An Affair of Vengeance (7 page)

Standing on a four-inch-wide ledge five stories up wasn’t anything she’d practiced, but neither was it entirely outside of the realm of her experience. She tore off her jacket and kicked off her shoes. Without hesitation, she swung one leg over the railing and set her foot down on the slender ledge. Bouncing slightly, she tested the strength of the formed stone. It seemed sturdy enough, even if the surface was cool, damp, and slippery under her toes.

Holding the camera in her left hand and the railing with her right, she lifted her other leg up and over the top bar. Breathing slowly, she set her foot down on the ledge. Now irrevocably committed to her plan, she shimmied quickly toward McCrea’s window, keeping her stomach pressed flat against the hard, pebbly
material that coated the building. When she’d gone as far as her arm’s hold on the balustrade would allow, she carefully lifted the camera toward his window.

The camera’s tiny eye looked directly into McCrea’s room.

Perfect, but one misstep and she would be a pancake on the asphalt below.

The thought ran an involuntary shiver down her legs. Her toes trembled, slipped, and lost their grip on the thin lip of concrete.

The camera clattered against the wall as Evangeline flailed, struggling to right herself. Her feet scrambled for purchase—and found it. Her right hand wrapped like a vise around the rounded rail.

Safe but shaken, she breathed deeply. Had they heard the clamor outside their window?

With one hand firmly gripping the balustrade, she lifted the camera back up, easing it slowly into the nearest corner of the window.

Luckily, his curtains were open. Through the thumbnailsized LCD viewfinder above her fist, she saw the two men seated on the suite’s plush white sofa. McCrea’s back was to the window, but Ménellier sat in full view. His mouth moved.

She pressed the earpiece deeper, hoping to hear what he said, but all she heard was a loud whine, like that of a vacuum cleaner. She couldn’t differentiate their voices from the white-noise device McCrea was using. Tech-ops should be able to filter out the noise and hear their conversation, and if they couldn’t, a lip-reader should be able to tell them what Ménellier said, at least.

If things ran on a typical Agency schedule, they’d have half of the conversation within a week. Not nearly good enough, but it was better than nothing.

“Twenty Stingers,” McCrea said, and waited silently for Ménellier to stop laughing.

Ménellier dried the corners of his eyes with a white pocket square. “You can’t be serious.”

“I always am.” A slight noise behind him caught his attention, but he didn’t turn. Instead, he watched Ménellier, who showed no sign of having noticed anything odd. McCrea trusted SOCA’s newest white-noise generator to deflect any electronic surveillance anyone might try. They’d gotten the technology from MI6, and while it wasn’t his job to know exactly how it worked, he knew that it emitted a whine, inaudible to the naked ear, that thwarted even the most advanced digital-forensics technicians. If the waitress tried to listen at the door or through a neighboring wall, she and her team would hear nothing but a hair dryer.

“And you need these by when?” Ménellier said.

“In a week.”

Ménellier swirled ice around an empty tumbler. “It’s not so easy as that.”

McCrea waited. A man like Ménellier tended not to give his best answer first.

“Well,” Ménellier continued after a pause, “I am pleased to work with you, of course. Your reputation is good. My idiot brother-in-law tells me you pay on time, which makes you my new favorite customer. But this isn’t something I can do so quickly. There are protocols.”

“Advance them.”

Ménellier chuckled, less easily this time. “You press too hard. Surely you understand how delicate this will be. These things take time. Be patient.”

McCrea wasn’t known for his patience. Penard had borne the brunt of that the night before. But Ménellier wasn’t Penard. McCrea had studied up on the man and learned that he didn’t capitulate when threatened, and he wasn’t so slow on the draw that he’d let McCrea bring a knife to his throat without defending
himself. Besides that, he had too many skilled minions waiting for the chance to earn credit and move up in the organization for McCrea to threaten him with violence and expect to live out the day.

So again, McCrea waited for Ménellier’s second answer. Ménellier flashed McCrea a rueful smile. “I’m sorry, my friend, but for once, Penard was right. These things cannot be delivered so soon.”

For Ménellier, money was the only thing that talked. McCrea knew how to speak his language. “I’ll pay double your normal rate.”

Ménellier surprised him with a guttural snort. “Bah! Money is not the issue. It’s a question of time. Boats, planes, donkeys, and camels have to physically move them from point A to point B. It’s not as if I have them sitting in a warehouse somewhere. I have to go get them and bring them into the country. This is elementary import-export. You know this.”

“I do. I also know I need twenty missiles by the end of the week, and I’m willing to pay any price to get them.” And yet, McCrea knew he was asking for the impossible. Stingers were used to shoot planes out of the sky. Legitimate governments had cracked down on their proliferation. Illegitimate governments hoarded them. Warlords and terrorists could barely get their hands on one, let alone twenty. For as much power and influence as Ménellier had, it wasn’t enough—which was exactly what McCrea had planned.

“I am very sorry, my friend. I would love to take your money, but I’m afraid that I cannot help you.”

“Who can?”

Ménellier sighed. “There may be someone.”

Lukas Kral
. “Call him.”

“I can’t.”

“I’ll pay you for it.”

“No, no. This is not a man whose name you can pay for.”

“He’s not you, then.”

Ménellier stroked the pointed length of his Vandyke beard. “No, my friend. He’s not me. He would have you killed for insulting him like that.”

McCrea only shrugged. “Penard said you could get this done. Seems he was wrong.”

“He wasn’t entirely wrong. I know people—a person. I simply don’t know if he’ll work with you.”

