by Lee Goldberg
She smirked. “All you want is someone to take your side against me.”
“Who wouldn’t take my side? I caught you fucking a woman!”
Barlier stepped between them and held up his hands in a halting gesture. “Please, sit down, and let’s try to talk about this calmly and without recrimination.”
“Easy for you to say,” Ian said. “You’re French.”
Before the doctor could reply, Margo grabbed his right arm, pinned it sharply behind his back, and covered his mouth with her other hand.
“Make a sound or try to struggle,” Margo said, “and I will break your arm.”
She removed her hand from his mouth. Ian pulled a roll of duct tape out of his Monoprix bag and tore off a piece.
“I’m sorry about this,” Ian said. “There’s a man in the next office who wants to assassinate your president and ours. We’re trying to stop him.”
“You’re crazy,” Barlier said.
“You could be right.” Ian covered Barlier’s mouth with tape. “We’ll know in a few minutes.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
Maurice Kwok picked up a pair of binoculars, went to the window, and looked out at the Eiffel Tower. Police snipers were on the observation deck and more were on the rooftops of the nearby apartment buildings. French and American Secret Service agents, police officers, and soldiers patrolled the grounds around the tower and along the Champ de Mars. Their vigilance was all for nothing. But he was wearing a shoulder holster and carrying a Glock just in case the police came charging in.
He lowered his binoculars and wheeled over the glass-cutting device, an enormous metal octopus with suction cups on five of its six outstretched tentacles. He hit a button, awakening the beast. The five tentacles reached out and stuck against the glass. The sixth tentacle, with a high-powered laser at the tip, reached over the other tentacles and began to slice the glass in a large circle. The crackle of the laser was so low that nobody besides Kwok could hear it.
Kwok took a few steps back to watch the beast work.
Duct tape covered Dr. Alex Barlier’s mouth and bound his hands and feet. He was lying against the wall and behind the couch, which had been flipped over to give him cover from what Ian hoped was about to happen.
Ian had emptied out four water bottles and was now carefully filling two of them with a mixture of cleansers, the potassium chloride salt substitute, and other chemicals. He was saving the other two bottles for the activating compound he’d pour into the other pair of bottles to create an explosive reaction. At least that was the theory. He’d never actually tried what he’d written because he wasn’t a crazy person. Now, apparently, he was. Just ask the shrink behind the couch, Ian thought.
Margo had laid out Ian’s books and the porcelain souvenir tiles on Barlier’s desk. She placed two tiles between two books and bound them together into a sandwich with duct tape. She repeated the process three times. When she had the four book-and-tile sandwiches completed, she lined two of them up spine to spine and taped them together. She did the same with the other pair, ending up with two packets comprised of two sandwiches.
Ian was rolling scraps of aluminum foil into gumdrop-size balls when some movement outside caught his eye. A police helicopter flew over the Seine, its spotlight illuminating the presidential motorcade as it crossed the bridge. They didn’t have much time. A few minutes, at best.
“I need your help.” Margo placed one of the packets she’d created over her chest and stomach.
Ian picked up a roll of duct tape and secured the improvised body armor to her, rapidly winding the tape around her midsection and over her shoulders.
“Not too tight,” she said. “I need to be able to breathe.”
“Can my books really stop a bullet?”
“They’d better,” she said. “Or next time I’m using Janet Evanovich’s novels.”
The beast finished its work.
Kwok hit a button and the beast’s tentacles retracted, its suction cups lifting out a round section of glass the size of a tractor tire from the window. Cold air blasted into the room, whipping up dust and dropping the temperature by ten degrees. He wheeled away the beast, and the glass it held, to the other side of the room, leaving a hole in the window large enough for a missile to pass through.
He walked back to the window and stood in front of the hole, the wind buffeting him. The presidential motorcade was pulling up to the tower. Police boats moved into position on the Seine. A helicopter circled the Eiffel Tower and swept the area with a spotlight.
It was 6:55. They were right on time.
Kwok went over to the missile launcher, took his seat, and peered into the viewfinder, lining up the restaurant windows in his crosshairs. He honored Tan Yow’s memory, and Yat Fu’s wishes, by activating the timer on the rocket launcher just in case something went wrong.
Classified Location, Kangbashi District, Ordos, Inner Mongolia, China. July 8. 1:55 a.m. China Standard Time.
It was the next day in Ordos.
The news feeds from the French television networks covering the presidential dinner were up on the big screen. Pang Bao, Shek Jia, and two dozen operatives watched as the French and US presidents and their much younger second wives, both ex-fashion models, arrived at the Eiffel Tower and emerged from their limousines.
Shek Jia hadn’t received any confirmation that their asset had been warned but Pang assured her that there wasn’t any real reason for concern. If Ludlow and the CIA knew about the assassination plot, or where the assassin was, the spy wouldn’t have been traveling to Paris on a commercial flight booked with his own credit card. At most, Ludlow was chasing a hunch that had come up empty—otherwise they would have heard radio chatter by now about major police activity at Tour Montparnasse.
At least that’s what Pang kept telling himself. And when that didn’t reduce his anxiety, or his urge to vomit, he told himself something else that did:
In five minutes, the United States would become a Chinese province.
CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR
Tour Montparnasse, Paris, France. July 7. 6:55 p.m. Central European Summer Time.
Margo finished taping the improvised body armor on Ian, who looked down at her handiwork.
“This would make a great author photo,” he said.
Margo looked past him and out the window. The motorcade was at the tower. “We’re out of time.”
Ian overturned Barlier’s desk to create a barricade, then went over to the coffee table and dropped tiny balls of aluminum foil into two of the bottles of chemicals.
Margo dashed into the waiting room, picked up a magazine from the coffee table, swiftly wrapped it around her left wrist like a sleeve, and duct-taped it into place. She did the same with another magazine on her right wrist.
Ian came in and handed her two bottles. One bottle was half-full of brown liquid and a ball of aluminum foil. The other was a third full of a bubbling concoction similar to Alka-Seltzer. “It’s a binary explosive. Pour the bottle with less stuff into the one with more stuff, seal the cap, shake it, and run.”
She skeptically regarded the two bottles. “Are you sure this is going to work?”
“Hell no, and if it does, there’s a good chance we’ll blow ourselves up.”
“Thanks for the pep talk.”
“Give me ten seconds,” Ian said. “And then go for it.”
Ian gave her a tender kiss on the cheek, ran back into the doctor’s office, and slammed the door behind him. He picked up the two bottles from the coffee table, added the bubbling mixture from one bottle into the other, sealed the cap, shook it like he was making a martini, and placed it against the common wall Barlier shared with Wang.
He knew the explosions would be heard by everyone on the floor, and noticed by scores of people on the street, but that didn’t concern him. The only people he worried about were on the other side of the wall and he hoped the element of surprise would give Margo and him an edge. It was why they didn’t just go charging throu
gh the Wang Studios door in the first place.
He took cover behind the overturned desk and saw Barlier behind the couch, staring at him with wide-eyed fear. Ian gave him a thumbs-up, hoping it would give the doctor some false reassurance, and covered his ears.
Out in the hall, Margo combined the two mixtures into one bottle, closed the cap, gave it all a shake, and placed the bomb on the floor at Wang’s door. She ran down the hall and around the corner to the elevator banks for cover. She prayed that no innocent bystanders working in offices on that floor walked into the hallway at the wrong moment—but it was a risk she had to take and one that would be over in a few seconds.
The two presidents and their wives were riding the elevator from the ground-floor lobby to the Jules Verne.
Kwok waited for a glimpse of the president in the window. He didn’t need the man in his crosshairs. All he needed to know was that the president was in there. The missile would obliterate everyone in the restaurant.
He was imagining the blast when a wall in his office exploded and blew him out of his seat.
The fire sprinklers burst on, creating a rainstorm in Barlier’s smoke-filled office, and an alarm began to bellow. Ian peered over at Barlier, who was fine, then rose from behind the desk and saw a jagged opening in the wall, large enough to step through into the next office.
He moved to one side of the hole, peered around the mangled, exposed metal framing, and saw a rocket launcher on a wooden platform, aimed through the window.
Holy shit, I was right.
Margo was flat against the wall by the elevators, getting drenched with water. People would be running out of their offices at any second and her bomb hadn’t exploded yet. She peeked around the corner and down the hallway. Her bottle was still sitting at Wang’s door, its contents bubbling, the plastic swelling.
Come on, blow!
Kwok sat up, his ears ringing, and squinted into the smoke and rain. There was a ragged opening in the wall that exposed the interior of the adjacent office. He drew his gun, got to his feet, and took aim at the hole.
Ian didn’t see anybody in the smoke and darkness. But he did see a tablet computer screen on the weapon, and it was ticking down seconds, the numbers glowing.
47, 46, 45 . . .
What happened to the second bomb? Where the hell was Margo?
He couldn’t wait for her, not with the seconds ticking down on a timer attached to the rocket launcher. It could only be counting down to one thing.
Ian took a deep breath and stepped through the opening into the next office.
Kwok fired three times at the man coming into the room, hitting him in the chest, center mass. The man went down.
Ian lay on the floor, struggling to breathe, all the air pushed out of his flattened lungs. It felt like he’d been hit with Thor’s hammer.
The shooter was coming back to finish him off. It was the man in the photograph on Fung’s phone. At least Ian would die knowing he was right.
The man was still alive and squirming, a cluster of three bullet holes in the center of what Kwok surmised was improvised body armor. The whole situation puzzled Kwok, but not nearly as much as the flash of recognition he saw in the man’s eyes.
How could this man possibly know me?
He aimed his gun at the man’s head for the kill shot and—
Blam!
—another explosion blew him off his feet. His gun flew out of his hand and right out the window.
The bomb that destroyed Wang’s door detonated at just the right moment. A second later and it would have exploded into the crowd of people that was now pouring out of the offices into the smoky, showering hallway.
Margo pushed through the panicked crowd, smashed the glass standpipe case in the wall, removed the fire extinguisher, and blasted the spray into Wang’s office as she charged in.
