Diplomatic Immunity (41 page)

So now I have done what I came to do. Marie Lefebre knows what I know. The moment I walk out the door she will be packing her bags to leave. But seeing her sitting now, so composed on the bed, I cannot help thinking of the scene down at the morgue and Pascal’s broken body; and the scene Tuesday morning in the basement, Toshio’s glassy eyes staring at nothing.

This should be worse for her, I think.

Reaching down, I grab her arm and haul her out to the living room. She swears in French and tries to pull away.

“Pascal sent you a message.” I lean over to the recorder.

She looks from the recorder to me, thrown now and uncertain, while I hold her arm tight. With my free hand I crank up the volume, then I hit rewind a moment, and then play.

“—and you, Pascal, you killed Toshio.”

Traffic noise on the tape, distant, from down on the Drive. In my mind’s eye I can see Pascal’s face. He is looking right through me. Thinking, I know now, of Marie. Here in the living room I watch her beside me. At last, on the tape, Pascal speaks.

“Le plus beau moment de l’amour c’est quand on monte l’escalier.”

Marie makes a sound, her lips part.
Le plus beau moment de l’amour c’est quand on monte l’escalier.
The same words Marie’s super shouted after me. The same words he must have been shouting at Pascal for the past three months as Pascal followed Marie up to her apartment. The best part of passion is the walk up the stairs.

How right he was, I say.

She continues to stare down at the recorder. Finally I release her arm and turn away. When I get to the door, I look back, but she has not moved. The tape plays on.

Rachel’s crying for her mother, sobbing into my chest; Mike up on the terrace shouting at the guards on the walkway, ordering them to back off; a few moments’ silence and then that sound of crumpling metal, a six-car pileup over Pascal’s broken body.

Marie’s eyes remain dry.

I let myself out. As I move across the landing I hear a cry rise behind me and I pause, but it is not her. Not Marie, but the tourist who witnessed Pascal’s fall, the woman up on the UN terrace caught forever in the fatal moment, screaming. My hand on the banister, I hang my head and descend the well-worn stairs.

SATURDAY

44

A
FTER THE MORNING
’
S BIG POWWOW UP ON THIRTY-EIGHT
I spend a couple of hours in my office, playing catch-up with the paperwork on my desk. Problems arising from the General Assembly session and the more usual troubles from out in the field. Added to these is a flood of queries relating to Afghanistan; it seems that someone has suggested my office as an alternate destination for anything addressed to Toshio Hatanaka. I will probably be receiving this stuff for weeks before the mix-up is straightened out. In the meantime I pile it all into a box. Then, when my own work is done, my desktop visible again, I take the box down the hall to Toshio’s locked office. The box is perched on my thigh, my knee pressed against Toshio’s door, and I am digging in my pocket for Toshio’s key, when Mike comes strolling toward me down the corridor.

“Heavy?” he inquires.

I hand him the box, then open the door. He follows me in.

“Misdirected mail,” I explain as he deposits the box on the desk. I tell him about the mix-up and my admittedly crude solution: The problem is now someone else’s. Mei Tan, Toshio’s secretary, will have the task of guiding Toshio’s yet-to-be-named replacement through all the paperwork in here.

Mike turns to the open door and starts peeling off the security notice, the No Entry sign.

“You pleased how things went this morning?” he asks me. The big meeting upstairs, he means. Mike and Eckhardt were both there, along with me, Patrick, and the Secretary-General.

“I’m pleased it’s over,” I say.

He leans back, tearing the notice off in one sweeping motion. Then he crushes it into a large ball.

“How’s Rachel?”

“She spent the night back home.”

“Permanent?”

“Nope.”

Almost the first thing Rachel said to me over breakfast was that she wasn’t staying, and the next thing she said was that she’d made an appointment for herself with Dr. Covey. After the emotional roller coaster she has been on the past few days, I had, naturally, feared the worst, that she might revisit the dark territory of withdrawal, the place into which she retreated after Sarah’s death, the first stop on the way back to anorexia and the intensive care ward. Instead, she seems to have come through it, battered but determined to go on. Determined not to be one of life’s victims. Though I cannot take any credit for how well she seems to have coped with what has happened, I am more pleased and more relieved than I ever believed possible to find that my daughter has discovered in herself that kind of quiet courage. I take it as a sign, I suppose, that in the years since Sarah’s death, I have not failed totally as a father.

“Look at the pluses,” says Mike. “For one, you don’t have to see the goofballs she brings home for supper.”

I give him a look.

She’s a good kid, he says. She’ll be fine.

Though being a good kid is no shield from harm, certainly not in this city; that is not what Mike really means. He is simply telling me that I cannot lay a protective hand over my daughter’s head forever. From Mike I appreciate the platitude, the reassurance and hope that he wants to convey.

