Tom Savage - Mrs. John Doe

“Which he did,” Jeff added from the backseat.

Josef nodded. “So, we started looking for the Western side of the deal. I couldn’t get that information from Gamal or his people, but I overheard enough to know that it was someone in England. And I heard that my country is the main target of the weapons they’re planning to make-Tel Aviv and Haifa.”

“Dear God!” Nora said. “How did you zero in on Bill?”

Now Jeff took up the story. “That was a case of really, really bad timing, Pal.”

Nora had to slow down as they passed through a village. They weren’t on the motorway, after all, but a country road, and there wasn’t time to go looking for alternate routes. She tried her best to avoid bumps in the road, thinking of her two wounded passengers. They’d just passed a signpost for Cowper Field, so she kept driving in that direction. It was 2:40 now-twenty minutes to takeoff. She accelerated again, listening to her husband’s voice from the backseat.

Jeff had suspected Bill Howard right from the start. Bill had left Vivian, bought a fancy sports car, and started running around with a lot of young women. Jeff knew Bill would need money for this new lifestyle, money he wouldn’t get from his rich wife after the divorce. He also knew that Bill was amoral, not particularly loyal to Britain or anything else, and one of the few people in England with the connections to locate and obtain nuclear parts. Jeff didn’t let Maurice Dolin in on his suspicions, but he got one of Maurice’s colleagues involved, a young woman named Solange Braure.

Solange went to work for Bill in London and vamped him into her bed, even promising to marry him, and she confirmed to Jeff that Bill was making a lot of calls to unidentified people in Tripoli from his new house in Norfolk. Jeff secretly recruited Bill’s driver, Andy Gilbert, asking him to keep an eye on his employer, and to keep quiet about it. Then all Jeff needed was concrete proof of Bill Howard’s treason.

That proof arrived in early June. Solange was at Laurels with Bill when the crates arrived and were placed in the barn. Bill told her it was computer equipment for a new regional station of his outfit, and she pretended to believe him. She slipped out there one night and saw what was in the boxes: steel and plastic casings for various interior parts of nuclear weapons. She took photos, and she found written correspondence between Bill and Gamal in Bill’s office, which she also photographed. She gave everything to Jeff, who put it all on a microchip. He needed to get it to Langley. He didn’t trust anyone in MI6 or the SDAT in France or even his American colleagues in England, because he didn’t know how far Bill’s influence reached. And he didn’t trust communications systems in the wake of the WikiLeaks scandal. He was on his own.

Jeff decided that the one person who might be able to get the proof out of England without raising suspicion was his wife. That’s when he came up with the idea of “dying” in an accident, and he let Bill Howard and Maurice Dolin in on the plan. This way, he told them, he’d be able to move around freely and find the bad guy. He also knew that Bill Howard would assume from this that his scheme hadn’t been detected. Of course Jeff didn’t tell them about the chip, which he concealed behind a photo of him in a gold locket.

As expected, Bill was delighted with the plan-he must have thought it was a perfect waste of Jeff’s time and energy while he, Bill, went on with the sale. It was Bill who’d suggested a dying former MI6 operative, a man whose weak heart and lifelong alcoholism had finally caught up with him. The former agent was in a nursing home in Weston-Super-Mare, and Jeff went there and told him the truth about Bill Howard and what he was planning. When the man realized that his body could help catch a traitor, he gladly signed on.

The man died on June 28-the day before the phone call to Nora-and Jeff collected his body from the nursing home and drove to Holland Park Avenue. Jeff planted the camera, keys, and gold locket on him, and he put photos of Nora and Dana in the man’s wallet while removing everything that might identify him. Jeff waited for a lull in the traffic and drove the car into the wall, activating the air bag. He moved the dead man from the backseat to the front, punched him in the face-Nora remembered the postmortem bruise there-and vanished.

That night, Jeff went to Laurels, at Bill’s suggestion. He’d given his two notes to Solange Braure for delivery to Nora if anything went wrong, and Solange had gotten him in touch with one of Maurice Dolin’s best men, Jacques Lanier. Jacques was to escort and protect Nora if she arrived in France. But Jeff had made it clear that none of Nora’s watchdogs-Jacques, Solange, and Andy Gilbert-could reveal their true agenda to her.

“I wanted you involved as little as possible,” Jeff explained. “I’d made up that locket with the microchip, and I was hoping you’d just take the personal effects and fly back to New York. But then came the bad timing…”

Nora saw a new signpost for the airfield. “What happened?”

Her husband sighed. She knew that sound; she didn’t have to look in the rearview mirror to know what it meant.

“I did something really stupid,” he said. “I arrived at Laurels two nights before you arrived at Heathrow, the night of the phony accident, and I decided to have a look around. I wanted to see those crates for myself; I thought maybe I could damage the parts and make the whole thing a moot point. There was no one else there with me except that guy Mustapha, who I thought was some kind of butler, and a daily maid from the village. After the woman had gone home and I thought Mustapha was asleep, I went out to the barn and started to open one of the crates. Next thing I knew, I was struck on the head from behind. I woke up in that groom room, bound and gagged.”

“I see,” Nora said. “So, Bill actually found out you were onto him before he called me in New York. He searched your apartment in Soho that night. Polly Jenner and her husband heard noises, but they thought it was you. I should have guessed it was Bill immediately-who but a top agent would know how to override your alarm system? And you ”-she looked over at Josef beside her-“were already on your way to New York to escort me to England, because Jeff didn’t want me unguarded for one minute, from the moment I left home, right?”

Josef nodded.

“Mustapha started with Pentothal,” Jeff continued, “and I must have said something about the photos, but I didn’t say where they were hidden, and I didn’t name Solange. She was already at the hotel when you first arrived there. She had the notes ready, in case we decided you should leave England in a hurry. I was supposed to call her every hour, from the moment you touched down at Heathrow. Well, by then I was in no position to call, so she knew I’d been taken or killed. You and Bill went to the morgue, and you were given the envelope, and by then Bill knew there was something in it that would compromise him. Enter his secret weapon.”

“Craig Elder,” Nora supplied. “Bill must have called him from the car the minute I got out, so he placed himself in Russell Square and waited for me. I guess he was going to steal my purse.”

Josef Abrams said, “Solange called me; she was worried when there weren’t any phone calls from Mr. Baron. I was in the hotel when you passed by it, and I followed you to the park. Solange and I decided I should steal the envelope and get everyone off your tail. I never saw that damned Elder, not until he caught me with the purse. As soon as I got away, I phoned Solange and told her to give you the notes. When you arrived back in the hotel with Elder, he saw Solange in the lobby and took off, but he obviously realized she was the leak. She passed the first note to you before they could do anything, but Elder followed her to Paris and killed her.”