She affected a scowl, though Bryson could see she was secretly pleased. “Please! I would hate to have my portrait done by Ingres!”

  “He did take forever on some of his portraits, didn’t he? Poor Madame Moitessier had to sit for twelve years.”

  “And he turned her into a Medusa, her fingers into tentacles!”

  “But an extraordinary portrait.”

  “Claustrophobic, I think.”

  “They say he may have used a camera lucida to produce some of his compositions—in effect, spying on his subjects before he captured them, you might say.”

  “Is that right?”

  “Still, as much as I admire his paintings, nothing compares to his drawings, don’t you agree?” Bryson knew that the Arnauds’ private collection included some of Ingres’s drawings, displayed in less public rooms of the château.

  “I couldn’t agree more!” Giséle Arnaud exclaimed. “Though he himself considered his drawings to be potboilers.”

  “I know, I know — while he lived in poverty in Rome, he was forced to support himself by drawing pictures of visitors and tourists. Some of the greatest paintings were done by artists working just to keep food on the table. The fact is, Ingres’s drawings are his best work by far. The use of white, of negative space, the way he captures light — they’re truly masterpieces.”

  Madame Arnaud lowered her voice and said confidentially, “Actually, we have a few of his drawings hanging in the billiards room, you know.”

  The ruse had worked. Madame Arnaud had invited Bryson and his guest to stroll into parts of the house that were not open to the other guests. She had offered to show him the drawings herself, but Bryson had declined, refusing to steal her away; but if she really didn’t mind, perhaps they could take a quick look by themselves?

  As he and Layla wandered through halls and more intimate, less public rooms, whose walls were hung with less impressive works by lesser French artists, Bryson oriented himself. He had prepared well: he had located the collection of blueprints of historically important châteaux, maintained at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, and had studied the layout of the Château de Saint-Meurice. He knew it was highly unlikely that the Arnauds would have done anything to alter Château de Saint-Meurice’s floor plan; the only variable was the use they made of the rooms, the location of the bedrooms and offices, particularly Arnaud’s private office.

  Bryson walked idly arm-in-arm with Layla down one hallway, turning left into another. As they rounded a corner, they heard low, muffled, male voices.

  They froze. The voices gradually became more audible and more distinct. The words were in French, but one speaker’s French had a definite foreign accent, which Bryson quickly placed as Russian, probably from Odessa.

  “ … to return to the party,” the Frenchman was saying.

  The Russian said something that Bryson couldn’t quite make out. Then the Frenchman replied, “But once Lille happens, the outrage will be enormous. The way will be clear.”

  Signaling Layla to stay back, Bryson flattened himself against the wall and inched forward, his tread silent, all the while listening, concentrating. Neither the voices nor the footsteps seemed to be approaching. He took from the breast pocket of his tuxedo what looked like a silver ballpoint pen, then pulled from one end a long, thin, glasslike wire, telescoping it to its maximum eighteen-inch length. He bent the tip of the flexible fiber-optic periscope cable, then nudged it along the wall until it jutted out no more than half an inch beyond the wall’s end. Looking into the small eyepiece, he was able to see the two men clearly. One, a trim, compact man with heavy black glasses, entirely bald, was clearly Jacques Arnaud. He was conferring with a tall, florid-faced man whom Bryson did not immediately recognize. A few seconds later the man’s identity came to him: Anatoly Prishnikov.

  Prishnikov. The mogul widely believed to be the true power behind the figurehead currently occupying the president’s office in the Kremlin.

  Shifting the fiber-optic periscope slightly, Bryson was startled to discover another man, much closer, seated just around the corner. A guard, clearly armed, stationed at the beginning of the corridor. Shifting the scope yet again revealed another seated figure, another armed guard, stationed halfway down the hall, where the men were standing, in front of a large, steel-paneled door.

  Arnaud’s private office.

  They were in a part of the château that had no windows; ordinarily, it would be an unlikely location for an office. But Arnaud’s chief concern was security, not views.

