He wore the gun just behind the right hipbone, the position he’d found most suitable for the fastest draw. The gun was a lightweight Walther TPH only recently acquired and he hoped it was as effective as advertised. Tom Quick, a U.S. Army sharpshooter and weapons expert before joining Hawke’s security staff, had assured him it was good for close work. Assuming one used Quick’s own hand-loaded ammunition, which Hawke most assuredly did.
“So. You are some kind of spy, or counterspy. Is that it?”
“Over-the-counter spy would be more like it.”
“Meaning?”
“For sale without prescription,” he said, checking the heft of the fully loaded mag and sliding it with a satisfying click into the butt of the gun.
“What?”
“Readily available, you know, generic espionage. Mundane stuff, I’m afraid. Tedious corporate snooping and the like. A dull business, I assure you. Might as well have studied the law.”
“And the gun?”
“Strictly precautionary. Might encounter some archfiend of the industrial espionage world out there.”
“Bullshit.”
He cut his eyes toward her. The word didn’t fit the face. Women had every right to use the same language as men. He wasn’t being priggish. He just didn’t find it attractive.
“Really? How on earth do you know that, my dear?” he said, reaching behind his back and slipping the weapon into its high-tech scabbard. Then he reached for his knife.
It was an item acquired a few years earlier in Qatar. A long-bladed dagger called the Assassin’s Fist. He wore it strapped to the inside of his right forearm with a quick-release device his friend Stokely Jones had perfected in the Mekong Delta. The knife had seen a lot of use. He’d recently replaced the original blade with six inches of the finest Sheffield steel.
“So. You have a meeting?” the actress pouted. “At this hour? Ridiculous.”
“Yes. Quite sorry, darling,” Hawke said, pulling a thick black turtleneck jumper down over his head. “Offshore work, you see. That’s the problem with freelance. Dreadful hours.”
He gave her a peck on the cheek and withdrew his face before she could slap him.
“You’ll find my office number in London scribbled inside,” he said, handing her a gaudy matchbook from the Casino Barriere de Cannes. “I do hope we’ll see each other again. A quiet dinner at Harry’s Bar, perhaps.”
“You are the most—”
Hawke put his finger to his lips and then said, “I know, I know. Unbearable. A cad. A fiend. I can only hope you’ll forgive me. You see, my dear girl, nobody quite knows this yet, but there’s a war on.”
“War?”
“Hmm,” he said, and started to turn away. She grabbed his sleeve and put a small white card into his hand.
“What’s this?”
“An invitation. The baron is hosting a small private dinner party aboard Valkyrie tomorrow evening, Mr. Hawke. To celebrate the launch of his newest ship. An ocean liner. Perhaps you would like to come, yes? As my guest, of course.”
“On one condition. You must promise never to say that word again, darling,” he said. “‘Bullshit.’ It’s most unattractive coming from that pretty mouth.”
He crossed the darkened room swiftly and pulled the heavy mahogany door softly closed behind him. Then he plucked his handwritten card from the brass fixture by his door, stuck it inside his pocket, and made a quick dash for the marble stairway.
The Star of Shanghai was scheduled to sail on the tide at midnight. His old friend Brick Kelly, the CIA director, had informed him that somewhere deep in the bowels of that old rust bucket was a captured American operative formerly working deep cover. A dead man walking who just might be able to save the world.
His name, Hawke had learned in Gibraltar, was Harry Brock.
Chapter Five
Paris, 1970
WHAT A FRIEND ARCHITECTS HAVE IN SNOW, THE CORSICAN chuckled to himself, climbing out of his taxi. Almost a foot of the white stuff had fallen. Even the Gare d’Austerlitz, an ugly duckling by Parisian standards, looked beautiful with its frosting. The barrel-shaped man slogged across the Place Valhubert to the station’s entrance. No boots, just tired leather shoes, his icy wet socks sagging around his ankles in the slush. He’d left the taxi running. His fellow drivers at the stand would look after it, no problem.
Yes, there are many grand railway stations in Paris, Monsieur Emile Bonaparte considered on this freezing December night, brushing wet snow from his eyes with the back of his hand, but this one, this ugly duckling hiding under its mantle of winter white, this one is all mine.
A vaporous yellow light hovered inside the main hall’s soaring web of iron. A cloud of iridescent steam rose above the damp and overheated woolens of the teeming crowds. Surprisingly busy for a Sunday evening, he observed. There was a hubbub of noisy passengers as throngs departing for the South of France, Spain, and Portugal surged against travelers arriving from those selfsame destinations.
Like the battlefield ebb and flow of charging armies, the old soldier imagined, firing a soggy unfiltered Gauloise. Emile felt a certain stirring of his blood, pleased with this ironic, militaristic turn of thought. In the café earlier, he’d spied a lengthy piece in Paris Soir and relished every word of the account, chewing it carefully with pride, seeing the action.
On this very day in history, he saw, the second of December, 1805, his glorious ancestor Napoleon and his Grande Armée had defeated the Austro-Russian armies above the small Moravian town of Austerlitz. A sublime trap it had been. A feint here! There! Suddenly, the genius Napoleon had lured the Allies to the Pratzen Heights, had rushed in his III Corps to crush them! Ah, yes. Long ago and far away, but still shining through the mists of memory and history.
An army on a hill. The glory of it. La Gloire!
He looked up at the sudden shriek of a whistle. A massive white-sugared engine, heavily laden with snow, rumbled in amidst a cloud of frosty vapors. A rush of porters and people meeting the Nice–Paris train brushed by him. He jammed the cigarette into the corner of his mouth, shot the cuffs of his rough brown leather jacket, and joined the tide. Ahead, he saw the doors of the second-class carriages open, and his heart beat a little faster. He slipped on his heavy tortoiseshell glasses with brown, tobacco-stained fingers and scanned the emerging passengers. Was that—could it really be?
Luca.
Emile Bonaparte watched his son step down from the train and hardly recognized him. Well, he’s grown, hasn’t he? Emile thought. My God, he’s almost as tall as I am!
“Papa! Papa!” the boy cried. Emile grinned as his son shouldered between two jostling women struggling against the tide. One of the two, the beefy one who’d dropped her string bag full of baguettes, shouted angrily, wagging her stumpy finger at his son. But the fifteen-year-old, seeing an opening, laughed merrily at her and darted and dodged ahead, making his way toward his father.
Two very large men in loud sport jackets remained between father and son. Emile shoved past them and stepped forward and, with his arms spread wide, embraced his child. He was startled at the hard knots of muscle at his back and shoulders.
“Luca!” Emile said, clasping him happily to his breast. “Did you bring it? You didn’t forget, did you?”
“Don’t be stupid, Father! You only need look in my sack.”
Emile released his son from the embrace (Luca was plainly embarrassed by such a show), and his son handed him the parcel. Inside, four brown bottles of Pietra, the beer of his native Corsica, difficult to find in the small shops in the St. Germain des Prés.