Stuart Woods: Dirty Work

"Good God, how many languages does she speak?"

"Nobody knows, but I'd guess at least a dozen, and with perfect accents in various dialects."

"So, why does she go around killing people?"

"When she was twenty, my firm and the CIA were pursuing the members of a terrorist organization in Cairo who had been killing foreign tourists. We received a tip that half a dozen members of the group would be traveling in a white Renault van along a major boulevard, en route to planting some explosives. Cooperating with Egyptian intelligence, our people set up an elaborate trap for them at an intersection. There wasn't supposed to be any traffic to speak of. Unfortunately, Marie-Therese and her parents were driving home from a very late party in another white van, and someone fired a rocket launcher at the wrong vehicle. Her parents were both killed instantly, but Marie-Therese, who was asleep in the third seat, was blown clear and survived with only scratches.

"She retreated to her Cairo home and became reclusive, but she was bitter about her parents' death. She refused compensation from all three governments, but then she was a wealthy young woman, having inherited two large houses and her father's considerable fortune.

"She had a boyfriend, an Irani, whose politics extended to extreme violence, and we think she was recruited by the boy and sent to a terrorist training camp in Libya, where she made contacts among others of her kind from Ireland, Japan, Germany, and God knows where else.

"She was trained in firearms, explosives, and chemical weapons, but her handlers, when they learned of her language skills, thought her meant for better things. They taught her assassination skills, document forging, and just about anything else a budding terrorist could possibly want to know, keeping her interest by telling her they would help her find the people responsible for her parents' death so she could kill them. She also became very physically fit in the desert, and she's known to work out almost obsessively, wherever she goes.

"When she finished her schooling in Libya, she returned to Cairo, then Zurich, selling her two houses and secreting the money in accounts around the world. Some say her holdings ran to several tens of millions of dollars. She returned to Cairo and, in effect, ceased to exist. The little we know of her since then comes from rumors and a couple of very aggressive interrogations of people who knew her.

"She seems to have assassinated two Egyptian politicians who held views unpopular with her terrorist friends. She shot one in the head while he waited in his car at a traffic signal, then calmly boarded a bus and rode away. That evening, she dropped cyanide, or something like it, in the other's drink in a crowded restaurant, then climbed out the ladies'-room window while he was still in his death throes. We think she performed half a dozen other such jobs over the next couple of years. Her handlers realized that they had a very valuable commodity on their hands, and they strung her along by telling her they were making progress in learning the names and locations of her parents' killers. They were lying, of course.

"Finally, she became impatient. She kidnapped the head of our Cairo station and tortured him until he gave the names of everyone involved in the operation," Carpenter said calmly. "Then she cut his throat and watched him bleed to death. The body, naked and very damaged, was deposited on the steps of the British embassy."

"Then she started hunting them?" Stone asked.

"Yes. The Americans were the first and easiest target. They were husband and wife. Both worked in their embassy in Cairo, and she fire-bombed their apartment while they slept.

"The British contingent, four of them, took longer. She garotted one in a railway station men's room in Bonn. The other, she stabbed with a poisoned umbrella tip as he walked across Chelsea Bridge, in London." Carpenter started to continue, but stopped.

"Go on," Stone said.

"She murdered Lawrence Fortescue the night before last," Carpenter said quietly.

"Larry Fortescue was a member of your service?"

"He was the man I told you about, the one I had a relationship with who decided to work abroad. He came here two years ago, married Elena Marks, and resigned from the firm."

"So she got them all," Stone said. "One by one."

"No," Carpenter said, "not all. She hasn't gotten me yet."

"You?"

"It was my first assignment abroad," she said. "I went along merely as an observer."

Stone gulped. "Does she know you're in New York?"

"I don't know," Carpenter replied. "But I'm moving out of your house tonight, and into a hotel."

"But why? You're safe with me."

"Stone," Dino said, tapping the newspaper on the table, "if little Marie-Therese, or one of her friends, happens to read today's Post, she'll know that the taking of her picture was instigated by a certain lawyer with a 'hard' name."

"But that's not enough to identify me, surely."

"And," Dino said, "she knows where you're dining tonight."

Stone looked slowly around Elaine's. He saw half a dozen women who could have been the woman in the photograph.

"Do you think this Marie… what's her name…"

Carpenter spoke up. "She picked up a sobriquet in Paris, after murdering a member of the French cabinet. Interpol calls her 'La Biche.' And yes, she could be here tonight."

Stone pushed back his chair. "Let's get out of here," he said.

Dino's driver took them to Stone's house, where Carpenter packed her bags, then they were driven to the Lowell, a small, elegant hotel on East Sixty-third Street, off Madison Avenue.

They were met at the door by the night manager, who, without bothering to register Carpenter, took them directly to a suite on the top floor.

"Are you known here?" Stone asked when the manager had gone and the bellman had deposited her luggage in the bedroom.

"My firm is," she said. "We've used the hotel often. We missed out on dinner; should we order something?"

They dined in the room on Dover sole and a good bottle of California Chardonnay, and without much conversation.

"So Dino," Stone said when the dishes had been cleared, "I guess you've put out an APB for this woman."

"Pretty tough, putting out an APB without a description," Dino replied, looking at the dessert menu.

"Description? You've got a photograph of her!"

"Yeah, well," Dino replied.

Carpenter went to her purse and brought back a sheet of paper. "Here's what the CIA's photo people were able to come up with," she said, handing it to Stone.

He opened the paper to see a rather bland face, framed by long, dark hair – straight nose, big eyes.

"The photograph Herbie took was of her looking up, so only her hair, forehead, eyes, and nose were visible, no jaw, and the hair was a wig."

"This could be nearly anybody," Stone said.

"Exactly. La Biche's stock-in-trade is looking like anybody. She can walk through the toughest airport security and pass herself off as an American businesswoman or a French fashion designer, an Italian countess, or a Spanish nun."

"I thought, what with electronics, it was getting harder to use false passports. Every time I've used mine, it gets swiped through a reader, and my information pops up on a screen."

"All true, but over the years there have been numerous thefts of blank passports from embassies and consulates all over the world, which solves the problem of paper authenticity, and if such thefts can be concealed for a few days or weeks, the numbers don't come up as stolen when going through immigration. It's very, very tough to catch somebody when your suspect is using real paper."

"I would imagine," Stone said.

The phone rang, and Carpenter went to answer it. "Yes? No, absolutely not. It would attract the attention of anybody who knew what to look for. Are you trying to make me a marked woman?" She paused and listened. "Well, that makes sense, I suppose, though the thought doesn't really appeal. Oh, all right, send them over." She hung up and returned to the table.