by Tom Savage
Chuck’s first concern would be for Nora; she had to let him know that she was all right. She moved forward through the crowd until she stood before him. He looked up at her, exhaled in obvious relief, shook his head once, and mouthed the word Go. He clearly didn’t want her involved in the inevitable police and paramedic activity. Nora nodded and slipped away. She paused at the next corner to call Amanda, quickly reporting everything that had occurred and sending her the photos she’d just taken.
“We’ll handle this,” Amanda said. “Go straight to the hotel and wait there until you’re contacted.”
“Right.” Nora ended the call, but she kept the phone out in case she had any further emergency between here and the hotel. She remembered the new number for the French police: 17—a two-digit number, as opposed to the three-digit 999 in England or 911 in America. And there was always 112, the general emergency number for all European countries.
Scanning the intersection, she saw a few pedestrians on the other three corners, some of them looking over and pointing toward the activity on the sidewalk behind her. She didn’t see the man from the alley or the man from the airport. She wondered if any of the people nearby were sent by Jacques Lanier, but she doubted it, just as she was certain there were no other CIA agents in the vicinity. Any interested parties would have helped Chuck and come to her rescue in the alley. She was alone here, six blocks west of the hotel.
Nora followed Amanda’s instructions, walking briskly, clutching the phone in her trembling hand, constantly looking around for potential enemies. Everything she saw was too bright; the landscape seemed to be in high definition, with sharp lines and saturated colors. The shaking in her hands and legs gradually subsided, but now her limbs felt heavy and numb, and she was hyperventilating. She recognized this as the onset of shock. She pushed herself forward, straining to breathe evenly, not stopping until she was back in her room.
Chapter 10
The red door was the first thing Nora saw when she arrived in the hotel basement; it was directly across from the elevator in a dimly lighted hallway. She moved directly to the door and knocked twice, then paused and knocked twice again.
The man who answered was about her age, and he was huge, even bigger than the big man in the alley. Six-four, she guessed, and well over two hundred pounds. His bullet-shaped, bald head was almost too small for his flat, wide nose and rubbery lips. A faint white scar extended diagonally down from the top of his forehead to his left eyebrow, and the thin welt that ringed his massive neck suggested a long-ago close encounter with a garrote. Nora tried not to stare, forcing herself to smile at him.
He didn’t return her smile. He glared at her and barked one word in a deep voice. “Nom?”
“Nora Baron,” she replied. Cecile Lanier had told her to give this man her real name. “You are Monsieur Brisson?”
The big man burst into a grin that revealed suspiciously perfect white teeth. He stepped back from the doorway, waving her inside with a hand the size of a catcher’s mitt, then shut the door behind her and locked it. They were in a neat, cozy living room with striped wallpaper, lace curtains at the high windows, and a bowl of flowers on the coffee table. Nora smelled fresh coffee and baking bread.
“Hello, Madame Baron! Yes, I am of the name of Monsieur Brisson, but you must call me Michel. I am pleased to make your acquaintance. I am welcoming you to my residence.”
“Thank you, Michel, and you must call me Nora,” she said, wondering where he’d learned his archaic, overly formal English. But she was grateful that he spoke it; her French was pas bon, and she was in a hurry. She was about to explain this to him when a beaded curtain on the other side of the room parted and a small, pretty woman with an apron over her dress arrived.
“This lady is the wife of me,” Michel said.
“Bonjour, madame,” Nora said.
“You are American,” the wife observed. “Will you have a cup of coffee?”
Nora was saved from replying by Michel, who launched into a brief speech in French. The wife nodded, smiled again, and vanished through the beads.
He turned back to Nora. “I am telling her that you are anxious to be speeding on your way to another location, and you have not the time to partake of the coffee. This is correct, yes?”
“Yes,” Nora said. “But things have changed since you and Jacques made this plan for me.” She told him about the attack in the alley, noting the expression of concern on his scarred face.
“Are you being well after your confrontation?” he asked.
