First Thrills

by Lee Child

  “How do you know you can trust the woman?”

  “You killed her sister, damn you. That’s how I know. She wouldn’t be in this at all if it weren’t for that.”

  “Her sister was collateral damage,” the voice said. “It couldn’t be helped. And unless you’re very careful, the same fate may befall her, too. And in the very near term. Do you hear what I’m saying?”

  Matosian, suddenly now as close to panic as he’d ever been, raised his eyes and found Chloe still seated at their table, finishing her foie gras, relaxed and beautiful. “I hear you,” he managed to get out. “What are my instructions?”

  The voice didn’t hesitate. “The best thing you can do is get to your hotel as soon as you can.”

  “Who are you?”

  “Call me Honest Abe, but don’t waste any time thinking about me. Time is of the essence now. Now! This second.” The voice repeated with metallic urgency. And then, with a click, the connection went dead.

  Matosian hung up and walked as quickly as he could without calling attention to himself back to his table. Chloe looked up at him questioningly as he took out his wallet. He was just dropping a thousand-euro bill on the table when the waiter reappeared with an amuse-bouche, some sort of superlight looking spoon-sized quenelle in a saffron broth, which he placed in front of Chloe.

  Matosian leaned over her and rasped out, “Don’t touch that. Don’t take another bite.”

  “But monsieur . . .” the waiter demurred.

  Matosian straightened to his full height. “Non, monsieur. Pourquoi pas vous même le mangez?”—“Why don’t you eat it yourself?”

  The waiter went white.

  “Je suis sérieux,” Matosian said. “I’m serious. Just take that little bite.” Then, suddenly, the tension and danger of the past few days took over and Matosian took the little proffered spoon and in one fluid and lightning motion forced the waiter’s hand up to his mouth, where he stuffed the little ball of dough and held the man’s jaw shut for another couple of seconds.

  As soon as he let go, the waiter spit the dough out and grabbed for one of the glasses of water on the table. At the same instant, Matosian grabbed Chloe’s hand and forcibly lifted her out of her seat. “We’re out of time here,” he told her.

  Behind her, the waiter had taken one step back toward the kitchen before his knees seem to give out from under him and he fell headlong into the spirits tray.

  “Now! Now! Now!” Matosian pulled Chloe along behind him as the crowd in the restaurant rose almost as a single unit to see what had caused the disturbance. They were both walking double-time, holding hands, past the standing, sometimes screaming, panicking patrons and toward the exit and the long elevator ride down. But then Matosian, thinking better of using the elevator, led her back even farther to the little-used stairway with its three hundred or so steps to the ground.

  When that door had closed behind them, Chloe pulled her hand away, stopping him. “What was that about?”

  “This is about believing the warning I got over the phone. And, by the way,” he added, “I’ve got my instructions now, or as good as I’m going to get them.”

  “What are they?”

  “It’s still not completely clear. But one thing is.”

  “What’s that?”

  “We’ve got to get to the hotel. Like yesterday.”

  And taking her hand again, he led her down the clanging and darkened stairway and out at the base of the Eiffel Tower.

  L’Hotel George V—Paris

  “Something’s changed,” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “This isn’t the way we left this room,” Matosian said as soon as they’d come through the door and double-locked it behind them.

  “What’s different?” Chloe said. “I don’t see . . .”

  But he had already crossed to the table in front of the couch. It held a variety of magazines and travel guides fanned out artistically. But within the fan, two of the magazines were folded open rather than to their covers. Matosian picked up the first one, glanced at its description of fine hotels in Washington, D.C., and then immediately grabbed the second, opened to an article on Abraham Lincoln called “The Great Emancipator.”

  He stood stock-still for a long moment. Chloe came up behind him and put her arms around him. “What is it?” she said.

  But, his heart breaking, Matosian kept his face straight as he turned to her. “I’ve got to go now,” he said. “You’ll be safe here.”

  “But . . . .” Her doe eyes filled with tears. “I thought that you and I . . .”

  “We will,” he said. “But I’ve got to finish this. And it won’t be safe for you where I have to go. If the warning we got in the restaurant meant anything, that much was clear. I’ve got to do this alone.”

