Once she had pieced together the extent of Damien’s plans, she had made a personal decision. She would ride out the storm with him.
He not only knew what was coming, but how bad it was going to get, and had prepared accordingly. She had been trading her body for so long, what was a little longer? It was about survival, as it always had been. Damien cared for her and she would use that to her advantage.
Wrapping her in his arms, he crushed her against his chest as they kissed. She felt warm all over, even as he had lifted her halfway out of the pool, exposing her to the crisp, autumn air.
Momentarily, she broke from his kiss. “Pool house or guest house?” she asked, a naughty smile on her face.
“Right here,” Damien said, placing her fully onto the edge of the pool. “Alfresco.”
This was how she was going to remember him — passionate, powerful, tender. He had always treated her with kindness, with respect. He had treated her like a lady. There had been many bad men in her life, but Damien wasn’t one of them. She would never forget that.
Wrapping her arms around him now, she tried to burn a snapshot in her mind — the pool, the house, the breeze on her damp skin, the sound of Wilhelmenia Fernandez singing La Wally from the terrace speakers.
She didn’t want to forget any of it. She wanted to always remember both how well he had treated her, and how much she had actually enjoyed her assignment. How it hadn’t even seemed like an assignment. How she had given herself freely to him.
Her only regret was that he would never know her — not the real her — and what her life had been. Not that it mattered. Without that life, without the Mossad, she and Damien never would have been drawn together.
All that mattered was that Bentzi and his people, his precious Israel, wanted him. That was what Bentzi cared about. It was all that he ever cared about. And Bentzi would do whatever he had to, including using her, to achieve Israel’s goals.
It was why she had kept Damien’s passwords for herself. She didn’t care if the Mossad was ever able to access the hard drive they had back in Tel Aviv. That wasn’t her fight. It had never been her fight.
Bentzi and Israel had used her, repeatedly. And in planning her exit, she had found a way to not only secure reparations for herself, but to stick it to the Mossad and everyone else in the process.
She had been an innocent, a good, young woman with her whole life in front of her. Israel could have done the right thing, it should have done the right thing. But it didn’t. Instead of freeing her, returning her home, it kept her in bondage. All they did for her was upgrade her shackles.
They might come after her someday, if there was even an Israel left. It was a possibility. What was a certainty was that they would eventually come after Damien. Though Bentzi hadn’t admitted it, she knew that they were thinking of killing him.
It was the biggest reason why she couldn’t stay with him indefinitely. Men like Pierre Damien were incapable of disappearing.
She, on the other hand, could disappear. Like so many other things in life, it all came down to money.
Once she had captured the code to Damien’s safe in Geneva, the password to his computer soon followed.
He kept everything on his laptop. A multitude of the files were also password protected, but patience proved to be its own reward. It was like having the keys to a palace in which locked doors and room after room contained some sort of secret or piles of treasure.
The most important thing she was able to ascertain was how to obtain immunity against the disease that was going to sweep the globe. As long as she survived the tumult and chaos in the immediate aftermath, the rest of her life would be hers to do with as she wished.
She quietly reached out to her parents and explained what they needed to do. Her father, always so stubborn and simpleminded, refused to believe her, instead calling it a grand conspiracy cooked up by the Jews. There was no circumventing his bigotry. She begged her mother to heed her advice and work on convincing her father. If he perished, it would be his fault, not Israel’s.
With her health and that of her family addressed, she began to dig into the information on Damien’s computer.
Knowing the financial markets were going to collapse, he had taken a series of positions in order to profit from the calamity. Some were so esoteric that she dismissed them out of hand. Others were quite simple, and those were the ones she focused on.
But like his passwords, many of Damien’s financial bets kept changing. It made it very difficult to keep up.
She established a relationship with a Zurich-based trading firm with offices in Geneva. Upon setting up her account, they provided access to their proprietary app that would allow her to get real-time market info, establish trades, and conduct business with their banking division. It was like having a miniature Swiss banker in her purse or pocket at all times.
But the most interesting thing of all on Damien’s laptop were his journals.
He had begun them shortly after his wife had passed away as a form of therapy, and had kept them going ever since. The insights deep into his mind and his soul were both fascinating and disturbing.
The transformation of a grief-stricken widower to a man determined to bring about the greatest holocaust in human history was riveting. And the closer the deadly event came, the more Damien’s confidence grew.
In his most recent entries, it was as if he knew his diaries would be read and dissected by posterity. He was standing at a pivotal moment in time, calmly laying out his case, explaining what steps needed to be taken, and why. They were quite literally brilliant and mad at the same time.
If history had any sense of decency, it would see Damien through the lens of his macabre devotion to eugenics — his belief that if not for the “overkindness” of the Western world, entire strains of “inferior” lines would have been allowed to die off, releasing pressure upon the planet and its limited resources.
The journals stood in sharp contrast to the man whose bed she so often shared. She had never heard him say a disparaging word about any group or class of people. In fact, he had always seemed devoted to helping those in the greatest need. It was an unsettling dichotomy that made it feel as if a completely different person had written the journals. But there was one thing in particular about them that betrayed his hand — his love of birds.
From the golden faucet knobs shaped like swans on his jet, to the original Audubons hanging in the apartment in Geneva, she had not been surprised to see him reference birds in his journals, but it was the manner in which he had that was so unsettling.
Each phase in the plan he had created was named after a specific type of bird. The Congo phase was named after the Crow, while the American phase was named after the Hummingbird. It was the Hummingbird reference that she found the most disturbing of all.
While he professed a love for the bird, he also admitted — while intellectually patting himself on the back — a nod to a dark event that had taken place in 1934.
Known as the Night of the Long Knives, or the Röhm-Putsch, it was a political purge, a three-day killing spree where Adolf Hitler’s SS and Gestapo were said to have killed hundreds and arrested thousands of his enemies in order to consolidate power. The code name they had adopted was Operation Hummingbird, the same name Damien would adopt almost a century later.
Helena knew that was why he had poured the 1934 sauternes for his dinner guests the other night. She had found the empty bottle in the kitchen trash. Dates mattered to Damien. It was why he had brought the bottles from 1978 to lunch. Wine was his portal to history, both good history and bad.