“And what do they want? Who are these people?”
“That doesn’t matter to you, Al-Saud.”
“It matters because my woman is at risk.”
“I promise you that Matilde is not at risk anymore. They won’t bother her again.”
“Fucking son of a bitch! If something happens to Matilde because of you, I’ll come back to this hospital and kill you right here in this bed. I’ll have no pity for the state you’re in.”
“Don’t worry, Al-Saud. If something happened to Matilde because of me, I would put a bullet in my head. Don’t think you’re the only one that loves her. No one loves her like I do. And when I gave her that key, I did it for her, to protect her, so that she would never lack for anything in case I died.”
“Matilde is never going to lack for anything because I’ll make sure she has everything. She’s mine now,” he growled, “and I don’t want you coming near her. And don’t send anyone to ask her to come visit you. You’ve been warned.” Still worked up, he continued, “I’ll be back tomorrow with the money. If the documents you have are satisfactory, I’ll give it to you.”
He entered the suite at the George V still driven by the rage that Blahetter had awoken in him.
“Thérèse, in my office, now!” he shouted.
The woman scurried after him with a notebook and pen in one hand and a bag from Emporio Armani in the other.
“I see you got the coat for Matilde,” he commented more calmly. “Put it here, Thérèse, please. And thank you.”
“You’re welcome, sir.”
“Thérèse, please take care of getting this frame fixed.” He gestured to the painting of Matilde as a girl, which he had propped against the wall, next to the door. “Take it to Monsieur Lafére. He’s the only one I trust. Get in touch with my sister. I want to have lunch with her today in the George V restaurant. Tell her no excuses. Tell Diana and Sándor to come this afternoon around four. Now put me in touch with my lawyer, Dr. Lafrange, and then Peter Ramsay. Any calls?”
Thérèse gave him his messages and reminded him that he had a meeting at three with the lawyers representing Mercure Inc. and Shaul Zeevi to finish drawing up the clauses of the contract. The Israeli had agreed to the plan of action for the Congo without questioning the inflated sum Mercure Inc. was demanding in payment. He put his lawyer, Dr. Lafrange, in charge of the three Iraqis retained at Quai des Orfèvres. He wanted them on the streets as soon as possible so that they could be followed.
The rest of the day turned into a succession of troubleshooting and putting out fires, like the one lit by the call from the president of Liberia, Charles Taylor, whose physical well-being and that of his family were the responsibility of Mercure. He was a hypocritical, cruel ruler and was difficult to deal with, but paid well for their services, and Mercure didn’t have the luxury of passing up such a lucrative job. Taylor was enraged with one of his bodyguards for having sex with his niece, and was threatening to have him executed. The gravity of the situation almost made Al-Saud rush to Le Bourget Airport on his way to Monrovia. However, Tony Hill, who had closed the deal with President Taylor, took responsibility for saving the Mercure employee’s hide and flew out on the Gulfstream V instead.
The lunch with Yasmín hadn’t been easy either. His sister had changed her mind about wanting to get rid of Sándor.
“You’re impossible, Yasmín! You’ve been bugging me about how you can’t stand Sándor, and now that I indulge you, you come to me saying that you want him to stay.”
“I’ve gotten used to the idea of him being with me. If you change him, I’ll have to get used to a new one.”
“Well, that’s how it’s going to be! Sándor is leaving your service and will be guarding Matilde.”
“Matilde?” Yasmín was piqued.
“Do you have something against my woman?”
“Your woman?” Yasmín’s expression turned from anger to shock. “You’re calling her ‘your woman’? I think I’m jealous,” she admitted after a silence, though she didn’t know who the jealousy was directed at, her brother or her bodyguard, who would be spending all day with Eliah’s beautiful girlfriend. “Forgive me,” she said, and squeezed his hand. “I’m just thinking about Samara…”
“Shut up,” Al-Saud murmured through gritted teeth, yanking his hand away. “How much longer will I have to pay for her death? Don’t I have the right to be happy?”
