by Sean Parnell
Steele tossed his rollaway on the bed, opened it, and changed from his blazer into a U.S. Navy G-1 leather flight jacket. Then he folded the art brochure, slipped it into the jacket, and made a local call on his cell. It took five European brrrings until a sleep-drenched voice answered.
“Tu sais quelle heure il est?”
“I know what fucking time it is, Claude,” Steele snapped. “It’s Max. Get up.”
He heard rustling sheets and the voice became more compliant.
“I apologize. I didn’t know it was you, Max.”
“Meet me at Les Délices d’Istanbul café in twenty minutes. Know where that is?”
“Ah . . . Boulevard Barbès?”
“That’s right.”
“Are you staying near there?”
“Pas de tes affaires,” Steele said. None of your business. Steele then clicked off.
He didn’t much like Claude Fischer, a half-German, half-French informant who was on the Program’s payroll and could be trusted with just about nothing. But the man knew everything and everyone in the underbelly of Paris, and might have heard some rumors about a recently murdered American and the woman who’d taken him down. The DGSE had kept everything about it out of the local news, but Fischer had shills everywhere, including the Gendarmerie. Fischer was a veteran of La Légion étrangère, the French Foreign Legion, and nothing scared him much. Except Max Sands.
Steele locked up, loped down the slim stairway, and found Madame LeBarge still reading Camus.
“The room’s very nice, Madame.” He smiled.
“I am so pleased you like it.” She coughed and nearly rolled her eyes.
He showed her the Louvre brochure.
“Do you happen to know where this came from, Madame? Did your staff put these in the rooms?”
“My ‘staff’ is myself and the occasional Algerian whore.” She flicked a finger at the brochure. “We don’t advertise for anyone unless they pay. This one, I believe, was distributed by a woman some ten days ago.”
Steele understood that whoever that woman was, she’d also bribed the madame.
“Do you happen to recall what she looked like?”
Madame LeBarge tapped her jowl and looked up at the starry sky. “I might remember better at breakfast.”
Steele nodded and put the brochure back in his pocket. He understood that her memory was only going to be spurred by more euros.
“In the morning, then,” he said.
“Good night.” She went back to reading her book.
Twelve minutes later, Steele was standing on the east side of Boulevard Barbès, across the way from the bright blue facade of Les Délices d’Istanbul, which curiously served Indian food. The waiters were outside, striking the white tablecloths from the chestnut café tables and folding up the chairs. The interior of the place was brightly lit, and Steele could see all the late-night patrons, but none were Claude Fischer. He looked at his Rolex Submariner and let another fifteen minutes tick by. Fischer never showed, and Steele knew if he called him he wouldn’t answer this time.
Something had scared Fischer off. Something scarier to him than Steele.
It was starting to drizzle as he made his way back to the Montmartre B&B. A few street sweepers were out, and back on Rue Muller a tall blond hooker tried to make an approach. He had a twinge of empathy for her as he waved her off, said, “Pas ce soir, mademoiselle,” and considered that their lives were similar—always on the move, hunting for action, encountering occasional pleasures and then sudden violence, all of which were part of the game. He was willing to bet that she’d also grown up without paternal guidance.
If you kill me you will never find your father.
He blew that tormenting phrase out of his mind and twisted his focus back to the mission at hand.
Something’s rotten in Denmark, he thought, which was actually a reference to Shakespeare’s Hamlet and had nothing to do with his current location. The whole point of the Program’s effectiveness was that it had remained ultrasecret for decades. Someone has figured us out. And once you’ve got a crack in that wall, the whole goddamn dam can collapse and we’ll all go tumbling over the falls. But he knew it was worse than just a simple breach of security, or a cyber hacker’s intrusion, or, God forbid, a leak from a disgruntled member. For Raines’s killer to have known about the Alpha headcount, she had to have someone on the inside, and he didn’t even want to think about that.
He walked, and brooded, and suddenly decided that it was all probably something much simpler. Raines’s killer hadn’t been alone. Stalker Six had been ambushed in that alley by more assaulters than just that one girl, and they’d tortured him until he’d given up just enough for her to spew her poison into his cell phone.
