where she was staying. She could reach it in her run.
Robert Mailhot’s house was unremarkable but comfortable-looking, a
two-story gray clapboard with a gabled roof, practically hidden in a
wooded patch of land behind a chain-link fence.
The blue light of a television flickered behind lace curtains in a front
room. The widow, presumably, was watching TV. Anna stopped for a
moment across the street, watching intently.
She decided to cross the narrow street to take a closer look. She
wanted to see if it was indeed the widow, and if so, how she was
behaving. Did she appear to be in mourning or not? Such things
couldn’t always be intuited simply by observing at a distance, but you
never knew what you might pick up. And if Anna positioned herself in
the shadows outside the house, she might not be seen by suspicious
neighbors.
The street was deserted, though music played from one house, a TV from
another, and a foghorn sounded in the distance. She crossed toward the
house
Suddenly, a pair of high-intensity headlights appeared out of nowhere.
They blinded her, growing larger and brighter as a vehicle roared toward
her. With a scream, Anna lunged toward the curb, unseeing, desperately
trying to jump out of the way of the insane, out-of-control car. It
must have been gliding down the street, lights off, its quiet engine
noise masked by the ambient street noise, until it was but a few feet
away, then suddenly switched on its lights.
And now it was barreling toward her! There was no mistaking it, the car
wasn’t slowing, wasn’t moving straight down the road like an automobile
simply going far too fast. It veered toward the shoulder of the road,
toward the curb, heading right at her. Anna recognized the vertical
chrome grill of a Lincoln Town Car, its flattened rectangular headlights
somehow giving it a predatory, sharklike appearance.
Move!
The car’s wheels squealed, the engine at full throttle, as the maniacal
car bore down on her.
She turned around to see it hurtling at her just ten or twenty feet
away, the headlights dazzling. Terrified, screaming, a split-second
away from death, she leaped into the boxwood hedge that surrounded the
house next to the widow’s, the stiff, prickly branches scraping at her
sweatpants-covered legs, and rolled over an dover on the small lawn.
She heard the crunch of the car hitting the boxwood, then the loud
squeal of tires as she looked up to see the car veer away from her,
spraying mud everywhere, the powerful engine racing down the narrow dark
road, and then the headlights vanished just as abruptly as they had
appeared.
The car was gone.
What had just happened?
She jumped to her feet, her heart thudding, adrenaline flooding
throughout her body, the terror weakening her knees so that she could
barely stand up.
What the hell was that all about?
The car had headed right for her, quite deliberately targeting her, as
if trying to run her down.
And then … it had unaccountably disappeared!
She noticed several faces looking through windows on either side of the
street, some of them closing drapes as soon as she noticed them.
If the car had for some reason been aiming for her, trying to kill her,
why hadn’t it finished the job?
It was entirely illogical, maddeningly so.
She walked, panting deeply, coughing painfully, drenched with sweat. She
tried to clear her head, but the fear would not leave her, and she
remained unable to make sense of the bizarre incident.
Had someone just tried to kill her, or not?
And if so why?
Could it have been a drunk, a joyrider? The car’s motions had seemed
far too deliberate, too elaborately choreographed for that.
The only logical answers required a paranoid mind-set, and she adamantly
refused to allow her thoughts to go in that direction. That way madness
lies. She thought of Harriett’s ominous words about decades-old plans
hatched in utmost secrecy, old men with secrets to hide, powerful people
desperate to protect reputations. But Bartlett was a man who, by his
own admission, sat in an office surrounded by yellowed paper, far
removed from reality, a setting all too conducive to the weaving of
conspiracy theories.
Still, was it not possible that the incident with the car had been an
attempt to frighten her off the case?
If so, they had picked the wrong person to try such a technique on. For
it served only to stiffen her determination to find out what the real
story was.
London
The pub, called the Albion, was located on Garrick Street, at the edge
of Covent Garden. It had low ceilings, rough-hewn wooden tables, and
sawdust floors, the sort of place that had twenty real ales on tap and
served bangers and mash, kidney pudding, and spotted dick, and was
jammed at lunchtime with a stylish crowd of bankers and advertising
executives.
Jean-Luc Passard, a junior security officer for the Corporation, entered
the pub and saw at once why the Englishman had chosen this place to
meet. It was so dense with people that the two of them would certainly
go unnoticed.
The Englishman was sitting alone in a booth. He was as described: a
nondescript man of about forty, with bristly, prematurely gray hair. On
closer inspection, his face was smooth, almost tight, as if from
surgery. He wore a blue blazer and white turtleneck. His shoulders
were broad, his waist narrow; he looked, even at a distance, physically
imposing. Yet you would not pick him out in a lineup.
Passard sat down at the booth, put out his hand. “I’m JeanLuc.”
“Trevor Griffiths,” the Englishman said. He shook hands with barely any
pressure at all, the greeting of a man who did not care what you thought
of him. His hand was large, smooth, and dry.
“It’s an honor to meet you,” Passard said. “Your services to the
Corporation over the years are the stuff of legend.”
Trevor’s dead gray eyes showed nothing.
“We wouldn’t have brought you out of your … retirement if it weren’t
absolutely necessary.”
“You screwed up.”
“We had bad luck.”
“You want a backup.”
“An insurance policy, so to say. An added safeguard. We really can’t
afford to fail.”
“I work alone. You know this.”
“Of course. Your record puts your methods beyond second-guessing. You
will handle the matter as you see best.”
“Good. Now, do we know the target’s whereabouts?”
“He was last spotted in Zurich. We’re not certain where he’s headed
next.”
Trevor cocked an eyebrow.
Passard flushed. “He is an amateur. He surfaces periodically. We will
pick up his trail again soon.”
“I will require a good set of photographs of the target from as many
angles as you have.”
Passard slid a large manila envelope across the table. “Done. Also,
here are the encoded instructions. As you’ll understand, we want the
job to be done quickly and untraceably.”
Trevor Griffiths’s stare reminded Passard of a boa constrictor. “You
have already brought in several second-raters. Not only have you
thereby lost both money and time, but you have alerted the target. He
is now fearful, cautious, and no doubt has been frightened into
depositing documents with attorneys to be mailed in the event of his
demise, that sort of thing. He will therefore be considerably more
difficult to take out. Neither you nor your superiors need to advise me
on how to do my job.”
“But you’re confident you can do it, yes?”
“I assume that was why you came to me?”
“Yes.”
“Then please don’t ask foolish questions. Are we done here? Because I
have a busy afternoon ahead of me.”
Anna returned to her room at the inn, poured a tiny screw-top bottle of
white wine from the minibar into a plastic cup, downed it, and then ran
a bath, making the water as hot as she could stand. For fifteen
minutes, she soaked herself, trying to think calming thoughts, but the
image of the Town Car’s vertical chrome grill kept intruding on her
consciousness. And she remembered the Ghost’s soft-spoken remark: “/
don’t believe in coincidences, do you, Ms. Navarro?”
Slowly, her sense of self-possession returned to her. These things
happened, didn’t they? Part of her job was to know where significance
might lie, but it was an occupational hazard to impute significance
where there was none.
Presently, she slipped into a terry-cloth robe, feeling much calmer and
now ravenously hungry. Slipped beneath the door of her room was a
manila envelope. She picked it up and sank into a floral-upholstered
armchair. Copies of Mailhot’s bank statements going back four years.
The phone rang.
It was Sergeant Arsenault.
“So is half past ten going to be all right for our visit with the
widow?” Around him she could hear the bustle of a police station in the
evening.
“I’ll meet you there at ten-thirty,” Anna replied crisply. “Thanks for
the confirmation.” She debated whether to tell him about the Town Car,