  The two men made the sort of final gestures that indicated they were finished talking, and fortunately they headed down the hall in the other direction. There was no need for Bryson and Layla to disappear.

  Withdrawing the fiber-optic periscope and collapsing it back into its pen case, he turned toward Layla and nodded. She understood without his saying anything. They had located their target, the locus of Jacques Arnaud’s business activities within the Château de Saint-Meurice.

  Swiftly, his tread silent, he backtracked until he found the open door to a room they had just passed. The sitting room was, as he had previously noted, dark and sparsely furnished, evidently rarely used. He consulted the luminous radium dial of his Patek Philippe watch. After a full minute had elapsed, he signaled to Layla, then ducked into the room, waiting in its dark recesses.

  Layla began weaving down the hall toward the room that had to be Arnaud’s private, secure office, staggering as if drunk. Suddenly she let out a whoop of laughter and said to herself, though loudly enough to be heard by at least the first guard, just around the corner, “There’s got to be a bathroom around here somewhere!”

  Turning the corner unstably, she came upon the armed guard, seated in a delicate antique chair. He straightened, stared at her with hostility. “Puis-je vous aider?” May I help you? he demanded stiffly in French, in a voice that commanded her to go no further. He was barely out of his twenties, with crew-cut black hair, heavy eyebrows, a pudgy, round face, and a five o’clock shadow. His small red mouth was turned down in a pugnacious frown.

  She giggled and continued to stagger toward him. “I don’t know,” she replied provocatively, “can you help me? Why, what do we have here? Un homme, un vrai — a real man. Not like those pédés, those young fairies and old goats out there.”

  The guard’s stern expression softened somewhat, his posture relaxed as he sized her up to be no threat to the security of Jacques Arnaud’s sanctum. His cheeks reddened visibly. There was no doubt he was quite taken with Layla’s voluptuous body, the swell of her breasts revealed by the low-cut black gown. “I’m sorry, mademoiselle,” he said nervously, “please, stay right there—you must go no further.”

  Layla smiled coyly, bracing herself against the stone wall with one outstretched hand. “But why would I want to go any further?” she said huskily, suggestively, as she inched closer to him. “Looks like I’ve found what I’ve been looking for.” She moved her hand along the wall, slinking ever closer to him, jutting her breasts forward.

  The young guard’s smile was uncomfortable. He cast a nervous glance down the hall at the other sentry, who seemed to be paying him no attention. “Please, mademoiselle—”

  She lowered her voice. “Maybe you can help me … to find a bathroom.”

  “Back down the hall you came,” he replied, attempting a businesslike tone, though without much success, “there is a restroom.”

  Her voice became even more breathy and suggestive. “But I keep losing my way around here, and if you wouldn’t mind showing me …”

  The guard again glanced uneasily at his compatriot, who was too far down the hall to take notice.

  “Perhaps,” she added, arching her brows, “a little guided tour. It needn’t take long at all, hmm?”

  Flush-faced and awkward, the guard rose from his chair. “Very well, mademoiselle,” he said.

  There were now, Layla calculated, several possible avenues the guard could pursue. If he happened to take her into the room in which Bryson was concealed, the guard would be taken down, the element of surprise a weapon as deadly as Nicholas Bryson’s hands.

  But the guard instead guided her into another room, this one a chambre de fumeur, comfortably furnished. He was, she noticed, quite unmistakably aroused. He gave a wolfish grin as he pulled the door closed.

  It was time to put Plan B into effect. She turned to him, her face full of anticipation.

  Silently, Bryson rushed into the hallway, turned the corner, and then slowed his pace, sauntering toward the sole remaining guard, who kept a solitary vigil before the closed steel-paneled door of Arnaud’s presumably empty office.

  Now it was Bryson’s turn to feign drunkenness, though to a very different end. The guard looked up as Bryson approached with a loose-limbed, swaying walk.

  “Monsieur,” the guard said brusquely, part greeting and part warning.

  As he sashayed closer to the guard, Bryson held up his gold Zippo lighter, shaking his head disgustedly. In English, he said, “The damnedest thing! Can you believe this? I remember my lighter, but it’s the damned cigarettes I forget!”

