Kiss Me While I sleep (10 page)

The Internet was a wonderful thing, Rodrigo thought. If one knew the right people-and he did-almost nothing on it was safe from scrutiny.

First his people had created a list of the rogue chemists available for hire who had the skill to create such a lethal poison. That last requirement had shrunk the list from several hundred down to nine, which was a much more manageable number.

From there it had simply been a matter of investigating finances. Someone would have received a large amount of money recently. Perhaps the person in question would be intelligent enough to put the money in a numbered account, but perhaps not. Even so, there would be evidence of an influx of cash.

He found that evidence with Dr. Walter Speer, a German national who lived in Amsterdam. Dr. Speer had been fired from a reputable company in Berlin, then from another in Hamburg. He had then relocated to Amsterdam, where he had been getting by but not making a fortune. Dr. Speer, however, had recently purchased a silver Porsche, and paid for it in full. It was child’s play to discover where Dr. Speer banked, and not much more difficult than that for the experts on Rodrigo’s staff to get into the bank’s computer system. A little more than a month ago, Dr. Speer had deposited a million American dollars. The conversion rate had made him a very happy man.

American. Rodrigo was stunned. The
Americans
had paid to have his father killed? That didn’t make sense. Their agreement was too valuable to the Americans for them to interfere; Salvatore had seen to that. Rodrigo hadn’t necessarily agreed with his father on their dealings with the Americans, but it had worked for a number of years and nothing had happened to upset the status quo.

Denise-or whoever she was-had effectively disappeared today, but now he had another link to her, to finding out who she really was and whom she was working for.

Rodrigo wasn’t a man who wasted time; that very night he flew in his private jet to Amsterdam. Locating Dr. Speer’s apartment was child’s play, as was forcing the lock on the door. He was waiting in the dark when Dr. Walter Speer finally came home.

From the moment the door opened, Rodrigo smelled the strong odor of alcohol, and Dr. Speer stumbled a bit as he turned to switch on a lamp.

Rodrigo hit him from behind a split second later, slamming him into the wall to stun him, then throwing him to the floor and straddling him, his fists delivering powerful one-two punches to the doctor’s face. Explosive violence stuns the inexperienced, throws them into such a state of confusion and shock that they are helpless. Dr. Speer was not only inexperienced but inebriated. He couldn’t manage anything in the way of self-defense, not that it would have done any good. Rodrigo was bigger, younger, faster, and skilled at what he did.

Rodrigo hauled him to a sitting position and thrust him against the wall, making sure that his head once more banged hard. Then he gripped the doctor’s coat and pulled him closer for a good look. He liked what he saw.

Huge red lumps were already swelling on the doctor’s face, and blood trickled from both his nose and mouth. His glasses had been broken and hung askew from one ear. The expression in his eyes was one of total incomprehension.

Other than that, Dr. Speer looked to be in his early forties. He had a shock of thick brown hair and was stocky in build, making him slightly bearlike. Before Rodrigo’s art work on them, his features had probably been ordinary.

“Let me introduce myself,” Rodrigo said in accented German. He didn’t speak it well, but could make himself understood. “I am Rodrigo Nervi.” He wanted to let the doctor know exactly with whom he was dealing. He saw the doctor’s eyes widen in alarm; he wasn’t so drunk that he was beyond all good sense.

“A month ago, you received a payment of a million American dollars. Who paid you, and why?”

“I-I… What?” Dr. Speer stammered.

“The money. Who gave it to you?”

“A woman. I don’t know her name.”

Rodrigo shook him so hard his head wobbled on his neck, and his broken glasses went flying. “Are you certain of that?”

“She-she never told me,” Speer gasped.

“What did she look like?”

“Ah-” Speer blinked as he tried to focus his thoughts. “Brown hair. Brown eyes, I think. I did not care how she looked, you understand?”

“Old? Young?”