“Yes, yes, of course. I’m sorry. You know that I loved her like a sister, that’s why…forget it. What I said was nonsense. I’m happy for you. Matilde is very sweet and seems to have a good heart. And you seem so in love with her. I have to admit that I’ve never seen you like this.”
“I’ve never seen myself like this,” Al-Saud agreed.
During the meeting with the lawyers from Mercure Inc. and the Israeli businessman, a few problems arose that would require new calculations on the part of Al-Saud and his partners. This would delay the signature, and thus the down payment. Absolute detail was needed; it included important, specific data such as the number of mercenaries involved and other less obvious but equally relevant information like the number of liters of mineral water that would have to be supplied.
Before the meeting with the Huseinovic siblings at four thirty, he called Matilde. There was a slight delay before she picked up the phone and he suffered a moment of fear; he was worried they had disobeyed his order and gone to the institute. When he heard Matilde’s “Hello?” blood started pumping through his heart again.
“What took you so long to answer?” he asked grumpily.
“Because we all had our hands full. Hello, Eliah,” she said pointedly. “How are you?”
“Hello, my love. Forgive me. For a moment I thought you had gone to the institute.”
“We agreed that we wouldn’t go. I keep my promises, Eliah. Do you?”
He hadn’t always kept them. He had promised Samara fidelity, and he had never been faithful to her. Why was the idea of betraying Matilde so intolerable to him?
“I do too.”
“Are you going to come for dinner?”
“Yes. And I’m sorry, but my brother, Mike and Peter are coming too.”
“We’ll expect them.”
Diana and Sándor didn’t like the idea of guarding Matilde, each for their own reasons. Diana protested that she would prefer riskier missions, like the one with Bouchiki in Cairo, that being a bodyguard wasn’t a challenge for her anymore and that she wanted to go back to Fergusson Island to finish her training. Sándor, for his part, didn’t offer any arguments to justify his surliness and just said, “If that’s what you want, Eliah.”
“Shit!” Al-Saud exploded, jumping up from his chair. “I’m putting what I treasure the most in the hands of the people I trust the most, and they’re both turning their backs on me.”
The Huseinovics’ attitudes were transformed as if by magic, and both started stammering apologies. The only question Sándor had was, “Who will protect Miss Yasmín in my place?”
Before he said good-bye to the Huseinovics, Al-Saud, still on his feet, declared, “You’ll be in charge of the protection of the only person who has heard Leila’s voice in years.”
“What are you talking about, Eliah?” Diana came back toward him.
“This morning, Leila went to wake Matilde up. She called her by her name and then said, ‘Bonjour, Matilde.’”
“Thank God!” Sándor cried in Bosnian.
“Why her?” Diana asked, unable to hide her jealousy.
“I don’t know,” Al-Saud admitted. “Right from the beginning, Leila has felt very drawn to Matilde.”
“What if it isn’t true?” Diana said, mistrustfully.
“Shouldn’t we consult Leila’s psychiatrist?” Sándor wondered. “Maybe Miss Matilde would agree to go with her.”
“We’ll see,” Al-Saud said, and before Diana had left his office, he took her by the arm and drew her closer. “If your attitude toward Matilde is going to continue as
it is now, I don’t want you as her bodyguard. Decide now. If you think you can’t undertake the assignment, I’ll find someone else.”
“Forgive me, Eliah. I was rude and acted like a jealous little girl. It will be an honor to take care of your woman.”
To top off a day plagued with problems and arguments, there was a call from Olivier Dussollier, which he took in the Aston Martin on his way home. The inspector had taken it upon himself to inform him that, thanks to his intervention, ballistics had worked hard to hand in the report sooner than usual. The words that followed alarmed Al-Saud.
“The comparative tests show that the bullet had a hollow point, like dumdum bullets.”
It could be a coincidence, he tried to convince himself. Still, the rational part of his mind told him that there was something murky going on. dumdum bullets were used pretty rarely; both victims, the bellboy and the Iraqi, had holes in the right eye; the deaths had all the hallmarks of having been carried out by a trained assassin. How was the attack on the George V related to the attack on Matilde? Could it be the same hit man hired by different people?
