He took a train to Rouen, bought some samples, and experimented. Plunging the needle straight down through the plastic cap left a hole— actually, not so much a hole as a disturbance in the smooth blue plastic— that was small but noticeable. Better to inject at an upward angle beneath the bottom edge of the cap, where it overlapped the neck of the bottle. The hole/disturbance was masked by the overlap and, once the cap was unscrewed, lost in the threads. He practiced doing it smoothly and quickly. After a couple of hours, he had it down to seconds.

Then he started to travel, by local train and bus, east toward Reims, then arcing south toward Paris. He knew that in Paris it would get the most attention. For Parisians the rest of the country scarcely existed. He had to pick unbusy hours to go into stores. Mid-morning was good. Late night had even fewer customers, but the emptiness and the hour led store clerks to pay special attention to a lone man with a face tattoo. So, mid-mornings.

With a preference, of course, for stores that didn’t have security cameras in the dairy aisle.

After five days he had been to a dozen stores and injected thirty bottles. No one had told him why they all had to be Bouvier Lait, but he assumed there must be a good reason.

Then he waited.

Fciid

FCIID

First Rafe, now this Nigerian. His gaze was intense, unnerving.

“Chat?” said Majid. “About what?”

He just wanted to know, the Nigerian said, if Majid knew anything about investments in a company called Sahel Hydrocarbon. “It has an operation in Nigeria.” Was Majid by any chance familiar with it?

Majid took a moment, sat in one of his two visitor chairs, invited his visitor to sit in the other. This was where he had his opening conversations with potential clients. What were their goals? What was their time horizon? Their risk tolerance? Yes, Sterling Wealth Management could serve them well. This kind of thing was exactly their specialty.

Their specialty was not dealing with African cops investigating a client’s role in sabotage and murder. So:

“Sahel Hydrocarbon? I’m not sure. What about it? What kind of investment?”

The man’s gaze was still on him. “It is related to a criminal case in my country. An act of sabotage. It might not have been heard of here, in Geneva, in Europe. But people died. It was a terrible thing.”

“But how is that related to an investment? I don’t understand.” Majid saying this at the exact moment that he absolutely, with certainty, all doubt and denial vanquished, finally did understand completely.