BETA - Project Avatar, page 16
“Topping hairdo!” he said. “Quite in the springtime spirit.”
Chapter 16
“Don’t you come near me!” Dee warned him, brandishing the perfume bottle.
He raised his hands with fingers spread and, still smiling, took half a step back. “No further warning is required, my good woman. Remember, I’ve seen you wield a bottle.”
“What are you doing here?” she asked, closing in a little and keeping the perfume bottle well overhead.
“On the other hand, if you intend to spritz me with perfume, I must beg for mercy. It doesn’t wash off easily, you know, and that sort of thing is so hard for one chap to explain to another.”
“I asked you a question!”
He gave her a wounded look, which she didn’t buy for a second. “I daresay this isn’t at all the welcome I had anticipated. Though I suppose it must look rather funny, me skulking about your car like this. You see, I didn’t want to wake you, and the car is quite an attraction. This thing must sport, what, five hundred horsepower?”
She was starting to feel silly, and her arm was getting tired. She lowered the bottle a bit. After all, if he had been sent by parties unknown to bring her in, he had already found her. It was too late to do much about it now.
She said, “I don’t know anything about cars. But if that’s what you’ve come all this way to talk about, you might as well come inside. Let’s not stand out here.”
“Actually,” he replied, “if it’s all the same to you, I should prefer that we have our little chat somewhere other than your cabin.”
She narrowed her eyes. “Is that so? Why is that?”
He looked the cabin over, as if he were thinking of buying it. “Well, you see—and I mean this only in the most complimentary sense—you seem to be the sort of woman that men are fond of chasing. And this cottage of yours would be a jolly rotten place to be found by any of those chasing men, if you follow my logic. A chap might feel rather cornered in there. Windows and doors on only two sides, don’t you see.”
“Oh.” Dee nodded knowingly. “You mean it has insufficient routes of exit for a tactical engagement.”
John looked surprised, and she took deep pleasure in seeing him ruffled for the first time since she had met him. “I say!” he exclaimed. Then he tried to hide his fluster behind a tentative smile. “Yes, that’s quite well said. Capital!”
“Okay, where do you propose that we go?” she asked suspiciously.
“To be honest, I was hoping I might coax you out for a drive. You’ve probably noticed that it’s a ravishing day. Your car, alas, might be a tad conspicuous for the occasion. Fortunately, I brought my own. What do you say? A loaf of bread beneath the bough, a jug of wine, and all the rest?”
She shook her head. “Oh, no. You can talk right here.” She waved her arm in a wide arc, calling attention to the privacy and openness of the location. The Audi was parked well away from the road, between the cabin and the woods, well concealed from all directions. “I’m not taking one step away from this cabin until you answer two questions. How did you find me, and why?”
John gave an uncomfortable smile and glanced pointedly at his watch. “Your curiosity is, of course, natural and in all ways laudable,” he assured her. “But these questions will engage us in some lengthy conversation, and really, this is not the place.”
“If you expect me to just grab my things and come with you, forget it.”
“Well, dash it.” He crossed his arms peevishly and turned away to gaze over the treetops at the distant mountains. Then he said, “The long and short of it is this: there I am in the American desert, making a generous effort to help you vanish mysteriously from your troubles, when, to my surprise, you vanish mysteriously. What am I to think? I make a few discreet inquiries with our good friends at UMBRA, but that’s a frost—as one might have expected.”
He glanced at her. She tried to avoid giving him any reaction.
He continued, “I have to admit, I was very worried, so I flew straight back to London and began prying some old mates in the Service for favors. I may as well confide that ever since the Cold War ended, terrorism or not, a lot of those lads simply have too much time on their hands. I had them put out a few feelers, as it were, into your past affairs. I hope you’re not too disappointed, but you turn out to be a reasonably easy person to track.”
Now Dee, too, crossed her arms and they stood facing each other in identically stubborn postures. “You had MI-6 go snooping around in my life?”
