She’d been softening toward him for the last few minutes, even her retaliatory responses laced with a slight smile, but he knew immediately from her expression that his last comment had been the wrong one. He wasn’t sure why, or what she wanted him to say, but her face visibly hardened again, and it was worse because he could see the fragility and sadness beneath that anger.
He was saved from any further deterioration by Mathieu, who appeared in the doorway and said, “Would you like to eat?”
Dinner was lively and chaotic, conducted in a mixture of English and French, sometimes within single sentences, and with little in the atmosphere to suggest that two of the diners were in a disintegrating relationship and that another had recently run away from home.
The boys were probably the saviors in that regard. They’d always been excitable around Finn, certainly more than he merited, but they were doubly so with Hailey. A couple of times Cecile tried to calm them down, but in the end everyone rolled with their good humor.
If the atmosphere stumbled at all, it was when they were discussing Sweden, as if Finn and Hailey had just been on a long-planned break there, and Adrienne said, “But I don’t understand, Hailey, I thought Jonas was your boyfriend?”
There was a tense pause. Hailey looked at Finn, who gave a minimal response, making clear he didn’t know where the comment had come from, and then she laughed.
She shook her head and said only, “Adrienne!”
Adrienne laughed, too, and shrugged, looking almost envious as she told Cecile in French about Jonas. Finn didn’t catch it all but something earned another “Adrienne!” from Hailey. Adrienne laughed all the more, and then the boys both mimicked the outraged “Adrienne! Adrienne!”
Finn had often dreaded coming here, no doubt rather less than Mathieu and Cecile had dreaded him coming, yet as the evening unfolded he realized he was more relaxed than he’d ever been in this apartment. It was late in the day to see that they were a good family, just as he was in danger of no longer being a part of it.
Hailey saw it, too, and before going to bed, she said to Finn, “Thank you so much for bringing me here.” It was as if the events of earlier in the day had been forgotten, as if Paris had been their sole objective.
“You’re welcome. Sleep well.”
Adrienne looked on, suspecting some ulterior motive even after the good humor of the evening, not believing the details of the Finn Harrington who’d turned up here. She didn’t bid him goodnight, simply made eye contact, her gaze lingering for a second before she turned and walked away with Hailey.
Mathieu was the last to leave him alone with his bedding and his sofa, but just before he left, Finn said, “Mathieu, do you still have that old laptop you had at Christmas?”
Mathieu nodded but said, “It’s no good. The battery. You have to plug it in the whole time.”
“That’s fine, it’s only to go through a memory stick—I don’t want to take it away with me.”
“Oh, I see.” He smiled. “I’ll get it for you.”
A few minutes later, he’d left Finn again. Finn plugged in the laptop, opening it up on the coffee table in front of him. As it booted up, he retrieved the memory stick from his bag and stopped briefly to listen, making sure the rest of the apartment was done for the evening. Adrienne was one thing, but this was where he’d really find out, he supposed, what the future had in store for him.
Chapter Twenty-One
Much of what Hailey and Jonas had intercepted was effectively gibberish—discreetly crafted messages, the same words often repeated, a catalog of boredom as Gibson reported daily on the absolute lack of activity by their target. Finn could only guess as much, without knowing the exact meaning of the coded words, but he was convinced that was what he was looking at.
One of these missives mentioned the Albigensian Crusade, Gibson perhaps hoping that he’d finally stumbled on something, that Finn had inadvertently broken cover. In response, he’d received a quiet rebuke telling him to ignore any such references in the future.
The messages received by Gibson were by far the most interesting. There were no names, but the tone suggested they’d all been sent by one person. It was in these that Sparrowhawk was mentioned, in these that Helsinki came up more than once, and Karasek, and in these that the puzzling line appeared: Imperative to identify Jerry de Borg.
The messages sent to Gibson seemed ridiculously indiscreet, almost as if the person sending them was intentionally spilling information. Finn toyed with the idea that he’d been meant to see this, that they were throwing out bait for him, but there was no way they could have anticipated him getting his hands on it.
The tone reminded him of someone, but he couldn’t quite pin it down. He tried to think back. It might have sounded like Ed Perry, but his career had ended with Sparrowhawk. Unless, of course, Perry was out on his own, but that didn’t square with financing a two-year surveillance operation.