The Fifth Doctrine: The Guardian Series Book 3

by Karen Robards

There was a particular booth that he favored in Vernaison, a central area of the flea market, and it was in that direction that Bianca headed. All around her shoppers browsed. The chatter was a mix of languages with French predominating. The sound of a woman singing the popular “Dernière Danse” to the accompaniment of a single guitar rose sweetly above the general hubbub. A mouthwatering smell—fresh-baked beignets?—wafted past her nose, reminding her that she was hungry.

  Spy now, eat later.

  “On your three.” Colin’s voice in her ear told her that he was, indeed, present, close enough to see her and, presumably, Park. His alert had her looking to her right.

  Sure enough, she spotted Park in the three o’clock position, in a booth not far from where she had expected him to be, and recognized him instantly. He was fifty-eight years old, five-nine and wiry, with a round face that belied his build and a short-on-the-sides, long-on-the-top comb-over that featured half a dozen dyed black strands plastered across a bald dome. He was wearing a navy overcoat against the chill over gray dress pants, with a long, fringed scarf of white silk looped around his neck. As she watched, he turned over a porcelain statue to, she assumed, check the maker’s mark on its base. A pair of larger, younger men in dark suits who stood with their hands clasped behind their backs a few feet away appeared to be keeping a close eye on him. Bianca knew that he never went anywhere without bodyguards, and assumed that the men were there in that capacity. The bodyguards would protect him and also spy on him, because such was life in the Hermit Kingdom.

  There was no way to be sure, but she thought that Park must be heading for the booth he favored. With the goal of beating him to it, she left off pretending to examine the stitching on an antique sofa and started walking that way.

  Passing the brasserie Chez Louisette, she discovered the source of both the singing and the delectable smell. The noise and bustle around the small restaurant faded into the background as she eyed the wonderful displays of food on the glass-fronted shelves that formed the eatery’s outer wall: trays of pastries, pain au chocolat, baguettes presented side by side with small tubs of the wonderful French butter. (Seriously, life-changing butter. Her mouth watered just thinking about it.) Inside the brasserie, she caught a glimpse of waiters carrying plates of roast chicken and croque monsieurs and steak frites. Patrons waited in a long line to snag a table.

  Bianca’s stomach rumbled, reminding her that breakfast had been a cup of coffee and a protein bar.

  “If you’re good, I’ll feed you when we’re done here,” Colin said in her ear. Clearly he’d heard her stomach growl. Bianca’s lips compressed. This close to the target, acknowledging him in any way would be bad tradecraft, so she didn’t.

  Skirting the line, she reached the booth that was her goal. Layers of vivid Oriental carpets with the silky sheen of age covered all three of the walls, with the fourth being open to the market. Against the deep reds and blues of the rugs, an antique walnut sideboard held a collection of blue-and-white Meissen china. A pair of enormous gilded candelabra flanked the sideboard. A marble-topped chest heavy with ormolu, a Louis XVI sofa and a gorgeous trumeau mirror were among the eye-catching offerings.

  Half a dozen shoppers browsed the wares. A thin woman dressed all in black with a deeply lined face and iron-gray hair cut boyishly short ran a handheld scanner over a set of silver flatware on a sideboard. She wore a plastic name tag pinned to her blouse that said Mme. Martin. She was, as Bianca knew from the intelligence reports, the proprietress of the shop.

  “Here he comes,” Colin said.

  Because timing was all, Bianca sidled closer to the proprietress, waited until she actually saw Park approaching, then walked up to the woman. In perfect imitation of Lynette’s flat, Midwestern voice (in case Park should subsequently manage to obtain a video of Lynette in which she spoke), she said in French, “Pardon, madame, but I have something—” while pulling a newspaper-wrapped item from her purse.

  Mme. Martin interrupted with a gimlet glare and an impatient gesture. “Ah, bah, you Americans, you cannot speak French, none of you. Why do you even try? What is this you are doing? If you are hoping to sell me something, I must tell you that I do not buy from unknown persons.”

  Park was in the shop. Watching him out of the corner of her eye might give the game away, so she didn’t. Instead she trusted in the power of her bait—and, she realized, in Colin’s voice in her ear to give her a heads-up if there was something she needed to know.

