Espionage Games Read online

  “You still haven’t said where you are.”

  “The Solomon Islands. We leave soon.”

  “We? Who’s we?” He spoke to someone, the phone pressed away from his mouth, his words muffled. In the background, Cat heard the whispering tones of a woman, dulcet and sweet. When he came back on, he said. “We’re on our way to Papua.”

  “Who is with you?”

  “We stopped to refuel, restock supplies, eat a good meal. We’re ...” More murmurs followed before Michel’s voice returned, as dulcet and sweet as the mutterings of his traveling companion. “We’re laying over for the night. The pilot needs some sleep.”

  “I’ll bet she does. Son nom?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Young? Built? Beautiful?”

  “Old, fat, and ugly.”

  “Are you her only passenger?”

  “I am her unauthorized freight. I appealed to her better nature. She took pity on me. I was about to be arrested for indecent exposure.” By using one of their prearranged code words, he had shifted from a galling conversation to a serious one.

  “What have I told you before about taking your clothes off in public?”

  “It couldn’t be helped. I was ... as they say ... withering in my bloom, lost in solitary gloom.”

  A line from Alexander Pope’s poem Eloise and Abelard. Michel had been forced to stop someone from talking ... not a man but a woman ... the poem alluding to a nunnery having been the clue. “What happened to your clothes? Did you toss them away?”

  “I was forced to open the bottomless pit.”

  And he opened the bottomless pit; and there arose a smoke out of the pit, as the smoke of a great furnace; and the sun and the air were darkened by reason of the smoke of the pit.

  The evidence of their crime had gone the way of the chariots, its nearness to the sun assuring a fiery immolation.

  “I have baptized myself with fire and water.”

  From the Book of Matthew, a verse Michel quoted often enough for Cat to have memorized it. I baptize you with water for repentance. But after me will come one who is more powerful than I, whose sandals I am not fit to carry. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire.

  “It was all very clean,” he said. “An accident that couldn’t be helped.”

  “And your pilot friend? She knows what you did?”

  “Only that I had business to take care of. She has a wicked tongue, this one.” He said something in English to the unnamed lady, his words garbled. She guffawed with exuberance and a hint of wickedness. “Plus a hearty appetite. For wine, food, and other pleasures.”

  “Does she know what you did? What you have done? What you mean to do?”

  “She is as duplicitous as we, ma douce. Are you jealous?”

  Cat whipped back and forth, the breeze off the river whipping with her and swirling her hair about her shoulders. Even if she sounded breezy over the phone, her anger was intense, nearly uncontainable. He would pay for this. He would pay in ways he could not imagine.

  “What will you do to her when she becomes a liability?”

  “It is what I will do to her before she becomes a liability.”

  She realized she was close to the Préfecture de Police. With the mobile pressed to her ear and her mind in another place, she had marched without regard to location. She could have drawn attention to herself. Talked too loudly. Shown her agitation. Become a person of interest. Inhaling a deep breath, she lowered her head, berating Michel in lower tones of lyrical displeasure. He had never done this to her before, cut off all communications. She had been fearing the worst. His death would have been tragic. She would have mourned and cried and cursed God. And then she would have damned him to Hell for being a stupid son of a bitch. He was never careful, always thinking himself immortal. His fingerprints and mug shots and modus operandi were on file with Interpol, linking him to numerous crimes, among them weapons smuggling, drug trafficking, and child pornography. Cat was also in Interpol’s sights, but for lesser crimes. Forgery, theft, and embezzlement. They were a pair made for havoc.

  “How long before you come home?”

  “We are island hopping. Taking our time. Sunning ourselves on beaches. Making love beneath the stars.” The bastard was teasing her, making her jealous, but also driving home a point. He controlled her, and not the other way around.

