Mrs. John Doe (25 page)

She was onstage. This muddy road in the forest was her platform, and these three men were her costars. One was down, shot and presumed dead, and one was beside her, injured and ill and barely able to stand. The third, the villain of the piece, was walking toward her, smiling, closing the gap between them. Ten feet. Eight feet. Seven. Nora stood very still, clutching her husband's arm and her most important prop—the loaded revolver that looked so much like her own empty one—waiting for her cue.

Craig Elder came to a stop five feet in front of them, the weapon still aimed at Jeff's chest. That maddening little smile was still there, on his lips. In his eyes.

And in his voice. “Did you really think you could outwit me, Nora? After all we've been through? You insult me. I knew where you'd go from the moment we found that you weren't in your room anymore. I knew you'd bring your husband here, and thanks to you, I was even expecting
him
.” He jerked his left thumb over his shoulder, indicating Josef, who lay sprawled in the mud behind him, pelted by the steady rain.

Nora kept her gaze locked with Craig's, but she used her peripheral vision. She strained to be aware of any movement in the space just beside Craig's left arm, the blurry form of the man lying in the road. He was an actor, Jeff had said, and she assumed he'd meant it literally. Now he was pretending to be dead, and she knew that her cue, when it came, would be from him. Until then, she had one motivation in this scene: to keep Craig's attention, to prevent him from turning around.

“You're out of time,” Craig said, “and I'm out of patience. Whatever he gave you isn't in the envelope. Tell me what you did with it.”

Nora contemplated spitting in his face, then thought better of it; that only worked in Victorian melodramas or Joan Crawford movies. She drew in a breath and said, “Or what? You'll shoot us? You're going to do that anyway, so why should I tell you where it is?”

The little smile on his handsome face vanished. He lowered the SIG Sauer until it was aimed directly at Jeff's uninjured left knee. “Because I'm the one with the gun. I can do this quickly, or I can do it very, very slowly. And please don't bother attempting to scare me with that useless revolver you're trying to conceal. Remember, I'm the one who emptied the chamber.”

Nora pulled the gun out from between her body and Jeff's, and turned around to face Craig. She dropped her right hand carelessly to her side, her finger never leaving the trigger.

“Oh well, it was worth a try,” she said with a shrug.

Behind Craig, the figure in the road stirred. Josef slowly sat up and rose to his knees. It was obvious, even from this distance, that he was in great pain, but it didn't deter him. He reached down with his right hand and pulled something from the pocket of his jeans. As if sensing the movement behind him, Craig started to turn his head.

“Okay, I'll tell you,” Nora said quickly, regaining his attention. He looked at her expectantly.

“No, Nora!” Jeff said. “Don't tell him where it is!” He too had seen the activity behind Craig, and he was playing along. Good.

She shrugged again. “Darling, he already has it—he just doesn't know it.”

“Hush!”
her husband cried. “If you tell him, he'll succeed, and we
can't
let him do that!” He was overdoing his part, but then again, he wasn't a professional actor.

Now Craig was watching them, fascinated. “I already have it? What the hell does that mean?” Behind him, Josef raised his right arm. Through the rain, Nora saw the glint from the object in his hand, and she remembered the moment in Russell Square Gardens when she had first seen it.

Nora smiled at Craig, timing her next line perfectly to synchronize with the action behind him. “It means, Craig Elder the younger”—Josef's arm snapped down—“you can go to hell!”

With her left hand, she shoved her husband as hard as she could, sending him sprawling to the side, and she brought up her right hand with the gun. Startled, Craig raised the SIG Sauer, now aimed directly at her. Josef's switchblade entered his back at that precise moment, and his arm jerked upward as he fired.
Pfft
. The silenced shot flew off into the trees. At the same moment, Nora fired. The report from the dead guard's revolver was deafening. The round slammed into the center of Craig's chest, and the gun fell from his hand. He stood there, staring at her, his mouth falling open in surprise. He sank to his knees, reaching down to pick up the fallen weapon, but Nora fired again. And again. And once more, the final bullet aimed directly between his eyes. His head erupted, and he toppled over backward. He crashed down into the mud, driving the knife more firmly into his back, and lay still.

