Cecile had lost interest in the pig by the time he’d disappeared, just as his mother had lost interest in her only child years ago, possibly days after he’d been born. She’d made it very clear that his presence on this earth was not by her choice—her possessive lover had refused to let her abort the child until he found out that he wasn’t the father, and by the time he took off it was too late. Marcie was in some quack’s office begging for a late-term abortion when she went into labor, and he was born three hours later.
He always wondered why she hadn’t simply strangled him and tossed him in a Dumpster or garbage can. Or not even soiled her hands by doing that much, but left him to die of starvation and cold on that November night thirty-two years ago. Maybe she’d been momentarily sentimental. Maybe it was the fact that she’d been very ill, so ill she’d almost died, so ill that they’d had to operate, removing her uterus and ovaries, making certain she’d never go through the indignity of pregnancy again. At one point he used to speculate that
she’d been lying in that hospital bed, afraid of dying, and she’d made a bargain with the god she professed to believe in. If her life would be spared, she’d raise her child and be a good mother.
Well, she’d fucked that up. She’d been a lousy mother. He’d been raised, if you could call it that, by a series of hotel maids and houseboys, until he’d finally taken off at the age of fifteen, leaving with an old friend of his mother’s, a woman twice his age with the body of a teenager and the heart of a…
Well, she had had a heart, and she’d loved him. Maybe been the very first person to do so. He’d left her in Morocco when he was seventeen—just walked away one day when she was out shopping, buying him presents. When they weren’t in bed she liked to dress him in elegant clothes, and he’d learned to appreciate silk suits early on. She’d died a few years later, he’d heard, but by then he was well past any feelings of regret.
He’d been recruited in his early twenties, by a man very much like Harry Thomason. A cold-blooded, heartless son of a bitch who knew exactly what someone like Bastien could be capable of, if properly trained. And they’d seen to his training.
Politics, morals meant nothing to him. He was ostensibly working for the good side, but as far as he could tell there wasn’t a whole lot of difference between the two. The body count on both sides piled high, no one even noticed the innocent lives that got caught in be
tween, and for that matter, neither did he. Chloe Underwood was an aberration, one he planned to take care of before people like Harry found out about her.
“So what happened at Hakim’s?”
That was one of the things Bastien hated about Harry—the man wouldn’t say shit if his mouth was full of it. “Things got fucked. What can I say?” He stubbed out the cigarette. He’d lost the taste for them, another annoyance.
“You can tell me what happened to the girl. Who was she?”
“Girl?”
“Don’t play me, Jean-Marc. You weren’t the only operative at Château Mirabel this weekend. The little American secretary—who was she working for? What happened to her?”
Bastien shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine. I’m thinking she was on the baron’s payroll, though she may have been there for recreational purposes. You know how the baron likes to watch, and he’s always enjoyed Monique with another woman.”
Harry wrinkled his nose with the distaste of a born celibate. “And you didn’t bother to find out?”
“I did my best, boss,” he drawled, knowing Harry hated being called “boss.” “I couldn’t get her to admit to anything.”
Harry looked at him for a long moment. “If you couldn’t get anything out of her then I doubt there was
anything to find out. If I can say one thing about you, it’s that you’re the best interrogator we’ve got. Better than anyone on the other side, even the late Gilles Hakim. He always tended to enjoy his work a little too much. So tell me, what happened to our old friend Gilles, and what happened to the girl?”
“Dead.” He lit another cigarette. He didn’t want it—even Gitanes were tasteless, but it gave him something to do.
“You kill them both?”
“Just Hakim. He’d already done the girl.”
“What happened to her body?”
Bastien looked at him through the drifting smoke. “There wasn’t much left of her by the time Hakim got through.”
