“That’s fine. He said he’d be willing to come to Paris if you want. He’s been hearing vague rumors from informants in the Russian underworld that the original kidnappers want to come back to collect the other fifty million. That means you’ll have to watch Mrs. Pasquier like a hawk. These people will stop at nothing.”

“We will be watching her closely from now on, even more closely than we have been. We want to catch them this time, once and for all,” Guy said, angry at what had just happened to her.

“Yeah. Me too. What are you going to do about de Vaumont?” Mike was anxious to know.

“I think we’ll bring him in for a little visit. We’ll tell him how concerned we are about him, that he may have come in contact with it too during his brief visit, and we want to test him, for his own sake, to make sure he wasn’t exposed. We’ll see if we find traces, but he may be knowledgeable about how to handle it. It’s a long-lasting agent, so we may find traces. I’m sure he threw away the gloves.”

“What a sonofabitch,” Mike said in a fury.

“You were right,” Guy admitted. “He’s worse than I thought, and not as small-time as I believed he was. Or maybe his friends are teaching him new tricks. He bears watching, very closely. Apparently he’s willing to do anything for a price. Who knows, he may have supplied information to the kidnappers a year ago. Maybe he talked to a gardener or a maid to learn their habits. Anything is possible. If he did, we’ll find out eventually, even if it takes time. Someone always talks.”

“I hope so,” Mike said, shaken by the experience of the day. He thanked Guy for his rapid action, and the very efficient agent he had assigned to Theo, who had moved quickly and effectively to get her medical help.

He called Robert after that and thanked him too.

“De Vaumont is a rotten piece of work. I didn’t think so at first. I thought he was a lightweight,” Robert said apologetically. “I question that now.”

“We all did, but I had a bad feeling about him,” Mike said. “I think now that he’s worse than we believed. A lot worse. He’ll stop at nothing to cash in on any situation. I wonder what they paid him to poison Theo today, or maybe it was his idea to speed along the sale of the château. Pretty heavy-handed.”

“Thank God it was a small dose of a less lethal substance. We deal with these things all the time. If it’s bad enough, they don’t recover. They die within a few months because nothing can reverse the damage. I hope she’ll be all right,” Robert said.