for the ensuing kick-off.
An older girl, a freckled American-looking blonde around sixteen or so in a chic blue skirt, striped top and the ubiquitous Nikes, was doing double duty as referee and scorekeeper. When she blew her whistle to end the game, Megan leaned in as Jeanne passed, fifty feet or so from the fence, as she made her way through the post-game handshake line. With her raven-black hair and dusky coloring, Jeanne looked nothing like the rest of the girls, but her flushed face and the sparkle in her dark, piercing eyes — her team had apparently won — spoke of a happy child, her place in her small world secure. Megan knew this had not always been so.
The girls gathered their gear along the sidelines and headed in groups of two and three to the school. Megan watched Jeanne until the last possible moment. No one had noticed her watching the game. And certainly no one knew that she had contracted to fund Jeanne’s tuition at L’Ermitge, a seven-day, twelve-month boarding school, through the end of her twelfth year, a sum that would eventually exceed ,000. Most of this money she had already extracted from the by now desperately-in-love Alain Tillinac, and given it with special instructions to Pictet & Cie.
On the short train ride back to Paris, Megan watched the small towns and countryside roll by for a while and then, images of a happy and healthy Jeanne fresh in her mind, allowed herself to recall her first, and last, meeting with the child, who was at the time chained to a filthy bed in the rear of an apartment in a housing project in the Paris suburb of Florentin.
* * *
“We have your man,” Sky had said over the phone, giving her the address. “Do not delay.” In thirty