“I see.” Harry took a drink of his coffee. The man didn’t smoke, didn’t drink, didn’t fuck as far as Bastien could tell. He was a machine, nothing more. Just as Bastien was trained to be. “A little premature,” he continued, “but it should be salvageable, as long as there are no loose ends. Hakim was disposable, but Bastien Toussaint is not. The others will be coming to Paris to finish the discussions, and the dilatory Christos will be joining them. You’ll be waiting for them.”
“You don’t think they’ll be suspicious? Wonder why I killed Hakim?”
“They know you and they knew Hakim. Why should they wonder? All that matters is they cement the ar
rangements, divide up the territory and choose a new leader. They might have chosen Hakim because he was a hardworking SOB, but with him out of the picture I’m guessing that Christos has a clear shot. And you’re going to stop it.”
“They may be willing to overlook Hakim’s death, but Christos has a great many more people in his organization. There are bound to be repercussions.”
“And so you’ll die,” Thomason said.
Bastien didn’t even blink. “Will I?”
“It’s very simple—you’ve done this sort of thing before, and even if you hadn’t I wouldn’t put anything past you. Once they choose Christos you’ll make a fuss, put a bullet in his head, and someone we’ll already have planted will shoot you. You’ll be wearing a dummy blood patch, and once you hear the gun go off you drop like a stone. Which means you only have one shot at Christos—you need to make it count.”
“I’ve never had any trouble hitting my target.”
“No, you haven’t. So Bastien Toussaint will be dead and if I’m feeling particularly generous I might let you take a little vacation in the south of France until your next mission. There’s a first time for everything.”
Bastien lit another cigarette that he didn’t want. “And the arms cartel?”
“The next obvious choice is the baron, and he’ll be easy enough to control. We have no interest in putting them out of business. Someone’s going to be supply
ing the arms to the international terrorists, and by watching the cartel we can trace the various splinter groups, tap into their plans.”
“I delivered detonators to Syria last April. Seventy-three people were killed, including seventeen children.” His voice was neutral, but Thomason wasn’t fooled.
“Don’t tell me you’re still sulking about that! The fortunes of war, my boy. Casualties of the fight against terror. You never used to be so sentimental, Jean-Marc. You know the math as well as I do. Seventy-three dead, with the potential of thousands being saved. Sometimes you just have to make the ugly choice.”
“Yes,” said Bastien, watching through the curling smoke of his cigarette.
“I trust you, Jean-Marc. I know you’d never make the mistake of lying to me. If you say the girl is dead then I’m certain she must be. Besides, what reason would you have to lie? In all the years I’ve known you I’ve never seen you show any human emotion, any weakness. You’re a machine. State-of-the-art, finely tuned, indispensable.”
“Even a machine needs to rest,” he said. “Let someone else do the job, and I’ll just disappear. Jensen has already built up a solid cover—he can take care of Christos himself.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m tired.”
“People in our line of work aren’t allowed to get
tired. They seldom get time off, they don’t get to rest. There’s only one way to retire, Jean-Marc. The way Hakim did.”
“Is that a threat?” he asked lazily, stubbing out his cigarette.
“No. Only a fact. The cartel will be meeting at the Hotel Denis tomorrow, with Christos arriving the next day. I leave it up to you. I have every confidence you’ll do what needs to be done.”
“Do you?”
“Don’t annoy me, Jean-Marc. You know how much is riding on this.” He rose, folding his newspaper neatly.
“The fate of the free world? Isn’t it always?” He didn’t bother to rise. “I think I’ve heard this all before. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few and all that crap. You’ve been watching too much
Star Trek.
”
“I thought it was
Star Wars,
” Harry said.
“I know what’s at stake,” Bastien said.
“See that you don’t forget. Anything.”
Bastien looked up at him. His time was running out, and he simply didn’t care one way or the other. His luck had held far longer than he would have expected, and it wasn’t going to last much longer. He’d be dead by the first snowfall. Except that it was already snowing.
But before they got to him, he just might slit Harry Thomason’s throat. For old time’s sake.
