Page 94 of Under Her Protection

"Vivienne."

"I mean it. Within reason. You are not going to ask me to live in a bunker. But on every meaningful call between now and her arrest, I will go with what you say."

"Noted."

"Avery."

"Yes."

"Get her here."

"She is twelve minutes out."

"Good."

---

Avery came in at twelve-oh-three in a flat black coat, dark hair pulled back, the leather portfolio in one hand and a laptop bag over the opposite shoulder, and she did not look tired. She had not been asleep. She had been in the Blackthorn HQ STRAUSS room with three screens open, and when Leo had called her from the Blackthorn car on the quai, she had packed in under two minutes and had been in a cab on the rue Royale before the cab had known where it was going.

"Madame."

"Ms. Cole."

"May I sit on the floor between the chairs."

"By all means."

Avery sat on the carpet between the oxblood chairs, the laptop on the low table beside the Armagnac. She opened it. She turned the screen to face Vivienne, not Leo.

"Right," Avery said. "Here is what we have."

She laid it out.

She laid it out the way she had laid the first flowchart out in the boardroom on the first of December, which was with the flat authority of a person who did not need Vivienne to speak, who did not need Vivienne to nod, who did not look up for permission between slides. Vivienne, in the oxblood chair, watched her work. Leo, in the opposite chair, watched Vivienne watch her. There was, Vivienne registered at the edge of her attention, a quality in Avery's hands with the keyboard that was the same quality as Leo's hands at a door, which was the particular discipline of a family that had been taught, Vivienne guessed, at a table somewhere in the north of England at a very young age to handle difficult things without flourish.

YLV Advisory in Geneva. Board Chair of YLV: Dr. Lara Kossek, re-seated in two thousand and twenty-one. Three SPVs registered in Luxembourg through which the YLV corporate intelligence arm had, over the past eighteen months, contracted Gaudin (ex-Strauss, Zurich), Renaud (Strauss communications, Paris, terminated Monday), and Petit (freelance courier, Paris, in custody on the quai tonight). Bertrand, the driver on the rue de Chaillot, in custody on a side of the river. A man called Morel in Zurich, on the books of YLV's research team, who had on Wednesday the thirtieth of November driven a rental car from Zurich to a farmhouse outside Fontainebleau and had not, since then, driven the car back. The farmhouse was on a private road off the D607. The farmhouse was owned through a French SCI registered to a law firm in Geneva that also represented the Luxembourg SPVs. The farmhouse, Avery said, was where Dr. Kossek had slept on Monday and Tuesday of this week.

"You have confirmed that."

"I have Morel entering the farmhouse on Monday at eighteen-twelve with a second passenger who is, from the frame I have on a traffic camera on the D607 at eighteen-oh-six, almost certainly Dr. Kossek. I have her leaving the farmhouse on Wednesday at thirteen-oh-four, in the rental, with Morel driving. The rental is, at the moment, parked in a lot in the fifteenth arrondissement in Paris. That has been the case since thirteen forty-one on Wednesday. Dr. Kossek did not, as far as I can determine, arrive at the gala tonight. But she is almost certainly in Paris."

"Where?”

"I do not yet know. The fifteenth tells me nothing. The rental is parked outside an apartment building with forty-two doors. I have two of our people on the building now. I will know in forty minutes which door."

"If you ask me for an assessment?”

"I am asking."

"She is planning a second visible move inside seventy-two hours. The plate tonight was a rehearsal, not the opera. I think she is going to send a letter to the board, not to the press, and I think she is going to do it in her own voice."

"Why do you think that?”

"Because the envelope in Geneva has an unsent draft letter in it, in her handwriting, addressed to your board chair. It is dated December the thirteenth. It is polite. It is ruinous. She wrote it two months ago."

Vivienne put her glass down on the low table.

"I would like to see it."