“I’m not here to pass judgment on how the Hong Kong Chinese conduct their affairs!” Frémeaux shot back angrily. “My job is to see to it that we, Interpol, are doing our job. These protocols exist for a reason, you know.”
Yeah, thought Danny, to satisfy uptight pen pushers like you.
Still, he could understand Henri Frémeaux’s irritation. So far the Azrael task force had made little or no headway, other than Richard Sturi’s brilliant statistical analysis; but without any forthcoming arrest on the horizon, that too was academic. Azrael had also taken up a phenomenal amount of time and resources, far more than the eight man-hours Frémeaux had grudgingly allotted. It was mostly Danny McGuire’s time, although Danny had just sent Claude Demartin on a fact-finding mission to Aix-en-Provence to delve deeper into the scant DNA evidence surrounding Didier Anjou’s murder. Thank God Frémeaux doesn’t know about that yet. Or about Matt Daley’s involvement in the Hong Kong fiasco. Then we’d really be up shit creek.
“I’ll give you a month, McGuire,” Henri Frémeaux grunted. “That’s assuming I get no more calls from member countries complaining about your attitude.”
“You won’t, sir. I guarantee it.”
“If I don’t see tangible progress in that time—and by tangible I mean something that justifies the money we’re spending chasing our tails—Azrael is finished.”
Danny McGuire walked back to his own office despondent. Céline was barely talking to him. At work, his own IRT division, who had always been extremely loyal to him personally, was starting to get pissed at the amount of time he was devoting to Azrael, which most of them considered to be the wildest of wild-goose chases. When he started all this, he’d thought of Matt Daley as a partner, a fellow American who cared about catching the Jakes killer, as Danny still thought of him, as much as he did. But now even Matt had deserted him, apparently besotted by the beautiful Mrs. Baring, the latest of the widows. It was a long time since Danny McGuire had felt this alone. Not since the wilderness years, after Angela Jakes went missing.
Initially he’d been focusing his own energy on trying to track down Lyle Renalto, unable to shake the idea that Angela Jakes’s lawyer was a key piece of the puzzle. It was Claude Demartin who’d put forward the “lover-killer” theory, although the seeds of Danny’s distrust in Lyle Renalto had been sown more than a decade ago, when first they’d met at Angela’s hospital bedside. But after weeks of intensive digging, trawling through databases in every country connected with Azrael, as well as all the major U.S. cities, he’d drawn a complete and total blank. The first official reference to Lyle Renalto was a tax return filed in Los Angeles just a year before Andrew Jakes was killed. Before that, there was nothing. And a year after the murder, poof, he was gone again, as if he’d never existed.
Angela Jakes’s words on the night of the murder floated back across Danny’s mind. “I have no life.” Lyle Renalto had no life either. Officially, neither Angela nor Lyle had e
ither a past or a future. Looking for some sort of pattern, Danny began digging into the backgrounds of the other victims’ widows, Tracey Henley and Irina Anjou. In both cases it was the same thing. There were marriage certificates, but no birth certificates. No family had ever come forward to search for these missing women, or even officially to report them missing. They too apparently “had no life” before or after the terrible crimes that came to define them.
“Oh, there you are. I’ve been trying to get hold of you all morning.” Mathilde, Danny’s secretary, pounced on him the moment he walked through the door. She ran through the long litany of requests and demands on Danny’s time, the myriad other IRT cases that he’d been neglecting and the names of the various colleagues who were baying for his blood. When she was finally done, Danny headed into his private office. As an afterthought, Mathilde called out to him, “Oh, and Claude Demartin called. He says he has news and would you call him back as soon as possible.”
AT THE PENINSULA, THINGS BEGAN MOVING at lightning speed. Every morning, almost every hour, Lisa Baring had the same thought: I’ve got to stop this. We can’t simply run away. But Matt’s enthusiasm, his self-belief, was so strong and so intoxicating that she allowed herself to be swept along with it, to believe the impossible: that maybe, with him, she could escape. Outrun her destiny. Be happy.
Matt spent the bulk of each morning making Skype calls from his computer. Having decided air travel was too risky, he’d planned a route using only boats and trains, booking under false names and transferring money anonymously via DigiCash from Lisa’s Alpha Offshore account. Matt hoped that, in Asia at least, a hefty bribe would prove an acceptable alternative to picture ID. The plan was for Matt to leave first, in the small hours of the morning. Assuming they were being watched twenty-four hours a day by Inspector Liu’s men, the idea was that Matt’s departure would lure the surveillance crew away from the hotel. He would then have to lose them somewhere on the DLR and head for the harbor. This should provide enough distraction for Lisa to slip out at six A.M., dressed in the plain knee-length blue uniform worn by all the Peninsula maids, hopefully without being noticed.
Lisa asked Matt, “How on earth are we going to get hold of a uniform? Hit some poor girl over the head?”
“No. We’ll ask her nicely. Failing that, we’ll try a fifty-dollar bill and a signed photograph of Matt LeBlanc.”
Lisa laughed out loud.
“You think I’m kidding? Friends is still huge over here.” Sure enough, he pulled a sheaf of publicity head shots out of a drawer. “You’d be amazed how far these go with our Chinese friends. Like cigarettes in jail.”
Lisa shook her head. “So our grand escape plan begins with Joey Tribbiani?”
“Uh-huh. Have some faith, Lise. I know what I’m doing.”
After Lisa’s getaway, the next stage was a fishing boat to the mainland, where a “fixer”—Mr. Ong—had agreed to arrange their passage via the South China Sea and Sunda Strait to Cape Town. From there a long series of overnight train rides would ultimately bear them north. It would be a month at least before they arrived in Casablanca.
“Simple,” said Matt, which made Lisa laugh again, because, of course, the plan was anything but simple. In truth, it was fraught with danger at every turn. But Matt’s confidence was unshakable, and the fantasy too sweet and perfect to resist.
We’ll live anonymously in some tranquil riad, watching the birds flit around the fountain in the courtyard. All will be peace and calm and beauty.
He’ll never find me.
The madness will end.
At nine o’clock the night before they were due to leave, Matt left a sealed envelope with cash at the front desk. Running for his life or not, Matt Daley wasn’t the sort of guy to disappear without paying his bill. Upstairs in their suite, he and Lisa drank a last nightcap of whiskey and settled down for a few short hours of sleep.
The alarm was set for two A.M.
For the plan to work, Matt had to be on his way before three A.M.
CLAUDE DEMARTIN HAD BEEN ON THE autoroute for five straight hours before he took the exit marked Aix-en-Provence. Skirting the ancient city itself, he finally pulled in outside a nondescript light-industrial complex.
Wedged between the autoroute and the railway line, Laboratoire Chaumures was a forensic facility used by all the police forces of southern France. Two days earlier, Danny McGuire had received a call from one of their senior research technicians, confirming that the lab had indeed provided DNA sample analysis on the Anjou murder and rape case last year.
“But there were no such results filed in the police case notes,” said Danny.