Rapture's Edge

time he was ten years old, he’d committed nearly every crime imaginable and was well acquainted with all manner of thieves and cutthroats.

So he knew a soulless bastard when he saw one.

Gregor turned his attention back to the man seated across the desk from him. Tall, impeccably dressed, and utterly French, he was the chief of police’s right-hand man, and a royal pain in Gregor’s ass. “This is bordering on harassment, Edoard. I’m a law-abiding, tax-paying citizen of this country. I tolerate it because I’ve got nothing to hide, but if you keep up these witch hunts, I’ll call my lawyer.”

The blandly handsome Edoard smiled, revealing a row of perfectly straight, white teeth, a little too big for his mouth, like Chiclets. “Tax-paying, I’ll give you. We’ve already looked into that. Law- abiding, however…” The Chiclet smile grew mocking. “You and I both know that’s a stretch.”

They stared at each other. Behind him on the divan, the blue-eyed man lifted his chin and, like the fire- breathing red dragon on the MacGregor family coat of arms, exhaled a long, gray plume of smoke.

Flanking either side of Edoard’s chair were two standing gendarmes, glancing around his luxurious office in obvious envy. Gregor wondered why Edoard never brought the same men twice. Maybe he hoped new recruits would see something the old ones hadn’t?

“What do you want?” His Scottish accent still added faint music to his speech, even after two decades in France, but its charm was lost on Edoard, whose smile never wavered.

“We’re looking for a thief. An art thief, to be specific.” His gaze flickered to the oil painting hanging on the wall behind Gregor’s head. It was large and abstract; Picasso in his blue period. Original. “I understand you’re well connected in the art community.”

A laughable understatement. Art was a small and insular community, and he was both a dealer and a collector. Some of the deals were even legitimate. But to Edoard he only said, “This La Chatte I keep reading about in the press?”

“The very same.”

Gregor shook his head. “Don’t know him. Can’t help you there.”

“You do realize, MacGregor,” said Edoard, his voice slightly lower than before, “I can make life much more difficult for you than I have. I can have men in here every night. I can have your every move watched. I can crawl right up your ass and plant a flag there if I like, and there’s not a thing you can do about it. So please, take a moment to think it over.” He paused, and that slick smile stayed affixed to his face as if it were carved on. “Perhaps you’ve overheard something in your travels. Perhaps there’s someone you don’t particularly like who might have some interesting news for us. Perhaps there might even be something you’d like to”—his brows lifted, hopeful—“confess. Even the smallest tidbit of information will do wonders for my general sense of leniency. You do enjoy all your expensive toys, don’t you?”

His gaze slid to the Picasso. “You wouldn’t want your art collection and your penthouse and your nightclub and your Ferrari to suddenly be seized by the government due to a paperwork error, would you? An unfortunate mix-up that would certainly take months, possibly years to untangle?”

Like a snake, anger unfurled in a slick, cold coil in Gregor’s stomach. A reptilian slither that wound its way up through his gut and into his chest until his lungs were constricted, it was as familiar as his own face in a mirror. With it came the equally familiar, nearly overwhelming urge to beat something to a bloody, unrecognizable pulp.

Luckily for Edoard, the urge wasn’t completely overwhelming.

With the steely control of a man who’d once stabbed a rival to death with his platinum Mont Blanc pen and hours later used the same pen to sign his name with a flourish on a check with six zeroes at the mayor’s annual charity ball, Gregor mused, “Did you know that hydrofluoric acid is one of the only things that can completely decompose human bone? It can also dissolve glass, it’s so corrosive. Even if as little as a few inches of your skin come into contact with it, you’ll die within hours. Reacts with the calcium in your body, causes systemic toxicity and tissue death. It’s untraceable, too.”

Edoard’s bland smile died a quick, ugly death. He sputtered, “Are you…are you threatening me?”

“What?” Gregor blinked, feigning innocence. “Sorry, I was just thinking about this thing I watched on TV last night. Amazing what you can learn from those crime shows.”

From behind Edoard came a low, amused chuckle. Gregor glanced at the man in the black suit and found him smiling, a flat slash across his face that did nothing to warm the frozen intensity in his gaze. With those sly, vulpine eyes and the clouds of smoke billowing around him, the man was reminding Gregor more and more of an ice serpent conjured from some glacial version of hell.

Edoard sprang from the chair. “Have it your way,” he snapped. “I’ll be back in the morning with a warrant. Plan on spending all day here. We’re going to need access to all your files.”

Muttering oaths, he jerked his head toward the door and turned. The two gendarmes followed on his heels. “Agent Doe!” he barked over his shoulder, then he stepped through the door and vanished.

The man in black rose from the couch with quiet, confident economy. He took one last drag from the cigarette and then dropped it to the handwoven Turkish rug beneath his feet. With the toe of his gleaming black oxford, he unapologetically ground it into the thick pile. He clasped his hands behind his back and regarded Gregor with those chilling blue eyes. When he spoke, his voice was a perfect complement to that look—cold and lifeless, with a pronounced German accent that could make even the most lighthearted child’s song sound like a funeral dirge.

“French cigarettes are as feeble as everything else in this country.”

Gregor leaned back into his chair and gazed at the inscrutable Agent Doe. “Including the police.”

“Ha. How right you are,” quipped Doe without an ounce of affront. He walked to the door, unhurried, his hands still clasped behind his back.

“You’re not one of Edoard’s, then,” said Gregor. “But he called you ‘agent.’ You’re with the government?”

Doe reached the doorway and paused. “I am with the government in the exact same way that you are a legitimate businessman.”

This statement bothered Gregor. The way he pronounced with the as wit zuh bothered him. Everything about the man bothered Gregor. Like a physical itch on his skin, he felt the intense, irritating need to know exactly who this man was and what he was up to. “Doe is an unusual name for a German,” he persisted. “What’s your first name?”

The agent gave him another of those dead smiles. He stepped over the doorway threshold and said, “John.” He disappeared through the door and swung it shut behind him. It closed with a thud that faintly shuddered the row of floor-to-ceiling windows.

John Doe?

From behind him a voice said, “Watch out for that one. He’ll skin you alive and make a lampshade out of your hide if he gets the chance.”

Gregor smiled but didn’t turn. He wanted to savor the moment.

He remembered the very first time he’d heard that silken purr of a voice. It was three years ago. He’d been at Bulgari with his son Sean and his son’s pneumatic bimbo-of-the-week Nicollette, shopping for a Christmas gift for his now blind, elderly mother he’d installed in a big house he’d bought for her in Monaco, when his idiot offspring had thought it a capital idea to try and steal a ten-thousand-euro watch as a Christmas gift for himself.

Try being the operative word. It was a clumsy attempt, at best, and a gargantuan security guard had him by the collar before he’d made it ten steps.

Like his father, Sean had been in trouble with the law since he was a child but had none of his father’s intelligence or ability to learn from mistakes and devise new, better ways of operating outside the confines of the legal system. He was a petty thief, a dumb one at that, and had it not been for the intervention of an angel he’d still be rotting in jail to this day.

Gregor didn’t know exactly how she’d managed it; he didn’t know because she wouldn’t tell him, and though he’d mulled it for years he’d never solved the riddle. The only thing of which he was certain was seeing with his own disbelieving eyes when his son palmed the watch and slid it in his coat pocket as Nicollette distracted the salesgirl from the selection on the white velvet tray. Then he turned and began to walk toward the door. Then the