He’d even filled up the tank late yesterday so he wouldn’t need to stop on this trip for fuel. But he hadn’t brought along anything to eat or drink in the car—truly an unforgivable oversight; how had he missed that?—plus he wanted to use a decent bathroom, not one of those freestanding toilet facilities along the French highways that suffered, to put it delicately, from inadequate plumbing. In any event, it was decided: he would stop. He found a gas station and killed the engine.
He had no disguise. He had ditched it hours ago, after everything had happened. His reasoning: if he were pulled over by the French police for some reason—either for what had happened in Monte Carlo or for something as innocuous as a moving violation—he wouldn’t want to have to explain why he was traveling incognito. How does an innocent man explain a disguise?
That was the dilemma, of course: he could remain disguised and assume that risk, or he could go au naturel and take a different chance—that he would be caught on some security camera, leading to the obvious question of what he was doing two hours outside of Monte Carlo at dawn.
He zipped up his light windbreaker, pulled his baseball cap down low, and adjusted his sunglasses. He checked himself in the car’s mirror. Not good. He looked like someone trying to conceal his identity. But again with the dilemma—wouldn’t that be preferable to smiling for the camera?
Yes, and so he got out of the car and walked without incident to the front door of the gas station’s shop. He reached for the door handle and looked through the glass door and saw the security camera and wondered just for a moment if he had taken leave of his senses and should just live with hunger pains and drowsiness, and he could always take a piss on the side of the road—
In his distraction with the camera he missed the door handle and his momentum carried him into the door itself, where the brim of his baseball cap collided with the glass, pushing the cap back off his face and nearly off his head altogether. This bit of embarrassing clumsiness caught the attention of the girl behind the counter inside, who, from the looks of it, had been reading something but now turned in his direction.
What to do? Cut your losses and make a run for it? Stroll inside as if nothing had happened?
He wasn’t good at this. He’d been remarkably adept in Monte Carlo, if he did say so himself. The pre-event planning had been careful and he’d carried it out with icy precision. Why was he so pitiful with the getaway?
He fixed his hat atop his head once more, adjusted his shades, and walked in. He tried to whistle, which he didn’t do very well but which signaled calm. He nodded to the girl behind the counter, a young petite woman with a button nose and inquisitive eyes.
“Hall-o,” she said in stilted English. Damn her. He hadn’t opened his mouth, and already he was exposed as a foreigner. So much for blending in.
He didn’t answer, fearing his voice might betray his nerves. His lips formed into some kind of conciliatory expression and he pretended to be fascinated by the assorted soft drinks and bottles of water lined up in the refrigerated case on the back wall. In the reflection of the case’s glass he could see her watching him. But why? What about him was arousing her suspicion? What else could she tell simply by watching him? Something obvious he had missed? Was he tracking in blood, for the love of God? Surely not, but the problem was, he couldn’t very well inventory himself right there in front of her. Why had he come here? Why was he risking everything just so he could piss in a clean urinal and fill his stomach with empty calories? How breathtakingly stupid could he be?
It flashed through his mind: he could kill her with his bare hands and then steal the security tape. But where would that tape be located? He could get that information from the girl, he could make her tell him before he killed her—
Without further thought, he walked across the store to the bathroom. He was headed to a urinal but suddenly found himself opting for a stall. His hands went flat against side walls and he balanced himself, as his heartbeat ricocheted against his chest and his legs buckled.
What had he missed? What mistake had he made? Why had he done it? In the end, why was it worth all the risk involved?
Then he exhaled and raised his chin. Remember, he told himself. Remember the anger. The betrayal. The wound to your pride. Let it motivate you now, just as it did last night, before you carried it out. Stay focused. Stay mad.
He took a breath, finished his business in the bathroom, and assessed himself in the mirror. He felt better. Screw up now, and everything you’ve done is for naught.
He strode confidently out of the bathroom and brought three power bars, a bottle of Evian, and a large cup of store-made coffee up to the register. The girl had returned to her paperback novel, which she laid facedown, revealing a crumbling spine and the words La comédie des menteurs.
Menteurs. Liars. He smiled at the girl but didn’t speak. He paid in cash and left. Once he was safely inside his car, he felt very much like laughing.
CHAPTER 17
I GAVE MY ARMS a long stretch and smiled at the ceiling. I was lying naked on a bed in a small bedroom. The pillows and comforter were all over the floor. A chair lay overturned.
I got up, feeling the full effects of last night. Every muscle was sore, every movement painful. My head was pounding.
And I felt great.
I found a cotton robe in an adjoining bathroom and threw it on. I walked into the large main room, where everything had started last night with Damon. No sign of him. I sighed. He was a man of his word. “Just one night,” he’d said.
Just one night, but everything was different. The dose of fantasy had really been a dose of reality. I couldn’t go back to Jeffrey. Whatever I’d tasted last night, not love but something—I had to have that something. I wouldn’t become Serena, dabbling in occasional affairs to keep life interesting. I wouldn’t be Winnie, living with a mysterious, distant man she no longer knew.
