Reckless

As she told Cameron later that night, “It was him, I know it. I think he’d been shot in the leg.”

As usual, Cameron ended up playing Devil’s advocate. “It could have been a bystander, hurt in the crossfire.”

Tracy wasn’t buying it. “A bystander would lie there and wait for help, especially once the gunman had made a run for it. But this man was as desperate to get away as the shooter. He couldn’t risk being identified.”

And Hunter Drexel had gotten away, again, leaving Major General Frank Dorrien red-faced and empty-handed. For the second time that day, Tracy found herself resisting the temptation to shame a man she loathed. Not least because, if she had seen him that day, there was at least a chance that Frank had seen her entering Pascal Cauchin’s apartment, but was choosing to keep quiet about it.

Maybe we’re both keeping secrets?

From each other and from the CIA?

“Do you know the most interesting thing I learned today?” Frank asked casually, helping himself to a large slice of Brie and proceeding to slather it over his baguette. “One of the teenagers murdered here was Jack Charlston.”

Frank gave Tracy a questioning look, but the name meant nothing to her.

“Jack was Richard Charlston’s son. Only son, as it happened.”

Richard Charlston. It rang a bell. Tracy dredged her memory, trying to place it.

“Richard was the MEP who opposed Crewe Oil’s attempts to secure fracking rights across the EU, including right here in France,” Frank Dorrien reminded her. “Vociferously opposed. And successfully.”

That’s right. Cameron had mentioned the name Richard Charlston to Tracy the very first night they met, in Geneva. He’d been in Switzerland trying to drum up support in the European parliament for an expansion of his European business, and the British MEP was speaking against him.

“I remember,” Tracy said.

“Richard Charlston was due to give a speech here, at Camp Paris, on the day of the shooting but pulled out at the last moment. I daresay nobody informed Group 99 of the change of plans. Still”—Frank smiled—“at least they got his son. I daresay that’s better than nothing from your boyfriend’s point of view.”

Tracy put down her plate. “What do you mean by that?”

“Merely that Cameron Crewe was an enemy of Richard Charlston. Just as he was an enemy of Henry Cranston. Doesn’t it strike you as curious the way that Group 99 seem to target your boyfriend’s enemies?” Frank helped himself to a large handful of dates and some pâté. “Almost as if they’re doing Crewe Oil’s dirty work.”

A surge of absolute loathing ran through Tracy’s body.

“Cameron lost a son,” she told Frank. Her voice was quiet but she was shaking with anger. “Marcus. He was a teenager, just like the children murdered here.”

“Yes, I . . .”

“I’m not finished.” Tracy cut the general off furiously. “I lost my son, too. At the same age. So you see, General, we know what it feels like. Cameron and I. We know what the Neuilly massacre pare

nts are going through. In a way that you never will. If you think for one second that Cameron is capable . . . that he would ever be involved in the murder of children, or support that in any way . . . then you’re even more bigoted than you look. You’re deranged.”

Frank looked at Tracy calmly. “I believe that all human beings are capable of terrible things, Miss Whitney. Just as we are all capable of greatness. Don’t you?”

Tracy glared at him in silence.

What a hateful, hateful man, she thought, as the general walked away.

But the names Jack and Richard Charlston haunted her for the rest of the day.

Group 99. Fracking. Cameron.

There was a link there. Not the link that Frank Dorrien was insinuating. But a link. Something connecting Cameron, or at least his industry, with these vile and cowardly acts of terror.

Did Hunter Drexel know what that link was? Was that why he had run?

Had Hunter seen whatever it was that Tracy was missing?

And where did Althea, whoever she was, fit into the puzzle?