Chapter 34

Major Thompson had spent most of the afternoon in constant motion, riding alternate Metro lines end-to-end, changing cars and platforms at random intervals. Over time, the initial panic that had seized him when he’d read Phythian’s note had shifted to resolve, and now he was weighing different scenarios by which he could silently approach his target, and be done with all this. Take the next train home to his chalet outside Montreux…or, better yet, board an airplane to some remote tropical archipelago and enjoy an extended vacation in the sun.

Professional arrogance convinced Thompson that, through his deliberate efforts to remain mobile, he’d managed to elude his killer. He’d seen no sign of Phythian since he’d left the hotel, and was growing increasingly confident that he’d lost him. The downside was that he had no clue where he might be, no leads to go on other than the encrypted dossier he’d received last night. It was a particularly comprehensive profile, detailing his history with the G3, offering insight into his incredible skillset. All of which was horseshit; no way was the asshole capable of half the things that were mentioned. The demonstration he’d witnessed twenty years ago at The Farm must have been a fluke, and not replicable under scientific conditions.

Which brought him back to his immediate challenge: before he could take any sort of action, he needed to find the motherfucker.

Phythian absorbed this entire thought process from just fifty yards across the Champs-Élysées. He didn’t have the former British Army major in his line of sight, but he knew where the assassin was: standing on the sidewalk in front of the Porsche dealership, admiring the lime green 911 GT3 sitting in the center of the display floor. A small throng of admirers was gathered around the vehicle inside the showroom, fantasizing about touching their feet to the accelerator and shifting the PDK dual-clutch transmission. Thompson was familiar with the vehicle, five hundred two horsepower, three hundred forty-six-foot pounds of torque. It could zero-wheelspin launch to 30 miles per hour in one second.

Phythian sensed all of this as the disgraced major pushed one of the two double glass doors open and wandered inside, trying to appear like any other window shopper admiring the merchandise. The other people staring at the GT3 were mostly tourists, American and German and Italian accents giving them away. They admired the car’s curves, fondled the soft leather as they slid in and out of the driver’s seat. They ran their palms over the brushed aluminum trim, gripped the undersized wheel, reached down for the Alcantara shift knob, pretending they were doing two hundred kph on the Autobahn.

Eventually it was Thompson’s turn to climb into the car, get a feel for how he fit behind the wheel. A half million dollars had just landed in his bank, and an equal amount would join it as soon as his current business here in Paris was finished. At that very second, however, he felt a vibration in his pocket, from the encrypted phone to which only one other person knew the number. Fuck…now what? he thought as he backed away from the vehicle.

“What?” he barked into the device as soon as he was back out on the sidewalk.

“Death, the great leveler. Not even the gods can defend a man, not even one they love, that day when fate takes hold and lays him out at last.”

Jesus H. Christ: It was Phythian, quoting the fucking Odyssey again. “What the hell do you want?” he said, lowering his voice so no one in the showroom could hear his anger as he pushed his way back outside to the sidewalk. “Where are you?”

“The GT3 is a beautiful driving machine,” Phythian replied, toying with him. “You can actually order those seats with matching green hand-stitching, you know.”

Shit. The sonofabitch was here, somewhere, and could see what he was doing—right now, mingling with all the tourists and lovers and business people crowding the broad boulevard. Thompson was disciplined enough not to glance around and try to spot him; that would only betray the calm demeanor he was trying to maintain, and unmask the near-panic that had returned in an instant.

“It’s not good form to stalk a man,” he said.

“Wherever you go, there I am,” Phythian replied. “But you already know that, if you read my dossier. They did send it, didn’t they?”

“What do you want, Rōnin?” Putting undue emphasis on his given name, as if meant as an insult. “What kind of name is that, anyway?”

“It derives from the Japanese word for a samurai without a lord or master, and thus left unconstrained to kill at will,” Phythian explained. “It’s all there in my file, which you really should have studied. Now, let’s get down to business.”

Thompson shifted his eyes left to right, trying to spot his quarry without turning his head. There: the man across the street in a brown suede jacket, plaid cap perched on his head…could that be him?

“And what business might that be?” he asked. Wondering, how the fuck did the bastard get access to this phone?

“Please, Major…we both know you’ve been hired to kill me,” Phythian answered. “And to answer your other question, the number I called came to me directly from your frontal lobe, where most of your cognition occurs.”

Damn, the motherfucker was way more nimble than I thought.

“The rumors are true, aren’t they?” Thompson inquired.

“You’re stalling, but I’ll play along. What rumors?”

“You dismantled the G3, didn’t you? Took out everyone in the corner office.”

“The least of my sins, believe me. But you are correct: the G3 no longer exists. At least not as a going concern. Of course, another opportunistic party was bound to come along at some point and take its place, hence the reason for your little junket here to Paris three days ago.”

“What do you know about that?”

“I know you killed Gabrielle Lamoines. And now you’re trying to kill me.”

