“Somewhere out in the country. I just came out of Paddington train station.”
“I know where you are,” said the Art Room supervisor. “Why haven’t you signed onto the communications system?”
“Tommy thought we were being followed.”
Telach made an exasperated sound and turned him over to Lief Johnson, who had taken over for Rockman as his runner.
“There’s an express train from Paddington to the airport,” said Johnson. “You have to go back into the station and turn left.”
“I know where the train is,” said Dean. “My flight isn’t until five tonight.”
“We may be able to get you something earlier.”
“Don’t bother,” said Dean, spotting a taxi.
* * *
Chief Inspector Lang looked as if he’d neither slept nor changed since Charlie had last seen him — but then again, the same could be said for Charlie.
“I’m on my way to the airport. I came to give you my phone number,” said Dean. “And to get yours.”
“You know why the man was murdered?”
Dean shook his head. “I assume it had something to do with us, but we don’t even know who he was.”
“You don’t know, or you’re not allowed to say?”
“I don’t know. I’m not sure I’d be allowed to say if I did, but I don’t know.”
“The hotel room was registered to Gordon Kensworth.”
“It was an alias. It doesn’t check out. The room was reserved with a different name and account. Vefoures. I assume you know that by now….”
Lang didn’t answer. Dean had dealt with American cops occasionally as a gas station owner. They always were skeptical when you first met them. If you got past that, they could be fairly cooperative, often helpful, and even once in a while sympathetic — but it sometimes took a lot to get past that first hurdle.
Dean glanced at his watch. He wasn’t sure how long it would take to get to the airport, and it was now past two o’clock.
“When I know more, I’ll give you a call,” he told the chief inspector. “I don’t have to work through the channels, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
“Are you interested in finding out who he really was?”
“Yes,” said Dean.
“Come along then.”
“Charlie, you have an airplane,” said his runner over the communications system as he started down the steps.
“I’ll take a later flight.”
Lang turned around.
“Talking to myself,” said Dean. “Bad habit.”
“Do it myself,” said the detective. “No one talks back at least.”
“I wouldn’t listen if they did,” said Dean, trotting up behind him.
Outside, the detective paused to light a cigarette.
“Want one?” he asked Dean.
“No thanks.”
“I didn’t think you were a smoker.”
“I don’t hold it against anyone.”
“Neither do I.”
Lang led Dean to his car, a five-year-old compact with a dent in the door. As they drove, Lang told him that a missing persons report had been filed that answered the murder victim’s general description. He had a hunch that this was their man and was going to find out.
“Family member is over in Brixton. Do you know where that is?”
“Couldn’t guess.”
Brixton was in London, but it wasn’t a place most tourists visited. The area mixed immigrants and hard-luck old-timers with a few dollops of working-class families trying to make ends meet. The flat they went to belonged to one of the latter, a Rose Pierce, who lived with her three tots. Her older brother Gordon Pierce, who had been staying in the room at the front for the past three months, hadn’t come home the night before.
Rose’s lip began to quiver as soon as the chief inspector showed his credentials. She led them back to the kitchen, hands trembling as she poured water into a kettle for tea. Dean took the pot from her and put it on the stove, then sat down at the small table. It was made of metal, the sides chipped and dented.
“I sent my kids around to my neighbor Eileen so’s we could talk,” said the woman.
“If you could tell us about your brother,” said Lang, his voice soft and gentle, “it might help.”
“Have you found him?”
“We don’t know.” He had a picture in his pocket, but it wasn’t particularly nice, and Dean guessed that Lang wanted to spare the woman the heartache of seeing it if he could. “It’s possible.”
Fighting back tears, Rose told them that her brother had been out of steady work for most of his adult life; he’d been a miner in Cornwall years ago, been hurt and unable to work. The story of his accident was elaborate and hard to follow — he’d been bonked on the head, but the doctors were unable to find any real damage, not even enough to qualify for what the woman called a proper pension. Lang took notes dutifully, though Dean could see he didn’t believe the brother had been disabled.
“He’d been a housepainter, on and off. At his age, not too many employers would take a chance. And he looks older than he was. That doesn’t sit well.”
“How old was he?” asked Lang.
“Fifty next month. The years wore him down. A few days ago he said he had a new job, something he couldn’t discuss,” continued the woman. “He left. He was gone for a whole night, didn’t see him the next day, yesterday, or last night.”
Lang frowned as if he didn’t quite believe this, either, and asked her for details. But she didn’t have any. Dean fit the missing time neatly into a sequence — the man was hired for the job, taken to France, then reintroduced into London.
“He came home from the pub that night, the last I saw him, and he had a few quid on him. He gave me a ten-pound note and said there’d be more. Bloody hell, that was unlike him. Not the generosity — Gordy was always a generous man. But to have money. That was mighty odd.”
The detective took a few notes, changed the subject to ask about her brother’s schooling, and then came back to the job he’d spoken of, making it seem as if it were an afterthought.
