“Take care of the rest of it,” I said.
“What ‘rest’?” Rivier asked.
As I led Kim toward the rear deck, Louis said, “I’m going to raise your anchor, start your motors, and set a course on your autopilot. In about an hour, an hour and a half, you’ll enter French waters. And when you do, you’ll quickly be boarded by Investigateur Christoph Le Clerc of the Marseille office of the French National Police. He’ll take evidence on an obvious incidence of piracy on the high seas, and the first thing he’s going to collect is that fancy lighter around your neck.”
“What?” Rivier shouted. “We had a deal!”
“Jack, what is this phrase from Animal House again?” Louis asked.
Over my shoulder, I said, “You fucked up. You trusted us.”
Chapter 75
Nice, France
7:22 a.m.
WE BOARDED PRIVATE’S Gulfstream at the airport.
Kim had been quiet for most of the ride in on the Zodiac, nodding off at times. But on the drive from Monaco to Nice, she’d started to shake from withdrawal. We’d anticipated her having some physical issues and had brought along a concierge doctor and nurse. They immediately took Kim to the back of the cabin and shut the divider.
We were soon in the air, heading back to Paris.
“This your normal duty at Private?” Peaks asked from across the aisle. “You know, rescues? That sort of thing.”
“They come up,” I admitted, and yawned. “Why?”
“The prince is happy Maya’s safe, and grateful to you and Langlois,” Peaks said. “I don’t think the same can be said about me.”
“Looking for a job?” I asked.
“If it comes to that,” Peaks said.
“If it comes to that, I’d love to talk,” I said.
Louis, to my surprise, was already snoring in the seat in front of me. I put in earbuds and called up a white noise app for the sounds of waves softly crashing on a beach. It was as if I were home, and that noise was coming in my window. I fell hard and deep.
When I felt someone shaking my shoulder what seemed like a few minutes later, I jerked awake in a foul mood, pulled out the earbuds, and stared angrily at the doctor.
“I didn’t want to disturb you, but you’ve been sleeping an hour,” she said. “And Kim keeps asking for you.”
“Okay,” I said, forcing open my eyes. “I’ll be right there. How is she?”
“Considering what she’s been through, the heroin and all, she’s good,” the doctor said. “We gave her a slight dose of morphine to stay her withdrawal for a more suitable time and place, and a smaller dose of amphetamine salts to keep her heart rate up in the meantime.”
“She stable enough to make the trip to L.A.?” I asked.
“I think so.”
I thanked her and went aft, knocked, and went through the divider. Kim lay under blankets, propped up against pillows. She had an IV in her arm and looked wrung out and pale.
The nurse left and shut the divider behind her.
“You don’t give up, do you, Jack Morgan?” she asked in a hoarse whisper.
“Not as a rule,” I said. “The doc said you wanted to talk to me.”
Kim looked at her lap, bit the corner of her lip, and nodded weakly.
“I owe you an explanation,” she said. “After what you’ve done, you deserve it. But please, I’d appreciate it if my grandfather hears none of this. He’s…he’s one of the few people in my life who always believed the best of me.”
I leaned up against the cabin wall and said, “You don’t owe me an explanation. But whatever you feel comfortable telling me stays with me.”
Chapter 76
OVER THE COURSE of the next forty minutes, Kim gave me the CliffsNotes version of her story. After her parents died in the boating accident, she felt compelled to return to France, where she ended up working in Cannes as part of the film festival staff. She ran with a young, wild Euro crowd. There were drugs, and she got a taste for them, heroin in particular.
Kim met Phillipe Rivier the night of her twenty-fifth birthday at a nightclub in Cannes. He was fifteen years her senior, but he was handsome, sophisticated, mysterious, and by all appearances fabulously wealthy.
“There was also this…” Kim started playing with the blanket. “He was very, very sexy. And it was like in that book, you know?”
“Book?”
“Fifty Shades of you know?” she said. “Except it all took place on the boat.”
“Oh,” I said.
“Yeah,” she said, and fell silent for several beats. “It was good for a while, an escape from everything, I guess. And then it wasn’t. I realized he was keeping me isolated on the yacht, and when I complained, he either punished me or gave me a little heroin, which kept me in line.”
Kim said she lived aboard Rivier’s yacht for more than two years. During that time, she became a junkie, using the heroin to deaden herself to her predicament.
Then one night, four months before Louis and I got the call from her grandfather, Kim said she overheard Rivier tell Whitey and the Nose that it was time to get rid of her, that the drugs had made her a liability. They were moored in the harbor at Marseille, one of the few times the yacht was so close to land.
“They were going to kill me once we were back out to sea,” Kim said. “Phillipe seemed to get aroused by that because later that evening he came to my cabin for the first time in weeks. I thought he might, so I had prepared.”
Instead of shooting up the powdered heroin he had given her earlier in the day, she’d saved it. When he gave her more, she heated both batches and pretended to shoot it while he stripped off his clothes. She lay back, acting as though she was in a heroin-induced stupor, and when he came to her she stabbed him with the hypodermic needle and drove the drugs into him.
Whitey and the Nose were ashore. And Rivier enjoyed S and M, so the captain never came to check when his boss yelled. Rivier punched Kim a few times before he passed out. Kim got dressed and decided she was owed something for the years he’d kept her prisoner. She knew the combination to his safe, and took one hundred thousand euros, and the only thing Rivier never let out of his sight: the lighter.
“You had no idea that it disguised a digital memory stick?” I asked.
“Is that what it was?” she said. “He always told me it was a present from his mother. I took it for spite.”
Kim got the keys to the speedboat. The captain saw her, tried to stop her, but it was too late. She made it to a dock in Marseille, and then to a church. She told the priest she was addicted to heroin and in trouble, but also that she had money to pay for her own rehabilitation.
For a twenty-five-thousand euro contribution to his church, the priest got her out of the city and to a private detoxification and addiction recovery center near Aix-en-Provence. Kim gave the center the rest of the money-seventy-five thousand euros-and spent three and a half months cleaning up there before Rivier’s men somehow found her.
“They asked for me at the gate, but the doctors refused to say whether I was there or not,” she said. “I took off that night and made my way to Paris, to a friend’s place in Les Bosquets. I had an ATM card from my trust, but no passport. I didn’t know what to do, so I called my grandfather, and he called you.”
I stood there, digesting it, until Kim said, “You think I’m a bad person.”
“I think you’ve got a few issues,” I said. “But I also think you got caught up in something that was way beyond your ability to either anticipate or control, and ultimately I have to commend you for escaping like that. It was gutsy.”
Kim smiled wanly. “Thank you.”
“One thing. Why didn’t you go to the police?”
“Because Phillipe always said he had the French police in his back pocket,” she said. “Especially in Marseille.”