It took Nora several minutes to calm Dana down, lying about where Dad was (“Oh, you know, work, work, work!”), but she promised they’d be home soon, hoping she’d be able to honor that promise. She repeated her order that Dana must not use her devices-no calls, texts, tweets, or Facebook-or tell anyone where she was. Dana didn’t understand; for a twenty-year-old, one week without electronics was the equivalent of ten years in Sing Sing. But she agreed, with many pointed questions and martyred sighs, to do as instructed. When Nora had finally extricated herself from her daughter’s melodramatics, she’d fallen across the bed, exhausted. She’d slept for nine hours.
Now, in the bright morning sunlight streaming in through the windows, Nora felt a new surge of energy. She took a long hot shower and put on her black brushed-denim suit and her beloved boots, pinning up her hair before donning the gray wig. The elderly makeup was quickly done-the lines, the crow’s feet, the pale cheeks and lips. The wire-rimmed granny glasses and the crocheted gray shawl over the cloth coat completed the old-lady effect. She was reaching for her bag to go down to breakfast when the hotel phone by the bed rang.
Craig, she thought. He’d left her here last night and gone off to Bayswater for a good night’s sleep in his own bed. They were to meet up later today, after he’d reported in at Bill’s office. She reached for the phone. “Hello, Cr-”
“Mrs. B.? It’s me, Lonny Tindall.”
“Oh. Good morning, Lonny. Why are you whispering?”
“I’m at the front desk, and I don’t want the bloke to hear me. There’s a delivery for you from some florist. I told him you were away, just like you said to, and I offered to keep ’em here at the desk for you, but he wants to take ’em up to your room. I thought I should check with you. We don’t usually allow tradesmen above stairs-”
“Wait a sec, Lonny.” She lowered the phone, thinking. She hadn’t told Lonny Tindall anything about her dilemma, and she wasn’t going to tell him now, but she needed to see whom this was. She didn’t believe for one moment that anyone in England had actually sent her flowers-not Jeff, certainly. She thought a moment and then raised the receiver again. “Okay, here’s what I want you to do…”
Ten minutes later, she was standing at the door of room 8, peering out through the peephole at the door to the room directly across the hall. Lonny and the man with the flowers arrived there, and Lonny opened the door to room 3 with a key card. She couldn’t really see the florist, only the back of his head and the vase of pretty flowers he carried in front of his face. Lonny waited in the doorway while the man-tall, black haired, dark skinned, dark suit-disappeared inside room 3 for a few minutes. Then he came back out, facing the peephole, and Nora finally saw the face she was fully expecting to see.
Her nemesis, the purse snatcher.
Lonny Tindall would indeed make a good spy. He never even glanced over at the door of room 8-where she stood, holding her breath-as he escorted the “florist” back downstairs. She gave him five minutes and then ran to the phone.
“Is he gone?”
“Yes, ma’am. I stalled him as long as I could, and it was long enough.”
“Good. What did he do in the room?”
“Oh, he was slick, I’ll say that for him! He wiggled over to the table and made a big show of placing the bowl down and fussing with the blooms, but he did a total scope of the place. Eyes darting everywhere-the closet, the loo, even under the bed. I told him you’d be back in London tomorrow or the next day, and he handed me a card from Sunshine Flowers in Oxford Street and told me to contact him as soon as you were back. ‘I don’t want my mums to droop!’ he says. ‘I might have to bring fresh ones if she’s away too long!’ I said I’d call him the minute I clapped eyes on you, and he took off. It’s none of my business, Mrs. B., but I’m here to tell you that bloke isn’t any florist. Those blooms aren’t mums, they’re carnations, and there’s no Sunshine Flowers in Oxford Street that I ever heard of. I’ll throw away the flowers in the dustbin behind the hotel, just like you said. And you were right-there wasn’t an enclosure card. I don’t know what this is all about, but it’s fun. So, how did I do?”
“You were great, Lonny; you should open a detective agency. I’ll be down in a few minutes. Could I have eggs and sausage-what do you call it, a fry-up?”
“You got it, Mrs. B.”
She was getting used to her bizarre new appetite. It seemed the more nervous she was, the hungrier she became. She’d just seen the man who’d knocked her down in the park and tried to rob her, who’d probably followed her to Paris and back, whose employers or co-conspirators were even now holding her husband captive-and she was starving. Well, go with it, she decided. Eat when you can; you never know what’s coming next. Besides, Craig Elder the younger was now on the job, and he’d let her know where the man went.
She’d called him right after telling Lonny to bring the “florist” up to the room and to take his sweet time about it. Craig must have broken several traffic laws getting there from Bayswater, but he’d been outside the hotel in the Ford Focus by the time Lonny finally let the man leave. A bellboy-another Tindall grandson-had taken the car from Craig, who was now tailing the man on foot.
She bundled up her jewelry and the iPhone to put them back into the hotel safe, where she should have left them in the first place. Her husband had warned her not to use the phone, and she hadn’t, not exactly. But her shadow and his friends knew she was back at the Byron, and she had a fair guess how they’d learned that. Last night she’d switched on the iPhone just long enough to get her messages, which was apparently long enough for these people. She’d have to be more careful. At least she hadn’t waltzed back to the hotel as Nora Baron and gone into room 3. If she had…
The hotel phone rang. It was Craig with bad news.
“He vanished. Got me all the way down past the museum, and then he must have ducked into a shop doorway, or he slipped round a corner before I could see him do it. Damn it!”
Nora suppressed a sigh; that was the last thing he’d want to hear. “It’s all right, Craig. You’ll find him again.”
“That’s for sure, and when I do, I swear to God I’ll-”
“Yes, of course,” she said, amazed at how steady her voice was. She was staring at Mme. Blanche Williams in the mirror, the elderly lady clutching the phone receiver. “You just come back for the car and go on to your office, Craig. I’ll call Bill there soon, and we’ll decide what to do next.”
It was a lie, but the actress easily made it sound like the truth. She’d already decided what to do next. The “florist” had apparently been aware of Craig Elder following him, which meant that Craig was no longer viable as a tail.
But somebody else was.
She stared at her image in the mirror some more as she hung up the phone. Then Mme. Blanche Williams hobbled downstairs for breakfast.
Chapter 28
By the time her food arrived, Nora had it all figured out. No more secret messages with encrypted instructions; she was about to take the initiative. She would play an active role in locating Jeff.
She didn’t call Bill Howard or Craig with her plan. They’d only try to stop her, tell her not to interfere in official business. Well, she’d seen just how effective their official business was: two French intelligence agents, one dead and one wounded, and one missing CIA operative, namely her husband. Now Craig had been spotted and shaken off by the man he was tailing. These official people weren’t exactly batting a thousand, so it was her turn.
As she worked on the heaping plate of Mrs. Tindall’s fried eggs, sausage, potatoes, tomatoes, mushrooms, and toast, she thought that perhaps she should have kept Jacques Lanier’s gun instead of handing it over to Craig. Not that she could ever bring herself to actually fire the damned thing, but it might have come in handy today. A prop, if nothing else. It certainly looked scary, and that would have given her courage, reassured her. Oh well, she didn’t have the gun, and it was no use wishing she did. She’d proceed without it.