The Geneva Decision (21 page)

Pia slipped behind her, put her in a headlock and pulled back tight.

“Are we alone?” she whispered.

Monique said nothing.

“I asked, are we alone?”

“No. My husband, my children, upstairs. Please don’t hurt them.”

“I’m not going to hurt anyone. Here’s the deal. You answer a couple questions, I let you sleep in your own home tonight. You don’t, I dart you, drag you back to Limbe, and let my friend Tania beat the crap out of you. She’s been in a foul mood since a bunch of your friends tried to kill her yesterday. So what’s it going to be?”

“Not my friends. I swear to you. What do you want to know?”

“Why did you send the boys to kill me?” Pia said.

Monique took a deep breath.

“After you hired me I found Calixthe, just like I told you. Until the shooting started, I thought she was genuine. But the day before you arrived, a different woman called from Austria and hired me to send her information about you and what you were doing. I had no idea—”

“Save it. I asked why you sent them to kill me.”

“Please, I have never been in trouble before. I didn’t know what to do.”

“You’ve done pretty well for yourself. The house is worth much more than what you charge in fees. You’re deep in this piracy thing, aren’t you?”

“No, no! My father is the head of surgery at hospital. He gave me this house when he and my mother bought a larger one. My husband is also a doctor—”

“Who are they, then?” Pia squeezed her arm tighter. “Who wants me dead?”

“Someone in Austria. She didn’t give me a name, just told me to call her le Directeur.”

“That’s masculine, isn’t it? Shouldn’t you call a woman by the feminine version, whatever?”

“La Directrice. I don’t know, le Directeur is what she said.”

“How did she pay you?”

“She left a bag with cash and phones at the gate.”

“Your whole fee in advance?” Pia asked.

“Ten percent. The rest is in Vienna. I am to meet her at Kaffe—”

“Yeah, Kaffehandels. I’ve heard of it. Who’s Elgin Thomas?”

Monique frowned. “I do not know.”

“Conor Wigan?”

Monique shook her head.

“When do you meet le Directeur?”

“Tomorrow night. I am to bring proof.”

“That I’m dead?” Pia said. “Great.”

She relaxed her arm and frisked Monique, turned on a light, pushed her to the dinner table. They sat opposite each other. She said, “OK, Monique. Never been in trouble and all of a sudden you’re in the murder for hire business?”

“It was not like that. Yesterday, I was horrified. You saw me. I was a coward in the pilothouse, hiding in the corner. I was ashamed. I am not like you. I am not brave. Then she called me and told me either you or I will die today. What else could I do?”

Pia darted her. Monique slumped onto the table.

“Sure I understand,” Pia whispered. “What else could you do?”

Pia tapped her fingernail on the table while she stared at her sleeping traitor. After a good think, she got up and darted the two children and a snoring husband. She administered the antidote injectors and checked that their airways were clear. They would awake in the morning, groggy and motherless but otherwise unharmed. She left a note for them then searched the rest of the house, found a packed suitcase, two cellphones, a notebook, and a passport she carried to the kitchen. In a small office downstairs she found evidence of a normal investigative firm: bail bond records, court services, investigations for legal firms. Nothing to contradict Monique’s story. She locked the back door and the window and secured the rest of the house.

Out on the street, a gray mist floated to the ground. She ran to her cabbie and woke him. While he pulled to the curb, Pia carried Monique out of the house on her shoulder.

“Sleeping pills,” she told the cabbie.

An hour and another three hundred euros later, the cabbie helped carry Monique past the sleeping church guard and into her room. They put her in Pia’s bed and the cabbie left.

Tania looked over her shoulder with bloodshot eyes. She sat up, rubbed her face in her hands, then squinted at the woman in Pia’s bed. “Wait, who’s that? You picked up a woman last night? Whoa. Didn’t know you swung that way.”

“It’s Monique Tsogo.” Pia turned around quickly. “Wait, what do you mean? Did you think I picked up a … You think I’m gay?”

“Are you trying to say you’re not? ’Cause you know what they say about female athletes.”

“No, I’m not gay. And they say the same thing about female soldiers.”

“True that.”

They stared at each other in awkward silence for a moment.

“Oh, uh, so, are you gay?” Pia asked.

“Me? Hell no. But, I could learn… y’know, if there’s a promotion involved.”

