Page 109 of Under Her Protection

She had, she registered, work to do.

She needed to find Lara Kossek and put this thing to bed finally. Avery was at the residence. Avery was good. Avery would be far more objective than Leo had been lately.

The piece of work that Leo could still do, from a desk in a flat on the rue Oberkampf, was the piece of work that did not require her to be in any room with Vivienne Strauss for a fortnight.

She opened the Blackthorn workspace.

She pulled the Lara Kossek file. She pulled the Avery notes from the seventh and the eighth. She pulled the Morel file and the Petit file and the Bertrand file and the rue Saint-Lambert file and the boot-mark photograph from the fifteenth-arrondissement window-sill and the laptop-wipe timestamp and the Fontainebleau farmhouse intel and the D607 traffic-camera pulls and she put all of it on her own screen.

She got to work.

Her hands, on the keys, did not shake.

She worked.

She worked until lunchtime and she did not have lunch. She worked through the rest of Thursday afternoon.

She worked through Friday. She had soup at the Vietnamese place at the end of the rue Oberkampf.

She heard nothing from Vivienne, but then she hadn’t expected to. She knew what she was to Vivienne.

She worked through Saturday morning and most of Saturday afternoon, and by Saturday afternoon she thought she had found her.

She had found Lara Kossek.

She had her in a serviced flat on the rue Bichat in the tenth arrondissement, three rooms over a wine bar, paid for in a name on a Maltese passport which was on a leasehold attached to an office which was on a sublease attached to an YLV Advisory Zurich shell. She had her on a CCTV pull of the rue Bichat from Wednesday evening (a tall woman, dark blonde hair loose under a black wool cap, walking from the corner of the rue de la Grange aux Belles to the staff door of the wine bar at nine forty-one). She had two bank wires in the Maltese name to a private security contractor who had, on the seventh of December, supplied two men to a private address in the fifteenth arrondissement and on the eighth had supplied the same two men to an address in the tenth. She had a text exchange between Morel (still at the Fontainebleau farmhouse) and a number on the rue Bichat about a "weekend window."

She put the file together.

She put it together in the way the prosecutor's office at the avenue de Ségur expected files put together, because Avery had taught her four years ago what those files looked like and Leo, being Leo, had remembered. She made a paper copy. She made a digital copy and put it on a sealed drive. She sealed the drive in an envelope. She put the envelope in the inside pocket of the field jacket.

She put a fresh coffee on. She drank half of it standing at the counter. The other half went cold on the desk while she read the file through one final time, which was what she did with files she was about to put in front of an officer of the Republic, because Avery had taught her that too.

She telephoned the duty number for special ops at the brigade criminelle at five oh six on Saturday afternoon.

"Cole. Blackthorn."

"Mademoiselle."

"I have an evidence file on the Kossek matter. I would like to deliver it tonight."

The officer on the line confirmed she could deliver it.

She hung up.

She showered.

She put on the fitted charcoal suit she wore for Maison Noire and the white cotton shirt she wore under it and the shoulder rig, and she put the field jacket over the suit because the field jacket was the one piece of her wardrobe she could disappear inside, and she put the envelope in the inside pocket of the field jacket.

The Métro smelled of brake dust and damp wool.

She gave her name at the desk. She was taken up to a small grey room on the third floor with two grey chairs and a table and a man named Chevalier who was, by the cuff of his shirt and the weight of his eyes, the prosecutor on Vivienne's matter, and a woman named Barré, who took the file, and the drive, and a brief affidavit Leo gave them, dated Saturday the eleventh of December, six fifteen p.m., and signed.

They went through it.

They went through it for forty minutes. They asked her questions. The questions were good. Chevalier asked her about chain of custody. Barré asked her about the Fontainebleau intel. Leo answered as Leo answered things, which was to say, in short sentences and only what she had.

At seven oh four Chevalier leaned back in the grey chair.