Lee Child - First Thrills

“Gato,” she whispered.

The agreed upon password. Cat.

She pressed something now into his hand-it felt like an ancient key-and closed his fingers over it. “Gato,” she repeated.

And then she went still.

There had been no time to search for the woman’s killer in Florence. It would have been a futile exercise in any event. No doubt, the assassin had done his damage and disappeared into the crowd even before Matosian had gotten out of the museum.

And there was no time to waste.

But the good news was that Matosian had received the key and immediately recognized it for what it was-as a youth, he’d been trained by traveling gypsies in the arcane art of lock picking, and now could not only pick any lock, ancient or modern, that he encountered, but he could identify by sight or touch any one of the 314 closely guarded discrete patterns used by ancient guild of locksmiths in setting the internal tumblers in locks since the late Middle Ages.

Now, in the swiftly darkening evening of the same day that he’d left Florence, and dressed in a low-key gray business suit, Matosian walked along the calm waters of the Serpentine in a deep fog. His destination: the shelter/pump house for the Italian Fountain at the north end of the park.

As he walked, something began to nag at the borders of his consciousness. Walking at this time in this weather, he wouldn’t normally expect to have any company on this gravel path. But his training let him hear things that others could not, and now he came to an abrupt full stop.

Sure enough, steps sounded behind him. They kept on for one or two steps before they, too, stopped. But that was enough for Matosian.

Side-stepping over to the grass, he waited until the steps began again. And another set of them, clearly several men, converging from in front of him as well. And then-he sensed rather that actually heard them-another set of footfalls registered from directly behind him on the grass.

They were closing in on him now from three directions, with the freezing waters of the Serpentine as his only escape.

Even now the shadows were beginning to appear out of the fog. Big men in trenchcoats. Matosian could take care of himself in any fight, but now he estimated a force of at least six men bent on taking him down.

And then he heard his name, in a female key. “Don,” the voice said. “Gato.”

He turned and saw her, frail and beautiful, yet somehow strong and competent, sitting on the metallic bench that bounded the gravel walk. With no time to reason it out, he went over to her. She had wrapped herself in a heavy scarf over her peacoat, and now she brought it up around his neck, and brought her lips to his. As her tongue probed his, he realized that she tasted of almonds.

His pursuers had by now converged on the path, thirty feet away from them. He could hear them talking as the kiss continued. And then, as a group, they began to come down toward the bench.

“Excuse me,” one of the men said, “have you seen…?”

The woman broke their kiss and, holding Matosian’s face against her shoulder, snapped out in a rich Cockney accent. “Does it look like we’re looking out for somebody here, guvnor? Now piss off.”

And then she came back to the kiss.

After the men had gone, spreading out to find their quarry, the kiss finally ended. And now Matosian saw that tears filled her eyes. “Daphne,” she said. “The girl in Florence this morning? She was my sister.”

The pump house for the Italian Fountain did not get a lot of traffic. Matosian and Chloe-for that was the name of the woman who’d saved him with her kiss, Daphne’s almond-scented sister-had no trouble finding the door that was the match for the key he’d carried from Florence.

Once they were inside, Chloe turned to him. “What’s supposed to be hidden here?” she asked. “Daphne never told me before…” Her voice broke as the sentence trailed off.

Matosian took her in his arms. “It’s all right,” he said. “She felt no pain. They were professionals. As for what’s hidden here, we’ll find it. I’ll know it when I see it.” He flashed his laser penlight around the dark room. The pumps churned hundreds of gallons of water and most of the space was filled with pipes and plumbing. The light traced what looked like ancient graffiti on the walls, and suddenly Matosian came forward to examine the writing more carefully.

“This is it,” he announced. “It’s not graffiti, though they’ve done a good job of making it look like it.”

“What is it then?”

“Cyrillic. Early Bulgarian Cyrillic.”

“What does it say? Can you read it?”

“Yes, of course,” he answered abstractedly. Matosian could read sixteen different alphabets and was fluent in twenty-two languages. “It’s… just a minute. It’s nonsense. ‘Roses are pie, are is the area of a circle.’ ”

“ ‘Are is’? Is that what it really says?”

“There’s no doubt about the words,” Matosian said.

“Maybe it’s a code,” Chloe offered.

“No, not a code. A puzzle.” His voice became more animated. “That’s it, a puzzle! Roses are…”

“Red!” she said.

“Yes they are.” Getting into it now, Matosian came back to the script. “So what’s left?”

“ ‘Pie are is the area of a circle.’ ”

“But it’s not,” Matosian exclaimed breathlessly. “That’s pi r squared.” A pause. “So what two words are left out.”

“Red Square,” she said.

“Exactly.”

Matosian normally worked alone, but Chloe now clung to him, both of them shivering in the north wind that whipped through the square. She had refused to leave him in London even as they’d sped to the private airfield just outside Dover-bereft over the loss of her sister, and fearful for her own life, she saw him as her last ray of hope.

On Matosian’s personal jet, she’d fallen asleep until they were making their descent into Russia, and now suddenly, as an early morning crowd of tourists and bureaucrats hurriedly brushed by them, the enormity of their situation seemed to strike her for the first time.

“So Daphne never got to tell you what this was ultimately about?” she asked.

Matosian shook his head. “They got to her two steps ahead of me. She barely managed to get out the password and pass me the key before… before she was gone.”

“Do you think it might have something to do with the password itself? Gato.”

“Shh.” He put a gentle finger to her lips. “Let’s let that remain unspoken until we need it.” He looked around at the milling crowd. “But yes,” he went on, “I don’t think that’s impossible. My initial contact…”

She stopped him. “Who was that?”

A grim smile. “People say it as a joke, but in this case it’s as real as a heart attack. I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you. But let’s say it’s a high-ranking official of my country’s government. Very high-ranking, and all but invisible.”

“And he told you something about… the password?”

“Not in so many words. At Langley…”

“So it’s CIA then?”

“Forget I ever said that.” Matosian cast around, checking the faces in the crowd. Then, back to Chloe, he lowered his voice. “I don’t know if it started there. Just that it came through there.”

“I understand,” she said. “I’ll tell no one. Ever.”

He looked at her for a long moment. Then, coming to the decision that he would trust her, he went on. “When he mentioned the password to me, I got the feeling that a cat, or the symbol of a cat, would play some role in what we were trying to locate, but when I asked, he just smiled that enigmatic smile of his and said, ‘I think you’ll find out when you need to.’ And then I was off to Florence.” He shook his head in apparent disbelief. “It’s hard to imagine that was only three days ago.”