The Secret Agent by Francine Mathews Read Free Book Online

never occurred to me, I will confess, that the entire hit was Thai. But inside of twenty-four hours, I heard the faintest whisper that someone might have financed the job out of Bangkok. So I contacted Harry.”
    Stefani turned and studied him intently. There was something in Oliver’s manner that suggested the confessional, as though all the blithe spirits and giddy talk of the past several weeks had been a type of mania designed to hold him back from the abyss. She remembered the elusive Catholic orphanage that had popped up in his background story. Had he often needed to invent a priest?
    “Of course you called Harry,” she said evenly. “It was the obvious thing to do.”
    Oliver was studying the flames with an absorption he usually reserved for golf magazines. “I sent Harry a report of the killing and subsequent investigation—
mine,
not the Swiss police’s—via secure fax. I know from the office logs that Harry received it. Four hours later he was lying dead under the front tires of a Kowloon taxi.”
    “Jaywalking?”
    Oliver’s caramel eyes skittered away from hers. “Harry never
walked
anywhere. His bloody great Jaguar was a point of pride. Symbol of Harry’s prestige. He was a Hong Kong
taipan
of the old order.”
    The Scotch felt like crushed velvet on her tongue. “And what did the police say?”
    “Something bland and polite and regretful and obscene,” Oliver muttered. “I do not accept it. I do not accept accident in my part of the world.”
    She set down the glass. The rain had settled in over the gorse and the milling sheep; rain spat and fizzled in the darting hearth. The early northern dark was falling.
    “You believe Harry was murdered because you queried him about Max Roderick? But he might have died for any number of reasons, Oliver. Gambling. Drugs. A man he shouldn’t have crossed. Or a woman. There must be things you didn’t know about him. There always are.”
    “Harry was no fool. He’d lived in Asia most of his life and he understood the risks of our job. At Krane’s we’re paid a hell of a lot of money to walk around with bull’s-eyes on our backs. We’ve got the world’s nasties in our sights, and they mean to take us out before we take them down. But in thirteen years of adventure and high jinks, old thing, Harry never once faltered the course. He was sublime.”
    And now the wind is whistling over your grave, Oliver Krane, and what worries you is your own fear.
    But instead she asked: “Did Harry know Max Roderick? Or anyone in the Roderick family?”
    “I have no idea. Harry’s lips, regrettably, are sealed.”
    “Have you told Roderick about Harry’s death?”
    “I chose,” Oliver replied with heavy emphasis, “to keep my cards close to my vest. The connection between the strangled whore and Harry’s hit-and-run exists, for the moment, only in my head.”
    So Oliver did not quite trust Max Roderick either.
    “Why was Harry in Kowloon that day?”
    He ran a hand over the back of his sleek head—a restless, futile gesture. “God alone knows. Presumably there was someone he wanted to collar—an informant, a friend. I imagine he was asked to meet there, on foot— and that’s the sort of mistake a novice would make, never Harry. Harry knew that when someone hands you a meeting, first thing you do is turn it inside out.”
    “But instead Harry went to Kowloon,” Stefani mused, “which means he was off-guard. He didn’t see trouble coming. He believed in the friend he was meeting.”
    “Right again.”
    “And you heard no more whispers out of Thailand?”
    “The trail, as they say in the best spaghetti westerns, has unaccountably gone cold.”
    “Except that Max has come to Krane’s for help, and you’re sending me to France. Where all the trails begin?”
    For the first time, Oliver smiled. “Bloody brilliant, Ms. Fogg. See why I wanted you for this job?”

4
    T hey said nothing more about Max Roderick that evening and avoided the subject of him