Persona (20 page)

“Fine. And I'm surprised you don't know where I am.”

“Not for lack of trying,” he admitted. “I was worried. At first I thought it might have been some rebellious foolishness, and I ran for the car to tell it not to take you anywhere before I could find out why you'd staged something so dangerous, but as soon as I realized you'd been injured, taken . . .” He trailed off, lifted one shoulder an inch, as much a shrug as he'd ever allow.

His face looked different when he was tired. More honest. She could almost believe he'd been worried about her all this time.

“You'll hear from me soon,” she said, “one way or another. Are you prepared to back me?”

He frowned. “What are you planning?”

“You'll know it when it happens.” A diplomat's answer; authoritative but without any real facts in it.

“Suyana, who have you fallen in with?”

He was skipping the diplomacy. Impressive. But it was a question with too many answers.

“I'm alone,” she said, and even to her own ears it sounded sad enough to be true.

For a moment, he looked at her as if he'd missed her. Then he said, “I've sent an associate to look for you. A private hire. If you keep to the main roads, he'll catch sight of you. When he catches up, tell him he's south of Normandy. He'll tell you they're hardy folk. Then let him know what he or I can do to help. He knows how to reach me. It shouldn't be long.”

Suyana supposed that was meant to be reassuring. She smiled a little despite herself, and after a moment he matched it, one eyebrow going up as if he was actually enjoying being on her side.

It would certainly be a novel thing.

Then his expression shifted. She knew this one; this was the face when he wanted to draw the truth out of you before it was too late.

“Suyana. Where are you?”

Downstairs, a car door slammed.

It was nothing—this was Paris, it was daytime, cars were everywhere—but the hair on her neck stood up, and she knew this wasn't a neighbor home early.

She shut the connection.

“How much did you hear?” she asked, without turning.

From behind her, Grace said, “Enough to know you're better at this than he thinks.”

Diplomat answer. Still, nothing Suyana had said could have given her away; she wasn't in the habit of confiding.

“I have to go,” she said. “They're on their way.”

“Who?”

“The IA has your place bugged. Either they actually paid attention to the feed for once, or Colin intervened and gave me up.”

Grace looked her flat in the eye and said, in a voice that had nothing of the diplomat in it, “Not from any signal of mine.”

“I know,” Suyana said, meaning it. “Thank you. But they're still here, and I have to go.”

Grace was throwing off the bedding and moving through the apartment, wiping Suyana's water bottle free of prints, sliding a slim stack of euros across the counter. She pointed at her comm bracelet.

Suyana shook her head—it wasn't worth the trouble Grace would be in if they found Suyana carrying it. At this point, they could still claim Grace had been under duress, if they had to. But if Grace had pulled her ID off the bracelet willingly, it put her under the knife too.

Grace said, “Ah, right, the hostage scenario, I see. I'll have a word with Martine, then, in case we need to get a story straight.”

Suyana froze. “Is that wise?”

“Don't worry,” Grace said. “She's not as bad as she seems. I doubt she could be.”

“Do you call on her a lot in crises?”

Grace raised an eyebrow. “You might be surprised.”

Suyana really would be. But Grace must know Martine better; maybe Martine just sat around off-camera, brimming with goodwill and waiting to be helpful.

Grace moved to the kitchen and opened a door that Suyana had thought was a pantry. But it was a second set of stairs, narrow and broken-down and filthy, and Suyana could have wept that she wouldn't be fighting her way down as the IA was coming up.

“Take care,” Suyana said, nearly under her breath, as she passed.

Grace nodded. “Good luck,” she said sincerely, and disappeared from the doorway.

As Suyana caught the landing and pivoted to head down the stairs, the last thing she saw was a sliver of Grace calmly swinging a folding chair, and the conference panel going up in a shower of sparks.

Daniel still couldn't quite believe that when Fine Tailoring was recruiting you got a chauffeured car, and as soon as they'd stapled a camera to your temple, you were on the Metro with the rest.

