Dirty Work

14

Stone looked at Dino and Carpenter narrowly. “I hope this is some kind of joke.”

“I’m afraid not,” Carpenter said seriously. “My people are very interested in finding her, and they asked me to liaise with the NYPD. That’s why Dino and I were in the same meeting. Since we were already acquainted, I picked him to liaise with.”

“Who is this woman?” Stone asked.

“I’ll tell you all we know about her, and believe me, it won’t take long. She was born Marie-Thérèse du Bois, in Zurich, of a Swiss father and an Egyptian mother, but she doesn’t use that name anymore, because if she did, she might get caught.”

“Tell me all of it.”

“Little Marie-Thérèse grew up in Switzerland and in Egypt, and she was something of a whiz with languages, being exposed to four—the usual Swiss three, plus her mother’s Arabic—while growing up. Even as a girl, her hobby was studying languages. In addition to her native tongues, she picked up Farsi, Urdu, and some Hindi. Her father imported Middle Eastern products to Switzerland—rugs, olive oil, dates, pottery—whatever he could turn a profit on, and he was very prosperous, ended up rich, in fact. She traveled with him often around the Mediterranean basin, picking up Spanish and Greek along the way. She’d sit in hotel rooms, watching local television and conjugating verbs.”

“Good God, how many languages does she speak?”

“Nobody knows, but I’d guess at least a dozen, and with perfect accents in various dialects.”

“So, why does she go around killing people?”

“When she was twenty, my firm and the CIA were pursuing the members of a terrorist organization in Cairo who had been killing foreign tourists. We received a tip that half a dozen members of the group would be traveling in a white Renault van along a major boulevard, en route to planting some explosives. Cooperating with Egyptian intelligence, our people set up an elaborate trap for them at an intersection. There wasn’t supposed to be any traffic to speak of. Unfortunately, Marie-Thérèse and her parents were driving home from a very late party in another white van, and someone fired a rocket launcher at the wrong vehicle. Her parents were both killed instantly, but Marie-Thérèse, who was asleep in the third seat, was blown clear and survived with only scratches.

“She retreated to her Cairo home and became reclusive, but she was bitter about her parents’ death. She refused compensation from all three governments, but then she was a wealthy young woman, having inherited two large houses and her father’s considerable fortune.

“She had a boyfriend, an Irani, whose politics extended to extreme violence, and we think she was recruited by the boy and sent to a terrorist training camp in Libya, where she made contacts among others of her kind from Ireland, Japan, Germany, and God knows where else.

“She was trained in firearms, explosives, and chemical weapons, but her handlers, when they learned of her language skills, thought her meant for better things. They taught her assassination skills, document forging, and just about anything else a budding terrorist could possibly want to know, keeping her interest by telling her they would help her find the people responsible for her parents’ death so she could kill them. She also became very physically fit in the desert, and she’s known to work out almost obsessively, wherever she goes.

“When she finished her schooling in Libya, she returned to Cairo, then Zurich, selling her two houses and secreting the money in accounts around the world. Some say her holdings ran to several tens of millions of dollars. She returned to Cairo and, in effect, ceased to exist. The little we know of her since then comes from rumors and a couple of very aggressive interrogations of people who knew her.

“She seems to have assassinated two Egyptian politicians who held views unpopular with her terrorist friends. She shot one in the head while he waited in his car at a traffic signal, then calmly boarded a bus and rode away. That evening, she dropped cyanide, or something like it, in the other’s drink in a crowded restaurant, then climbed out the ladies’-room window while he was still in his death throes. We think she performed half a dozen other such jobs over the next couple of years. Her handlers realized that they had a very valuable commodity on their hands, and they strung her along by telling her they were making progress in learning the names and locations of her parents’ killers. They were lying, of course.

“Finally, she became impatient. She kidnapped the head of our Cairo station and tortured him until he gave the names of everyone involved in the operation,” Carpenter said calmly. “Then she cut his throat and watched him bleed to death. The body, naked and very damaged, was deposited on the steps of the British embassy.”

“Then she started hunting them?” Stone asked.

“Yes. The Americans were the first and easiest target. They were husband and wife. Both worked in their embassy in Cairo, and she fire-bombed their apartment while they slept.

“The British contingent, four of them, took longer. She garotted one in a railway station men’s room in Bonn. The other, she stabbed with a poisoned umbrella tip as he walked across Chelsea Bridge, in London.” Carpenter started to continue, but stopped.

“Go on,” Stone said.

“She murdered Lawrence Fortescue the night before last,” Carpenter said quietly.

“Larry Fortescue was a member of your service?”

“He was the man I told you about, the one I had a relationship with who decided to work abroad. He came here two years ago, married Elena Marks, and resigned from the firm.”

“So she got them all,” Stone said. “One by one.”

“No,” Carpenter said, “not all. She hasn’t gotten me yet.”

“You?”

“It was my first assignment abroad,” she said. “I went along merely as an observer.”

Stone gulped. “Does she know you’re in New York?”

“I don’t know,” Carpenter replied. “But I’m moving out of your house tonight, and into a hotel.”

“But why? You’re safe with me.”

“Stone,” Dino said, tapping the newspaper on the table, “if little Marie-Thérèse, or one of her friends, happens to read today’s Post, she’ll know that the taking of her picture was instigated by a certain lawyer with a ‘hard’ name.”

“But that’s not enough to identify me, surely.”

“And,” Dino said, “she knows where you’re dining tonight.”

Stone looked slowly around Elaine’s. He saw half a dozen women who could have been the woman in the photograph.

“Do you think this Marie . . . what’s her name . . .”

Carpenter spoke up. “She picked up a sobriquet in Paris, after murdering a member of the French cabinet. Interpol calls her ‘La Biche.’ And yes, she could be here tonight.”

Stone pushed back his chair. “Let’s get out of here,” he said.