On a main street he slowed to a jog to avoid attracting too much attention. One of the best ways to find someone trying to run away was to follow the trail of confused pedestrians looking over their shoulders. He made his way around the block, doubling back to the broker’s street. If anything they would expect him to run farther away. The last thing they would expect him to do was head back.
On the same side of the road as the broker’s apartment he headed down a side street, cut across a main road, dodging around the slow-moving traffic. On the other side he took another alley, emerging from it into a casual walk across the next road.
Four blocks later he found a late-night café full of noisy patrons and sat down at a table with a good view of the window. As he waited he kept his eye on the alley he’d come out of, but no one came that way. No one he recognized passed on the street outside. He’d lost them. By the time a waitress arrived at his side his pulse and breathing had returned to normal.
“Ice tea,” he said, when he was asked for his order. “With lime if you have it.”
FIFTY-ONE
23:03 CET
He called the broker. She gave him the name of a bar and its location on the outskirts of the city. He hailed a cab, told the driver the destination, but had him stop a couple of blocks away. It could have been any low-income Parisian neighborhood. Winding streets seemed to blend into one another. Quiet.
He circled the block where the bar was located a couple of times, checking for anyone waiting who looked out of place. If the broker had been successfully shadowed before, she could be so again. It was not the kind of area where people would choose to just sit parked along the curb. He saw no one.
The bar was a run-of-the-mill drinking house. Linoleum-covered floors, faded wallpaper, and a long polished bar, marked and scuffed from thousands of glasses and bottles. The broker was sitting in the corner, facing the door. He expected she did so in order to see him enter instead of to look out for any threats like she should be doing.
Victor sat down on a stool next to her, adjusting it so he could watch the entrance and see the broker without moving his head. She had smartened herself up, cleaned her face, and reapplied her makeup. She was dressed differently too. There was a shopping bag next to her feet.
“I got us both a vodka tonic,” she explained, before adding with her eyes lowered, “I drank both though. Sorry.”
“That’s okay.”
Two glasses stood in front of her on the table, half-melted ice cubes lay in the ashtray. She saw him looking.
“Unless I have a straw, I can’t drink out of a glass with ice in it. They don’t have any straws here.”
Victor nodded as though it mattered. The broker was badly shaken up, that much was obvious. The adrenaline was all gone, and she was getting her head around what had just happened.
“First time you’ve been in a situation like that?” he asked
“Yeah.” She took a deep breath. “Do you ever get used to it, people trying to kill you?”
“They weren’t trying to kill us.”
“It was still terrifying. And you know what I meant. So,” she said, “do you? Get used to it?”
“Yes,” he answered, even though he’d wanted to lie and say no. “You deal with it better each time.”
“So I won’t feel this bad if it happens again?”
“Some people deal with it more easily than others.”
“Will I?”
Victor saw the fear in her eyes at what his answer might be. He wasn’t sure why, but he decided to spare her. “I’m sure it will get easier for you.”
The broker told him how she’d driven away without a problem and wasn’t followed. “I found a store that was still open and bought some new clothes. I-”
“Let’s just continue where we left off.”
“We need to go somewhere else to talk.”
Victor stood. “Okay, but we go where I choose.”
The neon sign above the door announced the hourly cost of the rooms. Inside, the lobby was dark and small, deliberately poorly lit. The short man behind what served as a reception desk stared leeringly at the broker while Victor counted out the money. A condom machine was attached to the wall in the corridor outside.
The room was small and featureless except for the double bed that took up nearly all the available space. There was a metal box next to the headboard that took coins to make the bed vibrate. Victor couldn’t believe people really used those things anymore. Had they ever? The last time he’d witnessed one in action it had made him feel sick.
The broker was standing in front of the window, looking out of the half-opened drapes. Victor was about to tell her she shouldn’t be doing that, but if there was a sniper out there, she would have been shot already.
She was nervously toying with the fabric. It didn’t look thick enough to actually prevent anyone from peering through. Victor supposed that was the point, an extra thrill for those who used the room. He guessed the fact that the only eyes likely to be looking in belonged to pigeons would hardly matter.
“It makes my spine crawl just being here,” the broker said, not turning around.
Victor closed the door behind him, locked it. That made her face him. “I don’t care if you don’t like being here,” he stated without emotion. “No one will find us. These kind of places don’t like to advertise who stays.”
She didn’t argue. He was right, and he knew she understood that. She folded her arms in front of her chest. He left the main light off and turned on a lamp by the bed. It had a thin red shade and cast a dim crimson glow over the room.
Neither talked for a moment.
The broker spoke first. “Back at my apartment, if they weren’t trying to kill us, why did you kill them?”
He’d been expecting such a question. “Flashbangs work for a few seconds only.”
She responded quickly, already knowing that fact. “But they had night vision. Surely they would have been blinded longer.”
When he finally answered he didn’t try to hide his displeasure at being questioned. “NVGs have a cutoff mechanism for bright light.”
“Okay,” she said eventually.
“If I hadn’t killed them, we couldn’t have escaped.”
“But they were just cops, right? Good guys.”
“It was either them or us,” Victor said. “And they knew the risks when they signed up.” He gave her a minute before speaking again. “What do we do now?”
She snapped out of whatever temporary anxiety or guilt had gripped her and straightened up. “Elliot Seif,” the broker stated with surprising venom. “He’s the first port of call.”
The broker withdrew a computer printout from her shoulder bag. It was low res, black and white, a head-and-shoulders shot of a thin, suited man in his fifties or older. His forehead was a mass of deep lines, lips thin, eyes dark under bushy eyebrows. He looked like an accountant.
“Who is he?” Victor asked.
“An accountant.”
Victor raised an eyebrow.
The broker looked at him closely. “Did I miss something?”
He shook his head. “Continue.”
“Seif is a senior partner at a large financial firm in London, Hartman and Royce Equity Investments. He handled the account that paid me the money, which I in turn used to pay you.”
“You’re certain?”
“You’re good at what you do. So am I.”
She was good-Victor knew enough about her to know that. He trusted she knew exactly what she was talking about. Victor reached into his coat for his cigarettes and matches.
“Could you not do that?” the broker asked.
He looked up. “Sorry?”
“Can you not smoke, please?”
He hesitated for a moment, then put the packet back. “I’m trying to quit, anyway.”
“You’ll feel better for it.”
“I don’t so far.”
She smiled briefly before getting back to business. “But Seif is just a stepping stone,” she said. “He’s a middleman, nothing more. A conduit for the money to provide an extra layer of protection for whoever’s behind this. We have to know who owns the account that paid me, or we’ve failed before we’ve really begun.” She paused to get her breath back, continuing after a moment. “And to do that I need access to his files.”