Silence. The downpour continued, pelting the leaves above and the road below, pounding down on the car, a continuous wall of noise, but she barely heard it. She was only vaguely aware of Jeff's groans as he struggled to his feet and the softer moans of Josef Abrams as he sank back down onto the road. The explosions of the revolver in her hand had taken all other sound away, leaving a void in her ears. She thought, I just killed a man. I took a human life, but I'm not horrified. I saved my husband, and Josef, and myself. So, why don't I feel triumphant? Why do I feel only this emptiness, this lack of any feeling at all? She shut her eyes and listened to the quiet.

When Jeff reached over and removed the gun from her hand, the world came back to her. The icy rain soaked her, dripping from her hair, running down her face in rivulets. She was wet and freezing and alive. Alive.

She looked down at the dead man lying at her feet. She knelt beside him and fished the car keys from his jacket pocket, where she also found his cellphone. She strained to roll him over onto his stomach, his face buried in the mud. She pulled Josef's knife from his back, carefully wiped it clean on his jacket, picked up the SIG Sauer, and stood up. She didn't look at Craig Elder again. She left him lying there and turned to her husband.

“Are you all right?” she asked. “I had to push you out of the line of fire—”

“I know,” he said. “I'm okay. My leg hurts like hell—but when I consider the alternative, I can't complain. We'd better see how Joe is.”

She shouldered her bag and took his right arm. They made their crablike, hopping way over to the car. She noticed that Jeff hadn't mentioned what she'd just done. In his line of work, he must know there wasn't much that could be said about it after the fact. As they said in the Scottish play,
What's done cannot be undone
. Jeff had presumably killed people, perhaps many people, but they'd never talked about it. Now she knew they never would. She'd been initiated; she'd killed a man, and that was that.

Josef Abrams was not her husband. The first thing he said when they reached him was “That was excellent, Mrs. Baron! Thank you.”

“Nora,” she said, handing him his switchblade. “How are you doing?”

“I've been better,” he muttered, wincing, “but I'll live.”

Nora helped him to his feet, and she unlocked the car doors while he retrieved his pistol. She helped Jeff get into the back, where he could sit sideways with his injured leg stretched out across the seat; he wasn't able to bend his knee. Josef got into the front passenger seat, and she helped him remove his jacket and T-shirt.

The bullet had passed through him, back to front, on his extreme right side just below his lowest rib—too low for the lung and too high for the kidney, or so she fervently hoped. Too far right for his stomach, but she wasn't sure about the large intestine. She wished she could recall more of her high school biology. The two tiny holes were about four inches apart, and they were bleeding.

Nora used the scarf and shawl from her bag, covering the holes with the silk before wrapping the shawl around his middle as tightly as she could. She found safety pins to secure the temporary dressing, helped him get back into the shirt and jacket, and rummaged for her bottle of Advil. She poured several gelcaps into his hand and caught rain in the cap of the bottle for him to wash them down. She also took a couple for good measure before getting into the driver's seat.

Craig Elder's prepaid phone was dead, as dead as Josef's phone. As dead as
Craig,
Nora thought. So much for calling the police—they wouldn't be able to arrive in time anyway. She remembered what Craig had said about his burner phones being untraceable, and about never storing information in them. She dropped the useless object and started the engine, bracing herself. She wanted to drive to the nearest hospital, but there was work to do first.

No police, no British agents, no French agents, no CIA—only the three of them. They had to get to Cowper Field before that plane took off.

“I'm the one who started all this,” Josef Abrams said.

Nora looked over at him for a moment, then back at the road. She was still getting used to driving on the wrong side of the street with a steering wheel that was on the wrong side of the car, and the torrential rain and windshield wipers didn't help matters. A larger, northbound road was coming up on the left, the one where Josef had seen the Aston Martin turn. She swung the steering wheel, then glanced at her watch: 2:36. They might already be too late.

