First Thrills

The Gato Conundrum by John Lescroart

Don Matheson, also known as Nishion der Matosian in Armenia and Nishi ibn Matos throughout the Arabian world, was starting to develop museum fatigue.

And no wonder. Every wall of the Uffizi was essentially wall-papered with masterpieces by Botticelli, da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, Titian, and (Matosian’s favorite, mostly because of his name) Fra Filippo Lippi.

All the art in one place wore a guy out.

Even if, like Matosian, you were a thirty-eight-year-old ex-Navy SEAL in perfect physical condition who ran six miles in under an hour every morning before the sun was up. And even if, as happened quite frequently, you’d enjoyed phenomenal, acrobatic, and oftentimes tantric sex the night before.

But conjuring up a deep artistic appreciation for fifty or sixty paintings should not be the work of an hour, or even of a day. Matosian much preferred the Rodin garden in Paris, where you could go outside and sit looking up at The Thinker and let the power and meaning of the sculpture get inside your head and heart and leave you, somehow, changed for the better.

Enriched.

In truth, he wasn’t here to enjoy the art, but to meet a contact who was driving up that morning from Rome. When that contact hadn’t arrived by the appointed hour, he’d decided-since he was here-to take advantage of the opportunity to check out the art, which he’d been doing now for nearly forty minutes.

It occurred to him that the late contact might not be the fault of Italy’s roads or the Florentine traffic, but a deliberate attempt to lull him into the semisoporific state in which he now found himself. Museum fatigue could not literally kill, of course, but it could leave you dull-witted and exposed.

And in Matosian’s life, these states were often the precursor to disaster.

Matosian tore his eyes away from Raphael’s Madonna of the Goldfinch and quickly but surreptitiously scanned the milling crowd of tourists surrounding him. Nothing untoward caught his eye on the first sweep, but then, in the limit of his peripheral vision, a flash of blond hair appeared and then disappeared behind the entrance to the next room.

He turned, but had only taken his first step in that direction when he heard a scream. In that first second the crowd around him froze, and he used that moment to push his way through the press of people. By now others had taken up the cries, but Matosian ignored them, getting over to where a beautiful young woman lay where she’d fallen.

Matosian was the first one at her side. He felt the slight pulse in her neck, noted the shiny pallor and heat of her skin. Clearly, she’d been poisoned, probably right here in the Uffizi while she was waiting to make contact with him. Now her eyes opened and even through her obvious pain, he detected a softening in her expression-she recognized him. “Veni,” she gasped. “Come.” And lifting her arm, she brought him down close to her lips.

“Gato,” she whispered.

The agreed upon password. Cat.

She pressed something now into his hand-it felt like an ancient key-and closed his fingers over it. “Gato,” she repeated.

And then she went still.

There had been no time to search for the woman’s killer in Florence. It would have been a futile exercise in any event. No doubt, the assassin had done his damage and disappeared into the crowd even before Matosian had gotten out of the museum.

And there was no time to waste.

But the good news was that Matosian had received the key and immediately recognized it for what it was-as a youth, he’d been trained by traveling gypsies in the arcane art of lock picking, and now could not only pick any lock, ancient or modern, that he encountered, but he could identify by sight or touch any one of the 314 closely guarded discrete patterns used by ancient guild of locksmiths in setting the internal tumblers in locks since the late Middle Ages.

Now, in the swiftly darkening evening of the same day that he’d left Florence, and dressed in a low-key gray business suit, Matosian walked along the calm waters of the Serpentine in a deep fog. His destination: the shelter/pump house for the Italian Fountain at the north end of the park.

As he walked, something began to nag at the borders of his consciousness. Walking at this time in this weather, he wouldn’t normally expect to have any company on this gravel path. But his training let him hear things that others could not, and now he came to an abrupt full stop.

Sure enough, steps sounded behind him. They kept on for one or two steps before they, too, stopped. But that was enough for Matosian.

Side-stepping over to the grass, he waited until the steps began again. And another set of them, clearly several men, converging from in front of him as well. And then-he sensed rather that actually heard them-another set of footfalls registered from directly behind him on the grass.

They were closing in on him now from three directions, with the freezing waters of the Serpentine as his only escape.

