First Thrills - Lee Child [75]
Matosian shook his head. “You people are cold,” he said.
“Cold is a virtue,” Chloe answered. “Cold is a necessity. And you’re a few degrees below lukewarm yourself.”
“For a while there I wasn’t,” Matosian replied.
“No. That was clear.”
Their eyes met. Even in the dark, Matosian thought he could still detect a spark there.
But Honest Abe spoke up, breaking the palpable tension of the moment. “Your mention of Langley was your only mistake. We thought of shutting down the mission then.”
“So why didn’t you?”
“Because you played it right, plain and simple. Of course, it only makes sense that someone had given you your marching orders, and you being an American, they could rationally have only come from one source. You telling Chloe about it the way you did established your credibility and gave away nothing she wouldn’t have already known if she were on the other side anyway. You may have even let the information slip on purpose. It would be interesting to know if that were the case.”
“I’ll keep that as my own secret,” Matosian said, “if I’m allowed to have any, that is.”
“We’ll give you just the one,” Honest Abe said, and Matosian thought he could detect the trace of a smile in the gash of his mouth. Agency humor.
“Don,” Chloe said. “We’re done here unless you’ve got any other questions.”
“Just one,” Matosian said. “What was the deal about the password. It had nothing to do with the mission.”
“It helped bring you to Paris,” she said. “Otherwise, it was meant to be a conundrum.”
“You mean a riddle?”
“Well, not precisely. You know that a conundrum is a riddle whose answer is a pun. For example, when is a door not a door?”
“When it’s ajar, of course,” Matosian said.
“Right. So we knew we were going to keep you running around. Everywhere you went, you checked out your surroundings, and if you were going to succeed, you had to say, ‘Got to go.’ Gato go. It suggested itself.”
“And on that note,” Matosian said. “I’ve gato go now. You’ll know how to reach me again, I’m presuming.”
“Bet on it,” Chloe said.
Little Dix Bay—British Virgin Islands
Twenty-four hours later, Matosian walked out of his beachfront bungalow and across the white sand into the crystal clear and warm Caribbean water. Navigating by the bright full moon, he swam straight out from the beach for four thousand strokes, then nearly out of sight of land, turned and began the long swim back.
By the time he got to where it was shallow enough for him to stand, the sky to the east was just lightening to a nacreous glow. He could make out the tracks he’d made in the sand on the walk down from his bungalow, but now standing in those tracks was a woman, facing away from him, wearing a diaphanous white shift and nothing else.
When he finally made it back to the hardened sand where the water lapped the shoreline, she turned around and tentatively walked down to where he stood, stopping in front of him, looking up at him with a mixture of trepidation and longing.
“In Paris, I thought you were with them,” he said.
“I know. When you took the phone call. Then with the waiter.”
“Would you have let me eat that little spoonful?”
“I knew you wouldn’t, by that time. Would you have let me?”
“I didn’t, if you remember. Even though I’d been convinced you were the enemy.” He paused, then came out with another question. “And I presume the waiter, like the woman who wasn’t your sister, is all right?”
She nodded. “And ten thousand dollars richer.” A pause. “But that was when you were sure, wasn’t it? At the restaurant?”
He nodded. “Yes. No one else but you could have known where we were. You called Abe when you went to the bathroom.”
She put a hand on his arm. “By that time, I wanted to tell you, but I couldn’t. I didn’t want you to leave me, but you had to. We were both trapped in the maze we’d helped create.”
“And,” Matosian asked, “are we still trapped in it now?”
“No,” Chloe said.