its own accord, her hand in her purse closed around the wool-wrapped LadySmith and yanked it out, and then she was frantically tearing the shawl away, fumbling with the small silver weapon. She fitted it into her right hand, closing her fingers around it, her index finger finding the trigger. She swung it to her left, aimed it directly between the eyes of the laughing man beside her, and fired.
A hollow click, nothing more. Again. Click. Nothing—and now the space beside her was empty. He had risen to his feet, and he was somewhere just behind her. She glanced down at the gun, realizing. He’d removed the bullets back at the Oasis, while she slept. Every action he’d taken—Russell Square Gardens, the French getaway, Louis Reynard, the Lucky Dolphin, last night in London and at the motel, all the way here, now, today—he’d done it all for one reason: to get her here. Now they had her, and they had the envelope, and they would torture her in front of her husband until he finally broke and told them what they wanted to know. Then her friend Bill Howard and his laughing acolyte would kill them and hide their bodies.
She’d been stupid, and now she and her husband would die. Well, she wouldn’t die quietly; she’d make it as difficult as possible. She opened her mouth wide, filling her lungs to shout, to cry out in sheer, impotent rage.
Something huge and heavy smashed into the back of her head. The scream on her lips became a grunt of sharp, exquisite pain as she slammed into the fence post, bounced from the impact, and sagged over sideways into the grass. Then everything faded to black.
Chapter 41
It was the actor’s nightmare all over again. She was standing on a stage in a theater, and she wasn’t wearing any clothes. The silent, faceless audience gaped at her as she looked around, trying to get her bearings. If she could only recognize something, she might figure out what play she was in, what role she was supposed to be playing. She might even remember her next line. But there wasn’t any scenery, the playing area was as bare as she was, and there were no other actors here with her. She was alone, in an unknown production in this unfamiliar playhouse, under a harsh spotlight, naked. She strained to remember…
Pal—He’s thinking—“Coop” demain.
What was that? A note slipped to her by a supporting player, a beautiful blond girl. A note from her husband: Go to Musée Rodin in Paris. He was getting her out of the country, rescuing her after the foiled robbery in Russell Square Gardens. It hadn’t been a real robbery after all. It had been an elaborate hoax, a performance, a pantomime, with the young man from the plane—her friend, not her enemy—trying to wrest the famous envelope from her, so the bad guys would follow him and leave her, Nora, alone. But it hadn’t worked out as planned. One of the bad guys had already been there; he’d followed her from the Byron Hotel, where he’d been waiting for her to return from the morgue. She hadn’t gone inside; she’d passed by the hotel and led Craig Elder to the park, and he’d thwarted the “robbery.”
Then Craig had escorted her back to the hotel, only to find another of Jeff’s agents—Solange, the brave young Frenchwoman who’d been under deep cover, romancing the notoriously randy Bill Howard in an attempt to find out if he was the arms dealer Jeff was seeking. Craig had spotted the girl in the hotel lobby and immediately bolted before she’d spotted him.
Nora was still naked, still bathed in the harsh white light, but now the scenario was coming back to her. The silent audience continued to stare as she worked her way through the script.
Craig had followed the girl to Paris, to the apartment in the Latin Quarter, and strangled her, breaking a window to make it look good. The note she was to deliver to Nora the next day in the museum was left in her dead hand, replaced by an alternate: GOOT! Dix roses pour Grand-tante J ce soir.
Bill Howard had thought that one up, of course, borrowing the GOOT from Jeff’s emails and the details of the cemetery ritual he’d known about for years, ever since Jeff had told him and Viv over that long-ago dinner. Craig had placed that note in the glove and had it delivered to Nora by a homeless man he’d probably bribed with a few euros for the purpose.
That false note had done its job: It had gotten Nora Baron to a remote graveyard in the middle of the night where they could shoot her, bury her, retrieve the envelope. But that had gone wrong too, thanks to Jeff’s other secret agent, the redoubtable Jacques Lanier. The assassin—a local French mercenary, no doubt—had been killed instead, Jacques had been wounded, and Nora had gone on the run.
Then the script had changed yet again, and Nora was fairly sure she knew why. Jeff had staged the car accident and gone to Norfolk, to Bill’s country house, Laurels. He had been all set to smoke out his enemy—by that time he knew it was Bill Howard—when he’d been captured. He hadn’t gone to the King’s Lynn train station; he’d never left this house. He’d already been in Bill’s custody when Nora arrived from New York, and Bill had known he had incriminating evidence. Bill had ransacked Jeff’s apartment the night before, to no avail. Then Dr. Gupta had handed her the envelope, which clearly had the vital data inside that would’ve scuttled Bill’s scheme before it was completed, and…Yes, it was all falling into place.
