The Third Woman

by Mark Burnell

  She returned to the sitting-room. 'Who's the woman?'

  'What woman?'

  'The woman who leaves Chanel No.5 in your bathroom.' She showed him the earring. 'This woman.'

  'That could be mine.'

  'Trust me, I'm not in the mood.'

  'It's none of your goddamn business.'

  'Sure about that?'

  'She's history.'

  'If she shows up here, she will be.'

  'It's been over for a while.'

  'It was on your bedside table.'

  'I'm the sentimental type.'

  'Her stuff is still here.'

  She saw that he was extremely nervous – the sweat, the shivers – but he was determined to maintain the façade. The pretence was all he had to cling to. 'You should see what I left at her place.'

  There was no answer to that; Stephanie had left pieces of herself everywhere.

  There was a large Loewe widescreen TV in the corner of the sitting-room. Stephanie sat on a sofa arm and flicked through channels; France 3, Canal+, France 2, pausing during a news bulletin on TF1. Continued analysis of the bomb in Sentier, riots in Caracas, an oil spill off the coast of Normandy. Then they were watching a female journalist with a red scarf around her throat. She was in rue de Berri, the Lancaster just discernible in the background, beyond the entrance to the Berri-Washington car-park.

  The studio anchor was asking a question. The reporter nodded then said, 'The police will say only that Russian art-dealer Leonid Golitsyn and another unidentified man have been shot dead in what looks like a planned execution.'

  'Have they suggested who might be responsible?'

  'Not yet. All we know is that their bodies were discovered by a member of the hotel staff and that …'

  Not true. By the time she'd left Golitsyn's suite, the police had arrived downstairs. She'd seen plain-clothed detectives at the front desk just seconds after stepping out of the lift. Yet seconds before, on the fourth floor, she'd exchanged a cordial bonsoir with the woman from Housekeeping.

  Newman said, 'No wonder I couldn't guess what you do.'

  'I didn't kill them.'

  'This guy Golitsyn – when you thought I was someone else, you thought I worked for him.'

  'When I got to the room, they were already dead.'

  She couldn't believe how guilty she sounded.

  Newman stared at the Smith & Wesson. 'That right?'

  'It hasn't been fired. It's not mine. I picked it off the floor.'

  'What are you saying – it was a suicide pact?'

  She changed channels, choosing CNN's coverage of the Sentier bomb. There was footage of the wreckage in Passage du Caire, a reprise of the casualty statistics and still no mention of Anders Brand.

  In the CNN studio two experts sat beside Becky Anderson. One was a spokesman for Le Conseil Représentatif des Institutions Juives de France (CRIF), the other was a terrorism expert from the London School of Economics. The CRIF spokesman insisted the bomb was part of a growing campaign of anti-Semitic activity in France and went on to castigate the government and – by implication – the public for their lack of outrage.

  The LSE analyst focused on the likely provenance of the two fake suspects. Snippets of information were threaded through the theory to lend it credibility; prescient rumours in recent days from sources at Le Blanc-Mesnil, a small town on the northern fringe of Paris with a largely immigrant population, formerly of Sephardic Jews from the north-African colonies, more recently of Muslims, many from the same countries.

  The premise sounded convincing; racial hatred boiling over in an area known for it. Le Blanc-Mesnil fell under the scope of District 93, also known as the Red belt from an era when it was controlled by staunchly Communist mayors. Immigrants had always been a pressing problem. The man from the LSE managed deftly to link ill feeling in Le Blanc-Mesnil to Jewish commercial interests in Sentier. Stephanie was almost persuaded by him until he mentioned the suspects again.

  She turned off the television.

  Two incidents in one city on consecutive days. Superficially independent of one another but linked by a third incident: the murder of Jacob and Miriam Furst. Not in itself significant enough to make the news – an old couple murdered in their home – but vital to Stephanie because she was the single factor common to all three.

  Day Four

  She woke with a start and checked her watch. Three-twenty-five. As a teenager, she'd been a hopeless sleeper. As Stephanie, she still was. But Petra had been trained to take sleep wherever she could, no matter how hostile the environment.

