Читать книгу Undercover Sultan - ALEXANDRA SELLERS - Страница 9

The young woman, small but shapely, her lips a rich red, her wild red-gold mane held up at one side with a jewelled comb, earrings dangly, skirt micro-short, ran lightly up the steps and into the dim lighting of the hotel foyer. She was short and very slender, with a long waist and low, curvy hips. Her dark stiletto-heel suede boots were above the knee, her neatly muscled stomach bare between the hip-hugging leather skirt and the white bolero top, revealing a neat gold ring in her navel. A delicate butterfly tattoo quivered on her stomach. A smart leather backpack was slung over one shoulder.

The concierge smiled involuntarily as he watched her. Many of the girls who used his hotel were beautiful, mostly actresses and students supplementing their incomes. This one, who called herself Emma—of course not her real name, he understood that—was not the most beautiful among them, but she had a certain something. It always cheered up his Friday night to see her.

“Bonsoir, ma petite,” he called. “Ça va?”

“Bonsoir, Henri,” she returned with a smile, crossing to where he held up the key for her. She was the one he could not place. With the others he could usually make a guess at their daytime occupation, but Emma was an unknown.

She was unusual in other ways, too. Always the same room. Always the same client. Only Friday night. Every Friday night.

Emma was not a regular in the usual sense of the word, but on Friday nights she was here at eleven, whatever the weather. Henri always saved the same room for her for two hours, and on the rare Friday night that she did not turn up, she paid him the following week.

She had arranged it this way to protect her client, who arrived separately and came in by the service entrance. Henri had never seen him. Emma had not said so, but Henri could guess that the man was a known figure—a foreigner, of course, since what Frenchman would have worried about such an arrangement becoming public? The président’s own mistress and illegitimate daughter had attended his public funeral alongside his wife, as was only natural. But foreigners were odd about practical sexual matters, there was no denying.

Henri had found himself agreeing that of course the man could come in the back way, although it wasn’t usual. Henri liked to vet the girls’ customers, so that if there was any trouble he could be as helpful as possible with the police. He ran a decent place and kept in well with the flics. His pride was that he took no money from the girls. He charged their clients for the room. The arrangement between the girls and their clients was their own business. He was an hôtelier, not a souteneur.

But Emma paid for the room herself. Now she slipped the money onto the counter and took the key, smiling that smile, and he thought it a pity that she spoiled the line of her own luscious mouth by painting it larger. Her mouth was generous enough, and he had often thought of telling her so. But she wasn’t like the other girls. She was warm, friendly, she never got above herself, but she was not confiding. He had never quite had the courage to give her the kind of avuncular advice he offered to some.

As usual, she ignored the elevator and went lightly up the wide marble stairs, and Henri watched with an absent smile till the flashing, slim brown thighs were out of sight.

Mariel put the key in the lock and slipped into the silence of room 302. A small night-light was burning. In the shadows the air of faded elegance that marked the hotel was a little softened; you could almost imagine yourself back in time. Before the war this had been a solid, respectable establishment. Then the Germans had used it as a military headquarters, and after the war it had never quite recovered its former status. It had been in steady decline ever since, but the furniture and hangings had been of good quality once, and although badly worn, still bore testament to the old respectability.

With the quickness of familiarity, Mariel locked the door behind her in the semi-darkness, leaving the key in the lock, and crossed to the window. She dragged back the curtains and slipped the bolt that secured the large sash window. When she pulled up the window, the night air blew in, the indefinable perfume that was Paris. She heaved a breath, slipped her other arm through the strap of her small backpack, sat down on the windowsill and neatly swung her legs over the edge. Then she jumped.

She landed almost silently on her toes on the ancient, slightly wobbly iron fire escape a few inches down and stood while her eyes acclimatized to night. Overhead only the stars gave any light. Below, one or two windows illumined the small, narrow courtyard.

After a moment, keeping close to the wall, she started up the steps. The courtyard, if it could be called that, was completely surrounded by the brick walls of buildings that abutted each other. The hotel was four stories high. One flight up, the fire escape, last remnant of something that had once honeycombed the space, made a right turn and ran along the wall of the adjacent building for a dozen yards. Mariel kept close to the wall all the way. At the far end it stopped against the back wall of a third building, which sat parallel to the hotel on the next street over. Here there was another window, open just a chink at the bottom. Mariel slipped expert fingers into the chink, pushed the window open, leapt up, swung her legs through. Her feet reached for the toilet seat in the darkness.

A moment later she tiptoed past the row of porcelain sinks and slowly opened the door onto the corridor. Behind her head the word Toilettes was marked in chunky italic brass letters on the grey door. Mariel glanced to right and left as she stepped through, and although the turn of her head seemed casual, her gaze and her body were alert.

