“Did he just slip out?” Colton whispered to Simon.
CHAPTER 134
DAMON KODIAK CLOSED the door behind him and looked up to the projectionist’s booth in the empty theater connected to the Lamar. He waved and smiled to Sam, who had been with the Lamarcke ever since Damon’s first movie premiere here, eleven years ago. Der Führer was Damon’s seventh premiere in this theater and they knew his secret well. And kept it, all these years.
Damon found a seat in the tenth row, square in the middle. The room went black, the curtain parted, and the movie began. Damon’s heart fluttered as he watched the two boxing gloves, one bearing the American flag and the other the hammer and sickle of the Soviet Union. They smashed together in an explosion and the scene cut to Rocky Balboa on the verge of knocking out Clubber Lang in their rematch, one of the final scenes of Rocky III.
And then there was the opening scene of Rocky IV. It had been Damon’s acting debut, twenty-six years back, a lifetime ago, when it was all about the art, all about the dream. Damon was a skinny college dropout who wrote poetry and went to the movies every night of the week that he wasn’t working one of his two jobs, delivering flowers and painting elementary school classrooms in the local school district.
He’d been nothing more than an extra in Rocky IV, a nonspeaking part, one of the security guards at the press conference held to publicize a match between the Russian fighter, Drago, and the American ex-champ, Apollo Creed. He remembered his one day on the set, shaking hands with Sly Stallone and feeling his knees weaken and praying his voice wouldn’t crack when he said, “Great to meet you.”
He settled into his seat. This was Damon’s secret. It had started back with his first starring role, four years after Rocky IV, when he knew that his whole career could go bust after one major movie if it flopped. He was so nervous he couldn’t stay in his seat at the premiere. Now he had a ritual, which had become a superstition—ducking out of his premieres and prearranging a screening of his acting debut. But now it wasn’t about nerves or fear of failure so much as it was a refresher, a reminder of how much this all meant to him. It kept him grounded in a—wait—what—
What was that noise—
At once, something cold pressed into his neck from the right. A hand gripped his left shoulder. From behind him, he felt the body heat, and then he heard a voice he remembered from not so long ago.
“I don’t have much time, Damon,” said Abbie. “So you better start talking.”
CHAPTER 135
AFTER THE INITIAL shock wore off, and I’d made it clear that yes, it was me, and yes, I had a gun, and yes, I was more than willing to use it, Damon grew perfectly still, his hands gripping the armrests of his seat and his eyes trained forward. “How did you know?” he asked.
“How did I know…you’d come here? You told me, you idiot,” I said. “You told me all about your little secret when you attend your movie premieres.”
Damon let out a brief moan. He obviously didn’t remember telling me.
“You have five minutes to tell me what happened or I pull this trigger,” I said. “Keep in mind, Damon, that I’m already serving a life sentence for murder. I kill you, I don’t kill you, same sentence either way.”
Damon didn’t move, but his breathing was becoming labored. It probably had something to do with the gun against his neck, and the fact that I was pressing it harder still to make my point.
“Tell me how this started,” I said. “And make it fast.”
“How this started? I don’t know how this started—”
“Now, you listen to me,” I said through gritted teeth, fear and anger choking my throat. “You and I both know you lied on the witness stand. You ruined my life. So if you think I won’t happily end yours—”
“Okay, okay, just—don’t shoot.” I was now gripping his hair tightly with one hand and drilling the gun into his ear with the other. “Okay, I’ll tell you,” he said.
Colonel Durand checked his watch as he paced his office. He had reports coming in from more than a dozen agents throughout Paris, who were themselves receiving reports from other agents in the city. He’d been giving instructions and monitoring events through his headset all day long. He’d probably walked five miles within this office.
Now it was dusk. With darkness falling over Paris, the focus would shift, because Abbie’s behavior would change. She would be looking for a place to sleep. If she picked a hotel, the odds were good they would catch her. If she didn’t, she’d be looking for something like an isolated park or a warm train station.
But all that, he realized, was assuming that Abbie simply chose Paris as a place to hide. If she had a particular goal in mind, then all generalizations about fugitive behavior went out the window.
He jumped as his aide, Verose, burst through his office door. “Sir, you have to see this,” she said. “Someone has a television on in the conference room.”
There was a flat-screen television on the wall of his office. Verose worked the remote until she found the channel she wanted.
On France 24, a correspondent was just signing off on a report from the Cinema Lamarcke on the Champs-Élysées.
Durand blinked twice, staring at the television in disbelief. Was it that easy?
He ran out of his office without a word.
CHAPTER 136
“LOOK, WHAT HAPPENED between us on that boat—it was real, okay?” Damon said to me with some effort, given the gun that was now shoved into his ear. “I wasn’t part of any plan. But when I left you—when I got off the yacht—I was walking down the dock and I saw it. I saw the whole thing happen.” He sighed nervously, as if reliving something horrifying. “I saw them…shoot Devo and Luc in their car.”
