“That’s all she can do,” I said. “Contain the threat and hope word never gets out.” I turned to Naomi. “Because otherwise, your leadership is for shit and you won’t last ten minutes.”
Infighting in any multinational organization can be cutthroat, but when the organization is made up of trained killers, the stakes are incalculably high. I wouldn’t have given a thin Eisenhower dime for the chances of whoever decided to pass on information from the Museum files. Naomi was as ruthless as the rest of us when it came to protecting her position as a director. But if she meant to hold her job, she would have to eliminate the mole and make sure Pasha Lazarov didn’t act on the information he’d received. The death ofLilian Flanders wouldn’t raise any eyebrows in the Museum; the loss of four former field agents would set alarm bells ringing from Belize to Bucharest.
“I’ve done everything I can, and I included a number for a burner. That is the only way I want you to contact me until this is over, and only in an emergency,” she said sternly. She popped her sunglasses down on her nose. “Good luck.”
We watched her walk away to join Dennis, who was just coming back from the bathroom. Layla was still perched on his shoulders, waving a gummy shark in each little fist at her mother and baby sister. They were such a perfect family they could have been in a car ad, something safe and dependable but also sleek and a little sexy. I could have stood there, watching them and thinking about the choices I’d made and the different lives I might have lived. But I didn’t. I liked the one I had too well to go regretting anything I’d missed.
So I turned in the opposite direction from the Capitol, looking towards Nassau Street, almost half a mile away. “Come on,” I said to the others. “Let’s get that packet. We have a Bulgarian to kill.”
Chapter Four
The porch at the cornerof Duke of Gloucester and Nassau was brick, built up from the street level, with arches punched into either side—the perfect place to stash a dead drop. We arranged ourselves casually around one side with Mary Alice and Helen poring over the map like curious tourists as Natalie ducked under the porch. We heard her scrabbling around, cursing a little until she finally emerged with a cobweb festooning her hair.
“Spiders,” she said, making a face as she dropped the packet she’d retrieved into Helen’s Birkin. It was too early for lunch but Helen insisted the Cheese Shop was a must-do, so we stood in a ridiculously long line for sandwiches that we took back to the Best Western. We assembled in the room I shared with Mary Alice, spreading our sandwiches and bottles of water and slices of pound cake over the two beds as Helen extracted the material from the packet.
“A dozen pictures of Pasha at various ages.” She divided them up and passed them around. “Followed by a dossier.” She kept this and skimmed it as the rest of us studied the photos.
“Dapper,” Natalie said. “I like the pinstripes.” She flashed a photo of a man who looked to be in his mid-fifties with fading sandy hair. His looks were forgettable, but you’d take a second glance at his clothes. He wore a navy suit with a wide rose-pink pinstripe, the seams perfectly matched. A violet silk pocket square was folded with precision, and he was smiling around a beautiful briar pipe with a mother-of-pearl stem. He had teeth like Richard Branson, large, white, and permanently on display in every photo.
Natalie moved on to the last photo and squealed. “You have got to be kidding.” She turned it over to show Lazarov in a straw boater and a gorgeously tailored cream suit—holding a teddy bear. “He’s dressed like Anthony Andrews inBrideshead Revisited.”
“God, I had such a crush on him,” Helen said. “He was so sexy inThe Scarlet Pimpernel.”
“ ‘Sink me!’ ” Mary Alice said, waggling her fingers at her eye to suggest a monocle.
Natalie’s face fell as she looked again at the picture. “I’m not sure I can kill a man with a teddy bear.”
“You killed a man with a dog,” Mary Alice reminded her. Boris Lazarov had boarded our private plane with a couple of bodyguards and an asshole of a poodle. Natalie had put her foot down, insisting she couldn’t kill a dog, so in the end,Helen had scooped it into her flight suit and parachuted out with it.
“I saved the dog,” Natalie shot back.
“Helen saved the dog,” I corrected. “And I promise, no teddy bears will be harmed in the killing of Pasha Lazarov.”
“It’s not about hurting the teddy bear,” Natalie said. “I’m notinsane, Billie. It’s about the fact that he is clearly a sentimental person. And I’m just not sure a person who carries around a teddy bear is capable of trying to murder us.”
There was always a point in just about every mission Natalie worked where she got cold feet. She made the mistake of humanizing the target, trying to find a loophole to get out of the killing. It never made sense to me, because once she got her nerve back, she was always the most enthusiastic of the four of us. It invariably took a deep dive into the dossier, turning over the rocks of the target’s life to see all the nasty things wiggling around underneath in order to convince her an assassination was a necessity.
I flicked through the pictures as Mary Alice jerked her chin towards the photo in Natalie’s hand. “Maybe it’s not really his teddy bear. It could have been for a costume party.”
“I don’t think so,” Helen said slowly. “According to the dossier, he’s an Anglophile—almost pathologically so—with a particular fondness for Evelyn Waugh. He has all of his clothes custom tailored in London. The actual biographical data is pretty sketchy. Pasha was born Pavel Borisovich Lazarov on April 26, 1962—an Easter baby, hence the nickname of Pasha. He and his younger sister were both born in thesouth of France. His father, our pal Boris Lazarov, was Bulgarian. His mother, Irina Feodorovna Dashkova, was White Russian, old nobility. Her parents fled St. Petersburg during the revolution in 1917, and Irina and her sister, Evgenia, were born in Paris. Auntie Evgenia is the only surviving member of Pasha’s family, living in an expensive old folks’ home in Switzerland. There’s no mention of wives or significant partners. No children. He dabbles a bit in dealing art, but no real occupation to speak of. He has a town house in Belgravia.”
“Nothing about that makes me feel better,” Natalie told her.
Helen’s brow furrowed. “This might. Two different Russian oligarchs have fallen out of the windows of that town house in Belgravia.”
“God, what is it with Russians and defenestration?” Mary Alice asked.
I shrugged. “Maybe they like the splat.” I turned to Helen. “So if our guy has been doing murders in London, why haven’t the British charged him?”
Helen turned back to the dossier. “Both happened during parties and other witnesses backed up his story that the deaths were accidental. He also apparently deals drugs—designer club gear, strictly for beautiful party people. He specializes in something called red razzies.”
“Ooooh, I love those!” Natalie puts in. “They’re shaped like little raspberries and they’re flavored. Nice buzz, but you have to really hydrate because they’ll suck the moisture right out of you.”
Helen stared at her a long moment. “Thank you, Natalie. That is very informative.” She resumed her narrative. “BritishIntelligence had to warn him off when a minor royal almost overdosed, but they hushed it up to avoid the tabloids carrying the story.” She fixed Natalie with a firm look. “The bottom line is: we don’t need to feel too bad about killing him.”
Natalie opened her mouth to argue, but I pulled a photo of Lazarov on the deck of a sleek teak racing yacht. “Look at the side of the boat. Next to the name. See the animal painted there?”
“It’s a wolf,” she said quietly.