S
he was gone, of course. He knew it even as he rode upward in the tiny elevator, but he went anyway, just to make certain. The place was dark, and she’d left a window open. Icy air was blowing in, laced with bits of snow, and he shut it and pulled the curtains before he turned on the light. He didn’t know whether they were watching, but he wasn’t in the mood to take chances.
There was no sign of forced entry, no blood. Her clothes were left behind, but his coat was missing, and someone had gone through his wardrobe. If they’d come to get her they wouldn’t have bothered dressing her. They wouldn’t have bothered taking her—she’d be lying dead in his bed if they’d found her.
Which meant she’d left of her own accord, and she was no longer his responsibility. He’d warned her, for some crazy, quixotic reason he’d tried to save her life. Even compromised his own cover for her, whether he wanted to admit it or not.
And she’d ignored his orders and disappeared. Good riddance.
She’d searched the place pretty thoroughly, which surprised him. What could she have expected to find here? Maybe she’d managed to fool him after all, maybe she wasn’t the innocent she’d convinced him she was. And then he remembered the look in her eyes when he’d made her come, and he knew she hadn’t held anything back. Harry Thomason was right about that much. No one could keep the truth from him, not if he was determined to find it.
She’d found the drugs, though she hadn’t touched them. He kept them as insurance—a marketable commodity for some informants who didn’t need money. He pocketed them, just in case, then went through the room with quiet thoroughness, wiping down every surface. It wouldn’t stop a DNA expert, but there would be no reason to go to such lengths. There were no dead bodies, no signs of a crime. Just a mysterious tenant who disappeared, leaving his clothes and toiletries behind, and not a single fingerprint.
If he’d needed to be thorough he could have torched the place. His rooms were on the top floor—most people would escape unscathed. But a fire might call too much attention. Better to just walk away, from the anonymous apartment, from the annoying memory of Chloe Underwood and her well-deserved fate.
He walked out into the damp, chilly night, pulling
his jacket around him, cursing his unwanted guest who’d not only disobeyed him, but taken his coat as well. He walked, head down, leaving the car behind as well. Too many people had seen it, and there were no records that would lead back to his real life, or the Committee.
It was almost midnight when he walked into the smoky bar near Rue de Rosiers. It was the third place he’d stopped—he’d had dinner near the Opera, gambled a bit at one of the small clubs his current alter ego frequented, and now he found himself in a dingy little place in the Marais, a holdout from the gentrification that had been going on for the past few decades.
“Étienne!” the bartender greeted him as he made his way through the crowded room. “What brings you here? We haven’t seen you in…how long is it? Two years? I thought you were dead.”
“I’m hard to kill,” he said, automatically switching into Étienne’s guttural Marseilles accent. “How have you been, Fernand?”
Fernand shrugged. “It’s a living. What can I get you? You still like that Russian vodka?”
In fact, Bastien had never been that fond of vodka, but he nodded amiably, taking a seat at the bar and pulling out his Gitanes.
“You’ve changed your brand, I see.” Fernand nodded toward his cigarettes. “I thought you only smoked American cigarettes.”
That was the kind of careless mistake that could get a man killed, Bastien thought with a faint frisson of something that could almost be called anticipation. He was getting sloppy. “I switch around,” he said. “I’m not a man with strong allegiances.”
“I remember.” Fernand poured him a shot of vodka, and Bastien tossed it back quickly, then held it out for another hit. “You look the same. How has life been treating you?”
“Like shit, as always,” he said easily. In fact, he looked very different from the Étienne he had once been. Étienne had been working class, dressed in leather and jeans, his hair had been streaked and much shorter, and he always had a couple days’ stubble. It was all a matter of how he carried himself, Bastien had found. He could become Étienne, or Jean-Marc, or Frankie, or Sven, or any number of people simply by changing the way he spoke and moved, and few ever saw through it.
“You still haven’t told me why you’re here,” Fernand persisted. “What can I get for you?”
In the past Fernand had been a purveyor of drugs, information and laundered money, but he had nothing Bastien needed.
