Mike finally got him back on the subject that interested him, the Pasquier case, and Guy confirmed that they had no new information, and were hearing nothing about it from their intelligence sources in Russia.

“She won’t be safe until you catch them, you know,” Mike said seriously, and Guy looked at him mournfully.

“She will never be safe,” he said. “She has too much money, she’s too successful, and she’s too well known. People are jealous, they want to hurt people like her and her late husband. They hurt her in the worst possible way they could when they killed her boy. They had to be heartless bastards to kill a thirteen-year-old child. They want what she has. They can’t earn it, they’ll never have it, so they want to take it however they can. There will always be someone willing to take the chance and go after her. She will have to be careful forever.” Mike didn’t disagree with him, but what he described was a terrible life sentence for Theo, and Mike’s heart ached for her. At least the last set of criminals who had tried needed to be found. Guy Thomas made it seem hopeless, and he obviously felt it was.

“You’ll keep me informed?” Mike asked him before he left, after three hours in Thomas’s small, cluttered, airless office. He had been impressed with Mike, and liked him, which was what Mike had hoped—that they’d form a bond of some kind, and Guy would be inspired to try harder and shake the trees again until something fell out to help solve the case.

“Of course,” he assured him. “I’ll let you know if I hear anything. But I don’t have much hope. The trail is very cold.”

“Someone knows something somewhere. All it’ll take is for one of them to talk and it will start to unravel. I assume you have DNA samples from the scene?”

Guy nodded. “We do.” He liked Mike’s enthusiasm and positive attitude, even if he was less optimistic than his American counterpart. But the CIA had such great resources to work with, the DGSE didn’t. France just didn’t have the budget the U.S. had. “By the way, be careful tomorrow. We’re having ‘manifestations,’ protests, and a general strike. There could be violence. Our protests have been getting out of hand. They’re our specialty, all the way back to the French Revolution. Don’t go out if you don’t have to, or at least stay away from the large crowds of protestors.”