“The information provided to me was quite specific.”
“The book was not there. Can you check again?”
“Of course.”
“In the morning, once I return to Paris for our gathering, perhaps we can speak privately beforehand?”
“I will be at the tower by ten thirty.”
“Till then.”
He hung up the phone and checked his watch.
Four hours to go. That was when he was scheduled to meet with his American contact. He’d hoped that to be his last conversation, as he was tired of the juggling act. He wanted Napoleon’s cache and had hoped the book in the Invalides held the key. Now the bloody Americans controlled it.
He’d have to bargain tonight.
Tomorrow would be far too late.
ELIZA CLICKED OFF HER PHONE AND THOUGHT BACK TO WHAT Henrik Thorvaldsen had predicted. If I’m right about him, he’s going to tell you that he wasn’t able to retrieve whatever it is, that it wasn’t there, or some other such excuse. And to what he’d told her again, just before they concluded their lunch and he left the restaurant. It will be for you to judge whether that be truth or a lie.
She was safe inside her house in the Marais, not far from where the Paris Club gathered. Her family had owned the property since the mid-19th century. She’d grown up within these elegant walls and now spent the majority of her time here. Her sources within the French government had assured her that the book she sought was there, in the museum. A minor relic, of little historical significance, other than being from Napoleon’s personal library and mentioned in his will. Her sources had asked few questions, nor would they have once they learned the book was gone, since they’d learned long ago that to appreciate her generosity meant to keep their mouths shut.
She’d debated what to do about Thorvaldsen ever since leaving Le Grand Véfour. The Danish billionaire had appeared from nowhere with information that she simply could not ignore. He clearly knew her business, and the oracle had confirmed his intentions. Now Ashby himself had corroborated what Thorvaldsen predicted. She did not intend to ignore the warnings any longer.
She retrieved the telephone number Thorvaldsen had provided to her yesterday and dialed. When he answered, she told him, “I have decided to extend you an invitation to join our group.”
“Most generous. I assume, then, Lord Ashby disappointed you.”
“Let us say that he’s aroused my curiosity. Are you free tomorrow? The club is gathering for an important session.”
“I’m a Jew. Christmas is not a holiday for me.”
“Nor me. We meet in the morning, in La Salle Gustav Eiffel, on the first platform of the tower, at eleven. They have a lovely banquet room, and we have a lunch planned after we talk.”
“Sounds wonderful.”
“I shall see you then.”
She clicked off the phone.
Tomorrow.
A day she’d been anticipating for a long time. She planned to fully explain to her cohorts what the parchments had taught her family. Some of which she’d related to Thorvaldsen at lunch, but she’d intentionally not mentioned a caveat. In a peace-based society, with no war, stimulating mass fear through political, sociological, ecological, scientific, or cultural threats could prove nearly impossible. No attempt, so far, had ever carried sufficient credibility or magnitude to work for long. Something like black plague, which had threatened on a global scale, came close, but a threat such as that, conceived from unknown conditions, with little or no control, was impractical.
And any threat would have to be containable.
After all, that was the whole idea. Scare the people into obeying-then extract profit from their fear. The better solution was the simplest. Invent the threat. Such a plan came with a multitude of advantages. Like a dimmer switch on a chandelier that could be adjusted into infinite degrees of intensity. Thankfully, in today’s world, a credible enemy existed and had already galvanized public sentiment.
Terrorism.
As she’d told Thorvaldsen, that precise threat had worked in America, so it should work anywhere.
Tomorrow she’d see if the parchments were correct.
What Napoleon had wanted to do, she would now do.
For two hundred years her family had profited from the political misfortunes of others. Pozzo di Borgo deciphered enough from the parchments to teach his children, as they’d taught theirs, that it truly did not matter who made the laws-control the money and you possess real power.
To do that, she needed to control events.
Tomorrow would be an experiment.
And if it worked?
There’d be more.
FORTY-THREE
LONDON
6:40 PM
ASHBY SEARCHED THE DARKNESS AND THE HUNDRED OR SO faces for a green-and-gold Harrods scarf. Most of the people surrounding him were clearly tourists, their guide yelling something about the feel of gaslight and fog and August 1888 when Jack the Ripper struck terror into drink-sodden East End prostitutes.
He grinned.
The Ripper seemed to interest only foreigners. He wondered if those same people would pay money in their own countries to be taken on a tour of a mass murderer’s haunts.
He was on the city’s east side, in Whitechapel, walking down a crowded sidewalk. To his left, across a busy street, rose the Tower of London, its taupe-colored stones awash in sodium vapor light. What was once an enormous moat was now a sea of emerald winter grass. A cold breeze eased inland off the nearby Thames, with the Tower Bridge lighted in the distance.
“Good evening, Lord Ashby.”
The woman who appeared beside him was petite with short-cut hair, late fifties, early sixties, definitely American, and wearing a green-and-gold scarf. Exactly as he’d been told.
However.
“You are new,” he said to her.
“I’m the one in charge.”
That information caught his attention.
He’d met his regular contact with American intelligence on several of London’s walking tours. They’d taken the British Museum stroll, Shakespeare’s London, Old Mayfair, and now Jack the Ripper Haunts.
“And who are you?” he casually asked.
“Stephanie Nelle.”
The group halted for the guide to spew out something about how the building just ahead was where the Ripper’s first victim had been found. She grasped his arm and, as others focused on the guide, they drifted into the crowd’s wake.
“Fitting we should meet on this tour,” she said. “Jack the Ripper terrorized people and was never caught, either.”
He didn’t smile at her attempt toward irony. “I could end my involvement now and leave, if you no longer require my help.”
The group again started forward.
“I realize the price we’re going to have to pay is your freedom. But that doesn’t mean I like it.”
He told himself to stay calm. This woman, and who she represented, had to be stroked, at least for another twenty-four hours, and at least until he obtained the book.
“The last I was told we were in this endeavor together,” he said.
“You promised to deliver information today. I came to personally hear what you have to offer.”
The group stopped at another notable site.
“Peter Lyon will bomb the Church of the Dome, at the Invalides, tomorrow,” he said in a low voice. “Christmas Day. As a demonstration.”
“Of what?”
“Eliza Larocque is a fanatic. She has some ancient wisdom that her family has lived by for centuries. Quite complicated and, to me, generally irrelevant, but there is a French extremist group-isn’t there always one?-that wants to make a statement.”
“Who is it this time?”
“It involves immigrant discrimination under French law. North Africans, who flooded into France years ago, welcomed then as guest workers. Now they’re ten percent of the population and tired of being held down. They want to make a statement. Larocque has the means and wants no credit, so Peter Lyon brokered a partnership.”