  “Sir?”

  In French, Bryson said, “Vous n’auriez pas une cigarette?” He kept waving the Zippo and shaking his head. “You’re a Frenchman—you must have one.”

  The guard obligingly reached into his jacket pocket at the same instant that Bryson flicked the Zippo’s striker, which jetted forward not a tongue of flame but a quick spray of a powerful neural incapacitant. Before the guard even had a chance to reach for his gun, he was at once blinded and frozen in place; a few seconds later he slumped forward, unconscious.

  Working quickly, Bryson propped the guard back on his chair like a mannequin, folding the man’s hands in his lap. The guard’s eyelids were closed, so Bryson, knowing from long experience that they could not be forced open, left him as he was. From a distance, one would assume the guard was on duty; a passerby who came near would assume the guard had fallen asleep.

  The incapacitating spray was not the only item of security equipment Bryson had purchased in Paris; he also had with him an array of other small devices, including infrared- and RF-code scanners and grabbers and a security-gate scanner. But a quick inspection of the steel door confirmed that only one piece was necessary. No doubt Arnaud employed the usual alarms and intrusion detectors when he planned to be gone from his home for any lengthy period of time. This evening, however, having just stopped into his office and perhaps intending to return again within the next few hours, he had simply allowed the door to close behind him. Although the door locked automatically, it was by means of nothing more elaborate than a conventional pin-tumbler door lock. Bryson took out a small black device, a lock-pick gun that he had learned to use over the years and had found far speedier than a manual lock-pick set. He inserted it into the lock, then pulled the plunger back and forth a few times until the tumblers turned and the heavy door popped open.

  Shining his small pen flashlight around the dark room, he was taken aback at how spare it was. There appeared to be no file cabinets, no locked credenza. In fact, the office had a barrackslike spareness. There was a small seating area with a couch, two chairs, and a coffee table, and a completely bare mahogany table used as a desk. On the desk were a Tensor lamp and two telephones … .

  The phone.

  The phone in question was there, a flat, charcoal-gray box about a foot square, apparently nothing more than a desk telephone with a lid. But Bryson recognized it at once. He had seen countless models, though few as sleek and compact: the latest generation of satellite encryption phone. The lid contained both the antenna and the RF. Built into the device was a chip containing the encryption algorithm, which used nonlinear-phase signal encryption, fixed-length convolver, unlimited 128-bit keys. Wiretapping the line would do no good, since the encryption key was never transmitted. An intercepted call would sound like garbled nonsense, the voices both highly encrypted and scrambled. The phone’s satellite uplink capacity meant that it could work even from remote corners of the earth.

  Bryson worked quickly, deftly dismantling the telephone. The door was locked behind him, and the guard would be out for at least half an hour, but there was a definite risk that Jacques Arnaud would return suddenly. If he did, and found one guard missing and the other passed out, he might simply attribute the wayward behavior to the party’s carnival atmosphere, which had somehow infected his household staff. Of course, that was only if Layla had managed to keep the lustful young guard occupied. Somehow Bryson did not doubt her ability to do so.

  There was nothing more he could do now than work as swiftly as he could.

  Spread out before him on the burnished, bare surface of Arnaud’s desk were the electronic guts of the telephone. Unseating the special read-only chip from the circuitry, he held it up, examining it in the strong light of the Tensor lamp.

  It was precisely what he had hoped to find. The cryptochip was relatively bulky, as such proprietary chips typically were, having been produced in very small quantities to link a small cadre of conspirators while ensuring zero-knowledge encryption. The mere fact that Arnaud had such a piece of equipment sitting on his desk revealed that he was part of a tightly linked group, international in scope, that required absolute secrecy. Could he in fact be one of the hidden principals of the Directorate?

