The ornamental garden was laid out in a formal pattern marked with low evergreen hedges of razor-sharp boxwoods. Now, the loamy beds they bordered were empty, but freshly turned earth indicated the gardeners had been preparing to fill them with annuals. They strolled through the maze of hedges and emerged on the slope that led down to the Thames. The gauzy yellow disc of the sun hung in a banded purplish haze above the horizon.
The view was quite beautiful, and Ambrose stole a glance at Diana. She caught him looking and cut her eyes away. He noticed, however, that she did not remove her hand from his as they walked down toward the river. Miraculously, he found his vocal cords still reasonably operational and he continued his narrative in clear, bell-like tones.
“To continue, Diana. As you well know, I was running a spy at the French embassy. My cousin. He turns out to have been a double agent, working for the Chinese. He disappears without a trace. We learn that a Chinese woman of your acquaintance, assuredly involved in espionage, is responsible. Within that same approximate time frame, Alex Hawke snatches an American agent from a Chinese vessel moored in French territorial waters. And then—good lord, what’s the matter with that man?”
“What man?”
“Down there, on the path.”
A large man was making his way toward them, loping up the hillside pathway and calling out to them, his hands cupped around his mouth. His shouted words were lost in the wind. But Ambrose believed he had clearly made out the word “drowned.”
“It’s my head gardener, Pordage. Poor old soul, he’ll have a heart attack running up this hill.”
“Diana, listen,” Congreve said, wanting to shield her from the once seen, never forgotten sight and smell of a submerged corpse, “there’s some kind of trouble down there. I’ll run down and meet Pordage. Perhaps you should go back up and notify the—”
She’d kicked off her shoes and was flying down the hill toward the river ahead of him.
“He says they’ve found a body!” she cried over her shoulder.
Chapter Twenty-eight
Paris
THE DATE WAS NOT ACCIDENTAL. IT WAS THE FOURTEENTH of July. Bastille Day. History records that it was on this very day, in the year 1789, that the citizenry of Paris had stormed the Bastille Prison and brought about the surrender of King Louis XVI. Violence had erupted throughout the country. Following the “Terror,” many French nobles and men long accustomed to privilege in government, fearing for their lives and their ill-gotten fortunes, had fled abroad.
Those who remained in Paris found themselves, usually with but a semblance of a trial, trudging up the blood-soaked steps to the guillotine. With each thunk of the heavy blade, the ancien régime saw that their collective necks were stretched thinner and thinner. The old guard quickly realized that it was no match for the new nation’s twin passions, Liberty and Equality, and took to their heels. That was the eighteenth century. The twenty-first had brought new, more volatile passions to old Europe and what the dailies heralded as the New France.
Once again, a lot of heads were on the chopping block.
A flat-screen television monitor, sitting atop a gilded ormolu desk in a corner of the French prime minister’s office, showed a live feed of the wild melee now occurring at Orly and Charles de Gaulle airports and at the train and bus stations of Paris. Chaos. At one of the bridges across the Seine, a sea of flashing blue lights and the red beacons of emergency vehicles. Smoke was curling from a burned-out tank and many overturned automobiles.
At daybreak, CRS riot police, one of the groups still loyal to President Bocquet, had clashed with a mob of Bonapartists on the Pont Neuf. Seventeen banner-carrying citizens belonging to an Anglo-American society had died when the exploding tear-gas pellets and a hail of rubber bullets failed to stop their advance toward a protest rally near the Elysée Palace. The now-smoldering tank had opened fire and killed a dozen rioting students before three heroic youths clambered aboard and dropped Molotov cocktails down the opened hatch.
Bonaparte was not watching these disturbing images on the monitor; he had eyes only for the restive crowd gathering beneath his windows. He had his head bent forward and his hands clasped behind his back in the familiar ancestral pose.
“Those who ignore the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them,” Luca Bonaparte said softly, quoting Santayana to no one in particular.
The quotation was not lost, however, on his companion.
Bonaparte and a very well-dressed black gentleman stood before an array of tall windows overlooking the palace’s large interior courtyard. A narrow bar of sunlight sharply bisected Luca’s face; his eyes shone with battle fire. His somewhat cruel mouth was in shadow. In the courtyard and in the surrounding streets below, a seething mob heaved and surged over the cobblestones.
The euphoric horde had been growing all morning, in both size and volume. New estimates were coming into the newly named prime minister’s quarters every half hour. The latest aide to enter Bonaparte’s gilded offices had calculated the crowd’s strength in this arrondissement alone at more than one hundred thousand electrified Frenchmen.
“Vive le France!” the masses shouted. “Vive le roi, vive Bonaparte!”
“They want a king,” the elegant black man observed.
“They shall have an emperor,” Bonaparte said.
This was the dream that had lain restive in his mind since the mock battles of boyhood. Luca’s lips curled into a wry smile as he lifted his gaze from this amorphous human mass to the sunlit palace wing on the opposite side of the courtyard. There, behind windows much like his own, he could almost make out the shadowy figure of Bocquet himself.
Unquestionably, the current president of France was staring at the selfsame scene below with a growing sense of horror. Luca raised an ornate brass spyglass, bequeathed to this office by Napoleon himself, to his eye.
He twisted the ring and brought the optics into crystalline focus.
“Monsieur le President Bocquet and I share a similar view of this situation,” he said to the little black man. “Albeit our reactions to it may not be quite the same.”
His companion chuckled appreciatively, his eyes glittering behind his gold pince-nez glasses.
“Everything in life depends on your point of view, My Liege,” the man said in his deep new voice. The bone-rattling chuckle, like the nappy white wig, was an essential part of his new disguise.
Bonaparte smiled in appreciation of the Chinaman’s bon mot.
After the successful completion of the Sotheby’s affair, Hu Xu had shed Madame Li forever. In her place, a foppish African diamond merchant from the Côte d’Ivoire. This smart white-haired gentleman with the startlingly white teeth and the coal-black face had a polished manner and was impeccably dressed. He wore a well-tailored light grey woolen three-piece suit, a patterned red Hermès tie, and mirror-polished black wingtip shoes. A gold watch chain spanned his little belly. And his voice had miraculously dropped from a clipped soprano to a broad basso profundo.
Earlier that morning, the reigning president of France, Guy Bocquet, had appeared on his balcony. Weaned on decades of the adulation of the French populace, he had been shocked at the reaction to his appearance at the balustrade. Sensing the brittle mood of the mob, he had wisely stepped back inside. He hurriedly conferred with his closest political and military advisors. Something must be done. Bocquet could feel his city, his country, his dominion, veering out of control.
And his lifelong friend Honfleur’s corpse was hardly cold!