  They were in the sitting-room. Newman was slumped in his chair, his head lolling to one side. Stephanie was on the sofa behind him. She'd chosen it deliberately for the small psychological advantage of being invisible to him.

  Silently, she rose from the sofa and went to the bathroom. She showered then wrapped herself in one of his towels and sorted through his ex-lover's wardrobe. The black jeans were the right length but Stephanie's waist was slimmer. She pulled on a navy long-sleeved T-shirt, a chunky black jersey and the silver trainers.

  She felt human again. As human as Petra could be.

  In the kitchen she filled a kettle. While the water heated she investigated Newman's study. On a large oak desk beside the window were two slim Sony monitors and a cordless keyboard. She looked in the drawers; stationery, bills and receipts, correspondence, cash – euros, dollars, Swiss francs – an Air France first-class boarding card from Singapore to Paris, and two American passports.

  The first passport belonged to Robert Ridley Newman, aged forty-eight. It had been issued two years before but there were already dozens of stamps in it, some recurring frequently; Damascus, Riyadh, Beijing and Shanghai, Tehran, Jakarta. The second passport was seven years older. She flicked through the pages. There were only twelve stamps in it, nine of them issued at Ben-Gurion airport, Tel Aviv.

  In the bottom drawer on the right she found a Vacheron watch with a leather strap. On the back was an inscription and a date: Robert, with love, Carlotta, 10-11-2001. A birthday? She checked the passports. Not his.

  Back in the kitchen, she switched on the TV suspended over the slate worktop. Bloomberg was playing. She flicked through the channels until she came to BBC World, which was showing archive footage of Anders Brand. He was shaking hands with Kofi Annan, Bill Clinton to one side, the three of them sharing a joke. At the bottom of the screen the caption read: Former Swedish diplomat named among Paris dead.

  A résumé unfolded; posts in Manila, Baghdad, Rome and Washington, as a junior diplomat, followed by two forays into business with Deutsche Bank in New York and Shell in London. Later, Brand had returned to the Swedish diplomatic service, serving in the Philippines, then Spain. After that, he'd joined the United Nations in New York, filling a series of increasingly undefined roles as his star rose. Divorced for almost twenty years, Brand was survived by his ex-wife, the former actress Lena Meslin, and their two adult sons.

  A little late but just as Stern had predicted.

  Stern.

  Painfully, Stephanie surrendered to the one thought she'd been resisting since the Lancaster.

  You set me up.

  Now, more than ever, she needed information. For years, he'd been her preferred source. Information from Stern was bought at a premium but was cheap at the price. She'd never had reason to question its quality. He'd never sold her out. On the contrary. There had been occasions where he'd volunteered information to protect her. Or rather, as he usually put it, to protect his investment.

  Safe from one another, their relationship had evolved into a form of sterile, electronic friendship, neither of them interested in finding out too much about the other because they both understood that security lay in anonymity. But in the beginning it had been strictly business; request, negotiation, payment, delivery. Cold and clinical.

  Stern traded information, not affection. The faux relationship that Stephanie had allowed to develop between them had come to obfuscat
e that uneasy fact. Stern owed her nothing, nor she him. At the end of every transaction they were equal. It was true that he'd made money out of her. Just as she'd made money out of the information he'd sold her. She'd come to assume that he'd never trade her because she was valuable to him. But why not, if the money was right? She'd never guaranteed him anything. Each transaction ran the risk of being the last. Stern existed in a transitory environment; the currency of information tended to devalue with time. In both their worlds, it paid to seize the moment.

  Ultimately, Stern's fidelity was always going to be a question of price.

  At first, he thought he'd imagined it. The sound of running water. A shower. His shower. He tried to straighten himself. Had he fallen asleep? Perhaps, but not in the regenerative sense. Sleep was nothing more than a brief lapse between uncomfortable bouts of waking. He was slowly seizing; numb hands, stiff neck, sore spine, cramping muscles. His mouth felt dirty and dry.

