Mrs. John Doe

Chapter 16

Catherine Deneuve was telling her where to go. Well, not the actress, not really, but it sounded like her. The voice emanating from the dashboard was soft, cultivated, expertly trained, with that professional mix of warmth and assurance that makes a person believe anything it says. Nora envied very few other actors for their gifts, but Catherine Deneuve was one of them, and so was the voice in the Renault’s speakers.

“…sortie nombre quatre pour l’autoroute trente-six. Procédez à l’ouest, une distance de quatre-vingt-douze kilomètres à l’autoroute six…”

The beautiful voice had led her successfully through the near-blinding downpour to the appropriate autoroute, west from Besançon to Dijon. Eventually, this road would be exited for the long one, the A6, heading northwest toward Paris. After that, she’d have to look for the A10 to the A6B-or was it the other way around? The voice would tell her. She wished she’d paid more attention to Jacques’s navigation on the way here.

Jacques.

No, she couldn’t think about him. He wasn’t dead-he wasn’t-and even now, friendly hands would be ministering to him in l’infirmerie down the hill from Pinède, or in the nearest big hospital. As for the other man, the sniper-well, she couldn’t sympathize. She had more immediate things to occupy her, like negotiating this wet French highway as she raced toward Paris in the middle of the night, running from a dead assassin and a please-don’t-be-dead bodyguard.

Bodyguard? It certainly seemed that way. Jacques Lanier was another one of them, a French agent involved in whatever this was. This crisis. He worked for something called the SDAT-she must find out what that was. Nora hadn’t really understood all the obvious signs this morning at Gare du Nord: the ill-fitting chauffeur’s uniform; the limousine that was not a limousine; the deliberately misspelled placard, Hugs; the use of mademoiselle to further shield her identity. He’d been watching the rearview mirror from the moment they started, and he’d spotted the tail immediately. His orders were to stay with her, protect her, hence his insistence on driving her all the way to the Franche-Comté himself, in a fresh car.

Jeff. Jeff must have flagged her name, Baron, and also Hughes. Jeff had instructed her to go to Paris, but he hadn’t known how she’d do that, and he couldn’t communicate directly with her. Somewhere, in a room in London or Washington, a technician had gotten a hit on the Eurostar reservation Lonny Tindall had made for Noreen Hughes. Once Jeff knew her train, he had simply arranged for the chauffeur at the other end to be a French agent. He was taking no chances with his wife’s safety. But something had gone wrong. At some point between Paris and Pinède, her husband had evidently lost control of the plan.

GOOT! Dix roses pour Grand-tante J ce soir. Either Jeff had meant something else entirely or…

Or others had changed the game. That ugly man with the shabby clothes and garlic breath: Could he possibly work with Jeff? Nora doubted it. He’d looked-and smelled-like a homeless man, a vagrant. And the note that had led her to the cemetery was odd too. Not her husband’s handwriting, but block capitals. And something else: Pal. He hadn’t called her Pal. The first message had been addressed to her, but the second hadn’t been so specific. It could have been written by anyone. But if it hadn’t been Jeff, how on earth had the writer known about Pinède in the first place? Grand-tante Jeanette, the roses, the ritual…

Her head was throbbing, partly from squinting through the wet windshield at seemingly endless miles of wet highway, but mostly from the strain of trying to understand what was happening to her. She’d been summoned to Pinède, to her husband’s great-aunt’s grave, presumably to meet her husband. Instead, she’d been shot at by a professional assassin who had dug a grave. A grave for her, for her body when she was dead. One clean shot, then into the hole, and she wouldn’t be found for days. Weeks. Months. Ever.

Whoever they were, they hadn’t counted on her leaving the manila envelope in the car. And they definitely hadn’t counted on Jacques Lanier. The noises behind her when she entered the churchyard-now she knew: Jacques had followed her from the car with his silenced weapon and his night-vision equipment, ready for trouble. And trouble was what he’d found.

She was praying. Nora Baron, the lapsed Catholic, was actually asking God to watch over the wonderful little man who had saved her life tonight. Keep him alive for Marianne; for the son whose car she was driving; for the rest of his family and his friend Felicia; and for her. So she could thank him in person and teach him some more English words.

