BETA - Project Avatar, page 14
She had Beta guide her to Rue du Rhône, a long strip of three-story fin-de-siècle townhouses and Victorian storefronts across from the English Garden. Then she had Beta help her find a parking garage not far from her planned rendezvous with Brice. She parked on the second floor, in the corner farthest from the elevators.
She still had a couple of hours, so she spent them shopping. Dee enjoyed shopping for clothes as much as the next woman, but by this point she was quite sick of it. She had lost two complete travel wardrobes in the past two days, and now here she was, buying a third.
She took advantage of the opportunity to alter her disguise a bit, ditching the big black wig for another in a much shorter style. The new one was smarter and more European, giving her an Audrey Hepburn look. Dee was coming to feel a certain awe at their transformative power. As she studied her new disguise critically in the mirror, she reflected that it would have taken hours to achieve such a transformation in a salon.
A few minutes before four o’clock, she lugged her shopping bags toward the waterfront. Half the population of the city seemed to be out for a stroll along the promenade on the bank of Lake Geneva. The city was enjoying the effervescent state of group intoxication which occurs spontaneously in chilly mountain climes during the first warm days of spring. People who should be at work were wandering in the sunshine instead, and everyone seemed a little lost in daydreams.
Dee slipped into the café where she hoped to meet Brice, and took a seat on the veranda. She situated herself behind a row of ornamental plants so that she could watch the passersby on the sidewalk without being seen. She flattered herself that her sneakiness was improving.
This café had been Beta’s choice, and looking around, she heartily approved. It was comfortable and elegant, and in addition to the usual list of libations, it also had a short lunch menu. On a whim, she ordered schnitzel.
She was savoring her first mouthful when Brice arrived. They recognized each other simultaneously during a tentative moment of eye contact as he was passing her table—a stroke of luck since he, too, was in disguise. His brown hair was covered with a curly blond wig, and he wore a heavy pair of horn-rimmed glasses. Most of the rest of him was covered in an unseasonable knee-length camelhair coat. He took the seat across from her and ducked his chin halfway down into his collar.
“Call me Karen Collins,” Dee said quietly.
His eyes flickered up and down over her, as if making sure it really was Dee Lockwood hidden behind the disguise and the fake name. Then he gave a lazy shrug and said: “Perhaps it is better, I think, that you do not call me by any name at all.”
Brice Petronille had striking facial features: a large nose, and bushy eyebrows frozen in a supercilious arch above drooping eyelids. Dee had never been able to make up her mind whether he looked like a poet bored with the shallow stupidity of the world, or just someone with a permanent hangover.
Brice waved away the menu that she passed across the table. He attracted the waiter’s attention with a little tapping sound and ordered a glass of Pernod. Then he sat slouched in his chair and methodically studied each person in the café, including the two waiters, as if memorizing their features. Finding herself ignored for the moment, Dee made an effort to finish her schnitzel, which was excellent.
When Brice’s Pernod arrived, he at last turned his attention to Dee. “Miz Colleens,” he intoned with vague irony, “do you come here to tell me something? Let us not waste our time.”
“Actually, I was hoping to ask you a couple of questions.”
Brice nodded absently, still watching the waiter, who was picking up plates from a nearby table. “Did you see this man?” Brice asked her in a gravelly whisper, leaning closer. “This look? What is this look that this man was giving me? I tell you that my life, it is always like this.”
“What? You mean the waiter? I missed it.”
“I wonder who is his true employer, this man. Is he really a waiter? Then why does he need to look at me?”
Dee stopped chewing and pursed her lips. “Well, maybe he just thought you looked interesting.” She was, after all, sitting across the table from a slouched mass of rumpled camelhair that covered pretty much everything but a pouf of yellow curls, a big black pair of glasses, and a gigantic nose.
He snorted. “‘Interesting,’ you say!” He wouldn’t stop staring at the waiter.
