Black Ice - Anne Stuart [50]
The man who sat down opposite him looked like a British civil servant—stuffy, unimaginative, middle-class and middle-aged. His name was Harry Thomason, and he was, in fact, a ruthless, soulless automaton who ran the Committee like a well-oiled machine. He shrugged out of his wet raincoat, put his newspaper on the table and ordered a cup of coffee before he finally looked at Bastien.
“What have you done, Jean-Marc?” he demanded.
Bastien lit a cigarette, his first in the last two days, milking the action of all its drama. Harry probably had as good an idea of his real name as anyone, but he went along with the Jean-Marc alias, not knowing that that particular name had come from his aunt Cecile’s pet pig.
That Jean-Marc had been a very elegant pig, of course. A family with their bloodlines would have nothing less, and Cecile enjoyed carting around her Vietnamese potbellied pig into the finest hotels in Europe and Asia. An elegant, bad-tempered pig, Jean-Marc had finally disappeared while Cecile and his mother were touring Burma. He’d always wondered if he’d ended up in someone’s kitchen, cosmic payback for the time he’d taken a chunk out of Bastien’s backside. It had been his fault—he was twelve at the time, bored, defiant, tired of being dragged from one end of the globe to the other, an adjunct to Cecile and Marcie’s renegade behavior, and as the pig received more attention and affection than he ever had, he’d decided to annoy Jean-Marc as he dozed on his fur-lined bed.
Jean-Marc had taken exception to it, and bitten Bastien on the butt, earning his grudging respect. At least the pig didn’t ignore him.
Cecile had lost interest in the pig by the time he’d disappeared, just as his mother had lost interest in her only child years ago, possibly days after he’d been born. She’d made it very clear that his presence on this earth was not by her choice—her possessive lover had refused to let her abort the child until he found out that he wasn’t the father, and by the time he took off it was too late. Marcie was in some quack’s office begging for a late-term abortion when she went into labor, and he was born three hours later.
He always wondered why she hadn’t simply strangled him and tossed him in a Dumpster or garbage can. Or not even soiled her hands by doing that much, but left him to die of starvation and cold on that November night thirty-two years ago. Maybe she’d been momentarily sentimental. Maybe it was the fact that she’d been very ill, so ill she’d almost died, so ill that they’d had to operate, removing her uterus and ovaries, making certain she’d never go through the indignity of pregnancy again. At one point he used to speculate that she’d been lying in that hospital bed, afraid of dying, and she’d made a bargain with the god she professed to believe in. If her life would be spared, she’d raise her child and be a good mother.
Well, she’d fucked that up. She’d been a lousy mother. He’d been raised, if you could call it that, by a series of hotel maids and houseboys, until he’d finally taken off at the age of fifteen, leaving with an old friend of his mother’s, a woman twice his age with the body of a teenager and the heart of a…
Well, she had had a heart, and she’d loved him. Maybe been the very first person to do so. He’d left her in Morocco when he was seventeen—just walked away one day when she was out shopping, buying him presents. When they weren’t in bed she liked to dress him in elegant clothes, and he’d learned to appreciate silk suits early on. She’d died a few years later, he’d heard, but by then he was well past any feelings of regret.
He’d been recruited in his early twenties, by a man very much like Harry Thomason. A cold-blooded, heartless son of a bitch who knew exactly what someone like Bastien could be capable of, if properly trained. And they’d seen to his training.
Politics, morals meant nothing to him. He was ostensibly working for the good side, but as far as he could tell