it.
“Fine,” he said.
“Good.” Peter smiled, then stood up. “Sean found a car for you. It’s on Forty-sixth, on the other side of Times Square, about halfway down the block. He’s waiting.”
He pushed past them and headed across the room toward the door.
“Once you’re out of the city, head north,” Peter said. “I’ll call you with instructions later.”
Peter let them out of the room. Quinn didn’t even look at Peter as he stepped into the hallway, but he could sense the head of the Office lingering in the doorway.
“Quinn,” Peter said. “The agent that was hurt tonight…”
Quinn stopped. “What about her?”
“I thought you should know. It was Tasha.”
“Tasha?” Quinn said.
The name had also gotten Orlando’s and Nate’s attention. They had all crossed paths with Tasha the previous year in Singapore.
“Tasha Douglas?” Nate said.
Peter nodded.
“How is she?” Orlando asked.
“Not good, but she’s holding on.”
“She working for you now?” Quinn asked.
“It was a … joint operation,” Peter said. “With her out… see … that’s why I need your help.”
Quinn stared at Peter, then said, “This is the last one. And I’m not talking about just our deal, Peter. No more after this.”
Peter’s jaw tensed, his words slipping through clenched teeth. “I know.”
CHAPTER 11
In only a week’s time, fear had become such a dominant aspect of Marion Dupuis’s life that she hardly even noticed it anymore. It had become her norm. Her friends would have picked up on it. Her family, too. But she had told none of them she had even returned from Africa.
The only people who knew she was no longer on the job were her boss at the UN who had approved her request for emergency leave— “A family issue,” she had said — and the two trusted colleagues whose help she’d needed to leave Cote d’Ivoire.
The first thing she’d needed were papers to get out of the country. Not for herself, but for Iris. There was no way she was going to leave the child behind. One of her colleagues in Africa had assisted her with this. Noelle Broussard was the only one Marion had told the whole story to. Marion was afraid that if she didn’t, the woman would have turned her in to the head of the mission instead of helping her to escape.
It must have worked, because ten hours later her friend showed up at her hotel room near the UN compound with a full set of backdated adoption documents, naming Marion as Iris’s mother, and a Canadian passport for the girl.
And that wasn’t all.
“Here,” the woman said, handing Marion a second packet.
Marion looked inside. There was another set of papers and two additional passports.
“What’s this?” Marion asked.
“In case of emergencies.”
Marion pulled out one of the passports. The picture inside was hers, but the name was different. Niquette Fournier. Hometown: Gatineau. The second passport was for Iris, only her name was listed as Isabel Fournier.
“What am I supposed to do with these?” Marion asked, confused.
“Maybe nothing,” her friend said. She looked over at Iris. The girl was sitting on the bed, holding a doll, but she was watching the two women. The woman turned back to Marion. “Someone came looking for you earlier today.”
Marion felt a chill go up her spine. “What? Who?”
“A man. A European, I think.”
“Caucasian?”
“Yes. He asked about a woman with a child. An African child.”
“What did you tell him?” Marion asked.
“I didn’t talk to him. But I heard about it later. Since no one else knows about the girl, they didn’t know who he was talking about.”
“Did he say who he was?”
“No name, just said he worked for an NGO and needed to talk to … well, you, I guess.” She nodded at the document packet in Marion’s hand. “So hold on to those. If you don’t want anyone to know where you are, they’ll help. They’re valid. No one will question you.”
Marion’s initial thought had been that she and Iris would be safe once they were out of the country. But would they be? Would she and the child need to disappear completely?
She put both sets of documents on the end of the bed and picked up Iris.
“Thank you,” she said to her friend.
The woman stood and walked to the door. “Be safe,” she said, and then she was gone.
Marion hugged Iris tightly, feeling the child smile against her cheek. So innocent. So vulnerable, yet almost always happy. She would be childlike for life, thanks to a genetic misfire, but in a way Marion envied that. But it was also that misfire, that malformed chromosome giving the child Down syndrome, that had made her both unwanted in her own community yet desired by men with guns who tried to steal her in the night.
That’s why Frau Roslyn had hidden the child at the first hint that her orphanage was going to be searched again. She had told Marion a few weeks earlier that there was a group on the lookout for discarded children of a certain type — those with traits that in the West would label them “special needs.” Specifically those with either autism or Down syndrome. Other facilities had been searched, and word had spread among those who cared for the orphans in the city to be on their guard. Why someone wanted these children, Frau Roslyn had no idea. But whatever the answer was, she’d told Marion it could not have been good. And when Iris came into her possession, Roslyn had made Marion promise to do what she could to help keep the child safe. Only Marion hadn’t realized at the time it would turn into this.
After what she and the child had been through, Marion knew she’d done the only thing she could have. And no matter how difficult, it had been the right thing. She was even starting to rethink her plan to find Iris a real home once they were safe. The child’s home should be with her. How could it not be?
That was if Marion didn’t get them killed first.
She brought Iris back to New York on the first flight another colleague, one who worked at the UN headquarters in Manhattan, could get her and Iris on. At JFK Airport, she had been tense as she approached passport control. She had chosen to go with the set of documents bearing her own name, but still worried about those Noelle had given her for the child. But Iris’s papers had held up, and they were both allowed into the country without a second look.
Marion got a hotel room not far from Port Authority, but her sleep that night was counted in minutes, not hours. She told herself it was jet lag, though she knew that wasn’t true. She’d been on edge for several days straight and now didn’t know how to turn it off. She was up and out of the hotel with Iris before 7 a.m.
“They’ll keep looking for her,” Frau Roslyn’s cousin Jan had said. “You need to get her away. Once you do, you need to disappear. Don’t let anyone know where you are. These people will find you. And once they have the girl, they’ll kill you.”
She knew she should get out of New York, but there was something she needed to do first.
She purchased an umbrella stroller for Iris from a Duane Reade drugstore on Fifth Avenue, then found a
