Mrs. John Doe

Chapter 9

Lonny Tindall turned out to be a treasure, and now Nora was speeding along beneath the English Channel at well over one hundred miles per hour. The view of the early morning British countryside outside her train window had been replaced by total black, with a steady stream of tunnel lights flashing by, but at this speed they were mere blurs. She was nearly in France now. Old Mr. Tindall’s clever grandson had seen to everything.

You have to spend money, Lonny had told her, and this is why: Immigration. What you want is a business premier class, flexible, round-trip ticket with chauffeur service at the other end. Nora had never been on the Eurostar before, but many of the Byron’s guests booked it through the hotel, and young Lonny had learned all the quirky rules and perks of the game. Bottom line: The rich are different.

If Nora was trying to be inconspicuous, he explained, she’d need a top-tier ticket. It was pricey but worth it. Business premier travelers were handled quickly in St. Pancras International Station, whereas the cheap-seaters might endure a longer process, usually involving lines. More questions, more scrutiny. Furthermore, she had to fill out an Immigration landing card because she was an American, and her passport would be checked by French Customs and Immigration people in the station before she boarded. One more step in the process, which wasn’t good for a Yank who needed to be off the grid, in Lonny’s considered opinion. Get it over with quickly, he advised, first-class all the way. She made a mental note to introduce Lonny to Bill Howard. The way the kid’s mind worked, he might very well have a future with those people…

The train was slowing down; the twenty-minute underground part of the journey was almost over. They’d left St. Pancras at eight, and there’d been two stops on the British side before the tunnel. Next was Calais, then Lille, then Paris. They’d be there before eleven, and Lonny had arranged for a car and driver to meet her.

Her seat was bigger than the one on the plane yesterday. She was in a line of singles along the left side of the sleek business premier carriage, and the right side was lined with double seats and groupings for conferences in motion. The staff came round regularly, offering snacks, tea, and coffee. The rest of the train was packed with tourists, many of them taking their hyperactive children to Disneyland-another reason to be grateful to Lonny for insisting on deluxe travel.

The pressure in her ears abated; they were back above ground. The train slowed, then stopped. Calais-well, actually Coquelles, four miles west of the city. She was in France now, as instructed. She was finally beginning to relax a little when the sudden announcement came over the speaker system.

“Attention, passagers à destination de Paris…”

Nora listened, instantly on the alert. The voice was saying something about producing passports and landing cards, which didn’t make sense. Hadn’t they already done that in London? Now the announcement was being repeated in English: a spot check by French authorities, to be completed as quickly as possible, with apologies for the slight delay.

Another inspection. Nora didn’t like the sound of this. It was another opportunity for people to enter her name in lists and ledgers-exactly what she’d been trying to avoid. The other passengers didn’t like it either; she heard groans and exasperated muttering from people nearby, and one disgruntled businessman type loudly opined that they must be looking for someone. This didn’t sound good to Nora, but there was nothing to be done about it now. She got her passport and Immigration card ready and hoped for the best.

The Immigration official who entered the carriage was a pretty young woman, and Nora took that as a good sign. There was a Customs man with her, checking passengers and carry-on bags. Nora watched them make their way along the aisle, asking for everyone’s papers, getting closer. Here they were.

“Bonjour, bienvenue en France,” the young woman said. “Votre passeport, s’il vous plait. Your passport, please.”

Nora smiled and handed her the Immigration card first.

“Une Américaine? Mademoiselle Hughes.”

Now came the passport.

“Ah, Madame Hughes-Baron.”

Nora smiled some more. “Je préfère Mademoiselle Hughes seulement, s’il vous plait. Je suis une actrice; c’est mon nom de théâtre.”

This produced the desired effect. The young woman’s eyes widened in delight, and Nora braced herself for the usual questions about Hollywood and which films had she been in and did she know Johnny Depp? As it turned out, the response was even better than she’d hoped.

“An actress!” the woman said, smiling. “I too will study to be an actress.”

“Oh? Where do you study?” Nora asked her, standing up so the man could run the wand over her. She’d been through this exact process back at St. Pancras ninety minutes ago, and she wondered again what this surprise inspection was about.

