“Proud of yourself, aren’t you?”
“As soon as we see you, we will swoop down. I have nearly as many guns in Paris as I do sets of eyes.”
“Lucky for me, I’m not in Paris.”
Riegel paused. When he spoke again, his tone had changed. “I want you to know, Phillip Fitzroy’s death was a regrettable accident. I was away at the time. It should not have happened.”
“Don’t bother to try to charm me with professionalism. That won’t save you when I come. You and Lloyd both are dead men.”
“So you continue to say. You should know, I recovered the telephone Sir Donald took from the guard. Your intelligence source from inside the château has been eliminated.”
Court said nothing.
“It’s looking bleak for your side, my friend.”
“It is. Maybe I’ll just walk away. Give up.”
Riegel considered this. “I don’t think so. When you went south to Geneva, I thought perhaps you were leaving the chase. But no. You are a hunter, as am I. It is in your blood, isn’t it? You can’t turn away. You have your quarry, your objective, your raison d’être. Without men like Lloyd and me to target, you would be a sorry soul, indeed. You will not walk off into the morning. You will come for us, and you willdie along the way. You must know this, but you would rather be killed by your prey than give up the hunt.”
“Perhaps we can make an alternate arrangement.”
Riegel smiled. “Ah. Now we come to the reason for your call. Not just being social, then. I am listening with interest, Mr. Gentry.”
“You will lose the contract. When I am still alive in seven hours, Abubaker will give your natural gas deal to your competitor, and he will use whatever it is he has on LaurentGroup against you. You cannot avoid that. But if you let the girls and their mother go, just get them to a safe place, when I come tomorrow, after the deadline, I will kill Lloyd, do your job for you, but I will spare you.”
“Spare me?”
“You have my word.”
“In my mind’s eye I always pictured you as a two-dimensional predator. A gunman, nothing more. But you are actually a clever fellow, aren’t you? You and I could be friends under other circumstances.”
“Are you flirting with me?”
“You make me smile, Gentry. But you will make me smile even more when I am standing over your body, another trophy for my case.”
“You really should consider my offer.”
“You overestimate your negotiating leverage, sir. We will have you within the hour.”
A pause. “You’d better hope so. Sleep well, Mr. Riegel.”
“I might stay up awhile. I am expecting some good news from my associates in Paris.Bon soir, Court.”
“À bientôt, Kurt. See you soon.”
“Just one more thing, Mr. Gentry. Call it professional curiosity on my part. Kiev... Not you, was it?”
The line went dead, and Riegel shook in the cold that seemed to have just blown down from the coast, four kilometers to the north.
TWENTY-EIGHT
The watcher was bored, but he was accustomed to boredom. He’d spent twelve hours on the same street corner, sipped espressos in three different cafés, the first two at tables outside in the bright morning and the graying and chilly afternoon, and then lastly inside at a window table as the air filled with vapor and the last of the day’s warmth left the street and sidewalk.
At nine he’d moved to his car, a small Citroën parked at an hourly meter that he’d been feeding all day like a hungry pet.
But the watcher was good, and his boredom did not affect his tradecraft. He had the engine running for warmth but did not play the radio; he knew his ears were nearly as likely to pick up any hint of his quarry as were his eyes. The radio would rob from his senses the sharpness needed to pick a man he’d never seen out of a passing crowd of thousands.
He did not know the larger picture of this mission, only knew his role. He was static surveillance. Unlike other watchers on this detail, he was not assigned to a known associate location. Instead, his detail was a general choke point overwatch. He had a photograph of a man, and he was to spendthe day trying to match the two-dimensional, years-old, five-by-seven picture to a living, breathing, moving target who would likely be trained in surveillance countermeasures and no doubt flow along in a crowd who would obstruct the watcher’s view.