Again Speer blinked, several times. “Thirties?” he said, making it a question, as if he wasn’t certain of his memory.

So. It had definitely been Denise who had given him the million dollars. Speer didn’t know who had given her the money-that was another trail to follow-but this confirmed everything. Rodrigo had known instinctively from the moment she disappeared that she was the killer, but it was good to know he wasn’t wasting time chasing down false leads.

“You made a poison for her.”

Speer swallowed convulsively, but a spark of professional pride lit his blurry gaze. He didn’t even deny it. “A masterpiece, if I do say so. I took the properties of several deadly toxins and combined them. One hundred percent lethal, if even a half ounce is taken. By the time the delayed symptoms are presented, the damage is so severe there is no effective treatment. I suppose one could try a multiorgan transplant, assuming there just happened to be that many organs available at one time and they were all a match, but if there was any toxin left in the system it would attack those organs, too. No, I don’t think that would work.”

“Thank you, Doctor.” Rodrigo smiled, a cold smile that, if the doctor had been more sober, would have frightened him senseless. Instead he smiled back.

“You’re welcome,” he said. The words were still hanging in the air when Rodrigo broke his neck and let him drop like a rag doll.

Swain lay in his hotel bed the next morning staring at the ceiling and trying to logically connect the dots. Outside a cold November rain was pelting the windows; he hadn’t yet adjusted from the much warmer climate of South America, so he was definitely feeling a chill, even though he was snug in bed. Between the rain and jet lag, he figured he deserved a rest. Besides, it wasn’t as if he was totally slacking off; he was thinking. He didn’t know Lily, so he was hampered in his effort to figure out what she would do. So far she’d proven herself to be inventive, bold, and coolheaded; he’d have to be on top of his game to outthink her. But he did love a challenge, so instead of running around Paris flashing a photograph of her and asking strangers on the street if they’d seen this woman-yeah, like that would work-he tried instead to anticipate what she would do next, so he could get just that one half-step ahead of her that he needed.

Mentally he listed what he knew so far, which wasn’t much.

Point A: Salvatore Nervi had killed her friends. Point B: She had then killed Salvatore Nervi.

Logically, that should be the end of it. Mission accomplished, except for the little detail of getting away from Rodrigo Nervi alive. But she’d managed that; she had made her escape to London, pulled that slick disguise switcheroo and then doubled back. She could possibly have gone to ground here in Paris, using yet another of her seemingly endless supply of alternate identities. It was also possible she’d left the airport, changed her appearance yet again, then returned and taken yet another flight out. She had to know that everything any passenger did in an airport, outside of the restrooms, was caught on some camera somewhere, so she would expect that eventually anyone looking for her would nail down the switches she’d made, and from there be able to run the passenger list and deduce the identities she’d used. She had been forced to do her quick changes to throw off Rodrigo Nervi and buy some time, even though that meant she’d burned three aliases and wouldn’t be able to use them again without raising all sorts of red flags that would get her caught.

With that time, however, she could have left the airport and assumed yet another name and appearance, one that hadn’t been caught on the airport cameras. Her paperwork was good; she knew some talented people. She’d be able to sail through security checkpoints and Customs with no problem. She could be anywhere by now. She could be back in London, snoozing on a red-eye flight back to the States, or even sleeping in the room next to his.

She’d come back to Paris. There had to be some significance in that. Logistically, it made sense; the flight was short, giving her time to land and get away before security could painstakingly go over and over the video to tell how she’d done it, then by process of elimination narrow the list of passenger names down to the one she’d used. By coming back to Paris, she’d also involved yet another government and bureaucracy, slowing the process even more. She could, however, have done the same thing by flying to any other European country. Though the London-to-Paris flight was just an hour, Brussels was even closer. So were Amsterdam and The Hague.

