She went into the bathroom of La Terrasse, past a hundred lunchtime diners staring at her, and used up all of the paper towels drying herself off as much as she could. After googling the nearest clothing store on her phone, which thank God was still working, Kate walked to the store, shivering. She found some decent enough clothes, jeans, T-shirt, and some athletic shoes a size too big. After throwing her wet clothes away, she went out and found a taxi, then found another store where she could buy a new hard travel case for her weapons, because she sure as hell wasn’t about to leave those behind. She made her way back to the airport with her hair still wet.
Kate looked at her phone. Her ringer was off, but now that she was checking she could see that Jessup had already called her three times. She also saw a text from a number she didn’t recognize. The message read “Sorry, that was an accident and the police were coming so we had to leave! I’ll buy you new dry panties that I’m sure you will find just ducky, I promise. Love, Mr. Peanuts.” Mr. Peanuts, she thought. Peanuts as in squirrel, as in Nick, as in I’m going to kill you when I catch up to you.
Kate went to the British Airways counter and caught a flight to London.
* * *
Kate was on the ground in Heathrow ninety minutes later. She took a taxi to the police station that had handled the shooting at the safe house, flashed her soggy FBI badge, and managed to catch the right person on the right day. He gave her the hospital and room number of Captain Duckworth, the man who’d stood next to her and helped her fire on the assassins coming up the stairs. If that doesn’t bond you, she thought, what else will?
She took another taxi to the hospital. When she walked into the room, Captain Duckworth was sitting up in his bed.
“Private room,” Kate said, looking out the window at the garden below. “With a view.”
Duckworth smiled at her and tried to lean forward but that was obviously a bad idea. “I’d normally stand when a lady enters the room,” he said, with an East End Cockney accent, sixty-plus years thick.
“I’m glad to see you’re on the mend, Captain.”
“And I’m glad to see a pleasant face.”
“I need to know where Quentin Fox is,” she said. “There are some very bad people on his trail right now. I’m sure you don’t want to see him killed any more than I do.”
“I know about the bad people,” Ducky said, patting his ribs. “But I’m afraid I can’t help you. He’s just an old friend I was helping out. Put him up for the night, introduced him to another friend of mine. Then he was off running, and I promise you, I haven’t heard from him since.”
“You have no idea where he could be right now? His son is with him.”
He raised an eyebrow at that. “Well, that’s a kick in the head. The Fox boys together?”
“Yes, they were just in Paris.”
“Lovely day for it,” he said.
“They were almost killed, Captain. I’m trying to help them.”
“Maybe they don’t need any help.”
“This other friend you introduced him to,” Kate said. “The professor. Tell me about him.”
“Hadrian Lewis. He’s a professor at Oriel College, Oxford. Germanic literature, I think. Sounds like a pretty dry topic to me.”
“He was helping with the map?”
“It was something mysterious, is all I know.”
“But you heard what they were talking about,” Kate said. “At the safe house.”
“Safe house? You mean the pub?”
“The pub that was used by the SAS and the CIA as a safe house, yes. I know all about it.”
Duckworth made like he was racking his brain on that one. “Now what would the British SAS and the CIA be doing using the same safe house?”
“Come on, Captain,” Kate said. “I know Quentin Fox came to see you for a reason. Did you two used to work together?”
“Working with an off-the-books American operative on SAS business? No, that doesn’t sound right, either.”
Kate was about to press him, but then she backed off. She knew what kind of man Duckworth was, a retired Special Forces captain who would never truly leave the job behind him. Just like her own father, the man who still wouldn’t talk about many of his missions.
“I’m going to give you my card,” Kate said, taking one out of her pocket. “If you see him, or if you hear from him, please make sure somebody calls me, okay? Will you do that much, at least?”
Duckworth took the card from her, looked at it. “Why is it all wet?”
“Long story.” As she was about to leave, she paused in the doorway. “Hadrian Lewis, you said? At Oxford University?”
“Germanic literature,” he said. They both smiled, because they both knew where Kate was going next.
* * *
Kate rented a car, took a few minutes to get accustomed to being on the other side of the road, and drove the eighty miles to Oxford University. Now she was doing the last thing she ever thought she’d be doing that day, listening to a lecture on the Nibelungenlied, a Middle High German epic poem written in the thirteenth century. Kate listened to Professor Lewis compare the three different surviving versions of the poem, then express his own opinion about which was the most reliable. He made it clear that he didn’t agree with most other Germanic literature scholars on this topic, so right away Kate could see she was dealing with a real gunslinger.
She caught up to him as he was leaving the lecture hall. He was wearing a Harris tweed jacket, with a white dress shirt and a red bow tie.
“I was at the safe house the other night,” she said, showing him her FBI shield. “I’m glad you got away unharmed.”
“I thought it was just a pub,” he said as he continued to walk down the hallway, increasing his speed by a notch. “I don’t know anything about a safe house.”
Kate wanted to grab him by the tweed jacket and tell him that everybody needed to stop pretending it wasn’t a safe house. Instead, she took a moment to compose herself. “Look, I know you were there, and I know you saw the map.”
Lewis stopped dead. He looked up and down the hallway, then at Kate. “I’m sorry, Miss, what was your name?”
“FBI Agent Kate O’Hare,” she said, leaning on the first half. It occurred to her that with the way Professor Lewis had run away from that safe house, he had probably never even talked to the police that night.
“I was just doing a favor for an old friend,” Lewis said as he straightened his bow tie.
“That’s the second time I’ve heard that line today.”
“I wasn’t there for more than five minutes before everything went to pot,” he said, describing a gunfight as only a British professor could. “If I’d had any idea that such a thing were going to happen—”
“Quentin Fox’s son climbed the Eiffel Tower today,” Kate said. “The map sent them there, didn’t it?”
Lewis swallowed hard. “They really did that?”
Kate nodded. “Not something you try every day. He must have had a good reason.”
Lewis just looked at her. He was the very definition of a man trying to act natural. At least Captain Duckworth had been charming about stonewalling her.