The huge dog did a somersault over his body and landed unharmed on the floor. Bond leaped to his feet and ran the most convenient way—onto the set.
The Chow-Chow had just jumped through a hoop as Bond emerged from the backstage area. His appearance surprised the dog in mid-air, throwing off its concentration. It landed right into Bond’s arms.
The audience roared.
The director in the control room went nuts. “Who is that? What is he doing?”
The stage manager was calling frantically into his headset. “Security!”
By now, the Great Dane and Labrador had jumped through windows in the stage setting, which resembled the back of a house. Bond tossed the Chow-Chow at them and ran toward the audience. The three dogs crashed into each other, yelping with rage.
The stage manager attempted to tackle Bond, but he tripped over one of the camera cables. Bond ploughed into the seats, causing the audience to panic. The dogs were right behind him. Suddenly the entire soundstage erupted into chaos.
The members of the audience jumped out of their seats and ran toward the exits, crowding Bond from making an escape. Three production assistants tore off their headsets and chased after Bond. One of them grabbed him, spun him around and threw a punch and missed. Bond, who had carefully avoided hurting anyone except the guard, saw that he had no choice but to defend himself. He hit the man in the stomach, causing him to bend over. Bond then brought his knee up into the man’s face. That took the fight out of him. When the other two saw what had happened to their colleague, they hesitated. After a moment’s stare-down, they backed off, and then directed their energy elsewhere by yelling at the audience to remain calm.
But the dogs weren’t afraid at all. They were barking furiously and knocking over the chairs in an attempt to catch Bond, who picked up one of the metal folding chairs and used it to hold them at bay, much like a lion tamer in a circus.
Then, four security guards pushed their way through the soundstage entrance into the mass of people clambering to get out. One of them had a gun.
Bond tossed the chair at the dogs, temporarily blocking their advance, then ran back onto the stage. One of the camera cables went up into the catwalk some thirty feet above the floor. Bond jumped and grabbed it, then quickly pulled himself up, hand over hand.
“Stop him!” the stage manager cried. “This is expensive equipment!”
By the time the guards had reached the stage, Bond was on the catwalk. He had to crouch because the ceiling was so low, but he ran quickly to the nearest exit. He almost tripped over some lighting instruments attached to the grid, but he caught himself on a metal beam and used it to swing over a rail onto another catwalk that was nearer to his escape route.
There was a gunshot from below and a bullet whizzed past him.
“What are you doing?” the stage manager shouted at the guard. “Don’t use that in here!”
Bond went through the little door into a lighting control room. It was full of electronic equipment, patch boxes and dimmer switches. He scanned the wall quickly and found the main power lever. He pulled it, plunging the soundstage into darkness. Then he climbed out of the light booth and found himself in a small corridor on the fourth floor. Apparently the soundstage was two stories tall.
He made his way to the stairwell and went inside. He was alone. Bond pulled out his mobile and punched in Bertrand’s number.
“Bertrand get over here quick. I’ll meet you on the street.”
“Is there trouble?”
But Bond hung up. He ran down the stairs two at a time all the way to the ground floor. He stopped to catch his breath, then opened the door to peer outside. It was the lobby, and it was bustling with activity. Guards were looking this way and that and visitors were being kept from entering the studios.
Now what?
A group of two dozen Italians were making a fuss. They all had tickets to be in the audience of a talk show. A guard was telling them to stand back against the wall until the “problem” was taken care of. A stroke of luck—the guard ushered the Italians back against the stairwell door. As soon as the guard had turned his back, Bond slipped out of the door and joined the Italians. They were so busy chattering among themselves that they didn’t notice the extra person.
He waited there for about five minutes, as there was no easy way to break away from the group and get across the atrium to the front doors of the building. Finally, a woman approached them and spoke in Italian. “I’m very sorry, but we have to cancel the show today. We can reschedule you to come back tomorrow.”
One of the men protested angrily, but a woman in the group attempted to calm him down. They all began to walk toward the front doors, and Bond merely blended in.
“What do you think is going on?” one of the visitors asked him in Italian.
Bond shrugged. “Someone probably lost a dog,” he replied.
The group filed out of the building. Bond got into Bertrand’s Citroën and said, “Drive like hell.”
Station P was located within a legitimate business on rue Auber, not a ten-minute walk from Bond’s hotel. “Internet Works,” as it was called, was an e-mail café where customers could check their e-mail or surf the net. The place also served snacks, coffee and soft drinks. They were open from 6:00 in the morning until midnight. Bertrand told Bond that they did very well.
“SIS lets me keep the money I make in the business, so I do okay,” he said. “If I wasn’t an agent, then I wouldn’t mind running an e-mail café as my sole occupation.”
“It’s always important to be happy in one’s job,” Bond said with exaggerated enthusiasm.
Collette laughed as they walked into the back office of the café. With a flick of a switch, a false wall slid open, revealing something a little more private. All of Collette’s communication equipment was inside. The room was full of radios, a couple of computers, and filing cabinets.
“Something to drink?” Collette asked Bond as he opened a small cupboard.