“Do you think someone hired him at the pub?” asked the detective.
“The pub? No. He got odd jobs sometimes in the morning.”
“Would he have gotten paid in advance for an odd job?”
“Not usually.”
“Which pub?” asked Dean.
The woman looked at him, surprised by Dean’s accent.
“I’m an observer from America. Learning,” he added.
“Kind of old to learn,” she said.
“Never too old to learn something useful,” said Dean.
“It was the Golden Goose, around the corner and down the block.”
“Would you happen to have a photo of him?” asked the detective.
The woman’s lower lip began quivering again as she got up from the table. The picture showed Kensworth — in life, Gordon Pierce — ten years before, hair already white, face well lined.
“It might be good if you could come over to the station with me,” Lang told her.
She nodded once, then burst into tears.
22
Deidre Clancy had begun to feel foolish the moment her father said he had succeeded in getting “Mr. Karr” as her escort back to Paris. She’d mentioned him as a joke — completely and totally and utterly a joke — but her father tended to be literal minded, and once he set his course it was impossible to get him to deviate.
Which didn’t mean that she didn’t want to see the handsome man who’d retrieved her purse, just that she wanted to see him under some circumstance other than as her minder.
Now she bristled as she waited for him in the car, torn in all different directions. They had tickets on the Eurostar and had been instructed to show up an hour before departure. They were running very late; depending on traffic they might not make the train at all. Deidre hated to be late; it was a trait she shared with her father.
“Hey there,” he said. “Fancy meeting you here.”
“We’re running a little late,” she said.
“You don’t think they’ll hold the train for you?”
Clearly he thought she was a spoiled brat — or even worse. As the car wended its way through traffic, Deidre watched out the window, annoyed at the entire situation. Meanwhile, Karr leaned back in his seat and seemed to doze. Then about halfway to the station he sprang to life as they bogged down in traffic.
“OK, let’s go,” he said, opening the door.
“What?” she asked.
“Pop the trunk.”
Before she or the driver could say anything else, Karr had jumped from the car and was at the trunk. He grabbed her bag as it sprang open, then swung around to her side. She got out.
“This way, quick,” he said.
She headed toward the curb, hesitating as she reached it because she’d forgotten to close her door.
“Come on, let’s go,” said Karr, looming over her. He gave her a gentle push and she started running, unsure what was going on.
“Left,” he told her, walking behind at a pace that wasn’t quite a trot. “Into the tube.”
She stepped to the side at the doorway. He slid a ticket into her hand as he passed, walking quickly through the gate and then onto the escalators. He kept up the same brisk pace and they arrived on the platform just as a train was pulling in. They hopped in.
“Two stops,” he said.
“Are we being followed?” she asked.
He didn’t answer. The train was crowded; they had to stand near the door. Deidre squeezed toward him as the train stopped to take on more passengers. She reached toward her carry-on bag, but he shook his head.
It wasn’t until the train stopped that she realized that they were at Paddington train station. He was out of the car so quickly that she had trouble keeping up; not until they made it upstairs did she point out that the Eurostar train for Paris left from Waterloo.
“Really?” Karr grinned and didn’t stop walking.
“We’re going to the airport?” she said when she saw the sign for the shuttle over to Heathrow.
“Very possibly,” said Karr. “But we’ll have to see how it plays.”
They made the shuttle just as the doors were closing. Karr produced two tickets for the conductor.
“Are we being followed?” Deidre asked finally.
“Not that I know of.”
“Why are we going by airplane instead of taking the train?”
“I like to fly,” said Karr.
“I don’t like this.”
“Which?”
“I don’t like being kept in the dark like this. What’s up? Why are we changing plans?”
“For one thing, you bought the ticket in your own name, and you did it a few weeks back,” said Karr. “So anyone interested in you had plenty of time to figure out where you’d be.”
“I thought you said I wasn’t being followed.”
“You’re not,” he told her. “But I am.”
* * *
LaFoote had nearly lost the American agent at the embassy; he’d had to circle on the bicycle at a distance until the car finally left. Luckily, he’d guessed not only that the man would be in the car but also that at some point he would abandon the vehicle, for either a second one or the tube. The retired French agent had spent nearly fifty pounds on the secondhand bicycle and felt a twinge of regret as he tossed it to the side before entering the tube station. But at least he’d made the train, getting in a car behind the American and the girl.
Given that some sort of mistake he had made had allowed his meeting to be compromised, LaFoote felt vindicated that he had at least managed to guess correctly that the government agent would return to the U.S. embassy. He hadn’t managed to get onto the shuttle for the airport. He considered hiring a car but decided instead to fall back on a second plan — he’d go to London Airport instead, where he knew he could catch a flight to Paris. He might not beat the Americans — there were three flights over that they could take before he’d land — but he had a friend who worked for Air France who could watch the terminal for him. LaFoote called her from London and described the pair to her.
“Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers,” said his friend, who like LaFoote had worked as a spy some decades before.
“If Fred Astaire had blond hair and was over two meters tall, yes,” LaFoote told her.
* * *
“I think you’re getting paranoid,” said the runner in Karr’s ear when he finally made it to the restroom at the back of the airbus en route to Paris.
“Paranoia is healthy,” Karr told him. “It’s an old guy. He was on a bike.”
“I really think you’re hallucinating,” said Johnson.
“Could be. You have my rentals ready?”
“I scrounged up two stiffs from the embassy in Paris,” said Johnson. Stiffs was Johnson’s favorite term for CIA officers; Johnson had worked at the CIA and was not particularly fond of his experience there.
“Good. Talk to you then.”
Out in the cabin, the pilot was flashing the Buckle Up sign and preparing to descend.
“Did I miss anything good?” Karr asked Deidre as he sat down.
“Two little green men flew by the wing in their flying saucer.”
“See? Now you’re getting the hang of it,” said Karr. “Sarcasm can be a very handy quality.”
“So why would someone follow you?” asked Deidre.
“They want my secret to a long life,” Karr told her. She seemed to be warming up a bit; maybe she wasn’t the stuck-up rich kid he’d taken her for. “I’m actually over two hundred years old, you know. I fool a lot of people.”
“Do you always turn everything into a corny joke?”
“Only when I’m awake. Although some people say I talk in my sleep, too.”
“We’re watching the gate for you,” said Johnson after the plane landed and rolled toward the gate. The Art Room had infiltrated the security system at the airport and was monitoring the video cameras. “So far you look clean.”
“Uh-huh,” murmured Karr.
“What?” asked Deidre.
“Talking to myself. You’ll find I do that a lot.”
“Do you answer back?”
“Oh yeah. That’s what keeps it interesting.”
Karr spotted one of the CIA people drifting beyond passport control, but if anyone else was looking for him they were being extremely subtle. Karr led Deidre toward the queue for one of the shuttle buses into the city, then turned and went over to the taxi line, staying there for about five minutes — long enough, he figured, for the Art Room and the CIA officers to pick out anyone following him. Then he got Deidre and tugged her toward the rental car counter, where the Art Room had already reserved a car for Mr. Greene of London. Karr flashed the proper credit card, paused to negotiate an upgrade, and then went outside into the lot.
His shadow didn’t show up until he was on the highway into the city — an old guy in a Renault, reported the CIA agents, who wanted to know what to do.
“Just tag along,” Karr said. “I’ll drop D here off at the embassy and then have a chat with Grandpa. Find me a dead end somewhere.”
“Who are you talking to?” Deidre demanded.
“If I told you, I’d have to kill you,” said Karr.
“Stop.”
“My phone has a mike in it,” he told her. He pulled it out and waved it in the air. “I’m talking to our trail team.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Suit yourself,” he said, sliding it back in his pocket.
“I’m D?” she said. “That’s not much of a code word.”
“Sorry. I’m not very creative when danger’s breathing down my neck.”
“Grandpa is the danger? Doesn’t sound very threatening.”
“That’s just his code word. Besides, guy with a cane? Could have a machine gun there.”
“Are we really in danger?”
“Nah. Nothing to worry about.” He turned and smiled at her. “So you live in Paris?”
“I go to school here, yes.”
“College?”
“Postgrad. Art history.”
“Good field,” said Karr, who had no idea if it was or not.
“I like to think so.”
“I’m going to drop you off at the embassy,” he told her, moving to the right lane as the exit approached. “They’ll take care of you. I want you to stay with them, all right?”
“I really don’t want to be taken care of,” she said. There was something plaintive in her voice.
“Yeah, I know,” said Karr. “But I do have to figure out who this is. I think he’s tracking me, not you, but until we’re sure, better safe than sorry. Promise?”
She didn’t answer.
“Listen, if you don’t promise, I’m going to have to hand you over to the Marines and have them put you in the brig.”
“I promise.”
“All right. No fingers crossed or any of that stuff, right?”
“Please.”
Karr had concluded that the person following him was either a British agent or the person who had used the dead man to contact him. He hoped the latter. Still, he couldn’t take any chances with her.
“So why are you being followed?” Deidre asked.
“If I knew, I wouldn’t have to grab him.”
“Can I come?”
Karr laughed. “No. Sorry.”
“I won’t get in the way.”
“Well, I know it seems like it’s fun and games. And it is.” Karr laughed. “Maybe next time I’m in town. Looks like a nice place.”
“You’ve never been to Paris?”
“Oh, I’ve been here once or twice,” said Karr. “Never as a tourist, though.”
“I’ll give you a tour.”
“Yeah?”
“Sure.”
He turned down the Champs-Elysées, the main boulevard in the heart of the city. It was choked with traffic — which was fine, since it locked his trail in place. The embassy was a few blocks away.
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