There was, however, trouble in the city, otherwise Jay wouldn’t be here.
He caught a taxi and gave it the location Seurat had provided: “Take me to the Garden of Perpetual Bliss,” he said.
The cabbie nodded and turned on his sat-radio. “Any kind of music you wanna hear?”
“How about classic rock, late sixties? Beatles? Rolling Stones?”
“You got it, pal.”
Paul McCartney began singing and playing “Black-bird.” An antiracist song, according to Sir Paul, and easy to see from a distance, though apparently at the time few had understood the message.
Wasn’t that always the way?
In his office, Thorn listened to Abe Kent’s report on his encounter with Natadze, nodding but not speaking. When the colonel had finished, Thorn said, “You’re sure it was him.” It wasn’t a question.
“No doubt in my mind. I don’t see how it could have been anybody else. Who would take a guitar and leave the exact amount he owed the builder in its place? Who could know how much that was?”
Thorn sighed. “I don’t see how there was any way you could have known he’d follow you — I wouldn’t have bet a penny against a dollar he’d have even been there.”
“I would have won the small bet, but I lost the game.”
“Don’t blame yourself, Abe.”
“I’d love to have somebody else to lay it off on, but it was my mistake. I should have had a contingency plan. It never crossed my mind, and it should have.”
“Done is done,” Thorn said. “What now?”
“I know where he was, and when. If it’s okay with you, I’ll get Gridley’s people to run a search on security cams in the area — motels, car-rental places, the whole package. He was at the guitar thing in Lincoln, he followed me — maybe he missed a step along the way.”
“You think there’s much chance of that?”
“Frankly, no. It was a fluke that we tied him to the Cox deal in the first place. A lucky break that he happened to be passing by a bank machine while somebody was using it, and that some woman ran a red light in front of him and we got pictures. Can’t bank on luck again.”
“Cox paid for it all,” Thorn said. “Blown to pieces in his own car. We’ve officially moved on.”
“Natadze is a loose end. And we’re sure he was the guy who took Cox out.”
“Depending on how you look at it, he did us a favor. Given the politics and money involved, Cox would have died of old age before we could have put him away, and even that was iffy.”
“He’s still a killer. And I owe him.”
Thorn nodded again. He understood that. “All right. Pass it along to Jay’s group and see what they come up with. Good luck.”
“Thank you, Commander.”
After Kent was gone, Thorn thought about that case. What a mess it had been. Old Soviet Union spies, hit men, a crooked billionaire…
His intercom buzzed. “Sir? Marissa Lowe on one.”
Thorn smiled. “Got it.”
He waved the phone to life and got a visual. Marissa, who did several things for the CIA, including being the liaison between that spook group and Net Force, was a strikingly handsome woman with skin the color of coffee and just a little cream.
“Hey, Tommy.”
“Hey, yourself. How’s…? Where are you again?”
“Classified, I’m afraid. You don’t need to know.”
He laughed. She was a funny woman. Smart, too, though she tried to play that down.
“When are you coming back to town?”
“More classified information, my boy.”
“But eventually?”
“I believe I can stipulate to that much, yes.”
“What a terrible operative you are — see, I just wormed information out of you. What if I were a spy? I could set up a surveillance, knowing you’d be coming to Washington sooner or later. Catch you, just like that!” He snapped his fingers.
She laughed, and he liked being able to make her do that.
“I want to see the requisition you put in for your surveillance team, Tommy. The little box where they ask for approximate cost and time for the team to be in the field. You gonna write ‘eventually’?”
“I’m the boss, I don’t need to fill out no stinkin’ report.”
She laughed again.
“I hear there’s a new restaurant opening up in Foggy Bottom,” he said. “Italian, being run by the guy who used to be the chef at Gianelli’s.”
“Ah. And…?”
“Well, if I had some idea when you’d be back, I could make reservations. Treat you to dinner.”
“Must be nice to be rich,” she said. “But I wouldn’t know, being a lowly GS-13 barely scraping by.”
“Oh, yeah, rich is good. You could marry me, then when we divorce, you could get half, then you’d see.”
“You put that in writing?”
They both laughed.
“Hypothetically speaking,” she said after a moment, “if you were to make a reservation at this new restaurant for, say, Thursday, maybe you wouldn’t have to dine alone.”
“Thursday’s bowling league night,” he said.
“Uh-huh. I can’t even imagine you in a pair of bowling shoes.”
“I was the lowest scorer in my junior high class,” he said. “A solid ninety-six average. Shall I pick you up?”
“Nah. If I’m back, I’ll meet you there. Eight o’clock?”
“Assuming I can get reservations.”
“Big-time bureau commander and rich man like yourself? No problem. Eight o’clock.”
She discommed, and Thorn grinned to himself again. He did like smart, funny, beautiful women. What was not to like?
Unlike some of his colleagues, Seurat didn’t mind going into the city when he had a good reason. He left his car at home and took the Metro — nothing of worth in the city was more than five hundred yards from a Metro station, so the saying went, and parking in the city, like a pay telephone, was impossible to find. Nobody with a brain drove into Paris, and since the advent of mobile phones, the government assumed everybody would have one, so why have the clutter of phone kiosks everywhere?
Today was a meeting with a potential new client — a Saudi prince and businessman who was looking to start a new server in that country, and who wanted a link with CyberNation. Being a prince was not as impressive coming from that country as it was, say, from England. There were scores, hundreds, maybe thousands of them down in the desert atop the oil pools, the result of royal families in which the men could have as many wives as they could afford. An oil sheik could afford a considerable harem.
The Saudis were not as pure as they liked to pretend; much of that Muslim strait-lacing offered publicly disappeared in private. Yes, they were currently French allies, of a sort, and there was a quid pro quo, but some of the hardest drinkers, biggest womanizers, and consumers of pornography Seurat had ever met had been Saudis. If you had enough money, there was usually a way to get what you wanted, if you wanted it enough, and to make sure that people looked the other way while you enjoyed it.
And in VR, it didn’t count — since you weren’t actually drinking or screwing around…
He glanced at his watch. Running a little later today than he wished. No time to stop at a museum or gallery. Seurat liked to drop round the Musée d’Orsay every so often and see Le Cirque. Georges Seurat had done many drawings, but only a few major paintings, and they were all over the world. Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, his most famous, and the inspiration for a musical play, Sunday Afternoon in the Park with George, was at the Art Institute in Chicago. Others were in London, New York, San Francisco. Too few of them were in Paris. A shame, that, but buyers with enough money to afford such things lived where they lived.