what Sonnegut had been instructing Mark to do while Deborah gave her orders. He would be set to watch her even as she watched him. That was probably another of the reasons he had been hired.
The irony of their keeping tabs on each other struck her as funny, especially if Mark was still an operative for his government.
However, if he had turned she might just die laughing.
Chapter 2
Once they had left the building, Renee turned to Mark. “Do you know anything about demolition?”
“Do you?” he countered, one dark eyebrow raised.
“Do you have a place to stay?” she asked, ignoring his question.
“No, I only arrived this afternoon.” He walked beside her, hands tucked in his pockets against the bitter cold, obviously willing to follow wherever she led.
“I have rooms in the Latin Quarter. You’ll stay with me.”
Better to keep him close, as Deborah had ordered, and find out what he was all about than to wonder where the hell he was and what he was up to. She didn’t expect to get much sleep, if any, in either case.
“Are you giving me a choice?”
“Sure.” Renee headed for her rental car, a puke-green Peugeot with a balky transmission. “You could go back and bunk with Deborah and Sonny. How do you feel about threesomes?”
He laughed, a brief, bitter sound. “I don’t see that happening.”
“Who are you working for?” She hoped to catch him off guard with the question, but he replied immediately.
“You, of course.”
Right. Very smooth answer and quick on the trigger. He wasn’t going to tell her a damn thing. And she wasn’t about to volunteer anything until she knew which side he was on.
If he was working undercover, as she was, his suspicions would mirror hers. If he had flipped since she knew him in the States, he might try to kill her. Alert to that possibility, she kept enough distance between them to respond to any attack he made. She was pretty sure he wouldn’t do anything until he knew for sure what she was really doing here.
They got in the car and she drove like a maniac on the streets of Paris. Like everyone else did. When she came to a screeching halt on the curb in front of her apartment building, she noted his knuckles were white as he loosened his grip on the dash. He exhaled as if he’d been holding his breath.
“Here we are. I’ll go up first. Give me a quarter hour alone, then come up to 304. Knock twice, then once.”
“Got it,” he said agreeably. “What’s with the code?”
“Old habits die hard,” she replied.
“So do old operatives in case you plan to wait behind the door to do me in.”
“If I planned to kill you, I would have done it already.”
He quirked an eyebrow. “I thought the drive here was an admirable first attempt. Nearly caused my heart to fail.”
“You have a heart? You’re in the wrong line of work.” Renee got out, slammed her door and left him sitting in the car, hoping someone would steal the wreck tonight so she could legitimately request another.
She could picture Mark on his phone the second she disappeared inside, either checking with his control on her current work status or calling Deborah Martine to reveal who she was and asking how he should dispose of the body. By the time he did either, she planned to know more about him than his own mother did and act accordingly.
The instant the door closed to her room, she was hitting her speed dial. “Get me whatever you have on British operative Mark Alexander. All sources. Instantly. It’s crucial. If you can’t find him in SIS, check other agencies, home and abroad. Then go to private. Also run him as a skel. He could be dirty.” She clicked off.
Renee felt extremely isolated on this op. Minimal phone contact, documents left at a specified drop and no face-to-face with the other agents in place. Three of her fellow COMPASS agents were here in Paris, waiting to help her wrap this up when the time came. Until then, she wasn’t supposed to reach out.
And the role she had assumed for the op—cocky, expatriated Goth chick and experienced killer with no conscience or morals—was wearing thin. There was no break from the act. She wished she could talk to someone as herself, just for a minute or two. She missed speaking English, though her French was fluent. She had acquired it as a child right here in Paris and fine-tuned it under her mother’s tutelage. Her knowledge of demolition had begun then, too, as she and her mom followed her dad from job to job. No one knew more about the business of leveling a landscape than Ed Leblanc. And she was trading on his name and reputation. Though retired in Miami for several years now, a bogus Web site, created specifically for this assignment, had him listed as still running a world class business out of Calgary, Canada.
She missed her mom and dad, her friends and her apartment. Renee let her thoughts drift to her home in McLean, Virginia, where Christmas decorations would be going up in stores even though it wasn’t quite Thanksgiving. Holly would be feeding her fish, tending her plants and collecting her mail. Unless Holly had been called away on assignment. If so, someone else would hold down the fort, one of her fellow agents. They provided good support on the homefront. But this was her first international assignment. It required a great deal of improvisation and all the acting skill she possessed. And she wasn’t used to going it alone.
Now she had a partner, of sorts. That just went to show, one should be careful what one wished for. Company could be deadly. As a fellow operative, Mark would judge her without mercy. And if he turned out to be a traitorous sonofabitch, he’d probably wind up trying to kill her, again without mercy.
Suddenly isolation seemed the lesser of two evils, but one she couldn’t afford.
Anxiously she waited for the report on him. “C’mon, c’mon, I don’t have all night,” she grumbled, frowning down at her cell phone.
Mark cursed as he put his phone away. Not a thing on her. Nothing! Lazlo had pulled every string available within the short amount of time he had with no results. None of the agencies, government or private, in the States or Canada, had a listing for Renee. He had captured a photo of her profile with his phone as she drove through the city at breakneck speed. She wasn’t in any database Lazlo could access which left damn few.
Corbett Lazlo could accomplish virtually anything, connected as he was. He had survived a conviction of treason, escaped prison and proved himself innocent. After that, he had refused to return to MI-6 where he had worked with Mark’s father and had begun his own company. Lazlo operated without the confines of bureaucracy that hobbled the government organizations. And ignored most of the rules. He was a law unto himself. Mark admired him more than anyone he knew. If Lazlo couldn’t get a background on this woman, then it couldn’t be had.
So who the hell was she? He knew she had been cleared to take that course at Langley. If she had been dropped by one of the agencies since then, there would be a record of it somewhere. That meant she must be working at a job important and secretive enough to have her background totally erased in case someone went looking. This was a good sign actually, he realized. If she were a traitor, even a suspected one, the word would