Dee sagged back in her chair. She was starting to suspect that she was talking to someone who had lost a marble or two. A year ago, Brice Petronille had been a man who could summon millions in venture capital with just a phone call. In retrospect, he had perhaps been a little less than forthcoming about the nature of his endeavors, but still . . . he had been full of ideals and energy, and he had been changing the internet and the world, hopefully for the better. That kind of spirit was very engaging. Anyone would have believed he was a huge dot-com success story in the making.
And look at him now: fearful and suspicious—a haunted man.
She let her gaze wander out toward Promenade du Lac, the ribbon of parks and paths that wrapped around the lakeshore. She had come a long way to have this meeting, and now she wondered whether she could treat anything Brice said as reliable.
“Listen, Brice,” she said, deciding on a direct approach. “I’ve been followed, too. U.S. government agents.” She almost added: And I don’t mean waiters. “You and I may have the same problem. So I think we should compare notes.”
“I am prepared to listen to what you have to say,” Brice said in a grudging tone. “This is why I have come here, at considerable personal risk. You have some information to give me, is it not so?”
“Information?”
“Yes, yes,” he prompted her impatiently. “You have been working for your government, no? You are bringing some documents for me?”
“Oh!” Dee finally understood. “You think I’m here to leak government secrets!”
Brice held his hand palm-up beside his face and wiggled it back and forth. “You do not need to be so coy, Miz Colleens,” he hissed irritably. “We both know why you are here. It is always the same. It is I who am threatened and sued, it is I who receive the death letters from the nationalists and the crazies. But still you people come to me with your government’s filthy secrets. And it is up to me to hang these dirty things in the open air for all the world, while you go creeping back to your big house and your daycare and your Wal-Mart.”
Dee was laughing a little bit by this point. A small and rather painful laugh. “Daycare!”
Brice held his hand out over the table and snapped his fingers. “So give me the disk now. And let us be done with this charade.”
“Look, I’m sorry to disappoint you. I don’t have any material for your website.”
His hooded eyes closed a little further, forming a squint. “I will not make negotiations,” he warned her. “I do not give out any payment for these things. This is a matter of conscience.”
Dee took a deep breath and prepared to start the conversation over. The waiter came and took away her plate, and she asked him for an espresso. Brice watched the waiter murderously from behind his heavy glasses.
“Have you heard of UMBRA?” Dee began.
He shrugged slightly and shook his head. His hand began patting at the pockets of his coat. “If this will be a long story, then I must make some notes.”
She leaned forward over the table and gave him her most confrontational stare. “Don’t you dare write down one word. This is not a story for your website.”
He took his fingers out of his pocket and made a twirling gesture in the air, somehow suggesting tentative compliance.
“Promise me, Brice!” she whispered at him, forgetting that she wasn’t supposed to use his name. “Not one word.”
“Very well. As you say.” He leaned forward a bit in his seat. She seemed at last to have captured his attention.
“UMBRA is some kind of shadow unit inside U.S. Defense Intelligence. Probably affiliated with the NSA. They’ve been trying to take me into custody for the past two or three days now. Trying very aggressively.”
Brice absorbed this information with a curt nod. He looked as though he had heard many such stories in his time. “Why? For what is it that you are wanted?”
“Nothing! I haven’t done anything at all. Don’t you see? I designed your security, so now they probably want to use me as a way to get at your files.”
He gave her a long, blasé stare. Gradually, he began to emit a sound of escaping air between his lips. At last he said, with the firmness of a doctor delivering a diagnosis, “You have become paranoid.”
“Ha! I’m not paranoid. You’re paranoid. I’m being chased all over the world by secret agents. That’s different.”
“Yes, you are now paranoid. So often this happens to emotionally fragile women in your profession.”
“I am not emotionally fragile! And I’m not paranoid. They’re really after me.”
He pouted sympathetically and gave her a superior, patronizing nod. “So now your life, it is much more exciting, is it not? Look at you in this ridiculous costume. Like you are in some Hollywood movie.”
