By the time she’d finished he was coming to again. He wasn’t moving anywhere. She was thorough. Just in case, she bent down, retrieved his gun and held the weapon tightly in her right hand, hating the feel of the thing.
With tears beginning to well in her eyes, she looked at the ruined remnants of her fiddle and then the crushed man on the floor and said, “I am not little. And I am not a girl.”
A noise made her look up. The front door was still open. She could see it from the living room and cursed herself for being so stupid. A tall, gangly man with exceptionally pale skin and an ugly face was marching through the door, looking both scared and determined at the same time.
Felicia Kaminski wanted to say something but at that moment her mind locked. Szeryng’s luscious rendition of the Bach Partita was reaching its final note, a delicious D played double stringed, one open, one fingered with vibrato, then dying into silence. She loved that touch and had wished for so long that one day she might emulate it. Tonight, maybe, in the Wigmore Hall. Tonight…
It took Pierre Crane one strike to knock the weapon out of the fingers of the slender, pretty-plain young woman, and a second to render her unconscious as she stood dumb-founded over a man who lay bound on the floor, face swollen yet still visibly terrified. She crashed down in a heap next to him. Crane’s eyes strayed around the room. There was no one else in the little house. He could sense this.
Crane made a fast search of the flat-which belonged to Harold Middleton, the American that the driver of the car outside of Paris had warned him about. He found what looked like a gun safe and scanned through a number of documents and notes on the desk.
“Find anything helpful, Pierre?” said a female voice behind him, one so calm and unflustered it made his blood turn cold, sent his hand dashing for the gun in the holster beneath his jacket.
Something stabbed into his shoulder before his fingers got halfway.
“Don’t be foolish,” she said.
He turned and saw the woman he now knew as Jana. She held a long black handgun with a lengthy silencer. A professional weapon. She looked at him carefully, her gaze reminiscent of what had passed between them on that deserted two-lane road outside of Paris not long before. “We meet again, Pierre.”
Crane gave a faint laugh, though he shivered at the memory of the bullets snapping against the windows of the limo. “You know me?”
“You do your background work as a reporter,” Jana shrugged. “I do the same in my line.”
Which told Crane that she had indeed followed him to the meeting outside of Paris with the man posing as the Scorpion.
“Where’s Middleton?” she asked.
“I don’t know.”
“The woman he works with? Tesla?”
Crane shook his head. “I don’t know her.”
In the distance, the urgent bray of a police siren grew closer. Had someone reported a disturbance? Seen a weapon? She grimaced, looking at the flat and apparently realized she had no time for a thorough search.
Jana ordered, “Take the girl outside. There’s a van there.” She hesitated. “Go with her. I will join you in a moment.”
“You don’t think I’ll run?”
A smile. “No.”
“Why?” he asked, trying to see some window of attack, realizing, from her careful stance and the steady gaze in her eye, this was impossible. Nor was he sure he wanted to; something-the journalist within him? Or the man?- told him to simply go with what was happening.
“Because you’re after the truth, aren’t you, Pierre?”
Jana reached out and removed the weapon from his jacket. Then she watched as he picked up the unconscious young woman in his arms and walked outside.
There was a Mercedes van with opaque windows by the front door and a driver in a black uniform, gloves and a cap, sliding open the rear door.
As Crane reached the gate with the girl in his arms he heard the sound from behind, and recognized immediately what it was. The low, explosive growl of a silenced weapon, followed by a curt, agonized shriek of pain, one that lasted a second, no more.
4
A gray morning in Paris had given way to a lovely, tranquil afternoon, and as she crossed the Place de la Concorde and entered the pebbly pathway that cleaved the Jardin des Champs Elysees, she reviewed her day: an early jog along Avenue George V across the Seine at Point d’ Alma, back through the Parc du Champ de Mars and under the Tour Eiffel; a shower in her room at the Hotel Queen Elizabeth on Pierre 1er de Serbie; and in a thin, peach v-neck sweater, jeans and a short, buttery leather jacket she’d bought for a small fortune in USD at a shop on Boulevard Saint Germain, a walk around the corner to the Hotel George V for a bowl of oatmeal sprinkled with brown sugar as she read
It wasn’t working. “Come to Paris,” her father had said. “You need a little magic.” “Thanks, no, Harry. Too many memories,” she’d replied. “Charley, maybe you’ll make new memories,” he said gently, taking her hand. “We need you among the living. We really do… ”
But everywhere in Paris reminded her of what she’d lost: her baby, the miscarriage induced by, of all people, her late husband who was part of a conspiracy that took her mother’s life as well. Every day was a relentless replay of what could’ve been and what would never be. Even now, as she strolled through dappled sunlight under leafy trees whose branches crowned the pathway, she saw young children toddling comically as they chased pigeons, their contented mothers smiling as they watched. Nothing else existed for her at that moment, neither the dignified old men in their brown suits who chatted knowingly, the businessmen and women on the Champs Elysees who were making their way back to their offices nor the tourists wandering toward the Obelisque and Jardin des Tuileries. All she saw were stout, laughing children and their beaming mothers, and she felt the weight of hopelessness and a profound, hammering sense of loss. She knew she would never be whole again and would never trust any man enough to love him. As for a child of her own, she feared she would never be able to provide the sense of security and optimism the child would need to thrive. She was counting her days, wondering when she would be consumed by the void inside her.
And so all that remained for Charlotte Middleton-she’d returned to her maiden name when she learned the extent of her husband’s participation in a plot to kill thousands in Washington, D.C.-was the work she was doing for the Volunteers. Her father had told her he needed her. It was possible that he did. Protesting, she’d said, “Harry, I can’t. Given how pointless, how empty… Damn it, I wish I could explain so you’d know.” “Charley,” he replied, “when I think about what my life would be without you, I know.”
At a kiosk near the Theatre Marigny, she bought a sandwich of thin slices of ham, a sliver of gruyere and salty butter on crunchy bread, and a bottle of Badoit, and sat on a bench in a stream of sunlight, the Etoile and the Arc de Triomphe in the distance, the relentless traffic coursing along the cobblestone. In an attempt to dispatch her thoughts, she recalled some of the research she’d done for the Volunteers. Her mind wandered to Connie Carson and the bravado instilled in every task undertaken by that little Texas firebrand, and then to Wiki Cheung’s fascination with Second Life and how the adorable 19-year-old computer geek had given himself a black avatar with a ’70s Afro and chiseled body any athlete would kill for. “Try it,” Wiki had suggested. “Everybody needs someplace to be somebody new.” As soon as the words passed his lips he recoiled in embarrassment. “I’m not saying your life is not good, Charley. No, what I’m saying-I’m saying, Charley, the game-Maybe you’ll make new friends-If you want new friends, Charley… Ah damn it… ”