I’m on a fool’s errand. I’m swinging my pike at ghosts. It was just a one-off and they’re having a ball making all of us crazy.
He felt better about all of it when he entered the courtyard of the B&B. Madame LeBarge wasn’t there anymore, and he trotted back up the darkened stairway and turned the key in his lock. In the morning he’d start over again, go over to the Louvre, buddy up with some museum security guys, and see if they remembered anything.
He closed the door behind him, flicked on the light, shrugged off his leather jacket, and tossed it onto the bed. Then his brow furrowed when he realized that the purple brocade bathroom drapes were closed.
They flew open with the sound of a wind-ripped parachute and a man the size of a dump truck came flying at him from the bathroom.
Chapter 9
Paris, France
It was like getting hit by a hundred-ton steam locomotive. Full speed, downhill, no brakes.
All Steele saw was this human bull encased in a giant purple corduroy jacket, with a massive head, arms like scuba tanks, and hands like bear traps, flying at him from the bathroom. Steele was at the left side of the bed, and only managed to snap a half turn and leap backward one stride. The flying monster was on the right side, and he stomped on the bed with one engineer boot the size of a gunboat, and launched his soccer ball–size left shoulder into Steele’s chest.
Steele didn’t fall. He sailed, backward, a full twelve feet, with the heels of his black Red Wing Oxfords leaving a double skid mark on the tile floor, and then his shoulder blades thundered dead center into a twenty-by-thirty-inch framed print of a Paul Klee painting, Camel (in Rhythmic Landscape with Trees). Reflexively, Steele had tucked his head down and to the right, because that’s all he could manage to do, and he knew what was coming. His assailant’s head torpedoed over Steele’s left shoulder and straight into the glass, which exploded, raining shards and splinters all over both of them. But the real damage was done to the man’s crown, which gushed streams of blood, and as he stood up to his full height and shook it off, his face was like a mask from a horror movie.
He swiped the blood from his eyes with a sleeve, slapped Steele in the face with a sirloin-size palm, and roared “Ubljudok!” Motherfucker! That’s when Steele knew he was a Russian, but for the moment, nationality didn’t matter.
Steele kicked him straight up into his groin with the hardwood blade of his shinbone. It was a wicked strike that would have put any other man down, but it had no effect. The guy’s a friggin’ sumo and can pull his balls back up into his pelvis flashed through Steele’s mind, and then his assailant obliged him by completing the Japanese metaphor.
He grabbed Steele’s right arm with his left hand, underneath by the shirtsleeve, while he twisted inside to the left and jammed his huge right arm underneath Steele’s right armpit. Then he spun around like a typhoon spout and executed a perfect judo ippon seoi nage—a one-arm shoulder throw—flipping Steele right over his head so his boots clanged off the ceiling. Steele’s spine bounced off the bed like it was a trampoline and he was launched nose-first into the bathroom’s plexiglass divider. He tasted blood as it gushed down over his upper lip, but there was no time for sensory observations, and he spun around just in time to duck away fr
om the flying electric fan that missed his skull by an inch.
“This is for Kuznetsov!” the giant roared in Russian as he reached down for the footboard of the bed, lifted the whole thing up, and tossed it out of the way like a snack table.
Who the fuck is Kuznetsov? Steele wondered, but he wasn’t going to ask; it just didn’t seem like the time.
The beast hunched his bison-size shoulders and crouched into a Russian Systema stance, with his arms forming a triangle to his body and his bladed hands jutting forward. Steele responded with a Krav Maga stance, slightly pigeon-toed with his open palms hovering in defensive position beside his face. Even at six foot two and two hundred pounds, Steele could move like a bantam and strike like a jackhammer, but this guy had six inches’ height on him and a hundred pounds. The only way to take him would be to feint for his head, burst his knees out with whipping side kicks, then blind him with both thumbs in his eyeballs.
Seemed like a good plan until the gorilla reached into his right boot and came up with a Kalashnikov bayonet. It looked like the standard-issue AK-47 knife with its honey-colored grip, blood groove, and wickedly curved blade tip, except that it also gleamed like it had just been honed on a diamond sharpener. The Russian spun the bayonet like a pencil, gripped it overhand, blade down, and grinned. He had teeth like dirty fingernails, the incisors tipped in gold.
