Girl Stalks the Ruins

by Jacques Antoine

  “How do you know? Weren’t you wearing a hood?”

  “Before the hood, I saw… they took them… apart from the rest.

  “There’s no time,” Perry said. “Go, now, if you’re going to go at all.”

  Once Nassim had made his move, and scurried away along the Italian gallery, Perry and Emily joined the crowd, and held their hands high when the security people pulled them away from the confusion. Soon they were on the floor, shoved face down, a knee pressed into each spine, and then their hands were bound behind their backs. Finally, they were led outside to a makeshift command center to be interrogated.

  Held in separate tents in the Carousel courtyard, Emily knew what Perry would say, so there’d been no need to coordinate their stories. He’d leave everyone else out – Yuki, Andie, Li Li and Stone – no need to confuse the story. If they’d gotten clear, there was no need to draw any further attention to them. As for the two of them, they were just tourists, that much was true, and it was best to stick as close to the truth as possible in such a situation. They’d been caught in the attack along with everyone else, but their military training enabled them to respond and disrupt the terrorists’ plans. She figured he’d be itching to tell them about the Mini-14s, but he’d know to save that detail for a more opportune moment.

  “What is your name?” she was asked several times, in a few different languages. “Where are you from, mademoiselle? What are you doing here?” A uniformed officer and his plainclothes superior peppered her with questions, barely waiting for an answer before posing the next one. Screening a hundred other tourists, mainly foreigners who probably didn’t speak French, taxed their resources. A more rigorous interrogation would come later.

  Paramilitary officers dressed in black tactical gear and carrying more Mini-14s patrolled the area, watching the crowd of tourists as well as the perimeter. Perry had been right about the ordinance, and she couldn’t quite imagine what it might signify that the terrorists carried them as well. After several hours, the rest of the tourists were processed and released, and she was reunited with Perry in a larger tent equipped with electronic gear and communications equipment. A long table held a row of laptops running some sort of facial recognition software on security videos from the museum.

  “Ah, Mademoiselle Tenno, you leave us in something of a quandary,” a short, stout man in a dark suit said. A taller, slender man, wraithlike with a pale face, stood behind him. “You are either a hero or a villain, and we can’t quite tell which.”

  He’d opened up, and she recognized an interrogation technique – indicate some bureaucratic confusion that might lead to an indefinite detention – a veiled threat, expressed in deceptively genial terms. It would take more than one or two moves to shift the balance of power in this conversation. “You have me at a loss, sir. What is your name?”

  “Jean-Claude Rémy. I am with the Police Judiciale… and this is Monsieur Levautrin, with the DGSI.”

  Emily noted the tension in Rémy’s voice as he introduced Levautrin, and figured it indicated the usual interagency rivalry. Here was an opening, she could exploit, especially by making use of a trick or two from the hostage negotiator’s handbook. “Please, monsieur, I’d like my bag returned, and my sweater. Night is falling, and I’m getting cold. Also, I’d like to call my mother, to let her know I’m safe.”

  Rémy looked amenable, but he glanced at Levautrin and was met with stony silence. The meaning was clear to Emily: the DGSI must be their intelligence service, and Levautrin a high level operative. No wonder Rémy resented his presence. He nodded to a uniformed officer, who brought her things over. The sweater wasn’t really necessary, but she pulled it over her shoulders anyway, to complete the effect.

  “My mobile phone is missing,” she said, after looking through her bag.

  Rémy handed her a different phone. “Use mine, please.” Levautrin nodded behind him.

  “… and my phone… it will be returned, eventually?”

  She didn’t wait for an answer, and punched in the codes for an international call, to her mother’s US mobile number, which she knew would be rerouted through the estate’s secure servers back across the Atlantic, to the hotel room in Paris, where she ought to be right now. Rémy undoubtedly hoped to glean more information about her by tracing this call, and having his team listen in remotely. But Michael had arranged all the family’s phones – no trace would lead anywhere, and the location data would show them to be back home in Charlottesville, Virginia. Still, with extra ears sure to be listening in, she’d have to speak cautiously to her mother, and devise a coded signal Yuki would recognize.

  When her mother’s voice came on the line, Emily spoke quickly, a few phrases in Mandarin. Yuki had been studying it for several months for Li Li’s sake, and she’d understand, at least, that her daughter was telling her she was safe. “Wéi, nín hao, mama. Zhè shì wo Emily, wo men shì anquán de.” The line was silent for a moment, and Emily switched briefly to Japanese, to utter a phrase from one of the ancient epics her mother was sure to recognize. “Josha hissui,” – all glories will fade – and then repeated the reassurance about their safety, now in Japanese: “… watashi wa anzendesu.”

  “Thank goodness you’re safe,” Yuki cried into the phone, now speaking English, and with an air of confusion in her voice.

