Swain groaned and sat up, rubbing his hands over his face. There was a flaw in that logic, too. She’d have had a better chance of accomplishing whatever it was if she’d gone to ground and had the cosmetic surgery. He kept coming back to that. The only thing that made sense of her actions was if there was a metaphoric time bomb somewhere, something that wouldn’t wait a few months and had to be accomplished right now, or at least in a short period of time. But if there really was something along those lines, something that posed a world danger, all she had to do was pick up a phone and call it in, let a group of experts handle whatever it was rather than her trying to pull a Lone Ranger.
Scratch “world danger” as a motivation.
Something personal, then. Something she wanted to do herself, and felt a compelling urge to get done as soon as possible.
He thought about the contents of her file. Her motivation for killing Salvatore Nervi was the deaths of a couple of her friends and their adopted daughter a few months ago. She’d done the smart thing and laid her groundwork for that, taken her time, got close enough to Nervi to do the job. So why wasn’t she doing the smart thing now? Why was an intelligent, professional agent doing something so dumb it would ultimately get her caught?
Forget motivation, he suddenly thought. He was a man; he’d go crazy trying to figure out what was going through a woman’s mind. If he had to pick the most likely scenario, he’d say she wasn’t finished with the Nervi family. She’d struck them hard, but now she’d circled back for a killing blow. They had pissed her off big-time, and she was going to make them pay.
He heaved a sigh of satisfaction. There. That felt right. And damn if it didn’t provide motivation, too. She’d lost people she loved, and she was striking back no matter what the cost to herself. He could understand that. The reasoning was simple and clean, without all the why-do-this and not-do-that second-guessing.
He’d run it by Frank Vinay in a few hours when sunrise hit D.C., but his gut told him he was on the right track and he’d start nosing around before he talked to Vinay. He just needed to decide on a starting point.
It all went back to her friends. Whatever they’d been doing that got on Nervi’s bad side, that same thing would be her target as a sort of poetic justice.
He thought back to the file he’d read in Vinay’s office. He hadn’t brought any paperwork with him, because it could compromise security; unsanctioned eyes couldn’t read what wasn’t there. He relied instead on his excellent memory, which produced the names Averill and Christina Joubran, retired contract agents. Averill had been Canadian, Christina from the States, but they’d lived in France full-time and been completely retired for over twelve years. What could have spurred Salvatore Nervi to kill them?
Okay, first he had to find out where they’d lived, how they’d died, who their friends were other than Lily Mansfield, and if they’d talked to anyone about something unusual going on. Maybe Nervi was manufacturing biological weapons and selling them to the North Koreans, though again, if Lily’s friends had stumbled across something like that, why the hell wouldn’t they have simply called their old bosses and reported it? Idiots might try to handle things themselves, but successful contract agents weren’t idiots, because if they were, they’d be dead.
That wasn’t a good thought, because the Joubrans were dead. Uh-oh.
Before he thought himself in circles again, Swain got out of bed and showered, then called room service for breakfast. He’d elected to stay at the Bristol in the Champs-Élysées district because it had hotel parking space and twenty-four-hour room service. It was also expensive, but he needed the parking for the car he’d rented last night, and the room service because he might be keeping some very odd hours. Besides, the marble bathrooms were cool.
It was while he was eating his croissant and jam that something obvious occurred to him: the Joubrans hadn’t stumbled across anything. they’d been hired to do a job and either it had gone bad on them or they’d succeeded at it and been killed afterward when Nervi struck back.
Lily might already know what that something was, in which case he was still playing catch-up. But if she didn’t—and he thought that was likely, since she’d been away on a job when the kills went down—then she’d be trying to find out who had hired her friends, and why. Essentially, she’d be asking the same questions of the same people that Swain intended to interview. What were the odds that their paths would cross at some point?
He hadn’t liked those odds before, but they were looking better and better by the minute. A good starting point would be finding out what, if anything, had happened to any Nervi-owned facility in the week preceding the Joubrans’ deaths. Lily would be checking newspaper reports, which might or might not have any mention of a problem pertaining to the Nervis; he was in a position to go straight to the French police, but he’d just as soon they not know who he was or where he was staying. Frank Vinay wanted this kept as quiet as possible; it wouldn’t be good for diplomatic relations for the French to know that a CIA contract agent had apparently assassinated someone as politically connected as Salvatore Nervi, who hadn’t been a French citizen, but had nevertheless lived in Paris and had many friends in the government.
He checked in the phone directory for the Joubrans’ address, but there was nothing listed. No surprise there.
Swain’s good luck was that he worked for an agency that collected the most minute bits of news from all over the world, then cataloged and analyzed everything. Another bit of good luck was that the information highway in that agency was open twenty-four hours a day.
He used his secure cell phone to call Langley, going through the usual process of identification and verification, but within a minute he was talking to a person in the know, by the name of Patrick Washington. Swain told him who he was and what he needed, Patrick said, “Hold on,” and Swain waited. And waited.
Ten minutes later Patrick came back on the line. “Sorry it took so long, I had to double-check something.” Meaning he’d checked on Swain. “Yeah, there was an incident at a lab on August twenty-fifth, a contained explosion and fire. According to the reports, the damage was minimal.”
The Joubrans had been killed on August 28. The lab incident had to be the trigger.
“Do you have an address on the lab?”
“Coming up.”
Swain heard computer keys clicking; then Patrick said, “Number Seven Rue des Capucines, just outside Paris.”
That covered a lot of ground. “North, east, south, or west?”
“Uh—let me pull up a street-finder—” More clicking keys. “East.”
“What’s the name of the lab?”
“Nothing fancy. Nervi Laboratories.”
Yeah, right. Mentally Swain translated the name into French.
“Need anything else?”
“Yeah. The street address of Averill and Christina Joubran. They were retired contract agents. We used them occasionally.”
“How long ago?”
“Early nineties.”
“Just a minute.” More clicking keys. Patrick said, “Here it is,” and recited the address. “Anything else?”
“No, that’s it. You’re a good man, Mr. Washington.”
“Thank you, sir.”
The “sir” verified that Patrick had indeed double-checked Swain’s identity and clearance. He put Patrick’s name down in his mental file of go-to people, because he liked that the man was cautious enough that he didn’t take anything for granted.
Swain looked out the window: still raining. He hated that. He’d spent too many hours in the steaming tropical heat after a sudden downpour had drenched him to the skin, and the experience had given him an intense dislike of getting his clothes wet. It had been a long time since he’d been cold and wet, but as he remembered, it was even more miserable than being hot and wet. He hadn’t brought a raincoat with him, either. Hewasn’t even certain he owned one, and he didn’t have time to go shopping.