Josef turned to Jeff in the backseat and said, “They killed Maurice Dolin. He's in the hayloft. He came out here yesterday, and they must have done it as soon as he arrived. I'm sorry—I know he was a friend of yours.”

“I was afraid of that,” Jeff said, “but I'm not surprised. I heard them talking about him; they knew I'd been in touch with him. I guess they figured he knew what I knew, so he was a liability to them. It would have been easy for them to get him here, to Laurels. Bill probably had Craig Elder call Maurice, posing as one of my people, and tell him that I was about to nab Bill and his gang. Poor Maurice didn't even know about Bill, but he would have jumped at the chance to join me for the bust. He probably ran all the way here.”

“That sounds about right,” Nora said. “They said on the news last night that he dropped everything and came rushing to England. He was also at the cemetery in Pinède right after I was there the other night. You don't know about that, darling, but I'll tell you later.”

“Actually, I heard most of it from them,” Jeff said. “Bill came out here the morning you went to France, and he enjoyed giving me blow-by-blow descriptions of your journey. I guess he thought it would make me talk. I would have, too, if I'd thought it would keep you safe. I'd already told Maurice that you'd be coming over to claim my remains, so he knew what you were doing. He must have gone to Pinède when he heard about the shootout, hoping to protect you, and he figured the best way he could do that was to take you into custody.”

Nora nodded, watching the road, remembering.
Armed and dangerous, approach with caution
. No wonder Bill and Craig had told her Maurice Dolin was the bad guy. If she'd known his true motives,
their
cover would have been blown.

Now she asked Josef, “What do you mean, you started all this?”

The young man beside her shrugged. “I'm the one who found out about the arms deal in the first place. I'm with, shall we say, a certain agency in Israel; I guess you figured that out. I'm an actor, and I can pass for several nationalities. Last year I went undercover in Tripoli, and I joined Nassim Gamal's group. When I learned of the upcoming deal, I got out of Libya and came to London. My employers don't know I'm here; they think I'm still in Tripoli. My father—my late father worked with Mr. Baron a few times, so I knew his name. Papa once said Jeffrey Baron was the only man in the community he completely trusted. I decided to find him.”

“Which he did,” Jeff added from the backseat.

Josef nodded. “So, we started looking for the Western side of the deal. I couldn't get that information from Gamal or his people, but I overheard enough to know that it was someone in England. And I heard that my country is the main target of the weapons they're planning to make—Tel Aviv and Haifa.”

“Dear God!” Nora said. “How did you zero in on Bill?”

Now Jeff took up the story. “That was a case of really,
really
bad timing, Pal.”

Nora had to slow down as they passed through a village. They weren't on the motorway, after all, but a country road, and there wasn't time to go looking for alternate routes. She tried her best to avoid bumps in the road, thinking of her two wounded passengers. They'd just passed a signpost for Cowper Field, so she kept driving in that direction. It was 2:40 now—twenty minutes to takeoff. She accelerated again, listening to her husband's voice from the backseat.

Jeff had suspected Bill Howard right from the start. Bill had left Vivian, bought a fancy sports car, and started running around with a lot of young women. Jeff knew Bill would need money for this new lifestyle, money he wouldn't get from his rich wife after the divorce. He also knew that Bill was amoral, not particularly loyal to Britain or anything else, and one of the few people in England with the connections to locate and obtain nuclear parts. Jeff didn't let Maurice Dolin in on his suspicions, but he got one of Maurice's colleagues involved, a young woman named Solange Braure.

Solange went to work for Bill in London and vamped him into her bed, even promising to marry him, and she confirmed to Jeff that Bill was making a lot of calls to unidentified people in Tripoli from his new house in Norfolk. Jeff secretly recruited Bill's driver, Andy Gilbert, asking him to keep an eye on his employer, and to keep quiet about it. Then all Jeff needed was concrete proof of Bill Howard's treason.

