An Affair of Deceit (12 page)

“They were.” What the hell? Greene knew damned well that his parents had been in the Peace Corps. “You know my mom. She raises prizewinning orchids and finches.”

“Finches win prizes? I had no idea. They could win a blue ribbon at waking my ass up at five in the morning whenever I stay at your house. But it doesn’t matter. You ever see the way your mom handles a cleaver? Like a pro, man. A cold-blooded, highly trained killer.” With his wrists locked and his fingers straight, Greene mimed rapid chopping on his desk.

Riley didn’t like this conversation. After all she’d been through, his mom was sort of a saint in his book. He knew Greene was just joking around, but the thought of her as an assassin was offensive on many levels. “So she’s good with a kitchen knife. She’s taken some knife skills classes.”

Greene laughed with such velocity that he nearly fell out of his squeaky chair. “Do you know how ridiculous that sounds? Knife skills? Who takes knife skills classes if they aren’t assassins?”

“My mom does.”

“Yup, because she’s a CIA agent, and if our secret agency weren’t so damned secretive, I’d pull up her file and prove it to you right now.”

“All right. You got me. My mom’s CIA,” Riley laughed, finally giving in to the teasing. That’s all Greene wanted, anyway, was for him to laugh at the end of every conversation. “She’s a sleeper agent trained to kill when she hears the words ‘I’m sorry, Mrs. Riley, but that’s just not good enough.’”

“Well, she’s never gonna hear that from anybody. Your mom’s the best, man. You know I’m just messing with you.” Greene’s smile was enormous and his chair squeaked like a mouse on crack. He loved it when people played along with his stupid jokes.

“Yeah. I know. But you’d better watch your back. I’m gonna tell her you think she’d make a good assassin. You know she’d take it as a challenge.”

Greene gave an exaggerated shudder. “Watch out, Jason Bourne.”

The frayed color photograph was old, but not so old that Abigail doubted for a second what it showed: her father sitting on a rickety wooden chair in a corner of their dusty old courtyard in Taiwan. He hadn’t known that she’d taken the picture, or else it wouldn’t exist. It was the only picture of him she’d ever seen. If there had been wedding photographs, they were surely destroyed by now. She’d taken this picture secretly from a hiding place where she liked to watch him go through his wushu routines, back before he’d invited her to join him. Her mother occasionally awoke in time to do her tai chi alongside him, but more often he warmed up alone, and in Abigail’s opinion he preferred it that way.

In this moment, he had just finished an hour of practice. A white T-shirt, darkly stained with sweat, clung to his torso, which was thin and strong, a testament to his commitment to wushu. His dark hair was short and parted sharply to the side in
a timeless, masculine style, and though Abigail couldn’t recall a hair on his head ever being out of place, in this picture, a single lock curled damply on his forehead. He was leaning forward on the old chair, his elbows propped on his legs as he stared intently at something out of frame.

He was handsome and young, and her throat seized when she looked at him. She saw so little of herself in him. While he, too, had very dark hair, that was where any possible resemblance ended. She looked almost exactly like her mother. In the hard set of her father’s pale, piercing eyes, though, she recognized her own determination.

“Have you seen this man? He would be older, in his fifties,” she said, and pushed the faded photograph across a chipped countertop.

“
Qui?
” said the skinny, lank-haired man who sat behind the hotel’s reception desk.

She tried again, this time in halting French. “
Avez-vous vu cet homme? Il est plus âgé.
”

“
Voulez-vous une salle?
”

She tried to smile. “No, I don’t want a room. No
salle
.” She pointed at the picture of her father. “
Est il familier?
”

Understanding and apology dawned on the Frenchman’s face. “
Non, non. Je ne le connais pas.
”

“
Merci.
”

Nothing, again. She’d flown into France last night and taken the high-speed rail south to Avignon, and from there she rode the twenty-minute train to Arles, determined to do her own leg-work on her father’s most recent disappearance. She’d already pushed that photograph across twenty-three such counters that morning, and there were another two dozen to go before she would call the mission a failure. But so far, she’d come up with nothing.

She put her sunglasses back on and walked outside. Most of these small budget hotels lacked air-conditioning, so the
blistering heat wasn’t much of a shock. It was a scorching summer day in Arles, but the low humidity made it feel vastly more pleasant than the same temperature would have been in Washington. The hot, dry air felt like a sauna, and it warmed her bones to their marrow. This was the famed Mediterranean climate that allowed fragrant herbs like lavender and rosemary to grow like weeds on the chalk-white hillsides. Their perfume flew down the mountains on mistral winds that whipped through ancient city streets, obliterating the stench of diesel fumes and dog urine, and very nearly allowing one to become transported to the glorious beauty of ancient Roman Arles.

Now, she walked out of a quaint, cobble-stoned alley and back to the main artery of the city, the Boulevard des Lices, lushly lined with shady trees and dozens of small hotels and restaurants. She’d chosen to canvass the city in a systematic fashion, thinking of no reason that her father would have chosen to stay in one hotel over another, but her highest hopes rested on investigating the establishments that resided in or near the alley where French police officer Alexis Durand had been killed.

