“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.
Upstairs in the galley, Ingrid poured herself a cup of coffee from the thermos flask. Gabriel was seated at the table, a phone at his elbow, laptop open. From the speakers came the sound of Trevor Robinson’s voice. In the background was a low multilingual murmur.
“Where is he?”
“The Crystal Bar at the Hôtel Hermitage. Brendan Taylor is minding the store.”
“Did anyone open the safe this afternoon?”
“Ian Harris. He returned the storage device when he was finished.”
“Did you happen to see the passcode?”
“No,” said Gabriel. “But I’m guessing it’s nine, two, eight, seven, four, six.”
Christopher and René Monjean were outside on the afterdeck. Monjean looked faintly ridiculous in his blazer and trousers—like a thief pretending to be a businessman. Christopher, in his tailored Savile Row suit, looked like the real thing. Ingrid helped herself to one of his Marlboros. The combination of caffeine and nicotine raised her heart rate and blood pressure, but she still felt unusually serene. There was no tingling in her fingertips, no fever.
She smoked the last of the cigarette and then returned to the salon. Trevor Robinson had left the Crystal Bar and was walking along the Avenue Princesse Grace toward his apartment. Brendan Taylor was playing solitaire on his computer at Harris Weber. The two men spoke at 9:05 p.m. Robinson asked Taylor whether the file room was locked. Taylor told Robinson that it was.
The young associate left the office at 9:09 p.m., but Gabriel waited until nine thirty to dispatch his operational team. Christopher departed Mistral first, followed ten minutes later by Ingrid and René Monjean. As they walked along the Avenue de Monte-Carlo, Ingrid allowed her eyes to wander over the costly goods displayed in the shop windows. Once the very sight of such luxuries would have set her ablaze. Now, strangely, she felt nothing at all.
