With everything that was in her, she would stop that process, but she was going to need help. Lopez had gone too far, done too much; she was out of her depth.
Cesar’s hand closed on her wrist. She wrenched free.
Something cold and feral flashed in his gaze, and Esther fought down another surge of panic. It was tempting to ignore Cesar, but she couldn’t forget that he had made this deal. He had climbed into bed with the Chavez cartel, and if anything was precious to Cesar, it had always been his own skin. His quick instincts and visceral reactions had made for good business decisions, but right now she was in almost as much danger from him as she was from Lopez.
She clenched her jaw as she rubbed at her wrist, the words she wanted to spit locked at the back of her throat. She would stop this madness, and if she had to lie through her teeth to do it, then that was what she would do. “Don’t worry, I’m not going to do anything. I can’t, it’s too late.”
“Okay.” Some of the feral tension abated. He let out a breath, dug in his pocket and handed her a white linen handkerchief. “I know it doesn’t look good. It’s not what I planned, but I’m handling it.” He turned away. “If I hadn’t signed with Lopez, we would have been out on the street within a week.”
Esther blotted blood from her mouth as he shuffled papers and slipped them back into the manila folder.
Fool. Lopez was the one who had put them there.
Four
Esther locked the door of her office and crossed the room, blind to the morning sun flooding through the French doors and gleaming off the rich hardwood floors. Cesar had finally left for work, an hour later than he usually did, and Tomas had just pulled out of the drive with Rina in the passenger seat. Esther had asked Tomas to take Rina to school on the pretext that she was feeling unwell after slipping on the steps of the pool, the piece of fiction Cesar had devised to explain her split lip and bruised jaw. She had iced her jaw before going to bed, and a few minutes spent applying makeup this morning had hidden most of the damage.
Bending, she opened the doors of an exquisite Louis XV bureau. Reaching inside, she pressed on a section of paneling and a secret drawer at the side of the bureau slid open.
The address book in the drawer wasn’t secret—Cesar knew about it—but it was sensitive and entirely her business. With the media’s interest in Cesar, and now her, it was expedient for the stability of their business that certain details of her past were never revealed to the press, and one relationship in particular.
The book in hand, she walked to the French doors and stared in the direction of the garage, which was partially hidden from her view by a screen of shrubs and palms. Cesar had said he would be out all day, but she didn’t trust that he wouldn’t turn up unexpectedly to check on her.
The previous evening she had convinced him that she was prepared to go along with his partnership with Lopez. By the time she had gone to bed they had reached a fragile accord, but she had no illusions that would last. Cesar had promised to give her breathing space to allow her to “adjust.” The offer had made her skin crawl and she had finally given in to the fact that Cesar was no longer operating in a normal way.
Despite his formidable business talents, Cesar couldn’t work out an equation that to Esther was obvious. She and Lopez existed on different sides of a very stark line; it was a truth that had been acknowledged on a subtle level the first time they had met and that had been reinforced at her dinner table. Lopez could control Cesar—to the extent that he had entrusted him with the bank transfer—but if he didn’t know it already, he would soon know from his research into her background that he would never be able to control her. The second Lopez knew she had unmasked him, it was game over. By her calculations she had bought herself a day, maybe two, three at the most.
When she was satisfied that Cesar had gone, she took a seat behind her desk and flipped through the address book until she found the entry she wanted. It wasn’t the telephone number she was searching for, it was the small color snapshot that slid out from between the pages. Heart pounding at the step she was about to take, she studied the lean, tanned features of a man she had once known very well. As it had turned out, far better than she had ever known Cesar.
Xavier le Clerc was an intellectual, a frighteningly clever man who would have been at the very top of his field in international banking…if he had chosen to stay within the bounds of the law. When he had transgressed more than a decade ago, he hadn’t done it by half measures. A skilled trader of stocks and shares, in a two-pronged assault he had engineered the financial collapse of the Swiss bank that had employed him—a bank he claimed had, in connivance with a former banker and SS officer, illegally transferred money out of the accounts of Jews who had been sent to the death camps.
Hours after the financial disaster had hit the front pages of European newspapers, it had been discovered that an inordinate proportion of the cash and art treasures stored in the bank’s vaults by alleged Nazi war criminals had also been stolen.
Xavier’s actions had caused a furore. A Jew himself, he had been labeled a thief extraordinaire, a Nazi hunter and a revolutionist. Despite the magnitude of what he had done, his crimes had been almost universally applauded, his sense of justice viewed as biblical. Not exactly an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, but close enough.
Esther had dated him a few times when she’d worked in Bern. The hours she had spent with Xavier had been challenging and addictive. She had come close to falling in love with him, but when his name had appeared on her list of people to investigate, she had immediately cut all ties. Shortly after the scandal had erupted, her contract had finished and she had returned to the States.
She didn’t know where Xavier lived now. He had gone to ground years ago and, to her knowledge, had never surfaced, but she could still remember the address of his sister in Bern.
Sliding the snapshot back into the address book, she put a call through to the number, not expecting to connect with Eva le Clerc after all these years. When the woman who answered the call confirmed in French that she was Xavier’s sister, Esther’s stomach contracted. It was the point of no return.
Despite the fact that Eva remembered her, she was abrupt and dismissive. “You’re wasting your time. I don’t know where he is. No one does.”
Esther stopped her before she could hang up. “Just tell him I need to talk to him. Urgently.”
There was a bleak silence. “He won’t call you.”
“Just tell him. Please.”
It was close to three-thirty in the afternoon when the phone finally rang. Tomas, who was picking Rina up from school, was due to arrive home any second. Esther picked up the receiver. A premonition prickled along her spine as she waited for the caller to speak.
The voice was male, the French rapid. “A qui appartient l’argent que nous allons valer?”
Whose money are we stealing?
That was Xavier, sharp as a tack. Cut to the chase with no preliminaries. He had always been too clever for everyone, including her. It had taken her hours of frantic thought and discarded plans before she had finally arrived at that particular option: get Rina to safety, steal Lopez’s money, then go to the police. That way she would cut Lopez off at the knees, and she would have the money as a bargaining chip if anything went wrong. She had tossed up going to the police straight off, but if she did that Lopez would have time to get away, and she couldn’t discount the fact that he could have law-enforcement people on his payroll. “You don’t have to know who we’re stealing from yet.”
“I’ll find out.”
That was true enough. Once the process was initiated, Xavier would be in control and she would merely be a passenger. The thought made her mouth go dry and her heart pump so hard that for a moment she couldn’t breathe. Xavier would have her cold. He could steal the money himself or expose her.
Either way,