9

Despite the cold rain blowing in under the protection of her umbrella, Lily kept her head high so she could see what was going on around her. She strode briskly, pushing herself to see how her stamina held up. She was gloved, booted, and wrapped against the chill, but she left her head uncovered so her blond hair was visible. If by chance Rodrigo’s men were looking for her here in Paris, they’d be looking for a brunette. She doubted Rodrigo had followed her path back here, though, at least not yet.

The Agency, however, was a different matter entirely. She was almost surprised she hadn’t been detained in London as soon as she got off the plane. But she hadn’t been, and she hadn’t spotted a tail, either when she’d left de Gaulle airport or this morning.

She began to think that she might have been incredibly lucky. Rodrigo had kept Salvatore’s death secret for several days, then released the news only after Salvatore’s funeral. There hadn’t been any mention of poison, just that he had died after a brief illness. Was it possible the dots hadn’t been connected?

She didn’t dare let herself hope, couldn’t afford to let down her guard. Until she’d finished the job, she would stay alert for trouble from every corner. After the job—well, she really had no idea. At this point, all she hoped for was survival.

She hadn’t chosen an Internet café close to her sublet studio, because for all she knew there might be a trap on any online requests for information pertaining to anything about the Nervi organization. Instead she had taken the Metro to the Latin Quarter, and opted to walk the rest of the way. She had never used this particular Internet café before, which was one of the reasons she’d chosen it. One of the basic rules for evasion was to not follow a set routine, not be predictable. People got caught because they went where they were most comfortable, where things were familiar.

Lily had spent quite a lot of time in Paris, so that meant there were a lot of places and people that she would now have to avoid. She’d never actually had a residence here, instead staying with friends—usually Averill and Tina—or at a B and B. Once, for about a year, she’d rented a flat in London but gave it up because she’d spent twice as much time traveling as she had at the flat and it was just an added expense.

Her theater of work had been primarily in Europe, so going home to the States hadn’t happened very often, either. As much as she liked Europe and was familiar with it, truly settling down there had never occurred to her. If she ever bought a home—a very big “if”—it would be in the States.

Sometimes she thought longingly of retiring as Averill and Tina had, of living a normal life with a nine-to-five job, of staying in a community and becoming part of its fabric, knowing her neighbors, visiting with relatives, chatting on the phone. She didn’t know how she had come to this, to being able to snuff out a human life as easily as most people would step on an insect, to being afraid to even call her mother, for God’s sake. She had started so young, and that first time hadn’t been easy at all—she’d been shaking like a leaf—but she’d gotten the job done, and the next time had been easier, and the time after that easier still. After a while the targets had become less than human to her, an emotional remoteness that was necessary for her to be able to do the job. Perhaps it was naive of her, but she trusted her government not to send her after any of the good guys; it was a necessary belief, the only way she could work. And still she had become someone she feared, this woman who probably couldn’t be trusted to enter normal society.

It was still there, that dream of retiring and settling down, but Lily recognized it as just that, a dream, and unlikely ever to happen. Even if she got through this situation alive, settling down was something normal people did, and Lily was afraid she herself had become less than human. Killing had become too easy, too instinctive. What would happen to her if she had to deal with the same frustrations every day, a nasty boss or a vicious neighbor? What if someone tried to mug her? Could she control her instincts, or would people die?

Even worse, what if she inadvertently brought danger to someone she loved? She knew she literally wouldn’t be able to bear it if anyone in her family was harmed because of her, because of what she was.

A car horn beeped, and Lily started, jerking her attention back to her surroundings. She was appalled that she’d let her thoughts wander, instead of keeping herself alert and focused. If she couldn’t hold her concentration, there was no way she’d be able to successfully pull this off.

She might have squeaked under the Agency’s radar so far—she hoped—but that couldn’t last. Eventually someone would come for her, and she thought sooner rather than later.

Looked at realistically, there were four possible outcomes for this situation. In the best-case scenario, she would discover what it was that had lured Averill and Tina out of retirement, and whatever it was, would be so horrible that the civilized world would distance itself from the Nervis and they would be put out of business. The Agency would never use her again, of course; no matter how justified, a contract agent who went around killing assets was too unstable for the job. So she’d win, but be unemployed, which threw her back to her earlier concern about whether she could actually live a normal life.

