by Jay Brandon
So he walked boldly in there. The bed was made up neatly, still with the flounces. Had someone found new sheets and ruffles in the same pattern, or kept the old ones all these years? The air smelled slightly musty. It circulated, but no one came here to dust regularly.
Even Madeline’s sheets were puzzles. This one she had designed herself. It featured a long meandering path through gardens and villages, like a giant gameboard. Jack had tried following those paths with his mind on idle mornings when he’d awakened under those sheets and lay there waiting for Madeline to wake up too. Sometimes his finger had traced the paths, over the hollows and hills of the bed, over her body, until Madeline woke up laughing.
He drew a deep breath and let it out slowly. This place would immobilize him if he let it. He wasn’t here on a memory tour.
In the next hour Jack took the place apart, neatly. He even managed to get into the safe under the fireplace, but that was too obvious a hiding place. All he found inside was some jewelry and a good bit of cash. He left it all. Once Madeline had modelled some of that jewelry for him, memorably wearing nothing else. Jewelry from an ankle bracelet to a tiara. “And I never quite figured out what to do with this,” she’d smiled, fastening a long necklace around her waist. It had a pendant that hung down, strategically.
Jack studied all the paintings, the books, the wallpaper. The way the dishes were stacked and the glasses put away. No scrapbook, no mementoes of her career. No photographs. That seemed a strange absence. Someone might have taken them.
Jack had returned to the bed. If Madeline had left him a personal message it would have been here, wouldn’t it? He had stood and stared at the sheet, following the path. It drew his eye downward. He had never noticed that before, possibly because his usual angle was from under the sheet. But looking at it from this perspective, he found the paths were not random at all. They went downward.
Along the way there were cottages and villages, occasionally a large country house, French Provencial style. Jack had stood trying not to move, except his eyes. They inevitably traveled down and down, to the foot of the bed. Near the bottom there was a representation of a house in a different style from everything else. A villa. Jack had stood there in the Chelsea bedroom studying that house. Had he seen it before?
He had remembered something else as he stood there. Madeline had kept a light blue coverlet at the very foot of the bed, of the softest texture Jack had ever felt. It was gone now. Now that he thought about it, he realized Madeline had gotten rid of that coverlet before her death. Right about the time she got sick it disappeared. Now it existed only in Jack’s memory, but it was firmly placed there.
It had been a deep, peaceful blue, with a wavelike pattern in it that almost seemed to ripple even when it lay still. Sometimes that sheet, that coverlet had in fact moved like waves, as Jack and Madeline had set them in motion. She had laughed a couple of times when she made the comparison. The waves. And the coverlet was blue like the sea.
It had seemed too simple. Jack had stood there staring, remembering. He also remembered the jewelry, the time Madeline had worn it and nothing else. She had been laughing, describing the jewelry, some of its history. Keeping him tauntingly at bay. The jewelry had seduced his gaze downward as well. He’d reached for the pendant on the necklace, the one hanging below her waist, pretending to be curious about it. “It looks valuable,” he had said with a dry mouth.
Madeline had grabbed his hand and laughed. “No. I got it from a street vendor in Nice. But it goes nicely with the necklace, doesn’t it?”
“Nicely from Nice,” Jack had repeated, the best joke he could manage under the circumstances.
Madeline had pulled him close, her eyes only inches from his, and she was no longer laughing. “Remember,” she’d said. Then the moment of intensity had passed. She’d drawn back, laughing again. “There might be a quiz later.”
But Jack did remember, years later as he stood in the otherwise empty flat again. Nice. And the path on the sheet led his eye down. Southward. To a villa that, when Madeline had lived here, had stood beside a coverlet as blue as the sea.
He also remembered the money in the safe. A thousand pounds, but the rest in francs. Before Euros.
No one else had been able to figure this out because they hadn’t had the clues. Jack hadn’t even needed to come here. She had tried to embed it in his memory.
She had succeeded.
