The Third Woman

by Mark Burnell

  That's what I'm thinking about as I ask him, 'Who's with you, Lance?'

  'I'm alone.' Despite the pain, he manages a smirk. 'Like you, Petra.'

  I fire the Heckler & Koch. The bullet tears through his left ankle. His whole body convulses. When the air flees his lungs it sounds like a kettle's whistle. Splinters of bone stick to the kitchen unit by his soggy foot.

  'Now I know why they call you Lance. Because that's where you get the next one. Who's with you?'

  I aim at his bruised balls.

  'No one,' he gasps. 'I swear it, man. No one.'

  I leave him writhing on the kitchen floor. Robert is on the sitting-room floor. He's trying to haul himself on to his hands and knees. I kneel beside him.

  'It's me. Are you okay?'

  He chokes, streaming saliva from his mouth and tears from his eyes. 'Never better.'

  'What happened?'

  He tries to speak again but his voice is an incomprehensible rasp that disintegrates into another retch.

  I see the delivery device lying by the sofa. Not dissimilar to the one in my safe-deposit box at Banque Damiani. I remove the opaque plastic cartridge and turn it over; Avrolax, engineered ketamine, instantly effective. The drug begins to break down the moment it enters the body leading to a recovery that is as swift and unpleasant as its administration.

  'Lie down,' I tell Robert, 'and stay still. Focus on your breathing. You might puke but it's going to pass, I promise.'

  I help him on to his side which is when I notice the discoloured skin above the right ear and around the temple.

  'You'll be okay. I'll be back in a minute. Don't move.'

  When I return to the kitchen, Grotius has dragged himself halfway down one side of the island, the meat cleaver handle still protruding from his side. I stand on his fingers.

  'Questions, Lance.' I pick up the Sabatier paring blade from the floor and crouch beside him. I rest the tip on his bloody ankle. 'Who sent you?'

  He clenches his teeth. 'No one.'

  I thrust the blade into the bony lattice. He tries not to cry out. But does.

  'Do yourself a favour. We know the way it works. If our positions were reversed, you'd do the same to me.'

  Through his grimace, he mutters, 'No way, man. I'd have you first.'

  'Better than after, I suppose.'

  'That depends.'

  'Drop the act, Lance, and I promise I'll make it quick.'

  His breathing is already turning shallow.

  'They'll never stop looking for you, Petra.'

  'Who?'

  'That's the beauty of it. I don't know.'

  'Well, they can try. But they won't find me.'

  'One day they will.'

  'How did you get the contract?'

  'The usual way.'

  'Electronic dead-letter drop?'

  He manages the slightest shake of the head. 'Text and e-mail.'

  It takes me a moment to understand. 'You're not freelance any more?'

  'For you, I'm … retained.'

  'By?'

  'You're not listening. I told you. I don't know.'

  'You're on someone's books but you don't know who they are?'

  'Better for everyone.'

  It sounds plausible but he's lying. 'How long have you been in Paris?'

  'Eighteen months.'

  'Where do they send you?'

  'Africa. The Middle East. Central and South Asia.'

  'What about me?'

  'You're out to tender.'

  'I heard. Five million. I wasn't pleased. How did you find me?'

  It takes several painful prompts to get the answer: a CCTV tape the police missed. Housed over the entrance to a jeweller, micro-lenses pointing both ways, one of them covering the junction between rue de Berri and rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. A shame we didn't head right down rue d'Artois, I tell him. He explains how he retrieved the tape with particular glee, how he narrowed it down to five vehicles within the time-frame, and how he sent their licence plates for identification. Robert's name and address came back next to one of them, with independent verification, which was why Grotius was given the green light.

  'Congratulations, Lance,' I say, as he watches me adjust my grip on the Sabatier paring knife. 'What does it feel like to be five million dollars richer than you were an hour ago?'

  Stephanie tucked the Smith & Wesson Sigma into the waistband of her trousers and moved through the apartment with the Heckler & Koch USP at the ready. She assumed Grotius had come in through the front door; her sweep provided no sign of an alternative entry or of any accomplice.