In the next-best-case scenario, she wouldn’t find anything suitably incriminating—selling weapons to terrorists wouldn’t be bad enough, because everyone knew about it anyway—and would be forced to live out her life under an alias, in which case she’d be unemployed, and back to the question of whether she could hold down a regular job and be Jane Citizen.

The last two possibilities were bleak. She might accomplish her aim, but get killed. Finally, worst of all, she might get killed before she got anything accomplished.

She would have liked to say the odds were fifty-fifty that she’d have one of the first two outcomes, but the four possibilities weren’t equal in probability. She thought there was something like an eighty percent chance she wasn’t going to survive this, and that might be an optimistic guess. She was going to try like hell for the twenty percent, though. She couldn’t let Zia down by giving up.

The Latin Quarter was a maze of narrow cobbled streets, usually teeming with students from the nearby Sorbonne and shoppers who came for the odd boutiques and ethnic stores, but today the cold rain had thinned the crowds. The Internet café, however, was already busy. Lily surveyed the café as she closed her umbrella and removed her raincoat, scarf, and gloves, looking for an unoccupied computer where she was least likely to be observed. Beneath the lined raincoat she wore a thick turtleneck sweater in a rich blue that darkened the shade of her eyes and drapey knit slacks over low boots. An ankle holster carrying a .22 caliber revolver was strapped around her right ankle, easily accessible in the low boot, and the drapey fit of the trousers hid any telltale line. She had felt horribly defenseless during the weeks when she hadn’t been able to carry a weapon because of those damn searches every time she got close to Salvatore; this was better.

She located a machine situated at such an angle that she could watch the door while she was there, plus it was as private as she was likely to get in this particular café. It was, however, being used by a teenage American girl who was evidently checking her e-mail. It was usually easy to spot Americans, Lily thought; it wasn’t just their clothing or style, it was something about them, an innate confidence that often edged into arrogance, and had to be irritating as hell to a European. She herself might still have the attitude—she was almost certain of it—but over the years her style of dress and outward manners had changed. Most people mistook her for Scandinavian, given her coloring, or perhaps German. No one, looking at her now, would automatically think of apple pie and baseball.

She waited until the teenager had finished with her e-mail and left, then slid into the vacated seat. The rate per hour here was very reasonable, doubtless because of the hordes of college students. She paid for an hour, expecting to take at least that long or longer.

She began with Le Monde, the biggest newspaper, searching the archives between August 21, when she had dinner with the Joubrans for the last time, and the 28th, when they were murdered. The only mention of “Nervi” was of Salvatore in connection with a story on international finances. She read the article twice, searching for any detail that might indicate an underlying story, but either she was in the dark concerning financial matters or there was nothing.

There were fifteen newspapers in the Parisian area, some small, some not. She had to research all of them, covering the archives for those seven days in question. The task was time-consuming and sometimes the computer would take forever to download a page. Sometimes the connection was broken and she would have to log on again. She had been there three hours when she logged on to Investir, a financial newspaper, and hit the jackpot.

The item was just a sidebar, only two paragraphs long. On August 25, a Nervi research laboratory had suffered an explosion and subsequent fire that was described as “small” and “contained,” with “minimal damage” that would in no way affect the lab’s ongoing research in vaccines.

Averill had specialized in explosives, to the point of being a true artist. He’d seen no point in wanton destruction when, with care and planning, it was possible to design a charge that would take out only what was needed. Why blow up an entire building when one room would do? Or a city block when one building would do? “Contained” was a word often used to describe his work. And Tina had been skilled at bypassing security systems, in addition to being talented with a pistol.

Lily couldn’t know for certain it was their work, but it felt right. At least this was a lead she could follow, and hope it went down the correct path.

While she was online, she pulled up what information there was on the research laboratory, and found precious little more than the address and the name of the director, her pal Dr. Vincenzo Giordano. Well, well. She typed his name into the search engine and came up dry, but then she hadn’t really expected he would have his home phone number published. That would have been the easiest way to locate him, but it certainly wasn’t the only way.

