by Lex Lander
‘I do trust you,’ she said, so immediately and ingenuously that he experienced a renewed surge of love and conscience in equal measure. ‘I love you and I know you love me.’ She frowned, marring the smooth plain of her forehead. ‘You’re not married, are you, Dennis? If you are, it doesn’t matter, not at all. But I must know. We must be completely honest with each other.’
He suppressed a laugh. ‘Not for many years. I’m footloose and fancy free - well, I was. Before I met you.’
The waltz wound down and he brought her to a gradual halt in the centre of the floor. They looked into each other’s eyes and beyond and when the music recommenced and the other dancers spun around them they remained rooted, touching only with their souls.
‘Just tell me what you want of me, my darling,’ she whispered. ‘Whatever it is, I will do it.’
PART SEVEN
MAY
Bugs Everywhere
Twenty-One
* * *
His call to the bank was brief and the dialogue consisted mostly of numbers.
‘Compte nombre zéro-zéro-six-six-zéro-un-deux-trois-barre-huit-septante,’ the man chanted back at him.
‘Exacte.’
‘Et votre code personnel, s’il vous plaît?’
‘Vingt-cinq, zéro-six, trente-et-un.’ His mother’s birth date.
A pause of perhaps a minute. Lux listened to the staccato tap of a keyboard.
A scraping sound as the receiver was picked up. ‘Monsieur?’
‘Toujours là.’ Still here.
‘Votre solde en dollars US est à quatre million neuf cent quatre-vingt dix-neuf mille, huit cent quatre-vingt dix-sept dollars, sans ajouter les intérêts.’
Five million, less transaction charges. Lux mentally rubbed his hands.
‘Merci bien. Au revoir,’
‘A votre service. Au revoir, monsieur.’
* * *
If the changes in him these past few weeks had been many and deep, his house on the hill was at any rate the same as ever. Against the grey citadel of the mountains, forbidding in the fading light of evening, it stood like a rock of stability. Lights burned in a downstairs window and over the porch.
He paid off the taxi at the bottom of the drive, for he enjoyed the walk up the winding path, mounting the steps by the pool to the terrace. It was an airless evening, sounds carrying across the valley: a car going up the precipitous Route de Castellar, the note of its engine rising and falling with every hairpin bend; rock music down in the Vieux Ville; even the clatter of dishes drifting through the open kitchen window of a near neighbour. And the air up here at the two hundred metre line squeaky clean, filtered free of impurities by the mountain palisade that walled Menton off from the outside world. Less than two kilometres away was the border with Italy. His bolthole, should he ever need it.
The front door opened as he reached it. She stood before him, the doorway framing her, the soft lights on the hall flowing over her chestnut-dark and slightly tousled hair, turning it molten.
‘You’re late,’ she accused, a catch in her voice. ‘I cooked a meal ... salmon ...’
‘The air controllers’ dispute ... it was late taking off.’ He stepped inside, closed the door, lowered his case to the floor.
The banality of the exchange was a cover up for a mutual confusion; hers at being here in his house, waiting for him as if she were his wife of many years and not someone else’s; his, at this tangible evidence of his ignobility. For he was not proud of breaking up her marriage. Conscious that, had he not pursued her as though on a vendetta, the fire of their love, with so little to sustain it, must soon have turned to dying embers.
‘Oh, Dennis, my love, my love.’
He crushed her to his chest, kissed her with such savagery that she gave a muffled cry. He didn’t pull back, nor did she wish that he should.
When they came apart she was gasping. Limp in his arms, almost a dead weight, her jaw slack and her desire laid bare in her eyes.
‘Where ...?’ he said thickly, wanting her as he hadn’t wanted a woman for years if ever. ‘Your son ... is he here?’
She shook her beautiful sleek head. Was incapable of speech. Not that speech was needed. He swept her up into his arms. She snuggled against him, a secretive smile playing over her lips, and he carried her to the living room. On the bearskin rug before the log fire he made love to her as he had never made love to any woman before.