Richie and Elena. It would be hard. But it wasn’t like they lived with us much, anyway. I’d move back to the States. I’d move somewhere close to their boarding school in Connecticut. Hey, I’d ask them if they even wanted to stay in boarding school. Jeffrey hadn’t given them much choice. But screw him. Let him stay in Switzerland and fuck the ambassador to his heart’s content. I wasn’t living a charade anymore. Not for another day. I was done.
No—I was just beginning. I hadn’t been playing someone else this weekend. I’d become someone else.
Winnie stumbled into the main room. She looked like someone else, too, but not in a good way. Her hair was flat and her eyes dull and bloodshot. She had on a large T-shirt and her legs were bare.
“Top of the morning,” I said. “Was it fun?”
“They’re gone,” she said, retrieving a bottle of water from the refrigerator.
“Devo, Luc, and François?”
She nodded and sunk into a chair.
“And that disappoints you?” I asked. “You expected a whirlwind romance from those characters?”
She started to answer but then we both heard it, the commotion outside. Something chaotic, people shouting, the noise of urgent footsteps rattling on the dock.
And then I remembered something, something tickling me from the recesses of my memory last night. A noise, a pop—
“Wonder what the ruckus is,” Winnie said.
—a burst, muted and distant, several in succession—
“The bloody hell?” she said.
—a gunshot? Had I heard gunshots?
And then the unmistakable sound of the yacht’s door swinging open, the pounding of footsteps entering the yacht, men’s voices shouting something in French. Winnie and I jumped to our feet.
Just as three commandos, in full combat gear, rushed into the cabin and trained assault weapons on us.
CHAPTER 18
THREE OF THEM initially, then three more spilling in behind them, dressed in blue, combat helmets with face shields, dark masks covering everything from their necks to their noses, bulletproof vests, weapons
galore on their belts, thick gloves, and heavy combat boots.
“Allongez-vous face contre terre! Face contre terre! Down!” Their assault weapons swept across the room. One of them motioned to the floor, lest we misunderstand, while others fanned out throughout the yacht.
“Face contre terre!” One of the soldiers moved toward me and I crouched down. He pushed me flat to the floor and I lay still. Winnie had done the same thing.
Shouting, from other parts of the yacht. Bursting through a door—the bedroom door. Serena’s inquisitive voice. More shouting. I caught Winnie’s eye. She was staring forward intently, perfectly still and perfectly terrified.
Chaos all around us. Serena and Bryah, pushed into the room at gunpoint and forced to the floor beside us, Serena in a T-shirt and panties, Bryah stark naked.
“What’s going on?” Serena shouted. The soldier behind her put a foot on her back.
“Silence!” he ordered.
I said, “Just do what they say—”
“Silence!”
That soldier stood sentry over us, training his gun on our backs, while the others stormed the various rooms of the yacht.
“Qui est-ce qui est dans le yacht? Comment?”
Comment? How many? I thought he was asking how many people were on the yacht. I didn’t know, other than the four of us. Devo, Luc, François, and Damon were gone. The fat American?
“Quatre ou cinq,” I answered. Four or five.
The soldiers called out to each other, announcing each room clear, I assumed, but I really didn’t know. I didn’t know much of anything. I was in a foreign country where an armed militia was overtaking our yacht. What in the world had happened?
The fat American, in a T-shirt and boxers, his hair standing on end, was pushed into the main cabin and forced to the carpet as well. The soldiers gathered and seemed satisfied that they’d rounded us all up. They went to each of us and grabbed our hands and fastened them behind our backs, some kind of a hard rubber restraint. Handcuffs, but not like the police used. At least not in America. But this wasn’t America.
I was lifted off my feet and pushed forward. Each of us was forced up the stairs and onto the dock. Outside, the air was clammy and the sun was low in the east. What would ordinarily be a sleepy dawn was a frenetic scramble of people and vehicles.
It was as if France had declared war on tiny Monaco. Gray helicopters hovered low overhead. A couple of planes that looked like fighter jets circled the sky. Official-looking cars swamped the harbor. The same military group, wearing combat gear and brandishing assault weapons, was pulling people out of all the other yachts moored in the harbor. The entire dock was lined with people lying flat on their stomachs in handcuffs.
We soon joined them—and this time, we didn’t require an order. We fell to our knees and then lay face down. Soldiers moved us with their feet until they had arranged us on the diagonal, clearing a lane on the dock for foot traffic.
“What in the world is going on?” I said, my head turned toward Winnie, each of us lying prone on the cold, dingy dock.
“Oh, God,” Winnie said. “Oh, God, no.”
“What?” I asked.
“Silence!” one of them barked at me.
Winnie closed her eyes, and the chaos escalated around us. She complied with the wishes of the French soldier, not speaking but simply mouthing the words.
Oh, no.
CHAPTER 19
TEN, TWENTY MINUTES passed. I was lying flat, my head turned toward Winnie and beyond her, to the harbor. A French soldier stood only a few feet away. Soldiers and people in civilian clothes ran back and forth. I heard several splashes, telling me that people were diving into the water. Some of the soldiers entered our yacht again. Troopers were boarding yachts with dogs, German shepherds, who wore large blue vests that covered their torsos.