  Having unwrapped the small white porcelain wine cup decorated with colorful chickens, Bianca held it up in such a way that it could be easily seen by anyone in the shop (read Park) and said, in English, “Madame, I have a Ming Dynasty chicken cup to sell. I was hoping—”

  Park appeared within her line of vision, his attention obviously caught.

  “—you might be interested in it.”

  “A chicken cup?” Mme. Martin frowned at it. Ming Dynasty chicken cups were rare. Bianca had no idea where Colin had obtained it. She doubted very much if it was authentic. But he had presented it to her as a means of gaining speech with Park without anyone, even his bodyguards cum minders, thinking there was anything odd about her approaching him. It worked: even as she feigned looking anxiously at Mme. Martin, Park came up beside her.

  “Bonjour, madame,” he said to Mme. Martin, who responded with an acknowledging nod and a slightly sour “Bonjour, M. Park.” Park then turned to Bianca. “Mademoiselle, I would be most interested in looking at this, if you would permit.”

  14

  By this Park meant the cup. Bianca, purposely hesitant, gave him a dubious look.

  “I am a collector,” he assured her. Madame grunted corroboration.

  Still projecting uncertainty, Bianca let him take the cup.

  He held it like it was incredibly valuable, which, if it was real, it was. Turning it this way and that, he examined it, his expression brightening with interest as he brushed a finger over the orange and green and blue painted chickens that decorated it.

  When he flipped it over to squint at the mark on the bottom, which had been intentionally blurred with a smudge of soot, Bianca said, “I believe the light is better over there—” she indicated a place where a shaft of sunlight poured in through one of the clear skylights that punctuated the corrugated plastic roof “—if you would care to get a better look?”

  As she had expected, he nodded and moved the twenty-some-odd feet that it took to reach the sunlight. Bianca moved with him. When he stopped she positioned herself so that her back was to the bodyguards, who watched with only tepid interest from just inside the booth. Mme. Martin had been distracted by a customer’s question, she was glad to see.

  Park rubbed at the soot mark with his thumb and tilted the cup into the light so that he could examine the bottom. “This is quite—”

  Bianca broke in. Her words were quick, her voice low. “M. Park, please keep your attention on the cup as I speak. I have vital information that I know will be of critical interest to the DPRK and to you, as one of its most senior representatives. It concerns an imminent attack on your country by the United States and its allies.” His mouth slackened a little and he shot a startled sideways glance at her. “Keep looking at the cup. You will buy it from me, I will wrap it up in the newspaper I brought it in, and I will include a flash drive that holds a summary of the information I have obtained, along with a way to contact me if you are interested in seeing more. If that is acceptable to you, ask me the price of the cup.”

  “Who are you?” He sounded both fascinated and appalled. His voice was low. His eyes stayed riveted on the cup.

  “My name isn’t important. I was doing work for the United States Department of Defense when I came across this information. In my opinion, an attack by my country against yours will lead to all-out nuclear war, which as a human being and a citizen of the world I feel I must try to prevent. Offering you this information so that you can pass it on to your country in time is how I hope to save us all.” Her
voice, while still barely above a whisper, sharpened and grew more urgent as she spoke. “If you’re interested, ask me the price of the cup. When I tell you, agree to buy it.”

  He wet his lips, swallowed. Then, a little too loudly, he said, “Mademoiselle, what is the price you seek for this cup?”

  Ah. She had him. “A thousand euros.” A pittance compared to the true worth of the cup, if it was genuine, but an American tourist such as Lynette appeared to be would not necessarily know that. Or if it was a copy and she knew it, she might only want to make a quick buck and get away before the fraud was discovered.

  He frowned, shook his head. “That is too much. This may very well be a forgery. I cannot—”

  She gave him credit for entering fully into his role, but she wasn’t sure there was time for feigned dickering—if it was feigned. Park was reported to be a notorious cheapskate. The bodyguards, in a concerted action that she found troubling, started to close in on her and Park. Whatever the reason for their sudden shift from stasis to motion, it made her pulse bump along a little faster. Although it couldn’t be anything to do with her, either as Lynette Holbrook or herself. She was almost positive.