Even now the shadows were beginning to appear out of the fog. Big men in trenchcoats. Matosian could take care of himself in any fight, but now he estimated a force of at least six men bent on taking him down.

And then he heard his name, in a female key. “Don,” the voice said. “Gato.”

He turned and saw her, frail and beautiful, yet somehow strong and competent, sitting on the metallic bench that bounded the gravel walk. With no time to reason it out, he went over to her. She had wrapped herself in a heavy scarf over her peacoat, and now she brought it up around his neck, and brought her lips to his. As her tongue probed his, he realized that she tasted of almonds.

His pursuers had by now converged on the path, thirty feet away from them. He could hear them talking as the kiss continued. And then, as a group, they began to come down toward the bench.

“Excuse me,” one of the men said, “have you seen…?”

The woman broke their kiss and, holding Matosian’s face against her shoulder, snapped out in a rich Cockney accent. “Does it look like we’re looking out for somebody here, guvnor? Now piss off.”

And then she came back to the kiss.

After the men had gone, spreading out to find their quarry, the kiss finally ended. And now Matosian saw that tears filled her eyes. “Daphne,” she said. “The girl in Florence this morning? She was my sister.”

The pump house for the Italian Fountain did not get a lot of traffic. Matosian and Chloe-for that was the name of the woman who’d saved him with her kiss, Daphne’s almond-scented sister-had no trouble finding the door that was the match for the key he’d carried from Florence.

Once they were inside, Chloe turned to him. “What’s supposed to be hidden here?” she asked. “Daphne never told me before…” Her voice broke as the sentence trailed off.

Matosian took her in his arms. “It’s all right,” he said. “She felt no pain. They were professionals. As for what’s hidden here, we’ll find it. I’ll know it when I see it.” He flashed his laser penlight around the dark room. The pumps churned hundreds of gallons of water and most of the space was filled with pipes and plumbing. The light traced what looked like ancient graffiti on the walls, and suddenly Matosian came forward to examine the writing more carefully.

“This is it,” he announced. “It’s not graffiti, though they’ve done a good job of making it look like it.”

“What is it then?”

“Cyrillic. Early Bulgarian Cyrillic.”

“What does it say? Can you read it?”

“Yes, of course,” he answered abstractedly. Matosian could read sixteen different alphabets and was fluent in twenty-two languages. “It’s… just a minute. It’s nonsense. ‘Roses are pie, are is the area of a circle.’ ”

“ ‘Are is’? Is that what it really says?”

“There’s no doubt about the words,” Matosian said.

“Maybe it’s a code,” Chloe offered.

“No, not a code. A puzzle.” His voice became more animated. “That’s it, a puzzle! Roses are…”

“Red!” she said.

“Yes they are.” Getting into it now, Matosian came back to the script. “So what’s left?”

“ ‘Pie are is the area of a circle.’ ”

“But it’s not,” Matosian exclaimed breathlessly. “That’s pi r squared.” A pause. “So what two words are left out.”

“Red Square,” she said.

“Exactly.”

Matosian normally worked alone, but Chloe now clung to him, both of them shivering in the north wind that whipped through the square. She had refused to leave him in London even as they’d sped to the private airfield just outside Dover-bereft over the loss of her sister, and fearful for her own life, she saw him as her last ray of hope.

On Matosian’s personal jet, she’d fallen asleep until they were making their descent into Russia, and now suddenly, as an early morning crowd of tourists and bureaucrats hurriedly brushed by them, the enormity of their situation seemed to strike her for the first time.

“So Daphne never got to tell you what this was ultimately about?” she asked.

Matosian shook his head. “They got to her two steps ahead of me. She barely managed to get out the password and pass me the key before… before she was gone.”

“Do you think it might have something to do with the password itself? Gato.”

“Shh.” He put a gentle finger to her lips. “Let’s let that remain unspoken until we need it.” He looked around at the milling crowd. “But yes,” he went on, “I don’t think that’s impossible. My initial contact…”

She stopped him. “Who was that?”

A grim smile. “People say it as a joke, but in this case it’s as real as a heart attack. I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you. But let’s say it’s a high-ranking official of my country’s government. Very high-ranking, and all but invisible.”

“And he told you something about… the password?”

“Not in so many words. At Langley…”

“So it’s CIA then?”

