11
Chloe stared up at him. She was lying flat on her back on his bed, wearing her underwear and a sheet, and she’d had sex with him less than twenty-four hours before. Hell, maybe less than twelve—she had no idea what time it was right then.
She also couldn’t bring herself to move, to reach up and shove him away. His dark, unreadable eyes were half-closed as he leaned over her, and for an insane moment she thought he was going to kiss her again.
But he didn’t. He levered himself up, away from her, seemingly finished with her. “I’m going to take a shower, then I’ll see what I can do about a passport for you.”
“I don’t need a new passport.”
He shook his head. “If you travel under your own name you’ll never make it home. I know what I’m doing, Chloe. Just do as I say and you might come out of this mess alive.”
She stared at him. “Who the hell are you?” she said. “What the hell are you?”
His faint smile revealed nothing. “I don’t think you need to know. Just try to sleep. You’re going to need your strength to heal properly.”
Doing what he said didn’t exactly appeal to her, but she was too worn out to fight him. The pain had subsided to a dull throb, encompassing every inch of her body, and at that moment sleep sounded much more important than the truth.
“All right,” she said grudgingly.
“What? You’re actually agreeing to something? I don’t believe it.”
“Go to hell,” she said, her voice barely audible.
“That’s more like it,” he murmured. “Try to sleep. You can insult me all over again when you wake up.”
She would have thought sleep would come immediately, but it was frustratingly resistant. It was cloudy outside—if she tried to reconstruct the last few hours she might be able to guess what time it was, but going back in time was the last thing she wanted to do. She didn’t want to think about anything that had happened yesterday, from the moment she’d gotten in the car with him. She didn’t want to remember those rough, powerful moments in her room, she didn’t want to relive the pain and terror and, most of all, she didn’t want to remember Gilles Hakim on top of her, his body a deadweight. Literally.
He’d been hurting her, planning to kill her, and she’d wanted him dead. She’d thought she was a pacifist, willing to die rather than hurt someone else, but when it came to a matter of her own life or death, all her noble sentiments were shot to shit. If she’d had a gun she would have killed Hakim herself, and enjoyed doing it.
Maybe. At this point she didn’t know what was true and what wasn’t. She could hear the sound of the shower running, smell the soap and shaving cream and the faint, teasing scent of the cologne he wore. She hadn’t been able to identify the components—they were subtle, nagging, almost…erotic. She didn’t like men who wore scent.
The shower stopped, and a moment later the door opened. She looked up to see Bastien walk into the room without any clothes, not even a towel wrapped around his waist. She jerked her head to the side, closing her eyes, and heard him laugh.
“Do men’s bodies make you uncomfortable, Chloe?” he said. She ignored him, keeping her eyes tightly shut as she listened to the rustle of clothing, the sound of drawers and doors being opened. She was almost asleep, miraculously enough, when she felt the bed sag beside her, and despite herself her eyes shot open.
He wasn’t wearing much, but at least he was decent. He’d put on a pair of trousers, and his shirt was open around his chest. Odd. She’d had sex with him before she even knew whether he had hair on his chest.
He didn’t—his skin was smooth, golden, and she closed her eyes again, trying to shut him out.
He tucked the sheet around her. “Sleep, Chloe. You need to keep that stuff on for another four hours and then you can wash it off, but in the meantime you need to just lie there and let the medicine do its job.”
She considered ignoring him, then couldn’t resist answering him. “There’s no medicine in the world that can heal what Hakim did to me that quickly.”
“Maybe not. But the physical pain will be gone. It’s up to you whether you want to let it scar you emotionally.”
“Up to me?” She tried to sit up, but he pushed her back down on the bed, not gently.
“Up to you,” he repeated firmly. “You’re young, you’re strong and you’re smart, despite the mess you managed to walk into. If you have the sense I think you do you’ll put it behind you.”
“So sensitive,” she mocked him.
