Mrs. John Doe (9 page)

Catherine Deneuve was telling her where to go. Well, not the actress, not really, but it sounded like her. The voice emanating from the dashboard was soft, cultivated, expertly trained, with that professional mix of warmth and assurance that makes a person believe anything it says. Nora envied very few other actors for their gifts, but Catherine Deneuve was one of them, and so was the voice in the Renault's speakers.

“…sortie nombre quatre pour l'autoroute trente-six. Procédez à l'ouest, une distance de quatre-vingt-douze kilomètres à l'autoroute six…”

The beautiful voice had led her successfully through the near-blinding downpour to the appropriate autoroute, west from Besançon to Dijon. Eventually, this road would be exited for the long one, the A6, heading northwest toward Paris. After that, she'd have to look for the A10 to the A6B—or was it the other way around? The voice would tell her. She wished she'd paid more attention to Jacques's navigation on the way here.

Jacques.

No, she couldn't think about him. He wasn't dead—he
wasn't
—and even now, friendly hands would be ministering to him in
l'infirmerie
down the hill from Pinède, or in the nearest big hospital. As for the other man, the sniper—well, she couldn't sympathize. She had more immediate things to occupy her, like negotiating this wet French highway as she raced toward Paris in the middle of the night, running from a dead assassin and a please-don't-be-dead bodyguard.

Bodyguard? It certainly seemed that way. Jacques Lanier was another one of them, a French agent involved in whatever this was. This crisis. He worked for something called the SDAT—she must find out what that was. Nora hadn't really understood all the obvious signs this morning at Gare du Nord: the ill-fitting chauffeur's uniform; the limousine that was not a limousine; the deliberately misspelled placard,
Hugs;
the use of
mademoiselle
to further shield her identity. He'd been watching the rearview mirror from the moment they started, and he'd spotted the tail immediately. His orders were to stay with her, protect her, hence his insistence on driving her all the way to the Franche-Comté himself, in a fresh car.

Jeff. Jeff must have flagged her name,
Baron,
and also
Hughes
. Jeff had instructed her to go to Paris, but he hadn't known how she'd do that, and he couldn't communicate directly with her. Somewhere, in a room in London or Washington, a technician had gotten a hit on the Eurostar reservation Lonny Tindall had made for
Noreen Hughes
. Once Jeff knew her train, he had simply arranged for the chauffeur at the other end to be a French agent. He was taking no chances with his wife's safety. But something had gone wrong. At some point between Paris and Pinède, her husband had evidently lost control of the plan.

GOOT! Dix roses pour Grand-tante J ce soir
. Either Jeff had meant something else entirely or…

Or others had changed the game. That ugly man with the shabby clothes and garlic breath: Could he possibly work with Jeff? Nora doubted it. He'd looked—and smelled—like a homeless man, a vagrant. And the note that had led her to the cemetery was odd too. Not her husband's handwriting, but block capitals. And something else:
Pal
. He hadn't called her Pal. The first message had been addressed to her, but the second hadn't been so specific. It could have been written by anyone. But if it hadn't been Jeff, how on earth had the writer known about Pinède in the first place?
Grand-
tante Jeanette, the roses, the ritual…

Her head was throbbing, partly from squinting through the wet windshield at seemingly endless miles of wet highway, but mostly from the strain of trying to understand what was happening to her. She'd been summoned to Pinède, to her husband's great-aunt's grave, presumably to meet her husband. Instead, she'd been shot at by a professional assassin who had dug a grave. A grave for her, for her body when she was dead. One clean shot, then into the hole, and she wouldn't be found for days. Weeks. Months. Ever.

Whoever they were, they hadn't counted on her leaving the manila envelope in the car. And they definitely hadn't counted on Jacques Lanier. The noises behind her when she entered the churchyard—now she knew: Jacques had followed her from the car with his silenced weapon and his night-vision equipment, ready for trouble. And trouble was what he'd found.

She was praying. Nora Baron, the lapsed Catholic, was actually asking God to watch over the wonderful little man who had saved her life tonight. Keep him alive for Marianne; for the son whose car she was driving; for the rest of his family and his friend Felicia; and for her. So she could thank him in person and teach him some more English words.