“For now I work pour l’Immigration, until I make the money for the Conservatoire.”

“Le Conservatoire d’Art Dramatique?” Nora asked, sitting down again. The man looked through her shoulder bag, peeking briefly in the manila envelope, then set it down on the seat beside her.

“Oui,” the young woman was saying. “I have been accepted there, but I am still…” She indicated her uniform with a smile and a Gallic shrug.

“You must be very talented to get into such a fine school,” Nora said.

“Merci, mademoiselle. Are you here for business or pleasure?”

“I’m on vacation in London; I’m just over to do some shopping.”

Nora surreptitiously watched the woman type the information on her little electronic device: Mlle. Hughes, Noreen, Actrice, Vacances. She also entered the passport number, but anyone looking for Nora probably wouldn’t go further than a name, and they’d be looking for Mme. Nora Baron, not Mlle. Noreen Hughes. She smiled some more as the young aspiring actress handed back her papers.

“Bonnes vacances!” the woman said as she and her colleague moved on to the next passenger. “How do you say in America? Break a leg!”

“Yes,” Nora said. “That’s what we say. You, um, break a leg too.”

As soon as they were gone, she fell back against the seat, relieved, silently thanking her late parents for giving her a name that could be abbreviated so easily. Everyone had called her the preferred Nora since she was a little girl, but her passport had the long version. She’d used Noreen in her acting career years ago, but she was Nora at the university and anywhere else that might have been checked recently. Now she hoped that Noreen would be just the cover she needed. Cover-Jeff’s word again.

The young Immigration woman had been polite, even friendly, but Nora the actress had studied her body language and that of her colleague the Customs man. The loud businessman had been right, Nora decided. They were looking for someone. More than one someone: They’d checked all the passengers, male and female. Well, at least they hadn’t been looking for her. And the delay had been brief, as promised, which must have mollified Eurostar.

The train was in motion once more, flying south through the French countryside, which looked remarkably like the British countryside they’d just left. Coquelles gave way to flat fields and woodlands dotted with houses and villages and the occasional ugly industrial complex. This fact of exotic foreign countries always managed to surprise her; the non-tourist areas often looked just like home. With the surprise ordeal at Calais behind her and no interesting scenery at the moment, she ordered coffee and thought back over the plan.

He’d never asked her to do anything for him before. He’d never even discussed his work with her. She wasn’t really sure what he did, exactly. A phone call in the night, a goodbye kiss, and he’d be off to Langley, Virginia, and from there to London. Or Zurich. Johannesburg. Buenos Aires. Once it was Mexico City, which bothered her more than the other places; the news was full of stories of drug cartel violence and murdered officials, some of them American. If he’d ever been sent to the Mideast or South Asia, he’d never mentioned it, which was probably a good thing; she worried enough as it was. But she’d insisted that he tell her where he was going whenever he could, just so she’d know where to start looking if he failed to come home. He’d smiled and indulged her, even though Nora had known it was silly of her to ask. If anything ever did happen to him, Langley would know exactly where he was.

In the last three years, it had mostly been London. No specifics, of course, but she knew his group was working with Bill Howard’s group and their equivalents in France, and once she’d overheard a phone conversation in which he’d mentioned Interpol and Europol. She wasn’t sure of the difference between those two entities, and she wouldn’t dream of asking Jeff. She raised their beautiful daughter, taught acting classes, and stayed out of his way.

Until now.

It should have been so simple. A quick in-and-out, as Jeff had described it. She would get a phone call, probably in late June or early July, from someone, probably Bill Howard, telling her that Jeff was dead. She was to go into grieving-widow mode on the live phone. That was Jeff’s phrase for it, meaning tapped. Then she would fly to London, claim the body at the morgue, have it cremated, and take it back to New York. A matter of two days, three at the most.

She and Bill had played their parts, but the plan had apparently been altered, and now she was proceeding without a script. The ultimate actor’s nightmare: She didn’t know her lines or even what play she was in. There was no way to ask anyone either; she didn’t have their contact information. All she could do now was wait for messages, like the note last night that had brought her here, to France.

