“You read too many thrillers, René. Yet you’re right, there’s a black-op flavor to it.” Hadn’t Thiely at the école Militaire intimated the same thing?
“How many years has he had to tie up a loose end? This is dangerous, Aimée—for you and Chloé. Let it go. Your five minutes are up,” said René as Maxence entered with his equipment. He hooked up the remote and plugged it into René’s bank of receivers.
“All systems go, Maxence.” René scanned the screen, looking at a moving green dot. “Wait, why has this been activated already?”
Aimée pulled out her scooter keys and winked. “Roland Leseur. I put a tracker in his wallet. Now we’ll see if he goes and visits the Ministry of Defense.”
AIMéE STOOD IN the small round salon upstairs at the Maison des Polytechniciens, the magnificient early eighteenth-century building where the reception was being held. This land had once belonged to Queen Margot, and the building had later been owned by Louis de Béchameil, after whom the sauce was named. De Béchameil had persuaded Jean-Antoine Watteau to decorate his h?tel particulier, and Watteau’s painted ceiling remained—a whimsical panoply of frock-coated monkeys on swings. During the Revolution it was the seat of power for the quartier: later in its history it was the headquarters of the national medical academy, a museum and a center of a movement for the French Renaissance. Finally école Polytechnique acquired it, “for their alumni,” as the hostess informed her, “and also available to hire for weddings and DJ parties in the vaulted subterranean cavern.”
Maxence had reprised his role as car valet, and was standing downstairs in the entrance hall, beside the escalier d’honneur, a winding staircase with smooth dark-wood banisters and filigree swirls. The conservative crowd—not one of them under fifty—drank and mingled. After a half hour of surveillance, sipping jus de pamplemousse and nibbling crudités, she’d begun to suspect the comte’s imagination at work. While his extended family talked behind his back, nobody seemed to have it in for him and his company. The comte’s cousin, the engineer, was short and mouse-like, with weak blue eyes behind thick-lensed glasses and a prominent nose—the only prominent thing about him. He seemed even less of a threat than the other members of the comte’s family. After all this surveillance, it appeared simply that the comte exhibited a paranoid streak.
But not her call—the comte was paying her for surveillance, and she’d deliver. She took careful notes in her head as she scrutinized each of the engineer’s conversational partners. So far there had been a middle-aged man with a protruding chin and an elderly dame. Judging by the advance guest list, a monsieur from a Geneva-based pharmaceutical company and the engineer’s mother.
She sighed. She’d forgotten how tedious surveillance was. She walked over to the staircase and shot a glance down to Maxence at his post in the foyer full of black and white marble. Murmured into the stamp-sized microphone clipped inside her beaded bolero. “All quiet on the western front?”
In her earwig she heard Maxence clear his throat.
A signal. Alert now, she readied her palm-sized camera. The comte’s cousin must have called ahead for his car. A moment later she followed him as he headed downstairs with his mother, still deep in conversation with the Swiss man.
If she hadn’t had her camera ready, she’d have missed it. On the staircase the engineer whipped something from his pocket. When they got to the marble foyer, he reached to shake the man’s hand. Hiding the camera as best she could behind her hand, lens aimed through her parted fingers, she snapped as many pictures as possible. After the handshake the engineer’s hands were empty. Caught that, too.
“Target’s handed off to protruding chin,” she said softly into the mic. “Monitor and stall the protruding chin until I reach his car.”
“Oui, Monsieur, the light blue Peugeot?” Maxence was saying for her benefit. “That’s parked at the far end. If you’ll take a seat on the recamier, s’il vous pla?t.”
She brushed past Maxence, heard the car keys drop into her open beaded clutch. Two minutes later she’d installed a tracker in the rear left wheel well, clipped a mini microphone to the car’s interior clutch stick base and passed the keys, wrapped in a fifty-franc note, to the waiting voiturier.
Maxence arrived at her scooter, which was parked under the eaves of the concierge’s loge, still in his valet attire. “Activation complete?”
She heard a double click as the blue Peugeot started up. “I wouldn’t have picked le vieux,” said Maxence. “The one with the rheumy blue eyes and bad breath.”
Just in case the comte had any other suspicious encounters, they stayed through the end of the party, which turned out to be a short affair. An hour later they were done.
“It’s never the ones you expect, Maxence.” She turned the key in the scooter’s ignition and revved the engine, and they shot into the night. “Never.” And it made her think.
After dropping Maxence at the Métro, she paused at the curb by a café, took her phone off mute and checked for messages. Nothing from Morbier or Dussollier. Should she call Dussollier, check in?
Her phone rang. René.
“I’ve got the feed recording,” said René. “Interesting. This engineer’s the comte’s cousin?”
“Exactement,” she said. “The engineer cousin handed off something to a Geneva-based pharmaceutical company.”
“Voilà, the Swiss man’s conversation is coming in loud and clear,” said René. “He’s listening to classical music and he’s talking percentages and shares he’s about to acquire from the comte’s cousin in the company. Sounds like he’ll get enough for a majority holding.”