Multiple Exposure A Sophie Medina Mystery (36 page)

“In here,” I said. “The back room.”

Baz appeared in the doorway, dressed in jeans with pressed creases, a black turtleneck, and a black leather jacket. He was carrying a small backpack. “My darling,” he said. “Where is he?”

“He’ll be here soon. Have a seat.” I pointed to the barrel chair opposite where I sat on the humpbacked sofa.

His eyes darted around, taking in my furniture arrangement in the viscous golden light of two candles guttering on the coffee table.

He sat with the backpack on his lap and crossed one leg over the other. “What’s going on, Sophie? I didn’t think you were going to be here.”

I am a fairly decent actress, but it’s tough to con a pro. I knew I didn’t have much time until he figured it out.

“Can I ask you something?”

“I don’t know. Can you?” His voice was sharp.

“
May
I ask you something?”

“You may ask.” He looked tense and on his guard, both hands now gripping the arms of his chair.

“How long have you been working for Arkady Vasiliev?”

A small smile played across his face and when his eyes met mine, they were almost merry. “Whatever are you talking about?”

“Katya Gordon held a press conference today at the National Gallery,” I said. “It was the first time the news was made public that Vasiliev had acquired the surprises for the Constellation egg. You knew about it yesterday and you implied you’d known for a few days. The only way that could have happened is if you talked to Vasiliev himself. Katya’s terrified of not being in his good graces, so she wouldn’t have said anything to you.”

He sat back in his chair and steepled his fingers. “That’s a lovely story, but I don’t work for anyone except Her Majesty’s Government.”

“Oh, I think you do. Perhaps it was a poor choice of words. Partners? Colleagues? It would explain a lot about why you’re so keen to see Nick,” I said. “Vasiliev wants the well logs from Crowne Energy. Nick told me someone from the inside has been setting him up for the murder of Colin and his CIA contact in Abadistan. All this time he thought it was someone from the CIA. But it was really you.”

Baz stood up. “Nick’s not coming, is he? This was just some sophomoric game of yours, some half-cocked story you invented—”

“Good evening, Baz.” Nick stood in the doorway.

Baz swung around and the small revolver slipped easily from under his jacket. “As I live and breathe, Nicholas Canning. I think we can dispense with the pleasantries and cut to the chase. Where are the well logs, mate? Tell me or I’ll shoot your wife. Sophie, love, get over here. And put your gun on the table, Nick, or I’ll kill her right now. I know you brought one. You’re getting sloppy, old man.”

Baz yanked my arm and I stumbled over to him. The barrel of his gun was hard and cold against my temple.

“Let her go,” Nick said, but he put his own gun down. “I’ll tell you where they are, but I want your word as a gentleman no one gets hurt.”

Baz put Nick’s gun in his holster and said in a calm voice, “Fair enough. And just to show you what a gentleman I really am, I brought money as I promised.” He picked up the backpack. “Fifty thousand dollars in unmarked bills. It’s yours. Take it.”

Nick looked at the backpack and shook his head. Baz’s gun was still pointed at me.

“Who killed Colin and Dani, Baz?” Nick said. “Was it you? Or does Vasiliev give the orders? I know you mortgaged the house in Eaton Square and you can’t afford your family’s estate in Surrey or Isabella’s house in Cap d’Antibes anymore. I heard the stories in Iskar about a high-ranking official in the British government who was spending a fortune on prostitutes, young girls kidnapped by the Shaika so they could be sold for sex or as maids in the West. I met one of them in Moscow who managed to escape from her captor. She knows who you are, Baz. That’s how Vasiliev got you, isn’t it?”

A muscle tightened in his jaw and I could feel him tense. “I have nothing to say. Now tell me where the logs are if you want Sophie to live.”

“You wouldn’t kill me,” I said to Baz, and my voice cracked. “You couldn’t.”

“I’m sorry, love, but I could.”

I looked at my husband. “Tell him what he wants to know, Nick.”

“He’s going to kill us both, anyway, Sophie,” he said. “Before you do, satisfy my curiosity, Baz, and tell me about Dani and Colin. Maybe you weren’t the one who killed Dani, but why did you have to go after Colin? You were in Vienna the day he was murdered. Why did you do it?”

