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He would not accept commissions from just anyone. The maniac who wanted to explode a bomb in a school as a protest for world peace was not going to purchase that bomb or the materials through him. Even in the world of terrorists there must be standards, no? Ronsard required an established organization, which would need his services again and so was not likely to turn on him.
For his part, he was absolutely scrupulous in delivering what he had promised. He took nothing for himself except the agreed payment. His own value, he knew, depended on his reliability. To that end, he went to extraordinary lengths to make certain nothing went wrong with any shipment, no matter how small. His business had flourished as a result, and his bank accounts in Switzerland and the Cayman Islands were . . . healthy.
Because he was so careful, anything out of the ordinary made him wary. Such was the phone call he received that morning on his private line, the number only a very few people knew.
“So,” he murmured to himself as he leaned back in his chair and rolled a fragrant cigar, taken from an inlaid sandalwood box on his desk, in his fingers.
“So?” Cara Smith, his secretary and aide—his first aide, as she liked to call herself—looked up from the computer she was using to track his various investments. He had been surprised, when he had her investigated, to discover her name really was Smith, and that she was from the unlikely named Waterloo, Kansas, which had given her the opportunity over the years to make some dreadful puns at his expense.
“We have a request from an . . . unexpected party.”
Cara, of all people, knew how much he disliked the unexpected. But she also knew him, better than was sometimes comfortable, and immediately saw his interest. Something intrigued him, or he would have immediately refused the commission.
She swiveled her chair tow
ard him and crossed her long legs. Since Cara was six feet tall, they were very long legs indeed. “And the name is . . . ?”
“Temple.”
Her cornflower blue eyes widened. “Wow.”
She was so American, he thought, so adept in the inelegant phrase. “Wow, indeed.”
Temple, known only by the one name, was a shadow in the already murky world of terrorists. His name had been whispered in connection with some assassinations, with certain bombings. He did not choose his targets at random, for the sake of creating terror. He might bring down an airplane, but one person on that flight was his specific target It was unknown whether he belonged to some even more shadowy organization or if he worked for himself. If for himself, no one knew what his agenda was. Temple was an enigma.
Ronsard didn’t like enigmas. He liked to know exactly with whom, and what, he was dealing.
“What does he want?”
“The RDX-a.”
To his relief, she didn’t say “wow” again. Nor did she ask the obvious: How did Temple even know about RDX-a? It had been tested only a week before, and though the compound had performed as it was supposed to, its existence was still known to only a few. There were a few problems in production that were currently being eliminated, such as the tendency of some batches to decompose at an accelerated rate, with unpleasant results for the handler. It was a delicate balancing act, to stabilize an unstable compound just enough to be able to predict its rate of decomposition, without rendering it too stable to perform.
“Find every available bit of information on Temple,” he said. “I want to know what he looks like, where he was born—everything.”
“Are you going to accept the commission?”
“It depends.” Ronsard lit the cigar, dedicating himself, for a few pleasurable seconds, to the ritual. When the end was glowing to his satisfaction he savored the subtle vanilla taste on his tongue. He would have to change his clothing before seeing Laure; she loved the smell of his cigars, but the smoke wasn’t good for her.
Cara had already turned back to her computer and was rapidly typing in commands. Computers were something else he didn’t trust, so none of his records were on the one Cara used, which was connected to that invisible electronic world the Americans called the Web. There were encryption programs, of course, but they were constantly being broken. Teenagers hacked into the Pentagon’s most secure files; corporations spent billions in computer security that leaked like a sieve. The only secure computer, in his opinion, was one that wasn’t connected to anything else—like the one on his desk where he kept his records. As an added precaution he regularly changed his password, to a word chosen at random from the dog-eared volume of Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities that he always kept on his desk He actually read the thing from time to time, though more to keep Cara from being suspicious about its presence than from any actual interest in the book He would turn down the page from which he had chosen his password and leave the book lying out in the open as if it were of no importance.
His system wasn’t perfect. He changed the password so often that sometimes he forgot which word he had chosen, hence the turned-down page. He could always recognize the word once he saw it, if he was on the correct page.
“Where’s Temple from?” Cara asked. “I’m not finding anything on him using a broad search. I need a closer focus.”
“America, I think, but I’ve heard rumors he had lived in Europe for at least ten years. Try Scotland Yard.”
She sighed as she tapped keys. “This is going to get me arrested some day,” she grumbled.
Ronsard smiled. He did enjoy Cara; she knew exactly what his business entailed but managed to maintain the same attitude as if she worked in a corporate office somewhere. Nor was she intimidated by him, and though a certain amount of intimidation was necessary in his chosen field, sometimes it was wearying.
Nor had she fallen in love with him, which was fortunate. Ronsard knew women, knew the effect he had on them, but Cara had bluntly told him that though she liked him she wasn’t interested in sleeping with him. That, too, had been a relief.
She slept with other men, most recently his Egyptian bodyguard, Hossam, who had been obsessed with the tall blonde woman from the day he first saw her. Ronsard only hoped Hossam wouldn’t lose control of his Middle-Eastern temperament when his American Norse goddess lost interest in him.
“Damn,” she muttered and typed furiously. The Scotland Yard computer was giving her problems, he concluded.
“Damn!” she shouted a minute later and slapped the monitor. “The bastards have added a wrinkle—”
