by Tom Savage
“Grid,” Nora said.
“Yes, grid. And Amanda Morris has no paper here in Paris—she could be anyone, anywhere. And I am thinking she could assemble any numbers of people to help her, and how would we know? We would not. It is the scrambled eggs, mademoiselle.”
“Yes, it is,” Nora said. She was dreading his next news, but she had to ask. “And the others? Any word of Daniel Fenwick or Ben Dysart?”
Nora knew Jacques very well by now; she could anticipate his words based on his actions. The sudden, awkward silence at the other end of the line told her the bad news before he did.
“I fear that Daniel Fenwick is dead, mademoiselle. There is a body this morning, floating in the Bièvre just before it is the Seine. You know this place in the rivers? It is not far from the Palais-Royal. They say he is an older man in evening clothes, but there is not the identity on him. He has drowned, and he has the needle marks in his elbows—this sounds like Fenwick, yes? I am sorry, mademoiselle.”
Nora clutched the phone, staring down at the field. The concert was over; the singer was asleep, and the dog with him. The sun was in the sky, the sheep were in the meadow, the cows were in the corn. The world was going on as usual, only without Daniel Fenwick, a good agent who had devoted his life to the safety of his country. Nora was going to bring these people down.
Jacques was speaking again. “We have nothing on Ben Dysart. He is their prisoner, or he is hiding, or he is also floating in a river. I do not know, mademoiselle.”
Nora didn’t know, either, but she now knew one thing for sure: Daniel Fenwick was dead, which meant they got what they wanted from him. Yuri Kerensky was in the hospital—they must know that by now—and his wife would naturally be informed as soon as possible. Once that happened, she’d vanish again. They were playing against time. It would definitely be tonight.
Daniel Fenwick. They hadn’t identified him yet, but Nora could do that from a photo, if there was one. This made her think of the obvious way to verify her new theory. Even in death, Daniel Fenwick was helping to get the job done.
Jacques was saying something else, and she hadn’t heard him. “I’m sorry, Jacques; could you repeat that, please?”
“I said that my sons are at your dispensal. They can be in Alpenberg in six heures. Do you want for them to come?”
Nora thought about it. “No, Jacques. Thank you so much for offering, but it’s three o’clock now. They couldn’t get to a train for at least an hour, and driving up here from the city takes longer than you’d think. They wouldn’t get here until ten or eleven tonight. By then, I’m hoping it will all be over.”
“Do you have friends?” he asked.
“Yes, I do—a surprising number of them. Two cops here in the village, four security guards at the clinic, and a secret weapon.”
“What is your secret weapon, mademoiselle?”
Nora smiled, but Jacques wasn’t there to see it. She was thinking how easy it was for a good actor to fool people.
She said, “I have Julie Campbell.”
Chapter 38
The first gray clouds rolled in to interrupt the bucolic perfection just as Nora ended her call with Jacques. She heard a distant rumble of thunder and watched as the shepherd and his dog rose to their feet and sprang into action. In seconds, the agitated flock was on its noisy way up the hill toward the main road and the turnoff at the opposite end of the town square, a symphony of brass bells clanging at their necks. They were being hustled back to their cote in the hills above town before the bad weather arrived.
Bad weather. Nora looked up at the darkening sky; they were definitely in for rain. She thought about that, wondering if the rain would turn out to be friend or foe. A chilly breeze reached her on the balcony, cutting through the mild air. She went inside and shut the glass door, then sat on the bed and called her husband.
“Hi,” Jeff said after the first ring. “I was just thinking about you. I guess now you’re going to tell me why you—”
“Nope,” she said. “In fact, I don’t want to talk to you at all. It’s nine-fifteen in the morning there, so you just got to your office, right? You’re looking at everything you have to do today, all those ops you and Ham Green are overseeing, and you’re working on your first cup of coffee. I love you, I’ll see you soon, and I don’t want to bother you—but I sure could use your assistant, if he’s around.”
“Ralph? Sure. Hold on, Pal.”