That proof arrived in early June. Solange was at Laurels with Bill when the crates arrived and were placed in the barn. Bill told her it was computer equipment for a new regional station of his outfit, and she pretended to believe him. She slipped out there one night and saw what was in the boxes: steel and plastic casings for various interior parts of nuclear weapons. She took photos, and she found written correspondence between Bill and Gamal in Bill's office, which she also photographed. She gave everything to Jeff, who put it all on a microchip. He needed to get it to Langley. He didn't trust anyone in MI6 or the SDAT in France or even his American colleagues in England, because he didn't know how far Bill's influence reached. And he didn't trust communications systems in the wake of the WikiLeaks scandal. He was on his own.

Jeff decided that the one person who might be able to get the proof out of England without raising suspicion was his wife. That's when he came up with the idea of “dying” in an accident, and he let Bill Howard and Maurice Dolin in on the plan. This way, he told them, he'd be able to move around freely and find the bad guy. He also knew that Bill Howard would assume from this that his scheme hadn't been detected. Of course Jeff didn't tell them about the chip, which he concealed behind a photo of him in a gold locket.

As expected, Bill was delighted with the plan—he must have thought it was a perfect waste of Jeff's time and energy while he, Bill, went on with the sale. It was Bill who'd suggested a dying former MI6 operative, a man whose weak heart and lifelong alcoholism had finally caught up with him. The former agent was in a nursing home in Weston-Super-Mare, and Jeff went there and told him the truth about Bill Howard and what he was planning. When the man realized that his body could help catch a traitor, he gladly signed on.

The man died on June 28—the day before the phone call to Nora—and Jeff collected his body from the nursing home and drove to Holland Park Avenue. Jeff planted the camera, keys, and gold locket on him, and he put photos of Nora and Dana in the man's wallet while removing everything that might identify him. Jeff waited for a lull in the traffic and drove the car into the wall, activating the air bag. He moved the dead man from the backseat to the front, punched him in the face—Nora remembered the postmortem bruise there—and vanished.

That night, Jeff went to Laurels, at Bill's suggestion. He'd given his two notes to Solange Braure for delivery to Nora if anything went wrong, and Solange had gotten him in touch with one of Maurice Dolin's best men, Jacques Lanier. Jacques was to escort and protect Nora if she arrived in France. But Jeff had made it clear that none of Nora's watchdogs—Jacques, Solange, and Andy Gilbert—could reveal their true agenda to her.

“I wanted you involved as little as possible,” Jeff explained. “I'd made up that locket with the microchip, and I was hoping you'd just take the personal effects and fly back to New York. But then came the bad timing…”

Nora saw a new signpost for the airfield. “What happened?”

Her husband sighed. She knew that sound; she didn't have to look in the rearview mirror to know what it meant.

“I did something really stupid,” he said. “I arrived at Laurels two nights before you arrived at Heathrow, the night of the phony accident, and I decided to have a look around. I wanted to see those crates for myself; I thought maybe I could damage the parts and make the whole thing a moot point. There was no one else there with me except that guy Mustapha, who I thought was some kind of butler, and a daily maid from the village. After the woman had gone home and I thought Mustapha was asleep, I went out to the barn and started to open one of the crates. Next thing I knew, I was struck on the head from behind. I woke up in that groom room, bound and gagged.”

“I see,” Nora said. “So, Bill actually found out you were onto him
before
he called me in New York. He searched your apartment in Soho that night. Polly Jenner and her husband heard noises, but they thought it was you. I should have guessed it was Bill immediately—who but a top agent would know how to override your alarm system? And
you
”—she looked over at Josef beside her—“were already on your way to New York to escort me to England, because Jeff didn't want me unguarded for one minute, from the moment I left home, right?”

Josef nodded.

