The Kashmir Trap (25 page)

M
ax
grabbed Juliette by the wrist and dragged her out and down the hallway. Still no one around. They took the stairs at the end of the corridor as more sirens sounded. In a few moments, the place would be crawling with cops, and they had to get out right away. They raced down the steps to the laundry in the basement. They found a fire exit across the room next to a soft-drink machine and exited into the alley. From there they saw a cop car racing down Sherbooke Street with lights flashing and siren blaring at full volume. They ran in the other direction, went in the service door of an Italian restaurant, and came out on Maisonneuve, where they blended in with passersby. More sirens and flashing lights, and they ducked into the Metro.

Juliette saw Max's silhouette reflected in the window while the train rushed on to
who-knew
-where.

Dennis Patterson, dead.

Plus what she'd found and didn't dare tell him … Pascale.

She bit her lips. Then Max turned to her.

“We didn't finish searching. That means the killers easily found what they wanted. Then pushed Patterson over the edge. Why take the risk of being seen by the neighbours?”

There was no way of knowing.

“Or else they didn't find anything, because Patterson wouldn't let them in and tried to escape via the balcony.”

“So he slipped?” asked Juliette.

“They searched the place, but fast and not well. Someone could see the body at any time.”

“There's nothing implicating us,” said Juliette.

“Except the surveillance cameras,” said Max. He closed his eyes. So they'd been seen going in. All anyone had to do was call the cops, so maybe it was a trap?

Something Jayesh said came back to him:
“So we aren't a threat to them anymore.”

“Not at all.”

“And that's why no one's been coming after us.”

Right, for once
, thought Max. They must be near their goal, closing in on the guilty parties in a tightening spiral.

“Suppose David had not risked transferring what he found in Zaheer's apartment via the conference after all? What if he'd taken the ‘school-bus route,' the long way around? Maybe Patterson was just too obvious a choice. So, what about someone else, say, Béatrice?”

“She was in Delhi, so she couldn't collect it,” answered Juliette.

“Collect it, no, but transport it, maybe.”

“Béatrice? A courier? No, she'd never go for that.”

“Maybe she didn't even realize it.”

David's mother, standing in the living room of her Rockhill apartment, was all the more scared of Max's determination than his mere presence here with Juliette as his “hostage.” She gripped her pistol firmly, though, the one she usually kept in her glovebox and was as easy to use as a tube of lipstick.

“The radio says the police are looking for you, so don't waste your time telling me they're on the wrong trail.”

Max turned to Juliette, who confirmed that he had nothing to do with Patterson's death.

Béatrice slid her other hand into the pocket of her bathrobe without taking her eyes off Max or cancelling her threat.

“Honestly, what on earth have you been telling her? You are so pathetic, you really are.”

A cellphone. With her thumb, she was already dialling a number: Roberge, Juliette guessed. She tried to intervene, but was too late. Max sent the pistol flying onto the glass-topped coffee table and grabbed the phone before she could finish, while Juliette picked up the gun. Now, Béatrice really did look worried.

“Don't you want to find out what happened to David and catch the guys who did it? Is that why you turned me in to Roberge?”

“Stop this circus right now, and quit implicating Juliette in your fantasy. She's got nothing to gain. Nothing at all.”

“Except the truth,” Max said, staring at her.

“The Canadian government's more concerned about its reputation overseas and its commitments in the region than by the investigation into the murder of a diplomat. The Department is just letting the Indians mess around anyway they like, and will swallow anything, no questions asked.”

“And what's your version?”

“David was no random victim!” yelled Juliette. “He was hand-picked.”

This bewildered Béatrice.

“Juliette's right. The Indians just play the Islamists and Hinduists off against one another to cloud the issue: the imam Khankashi — so-called defender of the Islamists — as well as Sri Bhargava and his inevitable Durgas, not to mention Doval Shacteree, the radical communist who can't hold up under torture. The official version is just gossip, no more than that.”

