But was there a connection between the death of Jean-Luc Martel and the killing of the ISIS terror mastermind known as Saladin? A connection other than a similar time and place? Even the most conspiratorially minded journalists thought it unlikely. Still, there were enough tenuous links to merit a second look, and look they did—from the West End of London, to the seventh arrondissement of Paris, to an empty art gallery in Saint-Tropez, to a patch of blood-soaked pavement near the entrance of Downing Street. Reporters who specialized in matters related to security and intelligence thought they could detect a pattern. There was smoke, they said. And where there was smoke there was usually the prince of fire.
In time, even the most carefully woven lies unravel. All it takes is a loose thread. Or a man who feels compelled, for reasons of honor, or perhaps out of a sense of debt, to bring the truth to light. Not all of it, of course, for that would have been insecure. Only a small slice of it, enough to keep a promise. He gave the story to Samantha Cooke of London’s Telegraph, who crashed it in time for the Sunday edition. Within hours, it had set four distant capitals ablaze. The Americans ridiculed the account as pure fantasy, and the reviews from the British and the French were only slightly less caustic. Only the Israelis refused to comment, but then that was their standard procedure when it came to intelligence operations. They had learned the hard way that it was better to say nothing at all than issue a denial no one would believe anyway. In this case, at least, their reputation was well deserved.
The officer at the center of the story was spotted at the weekly meeting of the prime minister’s fractious cabinet and, later that evening, with his wife and two young children at Focaccia restaurant on Rabbi Akiva Street in Jerusalem. As for Olivia Watson, the former fashion model, gallerist, and not-quite wife of the disgraced Jean-Luc Martel, her whereabouts remained a mystery. A prominent French crime reporter wondered whether she was dead. And though the reporter had no way of knowing it, Olivia was wondering the very same thing.
71
Wormwood Cottage, Dartmoor
They locked her away at Wormwood Cottage with only Miss Coventry the housekeeper for company and a couple of bodyguards to watch over her. And old Parish the caretaker, of course, but Parish kept his distance. He’d looked after all sorts during the many years he’d worked at the facility—defectors, traitors, blown field agents, even the odd Israeli—but there was something about the new arrival that rubbed him the wrong way. As usual, for reasons of security, Vauxhall Cross had withheld the guest’s name. Even so, Parish knew exactly who she was. Hard not to; her face was splashed across the pages of every newspaper in the country. Her body, too, but only in the racier tabloids. She was the pretty girl from Norfolk who’d gone to America to become a fashion model. The girl who’d been mixed up with the Formula One drivers and the rock stars and the actors and that horrible drug dealer from the south of France. She was the one the French police were supposedly searching for high and low. She was JLM’s girl.
She was a wreck the night she arrived and remained one for a long time after. Her blond hair hung long and limp, and in her blue Nordic eyes was a haunted look that told Parish she had seen something she should not have. Thin as a rail already, she lost weight. Miss Coventry tried to cook for her—proper English fare—but she turned up her nose at it. Mainly, she sat in her room upstairs, smoking one cigarette after the next and staring out at the bleak moorland. First thing each morning, Miss Coventry placed a stack of newspapers outside her door. Invariably, when she collected the papers later in the day, several pages would be torn out. And on the day her face appeared in the Sun beneath a deeply unflattering headline, the entire paper was ripped to ribbons. Only a photograph survived. It had been taken many years earlier, before the fall. Written across the forehead, in blood-red ink, were the words JLM’s Girl.
“Serves her right to get mixed up with a drug dealer,” said Parish judgmentally. “And a Frog drug dealer at that.”
She had no clothing to speak of, only the clothes on her elegant back, so Miss Coventry offered to make a run to M&S to pick up a few things to tide her over. It was not what she was used to, mind you—she had her own clothing line, after all—but it was better than nothing. Much better, as it turned out. In fact, everything Miss Coventry selected looked as though it had been designed and tailored to fit her long, slender frame.
“What I wouldn’t give to have a body like that for just five minutes.”
“But look at what it’s got her,” murmured Parish.
“Yes, look.”
By the end of the first week, the walls were beginning to close in on her. At Miss Coventry’s suggestion, she went for a short walk across the moor, accompanied by a pair of bodyguards who looked far happier than normal. Afterward, she took a bit of sun in the garden. Once again, it was not what she was used to, the sun of Dartmoor being rather different than Saint-Tropez’s, but it did wonders for her appearance. That evening she ate most of the lovely chicken pie Miss Coventry placed before her and then spent several hours in the sitting room watching the news on television. It was the night CNN broadcast the cell phone video shot by the American tourist outside Downing Street. When a grainy close-up appeared on the screen—a close-up of the officer who had held the terrorist’s thumb to the detonator—she leapt suddenly to her feet.
“My God, that’s him!”
“Who?” asked Miss Coventry.
“The man I met in France. He called himself Nicolas Carnot. But he’s not a police officer. He’s—”
“We do not speak of such things,” said Miss Coventry, cutting her off. “Even in this house.”
The beautiful blue eyes moved from the television screen to Miss Coventry’s face. “You know him, too?” she asked.
“The man in the video? Oh, heavens no. How could I? I’m only the cook.”
The next day she walked a little longer, and upon her return to Wormwood Cottage she asked to speak to someone in authority about the status of her case. Promises were made, she insisted. Assurances had been given. She insinuated they had come directly from “C” himself, a claim Parish found hard to believe. As if “C” would ever trouble himself with the likes of her! Miss Coventry, however, did not dismiss the idea out of hand. Like Parish, she had witnessed many peculiar events at the cottage, such as the night a rather notorious Israeli intelligence officer was handed a copy of a newspaper that declared he was dead. An Israeli intelligence officer who, come to think of it, bore more than a passing resemblance to the man who’d fired several shots into the head of a terrorist on the pavements of Whitehall. No, thought Miss Coventry, it wasn’t possible.