“You know him?”
“Know him? I arrested him twenty years ago.”
“On what charge?”
“Corsican recycling.”
“I beg your pardon? Recycling?”
A smile twitched Ondine’s lips. “‘Recycling is what Corsicans call arson. He burned down a rival’s factory. His friends broke him out of prison and he fled. Hasn’t been on Corsica since.”
“Could he have joined up with Securité Referral?”
“I don’t know what Securité Referral is, so how could I answer that?”
“Did I understand correctly that you are retired?” Janson asked.
Ondine finished chewing and wiped his hands on a napkin. “I do occasionally what you do—consult. It is better than sitting around.”
Janson gave him a Janson Associates card. “I wonder if I might have your card so I could call on your services.”
“But of course.” Ondine produced a card and stood up from the table. “ Merci, Princess. Pleasure to make your acquaintance, Mr. Janson.”
“I hope to call you soon,” said Janson. They shook hands.
Mimi saw the Frenchman to the door and came back. Janson was shrugging into his jacket.
“Where are you going?”
“As I told the man, Corsica.”
“He lied about Securité Referral.”
“I believe so.”
“Why?”
“Either he’s heard of it and fears it or he works for it. From what I’ve seen, he’s the type they look for: sharp, professional, connected, and on the edge. On the other hand, he’s a bit over the hill.”
“Why didn’t you question him further?”
“Because he would not expect such questioning from an ‘accounting fellow.’ ”
“But you will follow up?”
Janson kissed her on the cheek. “You have been wonderful. As always.”
THIRTY-ONE
A fire-gutted hotel was the first sight to greet Paul Janson as he steered a motor yacht he had chartered in nearby Sardinia into Porto-Vecchio, a sailing and tourist town that occupied a deep indentation in the rocky southeast coast of Corsica. Shattered windows gaping like dead eyes, walls blackened by smoke, the burned-out twelve-story tower stood grim sentinel over the gleaming boats that crowded the inner harbor. Spray-paint graffiti reading “ Resistenza!” and “ Corse pour Corsicans” left no doubt how the fire had ignited.
He left the yacht in charge of its captain and walked into the town, watching the narrow streets and sidewalks in the reflections of luxury shop windows, trading imperceptible nods with the muscular proprietor of a dive shop, and stopping briefly at the speedboat dock of a company that offered parasail rides. As he left the waterfront, he paused to look at the hotel. Workmen boarding up the ground-floor windows were banging industriously with hammers and nails, but the cleaners removing the graffiti were trading conspiratorial grins and not scrubbing very hard.
Janson hailed a taxi. It took him up into the hills, through tiny villages, past quarries, olive groves, and empty houses. The French language on bilingual road signs had been painted over and he saw “Corsican National Liberation Front” scrawled on a house that had its roof blown off. SR could do worse than hide Iboga here; restive islanders were not the sort to inform the police about a man on the run.
Janson got out of the taxi at a village café in an ancient stone building and asked the driver to come back in an hour. A patio shaded by a canopy presented views in two directions, turquoise water, east, and rugged mountains to the west. He could see the harbor far, far below opening into the Tyrrhenian Sea, the hundred-mile stretch of water between Corsica and Italy, and up a narrow road switch-backing down from the mountains. Scents of lavender and myrtle wafted off the sun-baked brushy land. The café was nearly empty midafternoon, and Janson had the patio to himself. He ordered a quatre fromagepizza and a glass of Ajaccio rosé and was just finishing the soft, oiled crust and peppery wine when he heard the high-pitched rasp of a powerful machine driven to the max.
Down the mountain road flew a red Ducati 848 sportbike.
One guess, Janson thought grimly, who was driving at that breakneck pace, though he could not help admiring her skill. Boots, knees, and thighs married tightly to the machine, torso levering independently, Kincaid was reading the bends in the narrow road, braking ahead of the corners, throttling early to maximize the engine’s gyroscopic and load-transfer effects, and accelerating smoothly out of them. But formidable skills aside, Janson knew she was pushing the limits of physics and luck. One mistake would flip her fatally end over end into the brush, and he had to wonder whether the near-suicidal speed meant that Kincaid was still so freaked out by the Australia catastrophe that she was pushing herself too hard to make up for it.
The Ducati whipped out of the final turn, throttle blipping a series of high-rev downshifts, braked hard, and stopped in front of the café. Kincaid, clad boot to helmet in black deerskin and festooned with high-power Swarovski field glasses and a Canon digital camera with a foot-long lens, heaved the bike onto its centerstand and swaggered onto the patio. A dog-eared copy of the British Ornithologists’ Union’s Birds of Corsicatossed on the table adjoining Janson’s explained the surveillance gear.
She removed her helmet, spiked her fingers through her hair, and glanced at Janson—one single tourist appraising another. Janson played his role with an expression of sincere interest. She ordered a pizza and a glass of wine, mimicking the local u Corsu dialect well enough to elicit an appreciative smile from the café’s waitress.
When they were alone on the patio, Kincaid said, “Stop looking at me like that. I’m all right, just lettin’ off steam.”
“Glad to hear it, and deeply relieved that they’ve suspended Newton’s Law of Gravity—so what do you think of Corsica?”
“Corsica’s like down home. I thought I was back in Red Creek with all their feudin’ ’n’ fightin’. Of course, if you’re not agin’ ’em, folks are as nice as nice can be. Specially out in the mountains. Beautiful mountains. Wow. Then you come around a bend in the road and there’s this turquoise-blue ocean jumping up at you and white sand beaches as far as you can see. Might be fun to come back sometime, when we’re not working.”
“Hard to picture you sitting still on a beach.”
“I meant rock climbing.”
“Is Iboga here?”
“Looks that way. But he’s moving around a lot.” She opened her bird guide to a blank “Notes” page and hurriedly sketched a map of Corsica. The island, a hundred miles long and fifty wide, looked like a hand closed in a fist with the index finger pointing north. “They started him up here on Capo Corso. Freddy thinks they came in from Italy by boat. Then they seemed to move him down into these mountains down the middle. But I lost them. Now Freddy’s guys think he’s on this private peninsula near Vallicone. That’s here, up the coast from Porto-Vecchio. Freddy’s absolutely convinced that’s where he’s at.”
“Why?”
“It’s a damn fortress.”
THIRTY-TWO
Jessica Kincaid flipped the page in her bird guide and drew a map of the peninsula thrusting into the Tyrrhenian Sea.
“Fifty-foot cliffs all around, so we can’t come on a boat, nowhere to land. Might do it in a little inflatable into a tiny crack of a fishing cove—though we’d need a fisherman to guide us in—then climb the cliffs. But how do we get him down without a damned derrick? Can’t helicopter in—they got radar.”
“Radar?”
“Whoever is there is scared the locals think they’re resort developers. So if it is SR, it’s kinda ironic that they’re hiding Iboga on an island that is a powder keg where all outsiders are suspect. Rumor has it SR is developing the peninsula into a gigantic resort. They have pissed off Corsican separatists, Union Corse mafia, the poor fishermen they ousted, and the ecologists, who tend to get pretty violent in France. I hear they’ve declared war on the French government and the superrich. From what I’ve seenI don’t blame them—this is the kind of place money destroys.”