“David never even went to Kathmandu,” said Juliette.

“Srinagar, actually,” added Max, “following the trail of a journalist, Ahmed Zaheer, who's just died in Niagara Falls. He'd gone there in secret, because he was interested in a Canadian company, Stewart-Cooper International, who were in charge of a hydroelectric project in Rashidabad, Kashmir.”

“A deal with the devil to keep the place running smoothly, a deal David wanted to expose.”

“When he got back to Delhi, he confided in Khankashi that he was determined to change things.”

Béatrice closed her eyes.

“What the hell was going on those last days before the attack?” Max asked. “I want you to tell me all … in detail, and don't leave out a thing, even if you think it doesn't matter. Do you hear me?”

Béatrice had seen David a few times, but rarely out of Juliette's company. “With all that shopping, I hardly ever …”

“Were you staying in the house?”

“The guest room in the back,” Juliette said.

Béatrice had several suitcases, but she packed every one herself.

“Was David anywhere around?”

“No, and they were never out of my sight all the way to the airport. The same thing happened the second time.”

“Second time?”

“I was supposed to leave on the tenth, but one evening David asked me to stay with Juliette a few more days.” She turned to the young woman. “He thought you looked tired, and he blamed himself for being away so much.”

Extend her visit in Delhi? Max looked at Juliette, who shrugged. This was news to her.

“There were problems with this. Air France refused to move the reservation to May 13 with the special rate. David fought with them and lost.”

Max got it now. He jumped on the phone and got the number he wanted from 411, then dialled it. There was voicemail and endless transfers, then a young woman's melodious voice: “Air France. Customer Service.”

“This is Claude Ferron, Transit Travel. Listen, I have a customer whose refund was refused for a Delhi-to- Montreal flight on …”

“May 10,” Béatrice repeated.

He gave the young woman Béatrice's name and heard her typing on her keyboard.

“What's going on, Max?” Juliette asked, but he ignored her.

“I'm not sure I understand. Everything here seems normal,” said the lady.

“Normal?”

“Yes, indeed, Mrs. O'Brien travelled with us.”

“What about the thirteenth?”

“Yes. She travelled with us twice.”

“You're sure?”

“Yes, absolutely.”

He put down the phone, as Béatrice and Juliette stared in fascination, but Max had no time to explain.

“I need your car,” he told Béatrice.

On Décarie Boulevard, he started speeding. This was the best way to get noticed, but all sorts of things were rushing through his head. He knew he needed to take care and blend in with the suburbanites, especially right now, but now he'd figured out
what
, he needed to find out
who
. Next to him sat Juliette, who'd been silent since they left Béatrice's place. As they turned onto Côte de Liesse Road, he looked at her.

“That piece of evidence. We always thought it was an object, some document, but it was a person.”

“What?”

“Yes, an individual, and this was someone whom David went to fetch from Zaheer's place in Srinagar. He went by train and by bus and brought that person back to Delhi the same way in time to take Béatrice's place on the plane. To Montreal.”

Juliette stared at him in stupefaction.

“All he had to do was get Béatrice to delay her departure and pretend Air France had agreed unexpectedly to transfer her trip to the later date. David just bought another ticket, and Béatrice was none the wiser. So, on May tenth, someone travelled in her place.”

“And it had to be a woman.”

“With a fake passport, which could easily be set up at the High Commission. Say, another tourist had lost her papers, for instance.” Max smiled. So David was a bit of a crook himself … all for a good cause.

“So this Madame X is in Montreal,” replied Juliette.

“Patterson met her at Dorval Airport, to take her into hiding till David got there.”

That's what they phoned each other about when he got back from Srinagar. Then the bombing changed everything, and with David in a coma, all Patterson could do was wait for him to recover and try not to attract attention. Max's, for instance.

“But why insist on hiding her himself? He could have got her police protection.”

Max had no answer to that.