* * *
Naked in the firelight, smoking, sipping a young Bordeaux Red, they talked.
Sending her on a day ahead of him had been a deliberate ploy to avoid making their liaison too public. His motives were largely unselfish: if spotted with him she might easily be regarded as his accomplice. In that eventuality, if - God forbid - the job went sour she would become a fugitive alongside him. But keep her pure and she might yet serve to shelter him. As it was, he did not even have to invent a reason for travelling separately. When he asked her to go to Menton alone and wait for him, she said okay and did not ask why. When he promised to join her as soon as his business in Paris was finalised, she said okay and did not seek reassurance. Her trust in him was absolute and left him bemused and humbled.
If he had his way this was to be their last night together until the job was over and done with, though he shrank from breaking this news to her. He hoped she would agree to stay here in Menton, while he would be based at his wife’s villa.
‘Where’s your son?’ he asked as she knelt before the fire to rearrange the logs, her skin turned the colour of old gold by the licking flames.
‘At school.’ She stared into the fire, her expression remote. ‘At the weekend, when normally he would come home, he will go to his mami’s - my mother. This will give me time to make other arrangements.’
‘And Michel? Did you tell him.’
She prodded moodily with the poker; sparks whooshed, a log collapsed. ‘I left a note.’
A note didn’t seem much for a marriage ended. They had been living together, initially out of wedlock, since she was seventeen. If she was to be believed, Lux was her first extra-marital lover. ‘And my last,’ she had said fiercely, as he plunged into her that afternoon in the hotel on the banks of the Seine, pumping a breathless scream from her lungs. ‘I will always love you - I swear it, oh God, I swear it!’
‘Tomorrow I must go away,’ he said, here and now, his tone matter-of-fact. ‘Out of the country.’ A necessary white lie.
Still on her haunches she rotated towards him. ‘Ah yes. Your big special job.’
‘That’s the one.’
‘I cannot come with you then?’
‘It wouldn’t be a smart idea.’
Apart from an insignificant flaring of the nostrils her face did not alter.
‘It’s not that I don’t want you with me,’ he insisted, and to his ears it had a lame ring. ‘And I can’t tell you more ... it’s confidential. When it’s over, I’ll explain, and you’ll understand.’
She sank onto her bottom, ran a hand lightly up his thigh. Such was her effect on him that his prick instantly stiffened, though they had already savoured intercourse twice within the last hour.
She gave a soft laugh. ‘You do not need to explain, my love. I have already told you - I trust you. I know you want to be with me and that if we must be apart it is because it is unavoidable. You see – ’ Another laugh, liberated, happy. ‘ - I am a very uncomplicated, undemanding woman. Aren’t you lucky to have me?’
She was sitting now, legs apart, leaning back supported by her spread hands. Her breasts drooped sensuously, the nipples casting sideways shadows over them like sundial pointers. She stirred restlessly under his scrutiny, not out of modesty (that much he had already learned about her), but out of the fires inside that her nakedness and his appraisal of it kindled. She had not been embarrassed to admit that she loved to display her body.
‘You’ll stay here, of course,’ he said, and made it a statement.
‘A few days only. I must als
o go to Paris to see Marc, no later than the weekend after next. Also, I must see Michel. I was not totally ... forthcoming in my note. It is only fair and right that I tell him about ... about us.’
Secretly Lux approved, though the jealous side of his nature, usually slow to inflame, resented the continued contact between her and her husband.
‘I also have to work,’ she said, after a pause.
‘Work? Look ... I’ll give you all you need. From now on you’re my responsibility.’
Little sparks that owed nothing to the reflection of the fire flickered in her eyes.
‘Never!’ she snapped with such emphasis that he was taken aback. ‘Never. I am my own responsibility.’ She perceived his hurt and held his hands, twining her fingers with his. ‘I love you, my darling, more than you can imagine. Whatever you wish I will do, I am your ... your ...’ She searched for words, found them: ‘… adoring slave. But my adoration does not extend to giving up my independence. Not yet, not for a long while ... maybe never, even if one day we should marry. I am a career woman. I enjoy my work.’