We stand by the desk a moment, looking around Toshio’s office just as we did Tuesday morning. The knowledge of what has happened since, everything our investigation uncovered, seems to have given the place a darker, more somber aspect. And when my gaze falls on the place where Rachel lay curled up and quivering yesterday, a cold hand seems to touch me. Whoever the next occupant of this office might be, this is one place that in the future I will be going out of my way to avoid.

As we head back to my office I ask Mike what he’s doing up here anyway. “What happened to the grand Security review?”

“We just finished phase one,” he tells me. “Eckhardt kicked my butt for an hour, I went and kicked ass downstairs.”

In the aftermath of Toshio’s murder, the discovery of how it was done, the inevitable reassessment of security procedures has been set in motion. Upstairs this morning the SG made it clear that he was not a happy man. He spent much of the time pacing the floor, yelling, while the rest of us hung our heads, jotting unnecessary notes in our files. He has demanded a full review of UN Security, to be followed, naturally, by a full and lengthy report. There will be no glory in the task, so Eckhardt has palmed the whole thing off on Mike. Which Mike ruefully accepts as a justified penance for everything that has gone wrong in his department.

“I was thinking maybe you had something to tell me,” Mike remarks now, lobbing the balled-paper wad into the trash can as he strolls into my office.

“About Rache?”

“No.”

When I glance over, the look Mike gives me is unexpectedly direct and probing. Sitting down, I rearrange the pens on my desk.

“Actually,” Mike says, “I was thinking you had something to tell everyone. Upstairs this morning.”

I shrug and shake my head.

“You sure?”

“What’s this, a quiz?”

When I smile, Mike very pointedly does not. “I went down the morgue, Sam. Spoke to the guys you saw when you identified Nyeri’s body. I saw the stuff from his pockets.”

I take a moment with that.

“Also,” he says, “I talked with our guys in Surveillance. Thought I’d better smooth things out there, put them straight about you. Let them know you’re not the jerkoff they think you are.”

“Did it work?”

He just looks at me. “They tell me you went back there, got them to help you with the editing. That you spliced together some of yesterday’s tapes.”

“Guilty.”

“So have you got something to tell me now?” he asks, and by this time, of course, it is clear to me that this is no offhand inquiry.

I had asked myself, naturally, how it would be if someone wasn’t satisfied with the Lemtov-Nyeri tie-up, everything that seemed proven by my taped conversation with Pascal out on the North Lawn. Lemtov, unsurprisingly, denies the whole thing categorically, denies any relationship whatsoever with Pascal. But last night the SG invited the Russian ambassador up to the thirty-eighth floor to peruse the FBI report. That, along with Pascal Nyeri’s death and my tape of the final conversation, has convinced the Russians that Lemtov is finished. The carefully constructed edifice of his career is in ruins; his ambassador is in no mood to listen to his pleas of innocence. And for her part, Jennifer has accepted the chain of events at face value too; and so, apparently, has Patrick. But the possibility that Mike Jardine might not be satisfied, that he might independently uncover at least part of the truth, that one I missed. On reflection, I really shouldn’t have.

“You saw the passport?”

“Ah-ha,” Mike says. “French. And I saw the date of issue. Yesterday.”

“You noticed that.”

Mike waits. He has me on the hook, he has no intention of letting me slip free. So at last I reach into my desk drawer and take out the videotape. I turn it over in my hands.

“Lemtov should never have been here.”

“Says who?”

“He should never have been here, Mike. And I don’t mean just what he put Rachel through. This is a guy whose only interest in the UN was the cover it gave him. Now he’s out, and if I had any part in that, I’m not sorry.”

“Okay, so you’re not sorry.” He points. “What’s on the tape?”

“Do you want Lemtov back here?”

“Sure. Great guy.” Mike squints. “What are you saying, do I want Lemtov back here? Guy’s a crook. I want him back here like I wanna dose of the clap. Now, what’s on the goddamn tape?”

No way around it. On my way to the VCR in the corner I close my office door; then, as I slide the tape into the machine, Mike comes and stands by me. The tape clicks, begins to play, and Mike leans forward.

“When’s this?” he asks.

On the screen the members of the Security Council are trooping into the side chamber. There is a date and a time in the top left-hand corner.

“Lemtov’s just gotten the word from the Tunku that Rachel’s gone,” I tell Mike. “This is when Lemtov asked for a recess in the side chamber.”

Mike grunts and watches the screen.

“Outside the side chamber now,” I say, locating the visual as the scene changes to a guard by a door and an empty corridor. I point to the time on the screen: a few minutes after the previous footage in the Security Council. “You’re still in Surveillance,” I tell him. “I’ve gone to help Rachel run.”

On the screen the side-chamber door opens and Ambassador Froissart comes out. Mike nods, remembering. “He went to the can.”

We watch as Froissart passes beneath three different cameras. Then another figure appears, a woman holding out a microphone.

“Journalists,” Mike comments quietly. “Man can’t even take a leak in peace.”

