tell you all we know about her, and believe me, it won’t take long. She was born Marie-Thérèse du Bois, in Zurich, of a Swiss father and an Egyptian mother, but she doesn’t use that name anymore, because if she did, she might get caught.”
“Tell me all of it.”
“Little Marie-Thérèse grew up in Switzerland and in Egypt, and she was something of a whiz with languages, being exposed to four—the usual Swiss three, plus her mother’s Arabic—while growing up. Even as a girl, her hobby was studying languages. In addition to her native tongues, she picked up Farsi, Urdu, and some Hindi. Her father imported Middle Eastern products to Switzerland—rugs, olive oil, dates, pottery—whatever he could turn a profit on, and he was very prosperous, ended up rich, in fact. She traveled with him often around the Mediterranean basin, picking up Spanish and Greek along the way. She’d sit in hotel rooms, watching local television and conjugating verbs.”
“Good God, how many languages does she speak?”
“Nobody knows, but I’d guess at least a dozen, and with perfect accents in various dialects.”
“So, why does she go around killing people?”
“When she was twenty, my firm and the CIA were pursuing the members of a terrorist organization in Cairo who had been killing foreign tourists. We received a tip that half a dozen members of the group would be traveling in a white Renault van along a major boulevard, en route to planting some explosives. Cooperating with Egyptian intelligence, our people set up an elaborate trap for them at an intersection. There wasn’t supposed to be any traffic to speak of. Unfortunately, Marie-Thérèse and her parents were driving home from a very late party in another white van, and someone fired a rocket launcher at the wrong vehicle. Her parents were both killed instantly, but Marie-Thérèse, who was asleep in the third seat, was blown clear and survived with only scratches.
“She retreated to her Cairo home and became reclusive, but she was bitter about her parents’ death. She refused compensation from all three governments, but then she was a wealthy young woman, having inherited two large houses and her father’s considerable fortune.
“She had a boyfriend, an Irani, whose politics extended to extreme violence, and we think she was recruited by the boy and sent to a terrorist training camp in Libya, where she made contacts among others of her kind from Ireland, Japan, Germany, and God knows where else.
“She was trained in firearms, explosives, and chemical weapons, but her handlers, when they learned of her language skills, thought her meant for better things. They taught her assassination skills, document forging, and just about anything else a budding terrorist could possibly want to know, keeping her interest by telling her they would help her find the people responsible for her parents’ death so she could kill them. She also became very physically fit in the desert, and she’s known to work out almost obsessively, wherever she goes.
“When she finished her schooling in Libya, she returned to Cairo, then Zurich, selling her two houses and secreting the money in accounts around the world. Some say her holdings ran to several tens of millions of dollars. She returned to Cairo and, in effect, ceased to exist. The little we know of her since then comes from rumors and a couple of very aggressive interrogations of people who knew her.
“She seems to have assassinated two Egyptian politicians who held views unpopular with her terrorist friends. She shot one in the head while he waited in his car at a traffic signal, then calmly boarded a bus and rode away. That evening, she dropped cyanide, or something like it, in the other’s drink in a crowded restaurant, then climbed out the ladies’-room window while he was still in his death throes. We think she performed half a dozen other such jobs over the next couple of years. Her handlers realized that they had a
“Tell me all of it.”
“Little Marie-Thérèse grew up in Switzerland and in Egypt, and she was something of a whiz with languages, being exposed to four—the usual Swiss three, plus her mother’s Arabic—while growing up. Even as a girl, her hobby was studying languages. In addition to her native tongues, she picked up Farsi, Urdu, and some Hindi. Her father imported Middle Eastern products to Switzerland—rugs, olive oil, dates, pottery—whatever he could turn a profit on, and he was very prosperous, ended up rich, in fact. She traveled with him often around the Mediterranean basin, picking up Spanish and Greek along the way. She’d sit in hotel rooms, watching local television and conjugating verbs.”
“Good God, how many languages does she speak?”
“Nobody knows, but I’d guess at least a dozen, and with perfect accents in various dialects.”
“So, why does she go around killing people?”
“When she was twenty, my firm and the CIA were pursuing the members of a terrorist organization in Cairo who had been killing foreign tourists. We received a tip that half a dozen members of the group would be traveling in a white Renault van along a major boulevard, en route to planting some explosives. Cooperating with Egyptian intelligence, our people set up an elaborate trap for them at an intersection. There wasn’t supposed to be any traffic to speak of. Unfortunately, Marie-Thérèse and her parents were driving home from a very late party in another white van, and someone fired a rocket launcher at the wrong vehicle. Her parents were both killed instantly, but Marie-Thérèse, who was asleep in the third seat, was blown clear and survived with only scratches.
“She retreated to her Cairo home and became reclusive, but she was bitter about her parents’ death. She refused compensation from all three governments, but then she was a wealthy young woman, having inherited two large houses and her father’s considerable fortune.
“She had a boyfriend, an Irani, whose politics extended to extreme violence, and we think she was recruited by the boy and sent to a terrorist training camp in Libya, where she made contacts among others of her kind from Ireland, Japan, Germany, and God knows where else.
“She was trained in firearms, explosives, and chemical weapons, but her handlers, when they learned of her language skills, thought her meant for better things. They taught her assassination skills, document forging, and just about anything else a budding terrorist could possibly want to know, keeping her interest by telling her they would help her find the people responsible for her parents’ death so she could kill them. She also became very physically fit in the desert, and she’s known to work out almost obsessively, wherever she goes.
“When she finished her schooling in Libya, she returned to Cairo, then Zurich, selling her two houses and secreting the money in accounts around the world. Some say her holdings ran to several tens of millions of dollars. She returned to Cairo and, in effect, ceased to exist. The little we know of her since then comes from rumors and a couple of very aggressive interrogations of people who knew her.
“She seems to have assassinated two Egyptian politicians who held views unpopular with her terrorist friends. She shot one in the head while he waited in his car at a traffic signal, then calmly boarded a bus and rode away. That evening, she dropped cyanide, or something like it, in the other’s drink in a crowded restaurant, then climbed out the ladies’-room window while he was still in his death throes. We think she performed half a dozen other such jobs over the next couple of years. Her handlers realized that they had a
Similar Books
