by Mark Burnell
> Nothing. Don't trust any messages from me. No phone, no notes, no e-mail. The next time we have contact, it'll be in person. I'll come to you. Until then, stay safe. And forget me.
She drove Newman's Audi to Croix Rousse, took the leather bag from the boot and abandoned it. She walked back towards the centre of the city and later caught a tram to the Centre d'Échange at Gare de Perrache, where she boarded a bus for Lyon-St Exupéry airport, arriving fifty minutes later. She spoke to the driver twice; once to ask how long the journey took, once to ask if they were going to be late. Both times, her smile bordered flirtation.
She went to P5, the long-term car-park, where she waited, ignoring all the vehicles that were already there since there was no way of knowing how soon their owners might return. Cars came and went, none quite suitable, until shortly before eleven, a dark blue Peugeot saloon arrived at the barrier. A single middle-aged man was driving. From a distance, Stephanie watched him park. He took an attaché case from the front passenger seat and a suitcase from the boot. He locked the car and dropped the key into the right pocket of his brown jacket before heading towards the terminal.
Stephanie closed the distance between them so that by the time he entered Terminal 2, she was only a couple of metres behind him. As he joined the queue for the check-in, the eleven o'clock Air France flight to Paris, she bumped into him, turning to apologize – 'pardon, monsieur' – as she walked on. Another sweet smile, this one reciprocated, the key secure in her hand as she pushed it into her own pocket.
She left the terminal building and waited another fifty minutes in sight of the car-park. The man didn't return. Inside the terminal again, she checked the departure board. By five-past-eleven, the Air France flight had gone.
Less than twenty minutes later, so had she.
They took the A42 and the A39, heading north, before veering east on the A36 towards Besançon and Mulhouse. Stephanie was driving, keeping just short of the speed limit. The radio was on. They listened to the news, neither of them saying what they were both thinking: will we recognize ourselves in the bulletins? The weather reports warned of storms blowing in from the east.
Stephanie rummaged through the CD cases. 'The Doors. I don't believe it.'
'Why not?'
'You should've seen the man who got out of this car. He looked like an accountant. Or an undertaker.'
He'd certainly been a smoker. Stephanie had emptied the ashtray of its cigarette butts on the way into Lyon but the Peugeot still smelt of stale smoke.
Newman said, 'Are you familiar with the phrase "never judge a book by its cover"?'
'I'm familiar with the phrase "mid-life crisis". Then again, I would never have had you down as a David Bowie fan.'
'I'm sorry?'
'When I was looking through your office, I came across your albums. All that vinyl …'
'I don't play them any more. But I like to keep them. Anyway, what's wrong with Bowie?'
'Nothing. God, nothing at all. I love Bowie.'
'Okay. What's wrong with me?'
'Look at where you live. The way you live, what you do. Everything.'
'When I was growing up, he was the deal. I was the right age at the right time. I loved the music, the way he looked, his attitude. And that most people hated him.'
'In New York? I'm surprised.'
'Mostly I grew up in Maine. The Thin White Duke went down well in Manhattan but not in Bangor or Bar Harbor. You know, it's stranger that you should like Bowie's music than me. When I bought his albums they were new. You buy him the way I buy Tchaikovsky.'
'Or read about Lebanon? As a matter of history?'
'Ouch.'
'You never did say why you went there.'
'For all the wrong reasons. But mostly because of my old man.'
'What does that mean?'
'It doesn't matter.'
'You can't say something like that and then drop it.'
'Why not?'
'It's … unethical.'
'Unethical? That puts it in the same ballpark as what you did to the guy in my kitchen.'
'That wasn't unethical. That was unavoidable.'
'Well, it's a long story.'
'This is a long road.'