She sulked for a moment, then stated the obvious: “My disguise is not ridiculous. Yours is.” Still, she was disappointed that the first review of her outfit should be so negative.
Brice took a blue pack of Gitanes out of his breast pocket and began an elaborate ritual of tapping them on the table, extracting one, and lighting it. He looked at her only occasionally, in the way he might look at a moping child. “So, these secret agents who are pursuing you. It is their wish to access my files. No?”
She wasn’t about to answer a rhetorical question, and instead made a show of peevishly waving his smoke away from her face.
He ignored the gesture and continued puffing pensively. “But in fact, you yourself cannot access my files.” He gave her a pointed look. “Can you?”
Dee shook her head. When she had installed the systems a year ago, she had promised in all honesty to give him security that was too good for someone like her to break into.
He made a rolling gesture in the air with his fingertips. “And so, you see? You are then of no use to my enemies.”
“But they don’t know that,” she countered.
“They do not have to,” he replied. “You say they have been chasing you. But me, they do not have to chase. They can find me at any time. I am lucky to escape their observation even for one hour. Look at this waiter!”
And for just a moment, Dee felt that the waiter was eyeing them from across the room in a peculiar way. She shook the feeling off. Her life contained plenty of anxiety without absorbing any of Brice’s.
He continued, “Why should anyone wish to detain you? This is my question. Why not detain me? Why not take me to Jordan or Morocco or some such place and torture me? It is I who know the passcodes. It is I who know where the secret copies of all the files are hidden. You do not know these things. And so you see, Miz Colleens, that the story you are telling to me cannot be true.”
The waiter brought Dee’s espresso, and she and Brice were silent until the man was out of earshot again. Then she grumbled, “Well, they really are chasing me. How do you explain that?”
He leaned toward her across the table and twisted his lips into a remarkably effective sneer. “No more games,” he said curtly. He blew a puff of cigarette smoke purposely into her face. “You are working for XCorp now. Admit that this is so, and we can begin to speak like adult people.”
“XCorp? You mean, like . . . the company XCorp?”
“It is useless to pretend.”
She was ransacking her memory but wasn’t turning up anything of use. She had heard of XCorp—they were a large multinational company, American-based, but to the best of her knowledge, they weren’t involved in anything that might overlap her area of expertise. Electronics of some sort. And maybe shipping?
“I don’t work for XCorp,” she said flatly, beginning to get angry. “I don’t think I even know anyone who works for XCorp.”
“You lie. It is obvious. I hope you will return to your bosses and tell them that Brice Petronille is not such a fool as they think.” He jabbed his index finger at her. “Your company is a cancer upon this world! I wish I had never heard of this name, XCorp. I want nothing more to do with you!”
Dee realized her mouth was hanging open, and shut it. Then she said, “I don’t work for XCorp. And I thought they just made . . . I don’t know, calculators and . . . TVs?”
He gave a contemptuous snort. “Please save this ridiculous performance of innocence. You know as well as I do, XCorp is a spider web that is stretched across all the globe. You should be ashamed to accept their filthy money.”
“Look,” she said, calming herself and speaking reasonably, “I don’t know anything about XCorp. I certainly don’t work for them. But even so, what have they done that’s so bad? I don’t think I’ve ever read about them being involved in anything particularly unethical.”
He sniffed and looked as if he might get up and leave. He eyed her suspiciously, waiting to see if she had more to say.
Dee fished her smartphone out of her bag and laid it on the table between them, then flicked on the screen. “Let’s look at their website,” she proposed. “I’ll bet you anything they’re not involved in weapons or diamonds or pharmaceuticals, anything like that. Beta, bring up the homepage for XCorp.”
Beta appeared in one corner of the screen, showing from the shoulders up. She was pleased to see that it had upgraded from its generic business suit to a stylish blazer over a silk blouse. It was still wearing long, black hair, but by now she knew that it would learn to match her new hairstyle in short order.
