Dirty Work (Stone Barrington 9)

“He wants a truce.”

She blinked a few times. “He actually said that?”

“To the extent that you can get an upper-class Englishman to say anything explicit, yes.”

“On what terms?”

“You stop killing his people, his people stop trying to kill you. He’ll remove all traces of you from British and European intelligence computers, keeping only backup files, in case you renege.”

“What if he reneges?”

“I asked him that, but I didn’t get a straight answer. Presumably, you could go back to killing his people.”

“I don’t get it. Why would he stop trying to kill me?”

“So far, you’ve killed, what, half a dozen of his people? And he hasn’t even killed you once. He’s losing, and he knows it.”

“It’s unlike him to relent,” she said. “In Northern Ireland he had a reputation of never giving up until he got his man. Or woman.”

“Maybe he’s getting old. He’s got to be in his mid-sixties. Maybe his fires are cooling.”

“Maybe. I doubt it.”

“Marie-Thérèse, how long do you think you can continue like this before you end up in somebody’s gunsights?”

“As long as I want to.”

“Don’t you ever get a hankering for a more normal life?”

“What, husband? Children?”

“Whatever you want—being able to live your life without changing your identity every other day; being safe, with no one hunting you.”

“Sometimes I think about that, but you don’t understand what I’d be up against if I stopped this. There are other people who would

not be pleased if I gave up my work.”

“I can understand that, but they don’t have the sort of facilities at their disposal that the intelligence services have. Granted, they may have large networks of people, but they don’t have computers that scan your face every time you cross a border. You could disappear, find a haven where you could live a more normal life—whatever you’d like that to be.”

She sighed. “You make it sound very attractive.”

“Look, the people you’ve been working with are going to lose, eventually. They’re being hunted, too, and that’s not going to stop. They’re going up against a group of big nations that have virtually unlimited resources, and they’re going to be ground down. Even the countries that have been sheltering them are going to start pulling away, because the cost to them is going to be too great. Eventually, they’re going to see that it’s easier to do business with the Western powers than trying to destroy them. This is inevitable. When that happens, where do you want to be?”

“You have a point, but it’s not going to happen tomorrow. And in the meantime, I’m quite enjoying myself.”

“I don’t believe that. I think you’re getting tired, and if you’re tired, you’re going to start making mistakes. And you can’t afford to make mistakes.”

“I may meet with Sir Edward, under the right circumstances, and you’re authorized to negotiate those for me. Tell him that if we do meet, it would be a very great mistake to make any move on me.”

“I’ll relay that.”

“Call me when you have something like an agreement, in writing.”

“Agreements like this don’t get put into writing.”

She sighed. “All right, do the best you can, but I want an immediate truce while we’re negotiating.”

“I’ll tell him that.”