“Practical,” he said. “He cut you. He burned you. He didn’t rape you.”
“No, that was you.”
He swore then, words she shouldn’t know, even with her command of languages, but she did. “Whatever you want to tell yourself,” he said after a moment. “I must have had momentary deafness. I don’t seem to remember you ever saying no.”
She hadn’t, and they both knew it. She said nothing, and a moment later she felt him move from the bed. She hadn’t realized she’d been holding her breath, half expecting him to touch her again, and she let it out as he moved away from her. “I’ll be back in a couple hours. Don’t answer the door, don’t answer the phone, don’t go near the windows. I don’t think anyone knows about this place, but you can’t be too certain, and a lot of people are going to be looking for you.”
She turned her head away, ignoring him. She just wanted him gone, out of there—if he said one more thing to her she’d scream.
She heard the sound of the front door closing, the click of the automatic lock, and she opened her eyes in the dimly lit apartment, to find herself alone. Finally. In his bed.
She sat up, slowly, wary of her wounds, but there was no pain. Whatever that green gunk was, it had managed to stop the pain, at least for now. She touched her arm, gingerly. The stuff had formed an almost waxlike coating over each stripe, sealing it, but it moved with her, and when she pushed the sheet off her body and stood up there wasn’t even a twinge, or a pinch.
It was probably some kind of radioactive poison—it had hurt enough when he’d painted it on her, and she didn’t trust him for even a moment. But she felt stronger, rather than weaker, so she could probably acquit him of that. Strong enough to get the hell out of there before he came back.
Her clothes were a shredded mess—there was no way she could walk out in public in them. She would have rather left stark naked than to put on his clothes, but she had at least an ounce of self-preservation left. If wearing Bastien Toussaint’s clothes meant she wouldn’t have to see him again, then so be it.
All his clothes were black. Of course—he was as dramatic as he was monstrous. It didn’t help that the only pair of trousers she could wear were a loose pair of silk pajama bottoms. Like most men, particularly the French, he had no hips, and she had at least her fair share.
Except that he wasn’t French. She wasn’t sure how she knew that—his accent was perfect, his manner, everything about him proclaimed him to be exactly what she’d discovered on the Internet. The son of an arms manufacturer from Marseilles—it was no wonder he’d gotten into the business of shipping them. It would have been a short move from legal armaments to illegal weaponry.
The married son of an arms manufacturer, she reminded herself, pulling his silk shirt over her arms, wincing in anticipation. The whisper-thin fabric barely touched her skin, and there was that inexplicable absence of pain. She moved to the window and peered outside. It was cold and rainy—it almost looked as if it might turn to flurries before long. It was a little too early for snow, but then, the world seemed to have turned sideways. She could no longer count on anything being normal.
There was no money—she searched the place thoroughly. She found a small cache of what was presumably cocaine or heroin—she didn’t give a damn which, but not cash. Not a cent to get her to the opposite side of Paris. It was easy enough to orient herself, with the Eiffel Tower to her left, the Seine snaking its way through the shadowy city. It would be a hike through the back streets and alleys to her apartment in the Marais, but anything was preferable to staying here. She grabbed his coat—a long, black cashmere trench that felt butter-soft in her hands. The faint trace of his scent teased her, enough so that she almost threw it down again, rather than wrap herself in the smell and feel of him.
But now was not the time for dramatic gestures. She ran a hand through her hair, feeling the uneven lengths, the scorched ends. There was nothing she could do about it now, but when she made it back to her apartment she could get Sylvia to fix it.
He’d told her it was too dangerous to go back to her apartment, but then he’d told her a great many lies, and he was the only recognizably dangerous thing in her life. Besides, no one knew where she lived. Sylvia sublet the tiny apartment from one of her former lovers, and neither of them were on record as tenants. Chloe’s mail arrived at the Frères Laurent, her cell phone was billed to the United States and there was really no way they could find her without trying very hard indeed. And she didn’t think they’d consider her worth the effort.