  In the sitting-room Newman was on the sofa, hunched over a wastepaper bin.

  'How are you feeling?' she asked him.

  'Marvellous. Next stupid question?'

  She gave him a glass of water. 'Drink this. Don't gulp it.'

  When he looked up at her his eyes widened, revealing bloodshot whites. 'Shit – are you okay?'

  'I'm fine.'

  'You're covered in blood.'

  Stephanie gave him a look that belonged to Petra. 'It's not all mine.'

  'Jesus … is he …'

  'Don't worry about him. He's in the kitchen wearing my spaghetti.'

  She went to the bathroom. The left side of her shirt was soaked. She unfastened the buttons and peeled the material away. The cut was almost six inches long. Grotius could easily have sliced through to the spine; a moving target, a matter of inches. The blood flowed freely. She rinsed her hands in the sink and investigated the laceration with a forefinger. The central third was deeper than she'd expected.

  She looked in the cupboard; Nurofen, a half-used pack of plasters, an out-of-date strip of anti-inflammatory pills, a box of unused antiseptic wipes.

  She returned to Newman. 'Do you have a first aid kit?'

  His eyes were drawn to the gash between her bra and the olive combats. The blood was turning the waistband black.

  'Answer the question, Robert.'

  'Uh … no. I don't think so. I mean I got some Band-aids …'

  'I found those. Apart from them?'

  'No. Sorry.'

  'It's not as bad as it looks. Have you thrown up yet?'

  'No.'

  'Then you probably won't. Not now. Drink some more water. It'll help.'

  She found a small white hand-towel in an airing cupboard and two silk ties in the wardrobe in his bedroom. In the bathroom, she stripped off her combats, washed the blood from her skin, used three antiseptic wipes over the cut, then pressed the folded hand-towel to the wound and secured it with the ties.

  As makeshift medicine went, it wasn't the worst she'd known. Once, in Romania, she'd had to use superglue to secure a deep cut on the back of her right calf. It had been three days before she'd managed to get to a hospital at the port of Constanta. The remedial work carried out by the doctor had been more painful than the original injury.

  She pulled on a pair of clean jeans and one of Newman's shirts, then a thick navy jersey and a leather jacket.

  'Better?' she asked Newman, when she went back to him.

  'Yeah. I only feel like shit now.'

  'Can you drive?' His sweaty skin was grey, his breathing short and sharp. Stephanie recognized the symptoms. On the verge of shock, he hadn't heard her. She repeated the question with added urgency. 'Can you drive?'

  'I guess so.'

  'Good. We're leaving.'

  'We?'

  'I need you to drive me.'

  'I thought …'

  'Well don't. There isn't time. I know what I said and I meant it. But right now, we need to get out of here.'

  'Where are we going?'

  'Get your stuff together.'

  'What stuff?'

  'All the money you have. Clothes, if you want.'

  'Wait a minute …'

  'We don't have a minute. Do it. Now.'

  On the way to Grotius's apartment they stopped at a twenty-four-hour pharmacy, where Stephanie bought all she needed to dress the cut proper
ly.

  'You've been here before?' Newman asked, as they parked on avenue des Ternes outside a branch of Crédit Agricole.

  'Of course not.'

  'I thought you said you knew him.'

  'I met him once. Not here.'

  'You sure this is the place?'

  'This is the address he gave me.'

  'Maybe he lied.'

  'If he did, it was only at the beginning.'

  Plane trees shivered in the wind. They sat in the car for a while watching the entrance to the building.

  Newman's demeanour had changed the moment he saw Grotius on the kitchen floor. Not a word had passed his lips, his eyes never straying from the twisted corpse, the blood or the blades. Afterwards, he'd gathered his things and had followed her out of the apartment in total silence.

  She pressed the buzzer marked Sturgess, which was the name Grotius had given her. No answer; good. She tried the code, 1736, and the door opened into a dark, dank hall. They rode the lift to the sixth floor. The number Grotius had given her was along a short passage to the right. When they reached his door, she pressed her ear to it but heard nothing. The TV was playing loudly in the apartment to the left, a sitcom, cheesy banter preceding canned laughter.