Swain locked his hands behind his head and scowled at the ceiling. There was a great big gaping hole in that reasoning. She could have gone through Customs in London and walked out of the airport long before there was any chance of someone watching the security tapes and figuring out which disguise she’d used. If she didn’t want to stay in London, she could then have simply changed her disguise and gone back a few hours later to catch another flight, and absolutely no one would have made the connection. She’d have been home free. In fact, that would have been a much smarter move than staying in the airport with all those surveillance cameras. So why hadn’t she done that? Either she didn’t think anyone would be able to pick up her identity switch, or she’d had a compelling reason for coming back to Paris at that particular time.

Granted, she wasn’t a field officer, trained in espionage; contract agents were hired for each individual job, sent in to perform a specific duty. Her file mentioned nothing about her being schooled in disguise or evasion techniques. She had to know the Agency would be after her for screwing up the Nervi deal, but it was possible she didn’t know the extent of surveillance in major airports.

He wouldn’t bet the farm on it.

She was too smart, too on top of things. She’d known cameras were watching her every move, though she’d thrown enough curve balls at them to keep them occupied for a while. And she might have decided that giving them more time, by leaving Heathrow and returning later, would give them a chance to… do something. He didn’t know what. Scan her face into the facial-recognition data bank, maybe? She
was
in the Agency’s data bank, but not anywhere else. If, however, someone had scanned her facial structure into Interpol’s database, the cameras at the airport entrances would then have been able to come up with a match before she could get to her gate. Yeah, that could be it. She could have been afraid Rodrigo Nervi would try to have her entered into Interpol’s data.

How could she avoid that danger? By having cosmetic surgery, for one thing. Again, that would be the smart thing for a woman on the run to do. She hadn’t opted for that, though; instead she’d come back to Paris. Maybe going into hiding and not coming out until after she’d had cosmetic alterations would have taken too long. Maybe there was some kind of time limit for something she wanted to get accomplished.

Such as? See Disneyland Paris? Tour the Louvre?

Maybe killing Salvatore Nervi was just the opening act, instead of an end unto itself. Maybe she knew the Agency’s best of the best-namely himself, not that she knew him from Adam’s house cat-was on the job, and it was only a matter of time before she was grabbed. That kind of faith in his abilities made him feel all warm inside. At any rate, say his thinking was on the right track: she had something she wanted to do, something so urgent that hours counted, and she was afraid she wouldn’t have time to do it.

Swain groaned and sat up, rubbing his hands over his face. There was a flaw in that logic, too. She’d have had a better chance of accomplishing whatever it was if she’d gone to ground and had the cosmetic surgery. He kept coming back to that. The only thing that made sense of her actions was if there was a metaphoric time bomb somewhere, something that wouldn’t wait a few months and had to be accomplished
right now,
or at least in a short period of time. But if there really was something along those lines, something that posed a world danger, all she had to do was pick up a phone and call it in, let a group of experts handle whatever it was rather than her trying to pull a Lone Ranger.

Scratch “world danger” as a motivation.

Something personal, then. Something she wanted to do herself, and felt a compelling urge to get done as soon as possible.

He thought about the contents of her file. Her motivation for killing Salvatore Nervi was the deaths of a couple of her friends and their adopted daughter a few months ago. She’d done the smart thing and laid her groundwork for that, taken her time, got close enough to Nervi to do the job. So why wasn’t she doing the smart thing now? Why was an intelligent, professional agent doing something so dumb it would ultimately get her caught?

Forget motivation, he suddenly thought. He was a man; he’d go crazy trying to figure out what was going through a woman’s mind. If he had to pick the most likely scenario, he’d say she wasn’t finished with the Nervi family. She’d struck them hard, but now she’d circled back for a killing blow. They had pissed her off big-time, and she was going to make them pay-

He heaved a sigh of satisfaction. There. That felt right And damn if it didn’t provide motivation, too. She’d lost people she loved, and she was striking back no matter what the cost to herself. He could understand that. The reasoning was simple and clean, without all the why-do-this and not-do-that second-guessing.