by Tom Savage
And there it was, at the end of the lane beside the hanging sign. As she threw herself at the driver’s door, the first warm drops of rain began to pelt her. She was in the car, slamming the door, tossing the gun in her Coach bag, thanking France for left-side steering and right-side driving, just like America. She could do this. She must do this.
The clé was in the allumage, just as Jacques had said. Oh God, a stick shift! She hadn’t driven one in twenty years. Depress the clutch pedal; turn the key. The engine roared to life. Headlights, windshield wipers, release emergency brake. Pull gearshift left; push it forward for first gear. Yes! The car lurched out into the road. She braked, remembering to hold down both pedals so it wouldn’t stall. Where the hell was reverse? There! She backed into the lane, swinging the wheel and yanking the gearshift forward, over, forward for first again, her mind racing faster than the engine. Move right foot from brake to accelerator; lift left foot from clutch. With another roar, the Renault turned, heading downhill, back the way they’d come.
Over the little stone bridge she drove, shifting gears easily now. She sped down the mountainside as fast as she dared, putting as much distance as possible between her and Pinède. She swiped at the tears in her eyes, squinting through the rain-pelted windshield. Jacques might be dead. The other man, whoever he was, was probably dead. Jacques had a wife in Paris, Marianne. This car belonged to their eldest son, who was on vacation with his family in New York City…
Where am I? she thought. Which way did we come? She glanced down at the dashboard, frowning. The navigation app would be in French, of course, but she’d figure it out. Ess-day-ah-tay. S-D-A-T. What on earth was that? He’d said the SDAT would help her find Jeff…
Another flash of lightning, followed by a loud crack of thunder. She could barely see through the windshield now, but she must keep going. Headlights loomed up on her left, and a car whipped by her. A cluster of lights ahead on her right: another village. More thunder, then—
Sirens. More than one, a high-pitched wail and a klaxon. Flashing lights down the road: blue, red, more blue, coming this way fast. She swung the wheel, turning off into the lane that led to the village. She drove a short way down it and stopped, switching off the lights. She watched in the rearview mirror as two police cars and an ambulance came flashing by, rushing up the main road toward Pinède.
When they were gone, she backed out of the lane and continued down the hill, away from the scene of the crime.
Chapter 16
Catherine Deneuve was telling her where to go. Well, not the actress, not really, but it sounded like her. The voice emanating from the dashboard was soft, cultivated, expertly trained, with that professional mix of warmth and assurance that makes a person believe anything it says. Nora envied very few other actors for their gifts, but Catherine Deneuve was one of them, and so was the voice in the Renault’s speakers.
“…sortie nombre quatre pour l’autoroute trente-six. Procédez à l’ouest, une distance de quatre-vingt-douze kilomètres à l’autoroute six…”
The beautiful voice had led her successfully through the near-blinding downpour to the appropriate autoroute, west from Besançon to Dijon. Eventually, this road would be exited for the long one, the A6, heading northwest toward Paris. After that, she’d have to look for the A10 to the A6B—or was it the other way around? The voice would tell her. She wished she’d paid more attention to Jacques’s navigation on the way here.
Jacques.
No, she couldn’t think about him. He wasn’t dead—he wasn’t—and even now, friendly hands would be ministering to him in l’infirmerie down the hill from Pinède, or in the nearest big hospital. As for the other man, the sniper—well, she couldn’t sympathize. She had more immediate things to occupy her, like negotiating this wet French highway as she raced toward Paris in the middle of the night, running from a dead assassin and a please-don’t-be-dead bodyguard.
Bodyguard? It certainly seemed that way. Jacques Lanier was another one of them, a French agent involved in whatever this was. This crisis. He worked for something called the SDAT—she must find out what that was. Nora hadn’t really understood all the obvious signs this morning at Gare du Nord: the ill-fitting chauffeur’s uniform; the limousine that was not a limousine; the deliberately misspelled placard, Hugs; the use of mademoiselle to further shield her identity. He’d been watching the rearview mirror from the moment they started, and he’d spotted the tail immediately. His orders were to stay with her, protect her, hence his insistence on driving her all the way to the Franche-Comté himself, in a fresh car.