“Yes, Karen. I’m opening the browser and seeking a URL for XCorp.”
When she glanced up at Brice, he appeared to be having some sort of epileptic seizure. His glasses were shaking in his hand, and his eyes, which she had never seen more than half open, were showing white all the way around the irises. His mouth, too, was wide open. He was staring at the little LCD screen, in the grip of a terror that robbed him of the power of speech.
“What is it?” she asked in a frightened whisper.
Suddenly, Brice Petronille regained control of his faculties and sprang to his feet, knocking over his chair. He bolted for the door and nearly ran headlong into the waiter. For a moment, she thought Brice was attacking the poor man. But he was in too much of a hurry for such distractions, and within seconds he was out the door and dashing away along the crowded sidewalk.
The waiter approached the table with some trepidation and slid a small steel tray with the bill onto the tablecloth, keeping an arm’s length away from Dee. Then he disappeared through the swinging door into the kitchen.
“I’m now showing the XCorp homepage,” Beta told her.
“Close the browser, Beta,” she said, putting the smartphone back in her bag. She paid the bill but sat a few moments longer over her empty espresso cup, looking thoughtfully out at the reddening light over Lake Geneva. It was still early, but the sun had already set behind the Alps.
Brice was a man with some strange troubles. She sat there replaying the conversation in her head and considering its odd twists and turns. Whatever his relationship with XCorp might be, it was hard to imagine it had anything to do with her.
She knew that her troubles were likely to find her again soon. And after coming so far, she seemed to be right back where she had started, with no idea how to head them off.
Chapter 15
In the lingering twilight, Dee drove the powerful sports car across the border and up into the French hills west of Geneva. The little highway was a winding ribbon of two-lane blacktop with almost no shoulder at all, squashed into dense pine and fir woods. By day, she reflected, this forest road was probably very romantic. By night, it just seemed dangerous.
Abe had been right: there were plenty of little inns up in these hills. With the ski season long over and the summer season not yet begun, there were vacancies everywhere. She pulled into the charming Hôtel Lajoux, a quaint row of cabins strung through the woods just off the little highway, with high-peaked roofs in the alpine style.
The proprietors were an elderly couple. They were watching television together on a couch in the reception lounge when she arrived. Rather than risk her rusty French, Dee used Beta for an interpreter. The old couple crowded around her smartphone and made noises of delight.
“Elle parle mieux le français que toi, Isabelle,” the old man said to his wife, and Beta translated: “She speaks French better than you.” The old woman laughed and kicked at him.
Dee booked a cabin for three days and insisted on paying cash in advance. She was becoming accustomed to sudden departures and preferred to leave no loose ends behind her. They asked for her passport number, but when she repeated the tall tale Abe had recommended, they were satisfied. She signed the register with yet another false name and selected the cottage farthest from the road.
She drove the Audi all the way around the property and parked it in the shadows between her cottage and the endless forest. Then she took her bags inside, bolted the door, and began running a bath. She spent the next hour making herself really clean for the first time in thirty-six hours.
Like many Alpine vacation inns, this one had its own dining room and chef and would be seating for dinner around nine. Dee was curious about the cuisine, but her stomach felt tense, so she decided to skip it.
Her cottage was warm and cozy, intended as an all-season retreat. It was just the thing. She wasn’t inclined to leave her room until the sun was high tomorrow. Her only worry was that she’d spend the whole night lying awake.
Suddenly she remembered that today had been the fifth birthday of her nephew, Hunter. She chided herself for forgetting, then checked her watch and did a quick calculation. To her relief, she realized that it was still early afternoon in New England.
She sat down cross-legged on the bed, still wrapped in an oversize terry-cloth bathrobe with the Hôtel Lajoux logo on it, and had Beta dial the number. Her older sister, Cecilia, answered the phone.
