Sidney Sheldon's Angel of the Dark by Sidney Sheldon & Tilly Bagshawe

Author:Sidney Sheldon & Tilly Bagshawe [Sheldon, Sidney & Bagshawe, Tilly]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780062073433
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2012-04-03T07:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER NINETEEN

I’M NOT HAPPY ABOUT THIS, MCGUIRE. Not happy at all.”

Henri Frémeaux didn’t look happy. Then again, Henri Frémeaux never looked happy.

“I understand that, sir.”

“We are here to assist and facilitate. Assist and facilitate. Which part of those two words do you not understand?”

“I do understand, sir.”

“Oh, really? Then why do I find myself on the receiving end of an extremely tense telephone call with Hong Kong’s chief of police, informing me that the Azrael team has been obstructive, difficult and unavailable, and that…”—he consulted his notes—“Inspector Liu cannot even get his phone calls returned.”

“With all due respect, sir, Liu asked me to ‘assist’ him by liaising with the Indonesian authorities. I was in the process of doing that when he decided to take matters into his own hands, arresting at least one innocent American citizen and possibly two. The legality of his actions was dubious at best.”

“I’m not here to pass judgment on how the Hong Kong Chinese conduct their affairs!” Frémeaux shot back angrily. “My job is to see to it that we, Interpol, are doing our job. These protocols exist for a reason, you know.”

Yeah, thought Danny, to satisfy uptight pen pushers like you.

Still, he could understand Henri Frémeaux’s irritation. So far the Azrael task force had made little or no headway, other than Richard Sturi’s brilliant statistical analysis; but without any forthcoming arrest on the horizon, that too was academic. Azrael had also taken up a phenomenal amount of time and resources, far more than the eight man-hours Frémeaux had grudgingly allotted. It was mostly Danny McGuire’s time, although Danny had just sent Claude Demartin on a fact-finding mission to Aix-en-Provence to delve deeper into the scant DNA evidence surrounding Didier Anjou’s murder. Thank God Frémeaux doesn’t know about that yet. Or about Matt Daley’s involvement in the Hong Kong fiasco. Then we’d really be up shit creek.

“I’ll give you a month, McGuire,” Henri Frémeaux grunted. “That’s assuming I get no more calls from member countries complaining about your attitude.”

“You won’t, sir. I guarantee it.”

“If I don’t see tangible progress in that time—and by tangible I mean something that justifies the money we’re spending chasing our tails—Azrael is finished.”

Danny McGuire walked back to his own office despondent. Céline was barely talking to him. At work, his own IRT division, who had always been extremely loyal to him personally, was starting to get pissed at the amount of time he was devoting to Azrael, which most of them considered to be the wildest of wild-goose chases. When he started all this, he’d thought of Matt Daley as a partner, a fellow American who cared about catching the Jakes killer, as Danny still thought of him, as much as he did. But now even Matt had deserted him, apparently besotted by the beautiful Mrs. Baring, the latest of the widows. It was a long time since Danny McGuire had felt this alone. Not since the wilderness years, after Angela Jakes went missing.

Initially he’d been focusing his own energy

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