“Because you played it right, plain and simple. Of course, it only makes sense that someone had given you your marching orders, and you being an American, they could rationally have only come from one source. You telling Chloe about it the way you did established your credibility and gave away nothing she wouldn’t have already known if she were on the other side anyway. You may have even let the information slip on purpose. It would be interesting to know if that were the case.”
“I’ll keep that as my own secret,” Matosian said, “if I’m allowed to have any, that is.”
“We’ll give you just the one,” Honest Abe said, and Matosian thought he could detect the trace of a smile in the gash of his mouth. Agency humor.
“Don,” Chloe said. “We’re done here unless you’ve got any other questions.”
“Just one,” Matosian said. “What was the deal about the password. It had nothing to do with the mission.”
“It helped bring you to Paris,” she said. “Otherwise, it was meant to be a conundrum.”
“You mean a riddle?”
“Well, not precisely. You know that a conundrum is a riddle whose answer is a pun. For example, when is a door not a door?”
“When it’s ajar, of course,” Matosian said.
“Right. So we knew we were going to keep you running around. Everywhere you went, you checked out your surroundings, and if you were going to succeed, you had to say, ‘Got to go.’ Gato go. It suggested itself.”
“And on that note,” Matosian said. “I’ve gato go now. You’ll know how to reach me again, I’m presuming.”
“Bet on it,” Chloe said.
Twenty-four hours later, Matosian walked out of his beachfront bungalow and across the white sand into the crystal clear and warm Caribbean water. Navigating by the bright full moon, he swam straight out from the beach for four thousand strokes, then nearly out of sight of land, turned and began the long swim back.
By the time he got to where it was shallow enough for him to stand, the sky to the east was just lightening to a nacreous glow. He could make out the tracks he’d made in the sand on the walk down from his bungalow, but now standing in those tracks was a woman, facing away from him, wearing a diaphanous white shift and nothing else.
When he finally made it back to the hardened sand where the water lapped the shoreline, she turned around and tentatively walked down to where he stood, stopping in front of him, looking up at him with a mixture of trepidation and longing.
“In Paris, I thought you were with them,” he said.
“I know. When you took the phone call. Then with the waiter.”
“Would you have let me eat that little spoonful?”
“I knew you wouldn’t, by that time. Would you have let me?”
“I didn’t, if you remember. Even though I’d been convinced you were the enemy.” He paused, then came out with another question. “And I presume the waiter, like the woman who wasn’t your sister, is all right?”
She nodded. “And ten thousand dollars richer.” A pause. “But that was when you were sure, wasn’t it? At the restaurant?”
He nodded. “Yes. No one else but you could have known where we were. You called Abe when you went to the bathroom.”
She put a hand on his arm. “By that time, I wanted to tell you, but I couldn’t. I didn’t want you to leave me, but you had to. We were both trapped in the maze we’d helped create.”
“And,” Matosian asked, “are we still trapped in it now?”
“No,” Chloe said. “I’ve gotten word of a secret mission involving the Vatican that we’ll need to see to soon, but until we get the call from Abe, our time is our own. One day, maybe even two, if we want to take them.” Her eyes pleaded with him. “If you could find it in yourself and in your heart to trust me again.”
“If you put your arms around me,” Matosian said, “maybe you can convince me.”
She did as he’d suggested, and after holding her body against his for a moment, he pulled away enough to let him lean over.
And their lips came together.
She tasted like almonds.
JOHN LESCROART is a
His first novel,
The Princess of Felony Flats by Bill Cameron
*
I
Barely a year into his sentence-ninety-nine moons for felony skullduggery and aggravated bloodletting-Frank Pounder’s barrister gets wind of an impending shit storm in Newcastle CID. Detective Inspector Dale Dingus is about to be brought up on charges for falsifying evidence in a connivance and brigandage case he’s been chasing alongside the Crown Bureau of Revelation and Arrest since before dirt. Not too bright, our boy Dingus. Suddenly his cases going back five years are getting a fresh look, and the Crabs are none too happy about it.
I can’t say as I blame them, but unlike the linear thinkers in the Bureau, I have a knack for sniffing out openings in the misfortune of others. I’m already noodling the angles before a whiff of the Dingus travail goes public, even before Frank’s shark moves for dismissal. The prosecuting magistrate knows no way Frank gets convicted in a retrial without Dingus’s tainted evidence, so the legal wranglings don’t figure to take long. Frank expects to be sprung in time to see his unborn baby mapped via UltraSound, and he spares no breath bragging about how he’ll be on hand to learn whether his offspring is a pointer or a setter.
But don’t get the idea Frank is some kind of sentimental doily muncher. Trust me, the man’s a black-hearted ogre with a chest like a beer keg and fists of seasoned oak who runs everything from Newcastle Deeps to the slopes of the West Hills, even from gaol. Kingpin of Felony Flats, territory he took by force from Old Man Miller himself. Ended up with Miller’s daughter too, a double-handful of hell named Dahlia with the personality of a wolverine and a body that looks like it was molded from the finest grade ballistic gel. That Frank’s looking forward to progeny is evidence of little more than his well-earned reputation for getting what he wants and then some.
Sure, he’s had his setbacks, getting pinched by Dingus in the first place not the least of them. Then, when he
