QUAI DES GRANDS AUGUSTINS, PARIS
Mara Song sat at a table by the window and watched the early autumn light soften to a pale peach on the spires of Sainte-Chapelle across the Seine. The lunch-hour crowds had long since cleared out of the restaurant and the few customers who remained were outnumbered by the waiters, who generally ignored them as they went about their business of changing tablecloths, sweeping the floors, preparing for the evening clientele.
Eugene Payton came into the restaurant and spotted her immediately, waving off a waiter who had started toward him. Mara turned her face away and listened to his footsteps on the floor, slowing as he drew near. When he stopped, she looked up.
“Well, it’s good to see you again, finally,” Payton said.
Mara nodded dismissively.
“No, honestly.” Payton grinned. “It is.” He unbuttoned his suit coat, pulled out the chair opposite her, and sat down. “We’ve talked so much by telephone and fax and e-mail during the last couple of months that it doesn’t seem as though it’s been that long since Camp Peary.”
“It seems that long to me,” she said. “And more.”
Gene Payton was second in command of the Foreign Intelligence Service. Strand had said that Payton was among the best of them. He had always been on the fast track to the top, and he understood the intelligence business in a way that very few did. He believed that the FIS was important, that it was even essential. He did not believe that it had a holy mission, which made a big difference in the way he saw the role and responsibilities of his officers.
“You’re looking good, Mara,” Payton said, clasping his hands on the table after ordering a cup of coffee from the waiter. He rigorously avoided letting his eyes go near her scars. She imagined he had rehearsed it, repeated to himself over and over not to look at them. He must have decided that he would candidly refer to her wounds right at the beginning. That would seem open and honest, without being gratuitous or unnaturally oblivious. “We were worried when we saw the photographs after your first operation.” He smiled. “But I can see those concerns were unwarranted. You look great.”
“I don’t have any complaints,” she said. Fine. She didn’t want him to say any more about it. He had something to tell her and she wanted him to get on with it. There was no need for small talk, as if their meeting was social, as if they could actually relax with each other. Cordiality seemed ill-suited to the circumstances.
Payton paused a moment as the waiter left his coffee. He poured in some cream and stirred.
“Okay,” he said, putting down his spoon. “I’ll get right to the point.” Payton was no fool. Whatever else, he was not that. “I can’t say that the final decision on all of this was unanimous, but it was a solid decision. Everyone understands that it’s the decision. Anybody who doesn’t like it can take a hike. It’s that solid.”
Mara lifted her glass and sipped the Bordeaux she had been nursing for the past twenty minutes.
“FIS is walking away from it, Mara,” he said. “Officially, unofficially, on the record, off the record, casually, formally, on the books, off the books, any way you can describe it. We’re out.”
Mara couldn’t help herself. She dropped her head and closed her eyes. She was suddenly weak, as if she had received an injection of morphine. Jesus Christ.
“I’ve got to tell you,” Payton went on, “letting the money get away from them, that killed them. Some of them couldn’t believe it. The scheme has their grudging admiration, but if it hadn’t been for the offsetting circumstances, the grudging part would have far outweighed the admiration part. For some of them, it always will.”
“What about the investigation? Where do they all stand on it?”
Payton cautiously took a sip of coffee. “Scotland Yard and the Bundeskriminalamt,” he said, “are inundated with possibilities, hundreds of leads, thousands of names, scores of new relationships and connections. They’ll be investigating Schrade’s assassination for a decade. They’ll never solve it. The German intelligence community is shut tight on this. So are the British. So are we.”
He looked out the window to the Seine, and Mara thought he was trying to decide whether or not to bring up something else.
“The wild card was that the international media got hold of the information about Schrade’s double life first. That pissed off the law enforcement agencies and the intelligence community. Rumor got way ahead of reality. The gaudy headlines made everyone cringe: ‘RECLUSIVE BILLIONAIRE TIED TO INTERNATIONAL CRIME SYNDICATES. GERMAN BILLIONAIRE LINKED TO GLOBAL CRIME LORDS.’ That kind of thing was alarming all of us. It could’ve gotten out of hand and pulled us all into a full-blown international scandal.”
Mara remained silent.
“A lot of questions had to be answered. People are still scrambling. Once the cat was out of the bag, the media wanted to know what else was in the bag and what it was doing in there.” He paused, looked down at his cup. “Whoever did that created a firestorm.”
She said nothing. He wasn’t going to get any reaction from her.
Payton took another sip of coffee. “But the mitigating factor was that the media received no information connecting Schrade to the FIS, or to any intelligence service. Just information about his crime world connections. That gave the whole intelligence community deniability when the inevitable spy rumors started flying around. No one ever definitively tied Schrade to any agency.”
“That was good.”
“Yeah”-Payton gazed at the quayside again-“that was good.”
Another couple left the cafe. The place was practically closed.
Payton turned back to Mara. “As far as your situation was concerned, the clincher was the information about Bill Howard.” He paused. “You know, Mara, we didn’t have a clue about him. The son of a bitch, he might’ve retired and we’d never have known.”
“Have you found him yet?” Mara asked.
Payton shook his head in disgust. “No, and with the kind of money he’s got he’ll be able to buy a hell of a lot of ghost help. This could take a long time. Plus, it’s got to be done in silence. Rules of the game.”
She nodded.
“Anyway, everyone knew you didn’t have to do that. I mean, it worked to your advantage, it was a score on your side of the ledger.”
“That’s not why-”
“I know, I know,” Payton held up his hand to stop her, “that’s what I mean. Everybody knew that, and that’s why it gave you the edge.”
He was silent a moment, looking at the buildings on the Ile de la Cite. Mara looked out to the Seine also. Her face ached, but it didn’t matter anymore. Time would pass, the scars would heal. The ones on her body, anyway. Right now was not the time to think about the others.
“One question,” Payton said, turning back to Mara. “This is for me-just me, believe it or not.”
Mara did believe it. “What’s that?”
“How did you get away from there? I know Mayfair was immobile with shock after the explosion. It’s not exactly on Scotland Yard’s hot patrol list. The weather was bad. The response time was bad. But still… shit, you were both blown up.”
A simple question. It seemed ingenuous enough. But within the last year her life had undergone irreversible changes. Ingenuous. The word had almost lost its meaning.
“I can’t talk about that,” she said, dropping her eyes to the last deep mulberry sips of wine left in her glass. “If it’s over, it’s over.” She hesitated, then looked up at him. “I don’t know how you people do this, how you make a life out of it. There are always more questions than answers, more tragedies than triumphs… and more secrets than all of it put together.”
Even for a man as circumspect as Gene Payton, even for a guy who knew the ropes and the rules as well as he did, the frustration was written all over his face. Still, he was destined to disappointment. That was the nature of his business. Almost all of the men and women in the intelligence profession died taking an entire nightful of secrets with them.
They visited a little longer, but they really had nothing to say to each other beyond the business of business. Though Mara’s connection to Payton and the FIS had been intense and indelible, it had been brief. And it had been
