The Long-Lost Jules

by Jane Elizabeth Hughes

  Leo. Was. Mossad.

  Of course he was Mossad. I thought of his hard muscles, his keen eyes and sharp mind, his languages, his ability to master any situation, anytime, anywhere in the world. How he kept finding me.

  Of course he was Mossad. Shea was right: What had I been thinking?

  I took a brandy from the bartender, chugged it down, and held my hand out for another. Leo elbowed through the crowd to stand next to me, but I refused to look at him. And he had dared to be angry at me for lying to him! It infuriated me that I still couldn’t figure out what he had been after, and whether he had achieved his goal.

  Even more horribly, it occurred to me that maybe he had pursued me because of my ties to the sheikhs. Perhaps I had been his Mossad assignment. Maybe his passion for Sudeley—and me—was faked after all.

  Maybe when he seduced me, he was on the job.

  Suddenly, I felt violently ill and ran to the ship’s side just in time to be sick over the rail. Leo followed me and tried to hold my shoulders, but I shook him off violently and vomited again. His touch nauseated me. “Get away,” I said.

  “But, motek—”

  I lifted my head. “Get away from me,” I said clearly, “or every one of these cell phones will live-stream me shouting that Leo Schlumberger is Mossad, at the top of my lungs.”

  He backed off, his eyes on me.

  I turned to the rail again and held on tight, waiting for a glimpse of shore so that I could get off this benighted ship and never see Leo Schlumberger again.

  Our new friends helped us down the gangplank and onto the pier and offered us rooms in their homes and hostels. But Kristen, suddenly belligerent again, turned on me and snapped that I had gotten us into this mess; now I could bloody well figure out how to get us into a good hotel with no money, no credit cards, and no ID. I told her that was what the American embassy was for, begged the loan of a cell phone from one of our friends, and called my emergency contact.

  “Seven oh eight one five oh Brahms reporting in,” I said briefly, walking away from the crowd so no one would hear me. The number would show up on the cell phone’s recent-calls list, in case anyone looked, as US Embassy, Paris.

  “Yes, Brahms, what do you need?”

  “Money, ID, credit cards at the desk of the”—I eyed Kristen thoughtfully for a moment—“Sofitel Old Port, Marseille. Reservations for two rooms.”

  “Roger that,” the man on the other end said, and disconnected. Agency handlers weren’t big talkers.

  Kristen and I did a little shopping in the elegant hotel store—I purchased the first, and last, $60 underpants of my life—and then retired to our rooms for an exhausted night’s sleep. Or at least that’s what I assumed she meant to do. I slipped out to buy a cell phone and SIM card so that I could brief Bob and then, after a short conversation, dropped the card into the toilet and lay on my bed, staring up at the ceiling.

  Leo had lied to me. Of all people in the world, I should have been able to spot a liar. Lying was my own specialty, my stock in trade, my life. My father lied to me for twenty years, and then I lied for a living. And then the man I thought I loved lied to me. It was, I thought, like the circle of life for lying. Everything always came back to lies.

  I thought again of how he kept finding me, no matter where I was. I’m a great researcher, he had said. Was that a lie too? Furiously, I ferreted through the pocketbook that the agency team had returned to me; even more furiously, I extracted the tiny, dot-size locator chip that had been inserted under its lining, and flushed that down the toilet too, then lay back again to castigate myself some more.

  How could I, a highly trained and experienced operative, have failed to consider the possibility of a locator chip? My friend Rosie had informed me that a smart civilian with high-priced software could hack into the lightly guarded reservations files of European train and hotel companies. . . .

  But still, the answer was probably that I didn’t want to consider it. I wanted Leo to be interested in me for myself—not in Jules the CIA officer, or even Jules the descendant of royalty.

  Well. That hadn’t turned out so well.

