Shadow Knight's Mate (24 page)

He was on his way to Nice, to the home of Paul Desquat, a French architect and occasional essayist. The dual occupation was a clear sign. Paul Desquat was a Circle member.

Jack had met him through Madeline, on a short trip to Paris those few years ago that seemed so long ago, because they were on the other side of the great divide in his life. It was only later, when he'd been re-evaluating everything Madeline had done, that Jack thought she must have had a purpose in introducing him to Desquat. Letting Desquat meet him.

None of the people to whom Madeline had introduced Jack had contacted him after her death, except for a few uninspired words of condolence. That seemed a clue now too. Some of those connections should have survived Madeline. Unless her death had been specifically intended to sever them.

So Jack was going to pick up the threads again. He didn't have time to track them all down, not now. So he had returned to the flat in London. The Chelsea flat had been maintained just as Madeline had kept it, another signal. The Circle owned that flat, and they wouldn't let a civilian buy it or move into it. Madeline's mind had been too twisty. She loved puzzles too much. There was
no telling how many signs she had left. People had been studying that flat very quietly ever since her death.

But she and Jack had had signals between them that no one else shared. Not many, they hadn't had a long enough history for that. And maybe everything she'd said to him had been false, even her personality made up for his benefit. But he didn't believe that, and if it was true everything else he did was pointless anyway.

On Jack's way to France, Jack
had
stopped off in London. After making sure he hadn't been followed, he had slipped into the flat in Chelsea very surreptitiously, he thought, but obviously not, since he'd been seen. The Chair had known about his going there. Maybe it was under constant surveillance. Jack hadn't spotted any cameras, but he hadn't given himself enough time to check out the place thoroughly.

Going inside the Chelsea flat was like walking through a time warp. Her things were still there. Her scent leaped into his nostrils. That must come from his memory, it couldn't still linger here. A faint aroma of violets, coupled with the scent of her own flesh. Jack swallowed and looked around coldly, but he couldn't stop his flesh from prickling with the feeling that she was about to walk through that bedroom door.

So he walked boldly in there. The bed was made up neatly, still with the flounces. Had someone found new sheets and ruffles in the same pattern, or kept the old ones all these years? The air smelled slightly musty. It circulated, but no one came here to dust regularly.

Even Madeline's sheets were puzzles. This one she had designed herself. It featured a long meandering path through gardens and villages, like a giant gameboard. Jack had tried following those paths with his mind on idle mornings when he'd awakened under those sheets and lay there waiting for Madeline to wake up too. Sometimes his finger had traced the paths, over the hollows and hills of the bed, over her body, until Madeline woke up laughing.

He drew a deep breath and let it out slowly. This place would immobilize him if he let it. He wasn't here on a memory tour.

In the next hour Jack took the place apart, neatly. He even managed to get into the safe under the fireplace, but that was too obvious a hiding place. All he found inside was some jewelry and a good bit of cash. He left it all. Once Madeline had modelled some of that jewelry for him, memorably wearing nothing else. Jewelry from an ankle bracelet to a tiara. “And I never quite figured out what to do with this,” she'd smiled, fastening a long necklace around her waist. It had a pendant that hung down, strategically.

Jack studied all the paintings, the books, the wallpaper. The way the dishes were stacked and the glasses put away. No scrapbook, no mementoes of her career. No photographs. That seemed a strange absence. Someone might have taken them.

Jack had returned to the bed. If Madeline had left him a personal message it would have been here, wouldn't it? He had stood and stared at the sheet, following the path. It drew his eye downward. He had never noticed that before, possibly because his usual angle was from under the sheet. But looking at it from this perspective, he found the paths were not random at all. They went downward.

Along the way there were cottages and villages, occasionally a large country house, French Provencial style. Jack had stood trying not to move, except his eyes. They inevitably traveled down and down, to the foot of the bed. Near the bottom there was a representation of a house in a different style from everything else. A villa. Jack had stood there in the Chelsea bedroom studying that house. Had he seen it before?

He had remembered something else as he stood there. Madeline had kept a light blue coverlet at the very foot of the bed, of the softest texture Jack had ever felt. It was gone now. Now that he thought about it, he realized Madeline had gotten rid of that coverlet before her death. Right about the time she got sick it disappeared. Now it existed only in Jack's memory, but it was firmly placed there.

It had been a deep, peaceful blue, with a wavelike pattern in it that almost seemed to ripple even when it lay still. Sometimes that sheet, that coverlet had in fact moved like waves, as Jack and Madeline had set them in motion. She had laughed a couple of times when she made the comparison. The waves. And the coverlet was blue like the sea.

It had seemed too simple. Jack had stood there staring, remembering. He also remembered the jewelry, the time Madeline had worn it and nothing else. She had been laughing, describing the jewelry, some of its history. Keeping him tauntingly at bay. The jewelry had seduced his gaze downward as well. He'd reached for the pendant on the necklace, the one hanging below her waist, pretending to be curious about it. “It looks valuable,” he had said with a dry mouth.

Madeline had grabbed his hand and laughed. “No. I got it from a street vendor in Nice. But it goes nicely with the necklace, doesn't it?”

“Nicely from Nice,” Jack had repeated, the best joke he could manage under the circumstances.

Madeline had pulled him close, her eyes only inches from his, and she was no longer laughing. “Remember,” she'd said. Then the moment of intensity had passed. She'd drawn back, laughing again. “There might be a quiz later.”

But Jack did remember, years later as he stood in the otherwise empty flat again. Nice. And the path on the sheet led his eye down. Southward. To a villa that, when Madeline had lived here, had stood beside a coverlet as blue as the sea.

