Reckless

“I’ve got nothing to tell,” Tracy said. “I’ve been recovering from a major head injury, remember? I’ve been off the case.”

Jeff gave her a loving look. “You’ll have to try that line with someone who doesn’t know you, darling. You wouldn’t have been to see Guy or Madame Dubonnet if you weren’t working. And you wouldn’t know about Sally Faiers either. So what’s been going on?”

Tracy told him the CIA’s latest theories. That Hunter Drexel was definitely involved in the Neuilly shootings. And that he probably had a hand in Sally’s death as well. And Hélène’s.

“I didn’t know about the student. That’s sad. . . .” Jeff frowned. But he seemed to hesitate.

“I’m sensing there’s a but?”

“I don’t know.” He looked at Tracy intently. “Hunter’s obviously involved with Group 99 somehow. He’s not who he says he is.”

“I agree.”

“The Americans and the Brits both have him in the frame now. And they’re probably right. But something doesn’t add up.”

“Right,” Tracy whispered. “Like the fact that he didn’t shoot Sally Faiers.”

“Exactly.”

“But Frank Dorrien knew she’d been killed within minutes.”

Jeff nodded. “I thought about that. He could have been watching the house.”

“In which case he’d have seen who did it. Yet no one was arrested.”

“I thought about that too.”

“But you still trust him?” Tracy looked deep into Jeff’s eyes. Looking back at her, Jeff longed to tell her everything. It took every ounce of his willpower not to.

“You know me,” he quipped. “I don’t trust anyone. How about you?”

“I think Greg Walton’s a good guy,” said Tracy. She wasn’t about to bring up Cameron’s name again with Jeff. She’d learned her lesson last time. “I told him I’d pass on any intelligence you gave me, by the way. As we’re being so ‘open’ with each other.”

“Don’t.” Jeff said, more forcefully than he’d intended. “Whatever gets to Walton gets to Milton Buck,” he explained, spitting out the FBI agent’s name as if it were poison. “Never forget that, Tracy. Never.”

Tracy was surprised. Jeff had as much reason to dislike Agent Buck as she did. After all, if Buck had had his way, Jeff would have been left to die at the hands of Daniel Cooper, nailed to a cross in a remote Bulgarian barn. Yet in the past it had always been Tracy who’d felt afraid of Milton Buck. Jeff had treated him almost as a joke.

Had something changed?

“I assume the British know about ‘Kate’?” she asked, changing tack.

“Yes. I told Frank Dorrien everything I just told you. MI6 have been digging for a week, looking for any ‘Kates’ in Hunter’s past.”

“Have they found any?”

“A whole bunch. I’m telling you, Drexel makes Magic Johnson look like a Buddhist monk. But no one significant. Yet.”

“All right,” Tracy said, making another sign of the cross and standing up to leave. “I’ll get on it.”

Jeff put a hand on her arm. “Don’t disappear on me, Tracy. I think Hunter came back to Paris because he’s planning another attack of some kind. This ‘story’ nonsense is just a cover.”

Tracy nodded. Hunter Drexel as the innocent, intrepid journalist was simply not believable anymore. Too many people had died.

“He’s trying to get Kate, whoever she is, to help him. You mustn’t get too close to this woman. If you raise her suspicions, you could be in very real danger.”

“You think I don’t know that? This time last week I was in a coma,” Tracy reminded him. “I’m doing this for Nick, Jeff. That’s the only reason.”

Jeff watched as Tracy left the church, her head bowed, like any other anonymous war widow.