A remote hospice in the Swiss Alps played Brahms when they put you on hold, whereas the New York City office of the Central Intelligence Agency played “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head.” Good to know. Nora waited for Ralph Johnson, her husband’s quietly efficient young helper. Unlike Jeff, Ralph never questioned Nora’s requests. He was also a whiz at locating information and a god of all things electronic, which was why Nora needed him now.
“Mrs. Baron?”
“Hi, Ralph. I hope I’m not bothering you, but—”
“Not at all. What can I do for you?”
Nora smiled. Even if she were interrupting him, he’d never admit it. “I don’t know if Jeff’s told you, but I’m working on something here in Switzerland, and I could use some background and photos on a couple of our people.”
“You mean Company people?”
“Yes—well, one of them was; his wife was MI6.”
“Was?” Now Ralph was intrigued; she could hear it in his voice. He lived for this. “Names?”
“John Campbell and Fiona Fenwick.”
“Oh, yeah, I’ve heard of them—the Deadly Duo. But they’ve been gone for years. What do you want to know about them?”
“Anything you have,” Nora said. “I’m particularly interested in their children.”
“Right. Hang on a sec…Wait. That’s weird.”
“What’s weird?” Nora asked.
“Our files on the Campbells are a mess. They’ve been heavily redacted, and it looks like some of them have been removed entirely.”
“I don’t understand,” Nora said.
“Neither do I. These are our files on our people. I could understand doing that for John Q. Public, but not in-house.”
Nora thought a moment. “Are the redactions and removals dated?”
“Uh, yeah, and they were all done at the same time, on—”
“Don’t tell me,” Nora interjected. “Let me guess—about nine years ago, right?”
“Exactly nine years ago. Wow, you’re good, Mrs. Baron!”
“Not really; it just ties in with what I’m working on here. This is beginning to make sense. I don’t suppose anyone signed off on it?”
“Just initials on the bottom of each redacted file: CW.”
Nora shut her eyes. CW: Chris Waverly. Julie Campbell had obscured her own family history? Not a chance. But someone had done it, and they’d signed her name to it.
“Well, it was worth a try,” she said. “I was hoping to—”
“Hang on,” Ralph said. “Do you have access to an email address there?”
Nora thought about it. “Yes, I do. I’m staying at Gasthof Kleiss—that’s K-L-E-I-S-S—in Alpenberg, Switzerland. There’s a computer on the desk in the lobby where you check in. The owners of the guesthouse are the local police chief and his wife, so I think we can
assume—”
“Are you there as Nora Baron?” he asked.
“No. At the moment, I’m Marianne Lanier.” She spelled it for him.
“Okay,” Ralph said. “You’re all set, Mrs. Baron.”
“Wait,” Nora said. “I’m all set with what? I thought all the files were—”
Ralph Johnson chuckled. “I’ve just sent you a link to a brief bio of the Campbells, with three photos—one of him, one of her, and one of her with their daughter, Julie, age twelve. The website for Gasthof Kleiss has an email address, so I sent the file to Marianne Lanier there. Will that help you?”
“Help me? Are you kidding? That’s wonderful! But if the files are gone, where did
you—”
Another chuckle. “Wikipedia. Where else?”
Nora blinked. Then she, too, was laughing. “Of course. Why didn’t I think of that? It’s too classified for the CIA, but it’s right there on good old Wikipedia for all to see. Dear God!”
“Welcome to the modern world,” Ralph said. “You wouldn’t believe the stuff you can find online these days!”
“Thank you, Ralph. Tell Jeff I’ll call him soon.”
“Will do, Mrs. Baron. Bye.”
Nora put the phone in her pocket and hurried downstairs to the lobby. The computer on the reception desk was asleep, the screen running a slide show of beautiful Alpine views. Nora looked around the ground floor for Trina or Frau Gund, but there was no one anywhere. She finally went over to the door under the stairs and knocked. Trina opened the door and smiled at her. Nora glimpsed a beautiful living room behind her; the Kleiss home was an apartment attached to the guesthouse.
