moment of surprise and adventure when the head-master of her school stepped into the girls’ class Thursday morning, just after roll, to call Claire and Kate out and back to the office. “Bring your schoolbooks, ladies, please. Lovely. Sorry for the intrusion, Mrs. Wheeling. Do carry on.”
Father was in the office, and he took each girl by the hand and led them out to a waiting taxi. Daddy had a Jaguar and Mummy drove a Saab, so the girls could not imagine where they were going in a taxicab. Mummy sat in the vast backseat, and she, like Daddy, was serious and distant.
“Girls, we’re off on a little holiday. Down to Normandy, taking the Eurostar. No, of course nothing’s wrong, don’t be daft.”
On the train the girls barely sat in their seats. Mummy and Daddy stayed huddled together talking, leaving Claire and Kate to run amok up and down the car. Claire heard Daddy ring Grandpa Don on his mobile. He began speaking quietly but angrily, a voice she had never heard him use with Grandpa Don. She stopped following her sister as they attempted to hop down the complete length of the car on one leg. She looked to her father, his worried face, the biting tone of his voice, words impossible to hear but impossible to interpret as anything other than anger.
Daddy snapped the phone shut and spoke to Mummy.
The only time young Claire had ever seen her daddy so visibly upset was when he yelled at a worker fixing the sink in their town house after he’d said something to Mummy that made her face turn red as a strawberry.
Claire began to cry, but she did not let it show.
Claire and her family left the Eurostar in Lille and took another train west to Normandy. By noon they were in their cottage. Kate helped Mum in the kitchen wash fresh corn for dinner. Claire sat on her bed upstairs and looked out to the drive below, to her father. He marched up and down the gravel speaking into his mobile. Occasionally he rested a hand on the picket fence along the garden.
Her father’s anger and consternation twisted her tiny insides into knots.
Her sister was downstairs, unaware and unworried, but Claire considered Kate the less mature of the two eight-year-old twins.
Finally Daddy put his phone in his pocket, shivered against the chill in the air, and turned to walk back up the drive. He’d not gotten more than a few steps when two brown cars pulled in behind him. He turned back to the cars as men began pouring out. Claire counted six in all, big men, leather jackets of different colors and styles. The first man to Daddy smiled and stuck out a hand, and Daddy shook it.
The other men filed around her father, up the drive and towards the cottage. Daddy looked to the men as they passed, and for an instant Claire saw his expression. It was first confusion, and then it was terror, and young Claire leapt to her feet in her little room.
And when the six men, all as one, reached into their coats and drew big black and silver guns, eight-year-old Claire Fitzroy screamed.
EIGHT
Kurt Riegel was fifty-two years old, and as tall, blond, and broad as his Germanic name implied. He had joined LaurentGroup just out of the German Bundeswehr, seventeen years prior, worked his way up from associate director of security in the Hamburg branch office, through a half dozen third-world foreign postings, each dingier and more dangerous than the last, and now he sat firmly ensconced in the Paris home office as vice president of Security Risk Management Operations. It was a long title, a fancy heading that belied a simple explanation of his job.
Riegel was the man one called if one needed something bad to happen. Off-the-books projects, black arts, human resource problems that required a visit from the heavies. Black bag, sneak-and-peek burglary squads, corporate espionage teams, media disinformation experts. Even hit men. When Riegel’s agents came to your office, it either meant they were there to help you clean up a difficult problem, or you yourself were the difficult problem someone had sent them to clean up.
Leading the “Department of Malicious Measures” virtually assured Riegel would climb no higher up the corporate ladder. No one wanted the chief head knocker out in the daylight, running the show. But Riegel did not mind the glass ceiling above him. On the contrary, he saw his position as virtually a tenured one, as he had erected a security dynasty around himself. In his four years as VP of SRMO, his agents had eliminated three political candidates in Africa, three human rights leaders in Asia, a Colombian general, two investigative journalists, and nearly twenty LaurentGroup employees who, for one reason or another, failed to tow the firm’s heavy line. Only one man at LaurentGroup knew of all the operations; Riegel compartmentalized those below him well, and those above him in the corporation knew enough of his tactics to recognize that they really didn’t want to know any more.
Problems arose, Riegel was called, problems disappeared, and Riegel was quietly appreciated.
This made Kurt Riegel an extremely powerful man indeed.
The big German’s teak-paneled office in the Paris HQ suited him well. It was, like Riegel himself, large and blond and strongly built but quiet and discreet, tucked near Competitive Intelligence and IT in LaurentGroup campus’s southern wing. Along his office walls hung over a dozen hunting trophies. There was a taxidermist in Montmartre who virtually made a living on Kurt’s African safaris and Canadian expeditions. Rhino, lion, moose, and elk all stared vacantly from their perches high on the walls around the room.
It was also here where he did his daily calisthenics every afternoon at five. He was nearly to his one hundredth sweat-inducing knee bend when his outside line chirped. Several lines he could ignore until he finished his set, but this was the encrypted number, the hotline, and he’d awaited this call for most of the day.
He grabbed a towel, walked to his desk, and turned on his speakerphone.
“Riegel.”
“Good afternoon, Mr. Riegel. This is Lloyd, from Legal.”
Riegel sipped from a bottle of vitamin-infused water as he sat down on the edge of his desk.
“Lloyd from Legal. What can I do for you?” Riegel’s voice was powerful, like the artillery officer he once was.
“I was told you would be expecting my call.”
“I was contacted by the chief executive officer, no less. Marc Laurent himself told me to drop everything and focus all my efforts on a project you will have for me. He also told me to supply you with some muscle and a communications specialist. I hope the technician and the team of Belarusian paramilitaries I sent have been helpful to your situation.”
“Yes, thank you for that. The tech is here with me. The muscle is down in France at the moment, and they are doing as they are told,” said Lloyd.
“Good. This is the first time Marc Laurent himself has called and asked me to pay special attention to an operation. I am intrigued. What kind of mess have you boys over in Legal gotten yourselves into?”
“Yes. Well, this matter needs to be cleared up quickly, for the good of the company.”
“Then let’s not waste another moment. What else can I provide other than the team I have sent?”
Lloyd paused. Then he said, “Well, I hate to shock you with this, but I urgently need a man killed.”
Riegel said nothing.
“Are you there?”
“I am waiting for you to say something shocking.”
“I take it you have done this sort of thing before?”
“Here in Risk Management Operations we like to say that every problem can be dealt with one of two ways. A problem can be tolerated, or a problem can be terminated. If a problem can be tolerated, Mr. Lloyd, my phone does not ring.”
Lloyd asked, “Are you familiar at all with the Lagos Natural Gas contract?”
Riegel answered immediately. “I suspected this would be in reference to the Nigerian fiasco. Rumor has it some fool attorney over there in Legal forgot to proofread a contract, and the Nigerians are backing out of a ten- billion-dollar deal we have already put two hundred million into. I had a feeling I would be contacted on the matter.”
“Yes, well, it’s a little more complicated than that.”
“Doesn’t sound so complicated. I just need the offending attorney’s address. We’ll make it look like suicide.