  And so saying, he kissed her one last time and strode for the door. “What ever you do,” he said as he turned at the door, “lock this behind me and don’t let anyone in, not even hotel staff. I’ve paid for your room for a week, and I’ll be back to you before then.”

  “Don!” She ran across to him. “I’m afraid. I don’t know . . .”

  He quieted her with a last kiss. “Wait for me,” he said. “Trust me.”

  And with that, he was gone.

  The Lincoln Memorial—Washington, D.C.

  It was close to 4:00 A.M. when Matosian mounted the steps at the end of the Capitol Mall. When he got near to the top, he moved into the shadow of the imposing structure and could just make out in front of him the looming bulk of the sixteenth president of the United States, Abraham Lincoln.

  The night was dead quiet and surprisingly warm. Matosian still wore his tuxedo from the Restaurant Jules Verne in Paris—there had been no time to change, and certainly not as he flew his own jet alone over the Atlantic, wrestling with his unanswered questions, his demons, and most of all, least familiarly, with his emotions.

  But now he was at the end, and there was no time for emotion.

  He got to the last step, paused, took a breath, and then continued forward under the massive stone ceiling and into the monument. The place seemed to be made of darkness itself. Then, steeling himself, he came forward more and then more, step by step. Finally, he stopped.

  With the laser light that had served him so well in the pump house in London, now he shone its beam over the words of the Gettysburg Address on his right, then over to the Second Inaugural Address on the left. He stopped on the words, “with malice toward none; with charity for all” and somehow he felt anew that however this whole terrible affair turned out, he was proud to be doing this important work for his country, proud to be an American.

  They could never take that away from him.

  For some reason, he became aware of the feel of water evaporating from the reflecting pond behind him, sending a chill down the back of his neck.

  There was no sound. He was alone.

  It was all as it should be.

  He drew in a breath as though it might be his last. Finally: “Gato,” he whispered into the cavernous emptiness. And then again, more loudly. “Goddamn it, gato.”

  And from behind the statue, he heard the footsteps—a light tread, but businesslike, echoing within the semi-enclosed chamber.

  A figure began to emerge from behind the sculpture. Matosian raised his laser beam, hesitated, and then pressed the button, bathing the figure in a green fluorescent light.

  “Hello, Don.” How Chloe had beaten him here from Paris he didn’t know and couldn’t imagine. And she also had managed to find the time to change her clothes, for now she wore a well-tailored dark business suit. “Well done,” she said, stopping ten feet in front of him. “Congratulations. You’ve passed.”

  “I’ve passed?” A slow, deep rage seemed to settle into the middle of his chest. “What do you mean? Has this all been some sort of a game?”

  “Not some sort of a game, Don. The most important game in the world. We had to know what you were capable of, what motivated y
ou, how you reacted under pressure. And we had to see it ourselves, not hear about it from some questionably reliable third source. This is the last round before you’re allowed to do the really important work, the work no one can ever know about.”

  “But what . . .” The world seemed to be whirling about him. He brought his hands up to his forehead and closed his eyes against the sensation of vertigo. He became vaguely aware of another set of footsteps emanating from the opposite side of Lincoln’s body. Opening his eyes, he pointed his light in that direction and was not surprised to see his original connection from Langley, call him Honest Abe now, rounding the corner by the emancipator’s right foot. “Hi, Don. Glad you could make it.”

  “You’re glad I could make it?” Again the rage threatened to undo Matosian. “But what about your sister?” he said to Chloe. “What was that?” He whirled on his CIA contact. “Was that simply collateral damage, as you called it, Abe?”

  “Easy,” Chloe said. “We expected you to be upset, Don. Most people who get to this stage in their training are upset. It’s natural. But first, know this. She wasn’t my sister, and . . .”

  “That doesn’t forgive . . .”