Jack had stood there thinking he understood something, far from everything. He had moved carefully around the flat then, not returning to the safe or the bed. He’d stood again for a long time in front of a painting that was full of symbols, like something by Dali. He hadn’t been able to make a lick of sense out of it. But if he was under surveillance, the last thing people would see him doing would be studying this painting, tracing a couple of the symbols with his finger, before he suddenly strode out of the flat as if with inspired purpose.
Now, having just sent Arden on her separate way, Jack finally had a chance to act on his hunch. He had been wanting to do so for weeks, but first he’d had to get to the ambassador, then other matters had intervened. But now, before he went to Salzburg he intended to stop in Nice, at the seaside villa of the architect Paul Desquat.
The train was fast. Jack would have liked to go by air again, but he had no more jet helicopter favors to call in and no airport was convenient. So he took a train from Italy, which was nice because it gave him time to think. Or would have if he could have turned off his nerves. Jack hardly sat on the train, he kept changing cars, standing at the back to see which passengers turned to look at him. Several did. He tried to narrow down the suspects. The teenage American girl, could he eliminate her? Not really. What about the two businessmen in suits, traveling together? Jack wasn’t willing to scratch them off the list of people who might be following him either, even after one put his arm around the other’s shoulders in an intimate way. What, you think there aren’t any gay assassins?
He edged his way through the cars, imagining that he was gathering a wake of people out to get him. He kept studying his fellow passengers, most intently the few who looked more or less like he did. This time there were no Jack doppelgangers, at least not out in the open. Maybe they had one stashed so he could take Jake’s place after they’d offed him. It would be a simple matter of pushing Jack out a door.
Because this wasn’t a steam engine in the old west. This was a sleek silver European metroliner, going a hundred and twenty miles an hour between stops. There’d be no jumping off this train and rolling gently down a slope to come to a rest. If someone were propelled off this train the suction of the train’s speed might pull him under the wheels. If you beat that hazard you would land on rocks at a speed of a hundred miles an hour, shattering whatever bones first hit the ground, including a skull. A very skillful adventurer, with pinpoint timing, might be able to leap from this train and suffer no worse than several compound fractures, unconsciousness, and a hospital stay. If he got lucky.
So Jack paced and jittered and had no time to plan what he would do once he got to Nice.
Rachel and Stevie had been Americans, raised in America. They’d always known they’d have to return to the countries of their origin, but by that time they’d become Americans. That was the Circle’s hope.
But sometimes, once in a great while, the Circle had to recruit members from other countries, brought up there, knowing their own countries. The Circle needed that intimate familiarity with foreign places. These recruits had to be wholly foreign yet wholly members of the Circle, too. But it is very hard to create a world citizen. Teaching and training these recruits in their home countries made it harder to instill the Circle’s values, which were intrinsically American. It was always a risk, and sometimes it didn’t succeed. Those people had to be dealt with later.
Paul Desquat was one of those foreign-raised members. He remained a member in very good standing. Jack knew, for example, that the Chair was receiving regular reports from him during th
e current crisis. It was hoped that Desquat would be very useful in stabilizing Europe.
But Jack had met the architect years earlier, with Madeline. He was sure now that that meeting had meant something. Madeline hadn’t done anything by accident. But Jack had heard nothing from Paul Desquat in the five years since Madeline’s death. That seemed odd now. If they had thought Jack worth recruiting, why hadn’t anyone tried to continue that after Madeline’s death? Or had she determined that Jack wasn’t material for the Inner Circle, and had waved them off?
He had a sudden thought: had Madeline faked her own death in order to start a new life somewhere else, one without Jack in it?
Members of the group had done such things before, when they’d become too well-known in a particular field. And Madeline had been a very popular designer.
Had she bailed on him?
Jack didn’t believe that. That would mean everything he’d known during those few months in London had been fake. Madeline’s affection for him, the glimpses of another world, the puzzles. The sex amid jewelry.
