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T e r r y H ay e s
The checks from Grace’s bequest arrived regularly and it meant I could live a life far more comfortable than anything the government had ever envisaged with their pension. The most tangible benefit was the apartment in Paris and I found myself racing through what had once been the mansion’s kitchen— converted to a plant room—and flying up a set of fire stairs toward my home. I opened a concealed door next to the elevator and burst into the small foyer. A woman was standing there. It was Mme. Danuta Furer, my seventy-year-old neighbor who lived in the mansion’s grandest apartment. The perfectly groomed widow of some aristocratic industrialist, she had the uncanny ability to make everyone else feel like a member of the Third World. She saw my tongue moistening my dry lips, shirt hanging out. “Something wrong, Mr. Campbell?” she asked in her inscrutable upper-class French. She knew me as Peter Campbell, on sabbatical from my job as a hedge-fund manager—the only job I knew of that would enable somebody my age to afford to live in the apartment and not work. “Fine, madame—just worried I left the oven on,” I lied. The elevator arrived, she got in, and I unlocked the steel-core door into my apartment. Bolting it, not turning on any lights, I sprinted through the living room with its beautiful bay windows and a small but growing collection of contemporary art. Bill would have liked that. In the gloom I ripped open a closet in the dressing room and keyed a code into a small floor safe. Inside was a large amount of cash, a pile of papers, eight passports in different names, and three handguns. I pulled out a 9mm Glock fitted with an extended barrel—the most accurate of them all—checked the action, and grabbed a spare clip. As I slipped it into my waistband, I dwelled on something that had been ricocheting around my head all the way home—if it was the Greeks, how the hell had they found me? One theory I could come up with was that the Russians had stumbled across something and passed it on to their former partners—just for old times’ sake, you know, and a bucketload of untraceable cash.
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11/5/13 5:27 PM