“Cooperation in Lausanne, interviews with any station staff who were on duty yesterday, maybe a look at security footage from, say, ten a.m. to noon. But, you understand, this is unofficial, off-the-record.”
“I’ll have a quiet word with the station manager in the morning. I’ll tell him you’re from the federal interior ministry, following up on a possible visa irregularity – purely routine, nothing to worry about. Your name will be Picard, Michel Picard. You’ll need an ID. I’ll e-mail a template: Work from that.”
“Thanks, I owe you.”
“Certainly, but I’m sure you can find a way of paying me back…”
Papin laughed again, this time with genuine amusement. “Well, now that you mention it, there’s a house we’ve been watching by the Parc Monceau, filled with remarkably beautiful girls. It’s attracted some very interesting clients with impressively exotic, imaginative sexual tastes. Perhaps I should send you some of the video footage to see if any Swiss citizens are involved. Purely as a matter of international cooperation, you understand.”
“Of course,” agreed Zietler. “What other reason could there be? As always, it’s a pleasure doing business with you, Pierre. The documentation you need is on its way.”
Papin was on the early-morning flight out of Charles de Gaulle to Geneva. He planned to be in Lausanne by the time the station manager arrived for work.
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 1
31
Carver woke just after three in the morning. It took him a second to work out where he was. He was lying on the sofa, still dressed, but someone had draped a duvet over him. He pondered the significance of the gesture. It certainly seemed like a good sign. Faced with a choice between killing him as he slept or making him comfortable and tucking him in, Alix had reached for the duvet.
So where was she? There was no one in the kitchen, nor in Carver’s office. The bathroom was empty, though a pair of women’s underpants was drying on the towel rack. That left only one possibility. Carver opened his bedroom door as quietly as possible and padded across the room.
She was in his bed. He could see the outline of her body under the sheet, the shock of her pitch-black hair against the white pillow. One arm was flung out in front of her, half-covering her face. As she breathed she let out an occasional soft, barely audible snuffle.
Carver smiled then shook his head as he recognized a long-forgotten emotion: affection.
Fancying a woman was one thing. But when you heard her snore and thought she was cute, well, then you knew it was serious.
It took an effort of will to turn around and leave the room. As he walked back down the hallway, Carver thought about everything Alix had said earlier. He believed the stuff about her joining the KGB. But the very fact that she had been trained to deceive men made him doubt the rest of her story.
She’s working behind the desk at a fancy hotel when some thug comes along and says, “Do a highly dangerous, top-secret mission with me in Paris, or I will tell the world you were a hooker?” No, that just didn’t sound credible. On the other hand, it didn’t automatically make her his enemy. There were all sorts of reasons why she might want to lie about her real identity and purpose. God knows he did it enough.
He checked his phones and office computer to see if she’d tried to talk to anyone or send any messages while he was asleep. His phones were routed through a sequence of relays that made it impossible for anyone to track where he was. The system also tracked any activity. There had been none at all. He logged on to his ISP mail server – nothing there either.
That left the stolen laptop. It was conceivable that Alix had used it. The bag was still on the kitchen chair where Carver had left it when they arrived at the flat. It looked untouched. But that meant nothing. She would have been smart enough to leave everything exactly as she’d found it.
Carver opened the padded black nylon case and pulled out the laptop. It was a Hitachi, another gray plastic box just like a million others. Carver opened it, pressed the power button, and waited while the operating system booted up. A box immediately appeared, demanding a password. Carver didn’t have a clue what Max had chosen as his personal open sesame, and he’d bet his bottom dollar Alix didn’t either. So no one had sent anything from this computer since the last time Max had used it. Carver closed the Hitachi again. He certainly wasn’t any kind of techno-wizard. But the next person who opened up this laptop would be.
He was sure now that Alix had not been able to communicate with anyone since he left her mobile on the Milan train. For now, at least, their presence in Geneva was still secret.
Carver suddenly realized he was starving. He went to a cupboard and pulled out a box of cornflakes. They were at least three weeks old, but that was too bad. At least the milk was fresh and cold.
He ate the cereal sitting at the kitchen island. After a couple of spoonfuls, he reached for the TV remote control and turned on the set. They were still talking about the princess, showing the same crash-site footage, the same holiday memories. There was a picture of her in a swimsuit that made her look unusually thick around the middle. Some guy on CNN was speculating that she might have been pregnant. Other reporters were commenting on the absence of CCTV footage. Twelve cameras covered the roads between the Ritz Hotel and the Alma Tunnel, but not one of them had produced a single image of the Mercedes at any stage of its journey. He sighed. Whoever had set this up had powerful friends. But he had a few friends too.
Carver washed his bowl and put it on the draining board. He wiped the milk and cereal splatters off the counter, using these simple domestic chores as a means of clearing his mind. He stood by the phone for a second, his hand hovering over the handset. Finally he picked it up and dialed a number. It rang several times, then there was a grunt of irritation at the other end of the line.
He grinned. “Wakey-wakey. It’s Carver.”
“Uhhh… what time is it?”
“Half past three. Yeah, I know, I’m sorry. But this is urgent. We need to meet. Can you be at Jean-Jacques in twenty minutes?”
There was another grunt, of assent this time. Carver grabbed the computer, pulled a leather jacket from a peg in the hall and headed out the door. He walked downhill towards the lake, through the commercial district by the shoreline and onto the Pont des Bergues, a V-shaped bridge whose two arms met by a small island jutting out toward the lake. A walkway linked the bridge and the island, which was planted with trees and illuminated by spotlights. At the far end there was a statue of a man in Roman robes seated on a chair, looking out across the lake with a frowning, thoughtful expression. This was Geneva’s most famous son, the eighteenth-century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
As Carver reached the statue, he heard a voice from the shadows. “‘Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains.’ Well, Monsieur Rousseau, you got that right.”
Carver laughed. “Now, now, Thor, stop feeling sorry for yourself.”
An extraordinary figure walked into the light. He was well over six feet tall, rake-thin, pale-skinned, blue-eyed, and topped with an explosion of blond dreadlocks. He rubbed his face with his hand to emphasize his exhaustion. “Aww, come on, man,” he said, in a singsong Scandinavian accent. “You wake me up in the middle of the night and make me come running like a poodle. How do you expect me to feel?”
“Come and rest your weary bones on this park bench,” said Carver. “See if I can make it worth your while getting out of bed.”
He’d met Thor Larsson four years back, at a bar where they’d both gone to hear a visiting American blues guitarist. They’d got to talking over a couple of beers. By the fifth or sixth round, Carver had discovered that this golden-haired Rasta was both a professional software engineer and a former lieutenant in the Norwegian army’s intelligence corps. “National service,” he’d said, apologetically. “I didn’t have any choice.”