Chapter 1

Nighttime in the City of Light, the soft glow of a streetlamp five floors below shimmered through glistening raindrops that trickled down the windowpane.

The floor-to-ceiling draperies were pulled open as far as they could go, dancing on a gentle breeze that seeped through a crack in the ancient wood frame. The scent of jasmine or gardenias, or something aromatic and flowery, tangled with the aroma of sweat and champagne and leftover sex. A Baroque concerto drifted through the ancient plaster walls from the attic flat next door, the muffled refrain of a string quartet yielding the gentle trill of a meadow full of songbirds. Quick ritornello signatures that Gabrielle Lamoines recognized as Vivaldi’s Concerto No. 1 in E major, Op. 8.

Spring.

It was her favorite season, both in life and in the concert hall. Her father had played the cello, although not as well as he liked to think, and her mother had dabbled from time to time with the tenor flute. As proper parents they had introduced their only child to classical music at an early age with the obligatory piano lessons, which she had abandoned around the time puberty arrived and introduced her to the erratic nature of hormones. Now that she was in her mid-thirties, however, she had circled back to music, and made a habit of visiting Le Bataclan whenever her busy scheduled permitted—or, more preferably, le Philharmonie de Paris, if she found herself in the mood for a particularly inventive interpretation of the masters.

Now her father was dead—an inexplicable and spectacular fall a decade ago from the first level of the Eiffel Tower—and her mother had been spiraling around the drain of booze and benzos ever since. They had been the ideal French couple: well-heeled financier of European construction projects married to a senior curator at the Pompidou Centre, with a lovely daughter who was just two years out of université and already making a name for herself in television news. Gabrielle’s life had crumpled in an instant when she’d received the news of her father’s accident, and she’d had to pick up the pieces as best she could.

The words of the French poet Anatol Franc seemed to help her through her darkest hours: “If we don’t change, we don’t grow. If we don’t grow, we aren’t really living.”

She lay naked on the bed and listened to the muted violins, the Egyptian cotton sheets having been scattered to the saxony carpet in a lustful frenzy. She watched as her lover pulled on his trousers and shirt, then his socks, shaking them out before tackling the left foot, then the right. Once again, she studied his strong chin and dark eyes, thick black hair she’d thought might be fake, until she had gripped it as she was nearing climax. His name was Archie Hunter—at least that’s what he had told her—and she had known him for all of three hours. That was more than enough time for their cleverly nuanced repartee to engage each other’s prurience, share a glass of the bar’s best sparkling wine, and subtly agree to mutually acceptable terms.

They then had dodged the raindrops as they hurried back here to her place, a small one-bedroom apartment in St. Germain, just a block off Rue Bonaparte. Weathered limestone set close to the cobbled sidewalk, with decorative iron grates over the ground-floor windows. A blue plaque with white lettering next to the door announced its historical significance for housing resistance fighters during the Nazi occupation in Vichy Paris.

For the briefest of moments Gabrielle wondered what time it was. She couldn’t see the digital clock on her dresser, couldn’t reach her cellphone on her nightstand. But she had a good internal timer that told her she still had an hour before she needed to think about getting dressed. Her line of work didn’t allow for extended personal dalliances, and she had a half dozen calls to return before she finished packing for her early flight to Rome at the crack of dawn. Plus, there was the pending visit from a man who had reached out to her just that morning, insisting they meet at her earliest possible convenience—something to do with the untimely death of her late father, news that he’d promised she would find of critical importance. Secrecy and intrigue were part of the life of an investigative reporter, so she had agreed to meet him here at her flat at ten.

Just as important was the scheduled hand-off of a highly valuable object at midnight, across the Seine at the Jardin du Carrousel. Despite her continued assurances that she would be there, the young man she was meeting was nervous and jittery about the matter.

All of which left her more than enough time to say a fond farewell to the man she was quite certain was not really named Archie Hunter. But then, hers was not really Avril Moreau. Like all valuable commodities, truth is often counterfeited.

He took his time fastening his buttons, then slipped on a pair of shoes that clearly were less upscale than they first appeared. When he finished, he rose to his feet and walked over to the demilune burlwood writing desk to the right of the window. Its surface was bare except for a table lamp they had not bothered to turn on when they’d pushed their way into the room earlier. On a chair in front of it was a leather satchel, which he had set down as they’d tumbled to the bed, lots of groping and kissing and moaning going on in the heat of passion.

He unfastened the clasp and reached inside the case, brought out something that looked—merde sainte!—like a semi-automatic pistol with a rubberized grip. It was the sort Gabrielle had seen many times in American gangster flicks, but never with her own eyes.

He glanced over at her with a tight smile, then reached back inside the case and brought out another object—long and cylindrical. He methodically attached the thing to the modified barrel, and she found herself identifying it as a sound suppressor. She marveled at her own lack of panic or alarm as he tightened it, sensing just an odd touch of curiosity as he hefted the assembled weapon in his hand.

