know that we crossed over the lake to see Lu. As far as I know, the pen’s still in the hotel.”
“Then they know what I’m doing.”
“No. They don’t know that, either. I’ve been holding out on them for a long time, Harry. There’s so much I haven’t told them. Almost everything. Howard’s all over me now. I’m sure he knows what I’m doing. He’s furious.”
Strand tried to regain his balance, trying to factor in and absorb all the readjustments to the reality of his situation.
“What about the tape of Romy?” he asked suddenly, almost without thinking.
“No, Harry. I didn’t know anything about that. I don’t think they did, either, to tell you the truth.”
“When did you last speak to Bill Howard?”
She told him everything about their conversation in Bellagio two days earlier.
“I don’t believe him,” Strand said when she was through. “You’re right about him being suspicious of you. Howard’s been around too long not to recognize a miscarriage. He knows you’re not going to stay with it. He knows this conversation we’re having right now is inevitable. He knew it before you did. And if he knew it, and if he was telling the truth about Washington going after me, he should have brought you in and had me picked up. But he hasn’t done that.” Strand looked toward the windows. “I don’t think he’s gone back to Washington with this. Something’s wrong with this.”
Mara cleared her throat. He watched her as she held the cool, damp washcloth to her eyes for a moment. His mind was flying over the possibilities. There was so much to think about, it made him queasy. It occurred to him- shot into his mind like a bright spark-that she might be lying. Just as quickly he decided that if she was, if all of this doubled back on him again, they could have him. If she wasn’t who he thought she was, whatever was left was nothing he wanted. He could understand what she had done. God help him, it wasn’t all that different from what had happened with Romy. If he had learned anything at all from her, it was that if he was ever going to redeem himself from the years of lies, he was going to have to learn how to forgive. It was really the only way. If he was going to manage to stagger toward something better than what he was now, he was going to have to do it with damaged people like himself who were also looking for a way out. If they wanted to climb out of the darkness, if they genuinely desired it, he would gladly extend a hand. No one would be required to have a clean conscience. That kind of hypocrisy was no longer good enough.
CHAPTER 34
She didn’t understand, and he really couldn’t have expected her to. As they talked into the afternoon, he watched her closely. Sometimes her eyes would slide away from him, slippery, lubricated by guilt. Deception was so insidiously destructive; and the first rule of survival for those who made it a profession was that you must never care about the people you deceived. It was the difference between dropping bombs on people from twenty thousand feet and going into their bedrooms at night and cutting their throats. The closer you were to them, the harder it was to live with what you did to them.
When you worked undercover, you had to learn not only how to wear a mask successfully, but also how to put a mask on whomever you were lying to. If they became real to you, if they became human, deserving of compassion or of any kind of consideration, you were ruined. So you had to lie to yourself in order to live with the lies you were living. It got to be tricky, and not everyone was made to live in that kind of labyrinth. It took its toll on everyone, but some people were completely destroyed by it. If you wanted to endure, you had to learn how to keep your deceit from becoming a vortex and sucking you down into its darkness.
The strangest part of it was that the damage that was done, the hurt that was inflicted, all happened within. Within the mind. Within the psyche. And, most grievous of all, within the heart.
“Are you nervous?” she asked.
Mara was standing at the windows, looking down at the street. She was sipping a glass of water, shifting her weight from one hip to the other.
They had gone out for a late lunch at a cafe not far from the Bibliotheque Nationale and had returned to the hotel arm in arm among the crowds on the sidewalks.
“Not nervous,” he said. “Anxious.”
He was sitting on the edge of the armchair, examining the documents he was about to put into his briefcase.
“That’s a distinction lost on me.”
“Obando is a far different man from Lu,” Strand said. “I’ll have to play him differently. I’m just trying to work it out.”
“I’m nervous about it,” she said.
Strand slouched back in the chair and put his hands together, elbows on the fat upholstered arms of the chair.
“I’d like you to do something for me.”
She hesitated a moment, then turned to him, her back against the edge of the window frame.
“I can’t imagine how you could possibly justify my presence at that meeting,” she said.
“No, it’s not that.”
She waited.
Strand approached the Cafe Martineau from the opposite side of the Boulevard des Capucines. He walked past it several times, glancing across to assess its location, to get a feel for the kind of place it was. In the short time he watched the cafe, he saw no one enter or leave. Its name was written on the front window in gold letters against a black band, and a black border with gold trim framed the window itself. A black awning with a dark beige trim protected the entrance. It was a very smart address.
Finally, moving with the pedestrian flow, he crossed to the other side and approached the cafe from the direction of the Boulevard de la Madeleine. He saw nothing amiss. He opened the front door and went in.
“Yes, sir. May I help you?”
A young woman met him immediately, speaking in English. But her accent was not French. She had short dark hair that implied a businesslike mind underneath it. She wore a mandarin red suit and a black, open-necked blouse tucked in firmly to a thin waist. She was not the hostess, but she was working; it was no mistake that she allowed Strand to see the automatic pistol tucked slightly to one side into the waistband of her short skirt.
“I have an appointment with Mr. Obando.”
“Okay,” she said. “This is the right place.” Two men came up behind her. “Put the briefcase down there,” she said, indicating a small marble-topped bistro table next to the reception podium.
Strand did as he was told and raised his arms as the two men checked him for whatever they didn’t want to find. Strand took the opportunity to glance farther into the cafe, empty except for a few more of Obando’s assistants scattered here and there. He thought he saw Obando halfway back, sitting alone at a table. Apparently the Colombian had bought the exclusive use of the cafe for a few hours.
After the men were finished the woman approached him again with an electronic wand with a digital readout and began going over him. Up and down his sides, between his legs-strictly efficient, nothing cute-over his back. She asked him to take off his suit coat. He did, and she went through the arms, through the pockets, over the seams.
“You’re very thorough,” he said.
“Yes,” she said. The two men were busy doing the same thing to the briefcase.
When she was finished, she held his suit coat for him and helped him put it on. She smiled.
“Thank you for being so patient,” she said. As if on cue, the two men finished with his briefcase. “Please”-she tilted her head for him to follow her-“Mr. Obando is waiting.”
It was odd to see the cafe empty. The staff was nowhere in sight. Only Obando’s silent bodyguards stood politely against the walls of the long, narrow establishment. Each of them looked as if he could have been the cafe’s owner or a very subtle maitre d’.
As Strand and the woman approached Obando’s table, she stopped and Strand stepped past her. Obando had been watching him approach, but he did not get up or offer his hand. He motioned to the only other seat at the
