17

M. Blanc wasn’t happy to hear from Rodrigo again so soon. “How may I be of service?” he asked somewhat stiffly. He disliked what he did anyway; to have to do it very often was salt in an open wound. He was at home, and receiving a call there made him feel as if he’d brought evil much too close to his loved ones.

“First, my brother, Damone, will be working with me,” Rodrigo said. “There may be times when he will call instead of me. I trust there will be no problem?”

“No, monsieur.”

“Excellent. This problem I asked your help with the other day. The report said that our friends in America had dispatched someone to handle it. I would like very much to contact this person.”

“Contact him?” Blanc echoed, suddenly uneasy. If Rodrigo met with the contract agent—at least Blanc assumed it was a contract agent, that was usually how a “problem” was handled—it was possible Rodrigo would say something that the contract agent would then carry back to his employers, and that wouldn’t do at all.

“Yes. I’d like his mobile phone number, if you please. I’m certain there is some way of contacting him. Do you know this person’s name?”

“Ah . . . no. I don’t believe it was listed in the report I received.”

“Of course it wasn’t,” Rodrigo snapped. “Or I wouldn’t ask, would I?”

He actually thought, Blanc realized, that he had been sent everything Blanc received. That wasn’t the case, however, and had never been. To minimize the damage he did, Blanc always removed important pieces of information. He knew that if he was found out, the Nervis would have him killed, but he’d become very skillful at balancing on that high wire. “If the information is available, I will get it,” he assured Rodrigo.

“I’ll be waiting for your call.”

Blanc checked the time and calculated the time in Washington. It was the middle of the workday there, perhaps his contact was even having lunch. After disconnecting the call from Rodrigo, he walked outside so no one—mainly his wife, who was an insatiably curious woman—could overhear, then punched in the required sequence of numbers.

“Yes.” The voice wasn’t as friendly as it was when Blanc caught him still at home, so he was probably where someone could hear his side of the conversation.

“In the matter I spoke to you about before, is it possible to have the mobile phone number of the person who was dispatched here?”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

No questions, no hesitation. Perhaps there wouldn’t be a number, Blanc thought, walking back inside. The temperature had dropped with the sun, and he was shivering slightly, not having put on a coat.

“Who was that?” his wife asked.

“It was work,” he said, dropping a kiss on her forehead. Sometimes he could talk about what he did, sometimes not, so although she clearly wanted to ask more questions, she did not.

“You could at least have put on a coat before going outside,” she scolded in a fond tone.

Less than two hours later Blanc’s mobile phone rang. Quickly he grabbed a pen, but couldn’t find a scrap of paper. “This wasn’t easy, buddy,” his contact said. “Something about different cell phone systems. I had to dig deep to find the number.” He read off the number, and Blanc scribbled it on his left palm.

“Thank you,” he said. After hanging up, he found some paper and wrote down the number, then washed his hands.

He should call Rodrigo Nervi immediately, he knew, but he didn’t. Instead he folded the paper and put it in his pocket. Perhaps he would call him tomorrow.

When Lily left his hotel room, Swain started to follow her back to her lair but decided against it. It wasn’t that he thought she would spot him; he knew she wouldn’t. She was good, but he was damn good. He didn’t follow her because it just didn’t feel right. It was crazy, but he wanted her to trust him. She had come to him, and that was a start. She had also given him her cell phone number, and he’d given her his. Funny how that felt the same as giving a friendship ring to a girlfriend in high school.

He hadn’t done what Vinay had told him to do. He kept putting it off, partly out of curiosity, partly because she was battling giants and needed all the help she could get, and partly because he was seriously interested in getting her into bed. She was playing a dangerous game with Rodrigo Nervi, and Swain was enough of a risk-taker to be intrigued and want to play, too. He was supposed to take her out of the equation, but instead he wanted to know what was going on in that lab. If he could find out, maybe Vinay wouldn’t demote him to desk jockey for not doing his job the first time he got close to Lily.

But all in all, he was enjoying himself. He was staying in a great hotel, driving a spitfire of a car, and eating French food. After some of the shit holes he’d stayed in during the past ten years, he needed some fun.

Lily was quite a challenge. She was wary and clever, with a streak of recklessness in her, and he never forgot that she was one of the best assassins working in Europe. Never mind that she’d had some pie-in-the-sky ideal about only making sanctioned hits until she’d gone after Salvatore Nervi; he was aware that he couldn’t afford a single misstep around her.