“Forget I ever said that.” Matosian cast around, checking the faces in the crowd. Then, back to Chloe, he lowered his voice. “I don’t know if it started there. Just that it came through there.”

“I understand,” she said. “I’ll tell no one. Ever.”

He looked at her for a long moment. Then, coming to the decision that he would trust her, he went on. “When he mentioned the password to me, I got the feeling that a cat, or the symbol of a cat, would play some role in what we were trying to locate, but when I asked, he just smiled that enigmatic smile of his and said, ‘I think you’ll find out when you need to.’ And then I was off to Florence.” He shook his head in apparent disbelief. “It’s hard to imagine that was only three days ago.”

“So what are we looking for here? This venue-Red Square-is a lot bigger than the pump house back in London. What ever it is could be anywhere.”

“You’re right.” Again, Matosian shook his head. “All we know is that somebody wanted me here and believed I would find and recognize what ever it was.” Now his face grew somber. “I feel like I’m letting my people down, that they might have picked the wrong man, that I wasn’t up to the job.”

“But no one’s told you what the job is!”

“That,” Matosian said, “comes with the territory.”

Suddenly a large black car pulled up and six men in heavy trench-coats appeared from its doors almost simultaneously in front of them. Matosian took Chloe’s arm and started to turn when he realized that one of the men had already gotten around directly behind him. He smiled in a relatively pleasant fashion and said in heavily accented English, “I have a gun and I will use it. You are both please to come with us.”

Matosian had been tortured before-in Iran, Afghanistan, Syria, and Colombia. He liked to think of himself as somewhat of an aficionado of torture. He knew that he would probably survive what ever they had in mind, but he wasn’t sure he could say the same thing about Chloe. And, now that she was in his care, he couldn’t live with that scenario.

He was going to have to break out and find her.

But currently he was in a dark subterranean room, the doors closed behind his captors after they’d tied him up on the simple wooden chair. They were obviously going to work first on his feet, and to that end, they had removed his shoes. But they’d thrown them to the side and left them against the wall. He was far better trained than they were and he’d already loosened the ropes with which they’d bound his legs and arms, but he wanted the ropes still to appear tight when they came back in to question him, so when he was sure he’d sufficiently weakened the knots, he rested.

He didn’t have long to wait. The big man with the heavy accent opened the door and turned on the light, one glaring bulb in the center of the ceiling.

“Mr. Matosian,” the man said as he came to stand in front of his captive. “I am Viktor. My last name, unimportant.”

“But enough about you, Viktor. What have you done with her?” Matosian asked.

“She’s safe. We haven’t touched her. Yet.”

“You don’t have to hurt anyone,” Matosian said. “I’ll tell you whatever you want. What ever I know.”

“You care very much for this woman, no?”

“Very much, yes. But you know, these ropes, they are too loose. You should know I can slip out of them whenever I want.”

“Very funny, that is. I watched Vladimir tie you up myself, of which no one is better.”

“Still,” Matosian said, “maybe you’d better check again. If you’re going to be tickling my feet, you wouldn’t want me to come undone from laughing too hard.”

Chuckling without any humor, Viktor took a step closer, bringing him into Matosian’s range. In a series of lightning moves, the seated man struck twice with his fists, once in the neck and the second shot to the nose, crushing the cartilage there. Before the blows had completely straightened Viktor up, Matosian had stepped out of the ropes binding his legs as well and now kicked out, hitting his captor again in the chest. Viktor went down in a silent hump.

Quickly donning his shoes and socks, Matosian was out into a narrow, dimly lit corridor within five seconds. Chloe had still been with them when they’d turned into his room, so she must be farther down the hall the way they’d been walking. So, turning in that direction, he started jogging, stopping to check the doors.

She was behind the third one, bound as he’d been, hand and foot, though they’d left her shoes on, and had put duct tape over her mouth.

Where had her captors gone? Where were the rest of them?

There was no time to ask those questions, and Matosian wasted no movement wondering about it or getting her untied. When he gently removed the duct tape from her mouth, he paused for a half second to touch her lips with his own. Then, taking her by the hand, he pulled her from her chair, and they were off and running down the hallway, toward a stairway beyond which shimmered the glow of sunlight!

They came out into an all-but-deserted alley that led off Red Square, and a fortuitous one at that. At the end of the block, as they were just coming out into the crowded square and the view of the Kremlin again, Matosian suddenly stopped, looking up.