She wondered who the man in the morgue was. She’d been told that no one would be harmed in this exercise, so he was probably a random body doing his bit for truth, justice, and the American/British/French way. A homeless man? Perhaps he’d volunteered for the job, when his heart and liver problems had brought on a death sentence. No, she wouldn’t think about him now. Later…

She wondered who the purse snatcher was. Young, dark, possibly South Asian. Paki wanker. Many refugees in England were Pakistani, so that boy’s rude epithet in the park was not unusual. But the man could just as easily have been Iranian, Iraqi, Afghan. Taliban? Hezbollah? Al Qaeda…

She had a vivid memory of where she’d been that Tuesday morning in September 2001. She’d just dropped little Dana off at preschool, kissed her forehead and ruffled her silken hair, and she drove into the parking lot at the university, all prepared for the early Theater Arts department faculty meeting to discuss the coming semester. The car radio was tuned to some AM station that played golden oldies between news reports. She pulled into her space, and she was reaching to turn off the engine when ABBA suddenly stopped singing “Chiquitita” mid note and a shocked male voice came on. She didn’t even get out of the car. When she could move, she drove back to the preschool, collected her daughter, and went home.

The rest of that day was spent in the study-Dana upstairs and safely away from it-watching the awful TV images and frantically trying to reach her husband, who was in Washington at the time. When she saw the footage of the Pentagon, she began to pray. Jeff finally called at four that afternoon, and she nearly fainted with relief, but he couldn’t talk for long. He was at a military airfield, on his way somewhere. He called her again that night, but he wouldn’t say where he was. He’d come home three months later, just in time for Christmas, and she’d never learned what he’d been doing all that time.

He’d disappeared again after Madrid, then after the London bombings, and she hadn’t asked questions. She’d never met any of his American colleagues, so she didn’t have a network of spouses to fall back on. She only knew Vivian Howard in London, but Viv was even more clueless than Nora. She wondered how all the other wives-and husbands-coped. Just as she did, probably: getting on with things and waiting by the phone a lot. What else could anyone do? She’d never gotten used to it, but she’d never told Jeff that. Even so, he knew.

She wondered if the purse snatcher was one of them.

She wondered why the plan had changed.

Most of all, more than anything else, she wondered about Jeff. She hadn’t seen him in nearly three months. He’d left home for London in early April, and he’d called several times, always postponing his return to America and apologizing for the delays, but he hadn’t explained. Then, in June, an old-fashioned handwritten letter had arrived in the mail, explaining the plan and her part in it. A quick in-and-out. She knew he was doing something important, but she had no idea what it was. Where was he now? Was he safe? She had to know, even if it meant breaking the precious rules of his employers. So, here she was.

Lille had come and gone, and now the announcements were being made for their arrival in Paris, first in French and then in English. She listened to the foreign language, translating it, remembering Sister Boniface (“Bony Face”) in high school. Two years of French, and the actress in her had picked up the words and the accent fairly well-not exactly fluent but not bad either. She could get by here as long as everyone spoke lentement. She had the charge card in her other name and plenty of euros, nearly a thousand dollars’ worth. And she had the manila envelope. She was as ready as she’d ever be.

The window went dark; they were in the station. She shut her eyes and relaxed back in the big seat, breathing deeply. She was hungry, and she was tired. Today was her third day in a row without sufficient rest. When this was over, she’d sleep for a long time.

But now she would be vigilant. She’d study the faces of every passenger getting off the train with her, and she’d scan the crowds in the busy station. She’d be on the lookout for a young, dark-haired, dark-skinned man in a dark suit, or anyone else who might be showing an interest in her. She was no longer Mrs. Nora Baron, the grieving widow, but Ms. Noreen Hughes, an unmarried, middle-aged actress on a lark in Paris. A day’s shopping, with a carefree side trip to a museum dedicated to her favorite artist. Nothing more.

It was now 10:47. She hoped the hired car would be waiting when she arrived. She had a little over one hour to get to the next stage, to make her next entrance.