“You don’t have to. I can be there within the hour.”
“There’s no way you can get here sooner?”
“I’ll have someone on my tail as well, remember,” Floyd said.
“Another of those horrible children?” she asked, nervousness creeping into her voice.
“No, just Belliard’s goons. They followed me to Montparnasse. I think I can lose them if I cross the river twice, but that will take time. I don’t want them thinking I’m taking an interest in Verity Auger. If they do, awkward questions might be asked.”
“What do you mean, ‘awkward questions?’ ”
“The kind that will involve a heavy dental bill.”
“Be here as soon as you can. This is as far into this as I want to go, Floyd. I never had aspirations to play the girl detective, and I’m not on your payroll.”
“You did a good job,” Floyd said as she hung up. He set his receiver down and began to plot his route across Paris, incorporating as many sudden turns and reversals as he dared.
Auger turned the key, locking the door from inside, and crashed on to the bed, suddenly overwhelmed by relief and exhaustion.
She closed her eyes for a few minutes, then hauled herself to the pea-green washbasin and splashed some cold water on to her face. “Stay sharp,” she said aloud. “The hard part might be over, but you still need to make it back to the portal. Don’t get too complacent, Auger. And don’t talk to yourself, either. It’s the first sign of madness.”
She removed her horrid, tight Parisian shoes and dialled down to the front desk for a pot of coffee. Then she called down to the lobby again and asked to be connected to an external number.
“Just a moment, madame.”
Someone picked up on the third ring, answering in poorly enunciated French. “To whom am I speaking?”
“This is Auger,” she said.
“Good,” Aveling answered, slipping immediately back into English. “Do you have—”
“Yes, I have the items. Can you get a message through to Caliskan?”
“Not possible, I’m afraid.” He was speaking from the safe house, a rented room a minute’s walk from Cardinal Lemoine. No direct telephone connection existed between the surface of Paris and the concealed chambers underground. “We’re having some technical difficulties with the link.”
“Tell me it isn’t serious.”
“It’s being worked on. It’s not the first time the link has become unstable, and it’ll most likely sort itself out within a few hours. It’s probably not related.”
“Not related to what?”
“Anything you need worry about.”
“Tell me, you patronising…” She tried to insult him, dredging her repertoire for something suitably nasty, but it was as if a mental roadblock had been installed between her brain and her mouth.
“There’s political trouble back home,” Aveling interjected before she could continue. “That Slasher offensive everyone was expecting? It’s begun. But don’t you fret. Just bring the box and let us worry about the bigger picture. We’re all very happy with the way you’ve handled things so far. It would be a shame to spoil things now, wouldn’t it?”
“I could just burn the papers,” Auger said. “Or throw them away somewhere where no one will ever find them. What’s the problem with that?”
“We’d rather you returned them to us. That way we can make sure nothing has gone astray.”
“I can make it to the portal,” she said, “but I’m not certain that’s such a great idea at the moment. I’m pretty sure someone followed me here, from the detective’s office.”
“What kind of someone?”
“Someone working for him, I think. He seemed very willing to hand over the box. With hindsight, it looks as though he always intended to have someone tail me.”
“And he’s just a local detective?”
“Yes, the one I told you about after I spoke to Blanchard.”
“He’s probably just curious. Do your best to shake him off your tail, but don’t worry about him.”
“There’s more going on here than you’ve told me,” she said.
“Listen carefully,” Aveling said. “It’s exactly ten-forty now. Check your watch and synchronise.”
“Done.”
“At exactly noon we will arrange for a two-minute power interruption on the Métro line running through Cardinal Lemoine. I’ll be waiting for you inside the tunnel, at the door, and for obvious reasons, it would not be good to be late. No excuses, Auger—we’re all counting on you. I’ll see you in eighty minutes, with the paperwork.”
She said nothing.
“Will you be there?” Aveling asked.
“Yes,” she said. “Of course I’ll be there.”
Room service arrived with a knock on the door. She hung up on Aveling and opened the door as far as the security chain allowed before letting the boy enter and place her coffee service on the bedside table. She tipped him generously and then locked and chained the door from the inside. The coffee was on the lukewarm side of hot, but it was considerably better than nothing. She spooned cream and sugar into it and had drunk half a cup before she began to feel calm again.
She was definitely not being told everything. Auger supposed that this suspicion had always been lurking at the back of her mind, but now she was certain of it. And there was something else, something even more troubling that had been nagging at her quietly since she had first learned of Susan White’s involvement in this whole business.
Why had White made such a point of involving Auger when they were little more than professional acquaintances? Auger could understand White being concerned about her own safety and wanting to make sure that the papers didn’t fall into the wrong hands. She could understand the requirement for someone from the other side of the portal to come and retrieve them. But why Auger, specifically? Sure, she had the necessary background on Paris, the deep knowledge of the city, but there had to be more to it than that. At first glance, it looked as if White was playing a posthumous trick on Auger, setting her up for a hazardous job out of professional spite. But they’d been cool rivals rather than enemies, with no mutual animosity that Auger was aware of. In truth, they were rather alike.
So it had to have been something else. White was clever and calculating—she’d have done nothing without an excellent reason. And the only explanation Auger could come up with—the only one that seemed plausible to her, given what she knew of the woman—was that it was a matter of trust.
Auger was an outsider. She had ties to Caliskan—that was unavoidable for anyone with an Antiquities background—but they weren’t exactly thick as thieves. More important was the fact that she was not part of Aveling’s operation. A little more than a week ago, she’d had no knowledge of E2 whatsoever. Which meant, presumably, that Susan White had decided that she couldn’t trust Aveling or his people.
All of them? Auger wondered. Or did she just suspect that somewhere in the organisation there was someone who couldn’t be trusted?
Auger preferred the second hypothesis. It made more sense to her than the idea that the entire organisation, from Phobos to E2, was compromised. If that was the case, then they would surely have found a way to avoid bringing in an outsider, no matter how much it inconvenienced their plans.
Auger thought about what she had already learned for herself. Everyone agreed that there was something important about those papers. Susan White had gone to the trouble of passing them on for safekeeping and making arrangements for their return to the other side of the portal. Caliskan, Aveling and all the others involved in the Phobos operation seemed to agree on the significance of the documents, or else Auger would never have been co-opted to retrieve them. And there was someone else who considered them to be significant: whoever had killed White and now Blanchard. Whoever that was, they seemed less than keen to see those papers return to Phobos. Which implied—unless Auger’s imagination was running away with itself—that the person or persons who had committed those two murders were in some way linked to the contents of the papers.