herself a day, maybe two, three at the most.
When she was satisfied that Cesar had gone, she took a seat behind her desk and flipped through the address book until she found the entry she wanted. It wasn’t the telephone number she was searching for, it was the small color snapshot that slid out from between the pages. Heart pounding at the step she was about to take, she studied the lean, tanned features of a man she had once known very well. As it had turned out, far better than she had ever known Cesar.
Xavier le Clerc was an intellectual, a frighteningly clever man who would have been at the very top of his field in international banking…if he had chosen to stay within the bounds of the law. When he had transgressed more than a decade ago, he hadn’t done it by half measures. A skilled trader of stocks and shares, in a two-pronged assault he had engineered the financial collapse of the Swiss bank that had employed him—a bank he claimed had, in connivance with a former banker and SS officer, illegally transferred money out of the accounts of Jews who had been sent to the death camps.
Hours after the financial disaster had hit the front pages of European newspapers, it had been discovered that an inordinate proportion of the cash and art treasures stored in the bank’s vaults by alleged Nazi war criminals had also been stolen.
Xavier’s actions had caused a furore. A Jew himself, he had been labeled a thief extraordinaire, a Nazi hunter and a revolutionist. Despite the magnitude of what he had done, his crimes had been almost universally applauded, his sense of justice viewed as biblical. Not exactly an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, but close enough.
Esther had dated him a few times when she’d worked in Bern. The hours she had spent with Xavier had been challenging and addictive. She had come close to falling in love with him, but when his name had appeared on her list of people to investigate, she had immediately cut all ties. Shortly after the scandal had erupted, her contract had finished and she had returned to the States.
She didn’t know where Xavier lived now. He had gone to ground years ago and, to her knowledge, had never surfaced, but she could still remember the address of his sister in Bern.
Sliding the snapshot back into the address book, she put a call through to the number, not expecting to connect with Eva le Clerc after all these years. When the woman who answered the call confirmed in French that she was Xavier’s sister, Esther’s stomach contracted. It was the point of no return.
Despite the fact that Eva remembered her, she was abrupt and dismissive. “You’re wasting your time. I don’t know where he is. No one does.”
Esther stopped her before she could hang up. “Just tell him I need to talk to him. Urgently.”
There was a bleak silence. “He won’t call you.”
“Just tell him. Please.”
It was close to three-thirty in the afternoon when the phone finally rang. Tomas, who was picking Rina up from school, was due to arrive home any second. Esther picked up the receiver. A premonition prickled along her spine as she waited for the caller to speak.
The voice was male, the French rapid. “A qui appartient l’argent que nous allons valer?”
Whose money are we stealing?
That was Xavier, sharp as a tack. Cut to the chase with no preliminaries. He had always been too clever for everyone, including her. It had taken her hours of frantic thought and discarded plans before she had finally arrived at that particular option: get Rina to safety, steal Lopez’s money, then go to the police. That way she would cut Lopez off at the knees, and she would have the money as a bargaining chip if anything went wrong. She had tossed up going to the police straight off, but if she did that Lopez would have time to get away, and she couldn’t discount the fact that he could have law-enforcement people on his payroll. “You don’t have to know who we’re stealing from yet.”
“I’ll find out.”
That was true enough. Once the process was initiated, Xavier would be in control and she would merely be a passenger. The thought made her mouth go dry and her heart pump so hard that for a moment she couldn’t breathe. Xavier would have her cold. He could steal the money himself or expose her.
Either way, she reminded herself, it didn’t matter. All she was doing was improving her and Rina’s odds of physical survival. Lopez was a killer, le Clerc was a thief who lived by his own code; the choice was literally the lesser of two evils. “Okay. The name he uses is Alex Lopez. His real name is Alejandro Chavez. He’s the only son of Marco Chavez, and he’s banking with RCS. I have an account number, and not much else.”
“Chavez. You do like to walk on the wild side.”
“Not by choice.”
“If it’s not your choice then it must be Cesar’s.” There was a brief silence. “You should never have married him.”
For a split second the knowledge of what could have been, and almost had been, hung between them, and with it an unexpected cocktail of emotions she thought she had dealt with years ago. Her options had been cut by Xavier’s choices. He had chosen his path; she had chosen hers. As it turned out, they had both ended up in exactly the same place: on the wrong side of the law. “Will you help me?” Instinctively, she used the personal plea, not one that included Cesar.
There was a pause. She could hear the faint rhythm of his breathing and somewhere farther away the cry of gulls, which meant he lived close to the sea. That fitted with what she remembered about him. Xavier had come from a well-heeled family. His father had been a banker. He had always liked the good things in life, particularly fine art and yachts.
“I’ll think it over. If I decide to take the job, I’ll be in touch.”
“Wait. I need to—” The phone clicked in her ear, followed by the sharp sound of the dial tone.
Hand shaking, Esther put the receiver back in its cradle. She had no idea where Xavier had been calling from. He could be anywhere in the Mediterranean, or even South America. He could be sitting in the Florida Keys or out in San Francisco Bay.
He would be in touch with her.
Her heart was pounding again, her stomach tight. She had to calm down. If Xavier didn’t want the job, he would have said so. The fact that he had contacted her at all and was now taking the time to think over her proposition meant he was considering helping her.
Despite needing his help, hooking up with Xavier in any capacity carried almost as much risk as dealing with Lopez. She had worked with him, dated him, then investigated him. She assumed that he had been attracted to her all those years ago. She also had to consider that he had known all along what her bank had employed her to do and that his interest had been a way of getting an inside track on any investigation. By the time she had reported the anomalies it had been too late, the damage had been done. Still, she couldn’t help thinking that if Xavier had a hankering for revenge, now would be the perfect time to exact it.
An hour later the phone rang again.
“I’ll take the job, but I’m going to need help from you. RCS isn’t top-of-the-line, but they do have dual controls, which means I’m going to have to bring someone else on board.”
Esther’s stomach sank. Most banks operated on a dual-controls system, where one person instigated the transaction, and another authorized and confirmed it. There was also the
