Kiss Me While I sleep (8 page)

He couldn’t believe how she had fooled him, fooled them all. Her paperwork had been perfect, as far as it went. Now that it was too late, he saw with perfect clarity how it had worked. Salvatore had been lulled into carelessness by her apparent indifference to his advances, and Rodrigo, too, had allowed himself to relax after Salvatore’s first few meetings with her were so ordinary. If she had appeared eager for his father’s company, he would have been much more vigorous in demanding answers, but she had played them all perfectly.

She was obviously a professional, no doubt paid by one of his rivals. As a professional, she had other identities to use when she disappeared afterward, or perhaps she simply used her own real name, since
Denise Morel
was an alias. She had definitely been on that plane to London-his men had seen her there-therefore, one of the passengers listed was her. He simply had to discover which one, and follow the path from there. The task before him now-or rather, before his people who would be doing the actual work-was daunting, but he had a starting point He would have them investigate every person on that plane, and he would find her.

No matter how long it took, he
would
find her. And then he would make her suffer far more than his poor father had suffered. Before he finished with her, she would not only tell him everything she knew about who had hired her, she would also die cursing her own mother for giving birth to her. This he swore on the memory of his father.

Lucas Swain moved silently about the flat that Liliane Mansfield, aka Denise Morel, had abandoned.

Oh, her clothes were still here, or most of them, anyway. Food still in the cupboard, a bowl and spoon in the sink. It looked as if she’d gone to work, or was just out shopping, but he knew better. He knew a professional job when he saw one. There wasn’t a fingerprint in the place, not even on the spoon left in the sink. The wipe-down was perfect.

Judging from the file he’d read on her, the clothes she’d left behind weren’t her type, anyway. The clothes belonged to Denise Morel, and now that Denise had served her purpose, Lily had shed her like a snake shedding its skin. Salvatore Nervi was dead; there was no reason for Denise to exist any longer.

What puzzled him was why she’d hung around for so long. Nervi had evidently been dead for a week or longer, but the landlord reported Mile. Morel had taken a taxi this very morning. No, he did not know to where, but she was carrying a small bag. A weekend trip, perhaps.

Hours. He’d missed her by mere hours.

The landlord hadn’t let him into the flat, of course; Swain’d had to sneak in, then quietly spring the lock on Lily’s flat. The landlord had obligingly told him which flat it was, saving Swain from having to break in during the night and look at the records, which would have wasted time.

As it was, this was wasted time anyway. She wasn’t here, and she wasn’t coming back.

There was a bowl of fruit on the table. He selected an apple, polished it on his shirt, and bit into it Damn, he was hungry, and if she’d wanted the apple, she’d have taken it with her. Curious, he opened the icebox to see what else she had in the way of food, and closed the door again in disappointment. Chick food: fruit, some fresh produce, and what was either cottage cheese or yogurt that was way too old. Why didn’t women who lived alone ever have real food around? He’d kill for a pizza, loaded with pepperoni. Or a grilled steak, with a huge baked potato dripping with butter and sour cream. Now, that was
food.

While he pondered what his next step should be in locating his quarry, he ate another apple.

According to her file, Lily was very comfortable in France and spoke the language like a native. She supposedly had a talent for accents, too. She had spent some time in Italy and traveled all over the civilized world, but when she settled down for a rest, it was in either France or Great Britain, where she felt most at home. Logic would say she had got the hell out of Dodge, meaning she was no longer in France. That left Great Britain as the most likely place to start looking.

Of course, since she was very good at her job, she might have considered the same logic and gone someplace else entirely, such as Japan. He grimaced. He hated it when he out-thought himself. Well, he might as well play it by the numbers and start with the most likely place first; even a blind hog sometimes found an acorn.

There were three common ways to cross the Channel: ferry, train, and airplane. He picked air, because it was the fastest, and she’d be wanting to put some space between her and the Nervi organization. London wasn’t the only G.B. destination she could have chosen, of course, but it was the closest, and she’d want to give any pursuers the shortest length of time possible in which to organize an interception. Information could be relayed instantly, but moving human beings around still took time. That made London the logical destination, which left him with two major airports to cover, Heathrow and Gatwick. He opted for Heathrow first, because it was the busiest and most crowded.

He took a seat in the cozy little parlor-no recliners, damn it-and pulled out his trusty secure cell phone. After punching in a long series of numbers, he pressed the
send
button and waited to connect. A brisk British voice said, “Murray here.”

“Swain. I need some info. A woman named Denise Morel may or may not have-”

“This is certainly a coincidence.”

Adrenaline surged through Swain, the kick felt by a hunter who has suddenly found the trail he’d been seeking. “Someone else has asked about her?”

“Rodrigo Nervi himself. We were told to follow her when she deplaned. I put two men on it; they tailed her as far as the first public facility. She went in, and never came out. She didn’t go through Customs, and I show no record of her taking another flight out. She’s a very resourceful woman.“

“More than you know,” Swain said. “You told Nervi all of this?”

“Yes. It’s my standing order to cooperate with him-up to a point. He didn’t ask to have her killed, just followed.”

But the fact that she had disappeared so thoroughly would have tipped Nervi off to her capabilities, which in turn would put her in an entirely new light. By now Nervi would have discovered there was no Denise Morel of this particular description, and worked out for himself that she was almost certainly the person who had killed his father. The heat on Lily had just been turned up a couple of thousand degrees.

How had she slipped away in Heathrow? A secure-access door? First she would have had to slip out of the restroom undetected, and that meant a disguise. A clever woman like Lily would have figured out how to do that, been prepared for it. And she would have had an alternate identification to use, too.

“A disguise,” he said.

