Mrs. John Doe (11 page)

Later, if Nora were asked to return to the apartment house in Paris, she wouldn't have been able to find it. They entered the city from the east at noon, and Craig drove down Boulevard Henry IV and across the Pont de Sully into the Latin Quarter. They passed the university and entered into an intricate grid of smaller streets crowded with summer-term students and lined with shops and cafés, all looking very much alike. Two or three turns down various streets and finally Craig pulled over and parked across from a medium-size limestone apartment house.

He took his cellphone from his pocket and punched the keypad. He held the instrument to his ear for a long moment, frowning. Then he broke the connection, looking over at the building across the street. He opened his door.

“She's still not answering,” he said. “Wait here.”

“No,” Nora replied. “I'm coming with you.”

He turned to confront her. “Nora, if anyone recognizes you from that shot on the telly—”

“They won't,” she said. “I'm wearing a scarf and sunglasses, and I'm not wearing the coat from the picture. Besides, there are two of us; everyone's looking for a lone woman, not one half of a couple. Is there a doorman?”

“No.”

“Security cameras?”

“One in the lobby and one in the elevator, but our company apartment is on the first floor, so I always take the stairs.”

Nora began to question this before she remembered that he was European; he meant the
second
floor in American English. “Right—I'll keep my head down in the lobby, but I'm coming with you. I'll feel safer in there than here on the street.”

“She's obviously not there,” Craig said, “but I'm hoping she's left a message, some indication of where she is…”

“Let's find out,” Nora said, and she got out of the car before he could change his mind and leave her there. They crossed the road and entered the main door to a tiny foyer lined with mailboxes and a row of buttons. He pressed the fourth one from the top and waited. Nora noted that the name beside the button was
N
OONE
. “Is that her name? Noone?”

“No,” he said, pressing the buzzer again.

“So, who's Noone?”

“No one,” he said.

Nora opened her mouth to ask another question and then shut it again.
Noone: no one
. The wonderful world of spies…

When it was clear there would be no response, he produced a key ring and opened the inner door to the lobby. This was a dingy space with brown walls and a brown tiled floor. A tiny lift was just ahead, and the staircase was on the right. She clung to Craig's arm, keeping her head down, and allowed him to lead her up the stairs. The narrow, dimly lit hallway here had four doors, and they went to the second one on the right.

Before he unlocked the door, Craig turned to her and whispered, “Wait here. I'll go in first.”

She nodded, noting the odd expression on his face. He was worried, and now she was worried too. It occurred to her that the girl had come here two nights ago, and she hadn't answered her phone since then. The possible import of that fact finally got through to Nora. She waited while he unlocked the door and stepped inside, disabled the alarm, and switched on a light.

She could see from the hallway, so his sharp curse was superfluous. She took off her sunglasses and followed him inside, quickly shutting the door behind her. They stood in an attractive, carpeted living room, staring over at the figure that lay very still on the far side of it, beyond a couch and an armchair and an overturned coffee table, near the curtained windows. Nora saw a spill of blond hair, an outflung arm, a blouse and skirt, a beautiful leg in a high-heeled shoe. She smelled the faint stench of recent death. She smelled something else, also faint but unmistakable: Shalimar.

Dear God, she thought. That beautiful girl…

“Solange!” Craig said, and he hurried over to kneel beside the body.

Nora stared from the entryway. The shock of that word was almost greater than the shock of seeing death. She watched as he knelt there, looking down at the still form, remembering Vivian Howard's words from the hotel two nights ago.

Solange—how's that for a name? She works for him, a secretary or whatever. I understand she's very pretty. He's bought a big house in the country for them to live in. They're getting married as soon as—as soon as…

“She was strangled,” Craig murmured. He stood up, looking around the room, his gaze locking on the closed curtains of the left window, which were moving slightly, billowing inward. He strode to that window and threw the curtains open. Bright sunlight poured into the apartment. Nora saw the perfectly round hole cut into the glass just above the window's latch and the fire escape beyond it. She joined him at the window, looking down one story to the alley behind the building. Across the alley was a commercial structure of some kind with industrial windows; it would probably be empty at night. No one would see anyone on the fire escape. It would have been so easy.

“Why wasn't there an alarm on the windows?” she asked.

