Tom Savage - Mrs. John Doe

She’d been stupid, and now she and her husband would die. Well, she wouldn’t die quietly; she’d make it as difficult as possible. She opened her mouth wide, filling her lungs to shout, to cry out in sheer, impotent rage.

Something huge and heavy smashed into the back of her head. The scream on her lips became a grunt of sharp, exquisite pain as she slammed into the fence post, bounced from the impact, and sagged over sideways into the grass. Then everything faded to black.

It was the actor’s nightmare all over again. She was standing on a stage in a theater, and she wasn’t wearing any clothes. The silent, faceless audience gaped at her as she looked around, trying to get her bearings. If she could only recognize something, she might figure out what play she was in, what role she was supposed to be playing. She might even remember her next line. But there wasn’t any scenery, the playing area was as bare as she was, and there were no other actors here with her. She was alone, in an unknown production in this unfamiliar playhouse, under a harsh spotlight, naked. She strained to remember…

Pal-He’s thinking-“Coop” demain .

What was that? A note slipped to her by a supporting player, a beautiful blond girl. A note from her husband: Go to Musée Rodin in Paris. He was getting her out of the country, rescuing her after the foiled robbery in Russell Square Gardens. It hadn’t been a real robbery after all. It had been an elaborate hoax, a performance, a pantomime, with the young man from the plane-her friend, not her enemy-trying to wrest the famous envelope from her, so the bad guys would follow him and leave her, Nora, alone. But it hadn’t worked out as planned. One of the bad guys had already been there; he’d followed her from the Byron Hotel, where he’d been waiting for her to return from the morgue. She hadn’t gone inside; she’d passed by the hotel and led Craig Elder to the park, and he’d thwarted the “robbery.”

Then Craig had escorted her back to the hotel, only to find another of Jeff’s agents-Solange, the brave young Frenchwoman who’d been under deep cover, romancing the notoriously randy Bill Howard in an attempt to find out if he was the arms dealer Jeff was seeking. Craig had spotted the girl in the hotel lobby and immediately bolted before she’d spotted him .

Nora was still naked, still bathed in the harsh white light, but now the scenario was coming back to her. The silent audience continued to stare as she worked her way through the script.

Craig had followed the girl to Paris, to the apartment in the Latin Quarter, and strangled her, breaking a window to make it look good. The note she was to deliver to Nora the next day in the museum was left in her dead hand, replaced by an alternate: GOOT! Dix roses pour Grand-tante J ce soir .

Bill Howard had thought that one up, of course, borrowing the GOOT from Jeff’s emails and the details of the cemetery ritual he’d known about for years, ever since Jeff had told him and Viv over that long-ago dinner. Craig had placed that note in the glove and had it delivered to Nora by a homeless man he’d probably bribed with a few euros for the purpose.

That false note had done its job: It had gotten Nora Baron to a remote graveyard in the middle of the night where they could shoot her, bury her, retrieve the envelope. But that had gone wrong too, thanks to Jeff’s other secret agent, the redoubtable Jacques Lanier. The assassin-a local French mercenary, no doubt-had been killed instead, Jacques had been wounded, and Nora had gone on the run.

Then the script had changed yet again, and Nora was fairly sure she knew why. Jeff had staged the car accident and gone to Norfolk, to Bill’s country house, Laurels. He had been all set to smoke out his enemy-by that time he knew it was Bill Howard-when he’d been captured. He hadn’t gone to the King’s Lynn train station; he’d never left this house. He’d already been in Bill’s custody when Nora arrived from New York, and Bill had known he had incriminating evidence. Bill had ransacked Jeff’s apartment the night before, to no avail. Then Dr. Gupta had handed her the envelope, which clearly had the vital data inside that would’ve scuttled Bill’s scheme before it was completed, and…Yes, it was all falling into place.

They’d interrogated Jeff, tortured him, but he hadn’t talked. And by the time the graveyard assassination had failed, Bill Howard had come up with a better plan for Nora. She suddenly had become more useful alive than dead. The new order had been issued to Craig Elder: Get her out of France, back to London, then out here, to Laurels. The tough CIA agent wouldn’t crack under torture, so let’s bring his wife here and torture her in front of him. That will make him talk. But by then, Bill must have known Nora was also suspecting him. She might not come along quietly; she might run to her husband’s outfit or MI6 or the London police, so…

Another pantomime. The house in St. John’s Wood. He’d handed her the martinis after carefully doctoring them with something that would get her safely away upstairs, in the bathroom, while he shot his inconvenient, rich wife and her housekeeper. Then he’d played dead as well, slumped in the armchair, waiting for his assistant to call her and get her to the next stage of her journey to this house.

Bill Howard’s arrogance was boundless. He’d predicted Nora’s actions and reactions every step of the way, and he’d been right every time. He’d known she’d be too squeamish to look more closely at him when she found him “dead” in the chair-but what if she had? He would have picked up the revolver from the floor by his hand and held it on her, forced her into a car and straight out here last night. But that hadn’t been his plan. Moving a prisoner across a good stretch of England would’ve been awkward, and it might’ve been noticed at any point. Besides, he’d wanted to be free to move around, to call the woman at the grocery store and allay her suspicions, to tie up any business he had in London. So, he’d handed Nora off to his accomplice, Craig, and she’d come dashing out here this morning, as planned. Above all else, Nora was disgusted with herself for being so predictable. These men had played her like a fiddle.

On the run, always on the run, with the police in hot pursuit. The French police had thought she’d caused the mayhem in the cemetery, but they’d been told to stop broadcasting it and to stand down-told by Bill Howard. It wouldn’t have suited his plan to have her arrested by French authorities before Craig had delivered her here. She’d never actually seen a gray SUV following them from Paris; now she knew Craig had made it up. The gendarmes in Calais and the constable in the Lucky Dolphin had been put on the alert-again by Bill Howard-and they had spurred her on, back to London in the dead of night. And there’d even been a bonus for the scenario, a further bit of good luck for them: Nora had run down Andy Gilbert, the very man they’d been seeking to silence ever since she, Nora, had told Craig that Gilbert was working for her husband. In her frenzy to escape, Nora had hit him with the car, so now she was a legitimate fugitive.

Be careful, Pal. It was all so simple, now that she thought of it. Her husband had learned of the arms deal, and he hadn’t told anyone about it-not his own employers, not MI6, and not the French SDAT. Nora still didn’t know Maurice Dolin’s part in all this, but she’d work that out later. As far as she could tell, Jeff had four assistants: Jacques and Solange, two French agents he knew he could trust; Bill Howard’s British chauffeur, Andy Gilbert; and the young man from the plane, Yussuf, whose nationality and motives were unknown to her.