They’d interrogated Jeff, tortured him, but he hadn’t talked. And by the time the graveyard assassination had failed, Bill Howard had come up with a better plan for Nora. She suddenly had become more useful alive than dead. The new order had been issued to Craig Elder: Get her out of France, back to London, then out here, to Laurels. The tough CIA agent wouldn’t crack under torture, so let’s bring his wife here and torture her in front of him. That will make him talk. But by then, Bill must have known Nora was also suspecting him. She might not come along quietly; she might run to her husband’s outfit or MI6 or the London police, so…
Another pantomime. The house in St. John’s Wood. He’d handed her the martinis after carefully doctoring them with something that would get her safely away upstairs, in the bathroom, while he shot his inconvenient, rich wife and her housekeeper. Then he’d played dead as well, slumped in the armchair, waiting for his assistant to call her and get her to the next stage of her journey to this house.
Bill Howard’s arrogance was boundless. He’d predicted Nora’s actions and reactions every step of the way, and he’d been right every time. He’d known she’d be too squeamish to look more closely at him when she found him “dead” in the chair—but what if she had? He would have picked up the revolver from the floor by his hand and held it on her, forced her into a car and straight out here last night. But that hadn’t been his plan. Moving a prisoner across a good stretch of England would’ve been awkward, and
it might’ve been noticed at any point. Besides, he’d wanted to be free to move around, to call the woman at the grocery store and allay her suspicions, to tie up any business he had in London. So, he’d handed Nora off to his accomplice, Craig, and she’d come dashing out here this morning, as planned. Above all else, Nora was disgusted with herself for being so predictable. These men had played her like a fiddle.
On the run, always on the run, with the police in hot pursuit. The French police had thought she’d caused the mayhem in the cemetery, but they’d been told to stop broadcasting it and to stand down—told by Bill Howard. It wouldn’t have suited his plan to have her arrested by French authorities before Craig had delivered her here. She’d never actually seen a gray SUV following them from Paris; now she knew Craig had made it up. The gendarmes in Calais and the constable in the Lucky Dolphin had been put on the alert—again by Bill Howard—and they had spurred her on, back to London in the dead of night. And there’d even been a bonus for the scenario, a further bit of good luck for them: Nora had run down Andy Gilbert, the very man they’d been seeking to silence ever since she, Nora, had told Craig that Gilbert was working for her husband. In her frenzy to escape, Nora had hit him with the car, so now she was a legitimate fugitive.
Be careful, Pal. It was all so simple, now that she thought of it. Her husband had learned of the arms deal, and he hadn’t told anyone about it—not his own employers, not MI6, and not the French SDAT. Nora still didn’t know Maurice Dolin’s part in all this, but she’d work that out later. As far as she could tell, Jeff had four assistants: Jacques and Solange, two French agents he knew he could trust; Bill Howard’s British chauffeur, Andy Gilbert; and the young man from the plane, Yussuf, whose nationality and motives were unknown to her.
The park bench yesterday—Andy Gilbert and Yussuf. The conversation she’d overheard, now that she recalled it, could’ve been interpreted two ways: bad guys conniving to kill her or good guys desperately trying to locate her and protect her. Now she knew the truth. Andy Gilbert had been trying to save her.
Andy Gilbert. Dear God, had that liar Craig at least told her the truth about Andy Gilbert’s injuries? She hoped so. She hoped the man was in a hospital, alive. If she’d killed him, she’d never be able to forgive herself.
Killing Craig Elder, on the other hand, would be easy. Nora had been wondering about her capacity for violence. Well, now she knew. She could shoot him, stab him, set him on fire, and she wouldn’t even blink.
But now the play continued. She was conscious and aware of her surroundings. She wasn’t naked; there wasn’t any spotlight. She was lying on her back on something soft, and there were voices nearby. A horrible, sharp pain was pulsating in the back of her skull. Oh yes—Craig Elder had struck her with the SIG Sauer, smashing it into her cranium. And that laugh, that awful sound in her ears just before it: Craig Elder, her friend, her only ally, had been laughing at her. He’d knocked her out, she’d dreamed the actor’s dream, and now she was awake, lying on a soft surface with a pillow under her aching head.
She regulated her breathing, careful not to make any sound or movement, and she kept her eyes closed. Now she remembered exactly what play she was performing. She was Mrs. John Doe, the worried wife, the reluctant spy, and she was in the lair of her enemies. They were here in the room with her; their low voices emanated from the space just above the…bed? Yes, she was on a bed, probably in an upstairs room of the farmhouse, in her black denim suit and boots, her widow’s weeds. Don’t move, she directed herself; you’re unconscious. Keeping her respiration slow and steady, she listened.
“…took your sweet time,” Bill Howard was saying.
“I had to make it look good; I even asked a local for directions,” Craig Elder replied, his voice light with the humor she’d seen on his face mere seconds before he’d struck her. “That old sot who’s always in the pub, Wycliff, the one with the dog. Then you had to ruin it all! I was about to sneak in here with her, charging in to rescue her husband, and deliver her straight into your arms. But then she saw you in the doorway, and that was the end of that idea. She nearly screamed, and we couldn’t have that, could we? If those fellows outside had seen the ruckus, they’d have known something was amiss, and they’d be out of here, and there’d go all our plans up in smoke. They don’t know about Baron, do they?”