Had the priest or sexton seen her? She didn’t think so. The police arriving at Notre Dame des Montaignes would find the dead sniper and Jacques, and they’d be searching for the missing weapon, the one she’d thrown in her shoulder bag, but as far as she could tell, they didn’t know she existed. Of course they’d find the sniper’s car, probably in the church parking lot, and they’d wonder how Jacques had arrived there. If Jacques was conscious, he’d tell them he’d walked or thumbed a ride and the dead man was a personal enemy, his wife’s lover, something like that. They wouldn’t believe him, of course, but it might buy her precious time…

The road was a blur, and visibility decreased with every minute. The rain was falling harder, cascading down the windows and singing under the tires, punctuated by a celestial symphony of light and noise in the black sky above the autoroute. The rearview mirror showed only wet darkness with occasional lights. She monitored each successive pair of headlights behind the Renault until she was sure the distant car wasn’t deliberately following her.

How would she know? How could she possibly distinguish her pursuers from fifty million benign Frenchmen? They’d been on the transatlantic flight with her, followed her to the hotel and the hospital, to Russell Square, to Paris, and now to the wilds of rural France. Was the man in the cemetery the man from the plane and the park? The man in the gray Citroën? Could all this be the work of one obsessed loner? If he was dead, was she safe now? How many of them was she dealing with-and who the hell were they anyway?

She’d made a choice when she came down from the mountains and rejoined the autoroute, where signs soon appeared before her for the exits that would take her either east or west. She’d thought about it as she drove. To the east was the Jura pass; she could be in Switzerland in not much more than an hour. She could stop somewhere-Neuchâtel was on the Doubs, just across the border-and figure out what to do next. But she didn’t know anyone in Switzerland. No; better to take her chances back in Paris, even if it was probably easier for her mysterious enemies to track her in France.

Were they still tracking her right now, this minute? If so, how? Not this car, certainly-it belonged to Jacques’s son; they couldn’t possibly know about it. Or could they? She’d have to work that out, but she wasn’t sure how to go about it. She was Nora Baron, a drama teacher from Long Island, not a federal agent. Her husband was the federal agent in the family. Jeff would know what to do, how to deal with these situations. But where was he? Did he know what was happening to her? More questions. She was going mad from all the questions.

A red light appeared on the dashboard; she was low on gas. Not surprising, considering the miles they’d put in since the rest stop this afternoon. The last thing she needed now was car trouble, running out of gas in the middle of nowhere. She edged over into the extreme right lane, searching the road ahead. Yes! There, in the distance: lights.

The young man in the petrol station was very wet and very polite. As she paid in cash for a full tank and a small bottle of water, Nora tried to calm herself enough to remember some basic French. She was suddenly exhausted. She had to stop for the night; she couldn’t drive any farther now. The storm was getting worse, and shock was setting in. She downed some water and spoke.

“Un motel, um, ici?” was all she could manage, but it was enough. With a grin, he burst into rapid speech, with gestures. She could barely follow him, but she got the gist of it. His mother-in-law-or his wife’s aunt?-ran a lovely chambres d’hôte just down the way, at the next sortie, Chez Martine. Cheap, clean, and she loved les touristes Americains. Salles de bains privée, petit déjeuner inclus dans le prix fixe, et la Wee-Fee pour les portables! Down the ramp, à la gauche, deux îlots, l’édifice jaune à la gauche. He then pulled a cellphone from his pocket and spoke into it. Yes, a room would be ready, and Martine herself would be expecting Mademoiselle Hughes.

Nora smiled and thanked him, glancing at her watch. It was nearly midnight. She’d only been driving for ninety minutes or so, but between the weather and her nerves, not to mention the unfamiliar car with standard transmission, it seemed much longer. Still, her mind was working overtime. Just before the young man ran inside the station, she called him back over. She explained in halting French that she’d met a man today who said he worked for the SDAT. Did he know what that was?

His eyes widened. “Ess-day-ah-tay? Oui, mademoiselle, ils sont les flics! La Police Nationale! Vôtre ami est un homme très, très important! Ess-day-ah-tay, c’est la Sous-Direction Anti-Terroriste!”