Each opened his envelope. Diem was the first to whistle. “Is this really the FBI director’s signature? On a letter with my name on it, even.”
“Your career is blooming like a rose.”
“My letter is signed by the head of New Scotland Yard,” Speedo Harris said solemnly, staring at the paper. Then he looked at Grafton with new respect. “You have some pull somewhere.”
“Somewhere. Now hit the bricks. You have my telephone numbers.”
I thought Speedo was going to salute, but he didn’t. As he and Diem exited, George Goldberg came in. He handed Grafton another copy of the Stehle photo. “Twenty-three percent,” Goldberg said. He nodded at me and left.
Grafton tapped the photo on his fingernail, then handed it to me. “Better hang on to that. You may need to wave it around somewhere.”
“Okay.”
“The folks at Fort Meade”—that would be the National Security Agency—“say that this photo and the one you took last year of the old man in Paris are of the same person, to a twenty-three percent certainty.”
I took a good look at the Stehle photo. His face had actually been too close to the camera when it was snapped, and so the lens distorted the image slightly. Was that the reason the probability was only 23 percent, or.. “He looked old last year,” I remarked.
“He can make himself look any way he chooses, but he can’t change the dimensions of his skull, and those are the dimensions the computer measures.”
“Twenty-three percent. Even Vegas gives better odds than that.” I put the photo in a breast pocket of my sports coat. “I don’t think Marisa poisoned anyone,” I added.
“Why?”
I hunted through the attic for a reason I could articulate, and couldn’t find one. None of it made much sense. Why in the world would Qasim want Isolde Petrou dead? Or playboy son Jean? On the other hand, I could think of a dozen reasons why Marisa might feel relieved that Jean was on his way to another place. I bulled ahead anyway. “Instinct, I suppose. She’s not the poison type.”
“Thank you, Dr. Freud,” Grafton said dryly. “She and her mother-in-law are on their way to Germany. Get a car, pack your toothbrush and hit the road. Check in with the duty officer this evening — she’ll tell you where those women have come to rest. I want you to get as close to Marisa as humanly possible and stay there.”
“You think Abu Qasim might try to kill her?”
He frowned. “I don’t know what their relationship is.” He rapped on the table several times with a knuckle; then his features softened and he looked me right in the eyes. “I want Qasim dead or alive, and I don’t give a damn which it is. Marisa is your bait goat. Take a pistol with you.
“Okay.” I stood to go.
“If I were you,” Grafton added casually, “I’d watch what I ate around those women.”
George Goldberg had four pistols in the safe behind his desk. I looked over his selection and took a new Springfield Armory EMP 1911 automatic with a three-inch barrel, in 9 mm. I’d have trouble hitting anything at a distance, but within twenty-five feet, the bad guys had better watch out. The one I took had a clip welded on the left side of the frame so that a right-handed guy could stick it down between his trousers and shirttail in the small of his back and hook the clip over his trousers, anchoring the gun in place. George gave me an extra magazine with hollow-point shells already in it, and I put it in my trouser pocket. I worked the slide a few times, tried the safety and trigger, then loaded the thing, left it cocked and locked, and put it where it was supposed to go.
“How do I look?” I asked George.
“That sports coat doesn’t really go with those trousers.”
“The next time I go shopping, I’ll take you along.”
One of the embassy staff took me to the airport to rent a car. Since Uncle Sugar was paying the tab and I have a certain image to maintain, I rented a Porsche 911. As I drove it back to Paris to pack and check out of the hotel, I decided that I would buy one of these if my old Benz ever went lame and I had to shoot it.
I was late getting out of Paris and got caught in rush hour. It was dark and raining by the time I had cleared the last of the suburbs. The pistol in the small of my back felt like a rock, so I put it in the pocket of my sports coat.
I called the duty officer in the embassy, as per Grafton’s instructions, and was told the women had gone to a castle on the Rhine River.
“A castle?”
“Yep. It’s owned by Wolfgang Zetsche, who is the chairman of the largest shipping firm in Europe.” She named it. “He retired as CEO last year.” She gave me directions to get there.
“Better get me a room in a hotel or inn nearby for tonight.”
“Already did.” She gave me the name of the place and more directions.
As I drove toward Nancy and the northeast corner of France, I thought about what I should do. I almost called Jake Grafton to get his opinion, then decided not to. If he had had instructions he would have given them to me before I left the embassy. I was on my own. Or semi on my own, anyway; he was as close as my cell phone.
Jake Grafton spent most of the evening in the SCIF on his telephones. He had three on his desk — two encrypted landlines and an encrypted satellite phone. He had received telephone calls from Per Diem and Speedo Harris, giving him the latest info on both the British and French investigations of the two poisonings. He also had a computer on his desk, which he used to send encrypted emails. He was pounding keys this evening, talking via the Internet to Sal Molina, who was at his desk in the White House.
If Alexander Surkov sold the identity of the Knights Winchester to al-Qaeda, which then poisoned him, the radioactive trail is a ruse designed to frame people with a known grudge against him. On the other hand, if the Russians really did it, it follows that the Knights have nothing to fear. If that is the case, who murdered Jean Petrou? Was it really an attempt to kill Isolde, Huntington Winchester’s best friend, or did Isolde and/or Marisa decide they had finally had enough of dear old Jean?
Wolfgang Zetsche is at his country home on the Rhine, and Isolde seems to be on her way to join him. Where is Oleg Tchernychenko- I am informed the Swiss banker is in Zurich at his bank. And where are the three Americans? I suggest you get the FBI to keep tabs on them. If al-Qaeda is really after these people, we need to get them to a place where we can guard them, and catch anyone who tries to assassinate them.
Grafton sent the message. Five minutes later he had a reply.
The Knights Winchester? Who thought that up? Tchernychenko is fishing in Scotland, and the three Americans are in the States, although scattered. I asked the FBI to locate them yesterday. If Surkov did indeed sell out the six Knights, he also betrayed your teams. And you. Keep me advised.
It was midnight on a dark, rainy night when I reached Strasbourg and crossed the Rhine into Germany. As I drove up to the border crossing, the gates were wide open and the man under the awning was just waving traffic through.
The Rhine River is the border between France and Germany from Basel, Switzerland, downriver to about Karlsruhe. Wolfgang Zetsche’s castle wasn’t really on the Rhine; it was about two miles up a tributary on the German side of the stream near the town of Rastatt. The hotel the folks in Paris had booked me into was in Rastatt, but I wanted to see the castle. I drove through town and took the river road toward the Rhine, trying to see through the night rain and mist. Visibility was terrible, and if it had been any worse, I would have missed Zetsche’s country retreat. It was a castle, all right, built on a rocky outcrop that forced the small river into a horseshoe bend to get around. From outside the gate, I got the impression of sheer walls of stone, a flat roof, all set amid huge trees behind stone walls that were at least fifteen feet high in the lowest place, higher elsewhere.
I turned around in front of the closed gate and headed back to Ras-tatt. The distance was only about a third of a mile.
Zetsche had obviously done well in the shipping business. Make that very well. So how did he know Isolde and Marisa? Why would they come here, of all places, immediately after the death of the good son?
Rastatt looked centuries old, with three- and four-story medieval buildings along a twisty, narrow street paralleling the river. The lights from the windows and poles reflected off the wet pavement. Not a single pedestrian this time of night. All the good burghers were home in bed.
The hotel wasn’t old — it was a modern brick structure of five or so stories that sat right on the street. An