“Can’t a man come in for a drink with an old friend?” he answered easily enough.
“Not a man like you.”
Bastien glanced at the street outside. The snow was
still drifting down in lazy flakes, and the streets were almost empty. Those who were still awake were someplace warm on such a cold, deadly night. And he realized with real amusement what he was doing in the seedy part of the Marais at midnight when he had better things to do.
“A woman, Fernand,” Bastien said with a self-deprecating smile. “I was in the area to see a woman, and I thought I’d warm myself up a bit before I face her wrath.”
“Ah.” Fernand nodded, immediately satisfied. “She lives around here, then? Maybe I know her?”
“Maybe. She’s Italian,” he said, making it up on the spot. “Short and plump and fiery, my Marcella is. Maybe you can tell me if you’ve seen her in here. I want to know if she’s been playing around. She swears she hasn’t been, but who can trust women?”
“Who indeed? She doesn’t sound familiar. Where does she live?”
Chloe shared a tiny apartment with an English girl two streets away—he’d found that out within hours of her arrival at the château. The others would know as well, but even she would have the brains to keep her distance from the first place they’d look for her. Wouldn’t she?
And she was no longer his problem. Except that he’d ended up in a bar two streets away from her, for no earthly reason. And he might as well stop fighting it, go and see if she was there.
If she wasn’t, he could forget about her. He should have already, but such things were easier in theory than in practice. He liked answers, and Chloe’s disappearance left too much unsettled.
Fernand was looking at him with far too much curiosity. Then again, information was one of his most valuable commodities, he’d be wanting to get everything he could from Bastien for future use.
Bastien named a street in the opposite direction. “And I’d better get my tail over there before she decides to come looking for me.”
“Then we’ll be seeing more of you? With your girlfriend in the area?” Fernand persisted.
“This will be my home away from home,” Bastien said grandly, portraying the slightly inebriated cock of the walk known as Étienne.
“’Soir!”
He was well-hidden in the shadows by the time Fernand followed him out of the bar. The little man peered through the lightly falling snow in search of him, never realizing he was only a few feet away, hidden. Fernand swore, then moved to a corner of the building, away from the light, and pulled out a cell phone.
He was too far away for Bastien to hear more than a few words, but he heard enough to know that his death wish was drawing closer. One more mistake like this one and that would be the end of it. Too bad he couldn’t bring himself to care. It didn’t matter who
Fernand was working for, or why. He’d have connections to half a dozen people who wanted him dead.
Fernand closed the phone, looked around one last time and spat before heading back into the bar. Bastien wondered how long it would be before reinforcements showed up.
It wasn’t important—he would be long gone by the time Fernand’s mysterious compatriots got there. It wouldn’t take more than a moment to check the apartment. And then, unless he were completely suicidal, he would go to his house in St-Germain-des-Prés and become Bastien Toussaint again. And Little Miss Chloe would have to fend for herself.
Sylvia and Chloe shared a typically small apartment on the top floor of an old house in a poorer section of the Marais. The ground floor was let to a tobacconist, the first was occupied by an elderly couple who spent most of their time traveling and the top floor held storage rooms and the cramped little flat. The entire house was dark when Chloe finally turned the corner. Her hair was wet with snow, and the burnt edges smelled horrible. The first thing she was going to do was take a bath and to scrub her entire body, even the waxed-over wheals. It had been a lot longer than four hours since he’d spread the stuff on her. A lot longer than four hours since she’d managed to leave the hotel without anyone looking twice. She’d been so muffled in his black coat that they might
have thought she was Bastien. Except that duplicating his walk would be just about impossible, for her or anyone else.