The pride with which she made this declaration was stark. With the firelight suffusing her features, creating deep dark planes where normally there was none, she resembled a warlike goddess, a Joan of Arc, ready to do battle for her rights.
He grinned his admiration, counted himself a lucky man. ‘You’re terrific.’
She made that languorous kissing motion with her lips. ‘As you know, I still have to finish my article on the President’s vacation home.’ Which Lux had forgotten. ‘It must be delivered by the 15th May, and I always meet my deadlines.’
‘So you should,’ he agreed, while thinking furiously about the implications. For her to go trespassing again on the Crillon estate, stirring up the natives, was to be avoided at all costs. ‘Do you absolutely need to go there again, to the house?’
‘You don’t want me to?’
‘I don’t want you to get into trouble.’
He gathered her to him and she sighed into his chest.
‘You smell like a man,’ she murmured.
‘Glad to hear it. I do my best.’
She chuckled then and snuggled closer.
‘So?’ he prompted. ‘Will you stay away?’
‘I must go, my darling.’ Her tongue flicked his nipple. ‘It is my duty.’
Already he knew her well enough to accept the futility of further entreaty. Hadn’t her husband warned him? ‘I wish I could come with you.’ And he honestly did. ‘If you get caught, you could be arrested. Must you really go through with it?’
She had already given him the answer to that. Quite rightly she didn’t repeat it.
‘I will be careful.’
And with that meaningless assurance he had to be content.
* * *
‘Dennis?’ came the disembodied voice from the recorder. ‘Ici Jules.’
Lux’s lawyer, Swiss-born, French mother, now Paris domiciled.
‘I have made enquiries into the veracity of the document.’ Pause. ‘If the photocopy you sent me is a true facsimile then it is indeed genuine.’ A more extended hiatus. ‘I will qualify that: conditional on the signature being genuine, then the document is good.’
As a fount of legal advice, Jules was infallible. Lux accepted his findings implicitly.
He took that to be the whole of the message, but as he reached for the STOP button Jules went on, ‘I have a question.’ If he had any faults it was that he was too inquisitive for Lux’s liking.
‘Who is the subject of the pardon?’
Lux had obliterated his name from the photocopy. Not that he didn’t expect Jules to guess correctly, more as a precaution against having such an incriminating piece of paper in circulation.
‘You know better than to ask that,’ Lux said softly to the machine and switched off.
The day after tomorrow at the latest Jules’s bill would turn up on Lux’s doormat. Minimum 10,000 Swiss Francs plus expenses. A reminder, as ever, that of the two of them the lawyer had the more lucrative profession.
* * *
Le Renard was in poor humour. He had overslept, thanks to a dinner party that had lasted too long the previous evening, and was suffering from a splitting headache. It was one of those days when he would have preferred if not to stay in bed, at least to be faced with nothing more demanding than a stack of reports and minutes to yawn through.
It was unfortunate then that at this, his introduction to Agent 411, aka ‘Lucille,’ he was irascible and impatient. And, worse, she was flanked by Mazé, Debre, de Charette and his minion, Victor Le Bihan. His office had the potential for a veritable Babel.
‘In résumé,’ he said, ‘we know about Barail, possibly Dubois, Simonelli, and the killer, our Jackal - an American whose name we think we know but who is not on file under that name … ‘ He checked them off on his fingers as he spoke. ‘Also an unidentified woman from New Zealand whom we believe is masterminding the whole business.’
Lucille nodded.
‘Let’s move in now, chef,’ Mazé urged. ‘We can’t lay our hands on the woman but there’s nothing to stop us picking up the rest of the bunch.’
‘No!’ It was Debre who responded. ‘We must have them all. Cut off the tail and another will grow in its place. We must have the head, though I cannot believe myself that it is this woman, whoever she is. This is not a woman’s project. She is merely a messenger, an intermediary of some sort.’