“I suppose that would be one uncharitable way to express the matter.”
“And you just did it on a whim? By your own authority and on your own nickel? You expect me to believe that?”
“Oh, you’d be amazed at what people will believe!” John smiled at his own little joke. Dee frowned, unamused.
“At any rate, one of my old friends received a daily brief on Brice Petronille, which included several photos of a clandestine meeting at a Geneva café, with a woman identified only as ‘Unidentified Female A7.’ Since you had a recent contract with Petronille, he faxed the photo straight over to me. Voila, there you were.”
She was speechless.
“So you see how it is. For those with access to resources, you aren’t so terribly hard to find. I would anticipate that your pursuers will be upon you, oh, more or less at any moment.” He smiled pleasantly and swept a hand toward the front of the inn. “And so, may I again suggest we continue this conversation on the open road? You have my word as a gentleman that I will return you here at any time you choose.”
She put her fingertips on her temples. “I can’t just leave this car here.”
“I see,” John replied with a pleasant nod. “Yes, one can follow that trend of thought. But, at the risk of belaboring the obvious, you couldn’t have picked a more conspicuous form of transportation if you had decided to go riding about Europe on a unicorn.”
Her shoulders sagged. “I’ll just grab my stuff.”
She locked herself into her tactically insufficient cottage. On tiptoe, she retrieved her computer and loaded it back into her shoulder bag. Then she changed into a ruched mustard-seed blouse and a pair of crop pants in green twill, suitable for the fine weather. She packed everything else into her plain little carry-on bag and was out the door in less than ten minutes.
John’s car was parked out front: a long, black sedan. At first glance, it looked like cross between a mafia car and something her grandfather might drive. She did notice that its lines were cut more sleekly than one would expect in such a breed of automobile, and its long hood suggested hidden reserves of power.
“It’s an Aston Martin Lagonda,” he told her with a touch of national pride, as he helped her load her luggage into the backseat. “It’s a 1989. A bit long in the tooth, perhaps, but well cared for. I borrowed it from an old friend at the consulate in Lyon. Not as much pizzazz as your Audi, though still a bit of a find, you must admit.”
Dee wasn’t so sure, but her doubts vanished as soon as she sat down inside and he closed the door. It was the most comfortable car she had ever sat in. A moment later, they were headed out onto the mountain highway. The big car caught the road and took off like a dragster.
They headed toward higher ground. John seemed disinclined to speak for the moment, content to be safely away from the cottages. Windows down, with fresh, warm alpine air blowing over them, they wound their way up higher into the Avignon Forest, hugging the tight mountain turns. The trees were tall and densely packed, their trunks straight as masts and pied with great lichens and thick mats of shaggy green moss. The shadowy undergrowth emerged from a thick duff of fallen leaves and evergreen needles. Here and there, massive, angular chunks of granite loomed up in the forest—intimations of the stark grandeur of the Alps behind them.
Dee stared out at the scenery flowing by. She glanced over at John. “You wanted to talk. So talk.”
“This really is a corker of a day!” he said, giving her a carefree grin.
“Don’t try changing the subject.”
“Very well. I understand your impatience, but there’s no point in skipping over the simple civilities, is there?”
Dee didn’t reply.
“You know,” he began, “I was very relieved to see you alive and well in Geneva—after the fire at the Taj, that is.”
She shook her head ruefully. So he even knew about her time in Bangalore! She was learning a rather humbling lesson in what it meant to be an amateur in the spy game.
He shot her a sideways glance. “Don’t be too hard on yourself. It was only because of the fire, quite honestly. All in all, you’ve done a ripping good job of keeping your head down. I can tell you this: even after one of my mates in the Service found a record of your passport’s little jaunt to Bangalore, I wasn’t fancying a flight out there myself. Initial attempts to locate you indicated you’d be quite difficult to find. It was beginning to look like I’d be knocking on doors all over town, seeking you out. Not a pleasant prospect, let me tell you! For starters, I can’t abide curry—must be allergic or something. I won’t go into the particulars of what it does to me.”
