All the Queen's Men Read online

  Ronsard’s guests were shocked and uneasy. The violence of the night’s events had forcibly brought home to many of them exactly what sort of world their host lived in. It was all very well to flirt with danger, to boast to their friends that they had been guests at the notorious Louis Ronsard’s luxurious estate, to give him information that made them feel wicked and notorious too, but the reality of it was more brutal than they could have guessed.

  He imagined none of them had ever seen a man who had been shot in the head. Then all hell had broken loose outside as Temple made his escape, with a hail of automatic fire that sounded as if a small war was being waged on his front lawn, the car crashing through his front gates, his guards scattering as small-arms fire was returned at them. It wasn’t just his security that had been breached, but theirs. They no longer had the illusion of safety. Most of them were leaving come the morning.

  As a host, his night had been a fiasco. As a businessman, it was worse than that.

  Temple and Niema had been in his office. What Niema was doing there, he couldn’t imagine. Perhaps she was Temple’s partner, perhaps not. Witnesses to the shooting in the hallway had agreed he was manhandling her, shoving her around, dragging her outside. On the other hand, Temple had been driving the car; who other than Niema had been shooting at his guards? It was possible Temple had been both driving and shooting; difficult, but not impossible, and Temple was a trained assassin.

  What had they been doing in his office?

  The lock wasn’t working. It had been, however, when he left the office the last time, because he automatically, from ingrained habit, tried the handle every time he left.

  He stood in his office looking around, trying to see what Temple could have seen. What would he have been interested in? The computers, of course. But there was nothing on Cara’s that would have been of interest to him, and the information in Ronsard’s computer was password protected.

  The password. He walked to his desk and surveyed the items on top of it. Nothing looked disturbed; his copy of A Tale of Two Cities was exactly where he had left it.

  And yet—

  And yet, the instinct for survival that had stood him in such good stead told him that Temple had somehow breached the security in his computer as surely as he had breached the estate’s security. Ronsard couldn’t afford to assume otherwise. Nor could he afford to underestimate his opponent, a man who evidently appeared and disappeared at will, and who had access to government documents before they were made public. Such a man was a man with power either behind him, or in his own hands.

  They had to be found. With one phone call to the authorities in Lyon he had immediately thrown a net over the airport, then, when one of his more observant men saw where a car had been driven off the road and found the Mercedes abandoned, extended that net to the car rental services also.

  They were on foot, unless Temple stole another car. Ronsard arranged that he be told immediately if any thefts were reported.

  He sat down at his desk, drumming his fingers on the wood. Lyon was the most logical immediate destination—but perhaps Temple would go in the opposite direction, for that reason. Do the unexpected. Keep your opponent off balance, guessing.

  This would be like a game of chess, with moves and countermoves. The key to victory was planning ahead, anticipating every move his opponent could make.

  Marseilles was to the south—a larger city than Lyon, with a huge, busy port. It was farther away, but once there, the chances of escaping went up dramatically.

  The port. That was the key. Temple would escape by water.

  * * *

  The village was a small one, no more than fifteen houses loosely grouped on each side of the road. John selected an older model Renault that was parked in front of a cottage, as the older cars were easier to hotwire. Niema stood watch while he eased the car door open and felt under the dash for the wiring harness. The interior light was burning, but he didn’t have a flashlight and had to take the chance of someone seeing the light. With his knife, he stripped the wires of their plastic sheath.

  Three cottages away, a dog roused from its doggy dreams and barked once, then fell silent. No light came on in any of the cottage’s windows.

  “Get in,” John whispered, moving aside so she could crawl in from that side and not make more noise by having to open and close the passenger door, too. She wasn’t a four-year-old, and the Renault was small; she banged her knee on the gear shift, her head on the interior light, and her elbow on the steering wheel. Swearing under her breath, she finally maneuvered herself into the passenger seat.

  John wasn’t laughing, but his mouth wore a curve that said he wanted to. The small interior light gave her the first clear look at him since they left the estate, and her heart skipped a beat. The right side of his face was streaked with dried blood, despite his efforts to wipe it off. His once-snowy shirt was rusty with dirt and blood, his hair was tousled, and beard stubble darkened his jaw. With the black strip of silk tied around his head, he looked like a disreputable, Armani-clad pirate.

  If anyone saw them the way they looked now, they were busted.

  He twisted the wires together, and the engine began trying to crank. It coughed, the fan turning, and he slid into the seat and gently pressed the gas pedal. With a high-pitched hum like a sewing machine, the car started. Without closing the door, he put in the clutch and shifted into low gear; the car began rolling as he let out the clutch. Fifty yards down the road, he closed the door.

  “What time is it?” she asked, slumping in the seat. Her feet were throbbing. She eased them out of the sandals, knowing she might not be able to get her shoes back on and not caring. Sitting down was such a relief she almost groaned.

  He glanced at his wristwatch. “A little after three. With luck, we have two or three hours before anyone notices the car is missing. Why don’t you try to get some sleep?”

  “I’m not sleepy.” She wasn’t. She was exhausted but not sleepy. She was both hungry and thirsty, and really, really needed to soak her aching feet in cold water.

  “You will be. When your adrenaline drops, you’ll crash.”

  “What about you? Don’t you have adrenaline?” she snapped, though she didn’t know why she was suddenly crabby.

  “I’m used to it. I’ve learned how to work through the crash.”

  “I’m okay.”

  She wasn’t, though. She glanced at him. His strong hands were steady on the wheel, his expression as calm as if he were out for a Sunday drive. Maybe she looked that calm, too, but inside she was shredded.

  “Do you want to talk about it?”

  “No,” she said, appalled. There was no need to ask what “it” was. She didn’t want him to be reasonable and logical and tell her to just look at what they’d done as part of the job. All she wanted was to get this over with and leave with some semblance of dignity still intact.

  “We have to at some point.”

  “No, we don’t. I just want to forget it.”

  He paused, and his jaw tightened. “Are you mad because you came, or because I did?”

  She felt like screaming. God, why wouldn’t he just leave it alone? “Neither. Both.”

  “That’s certainly a definitive answer.”

  “If you want definitive answers, get a dictionary.”

  Another pause, as if he measured her resistance. “All right, I’ll drop it for now, but we will talk.”

  She didn’t reply. Didn’t he understand? Talking about what happened was like touching a wound, keeping it fresh and bleeding. But, no, how could he understand, when it wasn’t like that for him?

  “How far is it to Nice?”

  “A couple of hundred miles if we use the expressway, less if we go over the mountains. The direct route probably won’t be the fastest, though, at least not in this car. It doesn’t have the horses to climb the mountains at much more than a crawl.”

  “The expressway should get us there by six-thirty or seven, though.”