The dimly lighted hallway was empty. It probably dated from the same era, but the decor of this building was very different from that of the hotel she had just left. Here there had been extensive updating—sunken lighting in the lowered ceilings, the walls neatly painted in grey, grey carpeting on the floor, and brass plates or letters announcing the names of the various companies behind the doors that lined the corridor.

Mariel went lightly and quickly to a door leading to the stairs, down two flights, and out into another identical hallway. Only the names in brass were different.

Shrugging out of her backpack, she pulled out some keys as she strode down the hall towards a door with a brass plate reading Michel Verdun et Associés, and sent up a little prayer. She didn’t start breathing again until she was inside in the darkness with the door closed, and the alarm code had worked.

She had been doing this every Friday night for weeks now. Sooner or later she was going to get caught. One day, she supposed, she might even walk in on Michel himself. She was sure he was often here at night.

If she did walk in on him, she had a story ready: she had been out for the evening, had lost her apartment keys and had come to the office because she kept a spare set in her desk.

Michel might be suspicious, but she hoped that he would be distracted by the signs that his employee led a double life, computer whiz kid by day, working girl by night. And that his confusion would buy her some time and the chance to get away. Afterwards, of course, she could not risk showing up for work again. Her usefulness as a spy would be over from that moment. But with luck Michel would never discover, among the many people he was cheating, exactly whom she had been spying for.

But tonight the office was dark. Mariel made her way aided by the light filtering in the long row of windows from the street, and the glow from half a dozen computer screens. At her own desk she tossed her bag down. First she opened the bottom drawer and pulled a few items out at random, setting them on the desk. This was set decoration. If Michel happened to come in, she hoped it would look as if she had been searching for her key.

Then she slipped into the chair and grabbed her computer mouse with one hand. The screen saver was a shot of moving clouds and sea, and was another thread in the fabricated character of Michel Verdun’s wuss of an employee. Mariel’s screen saver of choice would have been something closer to the wild starbursts on the desk next to hers—or perhaps a series of morphing faces. She liked colour and wackiness and excitement.

The serene sky dissolved, and her desktop appeared.

For a few moments Mariel typed and clicked until the window she wanted appeared. Then she grabbed up a pen and, on a bright pink Post-it note, copied the short list of letters and numbers that appeared. She carefully double-checked them, then deleted the file and exited. After a few moments the desktop would dissolve and her screen saver would reappear, leaving no evidence that she had touched the computer.

Mariel pulled a zip disk from a drawer, stood and, armed with the little pink square of paper, moved through the shadows and paused before an internal door.

Noting the first figure she had scribbled down, she keyed the code into the security keypad. She waited till she heard the click, then opened the door and slipped inside, closing it firmly behind her before reaching for the light switch. It was just possible someone in a building opposite might phone the police if they saw lights.

A few feet away, two bright squares of light showed two identical images of a naked couple deriving a great deal of apparent mutual satisfaction from the close conjunction of their rather improbably endowed bodies. After a moment the fluorescent lights flickered and settled into a bright glow.

Against the wall were two computers on a long desk. Beside it were several tall black filing cabinets. These and a chair made up the entire contents of the room. These were Michel’s top secret, dedicated computers. The room was off limits to everyone save Michel himself.

Mariel crossed to one of the computers. She dragged the wheeled chair over and sank down, dropping the pink note beside the keyboard, reaching for the mouse. The pornographic movie loop disappeared as the desktop came up on one screen, but on the other the couple moved tirelessly through their paces.

It was Michel’s favourite screen saver. Mariel hardly saw it anymore. She knew Michel did it to annoy, and it was annoying if she thought about it. Under ordinary circumstances she would have taken a stand, but these were very far from ordinary circumstances. Michel was a man whose guard went down around women whom he was successfully sexually harassing, and it was no part of Mariel’s plan to figure in his mind as a woman to reckon with. Mariel the Mouse was her role.

The real Mariel de Vouvray would have mentioned twice that she found his screen saver offensive and then would probably have kicked the screen out of the monitor the third time to make her point. The Mariel Michel knew lowered her eyes and bit her lip whenever he summoned her to some discussion while the screen saver was on. Which was something he did to all the women staff—too regularly for chance.

But that was okay. If she did her job right, she would have all the revenge she could want on Michel Verdun. And Mariel intended to do her job right.

Mariel was a corporate spy. She had ostensibly been working for Michel Verdun et Associés for four months—but in fact she was working for her American cousin, Hal Ward, of Ward Energy Systems in California.

Hal was the inventor of the world’s most efficient fuel cell technology, but he hadn’t stopped there. His work now involved research and development into a variety of energy alternatives to fossil fuel and the combustion engine.

And someone was carefully and consistently stealing the results of that research and passing it on to foreign-based companies and governments. The pipeline for the stolen material had finally been tracked last year. Michel Verdun et Associés was a “détective privé”—detective agency—based in Paris, with links all over the Middle East and, most importantly, with the country of Bagestan. It was Bagestan, and Bagestan’s unpleasant dictator, Ghasib, who benefited most from the stolen industrial secrets.