Logging off line, she flexed her shoulders and rolled her head back and forth to loosen the tight muscles in her neck. She hadn’t moved from the computer terminal in over three hours and every muscle felt stiff, plus she really needed to use the facilities. She was tired, but not as tired as she’d been the day before, and she was satisfied with the way her stamina had held up during the brisk walk from the Metro.

The rain was still falling when she left the café, but had slowed to little more than a drizzle. She opened her umbrella, thought for a moment, then struck out in the opposite direction from which she’d come earlier. She was hungry, and though she hadn’t had one in years, she knew exactly what she wanted for lunch: a Big Mac.

Swain second-guessed himself again. He was getting damn tired of doing that, but couldn’t seem to help himself.

He’d located the Joubrans’ old address, and found that the space had evidently been cleaned up, cleaned out, and either rented or sold to another family. He’d had a vague notion that he might break in and see what he could find, but that would have been useful only if no one else had moved there in the meantime. He had watched a young mother welcome a babysitter—her mother, from the resemblance—and two preschool children erupt out of the door into the rain before she could stop them. The two adults had, with much clucking and shooing, rounded up the two giggling curtain-climbers and got them indoors; then the young woman had dashed out again, clutching an umbrella and bag. Whether she was going to work or going shopping didn’t matter to him. What mattered was the residence was no longer empty.

That’s where he second-guessed himself. He’d also planned to question the neighbors and the proprietors of the local markets about the Joubrans, who their friends were, that kind of thing. But it occurred to him that if he beat Lily to the punch with those questions, when she did come around, someone was bound to tell her an American man had asked those same questions just the day before, or even a few hours before. She wasn’t stupid; she’d know exactly what that meant, and go to ground somewhere.

He’d been chasing around after her the day before, trying to catch up, but now he had to adjust his thinking. He was no longer necessarily behind her, which was good only if he knew what her next move would be. Until then, he couldn’t afford to alarm her or she would disappear on him again.

Through channels—with Murray dealing with the French—he knew that Lily had flown back to Paris using the identity of Mariel St. Clair, but the address listed on her passport had turned out to be a fish market. Just a little humor on her part, he thought. She wouldn’t be using the St. Clair identity again; she had probably slid effortlessly into yet another persona, one he had no way of finding. Paris was a big city, with over two million inhabitants, and she was far more familiar with it than he was. He had only this one chance where their paths might intersect, and he didn’t want to ruin it by jumping in too fast.

Disgruntled, he drove around the neighborhood getting the lay of the land, so to speak, and more than casually studying pedestrians as they hurried up and down the streets. Unfortunately, most of them carried umbrellas that partially hid their features, and even if they hadn’t, he had no idea what disguise Lily might be using now. She’d been just about everything except an elderly nun, so maybe he should start looking for those.

In the meantime, maybe he should take a look at that Nervi lab, eyeball the outward security measures. Who knew when he might need to get inside?

After an unhealthy and extremely satisfying lunch, Lily took the SNCF train to the suburb where Averill and Tina had lived. By the time she arrived there, the rain had stopped and a weak sun was making fitful efforts to peek through the dull gray clouds. The day wasn’t any warmer, but at least the rain wasn’t making everyone miserable. She remembered the brief snow flurry the night Salvatore had died, and wondered if Paris would see more snow this winter. Snow events didn’t happen in Paris all that often. How Zia had loved playing in the snow! they’d taken her skiing in the Alps almost every winter, the three adults who’d loved her more than life itself. Lily herself never skied, because an accident could put her out of commission for months, but after they’d retired, both her friends had taken to the sport like fiends.

Memories flashed in her mind like postcards: Zia as an adorable, chubby three-year-old in a bright red snowsuit, patting a small and extremely lopsided snowman. That was her first trip to the Alps. Zia on the bunny trails, shrieking, “Watch me! Watch me!” Tina taking a header into a snowbank and emerging laughing, looking more like the Abominable Snowman than a woman. The three of them enjoying drinks around a roaring fireplace while Zia slept upstairs. Zia losing her first tooth, starting school, her first dance recital, showing the first signs of changing from child to adolescent, getting her period last year, fussing with her hair, wanting to wear mascara.