“Yes, I’m fine,” she assured him. “But I’m a bit nervous about going out alone at this point.”
He nodded and said, “I will be company with you. Allow me to describe this to Michelle. Excuse me for a moment, please.” He went off through the beaded curtain.
Nora stood by the front door, thinking, Michel and Michelle. Perfect. She smiled at the thought of the big man and the little woman as she gazed around their immaculate home. The actor in her thought they’d make excellent characters in a French TV sitcom.
Then her current situation came back to her, and her smile faded. She’d waited in her room until Amanda had called to say that Chuck had a concussion and was being kept in the hospital for observation. Amanda told her to remain in the hotel until she and Ben Dysart came to take Nora to the dinner party Amanda had arranged for Julie Campbell, her friend visiting from America. This conspicuous event would occur in a restaurant on the Left Bank that was popular with the diplomatic community.
They would arrive with the car at seven; it was now nearly four-thirty. She would have to be quick with Jacques and be back here in time to get ready for the party. She glanced impatiently over at the beaded curtain just as Michel emerged. He’d put on a leather jacket, and Nora noted the slight bulge on his left side: a shoulder holster.
“Let us enter into our journey,” he said.
Nora smiled. They’d be walking a short way through a pleasant French neighborhood, but he’d made it sound like The Lord of the Rings. She followed him down the hallway to the rear door of the building. This opened onto steps leading up to a dark alley similar to the one she’d been in earlier today, and she winced at the memory. She wondered who the distraught man with the knife was, and where he was now. As they moved along the back of the hotel to the next street, Michel pulled out his phone, muttered something in French, and ended the call.
“He will be awaiting us at our destination,” he told her.
They left the alley, heading east to the next corner, then north the two blocks to Chez Felicia, a small storefront restaurant with only six tables and the best food Nora had ever been served in Paris. Nora wasn’t surprised when she saw that the restaurant was closed and the curtains on the front windows drawn; it was between the lunch and dinner hours.
Michel led her past the front door and into the alley beside the restaurant. The kitchen door was here, at the side of the building, and he repeated Nora’s double rap-pause-double rap. The door was opened by the proprietor, a handsome French widow in an apron.
“Bonjour, Nora!” she said, grasping Nora’s arms and bestowing a French double-cheek kiss. “Tu es en Paris encore! Bienvenu, bienvenu! Allo, Michel.”
“Bonjour, Felicia,” Nora said.
They followed Felicia into her kitchen, where her son, André, was chopping vegetables. Nora smiled over at him as they were led out into the dining room. The scent of roasting pork was so tantalizing that Nora wished she could ditch tonight’s party and dine here instead. But this thought flew from her when she saw the man who stood beside the big table in the center of the otherwise empty restaurant.
He was in his late sixties, with gleaming white hair and matching mustache, his dark eyes twinkling, as they always did. He was small and slight but amazingly strong, and adversaries who mistook his size for weakness were foolish, as he’d proved many times in his years as a field operative. He’d known her husband for a long while, but she’d first met him two years ago. And no
w, despite knowing that she was Madame Baron, he called her by his favorite name for her.
“Mademoiselle Hugs!” he said, and Nora rushed forward into his waiting arms.
“Oh, Jacques, I’m so glad to see you!”
Chapter 11
“I do not like this, mademoiselle,” Jacques Lanier said when he had heard Nora’s story. “I do not like you being in the thickness of it.”
“In the thick of it,” Nora corrected him. One of the first things she’d noticed about Jacques two years ago was that he loved to pepper his speech with phrases of American slang, but he nearly always got them wrong. She felt a flood of affection for him: Some things never changed.
“Yes, the thick of it,” he said. “You do this job for the CIA, and on your first day in Paris you are pulled into an alley and almost killed! How do we say this to Jeff, that his wife is dead in France? I love having you to be here, but it is not good for you to chance your life. Go home, mademoiselle.”