She saw the rocket launcher and Ian lying wide-eyed and squirming on the floor, trying to speak but unable to draw the air to do it. But there was no sign of anybody else. She caught movement from the corner of her eye and turned just as Kwok slashed at her throat with a stiletto.
Margo blocked the knife’s edge with her magazine-wrapped left forearm and slammed him in the side with her fire extinguisher.
He took the painful blow and stabbed the knife into her exposed midsection, the stiletto sticking deep in her body armor.
Margo head-bashed Kwok, breaking his nose, and took another swing at him. He ducked it and drop-kicked her into a pillar. She smashed hard into the iron and lost hold of the extinguisher.
While Margo and Kwok fought, Ian crawled to the rocket launcher and, still gasping for breath, climbed into the seat. The seconds were ticking down on the screen.
21, 20, 19 . . .
He tried to pull the tablet off the machine but it was welded tight. The only buttons on the screen were in Chinese and he was afraid of what might happen if he touched the wrong one.
15, 14, 13 . . .
If he couldn’t stop the damn thing from firing, he’d have to find a different target.
Margo yanked the stiletto out of her armor and charged Kwok with it. He grabbed the wrist of her knife hand and yanked her to his side, twisting the stiletto out of her hand and tripping her over his outstretched leg. She fell to her knees and he pounced like a lion, wrapping a garrote around her throat and attempting to strangle the life out of her.
Ian studied the launcher, noting the viewfinder and the two control wheels, and realized it operated just like a Panavision camera. The wheel on the left panned the firing tube from left to right, and one in the center tilted it up or down. He glanced at the timer.
10, 9, 8 . . .
He wiped the water out of his right eye, put his hands on the wheels, and looked through the viewfinder at the Jules Verne. The window and the foursome at a table beside it were in the crosshairs and at the end of a laser targeting beam.
Margo’s vision went black and she couldn’t breathe. Who did she think she was kidding? A lesbian folk singer and failed dog walker was no match for a professional assassin. In a few seconds, she’d be dead and she deserved it for being so stupid.
5, 4, 3 . . .
The only open space Ian could see was the Champ de Mars in front of the Eiffel Tower. He used the control wheels to point the crosshairs and the laser beam into grass, just past the fountains in the center of Avenue Joseph Bouvard.
Margo’s reflexes told her to grab at the wire around her throat. Instead, she reached down for the steak knives taped to her ankles and yanked them loose.
She stabbed one knife deep into Kwok’s left leg. Kwok cried out and stumbled, his hold on her throat going momentarily slack. She used the instant of freedom to twist to her right and plunge the other knife into his kidney.
Kwok staggered backward, pulled the bloody knife from his side, and turned toward the window. He realized two horrifying things in that single, crucial instant: The timer count was down to 2 and he was standing right behind the firing tube.
The missile shot out with a deafening crack and the scorching back-blast from the firing tube blew Kwok apart like a hand grenade in a piñata.
Ian kept the crosshairs pointed at the grass and saw the missile riding the targeting laser beam like a bullet train.
The missile smashed into the grass at five hundred miles per hour, igniting a blast that was the equivalent of twenty-two pounds of TNT, shooting up a roiling, dirt-filled fireball, and sending out a wave of concussive force that snapped tree limbs, shattered windows, and threw dozens of soldiers off their feet.
CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE
The air in the office was thick with water, smoke, and dust. Ian stood up, barely able to hear, and was joined by Margo. Together they went to the window and, through the settling dirt and smoke, saw a charred impact crater in the Champ de Mars. A helicopter banked behind the Eiffel Tower and came racing toward them.
“The cavalry is coming and we have to get out of here,” Margo said. “But we can’t go looking
like this.”
Ian didn’t hear what she’d said. She didn’t try to explain again—she simply cut the body armor off him with a few deft swipes of the bloody knife, did the same with her own armor, took his arm, and led him quickly out of the room. The two of them darted into the hall just as the office was floodlit by the helicopter’s searchlight.
They mixed in with the hundreds of panicked office workers pouring into the stairwells to evacuate the building. They let the human stream carry them out of Tour Montparnasse and spill them out into the plaza, where everyone was looking up at the hovering chopper, its spotlight illuminating the gaping hole in a forty-fifth-floor window. The wails and shrieks of hundreds of approaching sirens sounded to Ian like the onslaught of a rampaging army of robot hyenas.
“Follow me.” Margo took his hand and they darted through the crowd, across Boulevard du Montparnasse, and into the warren of streets leading to Boulevard Raspail.
“Where are we going?” Ian asked. They were both soaking wet.
“The US embassy,” she said.
“I’m not sure that’s the best idea.”
“It won’t be long before they figure out we were the terrorists,” Margo said.
“We weren’t.”
“But that’s not how it will appear when they look at the security video and talk to Dr. Barlier.”
“We might be able to get out of Paris before that happens.”
“Don’t count on it,” she said. “We’re going to need the CIA to keep the French government from taking us to the guillotine.”
“The guillotine doesn’t exist anymore.”
“They might bring it back just for us.”
“We just saved the French president’s life,” Ian said.
“You know that, and I know that, but I’m not sure if it’s clear from the damage we left behind. It might look like you fired the missile and simply missed. The real story is going to be a hard sell.”