I tried to steady my nerves. I had kept my hands busy, either gripping Damon’s hair or steadying the gun against his ear, to stop them from trembling. My heart was hammering so violently that I had trouble hearing Damon. I didn’t think this moment was ever really going to come. Now that it was, I wasn’t sure how to handle it.
“I…threw myself down on the dock,” Damon continued. “It was just instinct to duck down. I probably made a lot of noise. Anyway, they heard me. I…I didn’t know what to do. I was still processing everything and suddenly they were on the dock, pointing guns at me, and I was on my knees begging them not to kill me. I’d never been so scared in my entire life.”
I knew something about fear. I was terrified right now, and I was the one holding the gun. Sweat was dripping into my eyes and my pulse was working so feverishly I was beginning to wonder if this was what it felt like to have a heart attack.
“You have to believe me, Abbie, I was just trying to get out of there alive. I told them who I was and that I’d give them anything—I’d give them money, I’d put them in a movie, anything at all—if they’d spare my life.”
“And destroy four other women’s lives.” The bitter edge to my words made my voice unrecognizable to me.
“I wasn’t trying to destroy anything,” he said. “I was trying to survive. I knew if I didn’t go along with them, they’d kill me.”
“Who’s ‘they,’ Damon?” I asked. “Who did this?”
As the other guests watched a young Adolf Hitler struggling to peddle his paintings on the streets of Vienna, Simon Schofield and Colton Gordon huddled and considered their options. “This is our chance,” Colton whispered. “We might not get another one.”
It was the only reason they’d come to the party tonight, to get a word with Damon before the movie premiere, to make sure that Damon was on the same page with them, to give him a few not-so-friendly reminders. But the star of the show had been mobbed from the moment he stepped out of his limousine. Getting a second alone with Damon Kodiak at this event was harder than getting an audience with the pope.
But now they had a chance. Damon had slipped out of the theater. Maybe he was off to the bathroom, or to the alley for a smoke. Maybe an interview with the press. But if he left through that door, odds w
ere he’d return the same way. They could follow through that door and wait for the chance for their little chat.
Simon looked over at Colton, whose face was illuminated by the light coming off the movie screen. This was becoming a pattern: Colton preferring action over deliberation, always leading with his chin, while Simon played the voice of reason, viewing the bigger picture and plotting out the consequences. Lord knows, Colt had almost blown everything in Monte Carlo when he called the other husbands to join him—but Simon made sure to fly them down on one of his jets, where he could manipulate the passenger manifest and keep their arrival clandestine.
Then again, they’d worked together well as a team. Simon might never have acted without Colton, who was so fierce with rage after watching the wives at the nightclub, and then that orgy on the yacht.
“It’s now or never, brah, hey?”
Simon felt his pulse surge, just as it had that night.
“All right, Colt,” he said. “Let’s do it.”
CHAPTER 137
“WHO WAS IT?” I repeated, grinding the barrel of the Glock into Damon’s ear. “Who killed them?”
It sounded like Damon was beginning to cry. I suddenly realized that I’d been doing the same, that my face was wet with both perspiration and tears.
“No,” Damon said, his head dropping. “I can’t.”
“I already know most of it,” I said. “I know about Simon.”
It took me way too long to figure it out. But once I started suspecting our husbands, things began to tumble like dominos in my mind. Such as when we first showed up at the Hôtel Métropole, and the receptionist looking up our reservation said, “Simon Schofield”—Simon, not Serena. Simon had made the reservation and put it under his name. I didn’t know exactly how he did it. But at some time, in some way, somehow, Simon had gotten hold of a key card to our suite.
And Simon, with a net worth approaching a billion dollars, would have been the one who got to the warden, Boulez, too, bribing him to get me to confess and make the case against me airtight. And for all that money, he also managed to get Serena a plum spot in cell block A—Simon’s way of apologizing in some small way to his wife for framing her for murder.
“Simon bankrolled your movie, didn’t he?” I asked. “This film that Hollywood wouldn’t finance. Hush money for you. Right, Damon? That was the deal? You keep quiet about what you know and screw us at trial, and Der Führer gets made?”
Damon didn’t answer. However Simon had arranged for the money, he’d managed to do it without leaving a trail. Joe Morro at The New York Times couldn’t find any record of it, and he’d looked pretty hard.
“I’m done playing games.” I stood up, putting my full weight behind the gun shoved into Damon’s ear. My rage was overtaking everything else now. I hadn’t come here to kill Damon Kodiak. I’d come here to get answers. It didn’t do me any good to kill him. He was my evidence. He was my only chance. It didn’t do any good to kill him. But he’d helped them, at the very least, and destroyed me at my trial, and if I wasn’t going to make it out of this theater tonight, why should he?
Damon, practically lying in a fetal position, started shouting out. “It was the British one and the South African!” he cried. “The South Af—Colt? Colton?—Colton wanted to kill me but the Brit said no. Winnie’s husband. He said no, killing me would make this an international scandal because I was a movie star. Two guys dead in a car in Monte Carlo was one thing, but killing a world-famous movie star would bring a huge spotlight on things.”
