This information was conveyed in a letter from the same lawyer who also mentioned that there was a small matter concerning Bill’s estate that needed to be finalized. I told him I’d see him at his office in New York when I was home next – and then let it pretty much slip from my mind. The cheques from Grace’s bequest arrived regularly and it meant I could live a life far more comfortable than anything the government had ever envisaged with their pension.
The most tangible benefit was the apartment in Paris, and I found myself racing through what had once been the mansion’s kitchen – converted to a plant room – and flying up a set of fire stairs towards my home. I opened a concealed door next to the elevator and burst into the small foyer.
A woman was standing there. It was Mme Danuta Furer, my seventy-year-old neighbour, who lived in the mansion’s grandest apartment. The perfectly groomed widow of some aristocratic industrialist, she had the uncanny ability to make everyone else feel like a member of the Third World.
She saw my tongue moistening my dry lips, shirt hanging out. ‘Something wrong, Mr Campbell?’ she asked in her inscrutable upper-class French.
She knew me as Peter Campbell, on sabbatical from my job as a hedge-fund manager – the only job I knew of which would enable somebody my age to afford to live in the apartment and not work.
‘Fine, Madame – just worried I left the oven on,’ I lied.
The elevator arrived, she got in and I unlocked the steel-core door into my apartment. Bolting it, not turning on any lights, I sprinted through the living room with its beautiful bay windows and small but growing collection of contemporary art. Bill would have liked that.
In the gloom I ripped open a closet in the dressing room and keyed a code into a small floor safe. Inside was a large amount of cash, a pile of papers, eight passports in different names and three handguns. I pulled out a 9mm Glock fitted with an extended barrel – the most accurate of them all – checked the action and grabbed a spare clip.
As I slipped it into my waistband, I dwelt on something that had been ricocheting round my head all the way home: if it was the Greeks, how the hell had they found me?
One theory I could come up with was that the Russians had stumbled across something and passed it on to their former partners, just for old times’ sake, you know – and a bucketload of untraceable cash.
Or had I made some tiny mistake at Richeloud’s that Markus Bucher had passed on to his clients and which had allowed them eventually to discover who I was? But, in either case, what had led the Greeks to Paris? For God’s sake, I was living under a completely different identity.
The knock on the door was firm and definite.
I didn’t react. I had always known that a hostile would have little difficulty getting into the building – François, the middle-aged, snivelling concierge, was always leaving the front doors open as he plumbed new depths of servitude. No sooner would he have heard Mme Furer coming down in the elevator than he was probably out in the street alerting the limo driver and fussing around to make sure he was registering ever more clearly on her Christmas gift list.
Without hesitation I did exactly what the training says – I moved fast, silently, into the back of the apartment. One strategy experienced assassins use is to attach a couple of ounces of Semtex – a plastic explosive with the consistency of clay – to the frame of a door before ringing the bell.
The perpetrator takes cover – in this case it would be in the elevator car – and detonates it with a call from a cellphone. Eight ounces of Semtex brought down Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, so you can imagine what half that would do to a steel door and anybody looking through a peephole.
I backed through the dining room, grabbed a jacket to cover the Glock and headed for the spare bedroom. When the building had been the Comte du Crissier’s mansion his staff had used a hand-cranked elevator to send meals up from the kitchen to the dining room. This dumb waiter had terminated in a butler’s pantry – which was now my spare bedroom.
During the renovation the shaft had been converted to carry electrical wiring and, under the guise of installing high-speed computer cable to monitor the activities of my non-existent hedge fund, I got permission for a contractor who had installed surveillance equipment on The Division’s behalf to access the shaft. Having him fit a ladder inside, giving a route to the basement, I figured made the place almost worth the sky-high rent. Right now it was priceless.
I opened a closet door, pulled off an access panel and in less than a minute was heading into a narrow lane at the back of the building. Any moment I expected to hear the nineteenth-century facade and the heritage-listed bay windows heading towards a messy landing on the Champs-Élysées.