What had happened?
“Talk to me, Winnie,” I said, but a boot came down between our faces.
“Une arme!” The shout came from someone standing at the door of our yacht.
“Qui est le propriétaire du yacht? Celui-ci?” shouted a man whose boots were inches from my face. “Qui est le—”
“I am,” the fat American said. “It’s my yacht.”
“Levez-vous!” A soldier grabbed me by the wrist restraints and lifted me to my feet. “Allez-vous! Allez, allez!” All of us, the four of us ladies and the fat American, started marching toward the harbor.
“What’s going on?” Serena said in a hushed tone.
“Don’t worry, sweetie, this is some kind of mistake,” I called back with no conviction whatsoever.
Commandos had raided every boat. The parking lot was swarming with officials, mostly in plain clothes, not in uniform. An area around one particular car, a black convertible, was cordoned off with barricades.
Soldiers were lifting everyone to their feet and lining them up single file on the dock. But we were getting the royal treatment. We were marching ahead of them, all by ourselves.
We were being singled out.
CHAPTER 20
THE DIN IN the parking lot had reached near-deafening levels—everyone was shouting over each other and barking orders, sirens were blaring, helicopters were hovering. The four of us were each placed into a separate unmarked black SUV. Slowly, the vehicles started to move in a caravan. A helicopter flew overhead, trailing us. Soldiers jogged alongside the procession, holding their machine guns in ready position. A series of large vans passed us going the other way on a narrow road, heading back toward the dock, presumably to transport the occupants of the other yachts. Why, I had no idea.
“I’m an American citizen and I have rights,” I said to the driver and the soldier seated next to him in the front seat. “I demand to know what’s going on.”
They didn’t respond. They didn’t even look back at me.
We pulled into the same airport in Nice where we landed only two short days ago, the Aéroport Nice Côte d’Azur. But this time it was lined with military vehicles and armed soldiers. I was led into a small plane, where I was placed in a seat and my handcuffs were fastened to something else, locking me into the chair. Then a blindfold was placed over my eyes.
“Is that really necessary? For God’s sake, I’m handcuffed and—”
“Silence!” someone yelled in my face.
I heard others board the plane. My friends. I heard sobbing. I thought it was Winnie but I couldn’t be sure. I couldn’t even be sure that the sobs weren’t my own.
I couldn’t be sure of anything right now.
We sat in stunned silence. I could hear the rapid breathing of my friends, all of us bound and blindfolded and clueless.
Then some more men jumped onto the plane and said something that I missed. The plane soon moved down the runway. And then it lifted in the air. Less than forty-eight hours after arriving in Monte Carlo, brimming with anticipation, we were leaving in handcuffs and blindfolds, with absolutely no idea where we were going or what was happening.
“Ladies, you have rights,” I called out. “Demand a lawyer. Demand someone from the emb—”
A blow to my chest, a flat palm whisking the wind from me. My head slammed against the wall. I was woozy for a moment but I had to think, to focus. But focus on what? Nothing made sense.
It seemed like we were in the air for about an hour and a half. That was three times the time it took to fly from Bern to Nice two days ago. But Bern felt very far away right now.
Paris, I assumed. After our landing, we were released from our seats and marched down a flight of stairs. I was wearing nothing more than a robe, nothing underneath and nothing on my feet.
A mistake, I told myself. A misunderstanding.
I walked in blindfolded darkness, a strong hand clutching my arm, into another car. The car was blaring a siren, which echoed similar sirens from the other cars in our caravan. I thought of so many things—Richie and Elena, even Jeffrey, what in the world could have possibly happened—and lost track of time. The only thing
I noticed was that the car never stopped, hardly even slowed, during the entire trip.
Then we stopped. A door opened, a blast of warm air, and I was being handled again, forced out of the car, stubbing my bare toes on asphalt. A soldier on each side of me kept me from falling. They were carrying me as much as I was walking.
From asphalt to tile, the inside of a building. From tile to an elevator. We climbed three stories, by my count. Nothing but darkness through the blindfold. My wrists were abraded and one of my shoulders was cramping from my hands being held behind my back for so long.
Then more tile, then a room, a very cold room. I was put into a chair, my cuffed hands placed behind the back of it, and locked down.
I smelled aftershave, body odor, sweat. I sensed the presence of others in the room. One or two, I thought, but I wasn’t sure. A door opened and closed several times. People entered and exited. They whispered and they conferred. Someone lit a cigarette. I thought the French had banned indoor smoking, but I wasn’t entirely sure I was even in France and I doubted I would score any points raising an objection, in any event.
My head was pounding and my heart was racing. The silence was worse than the chaos on the dock.
And then the blindfold was ripped off my face.
CHAPTER 21
I BLINKED INTO the glare of a brightly lit room. The walls were shiny white and bare, and there were blinding fluorescent lights overhead. The ceiling had a pitch to it, sufficient to allow the can lights on the angled surfaces to shoot directly into my eyes. A modern version of the spotlight shining in the face. What with the frigid temperature in here, it felt like sunshine in the middle of winter.