'My point is that I tried to get her to do the same thing. Sell secrets.' She shook her head, biting her lip. 'I find it very surprising that Angela would sell them to the Chinese. In fact, I'm sure she wouldn't.'
'I agree,' he said, then stopped. A year ago… 'Oh.' Morel sat up. 'What?'
This was the woman Angela had dated, who had left her with a broken heart. Morel had broken her heart by showing that their affair had simply been a way to turn her. 'Nothing. Go on.'
She let it go. 'Angela wouldn't sell to us, but she did work with someone else. We spotted her having meetings with a man.'
'A red beard,' Milo said.
Morel frowned, then shook her head. 'No. Why do you say that?'
'Just a hunch. Go on.'
'The man she met with was clean shaven. An old man. Turns out our friend Angela was a double agent of sorts.' Milo stared back. 'Who for?”
“For the United Nations.'
He wanted to laugh, but it was too ludicrous even for that. 'You mean Interpol. That would make sense.'
'No. I mean she worked for the United Nations.'
'Really,' he said, finally smiling nervously. 'The United Nations has no intelligence agency. Maybe she was getting information from them.'
Morel rocked her head from side to side. 'That's what we thought at first. She met with someone from the UNESCO office here in Paris. His name is Yevgeny Primakov.'
'Primakov?' Milo said dumbly.
'You know him?'
He shook his head to cover the sudden feeling of panic. Not Yevgeny. 'Go on.'
'We did some background checks. Primakov used to work for the KGB. He reached a colonel's rank and kept it when the KGB became the FSB. Then he quit in 2000 to work for the UN out of Geneva. There's not much on him, but in 2002 he worked with some representatives from Germany, trying to institute an independent intelligence organ. Their argument was that the Security Council could only make educated decisions with an independent agency giving them information. Of course, it didn't even reach a vote. China, Russia, and your own country made it clear that they would veto it.'
'There you go, then,' said Milo. 'There is no UN intelligence agency for Angela to work for.'
Morel nodded, as if Milo had finally put her suspicions to rest, but said, 'In early 2003, Mr. Primakov vanished for approximately six months. He reappeared in July of that year in the Military Staff Committee of the Security Council, working out of the financial section. He's kept his position despite changeovers of all the other staff. I find it all highly suspicious.'
'Are you telling me that this man, Yevgeny Primakov, is running a secret agency within the United Nations? Impossible.'
'Why is it impossible?'
'If there was an agency within the UN, we would know about it.'
'You mean you would know about it.'
'Listen.' Milo felt himself reddening. 'For the last six years I've been running a desk that deals solely with Europe. If there was a new intelligence agency working the same beat, I'd figure it out pretty quickly. You can't hide that kind of stuff. Inexplicable events start to build up, little black holes that need filling. After a year or two, it becomes simple to put together, and there you have a new organization.'
'But don't be so sure,' said Morel, smiling. 'Back in the seventies, this Primakov was running successful operations for the Soviets in Germany. He helped a network of Baader-Meinhof terrorists. He knows how to keep things quiet.'
'Okay,' said Milo, still not believing, but for reasons he couldn't share with Diane Morel. The same reasons he'd never shared with the Company, nor even with his wife. 'Please. Tell me about Colonel Yi Lien.'
'You seem to know everything already, Mr. Weaver. Why don't you tell me?'
So Milo did. 'You met with him on weekends at his cottage. But you were working on him, weren't you? You might have slept with him-I suppose that was unavoidable-but he brought his laptop, so you could take what you liked from it. Am I right so far?'
Diane Morel didn't answer. She waited.
'We know all this because MI6 was watching the colonel. They're the ones who helped him when he had his heart attack; they also copied his laptop. That's how we learned he had some of our embassy documents, which he received at the cottage from a man named Herbert Williams, or Jan Klausner. We suspected that Williams received the documents from Angela, which is why we were watching her.'
'Is that why Mr. Einner killed her?'
He shook his head. 'You don't understand. Einner didn't kill her. He didn't want to kill her. We needed to see who she passed the information on to.'
Morel's face had turned a deep shade of red as Milo talked. She appeared livid, but didn't shout. Quietly, she said, 'Do you have a cigarette? I left mine in the office.'
Milo tapped out two Davidoffs and lit hers for her. She took a long drag, exhaled smoke, then looked at the cigarette. 'They're not very good.'
'Sorry.' Through his own smoke, he said, 'Did you talk to Angela's neighbors? She took sleeping pills regularly, so they were probably switched on Friday, during the day. A neighbor could have seen the murderer come into the building.'
'She took pills every night?'
'Maybe. I don't know.'
'That's not very smart,' she said, then glared at the surface of the table, perhaps at the ashtray. 'Was Angela depressed?”
“She didn't seem so.'
Morel took another drag. 'We talked to the neighbors. A few descriptions, but in a town the size of Paris workmen and deliverymen show up all the time.'
'Anyone suspicious?'
She shook her head. 'They say she didn't get many visitors.'
'Did you ever talk to her? In the last year, I mean.'
'Sometimes. We were in the same business, after all. We remained friends of a sort.'
'She came asking for information?'
'Sometimes I asked as well.'
'Did she ever ask about Rolf Vinterberg?'
She blinked. 'Once, yes. She wanted to know if we had anything on him.'
'Did you?'
'No.'
'What about Rahman Garang?'
A look flashed across Morel's face-whatever trust she'd felt was evaporating fast. 'That was a mistake. We have them sometimes, just like the CIA.'
He understood. 'I don't care about that. But Angela was working with him, trying to figure out who killed Mullah Salih Ahmad. Did you help with that?'
Again, she shook her head. 'The last time we talked was two weeks ago. A week before…' She shifted in her chair. 'She was upset about that little terrorist's death. She wanted to know if we'd killed him.'
'What did you tell her?'
'The truth. We didn't know anything about it.'
Milo didn't doubt this. Two weeks ago, upon learning of Rahman Garang's murder, Angela's suspicions must have run in all directions, and like any good investigator she'd followed up on anything she'd had the ability to follow up on.
Morel looked into her empty espresso cup. 'You were talking about Yi Lien earlier.”
“Yes.'
'And his laptop computer.”
“Right.'
