He yawned and sat up. 'Ten in the morning is a very respectable hour for an old family friend to be seen at the official residence. No one will notice my late departure. I'll be lost in the crowd of solicitous members of Parliament who are beating a path here this minute to offer their services to the Prime Minister's wife in her moment of anguish.'
'You're a capricious bastard,' she said, pulling the twisted bedclothes around her shoulders. 'Warm and loving one moment, cold and calculating the next.'
'How quickly women change their moods the morning after. I wonder if you would be half so shrewish if Charles had died in the crash?'
'The job was botched,' she snapped angrily.
'Yes, the job was botched.' He shrugged.
Her face took on a cold determined look. 'Only when Charles lies in the grave will Quebec become an independent socialist nation.'
'You want your husband dead for a cause?' he asked skeptically. 'Has your love turned to such hatred that he has become nothing to you but a symbol to be eliminated?'
'We never knew love.' She took a cigarette from a box on the nightstand and lit it. 'From the beginning, Charles' only interest in me was a need for a political asset. My family's social standing provided him with entrde to society. I've supplied him with some sterling polish and style. But I've never been anything to Charles except a tool to enhance his public image.'
'Why did you marry him?'
She drew on the cigarette. 'He said he was going to be Prime Minister someday, and I believed him.'
'And then?'
'Too late, I discovered Charles was incapable of affection. I once sought a passionate response. Now I cringe every time he touches me.'
'I watched the news conference at the hospital on television. The doctor who was interviewed told how your anxiety and concern for Charles touched the hearts of the medical staff.'
'Pure theatrics.' She laughed. 'I'm pretty good at it. But then I've had ten years of rehearsal.'
'Did Charles have anything interesting to say during your visit?'
'Nothing that made any sense. They had just wheeled him out of the surgical recovery room. His mind was still numb from the anesthetic. He spoke mostly gibberish, raked up the past, a memory of an auto accident that killed his mother.'
Danielle's lover slid out of bed and stepped into the bathroom. 'At least he didn't babble away defense secrets.'
She inhaled on the cigarette and let the smoke trickle from her nostrils. 'Maybe he did.'
'Go on,' he said from the bathroom. 'I can hear you.'
'Charles instructed me to tell you to increase security at James Bay.'
'Sheer nonsense.' He laughed. 'They have twice the amount of guards required to cover every square inch as it is.'
'Not the whole project. Only the control booth.'
He came to the doorway, wiping his bald head with a towel. 'What control booth?'
'Above the generator chamber, I think he said.'
He looked puzzled. 'Did he elaborate?'
'Then Charles mumbled something about
'Yes, discover what?'
She made a helpless gesture. 'He broke off because of the pain.'
'That was all?'
'No, he wanted you to consult with somebody called Max Roubaix.'
'Max Roubaix?' he repeated, his expression skeptical. 'Are you certain that was the name he used?'
She stared at the ceiling, thinking back, then she nodded. 'Yes, I'm positive.'
'How odd.'
Without further elaboration he reentered the bathroom, stood in front of a large full-length mirror and struck a pose known in muscle control jargon as a vacuum. Exhaling and sucking in his rib section, he expanded his rib cage, straining until the network of blood vessels seemed to erupt beneath the skin's surface. Next he did a side chest shot, left hand on right wrist, arm against upper torso.
Henri Villon studied his reflection with critical concern. His physique was as ideal as physically possible. Then he stared at the chiseled features of the face, the Roman-style nose, the indifferent gray eyes. When he dropped all expression the features became hard, with a satanic twist to the mouth. It was as though a savage was lurking beneath the sculptured marble of a statue.
The wife and daughter of Henri Villon, his Liberal party colleagues and half the population of Canada would never in their wildest fantasies have believed he was leading a double life. A respected member of Parliament and minister of internal affairs in the open, he walked the shadows as the veiled head of the Free Quebec Society, the radical movement dedicated to the full independence of French Quebec.
Danielle came up behind him, a sheet wrapped around her, toga-fashion, and traced his biceps with her fingers. 'Do you know him?'
He relaxed and took a deep breath, slowly exhaling. 'Roubaix?'
She nodded.
'Only by reputation.'
'Who is he?'
'Better to ask that question in the past tense,' he said, taking the brown-haired wig with graying sides and neatly placing it on his scalp. 'If my memory serves me, Max Roubaix was a mass murderer who swung from the gallows over a hundred years ago.'
FEBRUARY 1989
PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY
Heidi Milligan seemed out of place among the students grouped about the tables of the Princeton University archive reading room. The neatly tailored uniform of a navy lieutenant commander adorned a svelte body measuring six feet from manicured toenails to the roots of her naturally ash-blond hair.
To the young men in the room she was a welcome distraction from their studies. She knew instinctively that she was being stripped to her skin in their imaginations. But since she'd passed thirty, she'd become indifferent, though not too indifferent.
'Looks like you're on another allnighter Commander.'
Heidi looked up into the ever-smiling face of Mildred Gardner, the matronly head archivist of the university. 'Allnighter?'
'Late study. In my day we called it burning the midnight oil.'
Heidi leaned back in her chair. 'I've got to steal whatever time I can to work on my dissertation.'
Mildred blew the bangs of her nineteen-fortyish pageboy hairstyle out of her eyes and sat down. 'An attractive girl like you can't spend all your nights studying. You should find yourself a good man and live it up once in a while.'
'First I'll get my doctorate in history, then I'll live it up.'
'You can't get passionate with a piece of paper that says you're a Ph.D.'
'Maybe the sound of Dr. Milligan turns me on,' Heidi laughed. 'If I'm to advance my career in the navy, I'll need the credentials.'
'Sounds to me like you like to compete with the opposite sex.'
'Sex has nothing to do with it. My first love is the navy. What's wrong with that?'
Mildred made a gesture of surrender. 'No profit in arguing with a stubborn female, and hardheaded sailor to boot.' She rose and looked down at the documents scattered on the table. 'Anything I can pull from the shelves for you?'
'I'm researching Woodrow Wilson papers that deal with the navy during his administration.'
'How horribly dull. Why that subject?'
'I guess you might say I'm intrigued by covering an untapped sideline of history.'