  “Yes, we’re safe, Mom. Give Li Li the good news. I’m sure she and Stone were worried. In hindsight, it was a bit of luck that you took them back to Charlottesville when you did. This would have been too much excitement for them.”

  The laptops running facial recognition algorithms flashed across a scene with four masked men shoving two women and two small children into a stairwell behind an ornamental door. When the software identified one of the women as a French national, Marie Louise Roussel, a small commotion arose among the uniformed officers, and Rémy and Levautrin turned their attention to this news, and so did Emily, as inconspicuously as she could manage. The laptops continued ticking off common features, but had yet to identify Andie.

  Emily’s false statement about the kids had to have made the real character of this call clear to her mother. She’d spent too many years on the run with her father not to recognize a codeword, even one made up on the fly. All that remained was to convey some sense of the catastrophe, that Andie had been taken by the terrorists. This information had to be given to Michael as soon as possible.

  Why not simply report her abduction to the French police? Emily had weighed these two agents of the vast French security apparatus, and didn’t think she could trust one of them, and absolutely didn’t trust the institution he represented. She already expected to be accused of running an op on French soil without permission. Involving Michael in it before he was ready might give the bureaucracy the impulse it needed to gum up the works even more than they usually did.

  A quiet voice spoke in her heart, telling her this was a mistake, a paranoid phantasm. The sooner she notified the French authorities, who stood all around her, the better. For whatever reason, and she probably had too many to get any clarity, she couldn’t bring herself to do it. Now, to seal the decision with Yuki.

  “Tell Michael I have a present for Andie. I missed her at the train station. I look forward to seeing her soon, if she can find the time. You know how busy her social calendar can be.”

  Yuki gasped, and the line was silent for a long moment. “I will,” she finally managed to croak out.

  “I’m talking to the police now, outside the museum,” she continued, cycling back to Japanese. “I don’t know how much longer they’ll keep us here. They seem to be making a fuss. Whatever happens, I won’t rest until I find her. I love you, Mom.”

  She ended the call before Yuki could respond, though she would know there was no further information to give, and the sooner she called Michael, the better. Emily handed the phone back to Rémy.

  “Are we free to go?” She expected him to refuse, since the videos she’d already spied on the laptops showed her and
Perry in full battle mode in the Daru staircase, next to the statue of Winged Victory. There would be no mistaking them for bystanders, but that they weren’t terrorists ought to be clear as well.

  “We need to ascertain exactly who you are first,” Levautrin said, speaking now for the first time, in an aristocratic, nasal tone.

  “You have already examined my passport. Isn’t it in order?”

  “Well, yes and no,” Rémy said.

  “Doesn’t the Geneva Convention apply to people traveling with diplomatic passports in France?”

  “Mais oui,” Rémy said. “But there is a… discrepancy.”

  “A discrepancy? Let’s call the American Embassy, then, and they can straighten it out.”

  “We have contacted your embassy…”

  “That is the source of the discrepancy,” Levautrin said. “They have a record of a Major Michiko Tenno, but no current record of anyone named Tenno carrying the rank of captain. They also say that Major Tenno is expected back in Japan, at the headquarters of the Pacific Fleet.”

  “Crap. I hate when they do stuff like this.” She knew right away that Crichton had to be behind this maneuver. But who else was in on it – Lukasziewicz? SECNAV? Michael? – and what could they hope to accomplish by it? All it would do was make her a target for the resentment of all the other career officers they’d just leapfrogged her over, not to mention this current snafu.

  “Who are they?” Rémy asked. “If you wouldn’t mind…”

  “Fine, whatever,” she growled to herself, before turning her attention to Rémy. “Admiral Crichton, I expect… Look, biometrics from the Embassy database will confirm my identity, as you well know.”

  “Perhaps,” Levautrin said. “We shall see. But in the meantime we will hold you until this matter is resolved.”

  “And my fiancé, is he also being held?”

  “He does not hold a diplomatic passport. We have the authority to detain Monsieur Hankinson indefinitely.”

  Rémy tried to soften the blow. “You must understand, Mademoiselle Tenno, two American military personnel, one on an Interpol watchlist, discovered at the center of a terrorist incident in the heart of Paris. We must exercise extra caution in such a case.”

  “Does the fact that we thwarted the plot, whatever it was, mean nothing?”

  “Of course, we are grateful…”

  “… but until we know the full dimensions of the plot, as you say, we cannot determine your precise relationship to it,” Levautrin added.

  “Please accept the hospitality of the Police Judiciare for a few days, until we complete our investigation.”

  Chapter 9

  House Arrest

  “This is total bullshit,” Perry snarled, partly for the benefit of the minders who were constantly finding excuses to enter their hotel suite, and maybe partly also for Emily’s benefit.

  At least the food they sent in was pretty good, and it all came out of Police Commandant Rémy’s budget at the Police Judiciaire. There was some pleasure in this. Their new accommodations were roomy, three rooms including separate bedrooms. Emily had insisted on this, even though they only needed one bed. But this hotel couldn’t really compare with the rooms Michael had arranged for the family at the Four Seasons.