  Bryson removed from his dinner jacket an object that looked like a miniature transistor radio. In the coin-size slot at one end he inserted the cryptochip, then switched the device on. An indicator light changed from green to red and then, some ten seconds later, back to green again. A signal had pulsed through the chip, capturing the data. He listened for any voices in the hallway or approaching footsteps; then, satisfied there were none, he ejected the cryptochip and replaced it in the satellite phone’s circuitry. In a few minutes he had the phone reassembled. In the chip reader he now had stored all the specifications of the chip’s “key,” vast sequences of binary digits and algorithmic instructions. The encryption scheme changed each time the phone was used, never once repeating itself. It was a high-tech version of a self-replenishing one-time pad. Fortunately, he now had every single combination recorded. Making use of this information was a daunting task, but there were others who specialized in this highly specialized area.

  Moments later Bryson was striding down the hall back toward the party. The guard in the corridor by the office door, he took note, was still out. When he came to, in ten minutes, he would quickly recall what had happened to him, but the odds were great he would do nothing, summon no help, for to reveal that he had been overpowered by one man was surely to ask for abrupt termination.

  In the chambre de fumeur, the young guard stood with his trousers gathered around his feet, his shirt unbuttoned and hanging open, as he prepared for final gratification. Layla stroked his bare abdomen, kissing his neck. She had protracted things for just about as long as she plausibly could. Glancing at the sweep second hand of her tiny gold wristwatch, she took mental note of the time. According to their plan, it was just about time that …

  A scuff on the stone floor outside.

  Bryson’s prearranged signal. He was precisely on schedule.

  She stooped to grab her small black velvet evening bag, then gave the guard a quick, friendly peck on the check. “Allons,” she said crisply, rushing to the door. The guard gaped at her, his face flushed crimson, eyes half-maddened with desire. “Les plus grands plaisirs sont ceux qui ne sont pas realisés,” she whispered as she glided out of the room. The highest pleasures are the unrealized ones. Just before she shut the door, she said, “But I will never forget you, my friend.”

  Layla’s purse was heavier than it had been previously: it now contained his snub-nosed Beretta. She knew that the guard, however angry and frustrated he might be, would never say a word about her, for to do so would be to confess to an unforgivable security lapse. She checked her makeup in a compact mirror, reapplied her lip gloss, and then returned to the party, entering through the banquet room. Bryson, she saw, was himself just arriving.

  A small string ensemble was playing chamber music in the banquet room, while coming quite audibly from the adjoining parlor were the thumping beat and blaring synthesizer sounds of rock music. The two sounds clashed bizarrely, the elegant strains of Mozart’s eighteenth-century music easily overwhelmed by the jarring, earsplitting cacophony of the twenty-first.

  Bryson placed an arm around Layla’s slender waist and said to her quietly, “I hope you enjoyed yourself.”

  “Very funny,” she murmured. “I’d much rather have traded places with you. Mission accomplished?”

  As Bryson was about to reply, he noticed the balding head of Jacques Arnaud in a distant corner of the room. He seemed to be conferring with another man in a dinner jacket whose earpiece indicated that he was part of Arnaud’s security team. Arnaud nodded, looking around the room. Then another man rushed up to the two, his gestures and facial expressions revealing great urgency. There was a brief, huddled consultation; then Bryson saw Arnaud’s gaze flicker in his direction. Suspicions had been aroused, security breaches reported, a warning sounded. Bryson had little doubt that Arnaud was looking directly at him, and wondered whether the Frenchman had been tipped off by surveillance cameras in the vicinity of his office. Bryson knew there would be cameras. But everything at this point was calculated risk. In fact, to do nothing was the gravest risk of all.

  The answer came a second or two later, when the two security men Arnaud had been huddling with suddenly broke away and began threading their way through the crowd, each taking a different path around the room toward Bryson and Layla. In their single-minded haste, the guards collided with several guests. Then a third raced into the room, and it became immediately evident what they were doing: all three exits from the room were now covered, and Bryson and Layla could not escape.

  Closed-circuit surveillance cameras had indeed captured their movements through the halls of the château outside of the party. Bryson’s surreptitious entry into Jacques Arnaud’s office had been observed; or perhaps, given the delay in response time, only his exit from the office had been seen.