Lily briefly closed her eyes, shaking with pain and rage. Desolation filled her, the way it often had since she’d learned they were all dead. Since then she could see the sunshine but hadn’t been able to feel it, as if its warmth never touched her. Killing Salvatore had been satisfying, but it wasn’t enough to bring back the sun.

She stopped outside the place where her friends had lived. There was someone else living in the house now, and she wondered if they knew three people had died there just a few months before. She felt violated, as if everything should have been left the way it had been, their things untouched.

That very first day she’d returned to Paris and discovered they’d been murdered, she herself had taken some of the photographs, some of Zia’s games and books, a few of her childhood toys, the baby album she had started and Tina had lovingly continued. The house had been cordoned off, of course, and locked up, but that hadn’t stopped her. For one thing, she had her own key. For another, if necessary she would have torn the roof off with her bare hands to gain entrance. But what had happened to the rest of their belongings? Where were their clothes, their personal treasures, their ski equipment? After that first day she had been busy for a couple of weeks finding out who had killed them, and beginning her plan for vengeance; when she’d returned, the house had been cleaned out.

Averill and Tina had each had some family, cousins and such, though no one close. Perhaps the authorities had notified those family members, and they had come to pack up everything. She hoped so. It was okay if family had their possessions, but she hated the idea of some impersonal cleaning service coming and boxing things up to be disposed of.

Lily began knocking on doors, talking to neighbors, asking if they’d seen anyone visiting that week before her friends were murdered. She had questioned them before, but hadn’t known the right question to ask. She was known to them, of course; she’d been visiting for years, had nodded hello, stopped for brief chats. Tina had been a friendly person, Averill more aloof, but to Zia there’d been no such thing as a stranger. She’d been on very friendly terms with all the neighbors.

Only one had seen anything that she remembered, though; it was Mme. Bonnet, who lived two doors down. She was in her mid-eighties, grumpy with age, but she liked to sit by the front window while she knitted—and she was constantly knitting—so she saw almost everything that happened on the street.

“But I have already told all of this to the police,” she said impatiently when she answered the door and Lily posed her question. “No, I saw no one the night they were killed. I am old; I don’t see so well, I don’t hear so well. And I close my curtains at night. How could I have seen anything?”

“What about before that night? Any time that week?”

“That, too, I told the police.” She glared at Lily.

“The police have done nothing.”

“Of course they have done nothing! Worthless, the lot of them.” With a disgusted wave of her hand she dismissed a small army of public servants who every day did the best they could.

“Did you see anyone you didn’t know?” Lily repeated patiently.

“Just that one young man. He was very handsome, like a movie star. He visited one day, for several hours. I hadn’t seen him before.”

Lily’s pulse leaped. “Can you describe him? Please, Madame Bonnet.”

The old lady glared some more, muttered a few uncomplimentary phrases like “incompetent idiots” and “bumbling fools,” then barked, “I told you, he was handsome. Tall, slim, black-haired. Very well dressed. He arrived by taxi, and another came for him when he left. That is all.”

“Could you guess his age?”

“Young! To me, anyone under fifty is young! Don’t bother me with these silly questions.” And with that, she stepped back and closed the door with a bang.

Lily took a deep breath. A young, handsome, dark-haired man. And well-dressed. There were thousands who met that description in Paris, which abounded with handsome young men. It was a start, a piece of the puzzle, but as a stand-alone clue it meant absolutely nothing. She had no list of usual suspects, nor a selection of photographs she could show Mme. Bonnet and hope the old lady could pick out one and say, “This one. This is the man.”

And what did this tell her, really? This handsome young man could have hired them to blow up something at the Nervi lab, or he could have been no more than a friendly acquaintance who happened to visit. Averill and Tina could have gone somewhere else to meet the person who hired them, rather than letting him come to their home. In fact, that would have been more likely.

She rubbed her forehead. She hadn’t thought this out, but she didn’t know if it could be thought out. She didn’t know if it mattered why they’d taken the job, or what the job was. She couldn’t even be certain there was a job, but it was the only scenario that made sense and she had to go with her instinct on that. If she started doubting herself now, she might as well pack it in.

Deep in thought, she walked back to the train platform.