“Killing ‘two guys’?” I asked. “One of them was the pres—”
“They didn’t know he was President Devereux, Abbie!” Damon insisted, speaking quickly, as if his life depended on it. “Any more than you or I did. You think they would have done any of this if they’d known they were killing the president of France?”
I paused. I was woozy from the adrenaline spikes and sleep deprivation and pure, unadulterated bitterness. But it made sense. They had followed us to Monte Carlo and found us sleeping with other men, but they didn’t know who “Devo” was any more than I did.
Right. They thought they were killing two ordinary people. They didn’t realize they were creating an international incident.
“The Brit—the British one, he was so calm and cool—he snuck back on the yacht. When he came back, the murder weapon was gone—”
“He left it in my purse.”
“—and he had the camcorder. The one that recorded the sex video.” Damon was panting as the information poured out in spurts. “The Brit made me touch it. He made me hold it. He made me hold it so my—so my fingerprints were on it. He said to me, ‘If we go down, so do you,’ or something like that. That was their insurance. If I turned them in, I’d be turning myself in, too. It wouldn’t matter if I was guilty or innocent. Even if I could keep myself out of prison, if I was associated with this in any way, my career would be finished. Finished!
“And the next day,” he went on, vomiting information now, once again pleading for his life, as he did on that dock, “after we all realized that the guy they killed was President Devereux, they got worried that I might change my mind. They were freaking out. So was I. The president of France? This thing had suddenly become so huge! So they offered me the money for the movie. They made me dependent on them. They made us partners. And yes, that part was Simon. It was Simon and Colton’s money.”
“And what…” I said, my throat catching. “What about my husband, Jeffrey?”
Damon shook his head furiously. “Never met him or saw him. I don’t know, Abbie. I swear. I have no idea.”
It was all hurtling toward me at once. Much of this I’d already suspected, in the quiet, deliberative hours I’d spent with nothing to do in JRF. But now my pulse was racing so fiercely I could hardly hold still. I was a twitch of the finger away from murdering the number one film star in the world right now.
And I was still light-years away from proving any of this.
Or maybe not.
CHAPTER 138
“PLEASE DON’T KILL ME,” Damon pleaded. “Try to see it from my persp—”
“Shut up.”
While Damon lay on his side, like a small child, beaten and fearful, I did a two-step maneuver and climbed over the seat so that I was next to him. He didn’t move in the process. He watched me with wide eyes as I gripped his shirt.
“You’re going to do one more thing for me,” I said, “and if you do it right, I promise you I won’t kill you.”
“What…What—”
“You’re going to repeat what you just told me,” I said, “to a thousand of your closest friends next door. Get up, movie star.”
The man standing sentry by the door through which Damon Kodiak had exited crossed his arms and shook his head. “I’m sorry, gentlemen,” he said in English with a heavy accent. “Nobody passes through.”
“We saw him go through, lad,” Colton said. “We need a word with him just now.”
The man shook his head. He was younger and stronger than both of them.
Colton gave Simon a fiery look. Simon had seen that expression before. Colton was about to reach for his gun.
Simon shook his head. He reached for something else—money. A thousand euros, to be exact.
The man looked at the cash offered. His expression softened.
“Two thousand,” he countered.
As I pushed Damon forward, I felt my legs gain strength. Could this actually work? I never gave myself much of a chance at succeeding. Now, for the first time, I thought I might pull this off. I felt my head clear, my heartbeat decelerate.
Damon wasn’t having a good evening. He was blubbering like a baby, his head hanging low, his posture slumped and defeated, as I gripped the back of his tuxedo jacket and pressed my gun between his shoulder blades.
We reached the end of the aisle, at the front of the theater, when I heard the thump of a door opening.
“No,” I said.
Colton and Simo
n, in tuxedos, likewise jumped at the sight of me. Colton reached into his jacket. I didn’t have to think very hard about what he was reaching for.
“I’ll shoot him!” I warned, bracing myself.
But as soon as the words came out, I realized how empty they were. Killing Damon Kodiak would be perfectly fine with Colton and Simon. He was my last hope to prove my innocence and their guilt. He was their last outstanding liability. I’d be doing them the biggest favor in the world.
Colton raised a gun and aimed it at us.
During the standoff between Abbie and Colton, and with a fight scene from Rocky IV playing in the theater, nobody heard or saw the man take the stairs down from the balcony and walk onto the soft carpet of the aisle. Back in the day, this kind of silent movement had been part of Christien’s SIS training, and he’d been sure to wear soft-soled shoes tonight. He dropped to a crouch, his feet in a wide stance. Christien raised his weapon, the suppressor attached, and started moving.
CHAPTER 139
THE MOVIE SCREEN in front of us abruptly went blank and the overhead lights came on. Whoever was running the projector had realized that nobody was watching Rocky IV at this point. And he was probably calling the police right now.
“Don’t come any closer!” I called out to Colton.
“Ag, you’re a wild stukkie, I’ll give ya that,” said Colton as he inched toward me with his gun raised.
I still had my gun pressed into Damon’s back. But it made no sense. Colton would shoot both of us, and claim that Damon got caught in the cross fire. Surely I, the fugitive holding a hostage, would take the blame for everything.