That didn’t mean she wasn’t going home to America. She didn’t trust Bastien for one moment, but she’d seen enough in the past twenty-four hours to know that she’d inadvertently gotten mixed up with some very dangerous people, and if he was one of the good guys she really didn’t want to see the bad ones. The safest place for her was back in the mountains of North Carolina, surrounded by her overprotective family. For some reason Paris and the surrounding countryside had lost its allure.
Slogging through the cold, wet street, head down, with Bastien’s coat wrapped around her, didn’t do much to improve her mood. Her feet were numb from the cold, but at least the shoes fit. Funny that he’d stop long enough to buy her a pair of shoes on their escape back to Paris. She couldn’t even begin to understand what went through his mind, and she didn’t want to try. All she wanted to do was get far enough away from him and the others that no one could find her.
She was hungry—starving, in fact, and even remembering Hakim wasn’t enough to distract her. She couldn’t remember how long it had been since she’d eaten, and there was only so long she could go on nervous energy. There’d be food at her apartment, food and a warm bed. Tomorrow she’d fly home, on the first plane she could get. And maybe next time she’d listen to her family when they told her to stay put.
She was right—the rain was turning to snow. She stopped for a moment, leaning against a building to catch her breath. No one paid any attention to her as they moved quickly through the streets, their own heads down, intent on their own business. After a moment she pushed away and started forward again. It was growing dark, and even on the well-lit streets of Paris she didn’t want to be out alone any later than she had to be. Yanking the coat closer to her body, she strode forward again, trying to ignore the faint scent of his cologne.
It took him longer than he’d expected. Franc had been agreeable, particularly when Bastien had demonstrated how generous he was prepared to be, and promised to have the papers ready by 6:00 p.m. They could stop on the way to the airport and it would only take a few moments to add the right photograph. He was sending her out on Air France just before midnight, and after that he could breathe a sigh of relief, pay attention to business. Hakim was dead a little earlier than planned but that was no great disaster, and Christos hadn’t even shown up. There was a good chance of salvaging the mission once Chloe was out of the way. He wasn’t quite sure why he couldn’t wait until then—he was seldom distracted by sentimentality. Just one more piece of unexpected behavior that he would have a hard time explaining to the Committee. Except that he had no intention of telling them the truth.
He stopped at a café and ordered a whisky and soda. The rain was coming down steadily, turning to snow, and he sat in the window, looking out into the dismal streets, waiting.
The man who sat down opposite him looked like a British civil servant—stuffy, unimaginative, middle-class and middle-aged. His name was Harry Thomason, and he was, in fact, a ruthless, soulless automaton who ran the Committee like a well-oiled machine. He shrugged out of his wet raincoat, put his newspaper on the table and ordered a cup of coffee before he finally looked at Bastien.
“What have you done, Jean-Marc?” he demanded.
Bastien lit a cigarette, his first in the last two days, milking the action of all its drama. Harry probably had as good an idea of his real name as anyone, but he went along with the Jean-Marc alias, not knowing that that particular name had come from his aunt Cecile’s pet pig.
That Jean-Marc had been a very elegant pig, of course. A family with their bloodlines would have nothing less, and Cecile enjoyed carting around her Vietnamese potbellied pig into the finest hotels in Europe and Asia. An elegant, bad-tempered pig, Jean-Marc had finally disappeared while Cecile and his mother were touring Burma. He’d always wondered if he’d ended up in someone’s kitchen, cosmic payback for the time he’d taken a chunk out of Bastien’s backside. It had been his fault—he was twelve at the time, bored, defiant, tired of being dragged from one end of the globe to the other, an adjunct to Cecile and Marcie’s renegade behavior, and as the pig received more attention and affection than he ever had, he’d decided to annoy Jean-Marc as he dozed on his fur-lined bed.