“What is it?” Chloe asked.

“Look.” He was pointing to an ornate iron streetlight right above their heads. Matosian had almost run into it. The light was off since it was daytime. But its spherical bulb was held up by an amazingly realistic sculpture of the Sphinx. “This is it,” Matosian cried.

“I don’t see it,” Chloe said.

“Sure you do,” Matosian answered gently. “It’s the face of a woman and the body of a lion. And what is a lion?” he asked.

“A cat!”

His face lit up into a huge smile. “Hurry,” he said urgently. “There’s still time.” And taking her hand again, he started to run.

“I didn’t even realize that there was a Sphinx here,” Chloe said.

“They’re all over the place,” Matosian answered. “Santorini and Thebes in Greece, Giza in Egypt, St. Petersburg in Russia, and many, many more.”

“But then, how did you…?”

“As they knew I would, I recognized that the specific Sphinx on that streetlamp was based on the one here at the Louvre.” He stared for a moment at the enormous stone carving. “I really do think we’re getting close now,” he said.

“But who are ‘they’?”

“Yes,” he said. “Who are ‘they’?” He sat on a stone bench across from the ancient sculpture, patting the space next to him in invitation.

Chloe lowered herself down next to him, close enough so that their thighs touched. She took his hand and after a moment, he turned to her. “When I thought they were going to hurt you,” he began, and then could not go on. She reached up then and touched his lips with her free hand, and then that hand went back around his neck and brought his face down to where their lips could again meet-this time not as a ruse to fool Matosian’s pursuers as their first kiss had been in London, nor out of relief as the kiss they’d shared under the Kremlin. This time, their bodies lingered, their mouths locked in a transporting kiss of passion and connection.

When at last they broke it off, it had grown dark in the museum.

Matosian savored the first bite of his foie gras, the first sip of their twenty-five-year-old Chateau d’Yquem as he looked across the room at the beautiful woman who was returning from the ladies’ room, walking toward him 125 meters above Paris. “I don’t know how we’ve gotten to here,” he said when she got to the table and sat down, “but I’m so glad that we have. I never thought that this-a feeling like this-would happen to me. Here’s to you.”

She raised her own glass. “And to you. And us.” She tasted her foie gras, quickly seared and served with candied figs and a balsamic gastriche, and seemed to nearly swoon at the flavors. But then, abruptly, her face clouded over. “But where exactly are we?”

He knew, of course, that she wasn’t speaking literally, and he came forward and lowered his voice, his food for the moment forgotten. “All my senses tell me that we’re where we’re supposed to be.”

“But where do we go next? And to look for what?”

“Whoever’s running this hasn’t let us down yet,” Matosian said. “We’re here because they drew us here. I think that even though it goes against my every instinct, the best move now is simply to wait until they contact us. Otherwise, the trail simply ends here, and that I can’t accept. Not after all we’re been through.”

As though on cue, the tuxedoed waiter appeared at the table. “Mr. Matosian?” he queried.

Matosian looked up expectantly. “Guilty.”

“There’s a phone call for you at the reception kiosk.”

Flashing a quick and knowing glance at Chloe, Matosian stood and turned to accompany the waiter back to the small podium near the restaurant’s entrance. There he picked up the headset of the old-fashioned telephone and said hello.

“Gato,” came the cryptic reply in an electronically scrambled male voice.

“Gato yourself,” Matosian snapped, “and the horse it rode in on. Tell me what this is all about right now or I’m out of it. We’re both out of it.”

“How do you know you can trust the woman?”

“You killed her sister, damn you. That’s how I know. She wouldn’t be in this at all if it weren’t for that.”

“Her sister was collateral damage,” the voice said. “It couldn’t be helped. And unless you’re very careful, the same fate may befall her, too. And in the very near term. Do you hear what I’m saying?”

Matosian, suddenly now as close to panic as he’d ever been, raised his eyes and found Chloe still seated at their table, finishing her foie gras, relaxed and beautiful. “I hear you,” he managed to get out. “What are my instructions?”

The voice didn’t hesitate. “The best thing you can do is get to your hotel as soon as you can.”

“Who are you?”