“I thought the same, though I didn’t say so to Mr. Nervi. He’s a smart man, so he’ll eventually think of it, even though airport security isn’t his milieu. Then he’ll want me to look at all the film.”

“Have you?” If the answer wasn’t yes, then Murray wasn’t as sharp as he used to be.

“Immediately after my men failed to spot her when she left the facility. I can’t fault them, however, because I’ve been over the film twice and I haven’t spotted her yet, either.”

“I’ll be there on the next available flight”

Because of travel time to the airport, the availability of seats, et cetera, that was some six hours later. Swain passed the time by catching a nap, but he was aware that every passing minute was to Lily’s advantage. She knew how they worked, what their resources were; she’d be building herself a tidy little hidey-hole, adding more and more layers to her camouflage. The delay was also giving her time to procure funds from some unknown bank account that he assumed she had. If he’d been in her line of work, he sure as hell would have had several numbered accounts. As it happened, he himself had a little liquid security deposited offshore. You just never knew when something like that might come in handy. And if it never needed to be used, well, it would make retirement a trifle more comfortable. He was all for a comfortable retirement.

As promised, Charles Murray was waiting at the gate when Swain finally arrived at Heathrow. Murray was of medium height, trim, with short iron-gray hair and hazel eyes. His bearing said he was ex-military; his demeanor was always calm and capable. He’d been unofficially on Nervi’s payroll for seven years, and on the government’s for a lot longer than that. Over the years Swain had occasionally dealt with Murray, enough so that they were fairly informal with each other. That is, Swain was informal; Murray was a Brit.

“This way,” said Murray after a brief handshake.

“How are the wife and kids?” Swain asked, talking to Murray‘s back as he ambled along in the British wake.

“Victoria is beautiful, as always. The children are teenagers.”

“Enough said.”

“Quite. And you?”

“Chrissy is a junior in college now; Sam’s a freshman.

They’re both great. Technically Sam’s still a teenager, but he’s out of the worst of it“ Actually, both of them had turned out pretty damned good, considering their parents had been divorced for a dozen years and their father was out of the country a lot. To a large degree that was because their mother, bless her heart, had steadfastly refused to make him the bad guy in their breakup. He and Amy had sat the kids down, told them the divorce was for a lot of reasons, including getting married way too young, blah blah blah. Which was all perfectly true. The bottom line, though, was that Amy was tired of having a husband who was mostly somewhere else, and she wanted to be free to look for someone else. Ironically, she hadn’t remarried, though she dated some. The kids’ lives hadn’t changed all that much from when he and Amy were still married: they lived in the same house, went to the same school, and saw their father just about as often as they had before.

If he and Amy had been older and wiser when they married, they never would have had kids together, knowing how his work would affect their marriage, but unfortunately age and wisdom seem to increase at about the same rate and by the time they were old enough to know better, it was too late. Still, he couldn’t regret having his kids. He loved them with every cell in his body, even if he got to see them only a few times a year, and he accepted that he wasn’t nearly as important in their lives as their mother was.

“One can only do one’s best, and pray the demon seed eventually morph back into human beings,” Murray observed as he turned down a short corridor. “Here we are.” He blocked the view of a keypad and punched in a code, then opened a plain steel door. Inside was a vast array of monitors and sharp-eyed personnel watching the ebb and flow of people inside the huge airport.

From there they went into a smaller room, which also had several monitors, as well as equipment for reviewing what the numerous array of cameras caught on film. Murray seated himself in a blue chair on wheels and invited Swain to pull up another one just like it. He typed in a keyboard command and the monitor directly in front of them glowed to life. Frozen on it was a frame of Lily Mansfield getting off the plane from Paris that morning.

Swain studied every detail, noting that she didn’t wear any jewelry at all, not even a wristwatch. Smart girl. Sometimes people would change everything except their wristwatch, and that one detail would trip them up. She was dressed in a plain dark suit and wore low-heeled black pumps. He thought she looked thin and pale, as if she’d been sick or something.

She didn’t look left or right, just walked with the rest of the crowd getting off the plane, and went into the first restroom she came to. A steady parade of women came out of the rest-room, but none of them looked like Lily.

“I’ll be damned,” he said. “Run it again. In slow motion.”

Murray obligingly set the video back to the beginning. Swain watched her come off the plane carrying a medium-sized black tote, the kind that didn’t stand out because millions of women carried them every day. He focused on the tote, looking for any means of identifying it: a buckle, the way the straps fit, anything. After Lily vanished into the restroom, he looked for that tote coming out. He saw a lot of black bags of all sizes and shapes, but only one looked as if it might be that particular one. It was carried by a six-foot-tall woman whose clothes, hair, makeup all shouted, “Look at me!” But she wasn’t carrying just that tote, she was also hauling around a carry-on bag, and Lily hadn’t had one of those.

Huh.

“Run it again,” he said. “From the beginning. I want to see everyone who got off that plane.”

Murray obliged. Swain studied every face, and particularly noted what bags they carried.

Then he saw it. “There!” he said, leaning closer to the screen.

Murray froze the image. “What? She hasn’t come into view yet”

“No, but look at this woman.” Swain jabbed his finger at the screen. “Look at her carry-on bag. Okay, let’s pay attention to what she does, too.”

The stylishly dressed woman was several passengers ahead of Lily. She walked straight to the restroom, which wasn’t unusual. A fair number of women from that flight did the same thing. Swain watched the video until the woman left the restroom-without the carry-on bag.

“Bingo,” he said. “She took the bag in; the clothes for the disguise were in it. Back it up some. There. That’s our girl. She has the bag now.”

Murray blinked at the fantastic creature on the monitor. “My word,” he said. “Are you certain?”