Page 13 of France Face-Off
“I didn’t,” Striker said.
“So, you aren’t just an escort, you’re part of the security team, are you not?”
He shook his head. “I am not. I just have friends.” Which was a lie. All he knew was the voice of a woman who called herself Lucie. She could have been the one out there on the reception hall floor, plunging her knife into Anatoly’s rib cage. For that matter, she could have sent Alex to distract him and to make Anatoly more careless and unsuspecting when he returned to the reception hall. As the video played, Daniel watched Alex through his peripheral vision. Was she actually watching to make sure that the deed was done, and that the actual person who stabbed Anatoly wasn’t visible by any of the surveillance cameras?
The same incident replayed from the opposite angle. Striker zoomed in on Anatoly. Several men in tuxedos stepped between him and the camera, and they seemed to be laughing down at someone else. Striker couldn’t make out the person, considering they were looking downward. It had to be somebody shorter, possibly a female. He glanced at their legs, hoping to catch sight of another pair of legs or the skirt of a dress, but nothing seemed clear, and the two men in the tuxedos weren’t close enough to Anatoly to plunge a knife into the man’s body. In the next second, Anatoly was down. Some of the people who had clumped around him continued across the reception hall floor, unaware of the man who had fallen to the ground. “Do you know any of these people around Anatoly?” Striker asked.
Alex pointed at the screen. “The man in the lead is the Italian Minister of Energy. The one beside him is his aide.”
They slowed the video down and replayed it several times, zooming in on the people surrounding Anatoly. They looked at it from all the angles the cameras had to offer and came up with nothing. Any one of those people who were close to Anatoly could have been the one who had stabbed him.
Striker figured he should be doing this video review on his own, but there was something about Alex that he trusted, even though she’d held a knife over Anatoly’s body. It was strange because he had no reason to trust her. He didn’t know her. He didn’t know what she wanted, but she seemed just as determined to find out who wanted Anatoly dead. Striker turned to her. “Why do you care?”
“I have my reasons,” she said.
“Is it because you wanted to kill him yourself?” he asked.
She propped a fist on her hip. “If I had wanted to kill him, I would’ve done it as soon as we walked into the rose garden. I only pulled my knife to reinforce the fact I didn’t appreciate his intentions. The French police will be reviewing the video surveillance,” Alex said.
Striker nodded.
“And they’ll come up with the same conclusion we have. We still don’t know who struck Anatoly Petrov. It could’ve been anyone in that group,” Alex said. She drew in a deep breath and let it out on a sigh. “Fortunately, the strike wasn’t sufficient to kill the man.”
Whoever had done it still had two days to complete their mission, which meant that Striker had to be on his toes for the next two days. He wasn’t sure how he would mingle with the diplomats as a paid escort. Alex had the better vantage point as a translator. She would be involved in all the sessions discussing the fate of the pipeline and the other items on the agenda for the energy summit. Unless he offered his services as a bodyguard to the Russians, he might not be able to infiltrate the conference room where the diplomats would be discussing the fate of several nations and their access to natural gas.
“I’d better be going,” Alex said and headed for the door.
“I’ll walk you to your room,” Striker offered.
She shook her head. “That’s not necessary.”
He dipped his head in acknowledgement. “I know you can take care of yourself; however, I wouldn’t be much of a gentleman if I didn’t offer to see you to your room.”
She smiled. “I would prefer if you didn’t.”
“Very well,” he said, “then I’ll call it a night.” He walked with her to the door, reached around her to open it and held it as she walked through.
She turned and faced him. “I wasn’t going to kill Anatoly.”
The sincerity in her tone and the expression on her face made Striker want to believe her. But he didn’t know her, and he wasn’t sure if he could trust her. Still, his instincts told him he could. He didn’t like her walking around the hotel by herself at night, even though the hotel security was pretty tight. They hadn’t stopped the attacker from stabbing Anatoly. “I’d rather you let me walk you to your room,” Striker said.
“I would rather you didn’t. Goodnight, Daniel,” she said.
Hearing her calling him Daniel was jarring to his senses. That was his cover, and he had no intention of blowing it. “Goodnight, Alex.”
She turned and walked toward the elevator. He stood in the hallway until she entered the car. When the doors closed, he ran down to the elevator bank and watched as the elevator rose two floors to the seventh. He punched the button to go up. He wasn’t sure why she had specifically said for him not to follow her, but his gut told him to try. A different elevator rose. He waited and watched as the elevator she had gotten onto paused for a long time on the seventh floor before finally coming back down. Meanwhile, the other elevator’s door opened.
Striker stepped onboard and punched the number seven. The door slid closed, and he rose up the two floors. When he stepped out into the corridor, it was empty. Short of knocking on each door until he found the right one, he’d missed his opportunity. He stepped back through the open elevator door and went back down to his floor. When he entered his room, he couldn’t help but feel how empty it was without her presence. He sat at the desk, brought up the images on the laptop and ran through the recording several more times before concluding the videos were useless at positively identifying the person who had stabbed Anatoly Petrov.
“Well done tonight, Striker,” a voice said in his ear.
He jumped, not having expected somebody to be talking to him at that time of night. His heart beat hard in his chest. “Lucie, you’ve got to stop popping into my ear.”
She chuckled. “My apologies for startling you.”
“How can you say I did a good job?” Striker said. “I was busy out in the garden with a woman while one of the Russians was attacked.”
“Without being a personal bodyguard,” she said.