Jean-Marc had taken exception to it, and bitten Bastien on the butt, earning his grudging respect. At least the pig didn’t ignore him.
Cecile had lost interest in the pig by the time he’d disappeared, just as his mother had lost interest in her only child years ago, possibly days after he’d been born. She’d made it very clear that his presence on this earth was not by her choice—her possessive lover had refused to let her abort the child until he found out that he wasn’t the father, and by the time he took off it was too late. Marcie was in some quack’s office begging for a late-term abortion when she went into labor, and he was born three hours later.
He always wondered why she hadn’t simply strangled him and tossed him in a Dumpster or garbage can. Or not even soiled her hands by doing that much, but left him to die of starvation and cold on that November night thirty-two years ago. Maybe she’d been momentarily sentimental. Maybe it was the fact that she’d been very ill, so ill she’d almost died, so ill that they’d had to operate, removing her uterus and ovaries, making certain she’d never go through the indignity of pregnancy again. At one point he used to speculate that she’d been lying in that hospital bed, afraid of dying, and she’d made a bargain with the god she professed to believe in. If her life would be spared, she’d raise her child and be a good mother.
Well, she’d fucked that up. She’d been a lousy mother. He’d been raised, if you could call it that, by a series of hotel maids and houseboys, until he’d finally taken off at the age of fifteen, leaving with an old friend of his mother’s, a woman twice his age with the body of a teenager and the heart of a…
Well, she had had a heart, and she’d loved him. Maybe been the very first person to do so. He’d left her in Morocco when he was seventeen—just walked away one day when she was out shopping, buying him presents. When they weren’t in bed she liked to dress him in elegant clothes, and he’d learned to appreciate silk suits early on. She’d died a few years later, he’d heard, but by then he was well past any feelings of regret.
He’d been recruited in his early twenties, by a man very much like Harry Thomason. A cold-blooded, heartless son of a bitch who knew exactly what someone like Bastien could be capable of, if properly trained. And they’d seen to his training.
Politics, morals meant nothing to him. He was ostensibly working for the good side, but as far as he could tell there wasn’t a whole lot of difference between the two. The body count on both sides piled high, no one even noticed the innocent lives that got caught in between, and for that matter, neither did he. Chloe Underwood was an aberration, one he planned to take care of before people like Harry found out about her.
“So what happened at Hakim’s?”
That was one of the things Bastien hated about Harry—the man wouldn’t say shit if his mouth was full of it. “Things got fucked. What can I say?” He stubbed out the cigarette. He’d lost the taste for them, another annoyance.
“You can tell me what happened to the girl. Who was she?”
“Girl?”
“Don’t play me, Jean-Marc. You weren’t the only operative at Château Mirabel this weekend. The little American secretary—who was she working for? What happened to her?”
Bastien shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine. I’m thinking she was on the baron’s payroll, though she may have been there for recreational purposes. You know how the baron likes to watch, and he’s always enjoyed Monique with another woman.”
Harry wrinkled his nose with the distaste of a born celibate. “And you didn’t bother to find out?”
“I did my best, boss,” he drawled, knowing Harry hated being called “boss.” “I couldn’t get her to admit to anything.”
Harry looked at him for a long moment. “If you couldn’t get anything out of her then I doubt there was anything to find out. If I can say one thing about you, it’s that you’re the best interrogator we’ve got. Better than anyone on the other side, even the late Gilles Hakim. He always tended to enjoy his work a little too much. So tell me, what happened to our old friend Gilles, and what happened to the girl?”
“Dead.” He lit another cigarette. He didn’t want it—even Gitanes were tasteless, but it gave him something to do.
“You kill them both?”
“Just Hakim. He’d already done the girl.”
“What happened to her body?”
Bastien looked at him through the drifting smoke. “There wasn’t much left of her by the time Hakim got through.”