“No. No. I’m … not that way.”

“OK.” Tania looked out the window and sighed with relief.

Pia rolled her eyes. “Look, none of that matters. We’re taking her to Vienna—”

Something beeped in a duffle bag at the foot of the bed.

Tania grabbed it, pulled out a sat-phone, checked it. She said, “Looks like the Major left us the tracking unit and some other gear. Stuff they’d never get on an airline. Someone’s in trouble, wonder who?”

“Conor Wigan. Why couldn’t they take stuff on an airline?”

Tania pulled two M4s out of the bag and held them up. Pia shrugged.

“Have you ever flown on a commercial airline?”

Pia shook her head. Tania sighed.

Pia looked at the beeping phone. She said, “What does this mean, life alert?”

Tania looked over her shoulder. “Means Conor is dying. The tracker in his sock takes vital signs. When the nervous system erupts or his pulse drops off, it sends a warning. Sometimes we get a false positive, like if he’s exercising. In Conor’s case, I think he’s dying. Not dead yet, but critical condition.”

“Then let’s get going.” Pia headed for the door and dialed her favorite cabbie.

“What about sleeping beauty here?”

“She’ll sleep another two hours. C’mon, let’s try to save Conor.”

“The guy who held you at gunpoint?” Tania said. “Why?”

“He needs help.”

Pia’s favorite cabbie took them to an apartment building across town. They got out, checked the neighborhood, and headed in.

A hazy predawn horizon lit the hem of low clouds moving inland. Dawn would break, but little sunlight would reach them. The fine mist turned to small raindrops.

Pia opened the gate and began checking the apartments. Tania tapped her on the shoulder and pointed across the courtyard. A door stood halfway open.

Tania pulled her Glock. Pia did the same.

They crossed the way, lining up on either side of the door to peer in the narrow opening. A rough outline of furniture was all Pia could make out. They’d go in blind.

Tania nodded to Pia and burst through the door, moving to the right. Pia rushed in behind her to the left. They swept the room: cramped kitchen, dining area filled with boxes, living room with a worn-out couch and two cane chairs. They moved into the hallway, a bathroom on one side and a closed door on the other. They listened. Nothing.

Pia swung into the bathroom. Empty. She turned and stood on one side of the bedroom door. Tania turned the knob, took a breath, and ripped open the door. They jumped in, Tania on the far corner, Pia toward the bed.

Conor Wigan was propped upright with his back against the wall. His head sagged over his shirtless chest, his arms at his sides, the sheets beneath him red with blood. Pia checked the closet then holstered her gun. Tania flipped on a light. Conor lifted his head, recognized Pia, and smiled a gruesome smile. Losing his energy, his head sagged again.

“You’re… bloody cooked, girl.” He was barely audible. His chin touched his chest.

“Who did this to you, Conor?” Pia asked.

“Those Swiss…bastards. They…”

Pia looked him over from a few feet away, trying to figure out where the bullet holes were. Tania gestured that he’d been shot in the back.

“Sent Mustafa…” he said. “Bloody… traitor. He…”

“Save your breath, Conor. An ambulance is coming—you’ll be all right.”

Tania shook her head at Pia. She said, “No. Keep him talking.”

“Bloody hell … Mustafa thought he would take the…”

“Take what, Conor?” Pia said. “Stay with me now. Don’t go to sleep.”

Conor listed sideways, leaving a smear of blood on the wall. As Pia moved to help him Tania reached out and pulled her back.

“Touch nothing. We were never here.” Tania hissed.

Pia nodded. She choked and wiped her eyes.

“What is Mustafa taking, Conor?”

“God it hurts,” Conor said. He groaned loudly, spasmed, then relaxed. Black bile oozed out his mouth.

They stood in silence for a full minute staring at Conor’s corpse.

“Let’s go,” Tania said.

“We can’t leave him like this.”

“All we’re doing is messing up a crime scene. We take the trackers out of his shoe and pocket, wipe down anything we touched. Then we’re gone.”

“Guess you’re right. Seems cold.”

“Yes. It is.”

They cleaned up and left. From the cab Pia called the police to report gunfire in the apartment building. After that, the ride back to the convent was silent, each woman lost in her own thoughts.

The sun rose and streaked the clouds’ underbelly in bright orange before quickly disappearing above them.

