She looked at him, then at the passport, then did it again. “
D
’
accord
,” she said.
Carrier began handing Stone documents; he signed them and handed them to Madame Roche, who stamped and signed them. Stone tried to read one, but it was in French.
“I must say,” Carrier said, looking around, “that you have got yourself a very good buy here. Properties of this sort in this neighborhood are going at much higher prices than you are paying.”
“I’m delighted to hear it,” Stone said, signing the last of the stack of documents and handing it to Madame Roche. “I love a bargain.”
“And this is a very beautiful room,” Carrier said.
“You should have seen it the day before yesterday,” Stone said.
“Pardon?”
“I’ve done a bit of redecorating.”
“Ah.”
“Is there anything else I need to do?” Stone asked.
“No, we’ll e-mail these to Mr. Cabot right away for his signature. Assuming he signs, the house is yours. And there’s a car, too?”
“Yes, in the garage, but I haven’t bothered to look at it yet.”
“Let’s go and check it for a registration,” Carrier said. He followed Stone to the garage, and they approached the lump under a tarp in one of the two bays. Stone pulled the cover away to reveal a Mercedes four-door sedan of the late seventies or early eighties. Except for some dust, it looked almost new. A pair of wires ran from under the hood to a receptacle in the garage wall: a battery charger, apparently.
He opened the driver’s door and inspected the creamy leather, which was in excellent condition. He sat down, found the key in the ignition, and turned it. The car started instantly. He switched it off quickly, not wishing to be found dead of asphyxiation.
“Do you see a registration anywhere?”
Stone rummaged in an envelope and handed Carrier some papers.
Carrier inspected them, then went to the rear of the car and had a look at the license plate. He came back and handed Stone
the documents. “It’s registered to a name at the American Embassy,” he said, “and it has diplomatic tags. Park anywhere you like.”
“I like the sound of that,” Stone said, pocketing the keys and following Carrier back inside the house.
“Well, I hope you’ll be very happy here,” Carrier said. Hands were shaken, and he and his notary left.
Stone found himself again alone with himself. Curious, now, he went through the kitchen into the garage and, using his house key, let himself into the staff flat. It was a small but comfortably furnished suite with bedroom, bath, and kitchenette. He went back into the house and took the elevator to the top floor, where he inspected two en suite bedrooms with a common sitting room between them. One floor down, he found a large bedroom with a sofa and two chairs in front of the fireplace, much like the master. He walked downstairs, found his book again, and sat down beside the fire. He had been there for only a moment when he heard two loud pops from the direction of the boulevard. That brought him to attention, but after a moment he dismissed the noise as a vehicle backfiring and went back to his book.
Before long he rested his head against the chair and dozed off.
51
S
tone was dreaming of Election Day in the United States. He was in a large hall with a movie-theater-sized television screen, and Kate Lee was making a gracious, very affecting concession speech. “In the end,” she was saying, “it was all the fault of someone named Stone Barrington, who I had never heard of until last week… .”
Stone tried to speak, but someone put tape over his mouth and something black over his eyes, and his hands were taped to the arms of his chair.
“There,” a man’s voice said. “He will be most comfortable.”
Stone, still half in his dream, tried to protest that Kate’s loss was not his fault, but he stopped himself. This part with the
tape and the blindfold and the chair was no dream. He reoriented to the extent that he could. First, he wondered if he had been drugged, but he decided that was impossible, since the only thing he had eaten or drunk since yesterday had been given to him by Holly.
“
Mmmph!
” he said, wanting to speak.
“Just rest quietly, my friend,” a soothing voice said, in an accent that was not British or American but was otherwise not immediately identifiable. “He will be here soon, and then you will know everything.”
Stone was not looking forward to knowing everything, beyond the point where he had been so rudely awakened. He wondered if Holly really had drugged him, and if this event were part of what had been discussed at her meeting at the Paris station. He was still drowsy, and gradually he nodded off again, surprised at how relaxed he was.
He was awakened by a woman’s voice, speaking in French, apparently coming from another room. There was protest in her words, whatever they were.
