Her Spy to Have (Spy Games Book 1) (18 page)

She managed the gearshift but fumbled with the unfamiliar ignition. Garrett reached over and helped her find the right position for the key, his hand swallowing hers. Her thoughts shifted to the way he’d pinned both of hers to his bed, and everything that followed. Each second of heart-pounding pleasure.

The rain continued to pour. The inside of the van became the entire world, and he filled every inch of it. She eased her fingers from beneath his touch.

He hadn’t taken his eyes off her.

“You’ve been avoiding me,” he said.

“And you’ve let me.”

“No,” he corrected her. “I’ve been giving you space. But something happened today. I’d like to know what it was.”

Isabelle’s mouth went dry, her heart hammering so loud she was certain he must hear it over the steady drumming of the rain. She’d made her decision. Now she had to live with it. She hadn’t told her father that she believed CSIS was searching for him. She wasn’t telling Garrett anything more than she already had, either. She didn’t want to choose sides between them.

She turned her face away and looked at the streaming driver’s side window so she wouldn’t have to meet his eyes and read the disappointment in them. When she spoke, she was as honest with him as she could be. “I have nothing to tell you.”

He cupped her chin in firm fingers and forced her to look at him. His expression was grave, but he’d shut down his thoughts so she couldn’t read them. The creases around his mouth, so evident when he smiled, had smoothed. He dropped a light kiss on her lips.

“I guess this is it, then,” he said.

She swallowed hard against the painful lump in her throat. She’d known from the beginning there could never be anything of significance between them. She hadn’t expected to fall in love with him.

The rain slowed, then stopped altogether. The sun burst through a break in the clouds. Regret burned at the backs of her eyes. “I wish things could have been different.”

He let go of her and settled back in the passenger seat, six feet of rugged male indifference wrapped in a white Henley shirt and wheat-colored Dockers.

“Put your right foot on the brake, start the engine, and slide the gearshift into drive,” he said. “If you cut the wheels hard to the left, you should be able to pull back onto the road with no problem at all. Stay clear of the shoulder. It’ll be soft.”

Slowly, Isabelle maneuvered the van onto the dirt road. Muddy water from the puddles sprayed off the tires as she stepped on the accelerator. A minute later, they were on pavement again.

“For the record,” Garrett said, staring straight ahead, “I wish things could have been different, too.”

Chapter Eleven

Garrett’s plane touched down on the runway with a bump and the heavy exhalation of reverse thrusters. It taxied to the terminal. Ten minutes later, the seat belt lights blinked off and people crowded the narrow aisle, tugging their laptops and carry-ons from the overhead bins.

In front of the terminal, he grabbed a taxi for CSIS headquarters in Ottawa’s East end. He had an evening flight back to Halifax to catch, even though there was no chance he’d be getting more information from Isabelle. She knew too much about him and who he worked for, and she was bent on protecting her father.

While he’d never intended to make her choose between them, he’d hoped she’d decide to do what was morally right. Isabelle, however, honestly wanted to believe that her father’s activities were no more than a game and it wasn’t Garrett’s job to try to convince her otherwise. He dealt in information. Facts. All of which indicated Marc Beausejour was involved in something far bigger than CSIS had suspected.

The taxi pulled up at the entrance to a rectangular, concrete and glass building. Garrett paid the driver, then went through security. Once inside he headed straight for the director’s office, pausing only to speak to a few people he knew. He took an elevator to a sunny office on the third floor. The office overlooked a row of cultivated trees and beyond it, the parking lot.

John Carmichael sat at his desk, a dark frown of concentration permanently etched on his face. Garrett guessed his age to be around sixty—maybe a little more, could be less. He was retired military, with an impressive career that spring-boarded off a degree in engineering from the prestigious Royal Military Academy. That was all his immediate staff knew of him, or at least, was willing to share. Garrett had never seen his wife, although John wore a ring so assumed he was married.

John looked up when he noticed Garrett standing in the doorway. “Have a seat, Downing. What’s so important it couldn’t wait one more week?”

“Isabelle Beausejour is a dead end,” Garrett said. “She’s not going to give up any information on her father. She knows what I am—and no, I didn’t tell her. But from what little she’s told me, Beausejour doesn’t trust her any more than he does anyone else. He’s got her convinced he’s nothing more than a big kid playing high stakes poker.”

“Aren’t we all,” John said. Garrett could hear the fatigue in his voice. “Is it worth bringing her in to see if maybe you’ve missed something?”

Garrett gave his honest opinion. “No. He hasn’t involved her in anything. Not yet, anyway. I do think she can lead us to him, but your guess is as good as mine as to when that might be. He’s hiding, and he’s not telling her where.” He cleared his throat. “There’s a bigger reason I’m here. Beausejour has some serious connections. He managed to track down where Isabelle’s been staying and tapped into my brother-in-law’s home phone line.”

John’s jaw went slack. “You are shitting me.”

“I wish I was.”

Garrett filled him in.

The director slumped back in his chair. “Why am I just hearing about this now?”

“Because I wanted to tell you in private. If he could track down his daughter and tap a phone line, and hand deliver a message to her, all while hiding his physical location through a VPN, do you still think he’s a little man?”

“No,” John said. “I don’t.”

“So here’s what we know. Beausejour’s name has come up a few times in previous investigations dealing with stolen military goods. He grew up in Canada. He’s got some good connections here. We also know that a Dutch player is close friends with our minister of National Defence, and also happens to be a friend of Beausejour’s. The minister has lots of friends we don’t know about. If we connect the dots, who do you suppose one of those friends might be? Who’s our best guess?”

“It’s going to take a lot more than my best guess to make me start pointing fingers at the minister,” John said.

“But is it enough to make you withhold a few details in your reports to him?”

