Authors: Kevin Wignall
Chapter Twenty-eight
He had the cab drop him a few blocks from the Vergoncey and approached with a mixture of casual pace and complete vigilance, wanting to know exactly how much sand had slipped through the glass in the time he’d been away.
He saw the same two company men in their parked car, about a hundred yards this side of the hotel. But he noticed someone in a leather jacket squatting down and talking to them on the passenger side. He wasn’t CIA, and if they’d brought in the freelancers that could mean they were planning to take Dan down tonight.
He turned and went back the other way, so that he came to the hotel along the side street where there was a small, rarely used entrance that was locked after a certain time at night. And just as he turned into the doorway, he noticed another guy standing up on the corner ahead, but looking in the other direction. He was casually dressed, but wrong somehow, wrong for that street, in the way he was standing, in everything about him.
It suggested they were escalating the situation, putting all their available assets in place, and that meant Dan and Inger had to move out of here now. With that thought, he picked up his speed and turned before reaching the main lobby, climbing the stairs rather than waiting for an elevator.
The corridor on their floor was empty, a deceptive calm, but he stopped for a moment between their rooms, listening, taking in the quality of the stillness. He knocked on her door then. There was no reply, but there was no movement, either. He checked his watch and knocked louder, thinking she might be asleep or in the bath.
He checked his watch again, took out his gun, and attached the silencer, an emptiness creeping into his stomach. He was tempted to knock one more time, but he knew there would be no answer now and didn’t want to think through the possible reasons for that silence.
Instead, he opened his own door, his gun at the ready, though the room was apparently empty, even emptier than he’d left it. He hadn’t got around to unpacking his case and had simply left it near the door, but it had gone now.
He stepped inside, covering the angles, checking the bathroom, even the closet, and all the time he was trying to imagine a benign scenario that might explain the disappearance of both Inger and his case.
It was only once he was satisfied the room was empty that he spotted the sheet of notepaper left on the desk. He walked over and glanced down at it without picking it up, a couple of lines scrawled across the page.
Get out of the hotel! Switch on your phone!!
She hadn’t signed it, but despite the alarm of the message he couldn’t help but smile, relieved—she’d left of her own accord. He could even allow himself some bemusement now, that she was actually a step ahead of him.
He walked over to the window as he switched on his phone. The two guys were out of the car and a couple more were standing talking to them. The guy who’d been crouching down near the car earlier had gone, so by Dan’s reckoning, that meant there were at least six here.
The phone buzzed in his hand and he looked down at the screen—three missed calls from Inger. He returned one of them and held the phone to his ear.
She answered instantly, saying, “Where are you?”
The men standing down by the car had a businesslike air about them, he thought, as if they were gearing up for something rather than just idling or awaiting orders.
“You left a note,” he said.
“Dan, you have to leave. I’ll tell you more later, but you have to move now.”
Her voice was calm, but there was an urgency about it that set him on edge.
“Okay, I’ll call back.”
“No, wait! Do you have a pen?”
“Sure.” He walked over to the desk, grabbed the notebook and pencil and scribbled down the number she reeled off to him. “Thanks. I’ll call you soon.”
“Dan . . .”
She hesitated, perhaps torn between what she wanted to say and her need to keep a professional veneer.
“Twenty minutes, max. I’ll call you back.”
He ended the call and turned off the phone as he walked back to the window, then searched the street below, his heart kicking up a gear as he realized they’d gone—the car was still there, but the guys who’d been standing there a minute before had moved on.
He acted quickly now, slipping out of the room, walking fast along the corridor and down the stairs. He hadn’t gone far, though, when he heard an American accent heading in the opposite direction, talking quietly, but clearly audible in the thick-carpeted hush.
“Just heading onto second. Hold position . . .”
Dan backtracked, skipping back up the stairs and along the corridor, in through the door to the service stairs. He hurtled down them, taking each short flight in a couple of steps, and paused only briefly at the bottom to catch his breath, to listen to the hotel around him.
Six—there were at least six of them, a few to cover the exits, a few to trawl the hotel. On the other hand, it was a big place, so maybe that would work against them, stretching them thin.
He stepped out through the door and turned into the corridor that led to the side entrance. But he’d only covered half the distance when he noticed there was a car parked there now, and even as he was wondering if it was one of theirs, a guy strolled into view, chatting on the phone, perhaps the guy who’d been standing on the corner a little earlier.
Dan turned on his heel, heading back the other way, knowing he couldn’t follow this corridor all the way to the main lobby. Yes, it was a big hotel and there were plenty of places to hide, but he was already getting hemmed in and he cursed himself now, for being sloppy, for spending too much time talking with Florian and Carter.