“His killers thought, like us, that they were looking for a document or some object. First, they tried to make David talk, but it didn't work. Then they wanted to question Patterson, but he tried to escape and died. They searched his place from top to bottom for nothing.”

So, “living proof,” a helpless woman who dared not show her face, suspicious and terrified by everyone and everything. Who was she, and where was she? What was it about her that made her so dangerous to those tracking her?

Max parked in the short-term lot at the airport and, before getting out, cast a look around: the usual travellers with wheeled suitcases and today's paper under their arms. The police would certainly be on patrol, especially on the departures floor. Max had no intention of taking flight, though. Exactly the opposite. He took Juliette across the lot to the ground floor, where friends and family gathered to welcome their loved ones home. Without drawing attention to himself, he opened a door marked for authorized personnel only and found himself in a neon-lit corridor. Some men were chatting by a coffee machine. An unwatched TV showed a report on the discovery of Patterson's body behind his building. Interview with Detective Sergeant Bruno Mancini of the Criminal Investigation Branch at the QPF, who was in charge of the inquest. Max was afraid they might mention his name or show his photo, but no, there was nothing. They went down yet another corridor, and Max knew where he was. Same office at the end of the hall.

Totally unperturbed, Antoine turned to him and said, “You want to close the door behind you?”

The crowd was stepping fast and jerky, like an old silent movie at the wrong speed. On the tape, Juliette recognized the arrivals area they'd been in only moments before. Some Indians were waiting for a cousin or a
brother-in
-law. Mothers and fathers awaited their kids returning from a trip to France or a long voyage to Nepal or Thailand. On the first screen, automatic doors opened and closed to passengers with their baggage carts. A second showed those waiting for them, some with a sign with the passenger's name on it, The third panned over the space between the passengers' exit and the main doors. If Patterson had come to meet David's unknown person, as Max thought, camera two would most likely give them what they wanted.

Max had been looking from one screen to another for half an hour, trying to identify the former diplomat. Antoine, off to one side, leaned into his console, silent as always. Juliette watched, wondering if he knew what she'd found going through Patterson's files.

His sister, Pascale, was alive.

She asked Antoine to pass her the phone book from the shelf, and she leafed through it, looking for an address, when suddenly on the third monitor, appeared a familiar silhouette, and Max ordered Antoine to switch to normal speed. There was Patterson threading through the crowd. He'd traded his jacket for leather and his normal dress shirt for a T-shirt. Then he disappeared and reappeared to face the second camera. He was in the middle of a group of Sikhs gathered at the cordon separating them from the glass doors. Patterson looked at his watch, then at the people around him.

Antoine, never losing sight of the screen, said, “This guy's the one I told you about, the one I saw at her place when you were in prison.”

Max whipped around. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“That picture on TV just now, he's older, but it's the same guy.”

This was the mysterious stranger who'd taken Pascale to Europe and kept her incommunicado all those years, the one who'd observed her cremation at Varanasi from on high and then fled, the one he and Antoine had tried to find all over the city afterward to no avail.

What was Dennis Patterson doing at Pascale's cremation? What did she have to do with all this, the second anchor point in his two universes after IndiaCare and Sister Irène's abandoned girls?

Max retreated into his own thoughts, nose to the screen. Patterson, incognito, waiting in the crowd, Juliette off to one side, undecided.
Now
, she told herself,
There's no
good
time, so now might as well be it.

“Max …”

But he was worked up about something. On the screen, Patterson had raised his hand, waving to someone. He went around two people standing next to the cordon, and there, approaching, was a passenger who'd just gone through customs. The person was temporarily hidden behind baggage on the cart. Max glanced at the left-hand monitor. No way to see who it was. Then Patterson himself was in the way, but when he grasped the bar to push the cart, he shifted to the right, and there was a young woman, wearing a
salwar
, turning her back to the camera as they both drifted into the centre of the crowd and off screen. They reappeared on the third monitor, albeit later on, and the young woman briefly moved her head till she was facing the camera.