Steele knew that once that blade started stabbing down, it would never stop. He reminded himself to never, ever again, postpone swinging by a safehouse and getting himself armed up—not that he thought that anything short of a .50 caliber Desert Eagle could stop this guy. He jinked backward through the bathroom’s plexiglass door. The man advanced on him, thinking he had him cornered. Steele spun and, in one swift motion like a whirling dervish, ripped the ceramic toilet seat off its mounts, kept on spinning, and hurled it like a discus at the giant’s throat. From past experience with such things, Steele knew the monster would instinctively try to duck, which he did, and the toilet seat banged into the frontal lobe of his huge brow and shattered in half.
The giant roared, stiffened upright as if he’d just been shot through with high voltage, dropped the bayonet, and tumbled backward, crashing into the open wardrobe beside the smashed Paul Klee.
Then Steele was on him like a lightning bolt. He whipped a full-circle right-foot roundhouse kick into the Russian’s left knee, the sound of it like the whoosh of a baseball bat smacking a watermelon, and knew that he’d fractured the kneecap when the man threw his head back and roared like a gutshot lion. Then Steele stomped the floor with that same right foot and side kicked him in the solar plexus with the heel of his left Red Wing, bouncing him off the wall again, and the whole room trembled as if from a low-grade earthquake. Then he gave him two quick closed-fist strikes to the face, going for the temporomandibular joints, where that massive jaw was linked to the temporal skull bone, and hammering it left and right, which spiked a neural shock to his brain. And he was just going for the eyeballs with his thumbs when the Russian pushed off the wall and bear-hugged him.
It gushed the breath from his lungs like oversize pliers crushing a balloon. He palm-slapped the giant on both ears, but that had no effect. The Russian tossed him up into the air, spun him around like a ragdoll, and crush-hugged him from behind this time, and Steele felt his ribs bending like crossbows. He kicked a heel back as hard as he could up into the bastard’s balls, and they both crashed forward onto the floor, but the grip didn’t release one bit, and Steele felt his eyes starting to pop from his skull and he couldn’t draw a breath. Another thirty seconds of this and it would all be over.
He saw Jonathan Raines’s rollaway spilled all over the floor in front of him, next to the wooden night table. His fingers scrambled for the Superchunk CD as the giant hissed Russian death curses in his pulse-pounding ear, and he wrenched the plastic case open, somehow popped the CD out, gripped the gleaming disc with both hands, and cracked it in half on the corner of the night table, leaving two wicked half scythes of razor-sharp polycarbonate in his viselike-grip fists.
Steele flung his left hand back and sliced off half of the Russian’s left ear. The giant screamed and turned his head to the left to ward off the blade, exposing his right carotid artery, and Steele whipped his right hand backward, stabbed the jagged disc two inches deep into flesh, and cleaved through the meat of that Brahman bull neck with everything he had.
The giant said nothing. He suddenly released Steele and staggered to his feet, trying to stanch the hose of blood from his neck. He gripped his own throat as if he were choking himself, but that didn’t stop the gushing crimson, and he stumbled toward the bathroom, perhaps hoping that something in there might save him, and Steele lay there on his side and tried to regain his breath and just watched him careen. The Russian finally released his wound, reared his head back, gripped the purple brocade curtain, and tore the entire thing from its rings as he crashed face-first onto the bathroom floor.
Steele rolled up onto his rump and slid himself back against the wall. He dropped the bloody CD halves and looked at his shaking hands. Amazingly, he felt his cell phone still in his back pocket, and he pulled it out and tapped in for Cutlass Main. Out in the hallway, he could hear a female voice, Madame LeBarge, he was sure, yelling out in French and demanding to know just what the hell was going on in there.
“Code in,” said the robotic tone from very far away.
Steele recited his alphanumeric code in a voice that didn’t sound like his own. He was awfully thirsty.
“Yes, what can we do for you, Mr. Sands?”
“Know where I am?” He knew they’d have a GPS lock on him, but he wanted to make sure.