  But she raised her hand imperiously, stopping him. “Second, and perhaps more important, she’s not dead. She took a small pill we provided that mimics death very effectively for the better part of an hour. Her job was to get the key to you and then to appear to die. Your job, which you performed spectacularly, I might add, was to forget about her as an acceptable loss and move on with the mission. If you’d have stayed around long enough for her to recover, you wouldn’t be here now. You’d be lateraled into career oblivion and never even know what happened.”

  Matosian shook his head. “You people are cold,” he said.

  “Cold is a virtue,” Chloe answered. “Cold is a necessity. And you’re a few degrees below lukewarm yourself.”

  “For a while there I wasn’t,” Matosian replied.

  “No. That was clear.”

  Their eyes met. Even in the dark, Matosian thought he could still detect a spark there.

  But Honest Abe spoke up, breaking the palpable tension of the moment. “Your mention of Langley was your only mistake. We thought of shutting down the mission then.”

  “So why didn’t you?”

  “Because you played it right, plain and simple. Of course, it only makes sense that someone had given you your marching orders, and you being an American, they could rationally have only come from one source. You telling Chloe about it the way you did established your credibility and gave away nothing she wouldn’t have already known if she were on the other side anyway. You may have even let the information slip on purpose. It would be interesting to know if that were the case.”

  “I’ll keep that as my own secret,” Matosian said, “if I’m allowed to have any, that is.”

  “We’ll give you just the one,” Honest Abe said, and Matosian thought he could detect the trace of a smile in the gash of his mouth. Agency humor.

  “Don,” Chloe said. “We’re done here unless you’ve got any other questions.”

  “Just one,” Matosian said. “What was the deal about the password. It had nothing to do with the mission.”

  “It helped bring you to Paris,” she said. “Otherwise, it was meant to be a conundrum.”

  “You mean a riddle?”

  “Well, not precisely. You know that a conundrum is a riddle whose answer is a pun. For example, when is a door not a door?”

  “When it’s ajar, of course,” Matosian said.

  “Right. So we knew we were going to keep you running around. Everywhere you went, you checked out your surroundings, and if you were going to succeed, you had to say, ‘Got to go.’ Gato go. It suggested itself.”

  “And on that note,” Matosian said. “I’ve gato go now. You’ll know how to reach me again, I’m presuming.”

  “Bet on it,” Chloe said.

  Little Dix Bay—British Virgin Islands

  Twenty-four hours later, Matosian walked out of his beachfront bungalow and across the white sand into the crystal clear and warm Caribbean water. Navigating by the bright full moon, he swam straight out from the beach for four thousand strokes, then nearly out of sight of land, turned and began the long swim back.

  By the time he got to where it was shallow enough for him to stand, the sky to the east was just lightening to a nacreous glow. He could make out the tracks he’d made in the sand on the walk down from his bungalow, but now standing in those tracks was a woman, facing away from him, wearing a diaphanous white shift and nothing else.

  When he finally made it back to the hardened sand where the water lapped the shoreline, she turned around and tentatively walked down to where he stood, stopping in front of him, looking up at him with a mixture of trepidation and longing.

  “In Paris, I thought you were with them,” he said.

  “I know. When you took the phone call. Then with the waiter.”

  “Would you have let me eat that little spoonful?”

  “I knew you wouldn’t, by that time. Would you have let me?”

  “I didn’t, if you remember. Even though I’d been convinced you were the enemy.” He paused, then came out with another question. “And I presume the waiter, like the woman who wasn’t your sister, is all right?”

  She nodded. “And ten thousand dollars richer.” A pause. “But that was when you were sure, wasn’t it? At the restaurant?”

  He nodded. “Yes. No one else but you could have known where we were. You called Abe when you went to the bathroom.”

  She put a hand on his arm. “By that time, I wanted to tell you, but I couldn’t. I didn’t want you to leave me, but you had to. We were both trapped in the maze we’d helped create.”

  “And,” Matosian asked, “are we still trapped in it now?”

  “No,” Chloe said. “I’ve gotten word of a secret mission involving the Vatican that we’ll need to see to soon, but until we get the call from Abe, our time is our own. One day, maybe even two, if we want to take them.” Her eyes pleaded with him. “If you could find it in yourself and in your heart to trust me again.”

