Another long moment passed. “You’re right,” she said. “I’m sorry. I just—”
“Forget it. Who are they?”
“For the last year, I’ve had to spend time with a wealthy man. A Saudi. A financier. You can imagine what he finances.”
“Okay.”
“He’s very well connected. Which is why I was assigned to him. When my organization had learned what it needed to learn through me and had acted on the intelligence, I broke the connection with him.”
“He never knew you were using him?”
“No. He thought it was just an affair. The problem was, he became obsessed with me. To get him to stop contacting me, I told him I was in love with someone else. He still wouldn’t stop. So I told him if he didn’t leave me alone, I would tell his wife of the affair. He’s a very pious man, or pretends to be, and his piety is critical to his influence. So it was a serious threat.”
“How did he take it?”
“He was enraged.”
“Enraged enough to want to do something in response?”
“He’s a selfish man,” she said. “And cruel. The kind of man who, if he couldn’t have something for himself, would try to keep it from anyone else.”
I exhaled long and hard, trying not to imagine the psychic price she must have paid for repeatedly offering her body, and even a simulacrum of her mind, to someone who obviously repulsed her.
“You know,” I said, “it wouldn’t have hurt for you to tell me that before we were trapped in a restaurant with an ambush waiting outside.”
She said nothing, and I wondered if she could sense what I’d really been thinking. Probably she could.
“All right,” I said. “Never mind. This guy… is he connected enough to track you to Paris?”
“He knows I live in Paris. I didn’t try to hide that.”
“Does he know your particulars?”
“Of course not.”
“Is he connected enough to find out? To track a cell phone?”
“Yes.”
“Then what do you think these guys are here for? Kidnap you? Take you back to Saudi Arabia, put you in a harem?”
She looked at me, her face expressionless. “I think they’re here to hurt me.”
“Hurt you how?”
She cocked her head as though in wonder at how thick I was, then said, “If you and two or three other thugs had a woman alone in a panel van and wanted to hurt her in the worst way possible, wanted to ruin her for anyone else, what would you do?”
I didn’t answer. There was nothing to say.
“Well,” she said. “I imagine that’s how they’re planning to hurt me.”
I was quiet for a moment. Then I said, “When this is done, I want you to tell me who the Saudi is.”
“No. I don’t want you involved.”
“I’m already involved. I’m not going to let you walk out there alone.”
“My organization will take care of it. Let’s just focus on tonight.”
I wanted to press the point, but she was right. About the tonight part, anyway. The rest we could figure out later.
“All right,” I said. “I only saw one on the right, but there was another guy mobile so there could be two. Could you handle two on your own?”
“Yes.”
“Then here’s how we’ll play it. If I go with you, and the ones on the left see me help you drop the opposition on the right, I lose the element of surprise if they come after us. If I hang back, and anyone pursues you, they’ll have to get through me, and they won’t even understand I’m a real obstacle until it’s too late. Okay?”
She nodded. “It’s a good plan.”
“So we walk out together and kiss goodnight at the door. You go right, I hang back. If you need help, I’m close enough to back you up. If you don’t, I’ll mop up the others.”
Suddenly she looked alarmed. “You can’t kill them. Not unless you absolutely have to.”
I tamped down my frustration. I wasn’t used to having to consult on this kind of thing. I said, “Don’t make this harder than it has to be, okay? We’re up against four. Maybe more. We don’t know if they have weapons, we don’t even know for sure what this is about. When I hit these guys, I don’t want them getting back up. If you’re smart, you’ll do the same.”
“Think, John. We can’t leave four bodies, or more, outside a restaurant where we just had dinner, where we’ve eaten, what, eight, ten times before? The police will get a description. An attractive blonde and a Japanese guy, you want to be worried about the police looking for something like that every time we share a kiss on the Pont de Sully?”
Goddamn it, she was right. I was letting those images of what they would do to her in the truck affect my judgment.
I blew out a long breath. “You’re right.”
“I mean it,” she said, knowing me, realizing how I was feeling.
“I get it. I’m not going to kill anyone.”
But I’ll make them wish I had.
“If the plan is to get you into the truck,” I said, “that’s the center of gravity of this thing. So when you’re done taking care of business, you keep going in the same direction you started. Away from the truck. I’ll handle my end, you just get out of Dodge. You understand?”
“Yes,” she said. There was no need to affect protest. She was good, but she knew I was better. Sending the target back into the center of the op would have just been stupid.
“Good. And don’t go back to your apartment when it’s done. We don’t know how they tracked you. If it’s your mobile, they could have logged your movements to your apartment, we don’t know. So when we’re done—”
“Yes, I’ll turn it off and remove the battery. Where do you want to meet?”
“There’s a park, by Sully Morland Metro.”
“The Square Henri-Galli.”
“Yes. The playground inside it, the monkey bars—I’ll meet you there and we’ll figure out what to do next. But like you say, first this.”
“Okay.”
I rotated my neck, cracking the joints, and popped my knuckles. I felt a surge of hot adrenaline spread out from my gut and it felt like coming home.
“All right,” I said. “You ready?”
She nodded and we stood. She pulled on the cream suede jacket that earlier she’d hung on the back of her chair, slipped one arm and her head through the strap of her shoulder bag, and eased the Hideaway onto the first two fingers of her right hand, concealing it alongside the shoulder bag. I drained the last two inches of wine remaining in my glass, but didn’t swallow it, instead holding it in my mouth. Delilah bid the waitress au revoir, merci, and we walked to the door, each of us eyeing the area outside. Just beyond the threshold, we paused, facing each other, and kissed in the French style, one cheek, then the other, giving each of us two opportunities to see what was waiting a little way down the street.
I squeezed her arm and she moved off, her footfalls echoing quietly on the stone sidewalk in the dark, and there was something about the sound as it faded away that almost could have panicked me. I hadn’t expected it to be so hard to let her walk alone into whatever she was facing. I suddenly wondered if I’d made a mistake, if the odds weren’t better with us sticking together. But too late to go back now.
I took out my mobile as though to make a call, using it as an excuse to linger in front of the restaurant a moment longer. I kept my head down but my eyes up and saw the two on my end of the street start moving in our direction. They weren’t even looking at me. They were completely focused on Delilah. Bad enough that they’d underestimated her. But thinking I was a civilian, too… this just wasn’t going to be their night.
I glanced right. Someone had stepped out of the gloom in front of Delilah. I heard him say, “Désolé.” Someone else had peeled himself off the dark wall of the École and was moving to flank her. Delilah’s arm moved in a blur and the first guy stumbled back, clutching his face, crying out, “Ah! Putain de merde!” She’d slashed him with the Hideaway. I hoped across an eye.