Had the priest or sexton seen her? She didn't think so. The police arriving at Notre Dame des Montaignes would find the dead sniper and Jacques, and they'd be searching for the missing weapon, the one she'd thrown in her shoulder bag, but as far as she could tell, they didn't know she existed. Of course they'd find the sniper's car, probably in the church parking lot, and they'd wonder how Jacques had arrived there. If Jacques was conscious, he'd tell them he'd walked or thumbed a ride and the dead man was a personal enemy, his wife's lover, something like that. They wouldn't believe him, of course, but it might buy her precious time…

The road was a blur, and visibility decreased with every minute. The rain was falling harder, cascading down the windows and singing under the tires, punctuated by a celestial symphony of light and noise in the black sky above the
autoroute
. The rearview mirror showed only wet darkness with occasional lights. She monitored each successive pair of headlights behind the Renault until she was sure the distant car wasn't deliberately following her.

How would she know? How could she possibly distinguish her pursuers from fifty million benign Frenchmen? They'd been on the transatlantic flight with her, followed her to the hotel and the hospital, to Russell Square, to Paris, and now to the wilds of rural France. Was the man in the cemetery the man from the plane and the park? The man in the gray Citroën? Could all this be the work of one obsessed loner? If he was dead, was she safe now? How many of them was she dealing with—and who the hell were
they
anyway?

She'd made a choice when she came down from the mountains and rejoined the autoroute, where signs soon appeared before her for the exits that would take her either east or west. She'd thought about it as she drove. To the east was the Jura pass; she could be in Switzerland in not much more than an hour. She could stop somewhere—Neuchâtel was on the Doubs, just across the border—and figure out what to do next. But she didn't know anyone in Switzerland. No; better to take her chances back in Paris, even if it was probably easier for her mysterious enemies to track her in France.

Were they still tracking her right now, this minute? If so, how? Not this car, certainly—it belonged to Jacques's son; they couldn't possibly know about it. Or could they? She'd have to work that out, but she wasn't sure how to go about it. She was Nora Baron, a drama teacher from Long Island, not a federal agent. Her husband was the federal agent in the family. Jeff would know what to do, how to deal with these situations. But where was he? Did he know what was happening to her? More questions. She was going mad from all the questions.

A red light appeared on the dashboard; she was low on gas. Not surprising, considering the miles they'd put in since the rest stop this afternoon. The last thing she needed now was car trouble, running out of gas in the middle of nowhere. She edged over into the extreme right lane, searching the road ahead. Yes! There, in the distance: lights.

The young man in the petrol station was very wet and very polite. As she paid in cash for a full tank and a small bottle of water, Nora tried to calm herself enough to remember some basic French. She was suddenly exhausted. She had to stop for the night; she couldn't drive any farther now. The storm was getting worse, and shock was setting in. She downed some water and spoke.

“Un motel, um, ici?”
was all she could manage, but it was enough. With a grin, he burst into rapid speech, with gestures. She could barely follow him, but she got the gist of it. His mother-in-law—or his wife's aunt?—ran a lovely
chambres d'hôte
just down the way, at the next
sortie,
Chez Martine. Cheap, clean, and she loved
les touristes Americains. Salles de bains privée, petit déjeuner inclus dans le prix fixe, et la Wee-Fee pour les portables!
Down the ramp,
à la gauche, deux îlots, l'édifice jaune à la gauche
. He then pulled a cellphone from his pocket and spoke into it. Yes, a room would be ready, and Martine herself would be expecting Mademoiselle Hughes.

Nora smiled and thanked him, glancing at her watch. It was nearly midnight. She'd only been driving for ninety minutes or so, but between the weather and her nerves, not to mention the unfamiliar car with standard transmission, it seemed much longer. Still, her mind was working overtime. Just before the young man ran inside the station, she called him back over. She explained in halting French that she'd met a man today who said he worked for the SDAT. Did he know what that was?

His eyes widened.
“Ess-day-ah-tay? Oui, mademoiselle, ils sont les flics! La Police Nationale! Vôtre ami est un homme très, très important! Ess-day-ah-tay, c'est la Sous-Direction Anti-Terroriste!”

Nora sat up with a start. She was in a strange bed in a strange room, and for one wrenching moment she had no idea where she was. Then she remembered, and she fell back against the pillow, relieved.

Chez Martine. She'd arrived at midnight, carefully parking the car out of sight from the road, and the sleepy proprietress had signed her in and led her upstairs, apparently not noticing the smear of blood on the collar of Nora's raincoat. Nora was the only guest, which didn't surprise her. This stretch of the autoroute was between major towns, and most people probably kept going until they arrived in one. Martine was delighted to have the business, and very proud of her son-in-law at the gas station, who sent occasional weary travelers her way.