“Thank you, Olivier. I really appreciate your help. If anything else comes up, please don’t hesitate to call me.”
When he got home, followed by Alamán, Mike and Peter, he found Matilde and Leila, greatly amused, making a new dish for the Bosnian girl: milanesas, breaded veal cutlets. Matilde seemed relaxed, without a trace of her anxiety from the night before. Juana, with her elbows propped on the black marble of the island, was talking intimately into the telephone.
“She’s talking to Shiloah,” Matilde said. “The conversation has gone on for over an hour,” she added.
“The men and I have to take of a few things for Mercure before we eat. How much time do we have?”
“As much as you need. Let me know when you’re almost done, and Leila and I will have dinner ready. Why are you looking at me like that?”
“I’m looking at you because you’re beautiful. I’ll let you know when we’re almost finished.”
“Eliah.” She stopped him.
“Yes?”
“Did they fix the lock at my aunt’s house? I didn’t want to…”
“Everything is fixed. Don’t worry.”
“Thank you. Tell me how much I owe you.”
Al-Saud rolled his eyes before leaving the kitchen without answering.
Peter and Alamán had isolated the part of the recording captured by the cameras planted in the apartment on Rue Toullier between the hours Eliah had indicated, and prepared it for analysis at the base. As they went down the three floors in the elevator, Al-Saud considered the prospect that sooner or later Matilde would find the door and would ask him where it led. He pushed it to the back of his mind. He would worry about it later.
Masséna saw them come in and wondered why they were locking themselves in the projection room. Alamán took charge of the projector. The recording had been filmed by a camera installed in the dining room. Though it was dark, the image was pretty well defined, as the camera used night-vision technology and a light enhancer, although it still had a greenish tint and there were sections of darkness.
They fast-forwarded through the first few minutes until a flash appeared: the burst of the silent explosive. The entry had occurred at 11:40 at night. Seconds later, a man with a tall, powerful build appeared. He was dressed in a black jumpsuit. Eliah stood up to get closer to the screen, suddenly feeling uneasy. He noticed that the intruder wore a helmet with a night-vision mono-goggle. This confirmed his suspicions that they were dealing with a professional—not everyone had three-thousand-dollar night-vision equipment handy.
It became obvious that the man knew what he was looking for as he went along the walls. He pulled down Matilde’s painting and squatted on the ground to cut it open. Up to that point, the camera hadn’t gotten a good shot of the intruder’s face.
“What’s he doing?” Peter Ramsay wondered. “What is that?”
“Something that Blahetter hid in the painting,” Al-Saud replied.
The intruder took out several sheets of paper, smoothed them out, then rolled them up and put them away in a plastic tube, the kind used by architects to carry blueprints. He stood up and the camera hidden in the frame of the front door captured his face fully; the eye not covered by the goggle shone brightly like a cat’s eye.
“Mon Dieu!” Eliah exclaimed, jumping to his feet. “Alamán, go back! I want to see his face again. Freeze the image there! Merde,” he muttered.
“What’s going on?”
“I know that guy.” He stopped and fell silent for a long moment; it was almost unbearable to say what he was thinking: “I think that he’s the terrorist who tried to kidnap Yasmín, Mama and me in 1981.”
“You’re delirious!” said Alamán. “You can’t even make out his features. The light is too bad; the green tint diminishes the quality of the definition. Plus, that man would have changed a lot in fifteen years. No, no, brother, you must be confused.”
Al-Saud, however, knew that he was right. The fleeting face he had glimpsed in the pandemonium of the convention room at the George V hadn’t been a figment of his imagination.
He asked Ramsay to put one of his tracking experts on the trail of the three Iraqis who would probably be let out of jail in a day or two.
“Maybe they’ll lead us to the man we just saw on the recording.”
“I’ll call Amburgo Ferro, the Italian. He’s available and he’s one of the best.”
“Tell him to set up outside the door of thirty-six Quai des Orfèvres tonight. They could get out tomorrow or the next day. Warn him that he might not be the only one following the Iraqis.”
