something to Grafton, who glanced at it and put it in his pocket. Then she turned and came out, sweeping by me as if I weren’t even there.
Grafton shooed me away with a head nod.
It would sure be nice if for once I were a party to whatever was going down!
I snarled at Marisa, who was standing at the sink looking about distractedly. She paid no attention. Ah, me!
Five minutes later Grafton came out of the sitting room. Marisa met his eyes but didn’t say a word. He jerked his head at me and marched for the door. They probably don’t do a lot of marching in the Navy, but Grafton learned to cover ground somewhere. I was halfway to the sidewalk, following Grafton, when I realized I hadn’t even grunted au revoir to the Israeli agent.
Grafton got to the sidewalk and set off at a good clip. I fell in beside him. “What’d you get?” I asked hopefully.
When he didn’t answer, I thought maybe he didn’t hear me, so I tried again. “What’d you learn?”
He ignored me. It was that kind of day.
As we walked the streets, he made a few telephone calls on his encrypted phone. After the second one he said, “The police are looking tor you. They know about your car.”
I groaned. I wasn’t up for a night at a police station answering questions. Truthfully, I was whipped.
Grafton walked along the Paris sidewalks with his hands in his pockets, his head down. If he knew where he was going, he wasn’t sharing that, either. The wind was downright chilly, and I was so tired I shivered. Grafton didn’t seem to notice. Finally he said, “I suggest you crash at the embassy. I think they have a cot or two over there for the staff when they pull all-nighters. Tomorrow I want you and Sarah Houston to betray your country.”
“Okay by me,” I said with a sigh. “You American bastards deserve it.”
In the basement of the American embassy, Secret Service personnel and young Marines placed the bodies of Alberto Salazar and Richard Thurlow in coffins and packed dry ice around them. The technician, Cliff Icahn, sat in the van playing with the equipment while Jake Grafton and Pink Maillard watched from the open door.
“They had the interior tape running, which is standard procedure,” Cliff said. “It’s a four-hour continuous loop. Here is the sixty seconds before the shots.” He played it. Jake stood with closed eyes concentrating as he listened to the words, the sound of the door opening, the fast two pops, a pause, then two more, then the door closing.
“That’s basically it,” Cliff said. “Want to listen again?”
Jake and Pink looked at each other and both shook their heads. “No,” the admiral said.
“A cop,” Pink mused.
“More precisely, someone dressed as a policeman,” Jake said.
They walked away from the van. Pinckney Maillard had his hands in his pockets. “The ambassador isn’t going to like this,” he muttered, more to himself than Jake. “How are we going to get the bodies back to the States? We don’t have death certificates for the immigration people.”
“We can take them to Germany and put them aboard an Air Force transport,” Jake said. “No one checks vehicles crossing the French-German border.”
“That’s illegal, a violation of God only knows how many international treaties and laws,” Maillard protested. Sneaking bodies around… Jesus! Stunts like that weren’t the way to get ahead in the Secret Service.
“Someone around here could gin up some fake death certificates,” Jake suggested, “if that will make you feel better.”
“That isn’t very damn funny.”
“Maybe the best course is to pass the buck to Washington, let someone there figure it out.”
“Yeah,” Maillard agreed. That was the only safe approach. Then he added, “Of course, Lancaster is gonna blow a gasket.” An outraged U.S. ambassador shouting his name wouldn’t do him any good at the Treasury Department, either.
Grafton paused for one more look at the coffins, then headed for the elevator. Maillard followed along.
The Graftons’ apartment overlooked a tree-lined boulevard. Callie referred to it in her letter to her daughter, Amy, as “the perfect apartment,” and that was how she thought of it. It was a third-floor walk-up in an older building, the plumbing was antique, the pipes groaned, the kitchen was tiny and the refrigerator was barely large enough to hold a six-pack. There was a small balcony, just large enough for two chairs and two flowerpots, where she and her husband, when he was home, could sit and watch the endless traffic and, in the evening, Parisians stroll by on the sidewalks. It was Paris the way she had always dreamed it would be.
Of course, the place had a few drawbacks. The major one was that Jake said it was probably infested with electronic bugs, so no discussion could take place about anything remotely connected with what Jake was doing. When they had moved in Callie thought the possible presence of bugs no big deal, and she had forgotten about them. After the murders of the CIA technicians, she felt strangled. She wanted to discuss the situation with her husband, but she couldn’t do it here.
Tonight she stood on the balcony watching the sidewalk, waiting for Jake. The tops of the trees on the sidewalk were just below the balcony. Birds liked to light on the now bare branches, there to ride the swaying limbs as the fall winds blew through the canyon of the boulevard, quite unconcerned about her presence or the precarious-ness of their resting place.
Then she saw him, still almost a block away, walking this way, looking at the people, glancing into store windows occasionally. Jake Grafton. He was still the warrior she married, but he was no longer the young stud with the aroma of jet exhaust embedded in his clothing and hair. Yet at times she fancied that she could still smell it on him.
She went into the apartment and closed the doors to the balcony. She turned off the lights and locked the apartment behind her. The stairwell was dark, lit only by twenty-five-watt bulbs that dangled from sockets on each landing.
Callie stepped out onto the sidewalk just as Jake arrived. He reached for her hand but she hugged him instead. He wrapped his arms around her, pulling her tight against him. With her head on his chest she could hear his heart beating.
“Let’s go for a walk,” she whispered.
“Sure.” They set off down the sidewalk hip to hip, with his arm draped over her shoulder.
“Could we be under audio surveillance even here, walking along the sidewalk?” Callie asked.
“It’s possible,” he said. “Not too probable unless someone wants to spend a lot of time and money.”
“Can we talk?”
“I’m sorry about sending you off with Willie Varner and two dead men. I wanted you out of there and knew Willie didn’t have a clue where the embassy was.”
“I understood. And I’ve seen dead men before. Still, it’s hard to take. They didn’t deserve that.”
“No,” he agreed. “They didn’t.”
They went into a patisserie and got ice cream cones. When they came out, Callie asked, “What happened after I left?”
Jake was not in the habit of sharing classified information with his wife, even though she was the personification of tact and discretion. Still, in this instance, a woman’s perspective might be helpful. So he told it, about going into Rodet’s apartment with Tommy Carmellini only to find it had been searched and trashed. “You might speculate that the people who searched the apartment knew Al and Rich were listening and killed them before they went in. Of course, even with our guys dead, the audio from the bugs was recorded. After you and Willie returned the van, the folks at the embassy listened to the recording. All they heard was sounds of people searching and garbled voices.”
“So the searchers were pros?”
“Perhaps. Or very careful.”
“Did they find what they were looking for?”
“No.” He continued with the narrative between licks on the ice cream cone, telling her about waiting for Henri Rodet and Marisa Petrou to come home, then following them into the apartment. “Of course, Rodet suspected me of searching the place, then waiting until he came back to let him show me what I had failed to find.” He shrugged. “I’m sneaky enough for a trick like that, but in this case I happened to be innocent.”
A trace of a smile crossed Callie’s lips. She finished her ice cream and tossed the paper the cone came in into