  Alternately known as Misha or Mikhail or Michael, depending on his whims and his mission, he had unbreakable ties to the Milieu, the murky syndicate of mobsters operating in and around Paris. Just like the mob she was associated with, his mob was also an outgrowth of the French Maghrebi, simply referred to as the Moors, their Arabic origins rooted in western Africa. Some still clung to their Muslim ways. Others had been Westernized through blood and marriage, mixing Christian ancestry with Arabic tradition. All retained their savagery. Marginalization in an inhospitable country had turned them into dangerous weapons. The blackness of Michel’s eyes and hair, the permanent tan of his skin, the paleness of his heart, the beauty of his face, the build of his body, the darkness of his emotions, and the heat of his loins were all characteristics of his heritage, both of birth and of upbringing in the slums of Paris. Though his name hadn’t yet been linked to any single street murder, he was known as a hit man highly valued for his imaginative skills and his savagery.

  He added one more insult. “We plan to acquire matching tans on deserted beaches.”

  “Nique ta mère.” Hers was a spiteful voice.

  “Fuck yours, too.” His was a menacing and barely audible voice.

  Her greatest fear was of his capture. Were her partner identified by authorities as the notorious Michel Desmarais, whose name was known but face was not, except on blotters under different aliases, he could be extradited to Morocco or Syria, where his name had been linked to two assassinations of high-ranking officials. Once in custody, he would break quickly, nothing to prevent him from identifying Katerine Cécile Arnaud Madoc as his associate. Even though this magnificent man was wholly enamored of her, wanted her more than money or power, and would kill for her to prove it, nothing in God’s creation could stop him from identifying her. Gladly. Joyfully. And singing praises. Michel was strong of body but weak of will. Given the right circumstances, the suitable sequence of torture methods, the withdrawal of creature comforts, the racking of his body, or worse, the scarring of his beauty, he would confess everything, leaving no detail unsaid. And while Michel enjoyed inflicting pain, he could not endure it.

  “Does your pilot have an itinerary?”

  “One place is like another.”

  She had crossed the Rue de la Cité and reached the Quai de la Corse, backtracking toward her apartment off the Rue de Rivoli. The gendarme had long ago melted into the crowd of tourists and ambling Parisians. No one near the Préfecture de Police had taken an interest in her. She freely resumed swearing at her darling Michel, calling him bâtard and sauvage. Her French was rapid and stinging, but her anger did not impress him. The more she swore, the more he laughed. Snidely. Maliciously. Throughout her tirade, he spoke not a word, his laughter eventually subsiding and his heavy breathing fading away, as he would one day fade away, a snake shedding its skin and slithering into a muddy slick to be seen no more. This is what terrified her the most. Not her own life. But of losing him.

  She became quiet, waiting for a traffic signal to turn before crossing the street. Also waiting for something else. A word of endearment. An apology. A retort. An explanation. Michel remained silent.

  “And our sheep in wolf’s clothing?”

  “We won’t have to worry about him ever again.”

  “Merde! You’ve said that before!”

  “I left no witnesses. He’s caught like a rat in a trap. This time, they’ll hang him. I am sure of it.”

  He was equivocating, of course. She could hear it in his voice. He wasn’t as cool or calculating as he imagined himself to be. He was weak and ineffectual, careless and prideful, and glossing
over crucial facts. For Cat, details were important. Surety was indispensable. Peace of mind was worth gold. “Is Coyote alive? Yes or no?”

  “He breathes yet.”

  “Is the woman?”

  “She is in heaven, rhapsodizing with the angels. She was cleverer than we thought. But she won’t be talking to anyone about you or me.”

  Madelyn Gibbons had been their financial guru, the woman who constructed the framework, set up the money trails, opened the offshore accounts, managed the blind trusts, handled the paperwork, and made sure everything was in place before transferring the completed package to Cat, who pushed a button that sent the money in dozens of directions before landing in a fixed number of accounts. Authorities were pursuing Coyote and anyone associated with him. And Gibbons had become a liability. She had failed her most crucial task, because despite repeated assurances, the wire transfers were traceable. If Coyote could find the trail, others could as well, eventually leading agents to NBT Limited. The bank had to be destroyed, and with it, its overseer.

  Michel had glossed over an important detail. “And the trail? The evidence?” she asked.