Poor Durand’s alley happened to be the very next side street marked on her map, but when she arrived at its entrance, she was disappointed to find that it was hardly an alley at all. It was more of a crevasse between two tall buildings, and it contained no entrances to any commercial establishments. There was nothing at all inside the narrow passage, and as she craned her neck and shaded her eyes to see farther down it, she realized that it didn’t even pass through to another street.

A literal dead end.

Frustrated, she tucked her map into her purse and walked purposefully down the alley. If she’d wanted to, she could have reached out her elbows and touched both walls at the same time, but doing so would have left such repugnant grease upon her skin that she wouldn’t have dared. The surface upon which she walked was sloped to force rainwater
and God knew what other floating debris to gather in a putrid stream that ran down its center. Abigail placed her steps awkwardly on either side of the trough, endeavoring to keep her sandaled feet dry.

When she had proceeded fifteen feet or so down the alley, she saw far enough ahead to confirm that it indeed had no outlet to another street.

The alley wasn’t a thoroughfare. It was a forgotten crack between two dirty old buildings.

With an odd sense of vulnerability, she realized how dark and removed from the street she was. She stopped walking for a moment and turned around, relieved to find herself alone.

Of course she was alone. Who else on earth would need to be here?

Indeed. That was the question she needed to answer. Who would need to walk down this revolting crevasse? Why had Officer Durand patrolled it, and more importantly, why had he been murdered there?

She faced the rear of the alley, squinting as she looked for a reason someone might need to be in the narrow passageway. A rusty steel door in the wall to her right shone just another twenty feet or so down the path.

That must be it. She walked briskly toward it, not sure of what she would do when she reached it. Would she knock? Would it be open? Its hinges sparkled in clean chrome. Judging from the fresh black char coloring the brick on either side of the doorframe, an incendiary device had recently been used, and the door’s hinges had needed to be replaced.

An
explosive
. Here, in front of this door. Why?

She wiped at the char with a delicate finger. At the same moment, a warm breeze whipped her skirt around her knees and brought the smell of candy to her nose.

Candy? Definitely something sugary. Was a chocolate shop nearby? Before she could remember whether or not she’d seen
a chocolatier on her way here, her vision went black, as a sweet-smelling cloth was clamped over her face.

She tried to spin away, but a strong arm squeezed her body, trapping her torso and forcing her to inhale through the saccharine rag that quickly stole her consciousness.

A
BIGAIL AWOKE SITTING
upright with a skull-vibrating headache and the feeling of compression around her chest. Her butt was cold and numb. She wondered how long she’d been sitting on what felt like a very hard chair. When she tried to stand, she was horrified to realize that a rope bound her to the seat. Her wrists were tied together behind her back.

A very bright light focused its beam on her, casting the rest of the empty room into black shadow.

“What in the hell is going on?” she demanded, peering through the darkness. Looking at the light caused her head to throb.

“Why are you here?” an unfamiliar male voice asked in a monotone with an American accent.

“Perhaps if you tell me where ‘here’ is, I could answer,” she said, her voice blessedly strong. She tapped her foot, as if impatient. She was, but she mostly needed more information about her environment. The floor felt like concrete under her toes. She couldn’t see the walls. Were her hands tied to the chair or just slipped over the back of it? She tried to calculate the distance she’d have to run to get to the questioner and take him out. Twenty feet. A few seconds of sprinting, but it’d be hard to do with a chair strapped to her back like a turtle shell.

“Why did you come to France?”

This repetitive questioning was obviously an interrogation technique meant to wear down the detainee. Abigail was disgusted at the thought that she was a
detainee
. It was absurd. It was degrading.

But at least she was still in France.

“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result, you know,” she said.

“What are you doing in France?”

“Whatever I like, but I certainly didn’t come here to be tied to a chair. Release me and I may answer your question.”

“You are not in a position to request anything.”

“I am in precisely such a position. I am the person of interest. All eyes are on me, are they not?”

“I could kill you.”

A thread of horror ran down her spine. She flexed her core muscles to hide the shudder that followed. “I’m sure you could, but killing me won’t answer your question.”

“Why are you in France?”

She shook her head, hoping to convey amusement. The movement erupted a fresh wave of pain that nearly snapped her ears from her skull. She tried not to wince, but a clammy sweat emerged under her arms.

“I can give you something for the pain,” the man said.

“You can give me a knife so I can cut myself free.” She wondered why her head hurt so badly. What had they done to her?

“You’re not getting a knife, Miss Mason.”

He knew her name. That was a good sign. If they knew her identity, then they also knew that she couldn’t be offed without a few heads turning in Washington. She smiled.

“It’s hardly fair for you to know my name but not afford me the same courtesy,” she said smoothly, beginning to wonder when—and how—she would be forced to start cooperating. “With whom do I have the pleasure of speaking?”

“You don’t need to know who I am.”

“On the contrary,” she said, keeping her tone light even as her words became more menacing. “I need to know what name to write at the top of the lawsuit I intend to file upon my return to the United States. If you know who I am, you must know what I do for a living. You can’t think that I’m the sort of frightened little girl who lets kidnapping and assault go unprosecuted.”