“Hawkins-where the hell’ve you been?” It was Agent Campbell, sounding more excited than vexed. “I’ve been trying to get you all night. You weren’t in your-”
“No,” said Hawk as the ignition fired, “I wasn’t. Listen-”
“Things are about to pop over here. If you want to be in on it, better get your butt in gear now. It’s turning into a regular circus, you want to know the truth-CIA arrived last night, that’s one thing I wanted to tell you-and a bunch of guys from Mossad just called in to say they’re on their way, and not to do anything until they get here. Seems they think they oughta have first crack at her, I guess, because of that Israeli jet that went down two years-”
“Jeez,” Hawk broke in, “who the hell’ve we got here, anyway? Khadafy’s wife?”
“That’s the other thing I wanted to pass along. We’ve got a tentative ID on the lady with all the paintings. Took a while-still sorting things out over there at the Kremlin, it seems. Finally came through about four this morning.” Campbell paused. Hawk ground his teeth and spun gravel as he turned the Nissan onto the paved road. “Ever hear of Galina Moskova?” Hawk frowned and grunted a negative. “Alias Emma Butterfield Parker?”
Something began to nibble at his memory. Something ugly.
“Code name…The Duchess?”
“Holy…” Hawk went on to further embellish his favorite word, and when he ran out of possibilities, muttered, “We thought she had to be dead. Jeez. You’re sure?”
“Sure as we can be. It was that fingerprint your people turned up that did it. There’s never been a decent photo, and any descriptions would be, what, ten years out of date? And it’s likely she’s altered her appearance anyway. But the prints don’t lie. It’s her, all right.”
Hawk didn’t say anything for a few moments. He was on the highway now, pushing it as hard as he dared on the narrow country road, made more treacherous with patches of ground fog that had collected in unexpected places. He felt as though some of that fog had settled inside him. Jeez…Galina Moskova. The Duchess. Emma Butterfield Parker.
He remembered it all now. No wonder the hit on Loizeau had seemed so clean and professional. Back in their glory days, Galina Moskova had been one of the KGB’s most ruthless and successful assassins. As sought-after interior designer Emma Butterfield Parker, she’d moved almost unnoticed through Britain’s upper crust, pulling off an unbroken string of high-profile hits, many of them so discreetly done, it wasn’t until the fall of the Soviet Union that it had been known for certain they were hits, and not unfortunate accidents or death from natural causes. Discretion and restraint-those had been Emma’s trademarks. She’d had a reputation for never using an ounce more muscle than it took to get the job done.
Like at the auction, Hawk thought. Using just enough poison on Aaron Campbell to knock him out, but not enough to kill him. That was Galina, all right.
And Loizeau? But he’d seen her, spoken to her, face-to-face. So of course he’d had to die. Neatly, cleanly, hadn’t even seen it coming. That was Galina, too.
Dear God…Jane. It came to him suddenly, like a hard left to the midsection. If anyone in the world could identify the woman, Jane could. They’d been friends. Shared meals, confidences, a hotel room…a tube of toothpaste. Would that make a difference to Galina Moskova?
Hawk knew the answer to that. His heart felt like a lump of ice.
“Ten years or so ago,” Campbell was saying, “apparently our Emma saw glasnost coming, saw the handwriting on the wall, and went AWOL.”
“We assumed her own people had shut her down,” Hawk said in a leaden voice. “Permanently.”
“Yes, well, I’m sure Emma saw that in her cards and that’s why she split. Anyway, seems she went underground for a while, then quietly opened up for business, near as we can tell, about seven, eight years ago-private business. Now she works for the highest bidder.”
“Hired gun on an international scale.” Hawk swore softly.
“Yeah, but apparently not limited to that. She’s been a busy lady. We’ve turned up connections to the Libyans-”
“God. Not-”
“Yeah, and as I said, the Israelis want her for their crash also-”
And we’ve connected her to Sicily. And that means…
“-And we’ve got suspicions about half a dozen other terrorist bombings in Europe over the past eight years…”
Marseilles…April 1990. A beautiful spring day, warm sunshine and a mistral blowing, making the masts in the small-boat harbor clank with their own kind of rhythm, like a band of children making music with spoons and pots and garbage-can lids. Two days left of spring break from Tom’s job teaching history at the American School in Milan…They’d spent the morning on the beach, watching the windsurfers dip and dart though the waves like butterflies. That afternoon they’d planned to explore La Canebière and look at the model ships in La Musée de la Marine. Jason had been promised ice cream, but it was sieste time, and everything was closed They’d walked past café after café, teasing Jason and telling him stories to distract him, when they’d come upon the street…he couldn’t remember the name of it now…a street with no traffic, paved with stones and lined will all sorts of little shops and cafés. And in the middle, the merry-go-round playing a tune…what was the name of it? It was from a movie with Leslie Caron, he remembered, and for years he’d heard it in his dreams. Hi Lili, Hi Lo, he thought it was called.
“Hawkins? Are you still there?”
“Yeah.” It came out so garbled, he cleared his throat and repeated, “Yeah, I’m here.”
“You know this changes things.”
No kidding.
“If this is Galina Moskova we’re dealing with, then she’s got to be working for somebody with big bucks. I mean, government-big. She wouldn’t come cheap.” Campbell paused. “I’m thinking Libya.”
“Well, whoever it is,” Hawk said through the truckload of rock in his throat, “I don’t think she’s gonna be sitting here in Cooper’s Mill, North Carolina. waiting for her customer. She’s gonna be going to see the boss. So if you’re figuring on waiting for the rendezvous and getting both birds with one stone…”
“Right. So we move on her as soon as we know she’s got the disk. Uh, by the way, Hawkins?”
“Yeah.”
“What can you tell us about Mrs. Carlysle? We, uh, seem to have lost our… Ahem. The, uh, surveillance equipment we had on her seems to be down for some reason. You wouldn’t know anything about that, I don’t suppose.” Campbell’s voice was carefully neutral. “Or where she might be at the moment?”
“No, I don’t.” Hawk rubbed a hand over his eyes and then across his unshaven jaw. He felt like nine miles of bad road. “But I’ve got an idea she may be headed your way.”
“Say again?” He could hear the FBI agent’s voice crack.
“You heard me. I don’t know where she is. But I think she might be on her way to a meeting with our suspect.”
Campbell borrowed Hawk’s word and made it his own. “You don’t think she means to warn her?”
“Warn her of what, for God’s sake! Use your head. She doesn’t know anything. Look-I don’t know what she’s up to, but I’ll tell you this-she hasn’t got a clue who she’s dealing with.”
There was a pause, during which Agent Campbell held a mumbled conversation with someone on his end, and Hawk made the discovery that none of the cow pastures he was driving past now bore any resemblance to the ones he’d driven past last night.
“Hawkins?”
“Yeah.”
“You figure Mrs. Carlysle to be heading for the suspect’s house or her store?”