  He wondered how long he'd been alone. Not that it mattered. There was nothing he could do. He and the chair had become a single entity, she'd made sure of that. An entity isolated at the centre of a Bokhara carpet, a castaway in his own apartment.

  He couldn't reconcile the woman in his apartment with the woman who'd approached him at the bar in the Lancaster. Claudia Calderon had been confident, relaxed, playful. And sexy. He could admit that, even now. And then there was the creature with the gun. What had she done? What did she want?

  He tried to convince himself that she wouldn't harm him. That she'd float away, like a bout of bad weather, leaving him as she'd found him. But Leonid Golitsyn and another man were dead. Newman had seen that on TV. She'd admitted to being in their room. And she had the gun. He'd barely heard her denial. Stranger still, she'd seemed more preoccupied with coverage of the Sentier bomb than events at the Lancaster. Were the two connected? Was she the connection? And if she was, what would that mean for him?

  Stephanie said, 'I'm going to untie your hands. You need to get your blood moving.'

  The purple scars around the wrists were shiny and ragged. There was no smoothness to them, nothing … uniform. The hands themselves were swollen. As they separated a shudder coursed through Newman. He brought his arms to the front of his body in a series of stiff jerks, catching his breath with each halt. Once his hands were in his lap he flexed his fingers. She saw the solid tension in his shoulders, knotted muscle crawling on itself.

  'Who's Carlotta?'

  He didn't answer.

  'I usually like to know whose clothes I'm wearing.'

  Still nothing.

  'Was the earring hers?'

  She could see no fear, no anger, no emotion at all.

  She left him and took Golitsyn's attaché case to the sofa. Keys, pens, a leather-bound address book, lots of business documents. His letters were addressed to him at several locations: the head office of MosProm on ulitsa Tverskaya in central Moscow; Galerie Golitsyn on avenue Matignon, Paris; the Hotel Meurice, Paris; an apartment on East 62nd Street in New York City.

  In a see-through foolscap plastic wallet was a set of architectural plans. Stephanie turned it over to see the address. Cork Street, London; another art gallery, she assumed. There was something inserted between the folds of the drawings. She unzipped the wallet and a sheet of paper slipped free.

  It was an agreement with an immobilier named Guy Grangé on boulevard Magenta in the 10ème arrondissement. A one-month rental, a one-room apartment in the Stalingrad district, cash paid in advance. Not the sort of area Stephanie would have expected Golitsyn to frequent. Or the sort of property, for that matter. There was no address, just a reference number. The printed key code corresponded to the number on the red plastic disk attached to the keys.

  Why had Stern pointed her in the direction of this seventy-seven-year-old Russian?

  There were some credit-card receipts in the attaché case, including one from the fabled jeweller Ginzburg, on place Vendôme. A small card was stapled to the receipt. On the back, written by a shaking hand, was a brief message:

  Leonid, mon cher,

  merci pour tout,

  N x.

  Beneath that, in Russian, was an addition:

  Diamonds or bread? Only we know which.

  Stephanie looked at the first part of the message. N for Natalya? Aleksandr Ginzburg's widow was Natalya. And alive, it seemed. Stephanie was a little surprised. Aleksandr Ginzburg had died a long time ago – a famous car crash outside Cannes sometime in the late Seventies or early Eighties – so Stephanie had just assumed that his wife had died since then. Apparently not. Which now made her a very old woman. Except that Aleksandr hadn't been so old when he'd died. Perhaps she was as young as eighty. In other words, of the same vintage as Golitsyn.

  Stephanie stared at the message and felt the pull of its undercurrent.

  Diamonds or bread? Only we know which.

  London, 04:05

  When the phone rang in Rosie Chaudhuri's small first-floor flat off Chichele Road in north London, she was already awake. She'd fallen into bed at one, exhausted, a little drunk, unhappy. The alcohol was supposed to have soothed the pain but hadn't. An inexperienced drinker, the very least she'd hoped for had been a deep sleep but she'd been awake by half-past-three.

  Her first night out in a month, her first as a single woman in more than a year. Her friend Claire had insisted upon it. Time to move on. Time to consign him to history. Reluctantly, Rosie had capitulated. A poor decision, as it turned out. There had been no balm for the hurt, no boost for the self. Just a large bill and a hangover.