“Call me Honest Abe, but don’t waste any time thinking about me. Time is of the essence now. Now! This second.” The voice repeated with metallic urgency. And then, with a click, the connection went dead.

Matosian hung up and walked as quickly as he could without calling attention to himself back to his table. Chloe looked up at him questioningly as he took out his wallet. He was just dropping a thousand-euro bill on the table when the waiter reappeared with an amuse-bouche, some sort of superlight looking spoon-sized quenelle in a saffron broth, which he placed in front of Chloe.

Matosian leaned over her and rasped out, “Don’t touch that. Don’t take another bite.”

“But monsieur…” the waiter demurred.

Matosian straightened to his full height. “Non, monsieur. Pourquoi pas vous même le mangez?”-“Why don’t you eat it yourself?”

The waiter went white.

“Je suis sérieux,” Matosian said. “I’m serious. Just take that little bite.” Then, suddenly, the tension and danger of the past few days took over and Matosian took the little proffered spoon and in one fluid and lightning motion forced the waiter’s hand up to his mouth, where he stuffed the little ball of dough and held the man’s jaw shut for another couple of seconds.

As soon as he let go, the waiter spit the dough out and grabbed for one of the glasses of water on the table. At the same instant, Matosian grabbed Chloe’s hand and forcibly lifted her out of her seat. “We’re out of time here,” he told her.

Behind her, the waiter had taken one step back toward the kitchen before his knees seem to give out from under him and he fell headlong into the spirits tray.

“Now! Now! Now!” Matosian pulled Chloe along behind him as the crowd in the restaurant rose almost as a single unit to see what had caused the disturbance. They were both walking double-time, holding hands, past the standing, sometimes screaming, panicking patrons and toward the exit and the long elevator ride down. But then Matosian, thinking better of using the elevator, led her back even farther to the little-used stairway with its three hundred or so steps to the ground.

When that door had closed behind them, Chloe pulled her hand away, stopping him. “What was that about?”

“This is about believing the warning I got over the phone. And, by the way,” he added, “I’ve got my instructions now, or as good as I’m going to get them.”

“What are they?”

“It’s still not completely clear. But one thing is.”

“What’s that?”

“We’ve got to get to the hotel. Like yesterday.”

And taking her hand again, he led her down the clanging and darkened stairway and out at the base of the Eiffel Tower.

“Something’s changed,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“This isn’t the way we left this room,” Matosian said as soon as they’d come through the door and double-locked it behind them.

“What’s different?” Chloe said. “I don’t see…”

But he had already crossed to the table in front of the couch. It held a variety of magazines and travel guides fanned out artistically. But within the fan, two of the magazines were folded open rather than to their covers. Matosian picked up the first one, glanced at its description of fine hotels in Washington, D.C., and then immediately grabbed the second, opened to an article on Abraham Lincoln called “The Great Emancipator.”

He stood stock-still for a long moment. Chloe came up behind him and put her arms around him. “What is it?” she said.

But, his heart breaking, Matosian kept his face straight as he turned to her. “I’ve got to go now,” he said. “You’ll be safe here.”

“But…” Her doe eyes filled with tears. “I thought that you and I…”

“We will,” he said. “But I’ve got to finish this. And it won’t be safe for you where I have to go. If the warning we got in the restaurant meant anything, that much was clear. I’ve got to do this alone.”

And so saying, he kissed her one last time and strode for the door. “What ever you do,” he said as he turned at the door, “lock this behind me and don’t let anyone in, not even hotel staff. I’ve paid for your room for a week, and I’ll be back to you before then.”

“Don!” She ran across to him. “I’m afraid. I don’t know…”

He quieted her with a last kiss. “Wait for me,” he said. “Trust me.”

And with that, he was gone.

It was close to 4:00 A.M. when Matosian mounted the steps at the end of the Capitol Mall. When he got near to the top, he moved into the shadow of the imposing structure and could just make out in front of him the looming bulk of the sixteenth president of the United States, Abraham Lincoln.

The night was dead quiet and surprisingly warm. Matosian still wore his tuxedo from the Restaurant Jules Verne in Paris-there had been no time to change, and certainly not as he flew his own jet alone over the Atlantic, wrestling with his unanswered questions, his demons, and most of all, least familiarly, with his emotions.

But now he was at the end, and there was no time for emotion.