Outside, the distant wail of a police siren startled everyone. It receded and I heard Baz let out a long breath.

“Just tell me,” Nick said. “The CIA believes I did it. The man was my partner and friend.”

“I didn’t kill him,” he said. “It was an accident.”

“What happened?” I asked.

“I suppose there’s no harm in you knowing the truth.” He shrugged and I tried not to remember the evenings we’d been at one of his dinner parties, how entertaining and charming he could be, all the fascinating people he knew.

“We went for a walk by the river. Colin knew I wanted to talk about what Crowne Energy had discovered in Abadistan. It had been raining . . . we went down to one of the marinas for privacy. It was late and there was no one around. Bloody cold for late May with a wicked wind.”

“Go on,” Nick said.

“He told me you drilled a rank wildcat and found light, sweet crude. He was laughing like a giddy lunatic,” he said. “The next thing I knew he tripped over a cleat, lost his balance, and went headfirst into the water. It was dark . . . he had on dark clothing. I heard him scream that he couldn’t swim . . .”

“You didn’t try to save him?” I asked. “You couldn’t even find a rope to throw him, if you were at a marina?”

“I didn’t kill him. He drowned.” Baz’s grip tightened on my arm. “Don’t bloody judge me.”

“Don’t worry,” I said. “It’s not up to me.”

The carriage house door opened and clicked shut. Baz put his arm around my throat, the gun still at my temple, as Napoleon Duval walked into the room, his gun aimed at Baz.

“You set me up,” Baz said in my ear. To Duval he said, “Whoever you are, I’ve got enough bullets to kill her and myself. I’m not going anywhere. You’re not going to subject me to that humiliation.”

“Special Agent Napoleon Duval. I’m sorry, Lord Allingham, but you are walking out of this room with me. As for your bullets, do you think we’d let you come here with live ammunition? We paid a visit to your room earlier. Your gun has blanks. So does Nicholas Canning’s.”

“I have diplomatic immunity. You can’t touch me.”

“A few of your friends from MI6 are in town. They’d like a word with you as well.”

Baz winced at the word “friends” and, in the painful silence that followed, I knew he was considering his dwindling options. He lifted his chin and gave Duval a defiant look.

“This isn’t finished.” He released me and crossed the room. “All right, let’s get it over with.”

He stopped in the doorway and turned around. His eyes met mine and his gaze was steady, without a trace of repentance or remorse. “I was always good to you, you know. I was there when you needed me,” he said. “When you think of me, love, think of me kindly.”

The door closed and a moment later we heard the whine of a car engine quietly leaving the alley. I looked at my husband and saw in his face the strain of the ordeal we’d both been through, how we’d been tested, what it had done to us and our marriage.

“I’m done thinking about him. I’m done thinking about any of them,” I said. “Baz, Katya, Vasiliev, Roxanne. I want our life back, Nick.”

He came over and pulled me into his arms. “I know, sweetheart,” he said, stroking my hair. “I know. When we walk out of here tonight, we go forward into the light, not back to the darkness.”

EPILOGUE

Nick took me to London in November to visit friends who were overjoyed that he was alive, to make a sentimental tour of our old haunts, and to get away from the barrage of news stories for what had turned into the perfect Washington scandal: sex, blackmail, murder, politics, spies, and nobility.

Scott Hathaway resigned almost immediately as majority leader, stepping down from his Senate seat because, as he said, he didn’t want the distraction of his complicated personal situation to interfere with the important work of the United States Senate. He also wanted to care for his wife, who was still recovering from a gunshot wound that had left her partially paralyzed.

According to the press and some off-the-record information Grace passed along, Hathaway was cooperating fully with the D.C. police, which had reopened the case into the disappearance of Jenna Paradise. Katya Gordon’s photos weren’t incriminating enough to charge him with murder and, when questioned, she admitted she hadn’t actually witnessed the argument between Scott and Jenna. But she said she had gone to take photos at the top of the trestle bridge for a photography class assignment just as Hathaway was shoving Jenna into the storm drain. In the fading light, those photos hadn’t turned out, but she did manage to get pictures of him leaving the park on Jenna’s bicycle.