“Please.” Bond sat down at one of the desks and dug into his pocket for the pieces of photograph that he had taken from Essinger’s office. He spread them out on the desktop, face up, and began to put the puzzle together.
Collette set a glass of red wine in front of Bond. “Jigsaw puzzles, James?”
“Something like that,” Bond said. There were thirty-two pieces, and he nearly had it done.
Those magnificent eyes, Bond thought. He’d seen them before. But where?
Thirty seconds later, the picture was complete.
Who was this girl? Bond knew her from somewhere. She was strikingly beautiful. She had a face that he had seen in a magazine, or on television—and then he remembered. She was the girl from the billboard Bond had noticed when he drove into Paris.
He was drawn to the mischievous half grin on her face that projected a dynamic self-confidence. This girl knew that she was beautiful and loved it. There was also intelligence in her almost cat-like eyes. The brown hair was cut short, just covering her ears and giving her a fringe. It was styled with a bit of layered shape that caressed her incredible face.
“Do I win if I know her name?” Collette said.
“You certainly do,” Bond said. “Who is she?”
“That’s Tylyn Mignonne,” he answered, pronouncing her Christian name to rhyme with “smilin.” He waited until Bond registered surprise, but got no reaction.
“Tylyn Mignonne,” Collette said again. “The famous model and now actress?”
Bond shook his head. “I don’t keep up with that world. Tell me about her.”
Collette chuckled. “Be careful, James. She is married to Léon Essinger.”
“No!” Bond said, aghast.
“It’s true, but …” Collette paused for dramatic effect. “They’re separated.”
“So there’s still hope. Do you have any tape?” Bond asked. Collette laughed again and got a roll of transparent tape out of his desk. Bond carefully taped the pieces of the photo together as
Collette spoke.
“That’s not her only claim to fame, you know,” he said. “Ever heard of a Hollywood filmmaker named Jules Pont?”
“Yes.” Bond knew who he was. Again, he paid little attention to the show business world, but Pont was a well-known French film director-turned-producer who had emigrated to America in the forties, made a number of popular and successful films in the fifties and sixties, created his own studio in the seventies, and then died. Some of Pont’s comedies from the sixties were considered cinema classics.
“Tylyn’s his daughter.”
“Really?”
“Mignonne was her mother’s maiden name, and that’s how she goes professionally.”
“So,” Bond surmised, “she’s probably a very wealthy girl.”
“She is indeed,” Collette said. “She is the heir to the entire Pont fortune.”
“Which must be considerable. His studio is still running in Hollywood, isn’t it?”
Collette said, “It sure is. Doing very well, too.”
“Tell me about her.”
Collette shrugged. “All I know is what the public knows. As she grew up, her parents brought her several times to France. She is an only child. Her parents were fairly old when she was born. She started modeling as a child and became a famous face before she was twelve years old.”
“I had no idea,” Bond said. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen her before coming here.”
“You need to read more women’s magazines,” Collette said. “Anyway, she achieved supermodel status by the time she was eighteen. She has her own clothing line, too. It’s called “Indecent Exposure.” Pretty sexy stuff it is. Recently she has started trying to be an actress. She’s made a few films in France, one that was a big hit world-wide.”
“What about the marriage to Essinger?” Bond asked as he finished repairing the photo. He looked at her again.
“They got married about four or five years ago. It was fairly soon after he came back to France.”
“Why in the world would a girl like her marry him?” Bond asked.
“He’s a celebrity, too. Has money. He’s an artist. Don’t all those show business types stick to each other like glue? It’s a very incestuous world.”
“I suppose so,” Bond said. “She’s in Essinger’s new movie, so apparently there are no hard feelings.”
“Is she? I would bet that Essinger cast her for the publicity. She’s hot right now and he’s capitalizing on it. That blockbuster she was in before was made by Essinger before they were married.”
“Are they going to divorce?”
“Even the tabloids don’t know,” Collette said.
“I wonder …” Bond said.
“What?”
“If they do divorce, I wonder if Essinger will be upset about not being related to the Pont family fortune any more.”
ELEVEN
THE HOUSE
BOND WAS CONVINCED THAT ESSINGER WAS SOMEHOW INVOLVED WITH THE Union’s latest plot. Why would he have the tattoo if he weren’t? What could they possibly want with a movie producer?
The night after Bond’s visit to the television studio, he sat down in his hotel room at the Inter-continental to study the photographs he had taken in Essinger’s office. Collette had blown them up to a readable size and they were as good as if they had obtained photocopies of the actual documents.
Bond studied the production schedule for Pirate Island. Even though it was difficult to say what the movie was about since he lacked a script, the locations gave Bond a pretty good idea that it was an action-adventure film to be shot mostly on water. The cost for special effects and second unit work was over half the complete budget. Bond found a sheet listing the salaries of principal players in the film—the stars, the director and the crew. Stuart Laurence, the star, was being paid $4 million. Tylyn Mignonne was being paid $1 million. The director was Dan Duling, who had directed Essinger’s previous two pictures. He was being paid $1 million as well.