If that was true, if Madeline was still alive somewhere in the world, then there was only one thing for Jack to do. Track her down and kill her.
It was a strange thing to hope for, that his one true love had been murdered, but it was the only hope Jack had. Now, in the midst of this world crisis, he intended to find the proof one way or the other, and hope the two were connected. Who else but a ruthless Inner Circle could have pulled off such a thing? Maybe this inner group believed that America would be better off in isolation from the world. Maybe that had been the point of the 9-11 attacks, and this was another stab at the same goal.
Too many maybes. Jack had come to Nice to find answers.
He felt pretty sure he had gotten off the train unobserved. In a small cafe in Nice he resumed his Internet game. Sure enough, his best virtual friend was waiting for him. “WANNA PLAY?” Oh yes, Jack wanted to play.
An hour later he shut off, right in the middle of a maneuver that he hoped would keep his opponent off-balance for a while. Jack went into a shop and bought a bathing suit, towel, and small carrying bag. The thing about European shops was their look of permanence. Shops in buildings that looked older than the country Jack came from, possibly with the same shopkeepers. The buildings looked as if they had been remodelled from seventeenth century baronial manors, and not remodelled much. By contrast, Jack realized, stores in America, even the grandest ones, looked as if they had just been thrown up by a construction crew that morning, and might be scheduled for demolition that afternoon. How could such grand old buildings as these carry items as common as bathing trunks and gym bags? Europe made him feel that there had once been a world of grace and beauty, but it had been conquered and extinguished by the Gap. He wanted to apologize before he left.
Jack ducked into a kiosk men’s room. Another odd experience, using the bathroom practically in public, with one’s calves and feet exposed to view. Jack used this one only to change. When he emerged, wearing his swim suit, flipflops, and Hard Rock Cafe t-shirt, he looked as much like a native as the natives did. He strolled down toward the beach, not hurrying: that would have marked him as an American.
Nice boasted one of the most beautiful beaches in the world. It drew visitors from all over Europe and farther. Jack found a few square feet of unclaimed sand and sat down on his beach towel. It was October, cool, and the beach wasn’t nearly as crowded as it would have been two months ago. There were still plenty of people, though. Women in bikinis, or topless. Some whose friends should never have let them appear in public that way, a few who should by law never be allowed to wear clothes. Jack watched openly. No one looked back. He felt invisible, which was a relief.
The sun began to go down and people began to leave. There was a tourist pier, a sort of large boardwalk that kept going into the sea. Before the light disappeared Jack walked out on that pier, to a place where it widened. There were for-pay telescopes at every corner, and luckily Jack had the right coins. He dropped them in and the view clicked open. But Jack didn’t look out at the ocean. He turned the telescope inland, scanning from left to right, looking along the sand, then higher up the beach. He didn’t want to ask anyone where Paul Desquat lived, he didn’t want to be remembered as the man who’d asked questions, and he wasn’t sure he could find the man in a phone directory. But he remembered from Madeline that the architect’s villa was beside the sea. He needed to get lucky now.
The telescope found a dozen seaside houses within sight, and Jack gazed at each for a few seconds. Too big. Too small. Too ancient. Beautiful places, no doubt inhabited by beautiful people, but not the right one.
Suddenly the view of sand and houses disappeared, replaced by a pair of giant breasts. Lovely breasts even out of focus Stevie, without tan lines, but appearing threatening as they filled the view. Jack jumped back. A woman stood in front of the telescope, topless. This was one of the ones who should go through life naked. She was lithe and smooth and tan. “What are you doing?” she asked in French.
Her mouth was small, it seemed to close up when she wasn’t speaking, but that was the only flaw in her face. A good chin, interesting nose, hazel eyes staring at him as if in outrage. The woman was neither young nor old, but walking confidently through her own exquisite twilight of age.
She continued, “The viewers are for looking at the sea.”
Jack managed to answer in French, “I am not interested in fish.”
“What are you interested in?” She sounded accusatory.