'Okay. My father was a professor of politics at Harvard. An academic liberal. A socialist, I guess, though he never liked the word. He was also a fierce critic of Israel. Not of its right to exist, but of its conduct as a state. And he was equally critical of America's unqualified support for Israel, and of the pro-Israeli bias in the media. He thought it was absurd that you couldn't criticize Israel without being branded anti-Semitic. All these things he put in a paper in 1980; The Illness Inside. Professionally speaking, it was a thirty-seven-page suicide note.'
'Proving his point about the press?'
'Ironically, yes; they rounded on him and accused him of being anti-Semitic. Just as he'd predicted. They character-assassinated him and it cost him his job.'
'I would've thought a place like Harvard …'
'The pressure. Financial, political, all from the invisible above. Even a place like Harvard isn't immune. You know it happens. Everyone does. And he swallowed it. Said he had no interest in being part of an institution that didn't have the guts to stand up to tyranny.'
'A strong stance.'
'No. A weak stance dressed to look strong.'
'What did he do?'
'He went back to Maine. Back to the house where I grew up. To the house where my mother died from cancer the previous summer. And on the last day of October, he committed suicide.'
'Just because some half-wit journalists bad-mouthed him?'
Newman shook his head. 'That's what I thought back then. Now, I don't think it had anything to do with that. I think he killed himself because he was broken-hearted.'
'Yet you still ended up in Lebanon because of him?'
'That's right. I wanted to be a journalist. I wanted to redress the balance somehow. To be the Woodward and Bernstein of the Middle East.'
Stephanie rolled her eyes. 'A crusader in Lebanon? Smart thinking. Is this a genetic thing, chasing lost causes?'
'Could be – I'm still with you.'
'Very amusing.'
'Trouble was, I couldn't write for shit.'
'A slight drawback. What did you do?'
'I became a photo-journalist instead.'
'Just like that?'
'My mother was a portrait photographer. Quite well known in her own field. So I knew what an aperture was. The rest was bullshit. But it was enough to get me into an agency and to get assigned.'
'To Lebanon.'
'I would've gone anywhere. Europe, the Far East, Africa. But Lebanon came up. It was 1982. The Israelis had just invaded. Dad had been dead for less than a year. It just seemed to come together.'
'In a war zone?'
Newman smiled. 'I was an idiot with spots. It seemed like an adventure.'
'I'll bet it didn't disappoint on that score.'
'Damn right. So off I went.'
'To take pictures.'
'To document the truth. To be neutral.'
'How was it?'
'Extraordinary. Not another country, really. More like another world.'
'And did you succeed in remaining neutral?'
His laugh was simultaneously weary and nostalgic. Like the lines at the corners of his eyes, it was a scar of experience for which there was no short cut.
'Of course not,' he said. 'Nobody who was there was neutral. That didn't mean you had to be on anybody's side. You just couldn't be neutral. There was no neutral. I felt for the eighteen-year-old Israeli boys bullied into the IDF to fight a war they didn't understand. I felt for the Palestinians. Most of all, though, I felt for the Lebanese. Caught in the crossfire – literally and politically – their country ruined by a conflict between outside parties. You can't believe the mess it was.'
'Sounds like a non-stop adrenaline rush.'
'Right. I never had a dull day. Could never relax,
never wanted to. From one day to the next, you never knew what you were doing. No matter how much you resisted it, you got sucked in. Sooner or later you were bound to make a mistake. It was inevitable.'
'What was yours?'
'Falling in love with the wrong woman.'
New York City, 09:15
'We've got the footage from Lyon-St Exupéry airport coming through any moment now, sir,' Steven Mathis said. 'Five, four, three, two and … here we go. We're in Terminal 2.'
The active screen configuration at the front of the suite was two by two, the dividing lines between the four screens almost invisible. Each screen showed a different angle. The time was recorded in the bottom right-hand corners and was synchronized between the four. The pictures were almost five hours old. Since their recording, Cabrini had learned that Grotius was dead; Paris-1 had confirmed it. There had been no sign of Newman in the apartment on quai d'Orléans.
'I don't see her.'