Craig shook his head in disgust. “We requested it, but they haven't complied yet. At least they installed the door alarm and the cameras— Wait a sec!” He ran into the bedroom, and Nora could hear him rummaging around in there. Then he returned to the main room, an angry scowl on his face.

“The video file is gone, the feed from those two cameras.” He pointed toward the front door, then to a bookcase in a corner. Nora squinted, but she couldn't see a camera in either place. They must be very small, she thought, fiber-optic whatever. She knew nothing about cameras. Craig sank to his knees beside Solange's body again.

“Damn it to hell!” he cried, staring down.

Nora looked at the ugly purple bruises that mottled the girl's slender neck. Then she noticed something else. “What's that, under her hand?”

Craig gently lifted the lifeless fingers and picked up a crumpled ball of white paper. He opened it, and Nora knew what it was even before she saw the handwriting. Craig read it before reaching up to give it to her. Nora stared.

Pal
—

Sorry for cloak-and-dagger. Change of plan, had to get you out of GB ASAP. This is Solange; give her the envelope. Meet me CdeG, Air France, 3 p.m. Jacques will take you—he works for us. Trust no one else, and don't use your phone. We're going home. Always keep me close to your heart.

—
Coop

“The
real
second message,” Craig muttered. He rose to his feet. “He was on his way to London to come here, to De Gaulle Airport. Solange was supposed to deliver
this
note to you at the museum. They took him, and they killed her. And if I ever get my hands on that Paki bastard, there won't be enough left of him to
bury
!”

Nora looked down at the girl. “We have to call the police.”

“We can't,” he said. “We were never here. Besides, they'd arrest us, and it could be days before Mr. Howard straightened it out. And De Gaulle is no good; they'll be looking for you there. I'm getting you out of France and putting you on the next plane from Heathrow to New York, and then I'm—”

“No,” she said.

He stared at her. “What?”

“No,” she said again. “I'm not going back to New York. Not now, not while Jeff is—wherever he is. Besides, what makes you think I'd be any safer there than I am here? You and I are going back to London, to Bill Howard, and we're going to find my husband.
That's
what's going to happen now.”

The authority in her voice surprised both of them. More than that, more than her conviction, Nora was surprised by the anger she felt. As in the hotel room this morning, she was furious, and now she gave herself over to it.

“Who are these people, these terrorists?” she cried. “By what right do they invade our lives? And who in their right mind would
help
them do it? Look at this girl; she's not much older than my daughter. Jeff is trying to keep the world safe, he's working to protect everyone, he and Bill Howard. And you, Craig. I'm not going home until we find him!”

They stood in the silent apartment, regarding each other over the body of the pretty young woman. A shaft of brilliant afternoon sunshine slanted in through a gap in the curtains, spotlighting the lifeless form. It was horrible, obscene, yet oddly beautiful, almost as though this were not a real victim but a young actress in a play or film, and some award-winning
auteur
had carefully positioned her and lit her body for full cinematic effect. This eerily lovely tableau belonged in the work of Spielberg or Hitchcock, not here on this dusty floor.

The hot tears stung Nora's eyes, but she didn't even try to wipe them away. She tore her gaze from the sight and watched Craig Elder, waiting for his decision. After a moment, he nodded.

“Come on,” he said. “Let's go.”

“We have to tell Mr. Howard,” Craig said when they were back in the car.

Nora nodded, but she was thinking of something else as she buckled her seatbelt. “Where are we going?”

“North.” He pulled out of the parking space, and after several intricate turns, they were crossing the Seine. “We have to get back into England, and I'd say public transportation is out, wouldn't you? I need to make some calls—Mr. Howard, then a contact in Boulogne. But let's get out of Paris first. See if you can get any news on the radio.”

Nora fiddled with the controls on the dashboard. Snippets of various kinds of music and talk radio programs came and went while she searched.

“Whose car is this?” she asked.

“Ours,” he said. “It isn't trackable, and it sure as hell isn't bugged if that's what you're worried about.”

“That's what I'm worried about. What about your phone?”

“Nope,” he said. “Prepaid disposables,
always
.”

She glanced down at the car phone between the seats.

“Inactive,” he told her.