“Yes.” John rubbed the back of his neck, admitting defeat. “It is. Let’s back up and go over what we know about Beausejour’s personal life for a minute. He has a daughter, also born in Canada. His wife died in a car accident. She and the daughter were living in northern Quebec with her parents at the time. Do we know if he has any remaining immediate family other than the daughter?”

“None that we’ve found. Isabelle doesn’t seem to know anything about her family here. She was too young when she left Canada to remember much. She said her grandparents never liked her father, and they had a fight with him after her mother’s funeral. The next day, he took her away and she never saw them again.”

John tapped his chin with steepled fingers, thinking over everything Garrett said. Garrett could see the wheels spinning.

“Find the grandparents,” John finally said. “Ask a few questions. If they didn’t like him, they must have had a good reason.”

* * *

Garrett canceled his flight to Halifax and booked one for Quebec City instead. From there he rented a car and drove for seven hours to a small town called Lac Saint-Pierre.

He checked in at the first motel he found. It was late at night and the young man at the desk spoke very little English. While Garrett’s French was excellent, the sullen teenager claimed to have difficulty understanding him. Since all Garrett wanted from him was a room to sleep in, that point wasn’t too hard to get across.

GPS got him to Isabelle’s grandparents’ house the next morning.

Their white clapboard, two-story house sat off the main road at the end of a long, narrow dirt driveway. Trees surrounded the two-acre property. The large lawn had been neatly trimmed. The smell of fresh-cut grass flowed through his open car window. Two enormous flowerbeds fronted the house. A stone walkway led to the main door.

M. and Mme. Anjelais turned out to be a lovely couple who had no trouble understanding his French. Garrett liked them at once. While Isabelle looked nothing like her slight, white-haired grandmother, the two women shared mannerisms that he found uncanny. A graceful tilt of the head. A quiet, rapt intentness when something caught their attention.

He’d captured Mme. Anjelais’s with his first words.

“I’m a friend of Isabelle Beausejour,” he said after introducing himself. “I’m searching for her grandparents.”

M. Anjelais recovered first. He opened the screen door wide. “Perhaps you should come in.”

Garrett was ushered into a bright front room flooded with morning sunshine. It held a piano in one corner, an overstuffed pink sofa, and two matching armchairs. He took one of the chairs beside the lace-adorned window. The older couple shared the sofa facing him.

Mme. Anjelais’s eyes were anxious. “What is Isabelle like?” she asked. “Is she happy? Has Leon been good to her?”

So, they knew Beausejour as Leon, too.

Garrett could only imagine their fears. He did what he could to alleviate them. “She’s wonderful,” he assured her. “She works as an au pair. Very quiet, but she can take care of herself. Nothing much seems to bother her.”

Mme. Anjelais’s eyes misted over. “She’s like her mother, then. Christelle had a quiet personality. Everyone loved her.”

They talked for some time. Garrett answered what questions he could. He’d come here to get information, not give it, however, and it made him uncomfortable to be raising these peoples’ hopes of a reunion when he wasn’t certain how Isabelle would feel about it. He doubted if Beausejour would have painted what little memory she had of them with a flattering brush.

“If you don’t mind me asking,” he said, “how did your daughter meet Isabelle’s father?”

“At university,” M. Anjelais replied. “They both went to McGill in Montreal. Christelle planned to become a doctor. All of that ended when she met Leon, though. The next thing we knew she was pregnant and they were getting married.”

The Defence minister had gone to McGill, too. It would be a simple matter to check dates to see if they were there together. Yearbooks were another good source of information.

“They must have had mutual friends.”

“Leon was friends with anyone who mattered. He had a talent for identifying people who were going to be successful. I think that was why Christelle interested him so much. Everyone liked her. People liked Leon, too.”

“But you didn’t like him.”

“No,” M. Anjelais admitted. “Because we saw what he did to Christelle. The lies he told her. The promises he made to her, and to Isabelle, that he never kept. He was difficult to say no to. He used everyone he met. He borrowed money that he never repaid. Twice we had people come here to collect.”

Garrett filed that away as information worth investigating. Even back then, Beausejour had a pattern of narcissistic, entitled behavior. “Did he have any family?”

“Only his mother. She loved him, but she made no excuses for him. We kept in touch with her, hoping he’d bring Isabelle to visit her at least, but he never did. She passed away a few years ago.”

Garrett was forming a very clear picture of Isabelle’s father. It came as no great shock, but it didn’t fit the image she had of him at all.

“When do we get to meet Isabelle?” Mme. Anjelais asked.

That was the question he’d been dreading to hear. But it wouldn’t matter if Isabelle were angry with him for coming here. These people deserved to know their only grandchild and Isabelle was too kind to disappoint them by refusing.

“She doesn’t know I came to see you. I wanted to make sure I had the right people before I told her. Why don’t you give me a few days?” he suggested. “I’ll give her your phone number and she can call you when she’s ready.”

“Does she remember us at all?”

The wistful longing in Mme. Anjelais’s voice made Garrett feel like the worst kind of exploiter. He wished he’d come here with better, more honorable intentions. The least he could offer her was honesty and hope.

“She does. She remembers her mother, too,” he said. He rose to leave. He had a long drive ahead of him and an early morning flight to catch. “Don’t worry. She’ll call you.”

He’d see that she did.

The seven hour drive back to Quebec City left him with plenty of time to think. He’d gotten far too close to Isabelle. He cared too much that she would be hurt. He’d get nothing more from her, nor did he wish to. Not the way things now stood between them. He had other trails to follow in order to recover the missing DND weapons systems parts, the real focus of his investigation. Beausejour was only one of them.

The thought of parting from Isabelle tore a raw, jagged hole in his chest—one that would only get bigger as the days passed if he wasn’t careful.