Jeff. Jeff must have flagged her name, Baron, and also Hughes. Jeff had instructed her to go to Paris, but he hadn’t known how she’d do that, and he couldn’t communicate directly with her. Somewhere, in a room in London or Washington, a technician had gotten a hit on the Eurostar reservation Lonny Tindall had made for Noreen Hughes. Once Jeff knew her train, he had simply arranged for the chauffeur at the other end to be a French agent. He was taking no chances with his wife’s safety. But something had gone wrong. At some point between Paris and Pinède, her husband had evidently lost control of the plan.
GOOT! Dix roses pour Grand-tante J ce soir. Either Jeff had meant something else entirely or…
Or others had changed the game. That ugly man with the shabby clothes and garlic breath: Could he possibly work with Jeff? Nora doubted it. He’d looked—and smelled—like a homeless man, a vagrant. And the note that had led her to the cemetery was odd too. Not her husband’s handwriting, but block capitals. And something else: Pal. He hadn’t called her Pal. The first message had been addressed to her, but the second hadn’t been so specific. It could have been written by anyone. But if it hadn’t been Jeff, how on earth had the writer known about Pinède in the first place? Grand-tante Jeanette, the roses, the ritual…
Her head was throbbing, partly from squinting through the wet windshield at seemingly endless miles of wet highway, but mostly from the strain of trying to understand what was happening to her. She’d been summoned to Pinède, to her husband’s great-aunt’s grave, presumably to meet her husband. Instead, she’d been shot at by a professional assassin who had dug a grave. A grave for her, for her body when she was dead. One clean shot, then into the hole, and she wouldn’t be found for days. Weeks. Months. Ever.
Whoever they were, they hadn’t counted on her leaving the manila envelope in the car. And they definitely hadn’t counted on Jacques Lanier. The noises behind her when she entered the churchyard—now she knew: Jacques had followed her from the car with his silenced weapon and his night-vision equipment, ready for trouble. And trouble was what he’d found.
She was praying. Nora Baron, the lapsed Catholic, was actually asking God to watch over the wonderful little man who had saved her life tonight. Keep him alive for Marianne; for the son whose car she was driving; for the rest of his family and his friend Felicia; and for her. So she could thank him in person and teach him some more English words.
Had the priest or sexton seen her? She didn’t think so. The police arriving at Notre Dame des Montaignes would find the dead sniper and Jacques, and they’d be searching for the missing weapon, the one she’d thrown in her shoulder bag, but as far as she could tell, they didn’t know she existed. Of course they’d find the sniper’s car, probably in the church parking lot, and they’d wonder how Jacques had arrived there. If Jacques was conscious, he’d tell them he’d walked or thumbed a ride and the dead man was a personal enemy, his wife’s lover, something like that. They wouldn’t believe him, of course, but it might buy her precious time…
The road was a blur, and visibility decreased with every minute. The rain was falling harder, cascading down the windows and singing under the tires, punctuated by a celestial symphony of light and noise in the black sky above the autoroute. The rearview mirror showed only wet darkness with occasional lights. She monitored each successive pair of headlights behind the Renault until she was sure the distant car wasn’t deliberately following
her.
How would she know? How could she possibly distinguish her pursuers from fifty million benign Frenchmen? They’d been on the transatlantic flight with her, followed her to the hotel and the hospital, to Russell Square, to Paris, and now to the wilds of rural France. Was the man in the cemetery the man from the plane and the park? The man in the gray Citroën? Could all this be the work of one obsessed loner? If he was dead, was she safe now? How many of them was she dealing with—and who the hell were they anyway?
She’d made a choice when she came down from the mountains and rejoined the autoroute, where signs soon appeared before her for the exits that would take her either east or west. She’d thought about it as she drove. To the east was the Jura pass; she could be in Switzerland in not much more than an hour. She could stop somewhere—Neuchâtel was on the Doubs, just across the border—and figure out what to do next. But she didn’t know anyone in Switzerland. No; better to take her chances back in Paris, even if it was probably easier for her mysterious enemies to track her in France.
