“This is certainly a coincidence.”
Adrenaline surged through Swain, the kick felt by a hunter who has suddenly found the trail he’d been seeking. “Someone else has asked about her?”
“Rodrigo Nervi himself. We were told to follow her when she deplaned. I put two men on it; they tailed her as far as the first public facility. She went in, and never came out. She didn’t go through Customs, and I show no record of her taking another flight out. She’s a very resourceful woman.“
“More than you know,” Swain said. “You told Nervi all of this?”
“Yes. It’s my standing order to cooperate with him-up to a point. He didn’t ask to have her killed, just followed.”
But the fact that she had disappeared so thoroughly would have tipped Nervi off to her capabilities, which in turn would put her in an entirely new light. By now Nervi would have discovered there was no Denise Morel of this particular description, and worked out for himself that she was almost certainly the person who had killed his father. The heat on Lily had just been turned up a couple of thousand degrees.
How had she slipped away in Heathrow? A secure-access door? First she would have had to slip out of the restroom undetected, and that meant a disguise. A clever woman like Lily would have figured out how to do that, been prepared for it. And she would have had an alternate identification to use, too.
“A disguise,” he said.
“I thought the same, though I didn’t say so to Mr. Nervi. He’s a smart man, so he’ll eventually think of it, even though airport security isn’t his milieu. Then he’ll want me to look at all the film.”
“Have you?” If the answer wasn’t yes, then Murray wasn’t as sharp as he used to be.
“Immediately after my men failed to spot her when she left the facility. I can’t fault them, however, because I’ve been over the film twice and I haven’t spotted her yet, either.”
“I’ll be there on the next available flight”
Because of travel time to the airport, the availability of seats, et cetera, that was some six hours later. Swain passed the time by catching a nap, but he was aware that every passing minute was to Lily’s advantage. She knew how they worked, what their resources were; she’d be building herself a tidy little hidey-hole, adding more and more layers to her camouflage. The delay was also giving her time to procure funds from some unknown bank account that he assumed she had. If he’d been in her line of work, he sure as hell would have had several numbered accounts. As it happened, he himself had a little liquid security deposited offshore. You just never knew when something like that might come in handy. And if it never needed to be used, well, it would make retirement a trifle more comfortable. He was all for a comfortable retirement.
As promised, Charles Murray was waiting at the gate when Swain finally arrived at Heathrow. Murray was of medium height, trim, with short iron-gray hair and hazel eyes. His bearing said he was ex-military; his demeanor was always calm and capable. He’d been unofficially on Nervi’s payroll for seven years, and on the government’s for a lot longer than that. Over the years Swain had occasionally dealt with Murray, enough so that they were fairly informal with each other. That is, Swain was informal; Murray was a Brit.
“This way,” said Murray after a brief handshake.
“How are the wife and kids?” Swain asked, talking to Murray‘s back as he ambled along in the British wake.
“Victoria is beautiful, as always. The children are teenagers.”
“Enough said.”
“Quite. And you?”
“Chrissy is a junior in college now; Sam’s a freshman.
They’re both great. Technically Sam’s still a teenager, but he’s out of the worst of it“ Actually, both of them had turned out pretty damned good, considering their parents had been divorced for a dozen years and their father was out of the country a lot. To a large degree that was because their mother, bless her heart, had steadfastly refused to make him the bad guy in their breakup. He and Amy had sat the kids down, told them the divorce was for a lot of reasons, including getting married way too young, blah blah blah. Which was all perfectly true. The bottom line, though, was that Amy was tired of having a husband who was mostly somewhere else, and she wanted to be free to look for someone else. Ironically, she hadn’t remarried, though she dated some. The kids’ lives hadn’t changed all that much from when he and Amy were still married: they lived in the same house, went to the same school, and saw their father just about as often as they had before.
If he and Amy had been older and wiser when they married, they never would have had kids together, knowing how his work would affect their marriage, but unfortunately age and wisdom seem to increase at about the same rate and by the time they were old enough to know better, it was too late. Still, he couldn’t regret having his kids. He loved them with every cell in his body, even if he got to see them only a few times a year, and he accepted that he wasn’t nearly as important in their lives as their mother was.
“One can only do one’s best, and pray the demon seed eventually morph back into human beings,” Murray observed as he turned down a short corridor. “Here we are.” He blocked the view of a keypad and punched in a code, then opened a plain steel door. Inside was a vast array of monitors and sharp-eyed personnel watching the ebb and flow of people inside the huge airport.
From there they went into a smaller room, which also had several monitors, as well as equipment for reviewing what the numerous array of cameras caught on film. Murray seated himself in a blue chair on wheels and invited Swain to pull up another one just like it. He typed in a keyboard command and the monitor directly in front of them glowed to life. Frozen on it was a frame of Lily Mansfield getting off the plane from Paris that morning.