by Jay Brandon
A man and woman were making love. The man was on his back with his arms spread wide, the woman atop him. She had black hair and not as lovely a body as the one he had glimpsed on the pier. That was all Jack had time to notice as he ducked back away again. He sat back against the wall of the house, feeling guilty, like a voyeur with a conscience, waiting.
The breeze from the sea and the small sounds from within the house were oddly soothing. Jack had had a long, long day, beginning well before dawn. Sitting against the wall of the house, he fell into a trance that was very close to sleep. The sound of a door slamming woke him.
By the time he was alert the sound existed only in Jack’s memory. He didn’t know where it had come from. But a moment later he heard a voice calling from below, inside the house. “Hello? Where are you?”
Then Jack became aware of sounds much closer as well. The people in the bedroom were moving fast. Jack looked at the glasses and martini shaker on the table. Would they come out here? But he sat paralyzed, still groggy from weariness.
Luckily, no one came out onto the deck. A man’s voice called, “Coming!” That started a woman giggling, and the man shushed her.
Jack crept over to the open doorway and glanced into the bedroom, his head down near the ground. He saw the man and woman who’d been making love earlier hastily dressing. By the light from a bedside lamp he could see their faces. The woman wore a smirk as she zipped herself up, and the man smiled guiltily. “We were silly,” the man said in French. The woman answered, “Let’s ask Alexis’s opinion.” The man made a silencing gesture at her as he hurried out the bedroom door into the interior of the house. The woman took her time, moving leisurely, and at the doorway turned to look back at the bed. Jack pulled back out of sight.
But he wouldn’t learn anything up here. He gave the woman a few more seconds to get out, then he too crept through the bedroom. He looked around for any identifying features, such as photographs or maybe an architectural award, but saw nothing like that. He walked softly through the room and out its only other door.
Just outside the door was a staircase landing. This bedroom was the only room on the top floor of the house. Jack crept down the stairs, crouching low. The stairs wound down, and before he was halfway down he heard voices. “We were watching the sunset,” the man said in French. The woman’s voice answered in English, “Which set an hour ago.”
There was a pause, and the man said, “You know Yvette.”
In the silence that followed, Jack could picture the women’s expressions: Yvette still smirking, the other woman looking at her coldly, neither offering a greeting. Probably Paul Desquat standing there with the fatuous grin men wear when alone with two women with whom he’s been intimate. “Would you like a drink?” his voice asked.
“This is important. Jack Driscoll is on his way here. You need to be prepared.”
This brought a flurry of voices. The man obviously knew who Jack was. After a moment Alexis’s cool voice cut through the babble. “One of our people spotted him on the beach and I sent him this way. Well, we want him here, don’t we?”
So Alexis was the woman who had stepped into the view of his viewfinder. Jack wondered how she was dressed now, but he didn’t dare go farther down the stairs. They seemed to end right in the room where the people were talking.
“Good,” Paul Desquat said, sounding more sure of himself now. “Then we will have him and he won’t be able to interfere with our plans.”
“He couldn’t have anyway,” Yvette said. “Everything is set, and your Jack has just been wandering around cluelessly.”
A pause meant, Jack hoped, that the other two exchanged a glance saying Yvette didn’t know what she was talking about. But her assessment wasn’t far wrong.
Even without seeing them, Jack could sense the tension in the room. The pause continued. In the silence he heard the small click and hiss of a cigarette lighter, then smelled the cigarette. Paul Desquat relaxed into a chair and tried to start a conversation.
“What intrigues me about the whole business is that no one except we few know how one day will be different from the previous, but it will affect everything. Even the language. After this everyone will say the word ‘Salzburg’ the way they say ‘Nine-eleven’ now. It could easily have been another place, but now people will think of the world in terms of before and after Salzburg.”
