Chance looked at his watch. “If you will excuse me,” he said, rising, “I have another engagement.” He turned to Mirabelle, who was showing no signs of moving. “And so do you,” he said pointedly.

Reluctantly, Mirabelle got to her feet. Goodbyes were said, hands were kissed, and Prefect Chance and his sister made their exit.

“Well,” Holly said after they had gone, “she was really quite interesting, wasn’t she?”

31

As they were finishing their drinks, Holly’s cell phone rang, and she answered it. “Yes? Hi.” She listened for a moment, then covered the phone. “Lance is on the phone. He wants us to have dinner with him.”

“Do we have to?” Stone asked.

“He says he has more information about Simpson.”

“Dino? Viv?”

They both shrugged and nodded.

“Okay, where?”

Holly asked the question and was answered. “At Le Restaurant de L’Hôtel,” she said. “Thirteen Rue des Beaux-Arts.”

“At the restaurant at the hotel?” Stone asked. “Sounds pretty generic.”

“L’Hôtel is the hotel where Oscar Wilde died, Lance said. I suppose Le Restaurant is their restaurant. He’s on his way there now.”

Stone summoned the van, and they went downstairs. “I’ve begun to think of this thing as my hearse,” he said, as they boarded. Ten minutes later they drew to a halt in a narrow street, and waited while the two men up front cased the block and pronounced it safe.

They entered the hotel, where someone at the front desk told them to proceed straight ahead. They passed through a comfortable bar and emerged into a small but lushly decorated dining room. Lance sat at a table in the rear of the room, and he waved them over. Stone noted that, in contrast to his appearance that morning, he was now freshly groomed and wearing a beautifully tailored suit. Lance seated the party so that the women were on either side of him, and he ordered their drinks from memory.

“I thought you would like to know that there is a restaurant in Paris that stocks Knob Creek,” he said to Stone.

“I’m relieved to hear it,” Stone replied. “I managed to force the bar at l’Arrington to serve it, but it’s scarce on the ground in this town.”

Their drinks arrived and they were given menus. “It’s a short menu,” Lance said, “but everything on it is good. They have a star from Michelin, and I’m sure they’d have another, if they could expand the carte.

“How did your meeting with M’sieur Chance go?” Lance asked after they had ordered.

“It was brief,” Stone said, wondering how Lance knew of the meeting. “I had been told that Chance detests people who aren’t policemen, so I asked Dino to give him what news we had.”

“And his reaction?”

“Annoyance that we didn’t give him more,” Stone said. “He as much as said that, if he had been conducting the interrogation of the Russian, we would now know everything.”

“Who’s to say he’s wrong?” Lance asked.

“I was told you now have more information about John, no middle initial, Simpson.”

“I do,” Lance said, “by the simple expedient of releasing his service record to myself. Unfortunately, because of its restricted reading list, I can’t show it to any of you, but I can tell you what’s in it—there’s no restriction on that, as long as the recipients of the information are properly cleared, and I have the power to clear you all, just like that!” He snapped his fingers, then made the sign of the cross. “You are, as of this moment, all cleared, my children. Your clearance expires when the bill for dinner arrives, and you must never reveal anything I have told you, on pain of a polite refusal at the gates of heaven.”

“Why don’t you just give us the high points, Lance?” Stone asked.

“I’m afraid there aren’t any high points, Stone, only low ones. It seems that ‘Simps,’ as he was called by those who pretended to be his friends, lived his life moving from one low point to another. I am ashamed that such people are an absolute necessity if one expects to operate an effective intelligence service.”

“I’ll take your word for it,” Stone said.

“Can you summarize, Lance?” Holly asked.

“Well, let’s see: he was, as you know, brought to our attention by Our Man in Afghanistan, who had seen him maim and kill his way through the various mountain passes and villages, then sit down at dinner and eat two steaks. He arrived at the Farm for training having already learned just about everything one needs to know about killing another. He was especially adept at the use of almost any sort of blade. One of his trainers said that with a couple of weeks’ training, he could have won Olympic Gold with the épée. That amounts to high praise from such a figure.”

“Not the guy you’d want to meet in a dark alley,” Dino said.

“Not the guy you’d want to meet anywhere,” Lance said. “In the army, he fired expert with every weapon they handed him, and at the Farm, he amazed his tutors by hitting everything he saw from the hip—no actual aiming of a weapon. As they got to evaluate him and know him better they found they had discovered a man, not only with no conscience but with no scruples or, for that matter, pity, either. One instructor entered the following in his training record: ‘He is the kind of man to whom you could say, go kill these three people and report back in a week, and he’d be home for supper, wiping the blood off his hands.’”

“Jesus,” Holly said.

“Quite. And when you think of the sort of people who wrote these evaluations, who are not easily impressed by the capacity for mayhem of others, it all becomes especially chilling. Every fitness report written by everyone he ever reported to makes note of, as one supervising officer put it, ‘not his courage, but more his absolute lack of fear of anything or anybody.’ The two things are very different—the latter, I think, tends to be psychotic.”

Dinner arrived, and they approached their food more gingerly than they might have before Lance’s report. While they waited for dessert, Lance continued.

“So, I think we all see the kind of man Simps was, and we can all be happy that he is in a pauper’s grave in some French cemetery. It is astonishing to me that he met his end in the kitchen of a cottage, at the hands of a small woman with a very old shotgun. If my Agency had a medal that covered those circumstances, I would award it to her without hesitation.”

“Lance,” Stone said, “do you now have any idea what Simpson was doing there?”

“Well, it seems obvious that he went there to kill at least one, perhaps both of the other people present in the cottage that night. Certainly, if he had killed one, and the other had witnessed it, he would have had no hesitation in making the score two–love.” Lance paused and took a deep breath. “Unless, of course, he had been instructed not, under any circumstances, to kill the other. Do you see where this is leading us?”

“Wait a minute,” Holly said, “was Simpson freelancing for anyone who’d pay his price? Is that what you’re saying?”

“I think,” Lance said, “that it is impossible not to come to that conclusion, and, apparently, he had been freelancing for some time. Simpson had a bank balance, back in Virginia, of more than two hundred thousand dollars, and he didn’t earn it on a civil servant’s salary. It also seems that, after the death of the unfortunate Russian gentleman at Simps’s hands, he had all the time in the world to report to the man who hired him, before he rejoined his colleagues at their hotel. He had been to Paris three times on earlier occasions that we know about, so he had every opportunity of meeting and being hired by someone there.”

Stone spoke up. “Let’s get back to where all this is leading us. What are your conclusions?”

Lance spread his hands. “I conclude, from the available evidence—which would not convict anyone in any honest court—that Simpson was hired to kill you, Stone, not the sister of the man who hired him.”