Were they still tracking her right now, this minute? If so, how? Not this car, certainly—it belonged to Jacques’s son; they couldn’t possibly know about it. Or could they? She’d have to work that out, but she wasn’t sure how to go about it. She was Nora Baron, a drama teacher from Long Island, not a federal agent. Her husband was the federal agent in the family. Jeff would know what to do, how to deal with these situations. But where was he? Did he know what was happening to her? More questions. She was going mad from all the questions.
A red light appeared on the dashboard; she was low on gas. Not surprising, considering the miles they’d put in since the rest stop this afternoon. The last thing she needed now was car trouble, running out of gas in the middle of nowhere. She edged over into the extreme right lane, searching the road ahead. Yes! There, in the distance: lights.
The young man in the petrol station was very wet and very polite. As she paid in cash for a full tank and a small bottle of water, Nora tried to calm herself enough to remember some basic French. She was suddenly exhausted. She had to stop for the night; she couldn’t drive any farther now. The storm was getting worse, and shock was setting in. She downed some water and spoke.
“Un motel, um, ici?” was all she could manage, but it was enough. With a grin, he burst into rapid speech, with gestures. She could barely follow him, but she got the gist of it. His mother-in-law—or his wife’s aunt?—ran a lovely chambres d’hôte just down the way, at the next sortie, Chez Martine. Cheap, clean, and she loved les touristes Americains. Salles de bains privée, petit déjeuner inclus dans le prix fixe, et la Wee-Fee pour les portables! Down the ramp, à la gauche, deux îlots, l’édifice jaune à la gauche. He then pulled a cellphone from his pocket and spoke into it. Yes, a room would be ready, and Martine herself would be expecting Mademoiselle Hughes.
Nora smiled and thanked him, glancing at her watch. It was nearly midnight. She’d only been driving for ninety minutes or so, but between the weather and her nerves, not to mention the unfamiliar car with standard transmission, it seemed much longer. Still, her mind was working overtime. Just before the young man ran inside the station, she called him back over. She explained in halting French that she’d met a man today who said he worked for the SDAT. Did he know what that was?
His eyes widened. “Ess-day-ah-tay? Oui, mademoiselle, ils sont les flics! La Police Nationale! Vôtre ami est un homme très, très important! Ess-day-ah-tay, c’est la Sous-Direction Anti-Terroriste!”
Chapter 17
Nora sat up with a start. She was in a strange bed in a strange room, and for one wrenching moment she had no idea where she was. Then she remembered, and she fell back against the pillow, relieved.
Chez Martine. She’d arrived at midnight, carefully parking the car out of sight from the road, and the sleepy proprietress had signed her in and led her upstairs, apparently not noticing the smear of blood on the collar of Nora’s raincoat. Nora was the only guest, which didn’t surprise her. This stretch of the autoroute was between major towns, and most people probably kept going until they arrived in one. Martine was delighted to have the business, and very proud of her son-in-law at the gas station, who sent occasional weary travelers her way.
Nora had thrown off her clothes and fallen into bed, but not before washing the bloodstain out of her coat as best she could, putting a Band-Aid on her neck, and taking the gun from her bag to study it. The name, SIG Sauer, was on it, and the barrel was augmented with the fat, twist-on cylinder she knew was called a suppressor. Not a silencer—that was an invention of Hollywood and crime novels; it didn’t really exist. A suppressor was the best you could do for sound control on firearms, and it made that loud hissing noise. Pfft, pfft. She remembered the graveyard with a shudder.
She’d only handled one gun in her life, a semiautomatic, when she’d played a bank robber in an episode of a short-lived TV cop series long ago. The prop crew had explained everything to her, where the safety was and how to insert and remove the clip, which she’d had to do on camera. That gun had been a dummy, not particularly heavy.
This very real gun was bigger and heftier, but the safety and clip were in the same places, and she could see that the clip was nearly full, which made sense; Jacques had only fired two shots. Rounds—they were called rounds. She reinserted the clip and slid the safety catch until she heard the click as it locked. Leaving the suppressor in place, she put the weapon back in her bag. She didn’t think she could fire an actual gun at anyone, but it was reassuring to have it with her.
