Chapter 343: Swap Meet

Damien took the phone from her hand.

He spread the photo with two fingers and studied the edge of the frame, where the rocks blurred into dark water. Then he turned the screen toward the man at the head of the table.

"Where were our boats at one?"

"Past the breakwater, sir. Both of them."

"And this one?"

The man looked at the screen and kept his mouth shut.

"Five hours," Damien said. "Inside our line."

His voice stayed level. The dining room went quiet around it anyway. Two of the men at the laptops stopped typing.

He handed Aria back her phone and gave the man a few clipped words in French. The man went out through the terrace doors at a run, and two more followed him down the steps to the road.

Aria watched the white boat round the point and disappear.

’She had all afternoon,’ she thought.

Jade was on her feet beside the sofa. "She said nobody else."

Aria turned the phone around so Jade could read the last line.

Jade turned to Damien. "And you’re letting her walk in there?"

Damien lifted Aria’s coat off the back of her chair and held it open.

Aria slid her arms in. He turned her around by the lapels and did up the buttons himself, bottom to top, his knuckles brushing her.

At the last one, he kissed her, briefly.

Aria put her hand in her pocket and closed it around the rusted key. Then she took it out and crossed to Jade.

"Hold out your hand."

Jade held it out. Aria set the key in her palm and folded her fingers over it.

Jade stared at her fist. "Why me?"

"Because you’re not going down there. If tonight goes wrong, you take it to Séverine. Nobody else touches it."

"I’m coming with you."

"You’re coming as far as the gate." Aria kept hold of her fist. "Then you wait in the car for him."

Jade pressed her lips together. She shoved the key deep into the front pocket of her jeans and nodded.

***

Two of Damien’s men brought Rémy up from the garage at twenty past six.

He was still in the grey tracksuit. He had pushed the sunglasses up into his hair, and his eyes were red-rimmed. He looked younger, and exhausted. He had been on water since nine.

He saw the red box in Aria’s hands, and his eyebrows went up.

"That’s it?" he said. "The famous Key?"

"Ask your mother," Aria said.

Rémy laughed, then winced and put a hand to his stomach.

The car was a black Mercedes with tinted glass. Rémy rode up front beside the driver, his cuffed wrist locked to the grab handle over the door. Aria and Damien sat in the back with the box on her knees. Jade followed in the second car with two of Damien’s men.

They came down off the cliffs as the sun went. The Corniche ran along the water, and then the Old Port opened up, its masts packed tight, its café terraces filling for the evening. Past it the road climbed and dropped again, and the city turned grey and industrial: ferry terminals, chain-link fence, cranes standing against a sky gone the color of a bruise. A cathedral with striped stone domes sat on the hill above the docks.

Damien’s phone lit up every few minutes. He read each message and set the phone face-down on the seat.

Aria watched the cranes slide by.

Damien took her left hand off the box. He turned it over and kissed the inside of her wrist, where her pulse was running fast, then laid her hand on his thigh and covered it with his own.

In the front seat, Rémy was watching them in the rearview mirror.

"Charmant," he said.

Damien raised his eyes to the mirror. Rémy faced the windshield.

A minute later, he spoke again, to the glass. "Ma mère ne viendra pas."

"He says his mother won’t come," Damien said.

"Then who does?"

Rémy shrugged his free shoulder. "The ones who work for her. They don’t even know her name."

Aria leaned forward. "You know it."

Rémy found her eyes in the mirror and smiled.

"Moi, je l’appelle maman."

(Me, I call her Mom.)

***

The gate to the north basin stood open. The barrier arm was raised, and the guard booth beside it was dark.

The second car pulled over short of the gate. In the side mirror, Aria saw Jade’s face pressed to its window.

Their driver got out and walked back to it. Damien slid behind the wheel.

He drove them in past stacked containers and a dry dock with a ship in it, rust streaking its hull, scaffolding up one side. After that came a row of empty docks. He stopped at the fourth.

Damien got out first. He came around and opened her door.

Dry dock 4 was a stone trench cut deep into the quay, long enough to hold a freighter, and drained. At the seaward end, a steel gate held back the harbor. Stone steps zigzagged down the near wall in flights. A line of timber blocks ran down the center of the floor, black with damp, and the floor shone with standing water.

One work lamp burned at the bottom, on a pole beside the last block. Everything else was dark.

Damien unlocked Rémy’s cuff from the grab handle, hauled him out by the collar of his tracksuit, and walked him to the edge.

On a bollard at the top of the steps, a cheap phone lit up and began to ring.

Aria picked it up and put it on speaker.

"You found it," Valérie said. "Good girl."

Aria’s grip tightened on the box. "Where’s Leo?"

"Close. Monsieur Sinclair, you will stay where you are with my son, where my people can see you both. Aria, you will carry the Key down to the light. Slowly, please. The steps are wet."

Aria looked at Damien.

His jaw was tight. He moved Rémy to the lip of the quay, into the open, where anyone watching from the dark could see them both. His free hand went inside his coat and stayed there.

"I’m watching every step," he said.

Aria went down.

The first flight was slick with moss. She kept one hand on the iron rail and the box pressed against her ribs. With each turn of the steps, the lamp’s white circle grew. Water dripped somewhere behind the steel gate.

On the third flight, she could see the floor.

Someone sat on the last timber block, under the lamp, with a black cloth bag over his head and his bound wrists in his lap.

A hand came out of the dark beyond the light and pulled the bag off.

Leo blinked into the glare. His left eye was swollen shut. With the other one, he found her on the stairs.