There was no point in denying what Phythian was saying. The freaking psycho had pulled every byte of this information right from his brain, and there was absolutely nothing he could do to stanch the flow, nothing he could do about much of anything, although he was loath to admit it at this point. As Aristotle supposedly said, hope is a waking dream.

“If you know all that, you also must know I’m not the only one looking for you,” Thompson conceded.

“I’d expect nothing less,” Phythian said, with a shrug Thompson couldn’t see. “Five million dollars is a lot of bread, although I understand you’re only being paid one. Seems to me your pimp is holding out on you.”

This price differential clearly was news to Thompson, and he had no snappy rejoinder. “Like I asked a minute ago, what do you want?” he said instead.

Phythian sensed a thin wave of fear sweep through the former major’s nervous system. “It’s not so much what I want, as what you’re going to do,” he explained, then ended the call.

Thompson’s first instinct was to throw the phone into the stream of traffic, but he didn’t want to give Phythian the satisfaction of seeing his anger boil over. Plus, the device was his only line of communication with his employer, who would not understand why he’d destroyed it in a fit of rage.

Instead, he jammed it in his pocket and began wandering up the wide promenade alongside the Champs-Élysées, lined with a double row of elm trees on each side known as the Grand Cours. He’d been here before, many years ago, and recalled that it was particularly lovely during Christmastime, with hundreds of thousands of brilliant lights of all colors seeming to drip from the barren branches.

It was a particularly pleasant evening, and oddly he found himself no longer thinking about Phythian. There was no more panic, no obsession with how the former assassin—actually, it seemed, still very much active—had tracked him down and obtained his phone number. None of that seemed to matter now as the aroma of cheese and crepes and café au lait met his nose, and he began to feel a sense of nostalgia. Ennui mixed with a thread of sadness as he recalled that other time he’d walked along this beautiful boulevard in the City of Light, arm in arm with a beautiful young woman he had met while on leave from the army. He had fallen head over heels in love with her, but he feared she didn’t feel the same for him—and that whatever their relationship might be, it would end on a sour note.

It had been early December, and her name was Chantelle. She was from Ghent, and was visiting Paris on a weekend holiday from university. They had shared a first kiss in front of a store—right there, he thought with a pang of sorrow—that now was a Sephora outlet, too many years ago to calculate, more than half a lifetime. The kiss had been brief; little more than just a peck, and lacking any real passion, at least on her part. He had wanted more, but knew better than to press any further. Instead, he had taken her hand and they had strolled along the sidewalk, dodging pedestrians either heading home from work or hustling to meet a friend for a drink, or perhaps dinner.

Now as then, he found himself wandering toward the Arc de Triomphe, where he had kissed her next. They had stood in line for a half hour before paying what seemed like an exorbitant fee to climb the stairs to the observation deck at the top. They both had been out of breath when they squeezed out through the passageway and took in the view that stretched all the way from the Eiffel Tower to the Sacré Coeur. Thompson had grabbed her right then, and she had not protested his impromptu smooch, which he’d been planning since the last one.

Now, he found himself inexplicably heading down the stairs to the passageway beneath the busy Place de Charles de Gaulle that encircled the monument. Perhaps it was just the nostalgic yearning for a time gone by, or a lingering sense of unfinished business all these years later. He had not seen or heard from the lovely Chantelle after that bittersweet weekend, and he often wondered what had become of her. Did she remain in Ghent? Was she someone’s wife, perhaps a mother? Maybe she had a marriage that had grown stale and would welcome a call from an old friend after all these years…

Never once did he think his growing melancholy was part of a gentle nudge from Phythian, who was keeping his distance on the other side of the avenue. At that very moment he was tapping into a deep reservoir of emotions in Thompson’s brain, guiding his actions as he now emerged from the pedestrian tunnel and joined a crowd of tourists milling about the circular plaza in the center of the Etoile.

The line to enter the towering limestone arch was shorter than last time, but the price of a ticket remained exorbitant. No matter: he was a millionaire many times over, and the tug of memory was growing stronger by the moment. He paid cash and joined the queue edging toward the stairway.

He climbed upwards one slow step at a time—two hundred eighty-four of them, he remembered—and again was nearly breathless by the time he reached the top. The sense of melancholy was greater now as he realized there would be no sudden kiss, no hand to hold. There would be no future with a beautiful Belgian girl to consider; just a darkness that continued to press on him, envelop him with an inconsolable feeling that life long ago had passed him by, and all that he had done from birth until now had been for nothing.

He stood there on the roof of the monument, gazed out at the city that extended to the horizon in all directions. He was drawn to the side that looked back down the Avenue des Champs-Élysées past Place de la Concorde and peered wistfully through the metallic blades of the suicide-prevention barrier—was that here last time?—to the Louvres in the distance. Aside from the magnificence of the mountains near his home in Switzerland, it was perhaps the loveliest view he had ever beheld—and, at just a little over five feet in height, the barricade didn’t look that formidable.

In fact, it almost seemed to be challenging him.