“You talk too much,” Alexis said, and from the sound of her voice she was moving. Jack had to make an instant decision, and did. Quickly but as quietly as possible, he began backing up the steps. A little more, another two, three feet, and he’d be out of sight of the bottom. He moved on feet and hands, like a child eluding bedtime. Just as he backed up near the top he heard Alexis arrive at the bottom of the stairs. Had she seen his feet? He couldn’t tell. Jack stopped moving, because she had. He stopped breathing, too.
Alexis’s intense gaze up into the semi-darkness at the top of the stairs almost had a sound, a crackle like a laser beam. Then her foot touched the bottom step. The stairs were metal; that one step vibrated all the way up to where Jack crouched. If he moved she would feel him move, too.
Then another voice cut across. “What are you looking for up there?” It was Yvette. Her voice was playful and mean. “I may have left my jacket up on the deck.”
Jack didn’t wait to hear Alexis’s reply. He scuttled the rest of the way up the spiral staircase, gained his feet and hurried through the bedroom. He hated to miss what was being said in that living room, but it was even more urgent that they not know he had heard the one vital word.
The glass sliding door to the deck was still open. Jack went through it quickly, and across the deck to the steps cut into the wall, leading down. When he reached the bottom of those steps he was walking across the roof of the first floor of the house. He tried to step very lightly. He came to the edge of the roof and went down the other set of steps.
On tiptoe he ran through the blind spot he had created in Desquat’s video surveillance of the house. Carefully he moved the camera back to cover the house, hoping no one would review the tapes and notice the discrepancy. Then he stood in the darkness, listening for sounds. He heard nothing, which was ominous. Some presence was quieting the insects and birds. Jack stood completely still, trying to listen and to think at the same time. Which way? Back down toward the beach? He was dressed for that, but that way was more difficult, down that sandy cliff. He could circle the house toward the front, which would probably be more unexpected. Yvette seemed like a careless person. Maybe she had left the keys in her car.
He began moving that way, around the perimeter of the cameras. The driveway was probably covered too, but that couldn’t be helped. The little silver sports car was down at the end of the driveway, maybe out of camera range.
Moments later he was standing there. Peering in, he could see that surely enough the keys were in the ignition. He reached for the door handle and heard two clicks. One was of the door locking itself. The other, he saw when he turned, was Yvette cocking the semi-automatic pistol she held trained on him. She still wore the loose grin, and it was no more attractive when turned on him.
“I’ve always been the lucky one,” she said softly, her eyelids moving languidly. “I picked the right direction. And Paul had an extra set of keys to my car.”
She gestured with the pistol, indicating the direction of the house. For the moment they were alone. Jack could lunge and overpower her. But he saw her, even with the sleepy, seductive look, keeping a careful distance. She wasn’t prepared for another kind of attack.
“You know he’s in love with Alexis, don’t you? You’re just a diversion, something to make their lives interesting. You do know that, don’t you?”
In an instant her lip was trembling. Her eyes darted back and forth, obviously wondering if it was true. Then she stepped toward Jack, lowering the gun.
“Could you—?” she asked hesitantly.
“Yes.”
“—be more stupid?” she fi
nished, and hit him in the stomach with the gun. The heavy metal cracked off a rib. Jack doubled over instantly. Yvette moved around, kicked him from behind, started him moving toward the house. “The great manipulator,” she laughed.
A few minutes later Jack was sitting in that living room he had heard but not seen until Yvette had pushed him into it at gunpoint. It was a beautiful room, though too stark and modern for Jack’s taste, with a parquet floor, half-empty white bookcases and high-tech furniture. He sat in a very modern chrome and black leather chair. The back was high enough that he couldn’t turn and see anyone behind him. Jack pivoted the chair slightly so that he could see the wide windows of this room, with a view of the gardens but also a reflection of the room now at night. In that reflection he watched Alexis and Desquat enter the room from different directions, from their separate searches for the intruder. Jack looked at Yvette, saw her look first at Paul Desquat. Some women would look at their rival, comparing looks, but Yvette looked at her lover. She saw that his eyes went first to Alexis when he entered the room, involuntarily, the way a compass needle points north. Yvette’s pouty little mouth hardened.