  When her relationship failed, Rosie did what she always did: she buried herself in work. An easy solution which, for a week or two, seemed to deliver. Then came the familiar sensation; the weight in the chest, the suspicion of a greater malaise lurking at the heart of her. How could a smart, attractive woman continue to stumble from one third-rate relationship to another?

  A second-generation Indian, Rosie ran an organization at the cutting edge of global intelligence. From any point of view – race, gender, age – she was a success. But she didn't feel like one. Never had, if the truth be told, and now, at five past four on a dismal winter morning, she felt a total failure.

  What good was her position – her power – if she couldn't hold down a relationship? Dumped by an out-of-work actor because he was intimidated by her professional success. He thought she worked for the Centre for Defence Studies at King's College, London. That was the lie by which she was universally known among her family and friends.

  The actor was a lovely man; kind, funny, good-looking. But not much of an actor. When he'd complained about the hours she kept she'd seen straight through him; he'd resented her work because it fuelled his own sense of professional inadequacy. Which, in turn, she'd resented. It wasn't amusing to come home after a sixteen hour shift to be criticized by a man who'd spent the day lying on a sofa watching Countdown and Neighbours, waiting for Steven Spielberg to call.

  She picked up the phone. 'Yes?'

  'This is Carter, S3.'

  S3 was the intelligence section. 'What is it, John?'

  'There's a car on its way. It'll be with you in eight minutes.'

  'Give me the bare bones.'

  'Last night, Paris. The Lancaster hotel. A shooting, two victims: Leonid Golitsyn and Fyodor Medvedev.'

  The first name was vaguely resonant, the second meant nothing. 'Go on.'

  'S9 has intercepted communication between DST and DGSE.'

  Both agencies formed part of France's intelligence community. The DST, the Directorate for Surveillance of the Territory, was concerned primarily with counter-espionage, counter-intelligence and the protection of classified information, and was under the direct control of the Ministry of the Interior. The DGSE – Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure – was responsible for terrorism, human intelligence and industrial economic intelligence.

  Rosie asked for a brief reminder of Golitsyn's significance and then said, 'So what'
s the problem?'

  'Stephanie Patrick.'

  A sequence of syllables to rob the breath.

  Impossible, she thought. Well, no, not impossible. But as close to impossible as unlikely could ever be.

  Carter said, 'They're looking for Petra Reuter. There's been positive identification.'

  'Photographic?'

  'We're not sure. There's something else, though. The two Algerians fingered by DGSE for the blast in Sentier – they're a smokescreen. She's the one they want.'

  'A bomb?'

  The closest Petra had come to using a bomb was an exploding mobile phone that had decapitated an American lawyer in Singapore. As glib as it sounded, bombs weren't her style.

  'I know what you're thinking,' Carter said, 'but they seem very confident.'

  'They usually do. Are we sure she's real?'

  Like every star, Petra Reuter had her cheap imitators.

  'As sure as we can be.'

  Rosie put down the phone, hauled herself from the bed and entered the bathroom. She was still wearing most of her eye-liner, smudged like bruises. No time for fresh clothes, she dressed in yesterday's suit. In the sitting-room, she found her briefcase on a packing crate.

  Six months on and she still hadn't settled into the apartment. She'd sold her place just off the Seven Sisters Road but had been part of a buying chain that had collapsed. This place, a short-term rental, had been a stop-gap. She'd been looking for something small and comfortable in the heart of the city. Now she wasn't sure what she wanted.

  Her predecessor had installed a small bedroom at Magenta House. Towards the end, he'd never gone home. Rosie considered that symptomatic of much that had gone wrong within the organization; it had become too self-absorbed. Which, in turn, had led to levels of paranoia that had begun to affect its operational integrity.

  In every walk of life, one needed interests outside of work in order to maintain a balance. Rosie believed that was especially true for the employees of an organization like Magenta House. Within a fortnight of replacing him, she'd had his bedroom dismantled to make way for a new debriefing suite.