Maybe, twenty years from now, she’d remember him, and wonder what fit of insanity had come over her. She’d like to think she’d been drugged, anything to take the responsibility off her shoulders, but she couldn’t. She had been in an altered state of consciousness, all right, but it had nothing to do with drugs and everything to do with…God, she couldn’t even begin to understand what had prompted her to act that way. She’d been bored, longing for romance and adventure. No, actually, she’d been longing for sex and violence, and that was exactly what she’d gotten. Be careful what you wish for—hadn’t the Chinese said that? Or was it, “May you live in interesting times”? Whatever—right now all she wanted was a long bath and a warm bed, and tomorrow she’d fly home to the loving, protective arms of her family and all the boredom anyone could ask for.
It was at that moment that she realized she didn’t have a key. Not to the house, not to the apartment, and she almost let out a wail of despair. Her feet hurt, her hair smelled like wet dog, her entire body ached, and even though her stomach was empty she wanted to throw up. And she was cold, even in the soft cashmere embrace.
She could go to the police, but there would be ques
tions she didn’t want to answer. She could go to the embassy, but it was probably a mile in the other direction, and she didn’t think she could walk another foot, much less retrace her steps along the snow-drifted streets.
But luck was finally with her. The door leading to the upper floors was unlocked, as it often was. Sylvia usually couldn’t be bothered with locking it, and no one else had been around for the past few days. She closed the door behind her, shutting herself into the dark, cold hall, and reached for the light switch to guide her way up the two flights of stairs.
And then pulled back. It was very dark, but she knew her way by heart, and there was no need to draw attention to her presence. It was highly unlikely anyone would know where she lived, but Bastien had made her nervous. If she moved through the place in the dark, like some silent wraith, she could be reasonably sure that no one would come to investigate.
The door to the flat was locked, but Sylvia always left a key on the windowsill in the hall, just in case she lost hers, which she managed to do on a regular basis. She pushed open the door, and cold air surrounded her. Sylvia must be off having a riotous time in the arms of her elderly lover.
She closed the door, leaning against it, and slowly let out her breath. In fact, she hadn’t been away that long. Two nights, coming onto the third one, and Sylvia
had gone off for a long weekend. It wasn’t surprising that she hadn’t yet returned, and probably just as well.
The moon shone in the dormer windows, illuminating the cluttered rooms enough for Chloe to make her way through them. She started the gas fire, shivering in Bastien’s coat, then drew her bath. It had never been the best of arrangements. The flat consisted of one bedroom—Sylvia’s—a tiny kitchen and even smaller bathroom, and a jumbled living room. Chloe slept on a mattress on the floor, stalwartly refusing to consider the possibility of insects or rodents in the ancient building.
She opened the door to Sylvia’s room and peeked in, but even in the filtered moonlight she could see it looked as if it had been hit by a bomb. Sylvia must have thrown everything here and there as she packed for Chloe’s magical weekend in the country. She wasn’t going to be very happy at the disappearance of some of her best clothes.
It was nothing compared to Chloe’s state of mind. Knowing Sylvia, she might not be back for a week or more, and by then Chloe would be long gone. Once she got back to the States she’d wire her some money to cover her share of the rent until Sylvia found someone to replace her, and an extra bit to help replace the designer clothes. While Chloe had very little money, the rest of her family had more than they knew what to do with, and they’d be so deliriously grateful that she’d decided to return home they’d probably send Sylvia enough to support herself for months.
She didn’t look in the mirror as she stripped off Bastien’s clothes and kicked them away. She slid into the old-fashioned tub, bracing for searing pain, but instead the hot water enveloped her like a loving embrace. She sank into it with a moan of pure pleasure and closed her eyes, at peace for the first time in what seemed like an endless nightmare.
But eventually the water grew cold, and life had to be faced. She climbed out of the tub, catching a glimpse of her body in the mirror. She froze, staring in shock at the reflection.
The noxious, searing green gunk had done its job. The marks were still there, stripes of pain caused by fire and blade, but they looked months old, a distant memory. There were dark marks on her hips, and she peered closer, until she could make out the faint imprint of his hands on her hips where he’d held her. Bastien. It was only fitting that those marks would remain when the rest was healing.