  He was holding back. She repeated the question. When at last he spoke, his words were measured. He was more worried than he had let on. Something had gone wrong. She could hear it in his voice. He wasn’t as confident as the young man she met three years ago. With maturity, came care. With care, came fear. He was becoming a very fearful man. It wasn’t true what experts say about cold-blooded sociopaths who fear nothing but are capable of everything. They do fear one thing. They fear their own deaths.

  But then he shoved aside his fear and tittered with laughter, saying, “Quelle explosion!”

  The pulse of her racing heart pounded in her ears. It was an unusual sensation. She recognized it as fear. Fear was not in her inventory of emotions, and hadn’t been since a child of twelve, when she mutilated a vile man who tried to have his way with her. After it was done, in a dark alley where no one heeded his screams, where she had used a shiv to poke out his eyes before mutilating his genitals and shoving them down his throat, she had been reborn. Compunction, guilt, revulsion, but most of all fear, lifted away, never to be experienced again. Until very recently. It seemed she and Michel shared yet another commonality. “Collateral damage?

  “Only ashes remain.”

  “And her laptop? The one she takes everywhere?”

  “At the bottom of the ocean.”

  Her anger subsided. Michel had exceeded all expectations. He was worth keeping, in her bed and in her life. “We have much to talk about.”

  “Aren’t you going to say merci?”

  Even with the explosion and subsequent fire, the servers and computers at NBT Limited could still be recoverable. Except for one fact. Two actually. Once the main office in Sydney got wind of the sabotage, there would have been a mad scramble to cut all communications and obliterate any links. Even supposing authorities pounced on the bank and ran audits, the accounts and money trails could have been eradicated and unrecoverable. The bomb was meant as a diversion from the woman’s murder but also to further implicate that mad dog Jack Coyote as being the mastermind of an intricate money laundering operation. With no witnesses and no electronic trails to refute those facts, he was as good as gone. “When are you coming home?”

  “Two days, three days, a week, it’s in the hands of the gods. You still haven’t thanked me.”

  “Merci, mon ange.”

  “De rien, ma diablesse.”

  The connection broke but not before Cat heard him deliver a kiss to the lips of his companion. Even after this final insult, she couldn’t help but heave a sigh of relief.

  She briskly walked toward the Île de la Cité. Upon entering Sainte-Chapelle and being showered by its vaulted ceilings, its glorious stained glass windows, and its flamboyant tracery, she mingled with the crowd and headed straight toward an alcove, where she lit a candle in the memory of her dear maman. Everything, she decided, was going according to plan.

  26

  Sydney, Australia

  Friday, August 29

  AFTER SEVERAL DAYS of island hopping, catching flights to remote outposts, and taking vast stretches of healing sleep in between, Jack arrived in Brisbane. From Brisbane, he immediately booked a flight for Sydney and settled into the window seat.

  Once secured by the seatbelt and after receiving a complimentary drink, he took a long steady look at himself in the porthole. The surface reflected sundry bruises metastasizing from purple to saffron. Aviator glasses hid most of the damage from children who would have cried, women who would have recoiled, and men who would have sneered. Airport security inspected him more closely, but after meticulous searches of baggage and passport, passed him through.

  To the world-weary man he had become, he was ugly and deformed, a failure and a scamp. He was supposed to be a government hack, not some sort of superhero destined to take on the world with his bare fists. A man of conscience can handle only so much blame, shame, disgust, and introspection. Self-knowledge cures nothing. It only serves to make a man weaker and increasingly vulnerable. He wasn’t supposed to be a soldier of fortune or of misfortune. And he wasn’t supposed to face mortality in his thirties. The anticipation of death should have come much later, when fewer years loomed in front of him than lingered behind, when he was old and sick and ready to bid farewell, after he sculpted a life he could be proud of. Between the bookends, the pages of his biography should have contained his lady of choice, a house on a half-acre, and a passel of kids to carry on his name.