He also remembered the money in the safe. A thousand pounds, but the rest in francs. Before Euros.

No one else had been able to figure this out because they hadn't had the clues. Jack hadn't even needed to come here. She had tried to embed it in his memory.

She had succeeded.

Jack had stood there thinking he understood something, far from everything. He had moved carefully around the flat then, not returning to the safe or the bed. He'd stood again for a long time
in front of a painting that was full of symbols, like something by Dali. He hadn't been able to make a lick of sense out of it. But if he was under surveillance, the last thing people would see him doing would be studying this painting, tracing a couple of the symbols with his finger, before he suddenly strode out of the flat as if with inspired purpose.

Now, having just sent Arden on her separate way, Jack finally had a chance to act on his hunch. He had been wanting to do so for weeks, but first he'd had to get to the ambassador, then other matters had intervened. But now, before he went to Salzburg he intended to stop in Nice, at the seaside villa of the architect Paul Desquat.

The train was fast. Jack would have liked to go by air again, but he had no more jet helicopter favors to call in and no airport was convenient. So he took a train from Italy, which was nice because it gave him time to think. Or would have if he could have turned off his nerves. Jack hardly sat on the train, he kept changing cars, standing at the back to see which passengers turned to look at him. Several did. He tried to narrow down the suspects. The teenage American girl, could he eliminate her? Not really. What about the two businessmen in suits, traveling together? Jack wasn't willing to scratch them off the list of people who might be following him either, even after one put his arm around the other's shoulders in an intimate way. What, you think there aren't any gay assassins?

He edged his way through the cars, imagining that he was gathering a wake of people out to get him. He kept studying his fellow passengers, most intently the few who looked more or less like he did. This time there were no Jack doppelgangers, at least not out in the open. Maybe they had one stashed so he could take Jake's place after they'd offed him. It would be a simple matter of pushing Jack out a door.

Because this wasn't a steam engine in the old west. This was a sleek silver European metroliner, going a hundred and twenty miles an hour between stops. There'd be no jumping off
this train and rolling gently down a slope to come to a rest. If someone were propelled off this train the suction of the train's speed might pull him under the wheels. If you beat that hazard you would land on rocks at a speed of a hundred miles an hour, shattering whatever bones first hit the ground, including a skull. A very skillful adventurer, with pinpoint timing, might be able to leap from this train and suffer no worse than several compound fractures, unconsciousness, and a hospital stay. If he got lucky.

So Jack paced and jittered and had no time to plan what he would do once he got to Nice.

Rachel and Stevie had been Americans, raised in America. They'd always known they'd have to return to the countries of their origin, but by that time they'd become Americans. That was the Circle's hope.

But sometimes, once in a great while, the Circle had to recruit members from other countries, brought up there, knowing their own countries. The Circle needed that intimate familiarity with foreign places. These recruits had to be wholly foreign yet wholly members of the Circle, too. But it is very hard to create a world citizen. Teaching and training these recruits in their home countries made it harder to instill the Circle's values, which were intrinsically American. It was always a risk, and sometimes it didn't succeed. Those people had to be dealt with later.

Paul Desquat was one of those foreign-raised members. He remained a member in very good standing. Jack knew, for example, that the Chair was receiving regular reports from him during the current crisis. It was hoped that Desquat would be very useful in stabilizing Europe.

But Jack had met the architect years earlier, with Madeline. He was sure now that that meeting had meant something. Madeline hadn't done anything by accident. But Jack had heard nothing from Paul Desquat in the five years since Madeline's death. That seemed odd now. If they had thought Jack worth recruiting, why
hadn't anyone tried to continue that after Madeline's death? Or had she determined that Jack wasn't material for the Inner Circle, and had waved them off?

He had a sudden thought: had Madeline faked her own death in order to start a new life somewhere else, one without Jack in it?

Members of the group had done such things before, when they'd become too well-known in a particular field. And Madeline had been a very popular designer.

Had she bailed on him?

Jack didn't believe that. That would mean everything he'd known during those few months in London had been fake. Madeline's affection for him, the glimpses of another world, the puzzles. The sex amid jewelry.

If that was true, if Madeline was still alive somewhere in the world, then there was only one thing for Jack to do. Track her down and kill her.

It was a strange thing to hope for, that his one true love had been murdered, but it was the only hope Jack had. Now, in the midst of this world crisis, he intended to find the proof one way or the other, and hope the two were connected. Who else but a ruthless Inner Circle could have pulled off such a thing? Maybe this inner group believed that America would be better off in isolation from the world. Maybe that had been the point of the 9-11 attacks, and this was another stab at the same goal.

Too many maybes. Jack had come to Nice to find answers.

He felt pretty sure he had gotten off the train unobserved. In a small cafe in Nice he resumed his Internet game. Sure enough, his best virtual friend was waiting for him. “WANNA PLAY?” Oh yes, Jack wanted to play.

An hour later he shut off, right in the middle of a maneuver that he hoped would keep his opponent off-balance for a while. Jack went into a shop and bought a bathing suit, towel, and small carrying bag. The thing about European shops was their look of permanence. Shops in buildings that looked older than the country Jack came from, possibly with the same shopkeepers. The
buildings looked as if they had been remodelled from seventeenth century baronial manors, and not remodelled much. By contrast, Jack realized, stores in America, even the grandest ones, looked as if they had just been thrown up by a construction crew that morning, and might be scheduled for demolition that afternoon. How could such grand old buildings as these carry items as common as bathing trunks and gym bags? Europe made him feel that there had once been a world of grace and beauty, but it had been conquered and extinguished by the Gap. He wanted to apologize before he left.