“No, please don’t,” she said, laughing in spite of herself.
“It would put you right off Indian food, possibly for life.” After a lengthy pause, he added, “The air really does smell topping up here.”
“The fire,” she prompted.
“Ah, yes. I was getting to that, wasn’t I? All right, so there I was, bitterly contemplating an indefinite odyssey in India, where I would be turning green and losing weight by the day. All of a sudden, your name popped up on a computer screen right there at Vauxhall Cross. Seems that my mates at the Service had already found you.”
“Because my room was the one that burned,” she suggested.
“Indeed. Your name came through attached to the travel advisory. You were reported as missing. A body had been found in the burnt room, but it was already clear that it wasn’t yours.”
“A body!”
John paused for a minute as she considered the implications.
They had made their way up into the Jura Mountains now, and naked peaks jutted up here and there above the jagged skyline of trees. The car suddenly burst clear of the forest and began wandering along the lip of a deep alluvial valley. Ancient limestone layered in thin strata reminded her of a delicate pastry built on a geological scale. The cliffs dropped away on both sides into a seemingly bottomless chasm.
“Some fine, rough country up here,” he noted. “The Resistance positively thrived in these mountains, right through the Second World War. Conveniently close to Switzerland, you see.”
“You know it was UMBRA that burned the hotel,” she said.
He nodded. “Yes, that seemed clear enough. According to the reports, parties unknown came in through the fourth-floor fire escape, wearing masks. Somebody must have heard them breaking into your room and called the desk to send up a security guard. Initial reports suggested the poor chap died in the fire, though we were later advised he had died of a bullet wound.”
She shuddered. “So they had come to kill me, then?”
“I’m inclined to guess they would prefer you alive, all else being equal. But whatever they intended to propose to you, they weren’t prepared to take no for an answer. These developments suggest they’re a bunch of jolly rotters—not to alarm you or anything.”
“Not at all. You’re a great comfort.”
“I’m just trying to impress on you how wise you are to accept a little professional assistance from me at this point in your adventures. Perhaps now you might even be willing to confide in me the true nature of your troubles.”
“You mean, tell you why they’re chasing me? I’ve told you already, I don’t have the ghost of an idea.”
“Why do you suppose they burned the room?” He gave her two seconds of close scrutiny, which was as much as the winding road would allow. “I’ve puzzled over that question until the old bean was positively throbbing.”
“Well, don’t ask me. You’re the professional.” She glowered out the window at the spectacular canyon vista. “I guess they were trying to cover their tracks.”
“I think not. Setting fires is a good way to attract attention, not divert it. Let me propose that they searched your room, failed to find whatever it was they were looking for, but wanted to be cracking sure that if you had left anything hidden in there it was well and truly destroyed. A sort of scorched-earth policy, don’t you know.”
“I don’t have anything that UMBRA would want,” she insisted, though her voice lacked conviction. Her laptop contained encrypted files from dozens of sensitive contracts she had worked on, but she didn’t regard herself as a particularly heroic guardian of other people’s secrets. It would probably take mere seconds of professional physical persuasion to make her decrypt the lot of it and hand it over to pretty much anyone.
John confined his response to a small and knowing smile. “Let’s not be coy,” he said. “A woman in your profession must be dripping with secrets.”
“Okay, maybe. But not the kind of secrets that people kill each other over.”
He sighed at such naïveté. “A pleasant point of view. Sadly, not borne out by recent experience.”
They came over the top of the massif and began descending into a quaint valley. Villages of cob houses, built from ornately constructed adobe, were clustered so closely that their red-tiled roofs overlapped and made abstract patterns. The woods were shorter here, having been logged in recent decades and, at least in some places, replanted in rows. In the distance between the trees, they could see terraced hillside vineyards, spread out in the sunlight like embroidered carpets.