“This seems insulting,” he said as he and Bo emerged. “How much do you miss in all that time you spend underground?”

“I don't miss much.” Bo was already moving, scanning the street as he went, glancing once at his watch as if he were due to meet Margot for coffee somewhere.

Daniel followed. “What do Kate and Dev do with that footage?”

“What would you do with hours and hours of people on the subway?”

Spy on them for all they were worth. “Nothing.”

“Well, there you go.”

It was good to know some footage was deleted. It gave him some breathing room, maybe. Somehow. The idea of the rest of his life being on CCTV made the backs of his hands itch and the front of his throat close up.

“This doesn't seem like Margot's kind of neighborhood,” Daniel said. “I would have pegged her somewhere more . . . Ritz.”

Bo glanced at him for an instant between sweeps of the street. “George V,” he admitted.

Of course. What was the point in running the IA if you couldn't sleep in a penthouse suite where your night-light was the glow of the Champs-Élysées?

“So what are we doing this far south of the river, exactly?”

Bo pulled out his phone. “Following a pattern,” he said as he dialed. “Keep up, man. Even you must have done some research before you showed up to watch Suyana Sapaki get shot.”

“Fuck you,” said Daniel politely.

They rounded a corner and headed for what looked like a fortress that time forgot. A tourist sign proclaimed
MUSÉE DE CLUNY
.

Bo headed around to one of the service doors, where a young man was taking a smoke break that conveniently ended the moment they showed. He left the door open as he went back inside, and Daniel and Bo slipped into the museum.

“Stay one room behind me,” Bo said quietly. “You're watching me, not her.”

Frankly, he would have watched Bo even if that hadn't been his assignment. Margot was worth spying on, but Daniel knew enough about Margot to guess that if she came here as often as she seemed to, it wasn't to meet anyone. Everyone had one thing they kept just for themselves. If Margot wanted to conduct illicit business, she could do it more easily in the crowds of the Champs-Élysées.

Bo had to know that too. He'd taken the footage. Which meant they were here just because Bo had a favorite.

Daniel intended to catch every look Bo shot her way. Li Zhao looked down on personal involvement between a snap and his target; no telling whether this would be leverage whenever he wanted to graduate to his own beat.

He knew he was being punished for resisting recruitment, but he couldn't help but be a little insulted at the instruction. You didn't get from Free Korea to Europe without being able to blend in.

Bo vanished into the warren of rooms. Daniel picked up a map from the tourist desk and kept one eye on it as he followed Bo's lazy circle around the ground floor.

Daniel wondered how many field agents Bonnaire Atelier and Fine Tailoring International actually had; how many snaps were walking right now through London, New York, Hong Kong, Cairo. How many in Paris? One of them had to be looking for Suyana now that she was a person of interest.

How much information did they already have about her? Where would they start looking? Had what he'd done only helped them? Was it better for her to be tracked in case someone tried to make her disappear? Would they find her before whoever was after her finished the job?

Eventually Bo stationed himself at the juncture of two exhibits. It took Daniel a second to realize where Margot must be. Bo was good about not quite looking at anything.

Daniel obediently took up a position where he could see them both at a distance, and held his breath.

Margot wore a camel coat and prim heels, her hands clasped around a handbag that seemed too small for the amount of politics she was responsible for. She was standing inside the stained-glass room, bathed in a rainbow of light, her placid face tilted up like a happily receiving saint.

At the back corner, Bo stood against the curve of the wall looking sidelong at the object of his dreams, his body a murky shadow at the head of a hallway full of tombs.

[
ID 35178, Frame 51: IA Committee head Margot standing in the stained-glass room of the Musée de Cluny, Paris. She is alone. She does not seem to anticipate a meeting.

Background subject: ID 40291 is recording.
]

By the time Margot left the Cluny it was nearly dusk, and as they headed out, Daniel said, “There has to be a point at which crack surveillance teams eat something.”

“Only after we're covered by another shift. Margot's A-level.”