'Top right. Crossing now, in front of the taxi. Behind the guy in the brown suit. She's carrying a leather bag, two loop straps.'
'Okay.'
'Now she's inside. Go to the bottom left. You can see her coming into the terminal, towards us. Looks like she's in a hurry.'
Cabrini watched her until she disappeared through the bottom of the screen.
'Top left,' Mathis said. 'From right to left, beneath the departure board … now.'
Certainly in a rush, Cabrini thought. Where was she heading? Weaving in and out of passengers, she brushed against the man in the brown suit, just as he joined the short queue for check-in desk 25. She turned to apologize but didn't stop. Then she was scurrying forward again, towards the far end of the building, and was gone.
The four screens were refreshed with a fresh quartet of camera angles. Cabrini picked her up easily this time; the jeans, the leather coat, the scamper. Mathis gave the commentary that was no longer needed. When she vanished from the top right, she didn't reappear. Cabrini asked what was next.
'Nothing,' Mathis said. 'That's all we got. The passenger manifests are being scrutinized as we speak.'
As she would no doubt have expected, Cabrini thought. 'Let's assume she drove to the airport. Can we find Newman's car?'
'We're on to it.'
'And what about the hook-up in Paris? Any more on that?'
'No, sir. No one saw it.'
'No cameras?'
'Only what Grotius stole. Nothing from the car park.'
Cabrini sat back. How had it happened? Why Newman? It couldn't be a coincidence. Not with his connections.
'We've overlooked something,' he concluded.
'Maybe he was the first person she came across?'
'And she just climbed into his car? His car, of all people? Look at who he is. We know why she was at the Lancaster. Why was he there?'
They hadn't moved for more than two hours. Somewhere ahead of them in the gathering gloom, two lorries had collided. One had turned over, the other had jack-knifed. A dozen other vehicles had crashed into them. The road was shut. Air ambulances were ferrying the injured to hospital. Three were in a critical condition. Stephanie turned off the radio.
At first, there had been an inclination to panic: they weren't moving yet they had to keep moving. Perhaps they should abandon the car? Of course not. The moment they got out, they'd draw attention to themselves. What could be more anonymous than sitting in kilometres of stationary traffic? Then again, what if the licence plate was recognized? By whom? Almost certainly, the owner didn't know that his car had been stolen. Besides, the cars in front and behind were so close that neither driver would have been able to make the plate.
They were circular arguments. After a while, by force of will, she abandoned them. 'I'm going to sleep,' she'd told Newman, when the radio had confirmed the carnage ahead. 'I suggest you do too.'
To his surprise, she'd managed more than an hour. Her first waking thoughts had centred on the other Petra. Étienne Lorenz had said that she could be found at Club Nitro in Vienna. Stephanie hoped that was true. A persistent knot of dread suggested it might not be. Women like her were always expendable.
Now it was after six. The last of the daylight was long gone. Belching exhausts threw a fog around them, engines running to keep their drivers warm.
Stephanie said, 'If you had to pick another life for yourself, what would it be?'
'The one I was having.'
'As a photo-journalist?'
'Yes.'
'With the wrong kind of woman?'
'Yes.'
'She can't have been that wrong.'
'What about you?'
What a question. It was impossible to imagine how her life might have unfolded. A university career taken to its conclusion? A good job, then a husband and children? She supposed that was the fate that had befallen the majority of her contemporaries. Would it have been hers? Impossible to say now. She was too far away from the girl she'd once been to make that leap. But in theory …
'Like you, the life I was having.'
'Which was what?'
She looked out of the window. The first snowflakes were falling. They were blurred.
Around seven-thirty the traffic began to crawl forward. Close to Mulhouse, they stopped at a service area for fuel and something to eat. They rejoined the autoroute just after ten and headed north on the A35 towards Strasbourg. Down to thirty kilometres an hour in places, the snow dancing over the windscreen, a strong wind driving it across the open plain. All the bulletins were advising against travel. Just after Colmar they saw a car on the other side of the barrier slide into a three-sixty spin before veering off the carriageway.