“I see.” Harry took a drink of his coffee. The man didn’t smoke, didn’t drink, didn’t fuck as far as Bastien could tell. He was a machine, nothing more. Just as Bastien was trained to be. “A little premature,” he continued, “but it should be salvageable, as long as there are no loose ends. Hakim was disposable, but Bastien Toussaint is not. The others will be coming to Paris to finish the discussions, and the dilatory Christos will be joining them. You’ll be waiting for them.”
“You don’t think they’ll be suspicious? Wonder why I killed Hakim?”
“They know you and they knew Hakim. Why should they wonder? All that matters is they cement the arrangements, divide up the territory and choose a new leader. They might have chosen Hakim because he was a hardworking SOB, but with him out of the picture I’m guessing that Christos has a clear shot. And you’re going to stop it.”
“They may be willing to overlook Hakim’s death, but Christos has a great many more people in his organization. There are bound to be repercussions.”
“And so you’ll die,” Thomason said.
Bastien didn’t even blink. “Will I?”
“It’s very simple—you’ve done this sort of thing before, and even if you hadn’t I wouldn’t put anything past you. Once they choose Christos you’ll make a fuss, put a bullet in his head, and someone we’ll already have planted will shoot you. You’ll be wearing a dummy blood patch, and once you hear the gun go off you drop like a stone. Which means you only have one shot at Christos—you need to make it count.”
“I’ve never had any trouble hitting my target.”
“No, you haven’t. So Bastien Toussaint will be dead and if I’m feeling particularly generous I might let you take a little vacation in the south of France until your next mission. There’s a first time for everything.”
Bastien lit another cigarette that he didn’t want. “And the arms cartel?”
“The next obvious choice is the baron, and he’ll be easy enough to control. We have no interest in putting them out of business. Someone’s going to be supplying the arms to the international terrorists, and by watching the cartel we can trace the various splinter groups, tap into their plans.”
“I delivered detonators to Syria last April. Seventy-three people were killed, including seventeen children.” His voice was neutral, but Thomason wasn’t fooled.
“Don’t tell me you’re still sulking about that! The fortunes of war, my boy. Casualties of the fight against terror. You never used to be so sentimental, Jean-Marc. You know the math as well as I do. Seventy-three dead, with the potential of thousands being saved. Sometimes you just have to make the ugly choice.”
“Yes,” said Bastien, watching through the curling smoke of his cigarette.
“I trust you, Jean-Marc. I know you’d never make the mistake of lying to me. If you say the girl is dead then I’m certain she must be. Besides, what reason would you have to lie? In all the years I’ve known you I’ve never seen you show any human emotion, any weakness. You’re a machine. State-of-the-art, finely tuned, indispensable.”
“Even a machine needs to rest,” he said. “Let someone else do the job, and I’ll just disappear. Jensen has already built up a solid cover—he can take care of Christos himself.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m tired.”
“People in our line of work aren’t allowed to get tired. They seldom get time off, they don’t get to rest. There’s only one way to retire, Jean-Marc. The way Hakim did.”
“Is that a threat?” he asked lazily, stubbing out his cigarette.
“No. Only a fact. The cartel will be meeting at the Hotel Denis tomorrow, with Christos arriving the next day. I leave it up to you. I have every confidence you’ll do what needs to be done.”
“Do you?”
“Don’t annoy me, Jean-Marc. You know how much is riding on this.” He rose, folding his newspaper neatly.
“The fate of the free world? Isn’t it always?” He didn’t bother to rise. “I think I’ve heard this all before. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few and all that crap. You’ve been watching too much Star Trek.”
“I thought it was Star Wars,” Harry said.
“I know what’s at stake,” Bastien said.
“See that you don’t forget. Anything.”
Bastien looked up at him. His time was running out, and he simply didn’t care one way or the other. His luck had held far longer than he would have expected, and it wasn’t going to last much longer. He’d be dead by the first snowfall. Except that it was already snowing.
But before they got to him, he just might slit Harry Thomason’s throat. For old time’s sake.