“You don’t like that comparison, Pippi? Prove me wrong. Now, we’ll finish this up on the way to the airport.” Moreau consulted his watch. “The van should be here any minute.”
“Didn’t we just get off a plane?” asked Valentina, sighing in disgust.
“Look on the bright side, sweetheart. You’re going to France,” said Ames. “You can go shopping and get your nails done.”
“And when my nails are done, I can use them to reach into your chest and rip out your still-beating heart.”
“I was going to say you could scratch my back while we—”
“In your pathetic dreams.”
Ames wore a mock-wounded expression. “Why are you so mean to me?”
Valentina raised a perfectly tweezed brow. “Because when I was a kid, you were that boy who pulled my ponytail all through school.”
“I think you like me. I think you’re struggling with that. You’re afraid to admit it. Don’t be afraid, Maya. Don’t be afraid.”
“Ben, can you shut him up?”
Hansen waved them off and started up the stairs. In his mind’s eye he saw himself putting a gun to Sam Fisher’s head.
Fisher crashed to the ground, lying faceup, and began bleeding all over the pavement.
With the hot sun on the back of his neck, Hansen shifted over Fisher’s body, his shadow passing over Fisher’s face, the eyes glowing, a third equally bright eye appearing on Fisher’s forehead as his mouth moved and he gasped out,
14
The Cessna Citation X, the fastest civilian aircraft in the sky, swept over the Atlantic Ocean at six hundred plus miles per hour, climbing to a cruising altitude of some forty-five thousand feet.
Maya Valentina leaned back in her well-padded chair and sipped once more from her glass of champagne. Some bubbly was the least they could do. Since joining Third Echelon, she’d logged as many hours aboard aircraft as the average commercial airline pilot. Well, that was probably an exaggeration, but she was beginning to feel a constant state of lag taking hold beneath her eyes.
She glanced over at the black ash burl panels beside her seat and ran her fingers across the smooth, polished surface. She knew a lot about wood because of her father. He was a framer, trim carpenter, cabinet maker, and amateur knife maker in their hometown of Geneva, Florida. Her dad’s grandfather had been a wood carver in Sicily and had come to the United States in the early 1900s to find work in New York City as a piano maker. The family had eventually moved down to Florida, and her father continued practicing the family trade of woodcraft.
Valentina had been raised in a farmhouse built in the 1860s and nestled on ten acres that bordered state- owned lands. With all that room to roam, she and her four brothers spent their summers exploring the woods and creeks. She had been on a path to becoming a typical tomboy and could hunt, fish, and shoot with the best of them, but she was still attracted to fashion and makeup and all those things that made her feel like a girl. The colorful dresses she wore to Sunday-morning mass were some of her favorite clothes, and her mother had made sure that she had access to all of those feminine things and told her that, no, she was not just one of the boys, despite being outnumbered. Once she entered high school, she shed the last of her tomboy roots, and her mother taught her how to apply makeup and add highlights to her hair. Much to her father’s chagrin, the boys noticed… in droves. Her dad liked to show her dates his gun and knife collections, not because he was trying to threaten them, but because he was always trying to sell a piece or two. She had to yell at him for trying to solicit her friends.
What troubled her most, though, was the stereotypical dismissal given to her by her peers when she’d attended Rollins College to get a degree in political science with an aim toward doing something in the government. Her colleagues couldn’t wrap their heads around the fact that a woman with her looks wanted to do something with her brains instead of her boobs. Her own roommate told her, “You’re either a beauty or a geek. Don’t try to be both. You could get a job as a stripper and make more in a few months than you’ll make in a year as a lawyer.”
There were darker days when she’d stand in front of the mirror, put a knife to her cheek, and wonder what the scar would look like, how it might change their perception of her. She’d trace a line down from the corner of her eye, across her cheek, then wind it down beneath her chin. Yet the scar would just draw pity, and they still wouldn’t see her as smart. The dumb-blond jokes would keep coming. What do you call a dead blonde in a closet? The 1986 hide-and-seek world champion. Hilarious. The injustice of that stereotype annoyed her so much that she’d developed a rant she’d often unleash on her dates.
All of which underscored the fact that when Hansen told her to go into Leonard’s office and seduce him, she’d died a little more inside. The degree from Rollins meant nothing. The three years she’d spent at the NSA as an intelligence analyst — demonstrating her understanding of world history, geography, and the social, economic, and political events that affected global change — were a waste of time. That she had been recruited from her desk job by Irving Lambert himself and somehow survived the Third Echelon training program didn’t mean a goddamned thing.
She was a pair of boobs and legs.
Why couldn’t she get past that? Just use her looks to her advantage, allow men to let down their guards as they dreamed of doing likewise with their flies. Why would they take her seriously only when she had a pistol jammed into their temples? Oh, yes, they were shocked that the dumb blonde, the piece of ass, was a whole lot smarter than they’d thought, so smart, in fact, that they would now lose their lives to her, and she wouldn’t give them a second thought because, like all the rest, they couldn’t see past the flesh.
Was she bitter? Oh, God, don’t get her started.
Valentina looked down and realized she was clutching her armrest. She took a deep breath, then finished the rest of her champagne in one gulp.
To accommodate onboard meetings, the seats were arranged in pairs and facing one another. She sat beside Hansen, and they faced Ames and Noboru, both of whom were scanning maps on their laptops. Gillespie had opted to take a seat behind them but had turned around and pushed up on her knees like a curious kid in coach staring over the top of her seat at the people behind her.
On the way to the airport, Moreau had gone over the particulars: The Police municipale had received an anonymous tip that a man named Francois Dayreis was responsible for a brutal assault in a warehouse on the outskirts of Reims the night before. Five men had been severely beaten by a lone perpetrator, their IDs stolen. The story had made the local news and the Police nationale was now working with Interpol and the Central Directorate of Interior Intelligence, France’s FBI, to apprehend the criminal. The six victims were Romain Doucet, Georges Blandin, Avent Quenten, Pierre Allard, Andre Canivet, and Louis Royer. Doucet, it turned out, was a local thug and head of a gang that had intimidated his neighborhood, subsequently keeping him well stocked with alibis. However, he had nearly been implicated in the rape of a fifteen-year-old girl, and that, Moreau had said, took him to an even deeper level of hell. That Dayreis had pounded the crap out of these thugs was vigilante justice, no doubt.
That Francois Dayreis was a known alias of Sam Fisher’s had everyone at Third Echelon on the edges of their seats. Consequently, Delta Sly had some things to do and people to see.
Since IDs had been stolen, Moreau had consulted a list of high-end forgers known to Third Echelon, and the