“Of course we do, yes.”
“Good.” Steele dropped his head back against the wall and closed his eyes. “I need a cleanup on aisle thirteen.”
Chapter 10
Paris, France
Eric Steele slapped Claude Fischer for the third time, and so hard that water flung from the Frenchman’s eyes and made a spatter pattern on the filthy yellow stucco wall.
They were in the back hallway of a whorehouse inside the infamous Pigalle district, just two blocks from the Moulin Rouge. That’s where Steele had been pretty sure he’d find Claude, and he was right, because the man had only two obsessions—drugs and sex—and it was too early in the morning for drugs.
“You fucking set me up, didn’t you, Claude?” Steele’s left hand was sunk like a crab claw in Fischer’s throat and practically lifting him up off of his five-hundred-euro, Gianvito Rossi loafers. His right palm was cranked back and poised for another slap.
“I didn’t, I swear,” Claude gasped.
“Menteur.” Liar. Steele spat to one side onto the grimy runner carpet. “And who the hell was that Moscow monster?”
“I have no idea, Max, really. Mon dieu, I don’t!”
A redheaded hooker in a terry cloth bathrobe and stiletto heels appeared, carrying a cup of espresso. She squeezed by them in the hallway as if such violence was par for the course.
“Really?” Steele snapped. “So who the fuck is Kuznetsov, Claude?” He jabbed a finger between Fischer’s eyes as if it were a gun barrel. And it could have been, because by now he’d picked up the FN Five-seveN and the S&W knife from the safehouse, and he was sorely tempted to use them both.
“Kuznetsov? I . . . I don’t know any Kuznetsov! The only one I’ve ever heard of is that Russian writer!”
Steele hauled off and slapped him again.
“Listen, you little shit.” Steele jabbed the finger into Fischer’s forehead, making his eyebrows scrunch and his eyes bug even wider. “I know you know the fat lady at the Montmartre. She pinged you on my arrival and you set me up for that goon, right? That’s why you blew me off last night. You wanted me to hustle my ass back to my room so that fucker could play Ping-Pong with my head, right?”
“Max, I have no idea what you are talking about!” Claude began to keen from his throat as Steele squeezed harder. “I didn�
�t mean to blow you off, I swear. Marianne and I were getting high when you rang, and after you hung up I simply forgot everything and fell back asleep. I’m sorry, I swear, I didn’t mean anything by it and I know nothing about this Russian. And I do not know any fat lady at the Montmartre!”
Steele snarled, reached for his right-hand jeans pocket, and came up with the black Smith & Wesson folder. He thumbed the grip and whipped it open, and then the terrifying tanto-style blade was a millimeter from Claude’s left eyeball.
“Now tell me the truth, Claude, or I’m having this eyeball of yours in my afternoon martini.”
“Max!” Fischer shrieked, and then his eyes rolled back and he went half limp, and Steele realized the former legionnaire was pissing himself. He looked down at the stain spreading through the crotch of his jeans, and he stepped back and released him. Fischer slid down the wall and slumped to the floor. Steele looked down at him.
“You know what, Claude?” he said. “I think I believe you.”
He flicked the knife closed, clipped it back in his pocket, and stomped out the back door into the alley. Then he slapped some hanging laundry aside, popped out into the street, hailed a cab, and told the driver to take him over to the Louvre. The driver was going to make some small talk and angle for a nice early-morning tip, but then he saw the American’s face in his rearview mirror and decided that silence might be the better part of valor.
Steele sat in the back of the Citroën and fumed. He wasn’t going on much sleep, or any food for that matter, which left him with the surly disposition that Meg sometimes referred to as “hangry”—hunger-induced anger. But it wasn’t just the lack of sucrose and caffeine. He felt like he was being wagged like a jingle bell on the end of a big dog’s tail.
Thankfully, the “bleachers” had shown up at the Montmartre within twenty minutes after he’d made the call. There was such a cleanup team in every major capital where the Program worked, and if an Alpha was tasked to some out-of-the-way town in someplace like southern Africa, a bleacher team would be moved onto station there as well until the mission was wrapped and the Alpha exfilled.