Nora had thrown off her clothes and fallen into bed, but not before washing the bloodstain out of her coat as best she could, putting a Band-Aid on her neck, and taking the gun from her bag to study it. The name, SIG Sauer, was on it, and the barrel was augmented with the fat, twist-on cylinder she knew was called a suppressor. Not a silencer—that was an invention of Hollywood and crime novels; it didn't really exist. A suppressor was the best you could do for sound control on firearms, and it made that loud hissing noise.
Pfft, pfft
. She remembered the graveyard with a shudder.

She'd only handled one gun in her life, a semiautomatic, when she'd played a bank robber in an episode of a short-lived TV cop series long ago. The prop crew had explained everything to her, where the safety was and how to insert and remove the clip, which she'd had to do on camera. That gun had been a dummy, not particularly heavy.

This very real gun was bigger and heftier, but the safety and clip were in the same places, and she could see that the clip was nearly full, which made sense; Jacques had only fired two shots.
Rounds
—they were called rounds. She reinserted the clip and slid the safety catch until she heard the click as it locked. Leaving the suppressor in place, she put the weapon back in her bag. She didn't think she could fire an actual gun at anyone, but it was reassuring to have it with her.

Now it was morning, nearly eight o'clock by her watch, and the thunderstorm of last night was gone. Bright sunshine beat against the closed lace curtains at the window, and she threw them open to let in the light. The world beyond the inn's forecourt was going on as usual.

Why was she suddenly thinking of Mike Lasky? Her daughter had been distraught the other day in New York, devastated by her prelaw student boyfriend's alleged infidelity. Dana was in Great Neck with Aunt Mary, safe for now, but Nora was not at her side, counseling her on the potential drawbacks of romantic relationships. No, Nora was here, four thousand miles away, searching for Dana's father. Her maternal priorities had shifted, and not in a good way.

A hot shower, her first since London two nights ago, did wonders for her. Her neck stung where the chip from the edge of the mausoleum had pricked her skin, but it was healing; she wouldn't need the Band-Aid anymore. Clean hair, a toothbrush, fresh makeup—the little daily things she'd always taken for granted brought on a sense of calm. Well, not really, not entirely. She didn't know where her husband was or what he was doing. She didn't know if Jacques Lanier was alive or if he'd given his life for her.
Sous-Direction Anti-Terroriste:
Thinking of that name, what it clearly meant, was sharply unsettling. The beneficial qualities of the shower were already fading.

There was no phone in the room, but they'd have one downstairs. Jeff was
off the grid,
as Lonny Tindall would undoubtedly say, but she could call Bill Howard. Well, she could call Vivian Howard and ask her how to get in touch with Bill. She didn't know what agency he worked for. MI5? MI6? Or was it some other group, one of those outfits even the queen and the prime minister didn't know about, whose name you wouldn't learn from reading John le Carré or watching James Bond movies?

Langley. Jeff had an assistant there, a polite young man named…something or other. She'd spoken with him a couple of times. Ray? Roy? Roger? No, Jeff wouldn't want her to call Langley, and Ray/Roy/Roger would need clearance to tell her anything, assuming he knew anything, which he probably didn't. He was too far down the chain of command.

Clearance, chain of command, off the grid
. Dear God, the phrases she was throwing around! It was unreal—no, it was
surreal;
that was the word. This whole thing was surreal. Coded messages, bodyguards, silenced—no,
suppressed
—gunshots in midnight graveyards. Washing blood from a raincoat. And a dead body, possibly two.
Three,
if she counted her “husband” in the London morgue. She had to count him because he mattered. He mattered to someone somewhere, whoever he was.

In that moment, in the clean but otherwise nondescript bedroom in a guesthouse in the French countryside, Nora Baron realized with a shock that she was angry. It wasn't the emotion she'd expected, but it was probably a good thing. Otherwise, she might have waited there, crouching in a corner until someone came to save her, or to kill her. Her anger got her out of the room and down the stairs to the lobby.

The young woman at the desk looked so much like a younger version of Martine that Nora had no trouble identifying her. This would be her daughter, the wife of the nice young man at the filling station. With a smile, she ushered Nora into the empty dining room beside the lobby, seated her by the picture window looking out on the parking lot and the autoroute access road, and asked if mademoiselle preferred coffee or tea.

Mademoiselle preferred coffee, lots of it, and in minutes she had a pot of it and a basket of fresh bread. The daughter told her an omelet was on the way, and with a flourish of obvious pride, she switched on the big brand-new flat-screen television mounted on one wall before going back to the lobby. Nora gazed out the window at the parking lot, drying from last night's torrent, and listened to the droning voice of a news reporter and the distant noises from the kitchen.

