He finally found him sitting alone at a table near the far end of the bar, sipping a beer.
Thibault was looking directly at him.
CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT
Naomi wound her way down to the farmhouse. She waited a few minutes to make certain Thibault wasn’t coming back. It had become dark, and the path down was treacherous with sliding rocks and false steps, even with her flashlight, causing her to stumble and almost fall several times along the way.
Thank God Ty was following Thibault.
As she watched the house her blood started to race. The dark silence of the unfamiliar valley and realizing just what she was about to get herself into gave her one of the deepest feelings of loneliness and isolation she had ever felt. She begged her heart to calm down. There was no one there, nothing to be afraid of. She kept telling herself that this was the right thing to do. Still, her heart wouldn’t quite respond. A thought passed through her that would have made her laugh if she wasn’t so afraid: What’ve you gotten yourself involved in, Naomi?
She wasn’t a desk agent anymore.
When she was certain Thibault wasn’t returning, she darted across the mountain road, careful to avoid leaving imprints from her sneakers in the gravel. She moved over to the arched, wood-planked front door. The latch was locked. Shit. She poked her light through a crack in the shuttered window. She couldn’t see much. The lights inside were dimmed.
She hurried around the side. It was a stone and stucco cottage, could have been built a hundred years ago. The brush that crept up to the side of the house was sparse. Cautiously, she peered in through a cracked shutter. She could see an open kitchen with a large stone hearth. She tried the door off the kitchen. The iron latch didn’t budge either. Damn. She continued on around back.
She knew she had the time, the time to sort it all out and be careful, but her heart was thumping and she wanted to get this over with, and she didn’t want to take the chance that someone, anyone, might show up at the house. She peered into what looked like a bedroom window. She knew if she had to she could break the pane of glass. They knew where Thibault was. They knew what car he was driving, what name he was traveling under. They could always find him. Busting the window would blow their secrecy. But what was important was finding out what he knew.
She checked the shuttered windows along the back and, to her elation, saw that one of them was cracked.
She slid her fingers underneath the sill and jerked upward. To her relief, the window lifted. She wiggled a space just wide enough for her body to slip through and climbed inside. She was right; it was a bedroom. In fact, it seemed to be the one Thibault was using. His clothes were strewn haphazardly about a chair; the open suitcase she had seen Maria Radisovic bring in was on the floor. The bed was mussed.
She was in.
In the front room she spotted a breakfast table in a nook outside the kitchen that Thibault seemed to be using as his work space. There was a small TV that was hooked up to a satellite. There was a laptop set up on the table. Some books, papers stacked around. Naomi sat down and inserted a download flash drive in the USB port and tried to log on. Not surprisingly, the prompt came up for a password.
Damn.
Thibault had to have records. Records of who he communicated with. His financial interactions. The money flow. She was certain she’d find all that inside. The thought passed through her that maybe she ought to just take it. That it didn’t matter anymore, this cat-and-mouse. What was important was to track the trail to someone higher. Where this conspiracy led.
She tried to bypass the security but it proved to be futile. Pulse racing, she turned her attention to the papers scattered all over the table. She rifled through the files, mostly financial papers-partnership agreements, corporate documents, deal brochures. She had no idea if these were legitimate or part of Thibault’s illicit doings. But he’d brought them with him, so she assumed they must have some value. She laid them out on the table and snapped pictures of the cover pages, focusing on the corporate logos. There was a stack of business cards bound together by a rubber band. Naomi unfastened them and began to leaf through.
Most seemed like legitimate contacts from around the world. Thibault’s network. JP Morgan, Citi, Reynolds Reid. She even came upon James Donovan’s card and those of other securities traders from different firms, which made her wonder if they might have been more potential victims. She laid them all out on the table, snapping digital shots. She came across one that made her heart come to a stop.
The black, embossed logo of Ascot Capital.
Ascot was the investment partnership in Dubai that was linked to Crescent Bay in Toronto, the company that bought Donovan’s house.
The name on the card was Hassan ibn Hassani.
Her pulse rocketed. Hassani was the contact overheard on the phone with Marty al-Bashir in London. That had started the whole thing rolling.
The planes are in the air.
Thibault knew him. Hassani. Ascot was also a link in the chain of funds that went to pay off James Donovan. Not enough to prove a thing, to seek an indictment. But enough to hand over to the FBI and Interpol. Enough to widen the investigation. Everything was knitting together.
Naomi snapped away.
She wasn’t making any distinctions. Everything there could be important. She shot receipts, plane tickets. Even what looked like a ski-lift ticket. From Gstaad, the posh resort in Switzerland. Naomi took a look at the date: 06/26. The summer before. Maybe just a memento. It cost forty euros.
She snapped it anyway.
With haste, she threw the pack of cards back together, reattaching the rubber band. She checked her watch. Fifteen minutes. She felt comfortable that she had more time. She turned back to the computer and saw the download flash drive had connected and tried to enable the password-busting program to do its work. No way she was going to leave it behind.
That was when she saw a light flash outside and heard a vehicle coming up the road.
Naomi’s blood froze. Oh, shit.
Someone was here.
CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE
The lights were from a car coming up to the house. The sound of the tires on the gravel knifed through Naomi like a heart attack.
Could Thibault somehow be coming back?
Where the hell was Ty?
The thought that Thibault might have somehow ambushed him and had now come back for her sent her heart into a frenzy. Her throat suddenly got very dry and her blood was pumping at what felt like ten times its normal rate. She checked the table one last time. Everything seemed in order. She hastily threw the camera in her pack and headed back into the bedroom.
She pressed against the wall and took out her gun.
She heard the car door slam. Footsteps coming up the walk. Then a loud knock on the door. And a woman’s voice. Which came as a slight relief to her.
“Franko? Franko?”
It was Maria Radisovic. Thibault’s mother. Naomi wasn’t sure what to do. Stay in the house? Leave?
Then suddenly she realized she had left her flash drive connected to Thibault’s laptop.
Oh, God… If Thibault ever saw it, they were completely blown. She made a move to run out and retrieve it, but the door handle started rattling, scaring her.
“Franko?”
Naomi ducked back in.
Suddenly she heard a key in the lock at the front door. The door was pushed open. Naomi squeezed herself against the wall.
The woman stepped into the house. It was Maria. Naomi recognized her instantly from the day before. She was in a light-brown parka against the chill and a cloth hat pulled over her hair, and she was carrying what Naomi took to be a bag of groceries.
“Franko?” she called out one last time. Then she started muttering loudly in Serbian, no doubt upset not to have found him there.