Noel suppressed a shudder and gave her a Gallic pinch on the tips of her fingers. Alicia giggled, her breasts jiggled, and she patted Noel on the crotch. He tried to will a reaction, but even he wasn’t that good an actor.
She led him up a short flight of stairs and onto a small upper deck. “So nice to watch the sunset from up here,” she crooned.
“Alas, madam, I need to return to the hotel to take part in a conference call with some American backers. The Americans have no taste, but a vast amount of money.”
Alicia giggled again, an incongruous sound from so large a woman.
“Alicia, you bawdy broad, there you are.” The words were delivered with a boyish lilt. Noel felt his genitals trying to retreat deeper into his belly.
He turned to find Tom Weathers bounding up the stairs. He had the face of an aging model. Handsome, but his expression was too young for the wrinkles, as if he hadn’t realized that time marches on, and even the golden youth must grow up.
A few steps behind him walked a middle-aged but still beautiful Chinese woman. When Noel had last seen Sun Hei-lian her face had been shiny with Lilith’s juices, as Sun had eaten pussy while Tom Weathers boned her from behind. The things I did for crown and king. Noel knew from her dossier in the files of the Silver Helix that she was a Chinese agent, very smart and very deadly. Today she seemed oddly subdued, her head bent, eyes on the polished wood deck. Occasionally she glanced up at Tom’s back, and her expression was an odd combination of fear, frustration, and grief.
So, Noel thought, maybe this isn’t just an agent running a useful asset. She might actually care for Weathers. If he cared for her she might offer a decent substitute for Sprout. Or she’s an agent who knows her asset has gone rogue, and she’s trying to decide how to liquidate him. Either way she might prove useful.
Noel’s attention was so tightly focused on Sun Hei-lian that he didn’t notice the arc of Alicia’s arms as she threw them wide to accept Weathers’s embrace. One of her heavy bracelets caught Noel’s sunglasses and swept them from his face. Noel spun away, covered his eyes, and bent to snatch them up.
“Oh, Monsieur Pelletier, I’m so sorry,” Alicia cooed.
“Hey, man, let me help you.”
Noel seized the glasses just before Weathers did, and slammed them back over his eyes. Had he seen? Did he see? Oh, Niobe, I’m sorry. “Cataracts,” he muttered, his voice breathless with fear. “I’m trying to avoid surgery.”
Suspicion melted away into concern, though Noel read it as calculated as his own performances. “Oh, man, I’m sorry. That sucks. Aren’t you a little young?”
“A genetic propensity. It blinded my father,” Noel lied glibly.
“Wow, sucks,” Weathers repeated.
“Monsieur Pelletier, I would like to introduce our dear Tom, and his lovely lady Sun Hei-lian.”
“So pleased to meet you.” They shook hands, and Tom played boy games with an overly strong handshake. Noel kept his deliberately weak, quickly pulled his hand away, and gave it a surreptitious shake
… though not too surreptitious. Weathers noticed, grinned, and dismissed him as a weakling, and therefore not worthy of attention. Noel turned his attention to Sun, and gave her one of Monsieur Pelletier’s flourishing greetings. She didn’t respond to it half as well as Alicia.
Noel decided that engaging in small talk with Tom Weathers and a Chinese agent known for her brains and deadly abilities didn’t make a lot of sense. “My champagne is empty,” he said. “I’ll leave you all to talk.”
And he hurried away down the stairs, only to stop halfway down. He kept walking in place as he tried to overhear.
A shadow fell across the hatch. Someone was coming.
It was too late to move farther down the stairs. Noel set aside his glass, and bent quickly to tie his shoe. He always wore wing tips for just this reason. Retying a shoe was always an excuse for loitering.
Sun appeared at the top of the steps and stared down at him. Noel straightened, recovered his glass, smiled, nodded at her, and continued his descent.
Manhattan, New York
They were all quiet on the way back to the apartment.
They came out from the subway at Fourteenth Street, the closest stop to Michelle’s apartment. The first snow of winter was falling in thick, wet, white flakes. Most of the people exiting the subway turned up their collars against the cold, hunching down in their coats.
“Snow,” Joey said in an awed voice Michelle had never heard before. She held out her hand and stared at the flakes hitting her palm. “Cool. I’ve never seen snow before.” Her face was full of wonder.
Michelle just wanted to get inside and figure out what to do next. But Juliet took her hand and that made her stop walking.
And so Michelle and Joey and Juliet stood on the sidewalk and let the snow fall on them until they were damp and cold.
13
Tuesday,
December 8
On the Lukuga River, Congo
People’s Paradise of Africa
The bodies in the river were becoming more numerous; they’d passed three of them in just the last hour, and one of the floating corpses was that of a child. Wally had stared at the bloated form, at the distorted face, trying to see if it might be Lucien. Jerusha could feel his silent anguish, and she could do nothing more than put a hand on his shoulder. “It’s not him, Wally. It’s not.”
The worry and fear on his face was a torment to her. She found tears gathering in her own eyes as she saw the anguish in Wally’s face. She hugged him, wishing there were something she could say that would comfort him, wanting to be able to reassure him that it would be all right in the end.
But she didn’t believe that. She couldn’t believe that. They needed help; they needed it quickly. If the babbling of the frightened child soldier they’d captured was even halfway true, then the Committee had to know. Now.
Jerusha hardly believed it herself: a prison where hundreds of children had been injected with the wild card virus, where hundreds more had already died in order to produce two or three aces for the PPA. The thought sickened and infuriated her. She wanted to see the place razed and burned, wanted to see the Nshombos and Tom Weathers tried and executed for what they were doing here. And Wally…
Poor Wally. She didn’t know what to say to him. He glared downriver as if his gaze alone could drive them toward Nyunzu and his precious Lucien. All she could do was stay close to him, to stroke his shoulders, to whisper in-effective comforts that yes, they would still find Lucien alive. They would…
Their satellite phone was useless, and her cell didn’t work-no bars, no service-and the battery was nearly dead to boot. Jerusha sighed and thrust the phone back into one of the pockets of her cargo pants. Squinting into the sunlight, she could see a village set in the hollow of the next bend.
Wally crowded into the tiny cabin of the craft as they passed the village, and Jerusha avoided looking at the people staring as they motored past, facing forward as if confident and unworried about their presence on the river.
As soon as the bend put the village out of sight, she extended a hand to help Wally clamber out again. “Put us in here, Wally,” Jerusha said. “We really need to find a way to tell Lohengrin what’s going on down here. Maybe there’s a landline in that village I can use.”
Wally’s face stiffened. “That’s too dangerous.”
The roiling in her stomach agreed with him. “I don’t see another choice. Some of these people may not like the Nshombos any more than we do; they’re scared, but they might be willing to let me make a phone call.”
“And what if there’s a PPA fella there? It would only take one of them.”