They climbed out and gave the cabbie another hundred euros. He folded the money, pledged his silence and pulled away.

Pia tugged Tania’s sleeve. “You implied you could trade sex for a promotion—”

Tania laughed loud. “Hey, I wasn’t setting you up for a lawsuit. I swear, I was just having a little fun, checking out your ways. I would have said no. Probably.”

Pia shook her head, pulled open the convent door.

“Sexual harassment is not something we joke about.”

Tania said, “Yeah yeah yeah, whatever.” They walked inside. “You are gay though, right?”

Chapter 31

50,000 feet over North Africa

27-May, 10AM

P
ia could hear every word and she was not pleased. But she kept focused on reading the report on her pad.

“I could get used to flying around in this thing,” Tania said. “Just look out that window, Monique—that’s Tripoli down there. Tripoli! As in Libya. And we’re going to fly right over Rome in another hour.” She pointed. “See the map on the wall? That’s where we are, and the line shows where we’re going. Isn’t that cool?

“Now, here’s the thing.” Tania leaned forward. “If you say
NO
one more fucking time, I’m going to throw you out the window and you’re going to face-plant in Tripoli. You got that, bitch?”

“Tania!” Pia shouted down the aisle. “She just woke up. Let her sort out a few things out first. Don’t make threats.”

“No threats here, Ms. Sabel. I only make promises.” Tania turned to Monique, held her index finger up between them. “Ms. Sabel looks the other way for one minute, just one minute, and it’s whoosh, out the hatch.”

Pia turned to the window as Tania came up the aisle. Tania plopped in the chair facing her.

“OK,” Tania said, “so don’t invite me to sit down.”

Pia shrugged and looked out the window.

“You know,” Tania said, “you’ve got everything. Smarts and skills. Not to mention jets and cars and servants and mansions. And here you are, looking like—”

“Only thing money does is make other people jealous.”

“OK, let’s trade. Everything I have for everything you have.”

Pia leaned across the polished table between them.

Tania pulled back and said, “Hey, I was just kid—”

“Did your mother teach you how to cook?”

“Yeah, as little as she—”

“Mine was teaching me how to chop celery when the killers came in. He wore a red shirt, grabbed her by the throat and held her off the ground while he strangled her. The other guy went into the home office and shot my father in the head.”

“I’m sorry, I—”

“I’ll give you everything I have if you can give me five more minutes with my mom.”

Pia leaned back, turned to the window.

Tania sat still for a long time before wiping her nose. She said, “What the hell triggered that?”

Pia turned back to face her. She said, “Conor, I guess.”

“Survivors are always on a rollercoaster. Silly one minute, depressed the next. We were joking when we went back to the convent. That was the high. Guess what this is. Yeah. So talk to me. What else is it?”

“Alphonse.” Pia tapped a fingernail on her pad. “Our people in DC sent me his background check. High school in DC, college in Paris, a promising career in the Army. Then a court martial, but the charges were dropped. He joined the gendarmes in Lyon.”

“Hey, don’t worry about the court martial. They toss those out like party favors. Been there, done that. But Lyon—didn’t the gendarmes try to arrest you in Lyon?”

“It can’t be him.”

“You don’t sound so sure.”

“The Major thinks it’s him. And then the report came in. I was so sure before.”

“Call him, talk to him. Use your female senses.”

Tania went to the back of the jet. “Hey, Monique, you know how to play poker?”

Pia dialed Alphonse.

“Clément Marot was to meet in Vienna with the man named Elgin Thomas,” he said. The appointment was made the same day he called Sabel Security.”

“We keep hearing that name. Major Jackson thought it was made up, then she found a reservation to Brussels.”

“We find nothing about him in Geneva. The secretary knew nothing of the name, yet they were to meet tonight at ten.”

“I’m … leaving Cameroon,” Pia said.

“To Vienna, as we discussed? Capitaine Villeneuve has cleared my travel. I will be there late this evening. Where will we meet?”

What should she say?

“You are the quiet one, oui? What troubles you?”

No way out of it.

She bit her lip and took a deep breath. She said, “Alphonse, every time I tell you where I’m going, someone tries to kill me.”

Pia counted ten seconds before he responded.

“I see.”

She waited.

“I understand,” he said. “We do not need to meet in Vienna. I do not want the, ehm, suspicions.”