  But then, astonishingly, I started to chuckle. At first I thought it was hysterical, nervous giggles, but then I realized that, in fact, the absurdity of the whole situation was really quite amusing. Leo had lied to me, I lied to him, both of us lied to everyone else. I giggled again, thinking of Kristen, wet and furious in the cold water, swimming for her life—if only she had known it. Then I thought of Shea’s face when Leo identified himself, and burst out laughing.

  And then I was crying. I really couldn’t blame Leo for lying to me—though I still couldn’t figure out what his operation was—but he didn’t have to make love to me so sweetly, so languorously, so thoroughly. The days of setting “honey traps” to ferret out information were long gone; now we used money rather than sex.

  So what was his game?

  Chapter 44

  The next morning, I sat next to Kristen on the flight to London. She was barely speaking to me, which was just as well; I had nothing to say to her. I had already sketched out a story in which the sheikh’s son made a pass at me on board the yacht and I panicked and jumped overboard rather than deal with the situation. It seemed plausible, something Amy might be clueless enough to do. Kristen thought so little of me that she would probably buy it.

  My new cell phone pinged the instant we set down at Heathrow: Leo.

  “How did you get this number?” I demanded.

  He ignored this.

  “Are you home?” he asked.

  “I just landed.”

  “Good. I’ll be in the air in ten minutes and in London about ninety minutes later.”

  I took the phone away from my ear and stared at it.

  “Where the hell are you? The next flight from Marseille to London isn’t until tomorrow morning.”

  “Private jet,” he said shortly.

  I should have known.

  “Meet me at my flat at three,” he said. “Don’t bring any tails.”

  “As if I would!” I said indignantly. How dare he suggest that my tradecraft wasn’t as good as his?

  “Come in the back way,” he said. “Code is three six seven two.” And he disconnected.

  I told Kristen I was going to the doctor because I needed some Xanax after my traumatic experience. Then I actually did go to a doctor. Some of the scratches on my arm were deep and slightly infected from the stone fragments I hadn’t been able to dig out. The embassy doctor met me in a suite at the Park Lane and worked in silence while I squirmed and complained. He shook his head at the end and straightened up to put his instruments back into his large rolling case of Princess Catherine tea towels. He was wearing a shabby gray traveling salesman’s suit that even I acknowledged was a decent disguise. Then I slipped out the employees’ entrance and started on the multiple-taxicab-and-underground routine to ensure that no one was following me. It took almost three hours to get to Leo’s, but I was most definitely tail-free.

  He met me at the back door and eyed me warily as I shrugged out of my coat. “Did you see a doctor?” was his first question. “Those scratches could get infected. I think you need to see a—”

  In silence, I showed him my professionally bandaged arm. “Okay,” he said.

  I sat down at the rustic kitchen table. “All right,” I said. “All cards on the table.”

  He grinned at me. “I show you mine, and you show me yours?”

  Momentarily diverted, I said, “I’ve already seen it. And it’s not that impressive,” I added, lying through my teeth.

  “And perhaps you could return my locator chip?” he suggested. “Those little buggers are quite pricey.”

  “I flushed it down the toilet,” I said indignantly. “I can’t believe you put a chip on me!”

  He looked surprised. “Didn’t you have one on me?”

  I hung my head. “I believed Rivka,” I said.

  He shook his head, despairing of suc
h naiveté.

  Furious again, I demanded, “When were you going to tell me?”

  “Well, when were you going to tell me? If Kali hadn’t opened her mouth . . .”

  “If you hadn’t had to identify yourself to Shea . . .”

  We glared at each other in mutual distrust. Then his face cleared and he laughed. “What’s so funny?” I asked sharply, although I already knew.

  “You and me, of course. Both of us sneaking around, spying on each other, when we should have been working together all the time.”

  “Mossad doesn’t play well with others,” I retorted.

  “Neither does CIA,” he shot back.

  I was quiet for a moment. “How did you know I was in trouble? On the yacht, I mean.”

  “As soon as Kali told me where you were going, I set up the operation. We knew your Bahraini sheikh was bad news.”

  “You knew? Why didn’t you tell me?” It would have saved a lot of trouble, I thought.