Bond saw something strange on the sheet, and at first he thought it might be a smudge. The second unit director and special effects coordinator, a man named Rick Fripp, was being paid $5 million! More than anyone else on the picture. A London address was written beneath his name.
Bond got on the phone to London and spoke to Nigel.
“Hello, James, how is everything?”
“Fine, Nigel,” Bond said. “Listen, can you look up a name for me? He’s a movie special effects man, name of Rick Fripp. There’s a London address.” He read it aloud and asked Nigel to have him vetted.
Bond rang off and continued to look through the photographs. The taped-up picture of Tylyn Mignonne was set to the side, and he couldn’t help glancing back at those bewitching eyes. He picked up the photo and sat back in the chair. Could she be involved in anything with the Union? Surely not. But one never knew …
The phone rang. It was Nigel.
“James,” he said. “I ran Rick Fripp through the computer. He has a record. He served six years for manslaughter. Was released four years ago. Before that he had a long arrest record, mostly for petty crimes. There was an armed robbery charge, but he was acquitted.”
“How is it that he can stay in the motion picture business?”
“I don’t know. I suppose he’s good at what he does. His record states that he is an expert in explosives, pyrotechnics. His work on films is primarily in that area.”
“Thanks, Nigel. I’ll be back in touch.”
Bond hung up again and went out of the room. He went downstairs, bought a newspaper, sat in the Restaurant La Verrière, and had some strong black coffee. He thumbed through the news, noting that the bombing at the British Embassy in Tokyo was still a mystery. It had been a long time since Bond had been in Japan. He wondered if a trip to the Far East might not be in his future.
He continued through the paper and happened to come across the entertainment section, something he rarely looked at. His heart skipped a beat when he saw the photo, a full quarter page in size.
There she was, Tylyn Mignonne, dressed in a tantalizing wrap similar to the one she was wearing on the billboard. It was an advertisement for Indecent Exposure clothing. Next to the ad was a “personality profile” on Tylyn, accompanied by several other photographs depicting stages of her career: catwalk shots, head shots and fashion shots.
He read with interest that Tylyn had attended university in Paris after growing up in Hollywood with her famous father and mother. She elected to remain in France and become a model. After several very successful years at modeling, she tried her hand at design and created Indecent Exposure. Now her clothing line was sold all over Europe and she was hoping to open a retail store in America in the coming year.
Her acting career was jumpstarted with a small role in a French art film that had received good notices at the Cannes Film Festival a few years ago. A larger role for the same director followed that, and it proved to be a popular “foreign film” in America. Hollywood became interested and she eventually made an American blockbuster that did well internationally.
Although she hadn’t made any films for a couple of years, now she was poised to co-star with Stuart Laurence in Pirate Island, a film to be produced by her husband, Léon Essinger.
There was no mention that they were currently separated.
The article went on to say that Tylyn enjoyed riding as a lifelong hobby. In fact, she owned a stud farm in the south of France, near Antibes. She was quoted as saying that she always went there, to her “home away from home,” when she wanted to escape the hectic life of a supermodel and actress. Now twenty-nine years old, Tylyn said that she was actually looking forward to her thirties and that she hoped to correct some of the choices she had made in her personal life while in her twenties.
Bond looked at the Indecent Exposure ad again. It stated that there was an exclusive fashion show taking place the next day at the Louvre.
Bond grabbed his mobile and called Bertrand Collette.
“Internet Works,” the Frenchman answered.
“I need a favor,” Bond said.
“I will do my best. What is it?”
“There’s an Indecent Exposure fashion show at the Louvre tomorrow at noon. Can you get me in? Maybe arrange for Pop World to interview Tylyn Mignonne?”
Collette laughed. “My friend, I think you have been struck by a thunderbolt. I will see what I can do.”
Bond rang off and smiled. He hadn’t looked forward to meeting a girl this much in a long, long time.
Mathis had parked the rental car on the side of the road, carefully climbed over the barbed-wire fence, and walked in the darkness toward the thick trees. Using a specially built pen light with a high intensity beam, he made his way through the thick of the maquis and found the menhirs.
In the moonlight, they were indescribably eerie. The limestone statues were phallus-shaped and stood between four and six feet tall. On the heads were rudimentary carvings of human faces. Erosion had smoothed them down considerably, so much so that what little carving had been done to the stone was barely visible. They were similar to the menhirs that could be found at the prehistoric site of Filitosa, one that was open to the public.
This one wasn’t.
Before leaving the DGSE, Mathis had equipped himself with topographical and survey maps of Corsica. He had studied them carefully, pinpointing where the archaeological sites were located in relation to Sartène. He could see what pieces of land were privately owned and what was owned by the government or by villages. There were indeed a few patches of privately owned property north of Sartène and eastward on the road toward Levie. The prehistoric sites of Cucuruzzu and Capula were in that direction as well. Mathis figured that it was highly probable that other prehistoric artifacts existed on the private properties. After all, the Filitosa site was inhabited and still owned by the same family who had discovered it.
Never Dream Of Dying Page 10
