Reckless

“Exactly. Heir to Brecon Natural Resources and the first victim to be shot, after the poor teacher in the parking lot. There’s no good reason for Drexel to be there, Tracy,” Greg said grimly. “None that I can think of anyway.”

“No,” Tracy murmured. “Me neither.”

“Tell me about Montmartre,” said Greg. It was such a non sequitur, it caught Tracy completely by surprise. Which presumably had been his intention. “You were there, weren’t you? When the shots went off.”

“I’m guessing you know I was,” said Tracy.

“Did Hunter show up at the poker game?”

“No. But he was expected. And he was still using the Lex Brightman persona. Obviously I wasn’t the only person who knew that. Whoever was on that motorbike was there for him.”

“Who told you that?” the CIA chief asked archly. “Jeff Stevens?”

Tracy sighed. There didn’t seem much point in denying it now.

“How about we’re honest with each other, Tracy. I know I can’t trust the British. But I need to trust you.”

“Fine,” Tracy replied. “As long as it works both ways.”

Greg grinned, and Tracy remembered what it was she’d liked about him in the first place. “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.”

So Tracy filled Greg in on her conversation with Jeff, minus his unfounded suspicions about Cameron, and their private words about their son.

“MI6 have pictures of Hunter with a young French student. He may have been shot in the leg and this girl was helping him. They think he was heading for Belgium. That was the last I heard before . . .” She touched her head where her hair covered the stitches.

“Well, let me update you,” Greg said. He wasn’t grinning any-more. “The girl, Hélène Faubourg, is dead.”

Tracy looked aghast. “How?”

“Poisoned, apparently. Her sister found the body, still slumped over a bowl of ramen noodles. She’d ingested enough polonium to kill an ox.”

“Do we know who . . . ?”

“We never know who,” Walton said darkly. “All we know is, you meet Hunter Drexel, you die. He did go to Belgium, by the way. Sally Faiers met him there. Drove him to Bruges.”

“How is Sally?” Tracy brightened. “Is she talking to you directly now?”

“No. She’s dead too.”

Tracy listened horrified as Greg gave her the details.

“Someone went in before the police could get there. Cleaned the place up so there were no prints, no nothing. Except Faiers’s corpse.”

“Don’t.” Tracy winced. Somehow Sally’s death made this whole nightmare much more personal. “What about Hunter?”

“Evaporated,” Greg said. “We had a team on him. But the guy’s slipperier than an eel in a vat of oil. We think he’s left Belgium. At any rate he never went back to the bungalow again, where he and Faiers were staying.”

Tracy processed all this in silence.

“Why was Agent Buck so anxious to keep me out of the hunt for Drexel?” she asked Greg Walton directly. “Every time I asked him anything, he shut me down.”

“Because it was dangerous,” Greg said simply. “When I brought you into this the idea was for you to track Althea via her computer trail. I wanted you safe on the other side of a screen. Not out in the field in harm’s way.”

“You sent me to Geneva, Greg,” Tracy reminded him.

“I know. And maybe I shouldn’t have. But this is different. Hunter Drexel is a dangerous man, Tracy,” Walton said. “He’s not who he seems to be. We think he’s been part of Group 99 from the beginning.”

“It’s possible,” Tracy admitted.