Froissart appears to give the journalist the brush-off, then he disappears into the men’s rest room. And to Mike’s surprise my edited tape stays with the journalist. Marie Lefebre. Mike turns to me, puzzled.

“Watch,” I say, touching the screen.

He does, silent for the next two minutes. We see Marie send a message from her pager; then she hurries along the corridors, down the escalators to the public concourse. Then down another floor to the basement. At last she enters the UN bookshop, where she crouches unnoticed and takes the envelope from her purse. When she places the envelope behind a row of books, Mike’s head goes back. His glance shoots from me back to the screen. After a moment Marie goes hurrying out of the bookshop. The tape jumps, fast-forwards, and when it slows again we see Pascal arrive. He goes straight to where Marie deposited the envelope, reaches behind the row of books, collects the envelope, then leaves.

“Fuck.” Mike frowns. And then recalls the contents of the blood-encrusted envelope down at the morgue. “The French passport?”

I hold a finger up: Wait.

We watch the final scenes play out. Pascal hurries up the stairs, tries not to alert the guards by running. He gets himself to the exit as fast as he can. And then he is out. Striding fast. And suddenly, right behind him, I appear. When I grab Pascal’s arm, the video freeze-frames.

“You saw what happened after that,” I tell Mike.

“That woman,” he says, facing me. “The journalist.”

“Marie Lefebre.”

“She was like, what, the go-between or something? Between Nyeri and the French fucking ambassador?”

I incline my head. Gesturing to the VCR, I ask Mike if he would like to view it all again. He declines the offer, then takes a quiet moment with himself, refiguring the whole sequence of events. He asks me, finally, where Lemtov fits in.

“He doesn’t.” Ejecting the videotape, I return to my desk and lock it away in the bottom drawer. Then I clasp my hands together on the blotter. “Lemtov had nothing to do with Toshio’s murder. And it wasn’t Lemtov who was using Pascal to fool around with the paperwork. It was the French.”

“So why’d Lemtov frame Rachel?”

“Because he thought I was framing him. I mean, see it from his side. He’d defrauded UN funds, he was laundering money big-time, but what were we chasing? We were looking for Toshio’s murderer. Lemtov was guilty of plenty. That’s why he wanted me off his back, that’s why he used Rachel. But he didn’t know a damn thing about Toshio’s murder.”

“Plus, you threatened him. Like I told you not to.”

I open one hand, acknowledging the error. Mike looks at me askance.

“And this all came to you in a dream or something? You had a vision the French ambassador did it, so you went and checked the tapes?”

I remind him about the French passport. After finding that on Pascal’s body, it was really just a matter of working backward.

“Seem to recall you volunteered to go identify the body only after you already looked at the surveillance tapes,” he says.

“Remember the missing pink file? The one Pascal returned to Toshio’s office? Soon as I saw it I knew it was wrong.”

“You guessed straight off Nyeri spiked it?”

“It was all those figures on Po Lin’s investments again. Company names. Details we’d seen before. Even Jade Moon got another mention. The Kwok brothers.”

Mike lifts his head. “Whoa back. Nyeri spiked Hatanaka’s report with information we already had?”

“And do you recall where we got that information?”

Mike pauses, remembering what I told him. My source was a journalist. Then he glances back at the VCR.

“Not her,” he says. “Please.”

“Marie Lefebre. The very same.”

“That trip down to Chinatown?”

“We were wasting our time. Just like she meant us to.”

Mike rests his forehead in his hand a moment. The realization of just how wide of the mark our investigation remained throughout has hit him hard in his professional pride.

“All those investments of Po Lin’s?”

“Total crap.” Rising from my chair, I come around and prop my butt against the desk. I fold my arms. “The French must have picked up on Po Lin’s connection with Jade Moon from the Brits. Probably the Lefebre woman again. The French made up some numbers, then pointed us at Po Lin and the Kwoks. They knew that’d stir up trouble, at least keep us busy. They wanted to direct us away from Asahaki and Lemtov because both those trails touched Pascal.”

Mike considers that. “You figure that’s why Lady Nicola told you what she’d been up to with the Kwoks.”

“Right. It was like she said, she considered the Po Lin business closed. She figured I wouldn’t lay off till I knew, so she told me.”

“So the Brits were just innocent bystanders.”

I make a sound. The confirmation of Po Lin’s execution came through this morning. “Innocent bystanders” hardly seems an appropriate judgment on the Brits.

Mike thinks some more, not quite sure where this leaves us. He returns to the fact he has a handle on. “Nyeri did it, yeah? He was the one whacked Hatanaka.”

“What I said to Pascal out on the North Lawn yesterday, what you heard on the tape. Everything about him wanting something more, a better life, well, that was right. But it wasn’t Lemtov who offered him a better life, I got that wrong. It was her. Marie Lefebre.”

“Come on. You’re guessing.”

“I’ve spoken to the super in her apartment building. Pascal was a regular nighttime visitor at Marie’s for the last three months.”