“Mustapha started with Pentothal,” Jeff continued, “and I must have said something about the photos, but I didn't say where they were hidden, and I didn't name Solange. She was already at the hotel when you first arrived there. She had the notes ready, in case we decided you should leave England in a hurry. I was supposed to call her every hour, from the moment you touched down at Heathrow. Well, by then I was in no position to call, so she knew I'd been taken or killed. You and Bill went to the morgue, and you were given the envelope, and by then Bill knew there was something in it that would compromise him. Enter his secret weapon.”

“Craig Elder,” Nora supplied. “Bill must have called him from the car the minute I got out, so he placed himself in Russell Square and waited for me. I guess
he
was going to steal my purse.”

Josef Abrams said, “Solange called me; she was worried when there weren't any phone calls from Mr. Baron. I was in the hotel when you passed by it, and I followed you to the park. Solange and I decided I should steal the envelope and get everyone off your tail. I never saw that damned Elder, not until he caught me with the purse. As soon as I got away, I phoned Solange and told her to give you the notes. When you arrived back in the hotel with Elder, he saw Solange in the lobby and took off, but he obviously realized she was the leak. She passed the first note to you before they could do anything, but Elder followed her to Paris and killed her.”

“Yes,” Nora said. “And by the time I got to Paris, he had a fake note ready, sending me to that cemetery where they could kill me and dump my body, and get the envelope.”

Everyone in the car was quiet for a while, imagining that scenario—the scenario that hadn't succeeded, thanks to Jacques Lanier. Solange had been able to activate him before she'd met her fate in the apartment in the Latin Quarter, and Bill and his people hadn't known about him. They'd thought he was simply what he appeared to be, an elderly Eurostar chauffeur.

“Who was the man in the car,” Nora asked, “the gray Citroën outside the museum, the one Jacques managed to lose? From the description Jacques gave, I assumed it was
you
, Josef.”

The young man shook his head. “It was probably Elder, with a very dark tan and a black wig. He must have figured that if you or your driver spotted him there, you'd assume the thief from the park was still after you, which would send you running to Pinède.”

“It did,” Nora admitted. “Who was the man in the cemetery, the one Jacques killed?”

“A local French assassin for hire,” Josef said, “a fellow named Aristide, with a long history. No loss there, believe me.”

Nora believed him. She glanced over at the young man and said, “I was in the hotel yesterday morning, when you came with the flowers. I watched you from the room across the hall. I didn't know you were a friend, or I wouldn't have hidden from you. I wouldn't have followed you all over London either.”

Josef was surprised at this news. “You
followed
me?”

She nodded. “Russell Square, the Underground, Leicester Square. I was sitting on the bench next to you when you met Andy Gilbert. I heard every word—well, almost every word.”

He stared at her, but she didn't pause to gloat. She had one more question, her most important question. She asked it now. “What was his name?”

“Whose name?” Jeff asked from the backseat.

“The former agent. My ‘husband.' The man in the morgue.”

“Oh. His name was Trevor Markham.”

“Trevor Markham,” Nora said slowly. “Trevor Markham, Vivian, Claudia, Solange, a young woman named Wendy, and Maurice Dolin.” She didn't add Jacques Lanier and Andy Gilbert to the list, not yet; she hoped they were still alive. “Let's do this for them.”

“Zichronam livracha,”
Josef whispered. “Honor their names.”

They were all silent after that. The car passed through another village, then the road arced to the right; they were now moving east along the northern coast of Norfolk. She caught occasional glimpses of water on her left, the North Sea. There was a wood on the right side of the road, tall trees, and an entrance up ahead that led off through the forest. A standing sign at the turnoff announced
C
OWPER
F
IELD
. No traffic—they hadn't passed many cars since leaving the farm. Nora crossed the oncoming lane, pulled the Focus over onto the shoulder near the sign, and stopped.

Josef had his wallet out, open in his hand. He was gazing down at a photo inside, a pretty girl about his age with dark hair, dark eyes, and a wonderful smile. Nora didn't have to ask; this girl, whoever she was, was waiting for him in Israel, perhaps in one of the cities Nassim Gamal planned to obliterate.