Nora explained about the message, and Trina went over to the computer and woke it up. Two clicks, and the email was on the screen. “Here you are, Marianne. Let me know if you need anything else.” She went back into her living quarters.
Nora sat down at the desk. She clicked on the link, which opened a browser to the Wikipedia page, and began to read.
Chapter 39
It was a hot love story set in the Cold War. He was a handsome young CIA “specialist” in Washington, on the trail of a suspicious group of Soviet diplomats. She was a beautiful young British woman in Washington, ostensibly a secretary at the British embassy but actually an MI6 “specialist” monitoring the very same group of Russians.
They met on the job when they both showed up to stake out the Russians’ lair from the same empty house next door. After the initial shock of finding a fellow assassin in an abandoned building—and on the same errand—they decided to work together and not tell their respective bosses about it. They pooled their intel on the Russians and neutralized two Soviet moles, their first “his-and-hers” hits. Then they jumped in bed together—Wikipedia didn’t say that, but Nora inferred it.
They married against the wishes of their employers, who couldn’t kill them or even fire them because they were both too good at their specialty, which was euphemistically referred to as “wet work.” They did what nobody else wanted to do, and they did it very well. Within both agencies on either side of the Pond, they became known as the Deadly Duo. They lived off the grid, and their children—one boy, one girl—attended many different schools in America and England, never staying in one place for very long. And so the legend grew.
Twenty-four years ago, when Julie Campbell was eighteen, she was in a boarding school in upstate New York. On her graduation day, her parents and her brother, James, a junior at Syracuse University, left their house in Nyack and got in the family car for the trip to the ceremony. John Campbell was driving, his son sat beside him, and Fiona was in the backseat when he inserted the key in the ignition and turned it. The two men were killed instantly, and Fiona was blinded and permanently crippled. She died ten years ago in New York City.
No government, terrorist organization, or individual ever took credit for the car bomb. Who set it, and why, remains a mystery to this day. John Campbell’s name was added to the Memorial Wall at Langley, and a plaque commemorates Fiona Fenwick Campbell at MI6 headquarters in London. They and their son are buried together in an undisclosed location. Their daughter is a nurse in New York City.
Nora finished reading the sketchy bio, remembering a detail from it she’d forgotten until now. Twenty-four years ago she’d been in Washington, performing in the national touring company of a Broadway play at Kennedy Center. That’s where she’d met Jeff, and the car bomb in Nyack was a big news story that summer. She was dating Jeffrey Baron, but he hadn’t yet told her what he really did for a living; he’d claimed to be in electronics. She’d wondered why her new boyfriend, soon to be her husband, was so passionately upset by the news about the secret agents. If Nora had heard their names at the time, she’d forgotten them. So, that had been Julie Campbell’s family.
For Nora, the most interesting parts of this page were the photographs. The old pictures of John and Fiona showed her two attractive, intense-looking people, but the final picture, the one of Fiona and twelve-year-old Julie, was most revealing. They were wearing bathing suits, seated together on a blanket at a beach, a wicker picnic basket in front of them, grinning into the camera. The pretty child bore a striking resemblance to her mother.
Nora had seen the older version of this face today. It was difficult to reconcile the laughing girl on the beach with the woman in the Brandt Clinic, but she was definitely Julie Campbell. Now that Nora studied the features of the child, she had no doubt about the woman’s identity.
She closed the browser, trashed the email, and headed for the front door. The clouds were gathering in force now, filling the enormous sky above the mountains and temporarily dimming the vivid Kodachrome blue that was a trademark of this country. The town square was muted in the unexpected shadows. She checked her watch: four forty-five. Hall Kleiss should still be in the police station.