Now it was morning, nearly eight o’clock by her watch, and the thunderstorm of last night was gone. Bright sunshine beat against the closed lace curtains at the window, and she threw them open to let in the light. The world beyond the inn’s forecourt was going on as usual.
Why was she suddenly thinking of Mike Lasky? Her daughter had been distraught the other day in New York, devastated by her prelaw student boyfriend’s alleged infidelity. Dana was in Great Neck with Aunt Mary, safe for now, but Nora was not at her side, counseling her on the potential drawbacks of romantic relationships. No, Nora was here, four thousand miles away, searching for Dana’s father. Her maternal priorities had shifted, and not in a good way.
A hot shower, her first since London two nights ago, did wonders for her. Her neck stung where the chip from the edge of the mausoleum had pricked her skin, but it was healing; she wouldn’t need the Band-Aid anymore. Clean hair, a toothbrush, fresh makeup—the little daily things she’d always taken for granted brought on a sense of calm. Well, not really, not entirely. She didn’t know where her husband was or what he was doing. She didn’t know if Jacques Lanier was alive or if he’d given his life for her. Sous-Direction Anti-Terroriste: Thinking of that name, what it clearly meant, was sharply unsettling. The beneficial qualities of the shower were already fading.
There was no phone in the room, but they’d have one downstairs. Jeff was off the grid, as Lonny Tindall would undoubtedly say, but she could call Bill Howard. Well, she could call Vivian Howard and ask her how to get in touch with Bill. She didn’t know what agency he worked for. MI5? MI6? Or was it some other group, one of those outfits even the queen and the prime minister didn’t know about, whose name you wouldn’t learn from reading John le Carré or watching James Bond movies?
Langley. Jeff had an assistant there, a polite young man named…something or other. She’d spoken with him a couple of times. Ray? Roy? Roger? No, Jeff wouldn’t want her to call Langley, and Ray/Roy/Roger would need clearance to tell her anything, assuming he knew anything, which he probably didn’t. He was too far down the chain of command.
Clearance, chain of command, off the grid. Dear God, the phrases she was throwing around! It was unreal—no, it was surreal; that was the word. This whole thing was surreal. Coded messages, bodyguards, silenced—no, suppressed—gunshots in midnight graveyards. Washing blood from a raincoat. And a dead body, possibly two. Three, if she counted her “husband” in the Londo
n morgue. She had to count him because he mattered. He mattered to someone somewhere, whoever he was.
In that moment, in the clean but otherwise nondescript bedroom in a guesthouse in the French countryside, Nora Baron realized with a shock that she was angry. It wasn’t the emotion she’d expected, but it was probably a good thing. Otherwise, she might have waited there, crouching in a corner until someone came to save her, or to kill her. Her anger got her out of the room and down the stairs to the lobby.
The young woman at the desk looked so much like a younger version of Martine that Nora had no trouble identifying her. This would be her daughter, the wife of the nice young man at the filling station. With a smile, she ushered Nora into the empty dining room beside the lobby, seated her by the picture window looking out on the parking lot and the autoroute access road, and asked if mademoiselle preferred coffee or tea.
Mademoiselle preferred coffee, lots of it, and in minutes she had a pot of it and a basket of fresh bread. The daughter told her an omelet was on the way, and with a flourish of obvious pride, she switched on the big brand-new flat-screen television mounted on one wall before going back to the lobby. Nora gazed out the window at the parking lot, drying from last night’s torrent, and listened to the droning voice of a news reporter and the distant noises from the kitchen.
She had to make a plan. Paris. Get to Paris, leave the Renault in that alley next to Felicia’s restaurant, leave the gun in the glove compartment, give the keys to Felicia, and proceed to Gare du Nord. London: the Byron for her things, the hospital for her “husband’s” ashes, Heathrow. She could be home by midnight. Forget about the SDAT: Whatever her actual husband was doing, she was clearly more a liability than an asset as long as she remained in Europe—
“…une fusillade dans le cimetière de l’église Notre Dame des Montaignes…Pinède, un village en Jura de la Franche-Comté…deux hommes non identifiés, un mort et un blessé grave…”