  “Are you kidding?”

  I bit my lip. “So, then—”

  “I couldn’t warn you off, so I just set up a loose surveillance op in Marseille. One of our guys was on the beach at Juan-les-Pins and saw the rock fall”—Of course, the fishermen, I thought—“so when you went back to the yacht, I decided to bring in the party boat to check things out myself.”

  “Were the other people on the boat really civilians?” I asked.

  “Yup. Just went to the Jewish Community Center in Marseille and told them I was Sam Lowenstein from Mossad and needed some help. I had three hundred volunteers.” He grinned at the memory.

  I smiled too but then sobered quickly. “What was real, Leo?” I asked. “Was anything real? Or was it all a lie? Great cover, by the way.”

  “Merci,” he said. “Thank you. But it wasn’t a cover. My primary job is not Mossad.”

  As if that made a difference.

  He went on, “Yes, motek, sometimes I do missions for them if it fits with my profile. Historians and scholars travel a lot, you know. We can do collaborative research, attend conferences, speak on panels, mingle with scholars from all over . . . We have a freedom that other professions usually don’t.”

  “Like private bankers,” I said.

  “But this mission was different. This mission I brought to Mossad, not the other way around. I found you purely in my capacity as an Oxford professor. I needed Jules to help me keep Sudeley and its historical artifacts intact. That part was absolutely true.”

  “And then?” I asked.

  “And then you started telling me about the FBI investigation into your sheikh, and I recognized his son’s name. Not when you said it at first, but then you called him by his full family name, Abu Bakr el Arabiyya.”

  “Recognized it as what?”

  “A man with the nom de guerre Abu Bakr provided the funding for several terrorist attacks on Israeli tourists abroad, including the one at Sharm El Sheikh that killed seven women and children. We’ve been tracking him for years. But we knew him only as Abu Bakr. It was only when you mentioned his full name and linked his nom de guerre to a real name that the penny dropped. So I contacted Rivka, and we started an operation.”

  “On me,” I said, feeling sad and defeated.

  “Well, yes.” In a sudden burst of candor, he said, “I can’t believe you didn’t make me! You, a top CIA case officer, actually believed I was just a garden-variety Oxford don.” He was almost insulted.

  “But Rivka said—”

  “And I can’t believe you believed anything Rivka said! The woman hasn’t told the truth in so long, she doesn’t even know what it is.”

  I realized he was right. Maybe I had just wanted to believe her because . . . well, because I wanted to believe her.

  I had to defend myself. “I suspected you from the very beginning,” I argued. “I knew the gunmen were after you, not me, and I thought you were Mossad. Remember how many times I said that?”

  He shrugged, half acknowledging, half dismissing.

  “But then . . . I got confused,” I said.

  By my feelings for him, we both knew.

  Then I remembered Arturo, the mysterious sender whose email suggesting that I check out a certain account number had gotten me suspended from the bank. I had never seriously entertained the notion that Leo had sent the message, because I couldn’t imagine any connection between him and my sheikh. But now that I knew there was a connection . . .

  “Leo!” I burst out. I could feel my cheeks flushing red with anger. “Did you send that email that almost got me fired? Arturo from Canada?”

  He didn’t even have the grace to look embarrassed. “Bien entendu,” he said. “But of course.”

  “You bastard! You almost ruined two years of work for me!” I was practically spitting at him in my indignation.

  He spread his hands in that infuriating, charming French way. “But, ma chérie, how was I to suspect that the FBI had already tagged that account? I was as surprised as you were. Who knew they were that efficient?”

  I simmered in silence.

  He held out his hand to me, palm up. “Now what, motek? Can you begin to trust me a little? I’ve told you the truth.”

  Not all of it, I knew. He would never tell me “the whole truth and nothing but the truth,” just as I would never tell him. We were both professional liars, working for rival organizations.

  “I trust you,” I said, deliberately slowly and hurtfully, “just as much as you trusted me.”

  He flinched.

  “You see how that works?” And I picked up my new tote bag and walked out of his life.