John turned off the road and began rambling up a potholed driveway between vines, aiming toward a cluster of old buildings. “Let’s see if we can put up some supplies here, shall we? Another hour or so on the road, and we’re both liable to be peckish.” Dee shrugged.
They parked on a gravel strip under the curious gaze of several locals: muscular, boozy-eyed farm workers in muddy jeans and puffy cotton blouses. From the looks of things, not much work was being done on this beautiful spring day in the hills.
The main building had a tasting room fronted with tall windows, all of them open. The room was unattended when they stepped inside, but a few moments later a teenage girl in wooden shoes came clomping down from the second floor. She was plump and rosy-cheeked, and she greeted them with a cheerfulness Dee could only describe as jovial—a storybook farmer’s daughter.
It turned out that John could speak passable French. Dee put the Bluetooth insert into her ear so that she could follow the conversation through Beta’s translation. The district specialty was vin jaune, a white wine aged in oak for so long that it had turned golden. They tasted samples. It had an oddly agreeable flavor of nuts.
“Just the thing for a rustic picnic,” he said in English. Then, in French, he ordered a chilled bottle. The girl handed it to him and boasted that it had the best longevity of any wine in France—it would taste even better in five hundred years than it tasted today.
“I’m afraid this bottle is unlikely to survive so long,” he replied in French.
The girl also talked them into buying some freshly smoked sausages, another regional specialty. They were plump and fragrant and smelled heavenly.
The aroma was starting to make Dee hungry. She helped John collect the remaining necessaries: a big, fresh baguette, a wedge of Emmentaler cheese, and a bag of niçoise olives. The girl was visibly disappointed when they chose not to buy a jar of liquid cheese, even after she insisted that it was a staple delicacy of the region.
Beta translated her sales pitch: “Nowhere else in France can you buy liquid cheese!”
John twirled the white goo in its mason jar, and they looked at it queasily. Putting it down, he said, “A plausible claim.”
They bundled up their haul and got back on the road. They headed north through a strip of fertile wine country along the wide base of a glacial valley, with the main spine of the mountains on their right.
Dee decided to take another stab at prying information out of John.
“So,” she said, “If I understand your story, you followed me all the way out here from Arizona and spirited me away from the imminent clutches of professional killers, just because you’re a nice guy. Is that about right?”
He accepted the description with a modest smile. “If you must. I’d say that captures the general spirit of the matter. A maiden in distress. Villainous doings in the works. What fellow of spirit could stick that?”
“So there’s nothing in it for you? Or perhaps for MI-6?”
His smile took on a wounded aspect. “Really,” he complained. “Is all this suspicion called for? You have a rather persistent tendency to chew on a helping hand, you know.”
Dee pointedly withheld her reply. She held her arm out the window, playing idly with the rush of wind outside. She was willing to wait.
“Okay. Ulterior motives,” he said huffily. “I suppose we can agree that something fishy is in the works. You claim not to know what it is, any more than I do—but fishy it most definitely is. Of course, the Service is always pleased to be kept abreast of suspicious dealings, and I happen to be the man here on the spot.”
“I knew you were still spying for them.”
“I am not spying for MI-6,” John snapped. He was silent a moment, collecting himself. Then he continued in more subdued tones, “Or at least . . . not in the main. Certainly not in a professional capacity! I’m off the payroll. But I am still a loyal subject of the Crown.”
She shook her head. “You are an extremely hard person to trust. Frankly, I’d get out of this car right now if you didn’t come to me recommended by a friend.”
“Ah, yes. Abe.”
The name hung in the air for a few moments, with neither of them willing to snap at the bait. Then John said, “Don’t be bashful. I know Abe’s a good friend of yours. He was the first person I called when the news of the hotel fire came through the wire. He assured me you were quite safe, and about to leave Bangalore—which I was most relieved to hear.” He paused and then added, “I also know he gave you your identity as Karen Collins.”