Jack resolutely kept from glancing downward as he answered. “Architecture.”
The woman’s mouth quirked into a smile. He had been wrong: her mouth was just the right size.
“I believe you’ll find the most interesting homes down that way.” She pointed eastward.
She started walking out the pier, then turned back and said, “Interesting architecturally, I mean. One of them won a competition, I believe.”
She turned and kept walking, never looking back again, but her walk convinced Jack that she expected Jack to be watching her, and knew he would be. At the end of the pier she barely paused as she stepped up onto the wooden railing and dived off. Jack gasped. Oh, Mademoiselle, he wanted to say, please don’t risk that body by diving into unknown waters.
But she probably knew this water well. She surfaced twenty yards out and began swimming with strong strokes. Eastward, the way she had told him to go. Jack wanted to turn the viewer on her, but heard a click which meant his time had run out.
One of them won a competition, she’d said. Maybe that was the architect’s villa. Jack felt he had some luck coming.
He did get lucky, and it turned out to be the worst luck he’d ever had.
Night had fallen by the time Jack reached the architecturally interesting part of the seashore. There were still a few people walking the beach, but he sensed them as movements and soft sounds. A man who stood still could go unnoticed. There was no moon.
But the villa he sought gave off its own light. Jack was sure when he saw it that he had the right one. Madeline’s rendering of it on her sheet hadn’t done the place justice, but it was still recognizable. The villa was made of sandstone, so it seemed to rise straight out of the beach like a sandcastle. It was low and wide, except for a crest in the center that rose up two extra stories, a small crown atop the villa. There would be a deck up there, of course, with a splendid view of the ocean. It almost looked like the mast of a cruise ship, except it curved toward the sea. A melting smokestack.
The house stood atop a rise a hundred yards back from the beach. Jack walked up that rise, avoiding the house’s boardwalk. When he reached the top, the villa looked larger than it had from the beach. It dominated the view. How could a Circle member live here, in the most conspicuous house in town? We’re supposed to be unobtrusive, he thought, and wondered if the Chair had ever seen this house. As far as Jack was concerned, the house immediately branded its owner a traitor to his group’s valu
es.
He walked around the house for half an hour, keeping his distance. There didn’t seem to be any security guards, but there was an alarm system that included cameras. They might not be monitored full-time, though, they might just be making tapes that could be viewed later, after a burglary, for example. One of the cameras moved in a short semi-circle. One thing it kept in view on its circuit was some steps carved into the side of the house. Jack followed those steps upward with his eyes. He could reach that high deck without going into the house.
First he had to disable the camera, though. He crept up behind it, wondering if it had a microphone as well, and as the camera reached the farthest point of its arc to the left, Jack turned it on its pivot so it was pointing out toward the beach. Careful to stay out of its view, he made sure it was anchored there and then crept toward the house.
He hadn’t seen any people through the house’s large ground floor windows. But there was a car parked in the driveway in front of the house, on the side opposite the sea. A low, sleek, European sports car that called attention to itself as much as the house did. Someone must be here, but Jack didn’t know where.
He climbed the sandstone steps, walked across the flat roof, and found more steps leading up to that high deck. He crept up those even more cautiously. When his head came level with the deck he peeked over quickly, then ducked down again, reviewing the mental picture he had just taken. The deck was furnished in beach-fashion, but with better taste than most people display in beach houses. Two chaise lounges with thick cushions faced the sea. A small black table between them held two cocktail glasses, with a martini shaker between them. Light curtains billowed inward from an open doorway.
He hadn’t seen any people on the balcony, but they hadn’t been gone long. And that open doorway told Jack where he had to go next.
Wincing, wishing he had taken some secret agent training, he stole back upward again, this time out on the deck, crouching on its surface like Gollum. He slinked across to that open doorway, and began to hear sounds. A groan and sharp intakes of breath. It sounded as if someone was being tortured. Jack reached the doorway and stared in.
