Outside it was still raining and the temperature had dropped twenty degrees. The cold washed over them. They looked around to get their bearings; they were back where they’d started. Ahead, across the plaza, lay the red-roofed outbuildings. His progress marked by his flashlight, the guard was a hundred yards away and heading toward the reception area.
“Had enough prowling for one night?” Sam asked Remi.
“And then some,” Remi replied. “Besides, knowing you as I do, I’m sure there’s plenty of skulking left in our future.”
“Safe bet.”
Together they stepped out into the rain.
CHAPTER 33
GRAND HÔTEL BEAUVAU
An hour later, freshly showered and enjoying their second room-service Bombay Sapphire Gibson, Sam and Remi sat on their balcony and looked out over the Vieux Port. The lights of the city reflected off the water’s surface in a mosaic of red, yellow, and blue that slowly rippled with the falling rain. In the distance they could hear the mournful howl of a foghorn, and closer in the occasional clang of a buoy.
The phone trilled. Sam checked the screen: It was Rube. As soon as they got back to the hotel he had called Haywood, given him a purposely vague recounting of the night’s events, and asked him to call back.
Sam closed the balcony door, then answered and put the phone on speaker. “Rube, please tell us Kholkov and his merry band are in custody.”
“Sorry, no. The French DCPJ can’t find them.”
“Wish I could say I was surprised.”
“Me, too. Ready to quit and come home now?
“Not on your life.”
“Remi?”
“No chance.”
“Well, on the bright side, Kholkov’s name and picture are everywhere. If he tries to leave the country through an airport, port, or train station, they’ll pick him up.”
“Then again,” Sam said, “from what you told me it sounds like the Spetsnaz are trained to slip across borders. And he doesn’t strike me as stupid enough to walk into an airport.”
“True.”
“What about Bondaruk?” Remi asked. “Any chance of digging into his family’s skeleton closet and figuring out what’s driving him?”
“Possibly. It turns out the Iranian Pasdaran colonel who was Bondaruk’s handler during the border war ran into some trouble with the Ayatollah a few years later. We’re not sure what the rigmarole was about, but the colonel—his name is Aref Ghasemi—escaped to London and started working for the British. He’s still there. I’ve got someone reaching out to him.”
“Thanks, Rub
e,” Remi said, and hung up.
The next morning they slept in until nine and had breakfast on the balcony. The previous night’s rain had disappeared, leaving behind a blue sky with scattered cotton-puff clouds. Over coffee they called Selma, who was awake despite it being nearly midnight in California. As far as they could tell, their chief researcher slept only five or so hours a night but never seemed the worse for it.
Leaving out the finer details, Sam told her about finding the Château d’If hiding place empty. Remi added, “The cicada was there, though, and it looked like a perfect match for Laurent’s chisel stamp.”
“That’s better than nothing,” Selma said. “I’m making some headway on deciphering lines three and four on the bottle, but as for the rest, zilch. And I think I know why: There’s a third key.”
“Explain,” Sam said.
“Laurent’s book is one key and the bottle we have is another—at least the first four lines are. I’m guessing the third key is another bottle. We need all three to cross-reference and decode the rest of the lines.”
“This feels convoluted,” Remi said.
“From our perspective, maybe, but we’ve got to make some assumptions: first, that Laurent intended to hide the twelve bottles from the original case individually, at scattered locations—his ‘arrows on a map’ to whatever’s at the end of all this.”