'We're too exposed. We need to let the worst of this pass,' Stephanie said. 'We can't afford a collision.'
They came off the autoroute and made it to Ribeauville at the foot of the Vosges mountains. Stephanie drove through the picturesque town centre. Restaurant windows glowed in the darkness. Light seeped from the cracks in curtains. The pavements were deserted. When they reached the far side of town, Stephanie took the road for Sainte Marie.
'We're not stopping?'
'We can't take a room.'
'Where are we going?'
'No idea.'
They began to climb, the road twisting through steep slopes of mature forest. Despite this, Stephanie found the conditions marginally easier; the terrain shielded them from the worst of the wind. Fat snowflakes fell vertically through the cones of light cast by the headlights. Occasional houses came and went, emerging briefly from the darkness like passing ships in fog. There were intermittent turnings, some signposted, most not. After eight kilometres, she took one.
It was a rough track, marked out only by the alternatives: a steep rise on one side, a steep drop on the other, both through towering trees, their branches already sagging under the weight of snow.
'Know where we are?' Newman asked, after ten minutes of total darkness.
'No. But look on the bright side: if we don't, it's extremely unlikely anybody else does.'
'I like a woman who's glass-half-full.'
'What are you? The glass-half-empty type?'
'Not normally. What are we looking for?'
'Nothing.'
'I thought we found that already.'
Even as he said it, it was clear they hadn't. As they lurched around a rocky comer, a shack came into view, light spilling from fractured shutters, smoke curling from a chimney. Beside the shack was a rusting 2CV on bricks, a discarded refrigerator and an upturned bathtub.
It was barely a hamlet. A few creaking dwellings on either side of the track, wooden telephone poles running along one side, the lines looping from house to house. They crept on, the track turning sharply to manoeuvre around one house, then the next.
A cross appeared, gradually, then sharply, as it drifted into their light. A roadside shrine; a wooden crucifix with the gleaming white body of Jesus. Within twenty yards, there was another; a wooden box with a glass front, Mary holding the infan
t Jesus in her arms, illuminated by guttering candles. Despite the weather, somebody had persevered. In all, Stephanie counted seven shrines and a dozen houses.
They negotiated another tight bend and were in darkness again. As though the hamlet had been nothing more than a momentary flight of imagination.
Five minutes later, they spotted a dilapidated barn in a small clearing just off the track. Stephanie killed the lights and engine, took the hold-all from the boot and climbed back in. She handed the Smith & Wesson Sigma to Newman and kept the Heckler & Koch for herself.
'Ever used one of these?'
'All the time. They're useful in the boardroom.'
'Not even in your colourful past?'
'Never,' he insisted, before adding: 'but I know how to. Providing there's a safety-catch, of course.'
'Smart-arse. I'm going to check the barn.'
She circled it twice, peering through the gaps between the rotten planks. No livestock, no machinery. The front of the barn had two doors secured by a wooden beam dropped into iron cups. She removed the beam and tried to pull the doors open but the snow was banked too high. She managed to squeeze through the gap she'd created. The lack of wind made it comparatively warm. A few snowflakes fell through holes in the roof. There was no sign of recent use.
Using planks ripped from the rear wall, they scraped clear enough snow to allow the doors to open. By the time they'd finished, their hands were red, their fingers numb. Steam rose off them. Newman reversed the car into the barn and Stephanie pulled the doors closed as the headlights threw creamy pools on to gnarled wood.
'What was her name?'
'Who?'
'The wrong woman.'
We've been here half an hour. I don't expect him to answer. He's avoided talking about her every time I've given him the opportunity. But he surprises me.
'Gabriella.'
'Italian?'
'Spanish.'
I can see her immediately. 'The woman in the photo on your desk?'
'That's right.'
'Wow.'
He arches an eyebrow. 'Wow?'