Nora began to walk toward the center of the square just as three people came out of the restaurant where she’d be dining tonight. She stopped to watch as Frau Martens’s daughter supervised two young men who placed tall, standing umbrellas in holes in the centers of the two sidewalk tables and anchored them. The two young men were the constable, Lars Weber, and the singing shepherd, still in his overalls and Tyrolean hat. Nora noted with surprise that the two men were nearly identical: brothers, possibly twins. She wasn’t at all surprised when the shepherd’s dog trotted out of the restaurant to join them.
The red-and-white striped Cinzano umbrellas were unfurled above the two tables, and the shepherd grabbed the daughter and kissed her. The daughter laughed; she definitely wasn’t as sullen as she’d been earlier today. And why should she be? Nora thought: She’s the waitress who’s dating or married to the sexy shepherd whose brother is the constable whose boss is the police chief who’s married to the innkeeper. Hell, all they needed was Lana Turner, and Alpenberg could change its name to Peyton Place.
This thought stopped her. She wouldn’t go to the police station, not yet. Any news in this incestuous village would be up hill and down dale in a matter of minutes, and she was trying to keep a low profile. She smiled over at the three young people, who smiled back. The dog eyed Nora for a moment, then ambled over to stand before her. She put out a tentative hand and he sniffed it, then licked it. She patted him on the head; he bristled with pleasure and sat down, staring up at her and thumping his tail on the cobblestones.
“What’s his name?” she called to the trio.
“That is being Hund,” Lars called back. “It means ‘dog.’ He is liking pretty women. He will follow you now, and then he will go home. Is okay?”
Nora laughed. “Is okay.”
The two men went off toward the police station and the woman went back inside the restaurant. Nora pulled her phone from her pocket and looked down at the German shepherd at her feet.
“So, Hund,” she said, “where’s a good place around here to make a private phone call?”
Hund apparently understood her. He rose and loped off around the side of the Gasthof behind her, in the direction of the stream. Nora followed him along a narrow path beside the building, under her balcony. A worn dirt trail led away from the back corner of the inn, down the incline to the main road. Hund was already down there at the verge, looking back up at her expectantly. Nora clambered down the steep pathway to join the dog, and they strode off together toward the water.
The arched stone wall of the little bridge was just above waist height, so Nora leaned down on her elbows, gazing out at the meadow and lake below the waterfall. From this angle she could see another stream leading from that lake into the trees below it. She turned and looked up the mountain behind her, noting the glint of cascading water high above. This wate
r tumbled down from its source at the summit, forming a chain of streams, lakes, and waterfalls all the way to the valley floor, irrigating everything in its path.
The dog left her here, rushing off the bridge and down the steep slope to the water’s edge below, barking all the way. Nora leaned out and watched, alarmed. A family of deer was drinking there—a buck, a doe, and two spindly fawns—and for a horrible moment she thought the shepherd might mean to do them some harm. She needn’t have worried; Hund and the deer were old friends. He ran right up to them, nudged the two little ones, and proceeded to play a game of tag with them, the three of them scampering up and down the bank while the parents continued to drink, unconcerned.
The hiker from earlier passed by behind her on the bridge, heading back downhill. He was whistling, which made Nora smile: singing shepherds and whistling hikers. Nora waited until he was gone, drew in a deep breath, and called the Brandt Clinic. The same young woman answered and put her on hold; it was Beethoven this time. Then Sister Wäldchen spoke.
“Hello again, Madame Lanier. How may I help you?”
“How’s the patient?” Nora asked.
“She is the same as before; it could be a while, and—”
“Yes, I understand,” Nora said. “Sister, I’m dining at Frau Martens’s restaurant in the town square at seven o’clock. I know this is awfully short notice, but I was wondering if you would care to join me for dinner there.”
“Well, I—”
“As my guest, of course,” Nora added. “You see, I’m concerned about Julie Campbell’s welfare, and I have some ideas about how to keep her safe.”
“I spoke with the security team, Madame Lanier. Bruno has come here on his day off, and the others are remaining here throughout the evening. They are locking all the—”
Nora cut her off. “Will you be there, Sister? I mean, are you remaining in the clinic for tonight?”
“No. My home is in the village, and I will leave here at six, as usual.”