He dropped into another service corridor and headed for the clatter of the kitchens. It was busy in there, busy enough that he had to dodge a few bodies on the way through. A couple of the chefs and other staff threw glances in his direction, noting his presence without seeming inclined to challenge it.
He pushed out through the double doors on the other side, out into the narrow alley at the back of the hotel, lined with food bins and discarded produce boxes. He turned towards the street but instantly saw someone up ahead.
Dan recognized him right away; the guy in the leather jacket who’d been crouching down talking to the guys in the car. He walked directly towards him and the guy stood still and looked at Dan, as if waiting for him to come into the light, a look of general hostility in his eyes.
The guy seemed to realize who he was then, a moment of adrenalin and panic, a lunge towards his gun. Dan shot him in the face and picked up his pace, walking swiftly out onto the street and away.
He kept walking for a couple of hundred yards, then found a payphone and called the number she’d given him. It was only as he stood there that he realized he was out of breath, his heart kicking along at a canter.
When she answered, he said, “It’s me.”
“You’re out of the hotel?”
“I’m out of the hotel.”
He thought he heard a faint sigh of relief and couldn’t help but smile gratefully in response.
“Come to Hotel Bernet, Room 422.”
“Okay, I’ll see you soon.” He was about to hang up when his thoughts began to catch up with everything that had just happened, the missing suitcase, Inger’s disappearance, her warning. “Are you alone there?”
“No, I’m with a colleague.” She paused and added, “He’s fine. He’s probably the reason we’re still alive.”
Dan ended the call and looked back along the street, thinking through his exit from the Vergoncey, wondering how much of an edge Inger’s unseen colleague had given him. He knew it wouldn’t stop now, either, that the threat would remain at this pitch from here on in. Dan’s only real hope was to get to Brabham before his men finished the job.
Chapter Twenty-nine
The Hotel Bernet was a couple of blocks off the Champs-Élysées, nice but anonymous, in a busy street. He walked straight through the lobby and up to the room he’d been given. He stopped and listened then, the sound of Inger and a man talking in Swedish, the tone and volume of a normal conversation.
He knocked and the talking stopped abruptly and he could hear some hurried movement before Inger came and opened the door.
She said something even as she opened it and stepped aside, and Dan saw the guy behind her putting away his gun in response. Dan looked at Inger, smiling, and she gave a relieved laugh back before closing the door.
He looked at the guy now, mousy hair, a close-cut beard, youthful and sporty-looking.
Inger said, “Dan, this is Ville. Dan Hendricks.”
They shook hands, and Ville said, “Good to meet you.”
“Likewise.” He noticed his suitcase standing near the bed. “So what’s happening?”
Ville looked at Inger, uncertain, and she nodded and said, “Confusion is what’s happening. Our people heard that Brabham has made you his priority target and they were coming for you tonight. The order was to pull me out of there.”
She smiled at Ville and he smiled too, and said, “Inger and I go back a long way, so I know she gets what she wants. This is the confusion she talks about. It seems you and her moved on before I could get there. It’s the only way for Inger to stay part of this.”
Dan nodded and said, “I have to move tomorrow anyway, out of Paris. I’ve got a lead.” He was distracted even as he spoke, looking at Inger. “Maybe it’s better if you do take a . . .”
She shook her head, a barely perceptible movement, but letting him know that she was part of this, that she would remain part of it, no matter what Brabham was planning.
In the pause that followed, Ville said, “You got out with no problem?”
Dan looked at him and said, “They were moving in. Another five minutes and I might have been in trouble. But no, I got out okay, thanks. Killed one guy in the alley behind the hotel, not CIA, a freelancer.”
“Oh, sure. I see.” Ville looked shocked, perhaps by the fact that Dan’s version of a trouble-free exit including killing someone. “Well, anyway, you should be okay for a while.”
Dan looked at the room, but Inger said, “Not here. I’ve booked us into a business hotel. It’s better that way, so Ville doesn’t know where we are. We go there now.”
Dan shook Ville’s hand again and said, “I appreciate everything you’ve done for us. I don’t suppose your channels picked up anything else that might be useful, anything on Brabham?”
Ville smiled, saying, “I hate to break the bad news, but I think you’re already becoming the number-one expert on Bill Brabham.”
Dan nodded, taking it as a joke, hoping it was a joke, and hoping even more that Bergeron would give him something decent the next day.
They left Ville in the room and traveled a little way out to the business hotel she’d booked. In the car they hardly spoke but she held his hand the whole time and seemed to express more in the clutch of her fingers around his than if they’d talked.