  On the other hand, whatever it was almost certainly wasn’t anything good.

  “Seven hundred euros,” she said, summoning an air of stubborn determination.

  “Three hundred,” he countered as the bodyguards reached him. One of them came close to murmur something in his ear. Park nodded, then said to Bianca, “I must go. Three hundred fifty euros is my final offer. It is all the cash I have with me. As they say in your country, take it or leave it.”

  Bianca grimaced. “I— Fine. I’ll take it.” She reached for the cup. “Let me wrap it for you.”

  “Excellent.” He looked at the bodyguard who had whispered to him. “Three hundred fifty euros.” He jerked his head in Bianca’s direction. “To her.”

  His tone to the bodyguards was very different from the tone he had used with her. Rougher, more peremptory. It was, Bianca understood, intended to convey his status and the bodyguards’ subservient position.

  She rewrapped the cup in the newspaper, slipping the promised flash drive in among the wrappings. This one was not disguised as anything; not knowing how tech savvy Park was, they didn’t want to risk him not instantly recognizing it for what it was. Along with a summary of the information she had to sell, the flash drive acquainted him with her fifty-million-dollar asking price and details of how the exchange, if he was interested, would take place.

  The bodyguard handed over the bills. Bianca tucked them into her purse as Park, clutching the parcel, was hustled away.

  “You should have held out for full price,” Colin said. “That was a hell of a forgery.”

  Bianca’s lips quirked. She’d known the cup was fake.

  “You!” Mme. Martin spoke so sharply and unexpectedly that Bianca almost jumped. With Park gone, the woman must have hurried right over. “Go! Do not return to my shop! It is for me to make the sales here, not you. Out, out. Go on.”

  She made shooing motions with her hands, urging Bianca from the shop. Task completed, murmuring penitent phrases like, “I am so sorry, madame,” and, “Yes, I am going,” Bianca was glad to comply.

  “I’m recruiting her next. She’s terrifying,” Colin said.

  Replying might draw too much attention—she didn’t want anyone to notice her raising her hand to her mouth one too many times—so she didn’t.

  Instead she left the flea market.

  If she was going to pick up a tail, this was when it was most likely to happen, as an offshoot of her contact with Park. It was always possible that he was being watched, and that the watcher would try to determine who she was and if she constituted a threat. Or he himself might now order someone to follow her. Add to those possibilities everyone who conceivably might want to kidnap or kill her, either because she was Lynette or because she was Bianca, and her walk away from the flea market was potentially fraught with peril.

  The worst thing about it was, there was nothing she could do about it. Her job was to be Lynette, and Lynette would not know, much less employ, anti-surveillance techniques.

  She kept her eyes forward and trusted in Colin to have her back. Without, she hoped, giving the least appearance of hurrying, she headed for the train rather than the metro for the return trip into the city.

  Never go out the same way you go in. It was one of the rules.

  Blending with the hordes of tourists, she left the train at the Eiffel Tower. Despite the temperature and the overcast sky, the parklike lawn surrounding it was jammed with visitors. The walkways along the nearby Seine were packed, too, and the river itself was alive with boats. She walked to the Rue Alasseur and the modest room she had booked there under the name L. Fields. Assuming that Lynette Holbrook would not have a sophisticated system for creating a new identity, and assuming also that she would not be stupid enough to stay anywhere under her own name, Bianca had determined that Lynette’s most likely subterfuge would have been to claim a marriage not yet reflected on her ID and register under her supposed married name, which for Bianca’s purposes was Fields. That was, therefore, what Bianca had done. As it happened, the hotel was not that picky. They registered her under the name she gave them without question and allowed her to pay cash for the room. As an added bonus, their security cameras consisted of a single pair trained on the check-in desk in the lobby.