A deep male voice came from the speakers, and Nora tried to keep up with his rapid French. It was the top of the hour, two o'clock, and the headlines were just coming on. The lead story was about a government scandal of some kind, graft and kickbacks among politicians, five arrested. Then a homicide in Brittany. A hiking accident in the Dordogne, three injured. The Estivade festival in Dijon was officially open for business. By the time he started on a charity ball attended by Marion Cotillard and Ludivine Sagnier, Nora was beginning to wonder.

“What happened to Pinède?” she said. “It was all over the news this morning—”

Craig gave a low whistle. “Cor, that was fast!”

Nora turned to look at him. “What was fast?”

“The intervention,” he said. “The word must have been spread to the media by certain, um, agencies. Total news blackout.”

Nora switched off the radio. “Does this mean they're not looking for me anymore?”

“No, it just means they're not announcing it. They're probably looking even harder now.”

There was nothing to say to that, so Nora said nothing. She knew that her photo could still be online; even a deliberate blackout couldn't get rid of all the images everywhere. She leaned back in her seat and closed her eyes. When she opened them again, they were passing through Montmartre on their way to the northern
autoroute
. She studied her companion as he drove. He handled the car with skill, and he kept his eyes on the road, with brief glances in the rearview mirror. She remembered Jacques doing the same thing yesterday, scanning the terrain to be sure they were not followed. After a while, curiosity got the better of her.

“Who are you?” she said. “And don't give me that jazz about being a student in Dublin. You've never been to Dublin in your life, and you're not a student. Where are you from, really? And how did you get into this—this line of work?”

At first, she didn't think he was going to answer. He continued to drive in his silent, efficient way; he might not have even heard her. Then she realized that he was thinking, forming a reply. As the northern reaches of the city melted away into suburbs and small towns and the long road ahead he began to talk.

He was originally from Ireland, as he'd claimed, but not Dublin. He was born in Belfast. His father, Craig Elder the elder, owned a thriving auto business. This was in the seventies, the days of the rallies and the skirmishes and Bernadette Devlin. By the time Craig the younger was born, his father had had enough of IRA bombings and threats. He reluctantly sold the business for much less than it was worth and moved the family to London. A relative there helped him open a new auto shop, but it was never as successful as the one back home. For the first time in generations, the family was poor.

Craig grew up on a council estate, with a rough group of kids for neighbors, many of them refugees from the Middle East and South Asia. He saw poverty and crime and drugs and the beginnings of homegrown terrorism all around him, and he hated it. His mother died, and his father married a woman Craig couldn't stand. When he finished school, he got out of the house by enlisting in the army. A year in Wiltshire, rising from private to lance corporal, then a tour in Afghanistan. Back in England, he reenlisted for want of anything better to do. He nearly married a girl he was dating, but it didn't work out. She wanted children and stability; he wanted action. Then he met Bill Howard, who was searching the armed forces for recruits to his team.

Mr. Howard gave a speech at the base, making the jobs he proposed sound very thrilling indeed. His group wasn't like the usual government agencies, he told them. It was smaller, and he was looking for people who wanted work that was hands-on and action-oriented. In other words, military-trained secret agents for queen and country. Craig was the first soldier to volunteer, and Mr. Howard became more of a father figure to him than Elder the elder had been.

“That was five years ago—I'm twenty-eight now—and here I am,” he concluded. “I have a mingy little room in Bayswater, I see me da once a year at Christmas, I have two birds who don't know about each other, and I'm in debt for betting on football. I've got my eye on a condo in Notting Hill and a time-share in Barbados, but for those I'll need a rise in salary.” He grinned over at Nora before returning his attention to the road.

Nora said nothing, but she was secretly amazed. Excepting the difference in countries, his story was remarkably similar to her husband's early life. Jeff was from a relatively poor family in Connecticut, and he'd attended the state university on an ROTC scholarship before joining the marines. He'd been in Grenada in 1983, but then he'd gotten stuck in a desk job at the USMC recruiting center in Newport News. When his current employers approached him, he'd jumped at the chance. His reasons had been the same as Craig's: He'd wanted action, and he'd wanted to make a difference. He also hadn't had a place to call home. Nora had changed that…

“We'd better get off the motorway for a while,” Craig said, and she snapped to attention. “I have to make those phone calls, and I think we're being followed.”

Nora didn't dare turn around, but she looked into the rearview mirror, studying the lanes of traffic behind them. And there it was, a few cars back on their left.

A gray Citroën.