‘I believe there is another man, who may be the man behind it,’ Lucille said warily. ‘Listen again.’
She stabbed the rewind button of the recorder on the conference table and backtracked until the digital display showed 21:00, 21 minutes into the session.
Barail’s voice entered the room. It was slurred, rambling.
‘…. if you were not so anti-Chirac I would never, never, not never tell you, my little orchid (Lucille and Mazé grimaced together) … but … but ….’ A lengthy pause. ‘What was I saying? Ah, yes, but big changes are coming … coming. Mr Chirac is … is going to retreat … no, no, I mean retire … yes, retire from public life. In a manner of speaking, you understand, my love. Also, from private life.’ Another space. Glass clinked on glass. ‘Ah, zut! Excuse me …’ Sound of drinking. ‘It will happen soon, very soon. It is strange, is it not …? Is it not strange …?’ Barail’s voice degenerated into a mumble.
‘What are you saying?’ This was Lucille. ‘Speak up, my brave warrior.’
‘Brave warrior?’ Mazé said, through an incredulous grin
‘… I am saying -’ Barail again, more forcibly, ‘ - that it is strange that it will happen because of a woman coming from a country twenty-thousand kilometres from here.’
‘You mean Australia?’ Lucille again.
‘No … no, but close, very close. They are the same. Australians speak English as if their tongues were tied in a knot.’ Barail seemed to be getting his second wind, becoming more coherent. ‘And so does the man, her associate. She is American by birth, possibly Canadian.’
Lucille prodded the stop switch.
‘ “And so does the man, her associate,” ’ she quoted. ‘Fairly conclusive, non?’
‘They could be referring to the woman and the moneybags,’ Mazé demurred. ‘The one who is funding the whole show.’
Lucille bit her lip. ‘Ah. I did not know about him. Is he actively involved in the operation?’
‘We are pretty certain he is not,’ Le Renard said. ‘According to our sources he funds the breakaway group not the operations. He has not broken any laws, so we cannot touch him.’
‘Have we identified him, the moneybags?’ Lucille asked.
No one answered.
‘Hervé?’ Debre prompted.
De Charette’s head jerked up at the mention of his name. He had been about to nod off, penalty of a heavy lunch.
‘We have some leads. Greenpeace won’t even talk to us, for reasons you can guess. But a possible lead came up a few weeks ago.’
/>
Debre blew up. ‘A few weeks ago! Mon Dieu, what are you saying, man? You have had this information for a matter of weeks …?’ He found himself lost for words, a unique event.
Le Renard, who was so far slumped in his chair that he was in danger of sliding beneath the table, suddenly sat up.
‘Who is he, this moneybags?’
De Charette snapped his fingers at his chef de cabinet, Victor Le Bihan, who hastily flicked through his notes.
‘His name is Edward Noble Nixon,’ Le Bihan said shortly. ‘Sixty-nine years old. Owner of a hotel chain and several nightclubs.’
‘Doesn’t sound a very likely activist,’ Debre remarked.
‘Married to a Chinese,’ Le Bihan droned on. ‘Soon-Li Ying, twenty-seven, former prostitute …’
‘How sure are you that this Nixon is the moneybags behind it?’ Le Renard said. As holder of a CRS rank equivalent to that of a three-star general and bearer of ultimate responsibility for presidential security, he too was peeved at the failure of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to pass on this new intelligence but he didn’t make an issue of it. It was not his place to remonstrate with his soi-disant betters.
‘We are not sure at all,’ de Charette snapped, still smarting over the implied rebuke from his fellow-Minister.
‘Question him then.’
‘Not so easy. Apart from the need to observe certain legal niceties, especially in New Zealand, there is a major practical impediment.’ De Charette’s expression became doleful. ‘Nixon died last month.’
‘Merde!’ Le Renard flung himself back in his chair so violently that it rolled backwards a good metre.
‘And his wife?’ Mazé said.
