Free Deadly Heat by Richard Castle Page A

break her mother’s code. “Tell me.” Wired to be a note taker, Heat reached for the pen and spiral pad she kept on her coffee table, clearing the night from her throat.
    “I made contact with Anatoly Kijé.”
    “Did his goons slip a bag over your head and drop you at Deux Magots?”
    “Even better. He met me alone on the banks of the Seine. Just me and an old KGB warhorse. Isn’t that cool? Like walking into a le Carré novel.”
    Nikki drew the picture in her mind and smiled. “I’m warming up to this.”
    “Just wait. First off, Anatoly ID’d the doctor in Joe Flynn’s old photos. François Sisson. Turns out Sisson was a real doctor over here until he became one of the operatives in Tyler Wynn’s old CIA network. Ready for this? François Sisson turned up on a slab in a Paris morgue the day after helping Wynn play his death scene for us.”
    “Poison?”
    “Let’s call it lead poisoning. One slug behind his ear.”
    “I’m still waiting for the good news,” she said. “Sounds to me like you got your George Smiley jollies then hit a dead end.”
    “In Paris, yes. But things are a bit different down here in Nice.”
    Heat looked at her watch; it would be just past noon in France. “What the hell are you doing in Nice?”
    “Talking to you from my room at the Hotel Negresco. Want to know why? Because I just came from a meeting at a beach club called Castel Plage. It’s up the Promenade des Anglais between here and Le Château. By the way, that’s French for—”
    “Rook, I know what château is French for. Spit it out.”
    “OK, you ready for this? I just had brunch with none other than your elusive Syrian security attaché, Fariq Kuzbari.”
    Nikki set her pen down and just listened. Rook explained that, after his meeting by the Seine, he hopped the overnight high-speed train to Nice, where the Syrian security man had agreed to meet him. He dropped his bag at the Negresco and then walked the promenade along the bay to the Castel Plage, where Kuzbari waited for him at a secluded table on the beachside patio. “You know, Fariq’s a lot nicer guy when his men aren’t holding guns on you.”
    “Rook.”
    “Sorry.” He paused and, in the background, she heard the outdoor sounds of Nice: seabirds; motor bikes; a cruise ship’s horn. She wished she were there. “Kuzbari told me that your mother was not spying on him while she was tutoring his kids.”
    “And you just believe that?”
    “I’m only telling you what the man said, and the man said if anyone would know he was being spied on, it would be he. But Kuzbari did tell me something, and it’s big. Remember that week the PI said your mom spent at that conference center in the Berkshires with Kuzbari and his family?”
    Nikki remembered it very well from Joe Flynn’s 1999 surveillance report. And recently, when the Syrian and his security goons accosted her on the street in SoHo, she made sure to ask him about it. “Iremember Kuzbari was more concerned about denying any hanky-panky. What did he tell you?”
    “He said he went to the Berkshires for a symposium on limiting weapons of mass destruction, and that when your mom wasn’t giving his kids piano lessons, she was spending an inordinate amount of time with another attendee.”
    Heat picked up her pen again. “Who?”
    “Dr. Ari Weiss.”
    A jolt of adrenaline shot through Heat. Wide awake now, she paced her living room floor. “Remember that name?” asked Rook. She did. Of course it lived in her notes from a few weeks ago, but like most things she took down, the facts were burnished in her memory, and the movement of pen across paper only helped her memorialize them.
    Right before her murder, Ari Weiss had been the houseguest of another prominent family her mother tutored. Nikki had assumed her mom was spying on them, but Rook’s information cast things in an entirely different light. It’s possible her mother had worked her way into that home so she could snoop on the