“Of course not!” Bill said. “They think everything’s fine. He’s tucked away in the barn, and he’s not going anywhere.”
“Well, she’s not going anywhere either,” Craig said, and he laughed again. “So, where’s Gamal?”
“On his way—he just called from the road. He’s in the second truck, and those men on the lawn are waiting for him. As soon as he’s here, they’ll load up the two trucks, and—”
“What about the Barons?” Craig asked.
Bill Howard didn’t respond. Now Nora became aware of rustling sounds from elsewhere in the room, farther away from the bed. There was a third person here. Bill suddenly said, “Have you found anything, Mustapha?”
“No,” said a new voice: male, low, guttural, accented. The big man from the doorway? “There’s nothing else here, just the tracer and the gun and a lot of women’s things—”
“Never mind,” Bill said, and she could hear the impatience in his voice. “Leave it. We have the envelope, and we can grill them just as soon as—”
He was cut off by sounds from outside. There was a window on her left, she reasoned. Footsteps went over that way; Bill and Craig were looking out. She heard the distant sound of an engine. The second truck was coming up the drive from the main road. Nassim Gamal had arrived.
A sharp curse from Bill Howard. “Okay, let’s get down there. They’ll load up and leave for the airfield, and then we can see to our guests. I don’t know what he has on me, I don’t know what he gave her, but I’m going to find out before we leave here today.”
“And how are we leaving?” Craig asked.
“Same way as they are,” Bill said. “Their plane is at three, ours is at five. By eight tonight, we’ll be in Geneva.”
“I wasn’t planning on—”
“I know, I know,” Bill said, cutting off the complaint. “You were going to stay here, the innocent bystander, and be as perplexed as everyone else when it all came out in the wash. But then you had to go and kill that girl!”
“Solange? You told me to—”
“Not Solange, idiot! The other one, your girl, the one in London last night.”
“I had no choice!” Craig protested. “She overheard me on the phone with you, when you called to say that you and Mustapha had done your wife and the maid, and I was to call your cell in ten minutes, after Nora had come back downstairs and found you all dead. I was repeating your instructions back to you as you gave them, and Wendy heard me, and she freaked. I had to shut her up, and even so, she made enough noise to get that old woman across the hall involved, and she called the police. I ran out to the takeaway down the road, and—”
“Never mind, you can tell me the rest in the plane. Now we have to entertain Nassim and his friends. Mustapha, stay up here but out in the hallway. I may need your help downstairs if anything goes wrong with the exchange. We’ll lock her in here—she won’t be a problem—and you just wait in the hall outside this door. If you hear me call for you, get down there with your weapon drawn, understood?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Okay, come on,” Bill Howard said. More footsteps, then she heard the door open. “God damn that meddling Jeff Baron! I always hated him, such a nosey parker! I can’t wait for the pleasure of snuffing him—and her too. It will be almost as much fun as snuffing that bitch I was married to! But first—”
The door closed, cutting off the rest of his comments.
Silence. Nora lay still another thirty seconds, then opened her eyes and slid her legs over to the edge of the bed. She put her feet down on the carpeted floor and tried to sit up. A numbing stab of pain in her head nearly sent her down again, but sh
e waited a moment until it passed. She rose slowly to her feet, peering around her in the darkened room. Yes, it was a bedroom. Aside from the bed, there was a dresser and chair by the front window. Her shoulder bag lay on the carpet, its contents strewn everywhere around it. The only other window was in the wall next to the head of the bed. She moved over to it and looked out.
This was the side wall of the house, the wall she’d seen from the forest. It was the way she’d have to go; the men in the driveway would see her if she tried the front one. Below this window was a drop of perhaps fifteen feet, past another window directly under it, to the side lawn with the obsolete corral. Beyond the corral was the field, and then the fence and the trees that concealed the car. Freedom. But she couldn’t run to the forest now; that wasn’t an option.
It was 1:15; she’d been out for more than an hour. She looked around the room, and her gaze settled on the bed: two sheets and a chenille bedspread. She knelt beside her Coach bag, picking it up and running her fingers around the inside until she found the tracer Mustapha had mentioned: a black metal disc the size of a quarter, pinned to the black satin lining at the bottom. She frowned in self-disgust, remembering the morgue in London her first day here, when she’d handed this bag to Bill to hold for her while she went in to identify her “husband’s” body. Craig hadn’t called the SDAT to locate her at the French guesthouse after she’d fled the cemetery. There was no need; he’d known exactly where she was all along.
She tore the tracking device from the lining and placed it on the desk. She rummaged on the carpet, tossing her shawl, the gun, her makeup, her P. D. James paperback, and everything else back into the bag. Then she stripped the bed and began tying the sheets together.
She had to get to her husband.