“You sound like you’re expecting me to judge you. I’m in no position to do that.”
“Maybe. Anyway, I was lucky. Because I can speak English I got a job at a hotel, the Marriott, working at the reception desk. I found a good man, a doctor. He was not rich or handsome, but he treated me with respect.
“For a long time, I thought I was okay. Then Kursk started coming to the hotel. He had worked with the girls as a ‘bodyguard.’ That was what they called it. The real reason was to make sure we did not do any business for ourselves, or try to run away with a rich foreign client. Kursk liked to remind me that he knew who I was and what I had done. He could expose me at any time. Everything I had worked for would be ruined. I offered him money to go away, but he turned me down. He was happier teasing me, just keeping me like a fish on the end of a line. I knew that sooner or later he would pull on the hook.
“That’s what happened. Kursk came to the hotel on Friday morning. He said he needed a partner on a job. He wanted a woman. People would be distracted by her and pay less attention to him. He told me to leave work, tell my supervisor I was feeling sick. If I came with him, he would pay me ten thousand dollars, U.S. And if I did not…”
“Let me guess. He still had some of your old photographs. You would be caught by your own honey trap.”
Alix nodded.
“So what happened to the doctor?”
“He is still there. He wants to marry me.”
“What do you want?”
“He will give me a home, maybe a family. I will be a respectable woman.”
“But?”
“But I do not love him. I would just be selling myself again.”
“Come here,” said Carver.
He opened his arms, and Alix nestled against his shoulder. He put his arms around her. She could feel him pressing his nose against her hair, breathing in its scent. Then he leaned back against the arm of the sofa and she went with him, relaxing into his lean, muscular embrace.
It took a couple of minutes for Alix to realize that Carver was asleep. She smiled ruefully. She must be losing her touch if men could take her in their arms without being driven mad with lust. But perhaps it was a greater compliment that a man like Carver would let himself sleep. That was the ultimate vulnerability. She could do anything to him now.
Alix slipped out of Carver’s arms and got to her feet. She stroked a lock of hair away from his forehead, then gently kissed his brow, like a mother would a child. She picked up the wine bottle, the ice bucket, and the glasses and carried them to the kitchen.
She walked along the hallway to Carver’s bedroom, smiling as she saw the TV on a stand at the end of the bed, exactly as she’d predicted. There was a bedside table with a photograph in a silver frame, showing Carver at the helm of a yacht with a woman hugging him from behind. They were both laughing.
Alix felt a quick, sharp stab of jealousy. Who was this woman making Carver so happy? There was no trace of any feminine presence in the apartment. She wasn’t part of his life now. Even so, Alix resented her closeness to Carver and the unforced joy in their laughter.
She told herself she was just being professionally thorough as she looked through Carver’s wardrobe, fingering the fabric of his classic English and Italian suits, smiling at his well-worn jeans and baggy sweaters. She thought of his tracksuit. Why was it that the older clothes got, the more men seemed to like them?
On the top shelf of the wardrobe, above the hanging suits and shirts, there were a couple of folded blankets and a rolled-up duvet. Alix had to stretch to reach the duvet. She pulled it down, then carried it through to the living room and draped it over Carver’s unconscious body.
But where was she going to sleep? This was a bachelor apartment. There was only one bed. Alexandra Petrova went to sleep in it.
30
Alone in his office on Sunday night, Pierre Papin pursued the question of Carver, the girl, and the train they had taken out of Paris. A check on the ticket machines at the Gare de Lyon had come up with more than a dozen purchases made during the missing minutes when Carver could have used them. Four of these were for one ticket only. Papin was tempted to dismiss these, but he had to consider the possibility that the Englishman had dropped the girl and continued to a separate destination on his own.
Several of the ticket buyers had used credit cards, none in Carver’s name. But that was to be expected. If he had used a card, the name would certainly be that of an alias. So Papin was left with the task of checking twelve separate journeys, involving more than twenty individuals, hoping to track down his two suspects by a process of elimination.
It was a massive task and would require a great deal of cooperation. Ideally, Papin should ask for help from other departments, but he had no intention of doing that unless it was absolutely unavoidable. It was a matter of self-preservation.
It is said in politics that your opponents are in the other parties, but your enemies are in your own. Papin operated on the same principle. He had a visceral distrust of his colleagues in the various branches of the French security system. He knew they’d happily stab him in the back if it gave their department a moment’s advantage. That was the way the game worked in every intelligence community. It wasn’t the terrorists, the spies, and the other assorted dangers to national security you had to worry about. It was the bastard in the next office.
There had to be another way of tracking his prey. Papin put himself in Carver’s position: Okay, he arrives at the station with the girl. They split up in case anyone is looking for a couple. He tells her to go to the Milan train, makes a public show of buying tickets to Milan, and lets himself be seen on camera walking toward the appropriate platform. But unless he is engaged in a massive double bluff, he does not get on that train. He gets on another train, using tickets he has bought from a machine. Yet Carver and the girl do not return to the concourse….
Papin had been through the footage. Even if they had hidden their faces from the camera, he would have recognized them by their clothes or the way they walked.
So what does Carver do?
Papin got up from his seat and walked over to the small table where his cafetière was standing, poured out the last dregs into his dirty cup, and grimaced at the feel of the cold, gritty liquid on his tongue. He was about to spit it out into his wastebasket when the solution suddenly struck him. Of course! Papin’s face broke into a triumphant grin. Unless he had led his girl on a mad dash across the railway tracks, Carver must have got on whatever train was waiting on the platform opposite the one to Milan. Papin reached for a timetable and there it was, departing at thirteen minutes past seven, the express service to Lausanne, Switzerland. Carver and the girl had been on that train, he was absolutely certain of it.
As reluctant as he was to ask for help from any of his rivals in Paris, Papin had no hesitation in making a late-night call to Horst Zietler, of the Swiss Strategischer Nachrichtendienst, or Strategic Intelligence Service. Zietler had nothing to gain by screwing him. Papin got straight to the point.
“Horst, I need your help. I’m trying to find two people – a man and a woman. I think they arrived in Lausanne by train from Paris earlier today.”
“Anyone I need to be concerned about?”
“No, they’re no danger whatsoever to Switzerland. But…”
“They’re an embarrassment to France?”
Papin chuckled wearily. “Something like that. Let’s just say I’d like to know where they went once they arrived in your country.”
“So, what do you need?”