Gordon was proud of her, as many comments were made praising her, despite the fact she did absolutely nothing apart from look gorgeous.
The corporate lunch was very pleasant, and she made small talk with a lot of people, mostly men, and many were all but drooling. She maintained her accent, which added to her already glamorous and faintly exotic persona. As a result, no less than three people approached her with a view to persuading her to change companies.
After lunch, she toyed with the idea of going for another ‘walk’, but wisely decided to stay and do her bit for Gordon again.
Meanwhile, in the big bad city, New York was being New York, and three copycat Avenging Angels managed to get into the news.
The first two were male transvestites, who were arrested for indecent assault and possession of a concealed weapon. Their costumes, including silicone breast forms and lots of Lycra, were faintly ludicrous, but the cape was a common feature. The third was an overweight schizophrenic girl who managed to fall onto the tracks of a railway station as she attempted to fly from one platform to the other. She was carted away in tears, having broken her leg.
With no further reports of the mysterious girl, Captain Mancetti relaxed somewhat, and halved his intake of blood pressure tablets.
6.
Paris in December was as cold and damp as London and New York, but Michelle was delighted and thrilled to be there. She had read a lot about the place, having some romantic notions of the place and the lifestyle of the inhabitants.
As soon as they arrived, she started practicing her linguistic skills. She was delighted with the ease with which she had grasped the language, silently praising the aliens and their amazing technology.
The French men adored her, as, for a start, she was female, and that was a good start. The fact that she was big, blonde and amazingly beautiful helped.
Her personality seemed to grow, and Gordon had a permanent smile on his face. She was bubbly and witty, and her laugh was seldom far away. In between meetings, on the coldest day so far recorded, she made him take her up to the top of the Eiffel Tower.
As they stood looking over Paris at dusk, with the lights coming on as far as the eye could see, and with coats tight up to their chins, she had kissed him and said the words that he was longing to hear.
“Gordon, I think that maybe I will marry you.”
Stunned and completely overwhelmed Gordon wept for the first time in years.
He took her to dinner to a small chic restaurant on the banks of the Seine, and produced a very old and very beautiful engagement ring.
“It was my grandmother’s ring. I have been carrying it with me ever since that first morning in my flat.”
She allowed him to slip it onto her left ring finger. She was surprised that it fitted.
He laughed.
“I had to have it enlarged. When you were asleep, I measured your finger,” he admitted.
She kissed him, suddenly feeling all warm and fuzzy. She was not absolutely certain that she was being wise, but she was happy, and that was important.
Gordon, on the other hand, appeared to have received a personality transplant. His whole outlook on life had been turned around, and Michelle found the man he had become much nicer than the man she had initially fallen for.
They attended meetings together, and they were all in French. The fair was international, and Gordon’s company had a stand. Fenwick’s Communications Ltd attracted many small businesses, but when Michelle was helping on the stand, the amount of enquiries seemed to increase.
Most of the local French people thought she was French too, and were very surprised to learn she held a British Passport. She gleaned a lot of information from her conversations, and was able to actually find some new business. Everyone she met fell in love with her a little, and all of Gordon’s associates saw a profound change in the man, and once they met his new fiancée, they understood.
They found a little café that served superb coffee and delightful croissants and pastries. Michelle loved the whole atmosphere, and could have settled down in France. Sometimes, when Gordon was in a meeting and she was not needed, she browsed the small shops, and just breathed the Paris air. One afternoon, she had left the noisy and crowded fair, and walked along the river bank for a while. It was cold, but she enjoyed being alone with her thoughts for a while. She stood on a bridge and watched the Seine flow underneath her feet. She reflected on who she now was, and discovered that her previous life was all but a faint shadow in her mind.
Like the river, she had moved on, and was in a different place, having taken on a new character. She smiled, for she doubted that anyone who knew Mike would dream that she was the same person underneath.
She felt a little sad, as there was a lot in Mike’s life that had been important, but she finally let them go. She had thought to visit New Mexico, just to see how everyone had got on, but she now decided that it was best left alone. A new person - a new life. It was always a mistake to go back, the old life was gone, and she was content to let it go.
After Paris, they flew to Moscow to visit three plants that were in the first year of production. Snow met them, and it was bitterly cold.
Michelle used her Russian from the moment they landed, despite a growing desire by the Russians to use English. The hotel was comfortable, and they had a car and armed driver. Allegedly, there was a problem with various bandit-style gangs in the area they were passing through, so, the armed escort was thought prudent, as a consequence.
The first plant was in an old textile factory fifty miles east of Moscow, which had been gutted and completely re-fitted as an electronics works. Externally it seemed to be out of the dark ages, but inside it was modern, well equipped and warm.
The Manager was a weasel-like man called Dimitri to whom Michelle took an instant dislike. He had a supercilious attitude, and was suspicious of the tall blonde girl with the Ukrainian accent. He expected to deal with a dumb Englishman, so he had not expected to deal with a girl who looked as if she could be trouble.
She probed his mind and found a web of deceit and embezzlement. As she dined with Gordon that evening in their hotel, she asked who had arranged the armed guard.
“Dimitri, why?”
“I don’t trust him. I have a really bad feeling about him,” she said.
They dropped the subject, but her unease got worse.
So much so, that she awoke in the middle of the night. Gordon was sound asleep, and she let her mind seek out anyone close.
To her surprise she found three men, one was their driver, and they were just outside the hotel. She probed their minds, and discovered that the plan was to seize both of them, and purport to be Chechnyan terrorists. Then a ransom would be asked for, and all the while Dimitri’s embezzlement would be forgotten. The plan was to kill them anyway, and in the confusion the plant would be burned down, as all the expensive equipment already had a Russian Mafia buyer lined up.
She slipped out of bed, silently dressing in black slacks, a black sweater and with good walking boots on her feet.
She tied her hair back and flexed her limbs.
She kept her probes open, observing that one man was with the vehicle, a large van, while the other two entered the hotel by a rear fire door and were making their way up the fire exit stairs.
She let her mind enter the sleeping brain of Gordon, making his sleep so deep that an earthquake would not wake him. She lifted him from the bed and carried him to the bathroom, placing him in the bath and covering him with some blankets.
Then she returned to the bedroom and quickly made the bed look as if two people were still asleep.
She positioned her self behind the door and waited.
The locked door was unlocked from the outside and slowly opened. Both men walked in, silently and quite confident that they could affect their purpose.