Phythian didn’t watch him jump. He knew it was coming, but turned away just moments before it happened in order to study a cinema marquee halfway down the block. The screams coming from the direction of the Arc de Triomphe told him all he needed to know.

“Fly, dotard fly…with thy wise dreams, and fables of the sky,” he quoted once again, just as he had all those years ago at The Farm. Except this time, he kept the words between himself and the cool evening breeze.

He turned and casually headed around the Etoile to the far side of the monument; no need to look at the cause of the commotion. He kept his head down as he walked, in the event that one of several dozen cameras located around the monument might trigger a facial recognition algorithm that could place him at the scene of a tragic suicide: his old modus operandi, which could trigger questions he’d rather avoid.

His business here in Paris done, his thoughts turned to Utuliva. It was as far from the madding crowd as he could get and maintain whatever filament of normalcy he’d salvaged from a life that for too many years had been tied to death. It was an oasis of beauty and elegance that was a world away from the greed and human discord that was growing uglier at every turn.

His immediate destination was Neuilly-Porte Maillot, the same bus station that had been his port of entry in Paris not quite three days ago. It was a short stroll, and from there he would purchase a ticket to Paris Beauvais Aéroport, from which he could catch a flight that would have him off this continent and on another in five hours.

Twenty-four hours from now he would be nursing a glass of a local Tanzanian Syrah and watching the zebras and steenboks graze in his front yard.

The instant he felt his phone vibrate in his pocket he knew he was going to have to put those plans on hold.

“Beaudin,” he said after glancing at the screen.

“Hope I didn’t catch you in the middle of something,” the locksmith replied from the cozy library above his shop in the capital city of a small country in the center of the Pyrenees.

“Just wrapped up that matter we discussed earlier. What’s up?”

Beaudin hesitated, decided not to inquire about any details, thinking the less he knew, the better. “I just now received a phone call from a very reliable source,” he said.

“And this source…why was he calling?”

“He’s a she, and she owes me one.”

“And—?” Phythian asked, impatience in his voice.

Beaudin took a moment to clear his throat, then said. “She knows who took out the contract on Mlle Lamoines.”

“And she just called you up out of the blue and gave you this information?”

“I contacted her. She’s in the position to know a great many things, where a great number of bodies are buried. She didn’t have to dig very deep for this one.”

“Are you going to tell me who it was?” Phythian inquired.

This time Beaudin gave a little cough before saying, “Georgy Sokolov.”

Phythian recognized the name, and it brought the faintest of smiles to his face. Sokolov was one of the oligarchs who had not fared well when the west had lowered the boom on some of the Kremlin’s closest comrades because of the Ukraine matter. Ironically, he also was the father of the arrogant young poacher who’d been about to bring down a magnificent African elephant two years ago in the Tanzanian National Park when he—Phythian—had fired a .50 BMG bullet through his spine. In a misguided attempt to seek revenge, Sokolov had sent an advance team to track down and identify his son’s killer, while also dispatching a professional sniper to take him down in very much the same way as he had done to the Russian hunter.

Things had not gone well for her, or her two spotters.

“Your source is sure about this?”

“Yes, sir. She has sources of her own who owe her.”

Information truly was the currency of the world. “Do we know why?” he asked.

“Something to do with Mlle Lamoines’ investigation into Sokolov’s finances, and his connection to a man named Alessandro Bortolotti.”

Shit. Arnaud Clement had been right. Gabrielle had developed a fascination with the Italian far-right nationalist and the neo-fascist movement across Europe he was fomenting. She’d aired a segment about it on her show, which had resulted in death threats.

“You’re certain of this?” he asked.

“I have every reason to believe her, oui. And there’s something else you should know.”

“What’s that?”

“This Bortolotti…he allegedly tried to attack the G20 meeting in Rome a few hours ago. Things didn’t go according to plan and…well, he was killed in an armed raid.”

“Do we know where Sokolov is now?” Phythian asked. “Russia, I presume?”

“Actually, he’s fallen out of favor with the Kremlin,” Beaudin said. “And all of his known assets and real estate have been seized. But I’m told he has a place on Ibiza no one knows about, at least not until now.”

“And you think he’s there?”

“My source does.”

“Good to know. Text me whatever you have. And Beaudin?”

“Oui, monsieur?”

“Did you ever look at what was on that SD card you found?”

“No, sir. Do you want me to do that now?

“Absolutely not. Don’t touch it, not until I give you further directions.”

“Of course. Anything else?”

“Oui,” Phythian told him. “Merci beaucoup.”

Phythian ended the call, then opened a travel app as he continued his stroll up the boulevard toward the shuttle bus station. He typed in “Paris to Ibiza—one-way” and hit “search,” then waited until the program told him the next non-stop left PBA in a couple hours, and would land him on the island a little after ten.

He hit “select” and entered in the credit card info for Mason Graham from Malta that he’d pulled from Thompson’s brain just a few hours ago, as he sat at the outdoor café sipping that ghastly sugar drink.

As Shakespeare once noted, Make use of time, let not advantage slip.