Hal wanted the leak stopped. But Michel Verdun—as might be expected—had some of the best data protection software in the world on his computers. Hal had decided to put someone right inside Michel Verdun’s organization, not only to discover the source of the leak in his own corporation, but to unravel Michel Verdun’s entire operation, from leak to end user.

Mariel de Vouvray’s father was French, and a not too distant cousin of Hal’s father. Her mother was American, and the sister of Hal’s mother. Mariel had spent every summer in California almost since she was born, many of them on Hal’s family estate. She was fluently bilingual. She had taken her university degree in computer intelligence and then had gone to work full-time for Hal. She was a natural for this job.

It had been a relatively simple matter to get her into Michel’s organization. Through one of his friends in Silicon Valley, Hal had engineered the head hunting and abrupt departure of one of Michel’s key computer people. Mariel’s fluent English and glowing references from her mythical former job (courtesy of another good friend of Hal’s), added to her willingness to start immediately, had nailed her the post left vacant by the departure.

Since then, slowly and carefully, because time was not the most important factor, Mariel had wormed her way into the most secret parts of Verdun’s organization. She had placed “moles” into his computer programming so that her own computer was e-mailed a copy of all his new passwords and codes every week. She had reconnoitred the building and found the old disused fire escape, and the hotel.

Every Friday night before she left the building at the end of the day she went up to the fourth-floor toilets, unlocked the window and opened it a crack. Then she went home, changed into her disguise and returned as Emma.

And then she checked the computers in this room for data files that had arrived during the week and sent them on to Hal Ward’s own safe computer. Even if Michel did discover that he was being spied on, he would not find out where the information had gone.

Mot de passe? demanded the screen, and Mariel consulted the little paper and keyed in that week’s password. Then she summoned up the list of everything that had arrived during the past week. Michel routinely deleted the files as he dealt with them, but Mariel had installed a mole on the computer that saved all files to a second, hidden folder. Since she had been inside his firewall when she did it, the program remained undetected.

Michel had a finger in lots of pies, most of which were rotten. He had agents, moles and hackers everywhere, stealing data and sending it to these two computers anonymously. He then sold it to his many clients.

One of the things for which she most despised him was the work he did for a Swiss bank. Michel investigated the lives of the people who were fighting to get back the money that had been deposited before the Second World War by relatives who had afterwards died in German concentration camps. The bank was hoping to blackmail vulnerable people into dropping their claims. He did the same for a multinational pharmaceutical giant, investigating the backgrounds of anyone—politicians included—who challenged them.

That was Michel Verdun. Very, very choosy about his clients—he wouldn’t touch anyone who didn’t have money.

Mariel scanned the list of received data with practised skill. Michel’s system worked on a number code. Agents sent data signed with a code. In return he paid money into anonymous bank accounts. Anyone trying to sort out his little empire would have one hell of a time.

It hadn’t taken Mariel long to learn that one code prefix always related to Ghasib. Suffixes sometimes were also apparently assigned, but she hadn’t discovered yet whether a suffix related to a particular source or a particular job.

Of course Mariel’s priority was anything with a Ghasib prefix. Tonight there were nearly a dozen. It had been a busy week for the Ghasib spies. And most carried the same suffix number.

In the past few weeks there had been a new suffix used on more and more incoming Ghasib data, but since most were encrypted she had not been able to glean much.

She opened each file before sending it, and read it if possible. Then she downloaded it onto a zip disk and deleted it from the secret folder. When she had checked and downloaded all the new files she would take the zip disk to her own computer and send the files off to Hal.

She never sent anything out from the secret computers. Michel’s firewall was extremely efficient, and he had software monitoring all traffic from this machine.

Mariel lifted her head, listening for a moment. Nothing. Listening was an automatic response, making sure you didn’t get too deep in what you were doing. She checked the clock—11:38—then clicked on the next Ghasib-prefixed e-mail. A few lines of encryption gibberish met her eyes, and she instantly exited again and clicked it to download to the zip disk. The next few were the same.

The last file had only just arrived, so Michel hadn’t seen it yet. Mariel felt a curious presentiment as she clicked it open. Maybe it would be significant. Maybe this would be the break she needed.

Another encrypted message, with an attachment this time. Mariel bit her lip as she clicked on the attachment.

It was a photograph. The image slowly formed on the screen, and Mariel blinked and opened her eyes in dumb disbelief. It was no one she recognized, but it was the most gorgeous man she had ever clapped eyes on.

In her life.

Mariel sat gazing at the handsome masculine face while her brain circuits started misfiring, one by two by four, triggering off a chain of explosions that blew reason into the void. She knew about the reality of love at first sight. Coup de foudre, it was called in French. She believed it was possible.

But she had never heard before of anyone falling head over heels in love with a face in a photograph.