When they did talk, it wasn’t about Brabham, and it wasn’t until they were lying in bed together, much later, that she said, “Where do we go tomorrow? You said you had a lead?”
He almost didn’t want to think about the next day, or that day as it now was, not many hours ahead of them. How long, he wondered, would they be able to just hole up here and keep the world at bay? The simple answer was never long enough.
“There was a security tape from a bank, which by chance covered the entrance to the alley where Sabine was killed. The security guard was related to someone at DGSE headquarters, so he sent the tape to him—”
“So it’s true! Jack Redford got into the DGSE?”
“Not only that. The guy who received the tape had set up a meeting with a colleague from the Interior Ministry the next day, but the guy died in a car wreck that night.”
“And Redford disappeared. But without the tape?”
“I’m guessing so. What we saw in the shelter suggests Redford was trying to reconstruct the case after the fact. With the tape he wouldn’t have needed to do that.”
She nodded impatiently, as if annoyed with herself for not seeing that, and said, “So, presumably, he handed over the tape, maybe they tried to kill him or he got nervous, and he ran.”
Dan nodded, thinking back over what he’d heard the night before, and said, “Someone I spoke to said he’d received a letter from an old friend in Beirut, that it had unsettled him, so maybe that played a part in him disappearing. There’s someone else I can see about that, but it’s hardly the main issue right now.” He waited a beat, and said, “The tape may be gone, but as far as we know, there is someone still alive who saw it—the security guard. He lives near Auxerre, about an hour and a half’s drive from Paris. That’s where we’re headed tomorrow.”
“But why is he still alive?”
Dan shrugged and said, “Who knows? Maybe Brabham got complacent, maybe he reasoned a dead security guard would arouse more suspicion than a security guard who might make claims but wouldn’t be able to back them up. Maybe the guard is crazy. Maybe Brabham saw the tape and realized it proved nothing. Whatever it is, we’ll find out tomorrow.”
“Auxerre,” she said, as if just for the pleasure of saying the word.
“Near Auxerre,” he said, correcting her.
“We’ll need a car.”
“I have a car, here in Paris. They might not even know about it, but even if they do, we’ll probably be just as under the radar in my car as we would with a rental.”
She looked at him as if he’d said something extraordinary.
“You have a car, here in Paris?” He nodded. “What kind?”
“It’s a Mercedes. An SUV. I haven’t driven it in ages—be nice to get behind the wheel again.” She looked at him, a lightly mocking smile on her lips. “What?”
“It’s something I’ve thought several times, that you’re quite a lot like Jack Redford. And now I find out you also have an SUV that you hardly ever drive. Another similarity.”
“Yeah? Maybe I should go the whole hog and move to Sweden.” Already, this soon, it was only half a joke, and he studied her face carefully to gauge her expression—she was trying to play equally cool, but he couldn’t help but think he detected a certain interest, even happiness in her eyes. “I could rent a place to begin with, not up in the north like Jack, but maybe some nice neighborhood in Stockholm. What’s your neighborhood like?”
Looking like someone determined not to be teased, she was offhand as she said, “You know it. We met for coffee there.”
So he was right, the café had been near where she lived, and he thought back to it now, imagined being in that neighborhood, getting to know her properly, seeing if there really could be anything more than this between them.
“It was a nice area, what I remember. So maybe I could just sell the place I’ve got here, buy something outright there.”
She was dismissive as she said, “Perhaps you’re used to gullible women, but I’m not one of them.”
And he wanted to tell her, that as ridiculous as this sounded, he was firing up with adrenalin and possibility at the thought of it.
Instead, he said, “Unless I get Brabham off my back I wouldn’t want to be within a thousand miles of you.”
“And if you did?”
He kissed her, and said, “I’m not stupid or crazy. I know we’ve only been together a few days, and even then, in pretty wild circumstances.” He paused, smiled. “That’s why I’d rent a place of my own, to see how it would be. To live like people do. And I wouldn’t if you didn’t want me to. But right now, I couldn’t think of anything I’d rather do than move to Stockholm.”
She nodded and said quietly, “I would like that.”
“Really?”
She could see how genuine the doubt and surprise in his voice was, and she laughed and rolled on top of him, holding his face with both hands as she said, “Yes, really.”
And that was how easy it would be, he thought, how easy it would be to find a life with someone like her, someone to be with, to be part of. It was how easy it would be, if Brabham was removed from the picture. That was where the dream fell into shadow at the edges—Brabham, and there’d be no guaranteed future of any kind for Dan until that shadow was dealt with.