Kiss Me While I Sleep cs-3 Read online

  The phone rang. Vincenzo got up to leave, but Rodrigo stayed him with a lifted hand; he had more questions about the vaccine. He picked up the receiver. “Yes.”

  “I have an answer to your question.” Again, no names were used, but he recognized Blanc’s quiet voice. “There was nothing in our data banks. Our friends, however, came up with a match. Her name is Liliane Mansfield, she is American, and she is a contract agent, a professional assassin.”

  Rodrigo’s blood ran cold. “They hired her?” If the Americans had turned on him, matters had just become enormously complicated.

  “No. My contact says our friends are greatly disturbed and are themselves trying to find her.”

  Reading between the lines, Rodrigo interpreted that to mean that the CIA was trying to find her to eliminate her. Ah! That explained the American man who had been to her flat searching for her. It was a relief to have that mystery explained, as well; Rodrigo liked to know who all the players were on his chessboard. With the vast American resources and extensive knowledge they must have about her, they were far more likely to succeed before he did . . . but he wanted to personally oversee the solution to her breathing problem. She breathed, therefore she was a problem.

  “Is there any way your contact can share their knowledge with you, as they receive it?” If he knew what the CIA knew, he could let them do the legwork for him.

  “Perhaps. There is one other thing that I thought would be of great interest to you. This woman was a very close friend of the Joubrans.”

  Rodrigo closed his eyes. There it was, the one detail that made sense of everything, that tied it all together. “Thank you,” he said. “Please let me know if you can work out this other matter with our friends.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “I’d like a copy of all the information you have on her.”

  “I will fax it to you as soon as I am able,” Blanc replied, meaning when he returned home that night. He would never send information to Rodrigo from the Interpol building itself.

  Rodrigo hung up and leaned his head back against his chair. The two events were connected, after all, but not in any way he’d imagined. Vengeance. So simple, and something he understood with every cell in his body. Salvatore had killed her friends, so she had killed Salvatore. Whoever had hired the Joubrans to destroy Vincenzo’s work had set in motion a chain of events that had ended with his father’s murder.

  “Her name is Liliane Mansfield,” he told Vincenzo. “Denise Morel’s real name, that is. She is a professional assassin, and she was friends with the Joubrans.”

  Vincenzo’s eyes widened. “And she took the poison herself? Knowing what it was? Brilliant! Foolhardy, but brilliant.”

  Rodrigo didn’t share in Vincenzo’s admiration for this Liliane Mansfield’s actions. His father had died a very painful, difficult death, robbed of dignity and control, and he would never forget that.

  So. She had accomplished her mission and fled the country. She was perhaps out of his reach now, but she wasn’t out of the reach of her own countrymen. With Blanc on the job, he would be able to stay abreast of their search for her, and when they were closing in on her, he would step in and do the honors himself. With great pleasure.

  11

  When Rodrigo received the faxed papers, he stared for a long time at the picture of the woman who had killed his father. His machine was a color printer, so he received the full impact of the skillfulness of her disguise. Her hair was wheat blond and very straight, her eyes a piercing pale blue. She was very Nordic in looks, with a strong, lean face and high cheekbones. He was amazed at how changing her coloring to dark hair and brown eyes had softened her face; her facial structure had remained unchanged, but one’s perception of her was definitely altered. He thought she could have walked into the room and sat next to him, and it would have taken him a moment to recognize her.

  He had wondered what his father had seen in her. As a brunette, she had left Rodrigo cold; his reaction to her as a blonde was very different. It wasn’t just the normal Italian reaction to blond hair, either. It was as if he was truly seeing her for the first time, seeing the intellect and strong will so evident in those pale eyes. Perhaps Salvatore had been more perceptive than he himself was, because his father had respected strength as he’d respected nothing else. This woman was strong. Once she had crossed his path, it was almost inevitable that Salvatore would have been attracted to her.

  Rodrigo leafed through the other pages Blanc had sent him. He was interested in the Mansfield woman’s employment history with the American CIA; she was a hired killer, period. He wasn’t shocked that governments used such people; he would have been shocked if they didn’t. This was information he could use at a later date if he needed a particular favor from the American government, but nothing that would help him right now.

  He was more interested in the information about her family: a mother and a sister. The mother, Elizabeth Mansfield, lived in Chicago; the younger sister, Diandra, lived with her husband and two children in Toledo, Ohio. If he couldn’t locate Liliane, he thought, he could use her family to flush her out of hiding. Then he read that she hadn’t been in contact with her family in years, and had to allow for the possibility that she might not care about their welfare.

  The last page indicated what Blanc had told him, that his father’s murder had not been ordered by the Americans. She had acted alone, seeking vengeance for the deaths of her friends the Joubrans. The CIA had dispatched an operative to terminate the problem.

  Terminate. That was a very good word, but he wanted to do the terminating himself. If possible, he would have that satisfaction. If not, he would accept with good grace that the Americans had handled the situation.

  The very last paragraph made him sit up straight. The subject had fled to London using an alias, then evidently switched identities once again and returned to Paris. Search efforts were focusing there. The operative on location believed she was preparing for yet another strike against the Nervi organization.

  Rodrigo felt as if he’d been electrified; every fine hair on his body lifted, and chills ran down his spine.

  She had come back to Paris. She was here, within his reach. It was a bold move, and if not for M. Blanc, he would have been caught unawares. His personal security was as tight as he could humanly make it, but what about the Nervi holdings scattered around Europe? More particularly, what about the ones here in the Paris area? The security systems in place were good, yes, but where this woman was concerned, extra precautions were called for.

  What was her most likely target? The answer came immediately to mind: Vincenzo’s laboratory. He knew it; the flash of intuition too strong to ignore. That was where her friends had struck, and gotten shot for their efforts. She would see it as poetic justice if she completed the job, perhaps setting a series of explosive charges and completely demolishing the laboratory complex.

  Losing the projected profits from the influenza vaccine wouldn’t bankrupt him, but he was looking forward to that huge influx of cash. Money was the real power in the world, behind the kings and oil princes, the presidents and prime ministers, with each group trying to get more than the other. But even greater than the lost profits would be the insult, the loss of face. Another incident at the lab and the WHO would begin questioning the security, at best simply withdrawing the funding, at worst insisting on on-site inspections. He didn’t want anyone from the outside looking through the laboratory. Vincenzo could probably hide or disguise what he was doing, but any further delay would wreck their plans.

  He couldn’t let her win. Aside from everything else, word would reach the streets that Rodrigo Nervi had been bested—and by a woman. He could perhaps keep it quiet for a time, but eventually someone would talk. Someone always talked.

  This could not have happened at a worse time. He had just buried his father no more than a week before. As well as he knew what needed to be done, nevertheless he was aware that on some fronts there was still a lingering doubt th