  “You picked up a tail,” Colin said in her ear as she reached Lynette’s room, which was small, musty and on the fourth floor. The SVP ne pas Deranger (Do Not Disturb) sign was still on the door. She let herself in. The room was dark except for a shaft of grayish light spilling in through the single window. The piece of paper she’d inserted between the door and the jamb fluttered out onto the floor. She picked it up: no one had been in the room since she’d left. “He’s outside staring at the hotel now. No, wait—he’s on the move, coming around to your side.”

  “Where?” She walked to the window and pulled the old-fashioned roller shade down.

  “Front entrance being noon, he’s moving from eleven to nine o’clock.”

  That was the side she was on. Easy to think the tail knew where her room was, but another of the rules was never assume. After all, if he was at the front of the hotel there were only two ways he could go, and either way he had a 50 percent chance of being right. Bianca turned on the lamp beside the bed and made sure to get between it and the window so that any watcher got a brief look at her silhouette through the shade. Then she moved out of the light and started stripping herself of Lynette’s identity, losing the glasses, the prosthesis, switching her Lynette wig for one of flaming red shoulder-length waves. She’d chosen the eye-catching hue deliberately to provide a focal point for any witnesses to her exiting the hotel so that the red hair would be all they’d see or remember, whether in person or if questioned or shown a picture of Lynette by anyone who came hunting for her. Tradecraft 101: one vivid or unusual detail was enough to distract most observers. That detail would almost always be all they remembered.

  “Who is it? Can you tell?”

  “Best guess, one of Park’s. He picked you up not long after you got off the train.”

  Okay, that wasn’t so bad. Nobody had expected Park or the people he would have reported the encounter to not to check her out.

  “Got it covered,” she said.

  She shucked the pants and pulled on a short knit black skirt that she’d worn as an infinity scarf around the neck of the sleek black sweater that had been concealed beneath the boxy coat. She flipped her throwing star necklace—don’t leave home without it—from hidden beneath the sweater to eye-catching accessory against all that black status, turned the toast-colored coat inside out so that its black underlining was uppermost, and belted it with the black leather belt that had held up her too-large pants to alter the coat’s shape.

  Rolling the pants into a tube, she tucked them along with the other items she’d discarded
into the shoulder bag that, turned inside out, was now a kicky zebra print. Finally she snapped three-inch heels into place onto her flat black ankle boots, and cast an assessing glance around the room.

  She didn’t want to leave anything she’d been wearing behind in case someone broke in and searched the room. The slacks and blouse hanging in the closet and the items still unpacked in the carry-on by the bed were all Lynette’s, as were the toiletries in the tiny bathroom. She’d only touched the clothes and toiletries when she’d unpacked them and she’d been wearing gloves at the time. The suitcase she’d wiped down, just as she would wipe down the room before leaving.

  To the right people, using DNA from, say, a stray hair to determine identity was a piece of cake. The key was to make sure the stray hair belonged to Lynette.

  She put an almost-impossible-to-detect timer on the lamp that was set to turn the light off at 11:00 p.m., wiped down everything she’d touched and left. If someone broke in and searched the room, all the evidence would indicate that the room had been rented by Lynette, who, taking advantage of her time in Paris, was out for a night on the town. If they waited for Lynette to return, well, it was Paris. Random hookups were as popular as the fleur-de-lis.

  As a leggy redhead in a midthigh-length belted black coat, short black skirt, black tights and ankle-length black high-heeled boots, she was, she prided herself, unrecognizable as Lynette. Her ID said Alice Dunn, and Alice Dunn she now was. She exited the back door of the hotel and immediately plunged into the stream of pedestrians on the sidewalk. It was dark already—sunset came early in Paris in December—but the area was well lit from streetlamps and Christmas decorations and the glow spilling from shop windows. In the distance, the Eiffel Tower, all lit up for Christmas, glittered alternately gold and silver and red and green against the night sky. It was breathtakingly lovely, even through the fine sprinkle of rain that was just beginning to fall.

  Out of nowhere, a warning prickle between her shoulder blades made her breath catch. She was on instant high alert. The sensation came on so fast and was so strong that she almost looked sharply around in an attempt to identify the source. Training kicked in before she could betray herself in that way, but the conviction that she was under hostile observation did not diminish. It was not the kind of feeling that came from, say, Colin’s gaze as he watched her back.