He got to the last step, paused, took a breath, and then continued forward under the massive stone ceiling and into the monument. The place seemed to be made of darkness itself. Then, steeling himself, he came forward more and then more, step by step. Finally, he stopped.

With the laser light that had served him so well in the pump house in London, now he shone its beam over the words of the Gettysburg Address on his right, then over to the Second Inaugural Address on the left. He stopped on the words, “with malice toward none; with charity for all” and somehow he felt anew that however this whole terrible affair turned out, he was proud to be doing this important work for his country, proud to be an American.

They could never take that away from him.

For some reason, he became aware of the feel of water evaporating from the reflecting pond behind him, sending a chill down the back of his neck.

There was no sound. He was alone.

It was all as it should be.

He drew in a breath as though it might be his last. Finally: “Gato,” he whispered into the cavernous emptiness. And then again, more loudly. “Goddamn it, gato.”

And from behind the statue, he heard the footsteps-a light tread, but businesslike, echoing within the semi-enclosed chamber.

A figure began to emerge from behind the sculpture. Matosian raised his laser beam, hesitated, and then pressed the button, bathing the figure in a green fluorescent light.

“Hello, Don.” How Chloe had beaten him here from Paris he didn’t know and couldn’t imagine. And she also had managed to find the time to change her clothes, for now she wore a well-tailored dark business suit. “Well done,” she said, stopping ten feet in front of him. “Congratulations. You’ve passed.”

“I’ve passed?” A slow, deep rage seemed to settle into the middle of his chest. “What do you mean? Has this all been some sort of a game?”

“Not some sort of a game, Don. The most important game in the world. We had to know what you were capable of, what motivated you, how you reacted under pressure. And we had to see it ourselves, not hear about it from some questionably reliable third source. This is the last round before you’re allowed to do the really important work, the work no one can ever know about.”

“But what…” The world seemed to be whirling about him. He brought his hands up to his forehead and closed his eyes against the sensation of vertigo. He became vaguely aware of another set of footsteps emanating from the opposite side of Lincoln’s body. Opening his eyes, he pointed his light in that direction and was not surprised to see his original connection from Langley, call him Honest Abe now, rounding the corner by the emancipator’s right foot. “Hi, Don. Glad you could make it.”

“You’re glad I could make it?” Again the rage threatened to undo Matosian. “But what about your sister?” he said to Chloe. “What was that?” He whirled on his CIA contact. “Was that simply collateral damage, as you called it, Abe?”

“Easy,” Chloe said. “We expected you to be upset, Don. Most people who get to this stage in their training are upset. It’s natural. But first, know this. She wasn’t my sister, and…”

“That doesn’t forgive…”

But she raised her hand imperiously, stopping him. “Second, and perhaps more important, she’s not dead. She took a small pill we provided that mimics death very effectively for the better part of an hour. Her job was to get the key to you and then to appear to die. Your job, which you performed spectacularly, I might add, was to forget about her as an acceptable loss and move on with the mission. If you’d have stayed around long enough for her to recover, you wouldn’t be here now. You’d be lateraled into career oblivion and never even know what happened.”

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.

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. “I’ve gotten word of a secret mission involving the Vatican that we’ll need to see to soon, but until we get the call from Abe, our time is our own. One day, maybe even two, if we want to take them.” Her eyes pleaded with him. “If you could find it in yourself and in your heart to trust me again.”

“If you put your arms around me,” Matosian said, “maybe you can convince me.”

She did as he’d suggested, and after holding her body against his for a moment, he pulled away enough to let him lean over.

And their lips came together.

She tasted like almonds.

JOHN LESCROART is a New York Times bestselling author of twenty-one novels, including most recently Treasure Hunt, which is the third book in the San Francisco-based Wyatt Hunt series. His books have been translated into seventeen languages in more than seventy-five countries, and his short stories have been included in many anthologies.

His first novel, Sunburn, won the San Francisco Foundation’s Joseph Henry Jackson Award for best novel by a California author, and Dead Irish and The 13th Juror were nominees for the Shamus and Anthony Best Mystery Novel, respectively. Guilt was a Reader’s Digest Select Edition choice, and The Suspect, chosen by the American Author’s Association as its 2007 Novel of the Year, was also the 2007 One Book Sacramento choice of the Sacramento Library Foundation.