  “If you put your arms around me,” Matosian said, “maybe you can convince me.”

  She did as he’d suggested, and after holding her body against his for a moment, he pulled away enough to let him lean over.

  And their lips came together.

  She tasted like almonds.

  *

  JOHN LESCROART is a New York Times bestselling author of twenty-one novels, including most recently Treasure Hunt, which is the third book in the San Francisco–based Wyatt Hunt series. His books have been translated into seventeen languages in more than seventy-five countries, and his short stories have been included in many anthologies.

  His first novel, Sunburn, won the San Francisco Foundation’s Joseph Henry Jackson Award for best novel by a California author, and Dead Irish and The 13th Juror were nominees for the Shamus and Anthony Best Mystery Novel, respectively. Guilt was a Reader’s Digest Select Edition choice, and The Suspect, chosen by the American Author’s Association as its 2007 Novel of the Year, was also the 2007 One Book Sacramento choice of the Sacramento Library Foundation.

  BILL CAMERON

  I

  Barely a year into his sentence—ninety-nine moons for felony skullduggery and aggravated bloodletting—Frank Pounder’s barrister gets wind of an impending shit storm in Newcastle CID. Detective Inspector Dale Dingus is about to be brought up on charges for falsifying evidence in a connivance and brigandage case he’s been chasing alongside the Crown Bureau of Revelation and Arrest since before dirt. Not too bright, our boy Dingus. Suddenly his cases going back five years are getting a fresh look, and the Crabs are none too happy about it.

  I can’t say as I blame them, but unlike the linear thinkers in the Bureau, I have a knack for sniffing out openings in the misfortune of others. I’m already noodling the angles before a whiff of the Dingus travail
goes public, even before Frank’s shark moves for dismissal. The prosecuting magistrate knows no way Frank gets convicted in a retrial without Dingus’s tainted evidence, so the legal wranglings don’t figure to take long. Frank expects to be sprung in time to see his unborn baby mapped via UltraSound, and he spares no breath bragging about how he’ll be on hand to learn whether his offspring is a pointer or a setter.

  But don’t get the idea Frank is some kind of sentimental doily muncher. Trust me, the man’s a black-hearted ogre with a chest like a beer keg and fists of seasoned oak who runs everything from Newcastle Deeps to the slopes of the West Hills, even from gaol. Kingpin of Felony Flats, territory he took by force from Old Man Miller himself. Ended up with Miller’s daughter too, a double-handful of hell named Dahlia with the personality of a wolverine and a body that looks like it was molded from the finest grade ballistic gel. That Frank’s looking forward to progeny is evidence of little more than his well-earned reputation for getting what he wants and then some.

  Sure, he’s had his setbacks, getting pinched by Dingus in the first place not the least of them. Then, when he arrived at Little Liver Creek Penitentiary full of grandiose plans of conquest, the ruling camarilla, the Incandito Banditos, let him know they took their notions of seniority plenty serious. In the course of ensuing combat operations, some unidentified miscreant stuck a sharpened toothbrush between Frank’s ribs one night right before lockdown.

  But Frank survives—no surprise to anyone who knows him. The surprise is that during his recovery, he experiences what your more educated types call an epiphany. Life is a tenuous, fragile thing that could end any time: shiv, heart failure, meteor ricochet off the moon. That’s when he makes his plans for immortality via reproduction, with Dahlia Miller anointed brood mare.

  Only problem is there’s no place to breed in the gaol commons, and the warden’s a hard case. No conjugal visits, period. Bastard was immune to bribes too, some kind of miter hat with an overdeveloped sense of right and wrong. But if the warden is a stone, guards are made of squishier stuff. Frank arranges to smuggle his squirt out in a plastic cup so Dahlia can take it to some high-priced, honeypot medico over on the west side. Doc Ciconi is as good as they come in the field of procreation at a distance. Once the good doctor performs his magic, Frank can look forward to a little tucker waiting for him at the ass end of the slam. In the meantime Dahlia has something to keep her busy. Too busy to screw around, Frank figures. Clever plan, you ask me, except for the part where it doesn’t work for shit.