They moved quickly out onto the street, taking a right, Finn heading instinctively away from where he knew the BMW was parked, and once again calculating—would they be down the stairs yet, out on the street, would one pursue on foot while the other drove?
They ran into a busier street, his knee jarring slightly now from the drop and the weight of the bag on one side, but not bad enough to slow him down. A little farther along, he saw someone getting out of a taxi and he picked up his pace. He didn’t give the guy a chance to decide, throwing the bag in the back and handing him a couple of notes as he asked for the ferry terminal.
Katerina laughed excitedly once they were moving, but she kept looking back, making sure they weren’t being followed. Finn didn’t need to look, not now—no one was that good.
“Are we okay?”
“We’re okay,” he said.
He was already wondering, though, how they’d known. Perhaps it had just been thoroughness on Karasek’s part, following all the leads that Finn’s movements had suggested. Maybe two people had tailed him and Harry that day, or maybe they’d picked up on Harry afterward. Either way, Karasek had come impressively close to finding her.
Katerina hardly spoke after their escape, and didn’t question the change of plan until they were on the boat and heading out. “We’re going to Helsinki?”
He nodded, thinking of the many times he’d been to Helsinki in the last eighteen months, some of the grand times they’d had there. Then he looked at her and realized she wanted an explanation for the change of plan.
“I don’t want to wait in Tallinn for the late ferry. We can take another ferry from Helsinki to Stockholm.” The boat was out on a choppy slate sea now, the sky mean, the promise of a feisty crossing later tonight.
“But you bought tickets.”
“It’s okay, I can buy other tickets.”
The boat listed gently as it rode the swell, and she looked excited and alarmed, and by way of explanation, said, “I’ve never been on a ship.”
He smiled, impressed by how resilient her innocence was. “Your life will be better now.”
“I know it,” she said, with a certainty he wished he could muster for his own future.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
He trained the next day and ran farther still, his pace much quicker now, his stamina returning. As he came back from his run he saw Hailey looking down from the window of the Portmans’ apartment. He waved at her but didn’t go to see them.
On Monday morning, he retrieved a bag from his deposit box, containing his gun, ammunition, cuffs, various other things he’d bought nearly six years ago and barely looked at since. The fact that he’d kept them all this time said something in itself.
He’d bought them early on because at some level he’d believed someone would come after him. After the months had turned into years, he’d begun to relax a little. When the first book had become a success, he’d seen that public persona as offering him a little insulation, had let his guard down further by embarking on what, at the time, had felt like a committed relationship—with Adrienne.
Somewhere along the line, between book tours and research trips and the domestic routine of life with Adrienne, he’d fooled himself—though not her, apparently—into believing that everything had normalized. And yet he’d kept the box and he’d kept the contents, because a faint alarm had continued to sound, transmitting its weak signal no matter how far he traveled from that past. And now this was the day when that precaution paid off.
He took an early afternoon train to Geneva. He checked the building where Gibson was living—if Jonas’s information was correct. It was a modern apartment building with no concierge. Then he walked to the building that housed the BGS office. The address was also the base for a dozen other companies with unchallenging names. For all he knew, every one of them was a front for some intelligence service or other. There were no bars or cafés across the street but there was one farther along the block, and as long as Gibson walked home, which he guessed he would, he would have to pass it.
Finn checked his watch, bought a newspaper, and strolled back to the café, sitting with a coffee at one of the stools inside the window, like a man who just wanted to watch the world go by. The place was almost empty, but as the clock moved toward the end of the working day, a crowd steadily grew, a surprising number of them speaking English.
Finn checked his watch. If Gibson hadn’t made an appearance by six, he would write it off and head to his apartment. He had no idea if the BGS office was anything more than an address, but Gibson had gone out to work every day when he’d lived beneath Finn, so presumably he’d been going somewhere, perhaps even here.