“Let him be the judge of that.”

Ménellier took a moment to respond. “I can check. It’s all I can do. He’s not the sort of man I can hand off to a stranger.”

“I’d think my reputation would precede me.”

“With me, yes. But this man doesn’t give a damn how many AKs and Sig Sauers and kilos of heroin you’ve smuggled onto that tiny island of yours. You start moving jets and tanks, friend, then maybe he’ll take your calls. But this—these Stingers you want—is your first big order. He won’t trust you.”

“I thought Lukas Kral could supply anything a man desired.”

“Ah, so you already had the name. You play with me, but you are well-informed,” Ménellier said. “I presume Penard gave you the name with only the slightest pressure?”

“The pressure of a blade.”

“He never could stand the sight of his own blood,” Ménellier growled. “As I said, I’ll do what I can. You know the club called Avarice?”

“In Marseille?”

“Oui. I own it.”

“I can find it.”

“Good. Meet me there tonight, around eleven. I’ll have your answer.”

On the tiny LCD screen, Evangeline watched the two men rise, shake hands, and exit out the door.

Quickly but carefully, she retracted the camera and gathered herself back into the safety of the room. After popping the flash memory card out of the camera and into her phone, she dialed Mason.

Down the hall, the elevator dinged. She assumed the men had gone inside.

Mason answered on the first ring.

“I’m sending you a file.” She tucked the camera and telescope back into her purse and shoved her arms into her white Chanel jacket.

“I’ve got it…now,” Mason said. “Audio or video?”

“Both. Not sure how usable the audio will be. He used a white-noise scrambler.”

“And the video?”

“Poor, but passable.” She slipped on her sandals and jogged to the door. “Had to hang outside the building to get it.”

“You didn’t observe the meeting directly? You don’t know what was said?”

“No idea. They shook hands at the end. Nobody pulled any weapons. Whatever happened, they parted on good terms.” She paused for a moment at the door, listening for noises in the hallway, and heard nothing, so she opened the door and stepped out. The long beige passageway was empty. She sprinted for the stairwell.

“I’ve sent this to tech-ops,” Mason said.

“That’ll take days.”

“I’ll see what I can do. In the meantime, stay on him.”

“Will do,” she huffed between hard breaths. She took the steps two at a time, hoping to get to the lobby before McCrea and Ménellier left. When she reached the second-floor landing, it occurred to her that McCrea might simply head back up to his room once he saw Ménellier off. He’d walked down the stairs that
morning. He might use them again to go back up. She slowed to a brisk walk and fumbled in her purse for her sunglasses, trying to behave more like a woman about to walk outside, rather than an operative struggling not to lose her mark.

The loud rush of blood pumping through her skull masked Mason’s next question. She pressed her phone more firmly to her ear. “What?”

“Do you get the sense that he’s recruitable?”

Did she think she could convince him to inform for the CIA? All they’d been able to pull from Interpol indicated that McCrea was a minor gangster out of Glasgow, with no prior indictments.
“Tout est possible,”
she said, reverting to French to admit that anything was possible, and then asked if they had any more details on who he was.

“Nothing more on his criminal record, but I’ve put in a request with the British for more detail on his finances and known associates. We know that his mother is in a convalescent home in northern Scotland. His father is MIA. His older brother died a few years back of a drug overdose.”

“Ce n’est pas très utile,”
she huffed, indicating that the information wasn’t very useful. To turn a crook into an informant, the Agency looked for an area of weakness in a target’s life. Money, sex, and security were the top baits, and informants sought them not only for themselves, but for those they cared for.

“It’s irrelevant. He’s like anybody. He’ll go for money. Stay with him for now. Contact me immediately when he stops again.”

The steps widened as the stairwell opened to the spacious lobby. Digging in her purse as she walked toward the large doors that exited to the street, she kept her eyes down but looked about for McCrea and Ménellier.

A tall, ponytailed man slid into a black Jaguar that sped north toward the harbor as soon as the porter closed the car door. Ménellier, gone. But McCrea was on foot, heading in the opposite direction. He slipped on a pair of aviator sunglasses as
he sauntered past the hotel’s floor-to-ceiling windows. His stride was both long and nimble, and had a steady, rolling cadence.

She chewed on her lip and watched him walk almost out of view. That he had the grace and body of a dancer meant nothing to her except to illustrate the athleticism of his strong legs. He’d have a hell of a first step in a sprint, and he’d also able to hold a steady pace over a very long stretch. She was quick, but he’d outrun her at any distance. He’d have more reach, too. If it ever came to a fight between them, she’d have to get on the inside of those long limbs and strike with elbows and knees. Some big guys had trouble fighting small girls, and while she hoped she’d not have to find out if he was one of them, she was ready for the possibility.

She stepped out of the lobby and strode onto the concrete behind a foursome of sweaty, pink-skinned tourists heading toward the grand-colonnaded facade of the opera house. They doddered at a painfully slow pace, but they provided an excellent screen between her and her tall target. Bright sun pouring into the small, plain square in front of the Opéra Municipal hurt her eyes. She put on her sunglasses.

At the Opéra, McCrea turned left up Rue Saint-Saëns into one of Marseille’s busiest shopping districts. There, two tight lanes of traffic buzzed between lines of locals shopping and tourists gawking at the windows of fine
ateliers
. Behind those shops ran alleys, useful for loading freight as well as for dodging surveillance. Following a man on such a crowded street was child’s play. If McCrea wanted to be sure he wasn’t followed, at some point, he’d find his way into an alley.