room.
'Bravo?'
'I'm here.' He took her hand as he sat beside her. 'And so is Camille.'
As Camille came into her line of sight, Jenny said in a cracked voice, 'Where am I?'
'In a hotel,' Camille said with a smile. 'You're perfectly safe here.'
Jenny's eyes settled on Bravo. 'The Mercedes?'
'Destroyed, utterly,' he said. 'It hit a gas pump and went up in flames.'
'God…' Her head turned to one side and a single tear rolled down onto the bedspread.
'Thank you for saving my life,' Camille said, kneeling beside her. 'Your courage is extraordinary.'
Jenny looked at her but said nothing.
Camille leaned against the night table. 'You must rest and regain your strength. We have brought you to Mont St. Michel. It is a sacred place, Jenny. A place for healing both the body and the spirit. It has been so ever since the first abbey was built in the eleventh century. But the very site itself is holy. The monastery was founded in 708 by St. Aubert, the Bishop of Avranches, who was visited in dreams by the Archangel Michel himself. Ever since then Mont St. Michel has been a magnet for people in need from all over the known world. Be at peace now, you need time to recover. Call me if there is anything you want and I shall bring it.'
She rose and, smiling, told Bravo that she was going to lie down for a while.
Bravo waited until she closed the door behind her, then said, 'How are you feeling?'
'Like I was run over by a freight train.'
'You very nearly were,' Bravo said, 'or something very much like it.' He took a breath. 'Jenny, did you see who was inside the Mercedes?'
'I had only the briefest glimpse and that was… I keep getting flickers of images. There were two figures.'
'Male or female?'
'The one with the gun-he was a man, I'm sure of that. He had a long, narrow face, dark hair and eyes, mid-thirties or so.' She closed her eyes for a moment. 'Everything's spinning around.'
'Here,' Bravo said, 'see if you can sit up.'
He helped her put her back against two pillows. Then he gave her some water. Jenny stared down into the bottom of the glass as if it were a sorcerer's bowl in which the images of her encounter with the Mercedes could be conjured up.
'The driver was a man, as well.'
Standing in her room, smoking a cigarette, Camille had to admire the ingenuity of the microcircuits on the listening device she'd planted on the underside of the night table as she knelt down. Her conversation with Jenny had been a diversion while she pressed the tiny device into the unpainted plywood.
'Yes, he was,' Bravo said. 'I saw him slumped over the wheel after you shot him dead. I think we can reasonably assume that your recollection of the other man is accurate.' A small noise interrupted the flow, then Bravo's voice returned. 'The Mercedes had German plates. Camille thinks that Jordan might be right about the Wassersturms being after me.'
'Surely you don't think that.'
'I don't,' Bravo said, 'but I suppose it would be best to be certain.'
'The Wassersturms are a blind alley, and a potentially dangerous one,' Jenny said in a voice audibly more firm. 'We can't allow anything to interfere with finding the cache of secrets.'
'Dear God, no, we can't have that,' Camille said into the ensuing silence. When she was certain that the conversation was at an end, she took out her cell phone and tapped in a number.
'Bravo doesn't know where the cache is,' she said when her son picked up the phone. 'On the other hand, he isn't going to tell me a thing about the devilish labyrinth Dexter has set up.'
'Did you actually expect him to?'
'There was always the chance.'
Jordan laughed, a piercing, thoroughly nasty sound. 'How disappointed you would've been if he'd proved himself such a fool!'
'He's his father's son, after all, isn't he?'
There was a small silence.
'He won't go for the Wassersturm story, and neither will Jenny. I told you,' she said, abruptly changing the subject. 'That was Osman Spagna's idea, wasn't it?'
'What if it was?' Jordan said somewhat defensively.
'I don't like that man, Jordan. I've told you before. Get rid of him.'
'I didn't think Bravo would go for the Wassersturm story, either, but that wasn't the purpose,' he said, avoiding an answer he did not want to give. 'We needed to build your credibility with them.'
'Yes, it's an old confidence trick. The girl didn't like me from the outset, now there's a bond of trust between us.' She paused a moment. 'About the Mercedes, there were no survivors.'
'Survival of the fittest,' Jordan said. 'If they were good enough Jenny wouldn't have been able to kill them.'
'How did you know Jenny did it?'
Jordan laughed again. 'I have to have some secrets, Mother, even from you, otherwise I'm just too good a boy.'
'Make sure there aren't any more,' Camille said sternly as she broke the connection.
Silence.
Jenny, her eyes half-closed, whispered, 'Why are you looking at me that way?'
Without answering, Bravo disappeared into the bathroom. A moment later, she could hear the water running. The sound soothed her and her gaze drifted to the picture window, beyond which only the largest form- that of Mont St. Michel itself-could be seen, though indistinctly, no more than a shadow towering from the salt beds of the unseen tidewater. The long afternoon had progressed, but within the white void of the fog there was no sound, no movement, not even a hint that the sun continued to cross the sky. It was as if time itself stood still.
Settling herself, Jenny felt small sticking pains as if beetles roamed over her body, biting her with their pincers. She made incoherent sounds deep in her throat, as people often will when their dreams get the better of them.
After an indeterminate time, she opened her eyes to see Bravo standing over her. The water sounded like a cataract, burbling and rushing as if anxious to get from one place to the next. She had the strange impression that the tide had risen high enough to seep through the foundation, swirling upward to wash into the room and now lapping at her thighs. Her fingers worked the bedspread, searching for evidence that she had floated free of terra firma.
Without a word, Bravo scooped her off the bed and carried her into the bathroom. Once inside, he did not stop but stepped over the lip of the tub. Steam was rising, and it was wonderfully warm. He laid her in the water and, taking up the handheld faucet, ran the hot water over her. Then he began to untangle her clothes. At first, she felt as if the beetles had returned, and she resumed her sounds of distress, but when she was more herself, she understood that her own blood, drying, had made her clothes stick to her and it was this that caused the pain when she'd moved in bed.
Slowly, layer by layer, he unpeeled her. Her blood was dissolving, and it was not an unpleasant sensation. She thought of an orange, whose bitter rind must be stripped away to reveal the sweet fruit beneath. She gazed up into Bravo's face and saw herself reflected in his eyes. She was half naked, and somehow she was neither angry nor embarrassed.
On the other hand, she felt compelled to say, 'Why are you doing this?'
As his hands continued with their work, he looked at her for what seemed a long time. 'Because,' he said at last, 'I almost lost you.' His fingers, nearly finished, stroked her bare flesh. 'Because you mean something to me.'
'What?' The hot water cascaded over her, over both of them as he knelt facing her. 'What do I mean to you?'
She saw what he wanted to say in his eyes, felt it in the way he cradled her, in the heat rising between
