‘The woman, the former wife of wealthy auto heir, Dodge—’
I sat forward and scanned the paragraphs fast until I found the name: Cameron was dead. According to the police, she fell from the back of her cruiser while intoxicated – the story said that the local medical examiner had found a cocktail of recreational drugs and alcohol in her system.
In the middle of the text was a photo of Cameron and Ingrid arm in arm, posing with Ingrid’s stray mutt outside an impressive baroque building. With an increasing sense of dread, I flew through the story to find out what it meant.
A few paragraphs down, I got the answer. It said Cameron had only just remarried, tying the knot with Ingrid Kohl, a woman she had recently met in the town of Bodrum, Turkey.
‘The two women were among the first to take advantage of new German legislation allowing same-sex marriages,’ the report said.
‘They had flown to Berlin and were wed at the City Hall four hours after the law came into effect, a ceremony witnessed by two strangers whom they had recruited off the street and their dog, Giancarlo.
‘The couple then began their honeymoon by returning to their boat moored near—’
I got to my feet and walked to the starboard rail, trying to breathe. The sun was melting into the sea, but I barely saw it. Ingrid had been right: I didn’t understand the half of it. But I was certain that I did now.
All my experience – all my intuition – told me that the moment they had left Berlin as a married couple, Cameron’s life was effectively over. Though I couldn’t prove it, I was convinced that the masterful plan Ingrid had developed in the maelstrom of 9/11 had one secret codicil which Cameron had known nothing about – Ingrid was going to make sure that she was the one who inherited Dodge’s fortune. But didn’t Ingrid love Cameron? I asked myself, always the investigator. But I already knew the answer – she had been betrayed and abandoned by her long-time lover. She didn’t love Cameron, she hated Cameron.
Of course, working to my belief, she would have had no difficulty in concealing her true feelings: she was an actress, and she would have played the part right up to the end. Once they were married, she knew that she didn’t even have to get Cameron to write a will – as the legal spouse, she would inherit everything, even if Cameron died without making one.
The rest must have been easy – a long night of partying, a walk to the stern, a last kiss in the moonlight, a slender hand that tipped Cameron over the rail as the big cruiser powered on.
In the dying light I hung my head, angry with myself that I hadn’t foreseen it, even though – God knows – I had been warned. I left the railing and went back to look at the date on the newspaper.
It was months old, too much time had passed – the boat would have been sold and the rest of the money transferred through a maze of untraceable offshore companies until it finally ended up in a bank like Richeloud’s.
Somebody as smart as Ingrid Kohl – or whatever her name was – would have had a new identity and a new life waiting, and I knew that she would have disappeared already into the anonymity of the world, protected by her boundless intelligence and ingenuity.
She was the best I had ever encountered and yet … and yet … I had a strong feeling that somewhere … on some strange shore … in a street of some foreign city … in Tallinn or Riga … in Dubrovnik or Krakow … I would see a face in the crowd …
Chapter Fifty-two
I SAT ON the deck until long after night had fallen, thinking about the two women and the events which had drawn us into each other’s lives.
As a covert agent, darkness had always been my friend but, since my visit to the Theatre of Death, I had a fear of it which I suspected would outlast everything else in my life. I got up to switch on the running lights and check my course. Halfway along the deck, I stopped.
It seemed that my course was already set. I stared at the arrangement of the stars, the position of the moon and the pitch of the sea. When I listened, I heard a silence so loud it screamed.
I had been there before.
It was the vision of the future that I had seen the night I looked out of the window of the Oval Office. Just as I had glimpsed back then, I was alone on an old yacht, the sails patched and faded, the wind driving me into darkness, the boat and I growing ever smaller on a limitless sea.
Now this was the night and this was the moment, and I waited alone, barely willing to breathe, as the sea rolled towards me. Nomad heeled over and white water foamed at her bow as the wind backed a little and rapidly grew stronger. We were travelling faster and I stepped to the railing to work the winch. The rigging started to sing under the strain and, though there was not a soul on the dark-painted ocean, I was no longer alone.