“I can’t,” she said. “I’m doing something that’s very important to several people, not to mention America. I wish I could tell you about it, Jacques, but it’s classified. You’ll just have to take my word.”
He frowned and glanced over at the table in the back corner where Felicia sat with Michel. They were chatting and laughing like the old friends they obviously were, pointedly ignoring Nora and Jacques. Felicia had been told only that Jacques needed privacy to talk to Nora, and that was good enough for her. She’d served them coffee and left them to it.
“Okey-dokey,” Jacques said at last, returning his attention to Nora. “I will trust your deciding. But there is a thing you must know, mademoiselle.” He pulled out his smartphone and pressed buttons, then held it up to her. Nora peered at a photo of the man at the airport last night. He stood in the crowded main concourse, just before he’d exited the terminal and hailed a cab to follow Nora to her hotel.
“How did you get this picture?” she asked.
Jacques grinned. “You have not met my other son, the one who is not Pierre. He was there last night when you came from the avion, and he saw the man and the woman who followed you. Now you tell me the woman is an American agent who works with you. But the man, c’est une autre paire de manches—he is the horse in the different coloring book.” He pressed more buttons on the phone and held it up again.
Nora stared. She was looking at an official French file from the national police, with tiny print and a head shot of the man from the airport. Jacques touched the picture, enlarging it to fill the screen. The man was considerably younger in the photo. His hair and mustache were longer and darker, and his cold, blank stare was disconcerting.
“This looks like a mug shot,” Nora said. “Is he a criminal? Who is he, Jacques?”
He manipulated the screen again, enlarging the text that accompanied the photo. “See for yourself, mademoiselle.”
She couldn’t read French well, but she understood enough. Yuri Kerensky, thirty-two, a Russian citizen from Moscow, had been under surveillance here by la Police Nationale, suspected of being a professional assassin. His alleged target at the time had been a man named Igor Astrov, forty-three, a minor functionary with the Russian embassy in Paris who’d allegedly been selling Russian secrets to Western powers.
Astrov had been found dead, bound and gagged, on the floor of his apartment in Montmartre. He’d been tortured with an electric prod, and his neck had been broken by someone’s bare hands. Kerensky had been questioned and released without charge—the usual airtight alibi with witnesses, apparently—and he’d returned to Moscow, but the French officer who’d filed the report was certain of his guilt. The document was dated fifteen years ago, and the officer had added a handwritten postscript at the bottom: Je pense qu’il est Le Faucon.
“ ‘I think he’s The Falcon,’ ” Nora translated. The French policeman’s stark words chilled her. She placed the phone on the table, staring at her friend.
Jacques nodded. “You know who is Le Faucon, yes? Everyone knows The Falcon. He is a Russian hitting man, but he is not loyal to Russia or anyone else but the people with the most cabbage in their pants. He has killed many, many people in his time. Le Faucon must have taken the meurtre commandité, the contract. For you, mademoiselle. I know you cannot tell me about your work here, and I do not ask, but you are pretending to be someone you are not, yes? And I think Le Faucon is here to kill you—I mean, to kill the person he thinks you are being. Does this make the sense to you?”
Nora grimaced. It made sense, all right, and she didn’t like it. Yuri Kerensky had followed her from the airport to the hotel, but she’d have to revise her theory that he’d stolen into her room and looked through her purse. If he’d been in her room, he would have killed her in the shower. He could have made it look like an accident, a slip-and-fall on the tiles, with no one the wiser. No, someone else had been there.
The Falcon was apparently waiting for his chance to kill her, and a distraught stranger had tried to kill her this afternoon. Nora had no idea who TSB was, but she reasoned that she could safely eliminate everyone she’d encountered in Paris so far. TSB seemed to be late to the party…
Jacques was watching her, an expression of concern on his kind face. She had to fight the urge to tell him everything she knew, everything she was doing here. He’d have good advice for her—but he’d already given her the best advice anyone could possibly give her at this point: Go home, mademoiselle.