He walked over to the bed. His side, after they had finished their lovemaking, and they had laid there in post-coital bliss. He pointed it at her, but all she experienced was a strange perception of spiritual harmony, as if she were chanting om, but without the humming sound.

She watched for a moment as if in some sort of dream, then said, “Please put that down—guns are the evil tools of weak minds.” They were the only words she could find, in French, the uncertainty of what she was seeing causing her to blink. Her brain was still a little foggy from all the bubbly they’d consumed before falling into bed, and the sex—and maybe something else she had not been aware of until this very moment, when she realized her brain was functioning in a subdued state that was far from efficient, and certainly not normal.

“I promise, my sweet, you won’t feel a thing,” he said, in the same velvety voice that had seduced her into inviting him back to her flat in the first place.

At that moment the sense of euphoria released its grip on her brain, and she blurted out, “What in God’s name do you think you’re doing?”

“Simply the fulfillment of a business obligation,” he told her in that dreamy tone, almost a whisper—as if he was still making love to her.

“Business?” She tried to shift her position so she could see him better, standing there to her right, but she had momentarily forgotten that her wrists and ankles were still bound to the bedposts. It was her idea, using the silk scarves she’d retrieved from the dresser on a whim—and not a good one, it appeared. “Do you think you’re being funny?”

“No, Gabrielle,” he said to her, his whisper suddenly turning cold. “There is nothing humorous about this.”

“But…a gun?” She nodded at the weapon, the titanium silencer aimed directly above the bridge of her nose. She should have been hysterical at this moment, but it was an emotion she simply couldn’t find.

“Arguably the most decisive of all the tools of the trade.”

The biting chill in his voice caused her to jerk her head away from the end of the extended barrel. Until now she hadn’t even allowed herself to be afraid but, with those words, a wash of fear chilled her blood.

“You can’t just tie me up, point a gun at me—”

He cocked his head to get a better look at her, and for a second she caught a touch of sadness in his eyes. Was it remorse for what he was about to do, or perhaps a flicker of conscience? “The tying-up part was your idea, remember?”

“And if you don’t untie me right now, I’m going to scream—”

But Archie Hunter—now she was certain that was not his real name, nor was he a fabric wholesaler from London visiting Paris on a buying trip—simply shook his head. The motion was barely noticeable in the thin veil of light glimmering through the rain still trickling down the window. “Actually, you’re not,” he said with an icy, distant resolve.

It was at that point that Gabrielle realized this man actually intended to shoot her, to take her life, right there and then. Her compromised reflexes—and the damned scarves—prevented her from doing anything more than to wonder: who is this man? Why is he doing this? And after that: who sent him?

“You can’t do this—”

His finger gently tightened across the trigger, the pistol steady and familiar in his hand. French gun laws were some of the strictest on the continent, with no constitutional right to bear arms, although that had not helped the victims of the Charlie Hebdo magazine shooting. As a result, firing ranges were difficult to find, as were semi-automatic weapons whose serial numbers had been filed off, and whose provenance thus could not be traced.

That’s why he had brought this assembly with him, a Ruger SR22 with a ten-plus-one capacity chambered in the common and inexpensive .22 rimfire ammunition, with decent front and rear sights, if he’d needed them. Comfortable and sympathetic, like an old drinking friend.

The gun barely kicked in his hand as the subsonic bullet drove into Gabrielle Lamoines’ skull. It burrowed through her forehead at a point directly between and slightly above both eyes, instantly obliterating her entire universe as the contents of her skull were voided onto the down pillow, and the headboard behind it.

“I’m so sorry, mon cherie,” he lamented as he examined his handiwork, his voice no louder than a puff of wind. A very cold wind, as if sweeping down the steep ravine of a glacier.

He stood there a moment, studying her in the near-darkness, knowing she was dead but needing to make sure. Once he was certain, he retrieved the spent casing from the luxurious carpet but decided to leave the mangled slug where it had driven into the plaster wall. He moved back across the room and slid the gun and silencer into their leather satchel, then snapped a pair of blue nitrile gloves over his hands before retreating into the bathroom in search of towels, soaps, and whatever cleaning solutions the dead woman on the bed might have kept on hand.

Five minutes later he was finished. He opened the front door, finding himself engulfed by the thick odor of noxious cigarettes coming from a tenant who had recently passed by in the hallway. He sensed a sneeze coming on but pressed the back of his gloved hand against his nose to suppress it, not unlike suppressing the roar of exploding gas being forced from the barrel of a gun. Then he silently slipped out of the apartment, confident that he hadn’t left a print anywhere, not one telltale hair, not a strand of DNA. There was not one trace of his presence, not even a drop of fluid from the evening’s particularly amazing sex.

In that regard, Gabrielle Lamoines had definitely lived up to the details of her dossier, and had more than met his expectations. Such a shame he hadn’t met her under alternative circumstances.