  Stephanie looked both ways, then took out the key and the gun. Inside, she fumbled for a light switch, then closed the door behind them. It was stuffy, as though it had been empty for months, yet the bottom of the glass coffee pot beside the stove was lukewarm.

  The bedroom and bathroom were to the right. Stephanie saw twenty years of neglect; patches of wallpaper peeling from rotten plaster, discoloured light-shades, black cigarette burns peppering a dark green, nylon carpet.

  There were dumb-bells on a triangular rack along one wall. In the bathroom were tubs of supplements to aid muscle growth. Taped to the wall was a picture ripped from a magazine; Jennifer Lopez in a bikini. Stephanie laid the things she'd bought at the pharmacy on the cabinet beside the sink and was about to remove her shirt when she heard Newman.

  'In here.'

  He was in the bedroom. Stephanie picked up the gun and went through to find him standing in front of an open cupboard.

  'I was going through his things. and the clothes rail came away. It's on a hinge.'

  He showed her: when he pulled, the back of the cupboard swung forward. Stephanie peered inside the hidden compartment. There were three shelves for Grotius's professional equipment: boxes of .45 ACP ammunition for the gun, which she took; two passports – one Australian, one American, both in the name of Wayne Sturgess; a dozen miniature steel darts; two mobile phones; a selection of knives; another gun – a Spanish Star Megastar; brass knuckle-dusters; three canisters of pepper spray and one of CS gas; a box containing six Avrolax cartridges.

  The bottom two shelves revealed the true Grotius: thirty or forty well used hardcore pornographic magazines; seven DVDs and a dozen VHS tapes – all with pornographic covers; some rolled plastic-coated cord; a box containing a variety of lubricants and vibrators; a see-through plastic wash-bag with a capped needle and four small phials containing a colourless liquid with two cotton-wool balls, both pricked with rusty blood stains.

  Newman shook his head. 'What a sweetheart.'

  Stephanie nodded. 'Maybe I let him off too lightly.'

  'Guns and porn. In Louisiana, he'd be governor.'

  In the bathroom she dressed her cut again. Then she searched the living area. Cupboards and drawers yielded nothing but there was a Toshiba laptop attached to a Nokia mobile phone on the table beside the fridge. She touched the finger pad and the machine awoke from slumber.

  Newman came back with the two passports and some documents. 'I got statements from France Télécom and Crédit Lyonnais in the name of Wayne Sturgess. But the electricity and gas are addressed to Emeline Duprée.'

  'A sub-let, maybe.'

  'Or a girlfriend?'

  'I doubt it. I don't see any female influence here, do you?'

  Stephanie began to sort through the files on the computer. Predictably, his e-mails had been deleted. She could find no personal data anywhere. She examined the mobile phone; no numbers held on the handset or on the SIM card. She tried to retrieve the last ten numbers dialled and the last ten received. All erased. She tried direct last-number redial. No response.

  'We should get out of here,' Newman said.

  'I can't leave empty-handed,'

  'I thought you were going to vanish.'

  'I am. But I need to know.'

  'Know what?'

  She wasn't sure. Perhaps it was just because it was Grotius.

  They started in the kitchenette. In the fridge Newman found more than two kilos of beef, four bags of spinach leaves and half a dozen cartons of high-protein soya milk.

  'I'm surprised he didn't kill himself with his diet.'

  She checked beneath the sofa and armchair, beneath the green carpet, beneath the floorboards. Newman unscrewed the bath panel, examined the cistern, the bathroom cupboards, the vent. He turned the bed over, cut open the mattress.

  'Found anything?' Stephanie called out from the kitchenette.

  'A lot of black silk … I don't know what you call them exactly … kind of like … G-strings.'

  'A woman's?'

  'I'd like to say yes. But I don't think so.'

  The neighbour turned off the television. Stephanie looked at her watch. Ten-past-eleven. She peered out of the window. It was starting to rain again.

  'You might want to take a look at these.'