  Curiously, he had never been afraid of dying. All men die, except his path to glory would probably come sooner rather than later. When it happened, it would arrive in a blaze of gunfire or at the point of a knife or in a crash of metal. In the blink of a fading eye, he would be gone. No grave to be dug for his body. No memorial to be conducted for his soul. No monument to be erected for his legacy. Life was cheap, this he had always known. But something inside him was broken beyond repair. Jack Coyote had become irrelevant. He was a blip on a screen, a fading memory, a lone man circling a small planet populated by seven billion other frantic souls, surviving on his wits while running from invisible enemies. He could hold a pity party but no one would come. He could console himself by remembering he was a data analyst, a software coder, a hacker, a lover of women, and a seeker of truth, not that any of it counted for much. By accident or misfortune, he stumbled across inconvenient truths, which led to greater truths, such as how leaders can become corrupt enough to sacrifice their integrity for an idea. Nothing was out of bounds to achieve their goals. War, rape, enslavement, breaking basic laws of humanity, using God as a shield, greed as a motivator, and power as an excuse, all for the hollow notion of brinkmanship. They did it by corralling the masses, studying their habits, tracking their movements, cataloging their associations, starving their bodies, brainwashing their minds, connecting with their basest instincts, putting down their rebellions, and silencing their voices. All of it done to achieve complete and utter control even while the sands of time slipped between their fingers, signifying they themselves were nothing. Because of this and for many other reasons, he decided to heed the spark of humanity still beating in his breast and conduct a mission of mercy.

  He found her obituary in a local paper. Madelyn Gibbons, beloved daughter of George and Mildred Gibbons, loving sister of Michael and Julie Gibbons, cherished granddaughter of Evelyn and Daniel Gibbons and of Gerald and Kay Darling. Left this life much too soon but will live in the hearts of her dear ones forever.

  Determined to look up Madelyn’s family and tell them of her fate, he would throw caution to the winds, bow down to the gods, and confess his sins. On his knees, with joined hands raised in supplication. Through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault. He told himself the impulse may be a noble one but the idea was stupid, flat-out reckless. He asked himself what good it could possibly do. Yet how could he go on without doing this one small
thing for Maddie, not just telling her family how she died but how she celebrated life to the very end. He argued with himself. He stewed about it. He paced the dimensions of his room. At one point, he decided to get blinding drunk and forgot the whole damn thing. Better for everyone all around. And safer for him. Except for one small point. A stupid notion called integrity. It took more courage to admit his role in Maddie’s demise than to run and hide and pretend it never happened.

  After two days of hiding out in an inn at the outskirts of Sydney, he cleaned himself up, tidied his scraggly beard, combed his overlong hair, dressed in hand-pressed clothes, and set out during the early evening hours of a rainy day.

  At the funeral home, tears were copious and hearts were bleeding. Black-attired mourners milled around with somber faces and hand-shielded whispers. The woman laid out in the coffin was a shadow of the lady he made love to a little more than a week ago. What struck him most was her utter youth and her undeniable beauty, more so in death than in life. Possibly for the first time ever, she was at peace.

  He filed past the family and paid his respects. The parents looked him over with blank expressions. The brother was stoic and unapproachable. The sister became interested when he mumbled his condolences. Her eyes—piercing eyes very much like her sister’s—met his with curiosity. “Thank you,” she said simply. And then, “Your accent. It’s American?”

  He responded with a slight nod.

  “How do you know Maddie?”

  “We met in Nauru.”

  “You live there?”

  “On holiday.”

  “There was a man who ...” Letting her words drift off, she glanced towards her overwrought parents, clutching each other’s hands to hold themselves together. Deciding, she stood with purpose, straightening her skirt and flipping back her hair, the gesture so much like her sister’s. With a subtle nudge of her head, she slid her arm through his elbow and led him aside, speaking softly. “The authorities in Nauru told us she was with a man when it happened. Are you that man?” Her eyes were direct, piercing, hypnotic. A man could get lost in those eyes. “An American tourist, they said.” When he didn’t answer, she nodded with comprehension, her eyes surveying the room. “Where are you staying?”