Before long he rested his head against the chair and dozed off.
51
Stone was dreaming of Election Day in the United States. He was in a large hall with a movie-theater-sized television screen, and Kate Lee was making a gracious, very affecting concession speech. “In the end,” she was saying, “it was all the fault of someone named Stone Barrington, who I had never heard of until last week. . . .”
Stone tried to speak, but someone put tape over his mouth and something black over his eyes, and his hands were taped to the arms of his chair.
“There,” a man’s voice said. “He will be most comfortable.”
Stone, still half in his dream, tried to protest that Kate’s loss was not his fault, but he stopped himself. This part with the tape and the blindfold and the chair was no dream. He reoriented to the extent that he could. First, he wondered if he had been drugged, but he decided that was impossible, since the only thing he had eaten or drunk since yesterday had been given to him by Holly.
“Mmmph!” he said, wanting to speak.
“Just rest quietly, my friend,” a soothing voice said, in an accent that was not British or American but was otherwise not immediately identifiable. “He will be here soon, and then you will know everything.”
Stone was not looking forward to knowing everything, beyond the point where he had been so rudely awakened. He wondered if Holly really had drugged him, and if this event were part of what had been discussed at her meeting at the Paris station. He was still drowsy, and gradually he nodded off again, surprised at how relaxed he was.
He was awakened by a woman’s voice, speaking in French, apparently coming from another room. There was protest in her words, whatever they were.
Then someone untied the blindfold, and Stone blinked in the unaccustomed light. A man stood in front of him; he had a very good look at a silver belt buckle before the tape was ripped from his face. “Shit!” he said.
“Sorry, Mr. Barrington, it was the most humane method,” the belt buckle said. Then the man backed away from him and sat down in the chair opposite Stone’s. He slowly recognized Jacques Chance, prefect of Paris police, brother of Mirabelle.
“Thank you for your humanity,” Stone said.
“Jacques!” the woman in the next room said insistently.
“Silence, ma chère,” Jacques replied. “We will be done here soon.”
“Done with what?” Stone asked, honestly curious.
“That remains to be seen, Mr. Barrington. If you are cooperative, you will autograph some papers for me, and then I will be gone, and you will still be alive.”
Stone didn’t like what he imagined as the alternative. “Let me guess,” he said: “You want me to sign over my interests in the Arrington hotels?”
“Quite right,” Jacques replied. “But you will be handsomely compensated. I have in my possession a banker’s check for thirty million euros, with your name on it. I should think that would be a very happy alternative to what the Russian gentleman would have me subject you to, should you fail to sign.”
“I suppose this is what you would call the carrot or the stick,” Stone said.
“Be happy it is not the frying pan or the fire,” Jacques said. “It could easily have been so, were it not for Mirabelle’s persuasions.”
“Merci beaucoup, Mirabelle!” Stone called out, so that she could hear him in the kitchen.