“Nope.”
Helen turned to me. “We weren’t ‘led to believe’ anything. Naomi told us straight out that Galina and her mother were killed in the same accident years after we assassinated Boris Lazarov.”
I shrugged. “Naomi was doing this off the books which means she had to prepare the report with no help,” I reminded her. “She probably saw the story about the accident and took it at face value without checking.”
“Sloppy,” Helen said with a sniff.
I had been just as furious when I had realized the truth, but I found myself defending Naomi. “She was working on her own, with few resources, on a tight schedule. All while trying to also figure out the identity of the mole who turned over the files in the first place.”
“I suppose.” Helen still looked sulky, but she’d get over it. She was always fair.
“Do we have any idea where Galina is?” Mary Alice asked.
“Nope. I took a quick peek in the nightstand drawer. Aunt Evgenia doesn’t seem to have anything like an address book, and I suspect Galina likes it that way.”
In the rearview mirror, I saw Natalie cock her head. “Why?”
“She’s been playing dead for thirty years. The obvious conclusion is she likes being a ghost. There was nothing in that room to give away anything about her whereabouts.”
“Careless of Galina to let Aunt Evgenia keep a photo up,” Natalie observed.
“It’s a picture of Pasha,” Mary Alice pointed out. “Galina is barely a profile. She probably thought nobody would ever spot it and put the pieces together.”
“But if she’s monitoring Aunt Evgenia, she’ll know someone was there,” Helen said suddenly. “It won’t take her long to find out there were four of us. She’ll be putting some pieces together herself.”
I pushed the accelerator towards the floor. “Then it’s time we got the hell out of Switzerland.”
Chapter Sixteen
We made it back tothe farmhouse by the next afternoon, having taken a roundabout return trip via Tunisia. Mary Alice picked up a few souvenirs in the Tunis airport, and after we’d eaten a late lunch, she presented Taverner, Minka, and Akiko with leather slippers and packets of dates.
“It was slippers or stuffed camels,” she said as she pitted a few dates and tossed them to the cats. They didn’t eat them, but batted them around as we talked.
“So,” Akiko said, propping her elbows on the table, “what did you learn? Did Pasha Lazarov have a secret wife? A business partner? Is Auntie Evgenia an octogenarian Octopussy and she set her acrobatic minions on you?”
“None of the above,” Helen told her. “But Billie discovered proof that the whole Lazarov clan has been keeping a secret.” She paused and looked at me, and I retrieved the photograph I’d lifted.
“According to Aunt Evgenia, the woman in the picture is Pasha’s sister, Galina.”
Akiko blinked. “The dead girl?”
“One and the same,” I told her. Taverner was ostentatiously quiet. He just ladled out stew and sliced bread and filled glasses with fizzy water spiked with thimbles of murta arba, the Sardinian liqueur of choice made from myrtle. But there was an alertness about him that meant he was listening to every word and thinking hard.
“But why did your organization tell you Galina died in the car accident with her mother?” Akiko asked.
“It could have been an honest mistake,” Helen explained. “Our Provenance department keeps track of thousands—millions—of people at a time, and this information would have been logged before the databases were digitized. Back then it was just old-school newspaper clipping and paper filing. The accident happened in the south of France and the details in the local newspaper were probably sketchy, maybe incomplete. Someone in Provenance would have cut out the mention of the accident and filed it away. Simple human error, end of story.”
“Or,” Natalie said slowly, “the Lazarovs deliberately concealed the fact that Galina survived. Think about it—we killed Boris and even though we did a bang-up job of making it appear to be an accident, there would have always been at least a suspicion of a deliberate assassination when you’re talking about a guy like that. Then Irina Lazarov’s car goes off a cliff.”
“But we didn’t do that,” Mary Alice pointed out.
Natalie rolled her eyes. “It doesn’t matter what we did or didn’t do. It only matters what theythinkwe did. If they were suspicious about Boris’s death, Irina’s crash, no matter how accidental, is only going to spook the family further. So if you’re Aunt Evgenia, your sister is dead and her kids are possibly in danger. Maybe the local reporter got it wrong or maybe Aunt Evgenia suggested that he get it wrong on purpose. She could have even slipped him some francs to make sure of it, keep Galina off the radar of whoever might have been targeting her family.”
“She couldn’t have known for sure that Boris had been assassinated or that Irina’s crash was just a tragic mistake,” Helen mused. “But Russians are nothing if not paranoid. Letting people think Galina was dead was a good way of keeping her safe.”
“Why not protect Pasha?” Mary Alice challenged. “If the Lazarovs believed they were being picked off, Pasha would have been just as much a target as Galina.”
“He was already almost grown,” Akiko put in. “Maybe he wasn’t under Aunt Evgenia’s thumb. Galina was still a kid.”