Later that same night, Matilde was watching him swim from a chair at the end of the pool. Al-Saud stretched out his arms and opened his chest, swimming the butterfly. His shoulder muscles bulged before being submerged in the water only to reappear again, tense with effort. How many laps had he done? She felt his furious energy and knew that it was driven by rage. She had seen how tense he was during dinner—he had barely said a word, not even to praise her milanesas napolitanas, while Alamán, Mike and Peter had devoured them and thanked her with their mouths full.
Finally he got out of the pool and lay facedown, soaking and naked on a recliner; his arms hung heavily at his sides and rested on the teakwood planks. Matilde left her seat to dry him. His back rose and fell as he panted. He had made a superhuman effort.
“My Horse of Fire,” she whispered, her head close to his. “So strong and powerful. You know what, Eliah? I can identify all the muscles in your body one by one.” She dragged her lips down his wet back and felt him shift, seeing how his buttocks compressed and revealed the depressions in his side. “You’re so handsome.” With a languid caress, barely touching him, her fingers ran down his vertebral column and continued into the dent between his buttocks. Al-Saud stifled a moan, and Matilde saw that his left hand had closed around the cracks in the teakwood decking.
“Matilde,” she heard him say, and leaned down to see his face contracted with pleasure, although it looked more like he was enduring searing pain. She continued to torture him, running the tip of her index finger up and down the valley of his buttocks. She loved getting a reaction out of him, perhaps because he seemed so passive. When she sank her hand around past the dent and caressed his testicles, Al-Saud threw himself at her and they made love on the wood. Matilde pushed the hair from his face and stroked his bluish jaw. They stared into each other’s eyes as he thrust into her. He possessed her with the same passion as he always did, and yet it was clear that something was bothering him, something that robbed his green eyes of their glint.
When they went back to the bedroom, exhausted and satisfied, Matilde found her coat spread out on the bed. It wasn’t the same one, she realized immediately; Eliah had bought her another one.
“Thank you, my love,” she said, but she suddenly drew away and ran to her shika to get her Médaille Miraculeuse, which now l
acked a chain. “This is my most prized possession,” she told him once she was standing in front of him again. “It has protected me since I was sixteen. Now I want to give it you as a symbol of my love and admiration. You’re the best man I’ve ever known in my life, Eliah.”
Al-Saud took the medallion in a silence he was unable to break; his throat had gone numb. Matilde realized that his chin was trembling and that he was looking at her through a veil of tears.
“I’m giving it to you now so it will protect you from evil forever.”
Early the next morning, Al-Saud burst into room 304. Ezequiel was helping Roy to eat breakfast.
“Out.”
“Who the hell do you think you are to throw me out? I’m sick of this, Al-Saud!” Ezequiel rushed toward him, ready to hit him. In two movements, Eliah had pinned him to the linoleum floor. He spoke to him with one hand around his neck and the other pinning his hands behind his back.
“I don’t want to hurt you, Ezequiel, because you’re important to Matilde. But I have no patience today, no time and a lot of things to discuss with your brother. So I’ll say it one more time: out.”
“Please, Ezequiel,” Roy intervened.
His brother got up and looked at Al-Saud; he didn’t look humiliated, just shocked. He hadn’t spent years in the gym working on his body so that someone just a little taller than he was could throw him around like a child and shove his face into the ground. He would talk to Matilde. Who was this Al-Saud?
Ezequiel left, and Eliah walked to the head of the bed. He buried his fists in the pillow on either side of Roy’s head and leaned in to look him in the eye.
“Now, Blahetter, you’re going to tell me the name of the person who left you in this state.”
“Why would I do that?”
“You can do it for two reasons. Your choice: because Matilde is at risk and you want to help her, or because you’re afraid, because I promise you that if I leave this room without that information, this time they’ll have to operate on your arm.” To add weight to his threat, he seized Blahetter’s right forearm with both hands. “In my lifetime I’ve picked up certain skills, like the ones you saw recently. I have others that would allow me to break your forearm just by applying a little pressure here. Talk now. I’m so angry, Blahetter, that I can’t take responsibility for my actions.”