Then someone untied the blindfold, and Stone blinked in the unaccustomed light. A man stood in front of him; he had a very good look at a silver belt buckle before the tape was ripped from his face. “Shit!” he said.
“Sorry, Mr. Barrington, it was the most humane method,” the belt buckle said. Then the man backed away from him and sat down in the chair opposite Stone’s. He slowly recognized Jacques Chance, prefect of Paris police, brother of Mirabelle.
“Thank you for your humanity,” Stone said.
“Jacques!” the woman in the next room said insistently.
“Silence,
ma chère
,” Jacques replied. “We will be done here soon.”
“Done with what?” Stone asked, honestly curious.
“That remains to be seen, Mr. Barrington. If you are cooperative, you will autograph some papers for me, and then I will be gone, and you will still be alive.”
Stone didn’t like what he imagined as the alternative. “Let me guess,” he said: “You want me to sign over my interests in the Arrington hotels?”
“Quite right,” Jacques replied. “But you will be handsomely compensated. I have in my possession a banker’s check for thirty million euros, with your name on it. I should think that would be a very happy alternative to what the Russian gentleman would have me subject you to, should you fail to sign.”
“I suppose this is what you would call the carrot or the stick,” Stone said.
“Be happy it is not the frying pan or the fire,” Jacques said. “It could easily have been so, were it not for Mirabelle’s persuasions.”
“
Merci beaucoup
, Mirabelle!” Stone called out, so that she could hear him in the kitchen.
“Sign the papers, dummy!” she called back.
“All right,” Stone said, “I’ll sign the papers. If you will be kind enough to untape me.”
“Of course,” Jacques said, rising and coming toward him with a pocketknife. “I should mention that there are two strong
and dangerous men standing behind you, who would take it amiss if you did not behave properly.”
“I will be the soul of propriety,” Stone said.
Jacques cut through the tape holding both wrists, and Stone removed what remained and tossed it into the fireplace. He turned his head to see another man sitting at the desk with a stack of papers before him. “Here, please,” he said, indicating the chair next to him.
Stone got up, walked across the living room, and sat down at the desk. The man uncapped a Mont Blanc pen and handed it to him, then he riffled through a few pages of the stack. “Here,” he said, pointing to a blank space. Stone signed. “Here,” the man said at another page. Stone signed. This continued until Stone had signed a dozen times, then the man extracted an envelope from his inside coat pocket, produced a check, made out as Jacques had indicated, and a sheet of paper, where he indicated Stone was to sign once more. Stone signed.
The man returned the check to the envelope and handed it to Stone. “You may deposit it into your account at any bank in the world,” he said. He picked up the stack of papers, put it into his briefcase, and snapped it shut. He retrieved his pen, capped it, and placed it in an inside pocket. “My business is concluded here,” he said to no one in particular. “I bid you good day.” He left by the front door.
“Mr. Barrington,” Jacques said, “I wish to thank you for being compliant in these circumstances. It would have been unpleasant for me to watch someone of whom my sister is fond be subjected to great harm and, very likely, a painful
death. Now my business is also concluded here, and I, too, wish you a good day.”
Jacques went into the kitchen and came back holding Mirabelle’s hand.
“I am so sorry for all of this, Stone,” Mirabelle said, then she was whisked out of the house by her brother. She came back a moment later. “I want you to know that these stupid rumors about Jacques and me are ridiculous lies!”
“I never doubted it for a moment.”
She left again.
Stone got out his cell phone and called Marcel duBois. He was connected immediately.
“Hello, Stone.”
“Marcel,” Stone said, “I have just been compelled, under duress, to sign away my ownership in the Arrington hotels. Or at least, I think that’s what I signed—it was in French.”
“I’m sorry to hear that, Stone, as I have just done the same thing, and under duress, as well.”
“Are you safe now?”
“I believe so.”
“Then call your attorney, explain things to him, and have him take every legal action to stop the sale. And don’t cash the check.”
“Stone,” Marcel said, “I don’t know if that is the right thing to do.”