  Chapter 45

  This time, I knew it was grief. After so many flip-flops on Leo, so many starts and stops, I should have been accustomed to yet another break. But this time was different—it was real, and permanent. I was sad when I woke up in the morning, sad when I went to work, and sad when I went home at the end of the day. Kali was worried about me; she called frequently and told me funny stories about the children to make me smile. But she never mentioned Leo, although I knew she saw him occasionally, and I never asked about him.

  Now that my Bahraini sheikh and his son were behind bars for money laundering, mail fraud, and a few dozen other assorted charges, I was kept busy sorting out their accounts for the ongoing investigation. Alfred took me out to lunch and told me I could take on new clients if I wanted. He had hired two new vice presidents—one a heavyset, doughy-faced woman with a wicked sense of humor and a genius for investing, and the other a thin, young Pakistani man whose parents owned a tiny grocery store in Liverpool and who had worked his way through Edinburgh University. Rumor had it that Audrey would be returning as Alfred’s second-in-command. I couldn’t wait to see her reaction to the new hires. Probably, she would congratulate herself on the diversity of her peeps.

  But nothing was fun anymore. I couldn’t even laugh when Alfred had ten pizzas delivered to the office at lunchtime and Kristen R., her eyes round with wonder, tried a bite of the everything pizza. “Oh my God,” she breathed. “I’ve never tasted anything so delicious in my life.”

  A couple of weeks after what I thought of as my Last Conversation with Leo, Lord Featherstone breezed in and ordered us all into the conference room. Matt B. started to protest: “But I’m just teeing up an idea with—”

  “Spare me,” Alfred snapped. “Conference room. Now.”

  Once again, we gathered around the long table, and I gazed around at the lovely young faces, plus our two newbies, Muriel and Kassim. I had to stifle a sigh. Most likely the purpose of this meeting was to announce Audrey’s imminent return. Someone up there must really hate me, to take Leo out of my life and put Audrey back in.

  As I expected, Alfred began with a brief announcement that Audrey would be returning “but in a different capacity.” I’d barely had time to wonder what that meant when he cleared his throat and harrumphed loudly. “The real news, however, is that this branch of Atlantic Bank has been sold.”

 
; Gasps ran around the table. Even I sat up straighter.

  “This branch—you—has underperformed badly over the past year under Audrey’s leadership,” he pronounced.

  The PYTs, who had never been accused of underperforming in their entire lives, looked stunned.

  “We have lost three major clients, all of whom are under investigation for money laundering and terrorist connections. As a result, Atlantic Bank has decided to follow my advice and divest itself of this unit. The sale is effective tomorrow morning.”

  Silence. Kristen R. asked, in the smallest voice I had ever heard her use, “Lord Featherstone, who are the new owners?”

  “Banque de Monaco et l’Espagne. BME.”

  “Oh my God,” Jake M murmured.

  BME was a multinational bank, known to be tough, aggressive, and hard-driving. It was making a major move into European private banking and was especially successful in developing rocket-science mathematical algorithms to maximize its clients’ investments.

  “Outstanding,” Muriel said. She had never met an algorithm she didn’t love.

  Kristens R. and P., as well as Kristen the Younger and the two Matts, looked sick. They had the weakest quantitative skills in the room.

  “Brilliant,” I said. Muriel and I exchanged smiles.

  The next morning, the BME team strode in like conquering heroes, each one bearing a Starbucks cup overflowing with cream, as well as a rich, buttery scone or muffin. The aroma was intoxicating. Once again, we gathered in the conference room, but this time the PYTs had to stand awkwardly against the walls as the BME people, Muriel, and I snagged the chairs around the table. Just as the muted chatter settled down and I thought the meeting was about to start, the door opened again and Audrey walked in.

  At the sight of her, the PYTs’ faces lit up with joy and relief. I thought I saw tears in Kristen the Younger’s blue eyes. “Thank God you’re here!” she exclaimed, rushing to hug Audrey.