The Scarab didn’t wait for her to scream. He shot her again, jerking the trigger three times, knowing he couldn’t miss from so close, and she crumpled to the ground without making another sound.
He knelt between their bodies, as much to listen for other intruders as to admire his work, and, as darkness and silence wrapped themselves around the cemetery once again, he ran his hands over the body of the girl. Her limbs were heavy, her throat was warm, and her lips dry. Her eyes weren’t eyes any more, just glassy beads, lifeless. Green beads. He tried to close her lids but they didn’t stay down, not all the way, so he left her like that, half asleep, half peeking up at a starless night.
He rose, went to his bag, and took out the charm. It won’t be going to the right person, tonight was no longer safe for him, but it could go to this girl. He wiped his prints from the figurine and, carefully, placed it on her chest.
He straightened and turned to the man. He kicked him in the head, just in case, and the body seemed to sigh. But when he kicked it again, it just rocked a little, silent.
An owl hooted close by and he looked at his watch, seeing the second hand ticking around too fast, realizing that his heart was ticking too quickly, also. He slowed it with twenty seconds of deep breathing, the wind stroking his brow like the gentle hand of his mother.
Which made him think of one more thing he should do.
Chapter Two
Hugo Marston ignored his phone, giving his attention instead to the waiter unloading a basket of croissants and a large café crème onto his table. He thanked the man and looked out the window at the stream of tourists heading across the Pont au Double toward the Cathedral of Notre Dame. Café Panis was not on his way to work but there was something about this spot that gave him energy, as if it were the hub of a wheel that set Paris spinning into life every morning. Not to mention all those people to watch, which for a former FBI profiler was like leaving a kid in front of the monkey cage at the zoo.
Hugo unwrapped a sugar cube and stirred it into his coffee before taking a tentative sip. He checked his phone — technically he was on the clock — and was surprised to see that it was his friend Tom Green who’d called. He dialed him back.
“You’re up early,” Hugo said. “What time did you get in last night?”
“None of your business.”
“Ah, CIA business.”
“Like I’d tell you if it was. What are you doing?”
“Breakfast at Panis. Join me.”
“Not right now. You headed to the embassy in a bit?”
“Possible,” said Hugo. “It being Monday and that being where I work, I probably should.”
“You’re the chief of fucking security, you can show up whenever you want.”
“I’ll be sure and remind the ambassador about that rule.”
“Do what you like,” Tom said, “but have Emma make the coffee this morning, will you?”
“So you are coming in.”
“Sherlock Holmes. But gimme an hour. I got some yuck to scrape off my body.”
“Jeez, Tom, not again. What was her name?”
“When you pay,” Tom said patiently, “you don’t have to ask.”
“And when you ask nicely, you don’t have to pay.”
“Thanks but I don’t take romantic advice from a virgin, Hugo. See you at your office.”
Tom hung up, as usual, without a good-bye. He’d been Hugo’s roommate and best friend at the FBI’s training grounds in Quantico almost twenty years ago, a friendship that deepened during a shared tour at the bureau’s LA field office after graduation. Then their career paths took them in different directions: Hugo’s higher up the ladder at the Behavioral Analysis Unit as a profiler, Tom’s into the CIA as … Hugo never really found out what and suspected he didn’t want to know. But whatever Tom was up to put several years between them, and Hugo had missed his foul-mouthed intellectual of a friend.
Then Tom arrived in Paris, moving into Hugo’s spare room months ago, overweight, too in love with whisky for Hugo’s liking, and claiming to be retired but still “consulting” for the CIA. As far as Hugo could tell, that meant coming and going at random hours, disappearing for a week or more without warning, and sometimes sleeping for days at a time. Of course, the last one might just have been the booze.
Hugo sipped his coffee, wondering if Tom was on another job. Why else would he come to the embassy? Or be up before noon.
He turned as the news came onto the television behind him. A scrolling banner flickered along the bottom of the screen and Hugo sat up straight as the newsreader told of two tourists found dead at the famous Père Lachaise cemetery. No names, no nationalities, no suspect.
But the victims were tourists, which meant there was a decent chance they were Americans, and if so the ambassador would want all hands on deck, including his chief regional security officer.
Hugo swallowed the rest of his coffee and dropped twelve euros on the dish beside his bill. He grabbed a second croissant and stepped out of the café onto Quai de Montebello, humming with the traffic and pedestrians heading to wherever they belonged on a Monday morning.
He crossed the street at a stoplight and headed west alongside the Seine, nodding bonjours to the bouquinistes who were setting up their riverside book stalls for the day. As he did so, his mind inevitably conjured up images of his friend Max, the gruff and grumpy bouquiniste who’d sold Hugo every worthwhile book the American owned, always pretending to steal from Hugo while in reality giving him each book for a song. Hugo looked down at the Seine as he walked and watched the barges chug slowly along its edges, leaving the heart of the river for the glass-paneled bateaux mouches, the tourist boats that promised fine views of both sides of the bank, rain or shine. They were like servants, these barges, sliding to one side, making way for their glamorous masters who bore cargo more precious, more immediately lucrative, than coal, cloth, and wine.
Behind Hugo, the summer sun had crested Paris’s highest buildings and warmed the back of his neck, and he welcomed the cool morning breeze that drifted up from the river to accompany him on his walk.
He stayed on the Left Bank until he reached the Pont Royal, which took him over the river to the grounds of the Louvre Museum. It was a frequent walk for him, this morning stroll through the garden of the Tuileries, because it was the one time of the day that he’d see more birds than people, especially in the summer. From here it was less than a mile to his office, and as the trees and grass breathed for the city, this space breathed for him, too. His usually purposeful stride slowed to a genteel stroll as if a lasting decree from Napoleon himself forbade haste across this hallowed soil.
Emma looked up as Hugo walked into the ground floor offices of the security section of the US Embassy. She was, as ever, gently but perfectly coiffed, wearing an elegant silk blouse that complimented her graying hair, a matching string of pearls around her neck.
“Bonjour, Hugo,” she said. “Don’t bother with your office, the ambassador wants to see you.”
“So early?”
“It’s almost ten.”
“I’m on French time.”
“Well, in that case it’s almost ten. Now get going.”
Hugo winked and started back the way he’d come, taking the stairs up to the third floor where the ambassador had his rooms, including his office. His secretary, tucked behind a petite white desk, waved him in.
Ambassador J. Bradford Taylor was standing by the empty fireplace when Hugo walked in. He turned and smiled, and Hugo thought he saw a measure of relief in his face.
In temperament they were very much alike and so had transcended the master-servant relationship, something Hugo had never been good at in either role, and become friends over the two years Hugo had been stationed in Paris. Physically, however, they could not have been more different. At five feet, eight inches, the ambassador had surrendered his physique to the party circuit and acquired a potbelly that, in recent months, he’d started to caress when deep in thought. Hugo, on the other hand, stood a good six inches taller and merely nibbled at the foie gras. As a result, despite his forty-three years, Hugo’s shoulders remained markedly wider than his waist. And, where the ambassador was bald, Hugo’s dark-brown hair had done nothing worse than gray a little. In fact, at a dinner at Le Procope a few months back, Taylor had jokingly announced their arrival to some American businessmen by saying, “Fatty Arbuckle and Cary Grant are here,” prompting Hugo to remind his boss that he was still the ambassador and was entitled to a little extra weight. And respect.