CHAPTER 9
Back in America, life went on, tensely. The morning after the attacks and the President’s announcement, the Dow Jones average fell five hundred points before the board suspended trading. But days passed and nothing else happened. Habit has the force of tides; people stayed in their natural courses as rivers do. They went to work, bought groceries, took kids to school. Except in the communities most immediately affected, it was hard to tell that anything had happened.
Except in conversations. People talked of little else. At first the national response was to want to strike back, but as no immediate target of revenge became apparent, a large majority of Americans began to support the President’s view. Enough of this. Let the rest of the world destroy itself. Let’s stay out of it. Leave us alone.
Corporate leaders had larger views. Microsoft couldn’t withdraw from the world stage, nor would Wal-Mart, nor Disney. And they didn’t want to be alone out there. Executives of such companies talked of patriotism and commitment, and paid millions to public relations firms for ads extolling those virtues. But Americans, already tired of wars that lasted too long and had too little point, of screaming foreigners hating us, of being criticized even where we tried to help, switched channels.
The American Century was coming to a decisive end.
Within a very few minutes it became clear that Paul Desquat didn’t know what to do with Jack, even though his partner Alexis had lured him here. Desquat was a handsome, dissipated-looking man, growing a little belly on a thin torso, the beginnings of pouches under his dark eyes. But still with a strong chin and sharp features, though now they looked puzzled.
“Why here?” he said. “Why to me? Have you been paying calls on everyone you met while you were with—?”
Alexis cleared her throat sharply, cutting him off. She was standing close to Desquat, who sat on a low black sofa matching the chair that held Jack. Alexis was fully dressed now, in black slacks and a black filmy blouse, giving dramatic effect to her pale skin and black hair.
“He knows,” Desquat said to her dismissively. “Everything he’s been doing is about Madeline. As if she left him directions.”
“It certainly took him a long time to decipher those directions,” Alexis said, still staring at Jack. In Jack’s peripheral vision he saw, off to the side, Yvette glaring at the two of them, neither of whom seemed to notice.
“He doesn’t know all that—” Yvette said, and Desquat interrupted her, which was perfect.
“Maybe he didn’t need to do anything about it until now.”
Yvette scowled. Jack pretended to ignore her, as the other two were doing. “Maybe I didn’t want in until now.” He leaned forward, noticing how that move heightened Yvette’s interest in him, and her gun’s interest. The chair in which he sat was too low to spring out of suddenly. Jack said, “I believe I’ve learned everything I can from my—early tutors. Madeline was going to introduce me to others.”
Alexis and Desquat studied him. Alexis had her arms folded. “I don’t think so,” she finally said.
Jack studied her in turn, with frank curiosity. “I don’t know you. Haven’t even heard your name. Are you—” He turned to direct the unfinished question at Desquat. To Jack’s hidden delight, the architect looked guilty. “So you’ve been recruiting outside the—” Jack deliberately cut himself off, as if he’d said too much.
Alexis strode forward. “I know all about your precious Circle,” she sneered.
“Do you? What’s the password? Show me the secret handshake.” Jack held out his hand at an odd angle. Alexis kicked at it. Jack’s hand twisted, caught her ankle, pulled, and dumped her on her ass on the hard parquet floor.
Yvette smiled, and didn’t raise the gun in his direction. Jack jumped to his feet, but Paul Desquat didn’t move. “Where will you go?” he said quietly. “You came here to learn, didn’t you?”
That stopped Jack. Alexis regained her feet, with as much dignity as she could muster. Her face was even whiter, all the blood having drained southward. She looked like a vampire with her blazing blue eyes. Without any other warning she slapped Jack hard across the cheek.
He could have grabbed her then, used her as a shield and a hostage, maybe escaped. Instead Jack just pursed his lips at her in a simper. “Bitch.”