She wasn’t going to consult Jeff just yet, because she couldn’t. Edgar Cole had demanded secrecy for this op, and in the protocols of the Company that was as good as a federal law. More than protocols, it was a simple matter of expediency. Jeff would probably demand that she abandon Paris and catch the next flight home. She had no intention of doing that. She would see this assignment through; she would get the job done.
But she was up against at least two assassins, and her CIA team in Paris had just diminished from three people to two since Chuck had been sidelined. How soon could they replace him? She didn’t know Amanda Morris well enough to trust her with her life, and Ben Dysart was a babe in the woods.
Now, in Felicia’s charming restaurant, Nora Baron made a decision. There was one other option, and it was right here beside her.
“Jacques,” she said, “I need your help.”
He grinned again. “Okey-dokey.”
Chapter 12
The third restaurant Nora visited that Monday was more than a restaurant—it was an experience. Every major city always has a club-of-the-moment, and Rêve was Paris’s current hot spot. It took up the top three floors of a tall building near the Left Bank somewhere between her favorite museum, Musée Rodin, and the Eiffel Tower. A stunning view of that monument filled the west-facing glass wall of the dining room, the lowest level of the club, where Nora enjoyed a sumptuous French feast with Amanda and four of Amanda’s friends.
Directly above the dining room was a thumping, packed dance space with a popular DJ setting the beat for the writhing throng. The top floor, where Nora’s party went after dinner, was a sedate cocktail lounge where a jazz trio and a girl singer performed for quietly rich, beautifully dressed people on velvet chairs and couches arranged around low cocktail tables. Glass walls on all four sides looked out on the sprawling lights of Paris.
“Just because we’re working, it doesn’t mean we can’t have fun!” Amanda had explained as she’d ushered Nora into the dining room and introduced her to their party, all four of whom were Americans stationed in Paris with federal jobs.
Bob and Sheila were a fiftyish married couple from D.C. who worked at the American embassy; they smiled a lot and drank too much. Kiki was a giggling executive assistant to an American diplomat in Paris who’d known Amanda since their college days; her professed goal of the evening was to find a rich, single man. Clifford was a handsome thirty-something from New York who counted beans at the American consulate, and he was apparently supposed to be Nora’s date. He hung on her every word and con
stantly refilled her wineglass.
Amanda introduced her as Julie Campbell, and they all seemed delighted to meet Amanda’s nurse friend from New York. Nora suspected the chateaubriand smothered in foie gras, the cerises jubilé, and the unlimited wine and Champagne in the exclusive club had something to do with it as well, but she smiled and allowed them to celebrate her.
Clifford whisked Nora off to the dance floor as they moved upstairs from the dining room to the lounge. She gyrated as best she could in the hot, sweaty room, worrying that he might try to make a pass at her until she realized that he only had eyes for the younger women in the place. Relieved, she relaxed and had a good time with him.
The good time came to a definite end shortly after they joined the others in the lounge.
“How are you holding up?” Amanda asked as Nora sank onto the sofa beside her.
Nora smiled wearily. “To tell the truth, I’m running out of steam, but I’ll keep going for as long as you want.”
“Not much longer,” Amanda said. She checked the screen of the phone in her hand. “I’ve been getting reports from Ben Dysart—he’s posted outside, watching the front entrance. He hasn’t seen any persons of interest enter the place, and I haven’t noticed anyone, either. Have you?”
“No,” Nora admitted. “I’ve been scanning the crowds all evening for the man from the airport or the one from the alley, but no dice.”
Amanda looked around their table and smiled. “I think we can call it a night when we finish these drinks.”
Bob was dozing in his chair, Sheila was about to drop off as well, and Kiki and Clifford were checking out the available singles in the room and looking at their watches; they clearly wanted to go on the prowl. The trio played softly in a corner while the girl sang “Ne Me Quitte Pas.” Nora leaned back against the seat, reminding herself that she’d just had an excellent meal in a pleasant club with nice people.