She had to make a plan. Paris. Get to Paris, leave the Renault in that alley next to Felicia's restaurant, leave the gun in the glove compartment, give the keys to Felicia, and proceed to Gare du Nord. London: the Byron for her things, the hospital for her “husband's” ashes, Heathrow. She could be home by midnight. Forget about the SDAT: Whatever her
actual
husband was doing, she was clearly more a liability than an asset as long as she remained in Europe—

“…une fusillade dans le cimetière de l'église Notre Dame des Montaignes…Pinède, un village en Jura de la Franche-Comté…deux hommes non identifiés, un mort et un blessé grave…”

A shootout in a cemetery. Two unidentified men, one dead and one seriously wounded. The words invaded her thoughts, and she looked over at the TV screen. The churchyard where she'd been last night was swarming with people: police, paramedics, and what looked to be half the population of Pinède. There was a shot of a covered stretcher being placed in an ambulance, followed by footage of Jacques Lanier, strapped to a stretcher carried by two men, awake and aware, blinking around at the crowd.

Jacques was alive! She felt a surge of relief, followed immediately by alarm. The live images switched to an artist's sketch of the face of a young white man she'd never seen before: the dead assassin. This was followed by a grainy but distinct photo of a wild-eyed woman in a beige London Fog trench coat caught in the glare of floodlights, clutching a silver SIG Sauer in her hand. She was looking directly up at the camera, which was obviously a CCTV mounted on the corner of the church beside the emergency lights.

Nora had done a lot of television work and played small parts in several major films, so she was used to looking at herself on a screen, but nothing had prepared her for this. A still photo, taken from security camera footage, of her, Nora Baron, brandishing a gun.
Brandishing
—that was the only word to describe the image, and the expression on her face could only be called a
snarl
. She'd been dazzled by the sudden light in the cemetery, and she'd squinted directly up into the camera, raising her hand with the gun…

The newscaster, a pleasant-looking man, went on to report that the unidentified woman—Caucasian, fortyish, tall, slender, light brown hair—was wanted by the Gendarmerie Départementale. In the cemetery, a heavyset, balding older man with a walrus mustache and horn-rimmed glasses, identified as
Maurice Dolin, directeur, SDAT
, made an appeal for all citizens to be on the lookout for her.
“Armée et dangereuse, approche avec prudence.”
The still photo was shown again, and it was held on screen for a very long time, or so it seemed to its subject. Nora stared at the image of the desperate criminal, realizing that this unflattering picture was being broadcast from every network, on every television, computer, and electronic device in France.

She was on her feet, reaching for the now-famous raincoat, when Martine's daughter bustled back into the room, ushering in a tall young man in jeans and a denim jacket, bearing a backpack. A hiker, no doubt, stopping for breakfast before hitting the trails. The hostess showed him to a table on the other side of the room. He dropped the heavy backpack on a chair and turned around.

Nora stared at him, sinking slowly back into her seat. The daughter was going through her litany of breakfast choices for the new arrival, but he interrupted her speech by coming directly over to Nora's table.

“Pardonnez-moi, madame,”
he said to Nora.
“Anglaise?”

“American,” Nora replied.

“Great!” the young man said in booming, perfect English, and he grinned. “My rental car broke down a mile back, they can't get me a replacement for hours, and I really have to be in Paris today. Are you driving that way, by any chance?”

The hostess arrived at the table now, frowning at the young man; she clearly had rules about one guest intruding on the privacy of another. Nora nipped the woman's angry speech in the bud by smiling and waving to the empty chair across from her.

“Yes, I can take you to Paris,” she said, transforming herself into a friendly fellow traveler. “Won't you join me?”

“Great!” he boomed again. “Thanks so much!” He turned his beautiful grin on the hostess. “
Café, fruit, omelette, et
—um, have you any corn flakes?”

Martine's daughter blinked. “Corn…flakes? Oh,
les Kellogg's! Oui, nous avons les Kellogg's!
” She turned an inquiring look to Nora, who smiled and nodded. Translation: Yes, it's okay for him to sit here.

The big screen across the room was now filled with the image of a lovely young woman in an evening gown, extolling the delights of her silky, manageable
cheveux
. Nora asked if
la tay-vay
could perhaps be turned off?

The daughter complied immediately. Then she produced a very French smile, winked at Nora, and hurried off to the kitchen. The young man went over to retrieve his backpack from the other table, threw his large, lanky frame down into the chair across from her, and grinned some more.

Nora glanced over at the door to the kitchen, then back at her new companion, instantly dropping her pretence.

“What on earth are
you
doing here?” she said.

Now, at last, the disarming grin vanished, and Craig Elder the younger leaned forward to whisper.

“I'm here to get you
out
of here.”