She was also sad, grieving for her friends and the young girl she’d thought of as her own. Swain thought of his own kids, and how he’d feel if one of them was murdered. No way would the murderer escape, or even make it to trial—no matter who it was. He was totally in sympathy with her on that score, not that it changed the final outcome.

He lay in bed that night and thought of her drinking the wine she knew was poisoned, just so Salvatore Nervi would continue drinking it. Damn, she’d skated close to the edge. From what she’d told him about the poison, how potent it was, he knew she’d had a very rough time and was probably still weak. There was no way she could get into that lab on her own, not in her shape, so that was probably why she’d called him. He didn’t care what her reason was; he was just glad she’d done it.

She was beginning to trust him. She’d cried in his arms, and he got the feeling she didn’t often let anyone get that close to her. She gave off a strong DO NOT TOUCH signal, but from what he could tell, that was more out of self-defense than coldness. She wasn’t a cold person at all, just wary.

Maybe he was crazy for being so attracted to her, but, hell, some male spiders willingly let their mates chew their heads off while they are going at it, so he figured he was ahead of the game in that respect: Lily hadn’t killed him yet.

He wanted to know what made her tick, what made her laugh. Yeah, he definitely wanted her to laugh. She looked as if she hadn’t had much fun lately, and a person should always have something to enjoy. He wanted her to relax and drop her guard around him, laugh and tease, make jokes, make love. He’d seen flashes of a dry sense of humor, and he wanted more.

He was well on his way to being obsessed, no doubt about it. He might lose his head yet, and die happy.

A gentleman wouldn’t plan the seduction of a woman he’d been sent to take down, but he’d never been a gentleman. He’d grown up a rowdy west Texas shit-kicker, refused to listen to adults who knew better and married Amy when they were both eighteen and fresh out of high school, was a father at nineteen, but he’d never quite got the hang of settling down. He’d never cheated on Amy, because she was a great girl, but he hadn’t exactly been there for her, either. Now that he was older, he was more responsible and felt ashamed of how he’d basically left her to raise their two kids by herself. The best he could say for himself was that he’d supported his family, even after the divorce.

Over the years he’d traveled a lot, become more sophisticated, but good manners and knowing how to order off a menu in three different languages didn’t make a gentleman. He was still rowdy, he still didn’t like rules, and he did like Lily Mansfield. He hadn’t often met women who could hold their own with him, but Lily could; her personality was as forceful as his. She decided what she was going to do and did it, come hell or high water. She had a steel backbone, but at the same time she had a real feminine warmth and tenderness. Finding out everything about her would take a man a lifetime. He didn’t have a lifetime, but he’d take what he could get. He was beginning to think that a few days with Lily would pack more of a punch than ten years with any other woman.

The big question was: What would he do afterward?

Blanc tensed when his phone rang early the next morning. “Who could that be?” his wife asked, annoyed that their breakfast was interrupted.

“It will be the office,” he said, and got up to take the phone outside. He punched the talk button and said, “This is Blanc.”

“Monsieur Blanc.” The voice was smooth and calm, one he had never heard before. “I am Damone Nervi. Do you have the number my brother requested?”

“No names,” Blanc said.

“Of course. This one time it seemed necessary, as we haven’t spoken before. Do you have the number?”

“Not yet. Evidently there is some difficulty—”

“Get it. Today.”

“There is a six-hour time difference. It will be afternoon at the earliest.”

“I’ll be waiting.”

Blanc hung up and for a moment stood with his fists clenched. Damn the Nervis! This one spoke better French than the other one, he sounded smoother, but underneath they were all the same: barbarians.

He would have to give them the number, but he would try to impress upon Rodrigo that it would be ill-advised to call the CIA’s man, that it could easily result in both him and his contact being prosecuted. Perhaps not, perhaps the man the CIA had sent didn’t care about who hired him, but that wasn’t something Blanc felt confident about.

He went back inside and looked at his wife, her dark hair still tousled from bed, a robe cinched around her trim waist. She slept in flimsy, low-cut nighties because she knew he liked it, though in the winter she put an extra blanket on her side of the bed because she felt the cold. What if something happened to her? What if Rodrigo Nervi followed through on the threats that had been made years ago? He couldn’t bear it.

He would have to give them the number. He would stall as long as he could, but in the end he had no choice.