They moved along the spotless pavement to the next shop. “How about Valentino? They have lovely things for men.”

“I prefer Hermès.” It was located next door. “Home of the seven-hundred-euro polo shirt.”

Ingrid eyed the elegant garment worn by the mannequin in the window. “And the five-thousand-euro cashmere stole.”

“I’m sure you can get it for less,” said Monjean. “Much less.”

“Are you daring me?”

“It would look great with the pantsuit you’re wearing.”

It would, indeed. But Ingrid had no desire to possess it. She was sure it was only a side effect of the scopolamine. Her eyes were killing her.

“I’ll pass,” she said.

“Should I pinch it for you?”

“Dressed like that?” She looked him up and down. “They wouldn’t let you in the store.”

They followed the avenue past the Casino de Monte-Carlo and the Hôtel de Paris, then walked through the Jardins de la Petite Afrique to the boulevard des Moulins. Number 41 was to the right. They sat down at an outdoor table at La Royale, and Monjean ordered two café crèmes in his Marseillais French.

“Have you noticed that there’s no dirt in this place?” he asked.

“And no poor people, either.”

“There are plenty of poor people. They sweep the floors and change the beds and clean the toilets, but they’re not allowed to live here. To tell you the truth, I hate Monaco. It’s the most boring place on earth.”

“Ever work here?”

“Sure. You?”

“It’s possible that I picked a few pockets in the casino. I also had a nice score at the Hôtel de Paris.”

“Room safe?”

She nodded.

“How did you open it?”

“Magic word.”

“What was inside?”

“A diamond necklace and a hundred thousand euros in cash.”

“How much did you get for the necklace?”

“Two fifty.”

“Antwerp?”

“Actually, I returned it to Harry Winston on the Avenue Montaigne in Paris. They kindly gave me a full refund despite the fact that I couldn’t find my receipt.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” said Monjean. On the opposite side of the boulevard, a well-dressed man was approaching the entrance of Number 41. “Looks like a British lawyer to me.”

“How can you tell?”

“Could be the stick up his ass.”

Ingrid nodded toward the attractive young woman approaching the building from the opposite direction. “And here comes Mademoiselle Dubois.”

The well-dressed man arrived first. He inserted his cardkey into the reader and held the door open for the secretary—and for the man who emerged from the back of a Mercedes sedan. It was Ian Harris, founding partner of the dirty law firm that bore his name.

“I think I’m going to enjoy this,” said Monjean. “I only wish we could steal something from him other than those files.”

“They’re worth hundreds of billions of dollars.”

“Not to me. But it is rather ironic, don’t you think?”

“Thieves stealing from thieves?”

“Exactly.”

“Poetic justice, I’d say.” Ingrid’s phone shivered with an incoming message.

“Something wrong?” asked Monjean.

She glanced at the man with gray-blond hair and a square jaw coming along the pavement. “Does he look like a murderer to you?”

“The good ones never do.”

Trevor Robinson jammed his cardkey into the reader and went into the building.

“Seen enough?” asked Ingrid.

“Oui.” Monjean swallowed the rest of his coffee. “Let’s get out of here.”

*  *  *

At a computer shop on the boulevard d’Italie, Ingrid purchased two palm-sized external hard drives with a combined storage space of sixteen terabytes, more than enough to handle Harris Weber’s sensitive attorney-client files. Then she marched René Monjean over to an American clothing retailer near the yacht club and supervised the purchase of a blazer, a pair of gabardine trousers, leather oxfords, a blue button-down dress shirt, and an attaché case.

They returned to Mistral shortly after noon to find that Gabriel and Christopher had prepared lunch. They dined on the sunlit afterdeck in the manner of four friends on holiday while monitoring the audio feed from Trevor Robinson’s phone. The former MI5 officer was lunching at Le Louis XV with the head of HSBC’s wealth management division. The topic of conversation was the prospect of data loss and exposure. Robinson assured the HSBC executive that the firm’s most sensitive files were offline and entirely inaccessible.

“There will be no spillage from Harris Weber & Company,” he promised. “You and your bank have absolutely nothing to fear.”

Ingrid helped René Monjean with the dishes, then repaired to her berth for a few hours of sleep. For the first time in many years, Lars Hansen visited her in her dreams, though this time the encounter took place in a lavender-scented grove of towering laricio pine trees. When she returned home, her mother pointed at her in the Corsican way and screamed, “Occhju.”

She woke with a start to find her berth in semidarkness. It was nearly seven thirty. She gave herself a quick rinse in the marine shower, then put her hair in order and dressed in the same dark pantsuit. Next she packed her handbag. Her laptop was fully charged, but she added a power cord nonetheless, along with the two external hard drives. She carried no wallet or identification, only her phone and a wad of cash. After a moment of deliberation, she tossed in her bump keys and screwdriver, more out of habit than anything else. The automatic combination dialer and rare-earth magnet were in René Monjean’s attaché case.