Fournier let the wounded look fall from his face and began patting the pockets of his gray trench coat in search of something. A moment later, he fished out a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. He lit one and then extended the cigarette to Neville.
“I’m sorry?” he asked, pretending to not understand.
She shrugged. “I ask you a simple question, but you refuse to answer.”
Fournier suddenly looked offended. “Come now, my dear Francine. I know things did not end well between us, and I am sorry for that, but it was what . . . ten years ago? Surely we can be professional about this.”
She ignored the fact that he was off by six years and instead focused on a thousand things she’d like to say to the jerk. All of them would have felt good, would have been accurate, and they would all have been a mistake. Accuracy and truth had no sanctity to Fournier. For him they were devices to be used to advance his agenda and schemes. He would obfuscate and claim the mantle of victim no matter how egregious his sins. Engaging him was exactly what he wanted. “Paul, I am being completely professional about this. That is why I asked you why you are here. This is my crime scene. Directorate of Security or not, I need to know why you are here.”
“Fair enough,” Fournier said in an easy tone. He exhaled a cloud of smoke and turned to the bed. “Do you have any idea who that is?”
Neville was suddenly very angry with the officer she had sent down to the front desk to find the answer to this exact question. She straightened a bit and said, “I do not.”
The answer brought a smile to Fournier’s face. “Well, let’s see.” He wheeled back toward the dead bodies and said, “Four men with suppressed automatic weapons, all dead.” Gesturing to the bed he continued, “An overweight man in his sixties and a skinny young woman less than half his age . . . most likely a prostitute.”
Neville acted bored. The conclusions were obvious. She was tempted to say so, but knew the less she said the better. Fournier had his stage, and he needed to play out this little game in order to diminish her in front of her men. “The man’s name?” she asked in a dispassionate voice.
“I’m getting there,” Fournier said, holding up a cautionary finger. “Six bodies. That’s rather a lot.”
Neville didn’t bother to correct him and tell him about the other three bodies. She would offer as little information as possible in hopes that the spook from Directorate of Security would get what he was looking for and leave.
As Fournier continued to analyze the obvious, his eyes were busy noting the more interesting aspects of the crime scene. There were certain incongruities that Neville and her team would eventually notice, but for now, it was hard to see the proverbial trees through the forest. He placed himself in the room when it all went down. Looked at the shattered glass headboard, the bullet-pocked plaster wall, and the two bodies on the bed, riddled with bullets. Brass shell casings littered the floor. Hundreds of rounds had been fired. That the assassin had escaped was a miracle. Fournier looked at the nearest man on the floor and noted the precise location of the bullet hole in his forehead, and couldn’t help but nod in respect for the man whose aim had stayed so steady under a fusillade of bullets.
“The man’s name?” Neville asked again.
Fournier approached the bed. He looked down at the heavyset man, noted more than a dozen shallow entry wounds, and then his eyes found the near-perfect dot just above the minister’s nose. That would have come from their assassin. Fournier inhaled deeply and waved his cigarette at the bed. “That, my dear, is Tarek al- Magariha.”
Neville waited for him to expand. It was a long moment that grew longer, and when she tired of the wait, she asked, “And who is Tarek al-Magariha?”
“He is Libya’s oil minister, and these men I presume are, or I should say were, his bodyguards.”
Neville closed her eyes for a moment and clenched her fists. Serbian and Russian gangsters killing each other was one thing—it wasn’t good, but to a certain extent the good people of Paris didn’t care as long as they were killing each other. A foreign diplomat, however, was an entirely different mess. A Libyan diplomat was even worse, and their oil minister the worst of all. Neville didn’t know the exact number, but she knew her country received a large portion of its oil imports from the country across the Mediterranean.
“Any idea who killed him?” She found herself asking the question before she could stop herself, and she instantly regretted it, for she knew Fournier was incapable of telling her the truth.
“No idea at the moment, but the usual suspects will be looked at.”
“The usual suspects?”
“The Israelis . . . a few others.” Fournier knew much more than he was letting on, but he wasn’t about to tell someone from the National Police that al-Magariha had spent most of his career working for Libya’s brutal intelligence service, the Mukhabarat el-Jamahiriya.
Neville eyed Fournier with suspicion. All of her instincts told her he was holding back information. “How did you find out so quickly?”
“Quickly?”
“That he’d been murdered.”
Fournier flashed her a proud smile. “I have my sources.”
Neville wondered if the DGSE had had the Libyan under surveillance. She was about to ask the question but thought better of it. He would never give her an honest answer. She would pass her suspicions on to her bosses, and they could lock horns with the higher-ups at DGSE. “I’m still a bit confused as to why you are here.”
“We have a dead foreign diplomat, my dear. I would think you would understand the need for the Directorate to be involved.”
Neville gave him nothing.