Daniel wondered if it was too late to throw himself into the Seine. “And how did you get this A-level assignment?”

“Li Zhao put me on it a few years back, when the last day guy got made and had to be relocated in a hurry.”

That was only half an answer. “So is Margot under watch twenty-four/seven?”

Bo gave him an
of course
look. “She's the head of the Central Committee of the world's biggest diplomatic assembly.”

“So why you?”

Bo looked away, let out a heavy breath through his nose. “We're losing her.”

Surprisingly, Margot didn't step into an IA-plated car to get whisked back to the hotel. Instead, she walked up to the quay and across the Pont au Double to the Île de la Cité, looking like a still from an old movie when she turned, and her profile against Notre-Dame caught the setting sun.

Daniel wondered if this was what would happen to Martine, as photogenic and self-aware as Margot could hope to be, who'd followed Margot's footsteps out of Norway right into the upper echelons of the International Assembly. Martine wouldn't be able to take over anytime soon—Margot wouldn't be giving up that Head of Committee chair until she died in it—but he had a suspicion Martine needed only to reach out with the right gift in hand to be lifted up into the Committee.

Maybe she already had. He'd pay ten grand cash to know whether Martine had given up Suyana. She was a game player. She knew how much that information was worth. It would be all the leverage Martine needed to seal her career.

He wondered if, fifteen years from now, he'd be following Martine down the streets to Terrain the way Bo followed Margot, half hunting and half in love.

They followed Margot at a distance. Daniel kept a steady pace, with Bo catching up with him or falling behind, like two strangers might.

After one pass where Margot glanced toward the river with her hair just beginning to come loose, Daniel said, “She takes a good picture, I'll give you that.”

“That's not my concern,” Bo said, moving ahead so quickly Daniel couldn't tell what his expression was. “I only care what she's doing.”

Even if Bo was better at lying than he was, Daniel would never have believed it. A photographer wanted the best shot, always, no matter what was happening.

Someday, when he could admit it to himself, he suspected he'd look at the photo of Suyana being shot—the sharp line of her profile, the blood in the sunlight, her body not yet coiled to run—and think it was beautiful.

When Margot looked up at the spires of the church, Bo edged through the crowd a few people to his right, to preserve her profile.

Bo hadn't answered Daniel's question about how one got assigned to the most powerful person in the world, but maybe he didn't have to. She was powerful and secretive, even under surveillance. Li Zhao had a knack for this; she'd probably guessed Bo would get too fascinated with Margot to ever look elsewhere.

(Did Bo know it himself? Maybe Bo thought he just liked having a prestige gig. When it was Daniel's turn to follow Martine, would he find himself staring at the curl of her lip every time she delivered an insult?)

The sunset against Notre-Dame was prime tourist material, and the crowd packed tight along the pavers. Margot moved through it like a wisp of smoke, but Bo didn't push forward to follow.

“Aren't you going after her?”

“We'll let this spool out for a while,” Bo said, gnawing absently on one corner of his mouth. “No need to risk exposure if she's just here to feel like a spy. If she meets with anyone, I'll move in. You stay here.”

If she's just here to feel like a spy.
Daniel rolled that one around for a second.

For a few minutes it was just the murmur of the crowd and the honking traffic across the bridge and, every once in a while, a muffled whirring close to Daniel's skull, as his camera transmitted a batch of photos.

Daniel would get used to it. He hoped.

Then a movement through the crowd caught his eye, and Daniel looked up to see the stranger from Bo's last excursion sidling up to Margot.

Bo vanished.

Daniel tried to get a better look without disobeying the order to stay put. He could almost place the man, but who? One of the handlers? Had he been standing in the background of some IA broadcast Daniel half remembered?

The stranger leaned in and said something brief and measured. Daniel couldn't see enough of his expression to draw conclusions.

Then Margot turned.

Her placidity had vanished. Her eyes were narrowed, and her face seemed to pull in on itself and sharpen as she looked him over. The stranger shrank back an inch, which Daniel could only think wasn't far enough.