“Get us a translator,” the agent in charge said harshly. “I want to know where the others are going.” They hadn’t loaded anything on the truck yet, so nothing had been stolen. Theo realized then that she had heard the foreman’s accent but hadn’t made the connection that these men were the same nationality as the original kidnappers, and possibly the same ones. She had been too overwhelmed by memories of Axel and Matthieu to pay close attention to them.

It was all a blur of activity after that. A forensics team arrived to collect fingerprints and samples of DNA to see if there was a match with Matthieu and Axel’s kidnappers. Theo remained in the kitchen, and various people came to talk to her, including a female police sergeant and the senior DGSE agent. Franck helped her clean off some of the blood and brought her a clean sweater from one of her suitcases, her jeans were soaked through with blood and her shoes were covered with it, but all of her clothes were packed.

Somewhere in the melee, Guy Thomas appeared and was very kind to her. She told him everything she had observed. She said that they hadn’t worn gloves while handling the art, and he assured her they would get fingerprints from the frames, and the police uncrated everything they’d packed while the forensics team went to work.

The DGSE marksman assigned to her had saved her life. But there were still three of the kidnappers at large, one of them possibly badly injured.

“We’ll find them. We want to know if they’re the same men who kidnapped your husband and son,” he said, and she nodded. Guy had already advised Robert Richmond about what had happened. The British police and MI6 would be looking for them and for any information they could get from their informants all the way to Moscow.

Guy told her she could go home, and they would be in touch with her. He was going to provide four agents to protect her, until the remaining three kidnappers were caught, however long that took. As her own men drove her away, Guy called Mike Andrews in New York. It was three o’clock in Paris by then, nine a.m. in New York, and Mike had just gotten to his office and had his hands full with his own serious cases at the moment. The natives were restless these days, particularly in the drug world. They were waiting for a shipment to hit New York, via Bolivia, and Mike was determined to stop the activities of a particularly bad gang of Colombians he’d been trying to catch for two years.

Guy told him what had happened and Mike was worried sick as he listened, but grateful too. “Thank God for your guy at the scene. Do you think it’s the same group?”