Hathaway exacted his own revenge against Katya, though it turned out to be—in the words of Sir Francis Bacon—a kind of wild justice. He had kept all of her correspondence over the years, turning a file box of incriminating documents over to the FBI. It wasn’t long before Katya was facing charges of blackmail and extortion against a U.S. senator for the purpose of benefiting her late husband’s Wall Street investment firm. If Hathaway was going to go down, he was taking Katya with him.

In the tangled legal matter of the shootings at the Hathaways’, the media was having a field day with the bombshell news that well-known philanthropist and Lane Communications heiress Roxanne Hathaway had been charged with conspiracy to commit murder. Both Taras and Katya had pleaded self-defense, and I suspected any charges against them—especially Taras—would be dropped sooner rather than later. There would be no trial until Roxanne recovered enough to appear in court, though lawyers for both sides had already spoken to Nick and me, letting us know we would be summoned to testify.

The waiter who had been picked up that day at the Library of Congress was charged in the murder of Ali Jones, who had, as I suspected, asked too many questions, after Detective Bolton turned up witnesses who remembered seeing them together that night at Arkady Vasiliev’s wild hotel party. Luke went to the arraignment—I couldn’t bear it—and watched as the waiter was held without bail and led away in a prison jumpsuit and handcuffs. Predictably there was no evidence to link Arkady Vasiliev to the waiter or the plot to assassinate Taras Attar, but Vasiliev retained a top New York law firm anyway, claiming harassment by U.S. authorities.

Baz’s picture turned up almost daily in the British newspapers while we were in London. The story of how he’d been allowed to leave Washington while under investigation in the United States—he was, after all, a minister in the British government and a member of the House of Lords—had been a flurry of diplomatic maneuvering that sorely tested the U.S.-U.K. “special relationship.” Eventually it had been determined that Baz’s celebrity status made him an unlikely flight risk and he flew back to London, where he continued to insist he was the innocent victim of overzealous American law enforcement agents.

“What are they going to charge him with?” I asked Nick. “He didn’t kill Colin. Or so he said. He can probably weather the sex scandal—a lot of politicians have been involved with prostitutes and, after a while, they claim they’re rehabilitated and move on. Isabella’s sticking by him, so that helps.”

“Don’t worry, besides the fact Duval overheard him threaten to kill you, there’s plenty more to find,” Nick said. “Corruption. Selling classified information. It’s all going to come out. He’ll get what’s coming to him.”

But not everything had come out in public. Nick had slipped Taras the well logs the day of the shootings at the Hathaways’ home and, so far, there had been nothing in the news concerning the discovery of a potentially abundant supply of high-quality oil in Abadistan.

“How much longer is Taras going to be able to keep that quiet?” I asked.

“He isn’t,” Nick said. “To quote Madame de Staël, ‘In Russia, everything is a mystery but nothing is a secret.’ Why do you think the fighting between the Russians and the Abadis has escalated? Everyone wants that oil.”

“Taras is a good man,” I said. “He’d be a good leader if Abadistan ever became independent.”

“He would,” Nick said. “And you certainly made an impression on him.”

The thank-you letter Taras Attar wrote me after I sent him the photos of his talk at the Library of Congress had accompanied a book of his poetry. There was an inscription on the flyleaf.

Come to Abadistan with your camera. I promise to show you the beauty of my country so you may know its people and understand its soul.

But first, it was time to return to Washington. We were leaving London in the morning, the day before Thanksgiving, skipping the annual service for the American community at St. Paul’s Cathedral. Though I loved the pageantry—especially the soaring sound of the congregation singing “America the Beautiful” as a Marine Color Guard retreated down the aisle of London’s most famous church—it was always the day I felt the most homesick.

This year Harry and my mother were hosting a family celebration for Nick and me at the farm in Middleburg. Nick’s sister was flying in from California, and even my brother, Tommy, had managed to get leave to come home from Honduras. My mother had been making plans for weeks.

We decided to spend our last day in London visiting all the iconic places in Westminster—the palace, the Abbey, Parliament, Big Ben—ending in Trafalgar Square, where the Norwegian Christmas tree had just been set up in anticipation of the lighting ceremony the following week. The rain began as Big Ben chimed five and we climbed the steps from the Victoria Embankment in front of the Houses of Parliament. Directly across from us was the House of Lords, where Baz had so often invited me to tea on the terrace. I laced my fingers through Nick’s as we turned away and headed down Whitehall.