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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 wh
ole 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.”