  She turned round. Newman was holding two disks.

  'They were in one of the DVD cases. They've got no marks on them.'

  Stephanie slipped the first disk into the Toshiba, fearing the worst: something 'homemade' by Grotius. The laptop whirred and a window formed on the screen, revealing a large data directory. The folders were colour-coded: red, green, blue. There were nine of them. She dipped into four at random and scrolled over the files. Most of the filenames were letter-digit combinations. Unintelligible to her, they clearly had order. She investigated a selection. Saved e-mail, information downloads, photographs, some of them timed and placed, some not.

  'Any idea what it is?' Newman asked.

  'If I had to guess, I'd say it was an insurance policy.'

  In one folder, Stephanie found files documenting banking transactions. Cash deposits, wire transfers, even cheques, all paid into a series of holding accounts, then transferred and rolled. She knew the process well. Dirty dollars reclaimed their virginity, commissions were paid, proceeds invested.

  Another folder contained scanned documents; medical bills, property contracts, three insurance claims and several invoices for transport. She opened one, a claim from Calloway Transport Inc. of Trenton, New Jersey, billed to a company in Paris named Dupree. The billing address matched Grotius's apartment. It was marked for the attention of Wayne Sturgess and listed container numbers bound by sea for Rotterdam, then overland to Paris. It priced for shipping, handling charges, import duty tariffs and local taxes. It didn't specify what was in the containers.

  'Look at that,' Newman murmured. 'Calloway and DeMille.'

  'Calloway and DeMille?'

  He leaned over her and retreated through several open documents until he came to a piece of faxed correspondence between two companies. One of them, Red Line Aviation, was demanding compensation for a delay in payment from a firm called Gilchrist Marine Services of Miami, Florida. Red Line was requesting seventy-five thousand dollars for private aircraft and helicopter transport in Indonesia. It asked for the bill to be settled immediately and in full at the offices of its parent company, the DeMille Corporation of Houston, Texas.

  Newman pointed to the reference number on the scanned fax and then at the corresponding reference on the invoice from Calloway Transport. 'See that. RW/434/DeM/CTI. The DeM part, that's DeMille. It's on both.'

  'DeMille. That sounds familiar.'

  'The DeMille Corporation. Private military contractors for those who can afford
it. Like the Saudi royal family. DeMille helped establish and run SANG, the Saudi Arabia National Guard. They've also trained the Indonesian army.'

  'What about Calloway?'

  'Calloway Transport is a wholly owned subsidiary of DeMille. DeMille is wholly owned by Kincaid Pearson Merriweather. KPM is one of the largest defence contractors in the States and is owned by the Amsterdam Group. KPM's CEO, Kenneth Kincaid, is a political heavyweight. A member of the American Partnership Foundation in Washington, he's a friend of this president, the last president, every president.'

  'So there's a food-chain?'

  'Right. Running from the top: Amsterdam – KPM – DeMille – Calloway.'

  'And at the bottom we go from Calloway to Grotius.'

  'Looks like it,' Newman admitted.

  'But Calloway's a transport group.'

  'Sure. And Voice of America is a public service radio station.'

  'How do you know about DeMille?'

  'Look at where they operate. Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Nigeria, Venezuela.'

  'Oil?'

  He nodded. 'They're not involved in oil directly. But those who are tend to be the ones who can afford – and who require – the services that DeMille offers. They're not a secret. But they are secretive. They were the original pioneers of military privatization. No one's as good, no one's as big.'

  'They must have a lot of people.'

  'They have access to a lot of people. It's kind of like running a modelling agency. You don't own the models. They're on your books and you get them work. For a fee.'

  'How many?'

  'Thousands. Twenty, thirty. Maybe more.'

  'An army, then.'

  'Several armies.'

  'How can a company so large be so … quiet?'

  'Because it operates on a micro-level, through small outfits like Calloway. Companies that don't have premises. Companies that can be folded in the press of a button.'

  'Companies that can't be connected to DeMille directly?'

  'Right. Except when someone like your friend decides to keep a piece of information to himself.'