“Marcel, right or wrong, it is the
only
thing to do.”
“They have made very serious threats.”
“Ignore them. I’ll call Mike Freeman and have you removed to a safe place at once.”
Marcel sighed. “All right, Stone, if you insist,” Marcel replied. “But I am very much afraid that you and I are out of the hotel business.”
“We’ll see about that,” Stone said.
52
S
tone called Yves Carrier at the Paris Woodman & Weld office and explained what had happened. “I should tell you that I signed the papers ‘Steve Ballington.’”
Carrier laughed loudly. “Nevertheless, I will take immediate steps to stop any transfer of title to the company in every country in Europe. You should have the New York office stop transfer in the United States. Someone might not notice the discrepancy in the signatures.”
Stone hung up and called Bill Eggers, the managing partner in New York, and brought him up to date.
“I can’t imagine how they think they can get away with that,” Eggers said. “Whatever you do, don’t cash the check.”
“Right,” Stone said. He hung up and called Mike Freeman and asked him to reinforce Marcel’s security. “That’s twice they’ve gotten to Marcel,” he said. “You’ve got to move him.”
“I don’t have a safe house at my disposal,” Freeman said.
“Then bring him to me here,” Stone said. “There’s plenty of room. We’ll need more security, though. Jacques Chance has already gotten into the house.”
“I’ll send people at once. What’s the address?”
Stone gave it to him, then hung up the phone. He called Rick LaRose and told him what had happened.
“I don’t understand how Chance got past my people,” Rick said. “Hang on while I call them.”
Stone hung on impatiently.
Rick came back on the line. “No answer. Something’s wrong.”
“No kidding? What happened to the men who were supposed to be on the roof?”
“They weren’t due there for another hour.”
“Mike Freeman is sending people. See that yours don’t shoot his.” He hung up, then Holly called.
“Rick told me what happened. It’s partly my fault.”
“Which part?”
“I put a sleeping pill in your orange juice at breakfast. I was concerned about you, and I thought more sleep would help.”
“Thank you for your concern—the pill worked all too well.”
“I’ll be there as soon as possible,” she said. “Hang on a minute.” She covered the phone and spoke to someone. “Our two men on the gate were taken out with a dart gun. They’re still unconscious in a car outside your gate.”
“Great.”
“Rick has replacements on the way.”
“Mike Freeman is sending people, too. He’s having Marcel brought here. I’ll put him in one of the upstairs rooms.”
“Just hang on until everybody gets there. Be ready to shoot anybody who won’t identify himself properly.”
“I hope I can get out of this without killing somebody,” Stone said. “That could keep me in France for weeks, while it’s being investigated.”
“I hope that doesn’t happen, but it’s preferable to having you killed.”
“I’ll go along with that,” Stone said. He hung up and pulled his chair near the window and peeked past the curtain, so he could see into the mews, the pistol Rick had given him in his hand.
—
HOLLY ARRIVED
half an hour later with reinforcements and oversaw the placement of her people. “They’re on the roof here and across the street. There are two men just inside the gates, and they’ll all be replaced in shifts.”
Mike Freeman arrived with Marcel duBois in tow, carrying a small suitcase, and Stone took him upstairs in the elevator and got him settled in, then he went back downstairs. Lance Cabot was seated before the fireplace.
“How the hell did you get to Paris so fast, Lance?”
“I never left,” Lance replied.
“So when I called you, you were in Paris?”
“My phone works everywhere, Stone.”
“Of course it does.”
“I’ve just come from a meeting with Prefect Chance.”
“Jacques?”
“His father, Michel. He is extremely embarrassed about the conduct of his son. He says he has not been able to find him or speak to him since the newspaper revelations of his selling out to the Russians. He is determined to see Jacques in prison.”
“The old man is not going to be of much use to you, is he? In the circumstances?”
“I hope I talked him out of resigning. We need someone we know in that office, until this business is resolved. The good news is, because of the revelations about Jacques in the papers, Yevgeny Majorov is now a fugitive in France. Michel has put his best people on the search for him.”