Yvette had to stifle a laugh.
Jack sat down slowly, looked up at Alexis, waited for her to walk away. Then he returned his attention to Desquat. “Tell me why I should want in,” Jack said slowly.
“No one’s invited you.” When Jack didn’t respond, Desquat shrugged. He repeated Jack’s question, with an eloquent French gesture that took in the beautiful room, the house, Nice, his life.
Jack acknowledged what he wasn’t saying. “You have a villa in Nice. How nice. All the money you could spend in more than a lifetime. Comfortable furniture. Lovely friends. Why would you want more than this? You do have Internet, right?”
Desquat smiled. “I have a wine cellar. A lovely beach, where the most beautiful women in the world come to play nearly naked. More comforts than the most powerful Caesar could have had. Why isn’t this enough, Jack?”
“I don’t know.”
“Yes you do.” Desquat waited, but when Jack didn’t take the bait he answered, “Because nothing is ever enough. We are the monkeys who climbed to the top of the highest tree, Jack. But from there we can see the mountains.”
Jack nodded slowly, as if convinced. “All right. You’ve got me.”
Desquat smiled sadly. “I’m sorry, Jack.”
“Madeline trusted me.”
“Really? What did she tell you?”
“Your name. She was ready to bring me in.”
“If she gave you my name, why has it taken you all these years to come to me?”
“Not to find you. Just to decide I wanted in.”
“I’m sorry, Jack. You need a sponsor to come in. You don’t have a sponsor.”
Jack noticed that Alexis had disappeared. He had shamed her out of the room. Desquat probably wasn’t going to buy his turncoat act, and Alexis clearly wouldn’t. So he turned serious. His voice turning hard, he said, “Did you kill her?”
Desquat merely sighed. “I’m sorry. I really am. Maybe Madeline would have brought you in. But not now. You’re too wild a card, my friend. I think you don’t want this. You want to stop us.”
Jack lifted his arms from the uncomfortable chair arms. “I don’t have a gun. And I’m sure my knowledge of martial arts is less than yours. I’m not a threat to you.”
“You have your mind. It is one of the twistiest we have ever known. No one can trust you.” Desquat gazed off into the distance, considering. “But… I don’t think—” He almost said a name. Jack listened tensely. But Desquat stopped himself. “What are we to do with—?” He looked around and saw for the first time that Alexis was gone. As
he realized it, she came striding back into the room. “That’s simple,” she said. “He’s a burglar, isn’t he?” A doorbell chimed. “That will be the police.”
The others went more tense than Jack did. At least Alexis and Desquat looked tense. Yvette seemed to enjoy their sudden and quick quarrel. She glanced at Jack with a conspiratorial smile. He didn’t try to send her any message.
Desquat’s and Alexis’s argument was quick and only half-spoken. “We can’t turn him over—” “What’s he going to say? That he’s discovered some worldwide—” Alexis turned and laughed at Jack. “Go ahead. They’ll bury you in the crazy ward.”
Jack smiled back at her ever so politely, like a guest at a cocktail party who knows no one.
Then came the sound of the front door crashing inward.
One would expect that an elegant resort city in the south of France might occasionally need to incarcerate celebrities, or at least rich people. One could hope that their jails, therefore, would be several cuts above the American equivalent. But if that was the case, these gendarmes obviously didn’t think Jack worthy of the presidential suite. The small cell into which they threw him unceremoniously had a rough cement floor—he could attest to the roughness—a small cot, and a constant stench. Its only luxury was solitude. Maybe they thought he would infect the other prisoners with his craziness. Or maybe this was solitary confinement.
It could have been, in fact, that those were no police who had taken him from Paul Desquat’s house and that this was no jail. At least no official one. It could be that that barred door would never open again, and there would be no official record of this discarded American.
Jack curled up on the cot, which immediately sank so that his side was touching the floor. He was wearier than he had ever been. The only useful thing he could do in here was sleep, but he didn’t. He thought.