  Just thinking about the look on Rémy’s face when Emily refused to let his department use their original rooms for the house arrest… maybe that made it worth slumming on this side of the river. It even brought a little smile to his face. Still, he was angry with her, though he couldn’t quite say about what. Certainly it wasn’t her fault they’d stumbled into another ‘incident,’ or that the French police had detained them. They’d done what they had to, what they’d been trained to do, and the police were doing exactly what they had to do, as well. He couldn’t complain about what happened at Ramstein or Trier, even though this is what got her placed on the watchlist, not now that he’d shot up the Louvre.

  Whenever the minders showed up, they’d turn off the television, and Emily would retreat to the bathroom and run the shower. After she’d forced, or cajoled – Perry wasn’t quite sure how to describe her technique – Rémy to allow an embassy official to visit her, and bring her an embassy phone, she became much more interested in the ambient noise within the suite. An open window in the other bedroom admitted enough street noise to drown out a quiet conversation, even on the fifth floor.

  None of the TV news shows spoke to him, since they merely recycled the same images of the exterior of the Louvre, which no explosion had damaged, thanks to his as yet unacknowledged efforts. Cameras showed official vehicles entering the Carrousel and men in tactical gear guarded the entrances. The faces of political figures cycled across the screen, and one or two of these were familiar even to him from election coverage, including the Front National candidate, who was particularly animated in her interviews. But no insight into the events of the previous day could be gleaned from the looping broadcasts. It was almost a relief when the minders switched them off.

  He walked into the bedroom to get away from them, and maybe listen at the door to the bathroom – or to make sure no one else could – but there was no way for him to follow a call that shifted between English, Japanese, and Chinese at almost every sentence. Later, she’d call Michael again, and that conversation would have to be in English exclusively, and she’d be even more careful about creating an acoustic barrier for whatever listening devices had been installed. At this moment, however, he thought she was sobbing.

  “They’re safe in London.” Emily pulled him into the steamy bathroom and whispered close to his ear.

  “Mrs. Cardano, too?”

  “No… no sign of Andie yet. But the kids and my mom are out of the reach of French security agencies. That’s the first step.”

  “What’s Michael going to do?”

  It was a reasonable question, but she didn’t seem to want to turn her mind to it yet. She pressed a finger to his lips, and then lifted his shirt above his head. The water had been running for what seemed like hours, and he knew she’d been using it to drown out her words. But now she actually wanted to shower, and before he could register any objection – as if he’d object – she’d stripped the two of them down and pulled him behind the curtain. She kissed him occasionally, ran soap through his hair, and said almost nothing, and it occurred to him that they hadn’t slept or bathed for a day and a half.

  Emily nudged him awake a few minutes or several hours later – he couldn’t really tell, since the ambiguous twilight could have been morning or evening. Another moment brought her face into focus, and her dark eyes, and the world began to make sense again. She pulled the bed sheet over their heads and kissed away his questions.

  “How long was I…”

  She reached out from under the sheet to switch on the clock radio. When a folk song came over the air, she whispered, “You looked exhausted. We need to be strong… for what we have to do next.”

  “What exactly do we…”

  She kissed him again. “Rémy’s men are gone, finally. I think maybe they got embarrassed.”

  “Are you thinking we should make a run for it?”

  “I’m sure he’s got men in the hallway, or in the lobby. Michael thinks we should stay put for now.”

  “Has he been in contact with the French about Mrs.…”

  “No. He thinks there’s a problem… you know, in their command structure.”

  “A problem?”

  “It’s about the Mini-14s. You were right about how tightly controlled that supply chain is. He thinks it means someone in the Police Nationale must have had a hand…”

  “An inside man? You’ve got to be kidding me.” She kissed him again, when he spoke too loudly.

  “What can I say… it was your intel.”

  “Shit. Where the hell does that leave us?”

  “Not trusting the damn French, that’s for sure. Michael is working with a friend in the SAS.”

  “The SAS?”

  “Yeah, you
know, MI-6.”

  “What the hell can British Intelligence do for us in France?”

  “He says they have the best signals intel in the region. He’s afraid if we identify Andie to the French, and it gets back to whoever took her, it raises the stakes too high. So, for now, we’re on our own.”

  “What sort of SIGINT is he hoping for? Those guys were organized, sure, but they’re not likely to be doing much comms now, are they? I mean, if there’s any SIGINT, the French, or maybe MI-6 should have been working it before the attack.”

  “You remember what I said about finding Andie’s mobile phone all smashed up. He says she would know to remove the GPS chip. Apparently Ethan showed her how to get it to chirp with a battery.”

  “You’re kidding?”

  “Nope. All the family phones are tracked with a special chip, with a unique ID. If she thought they were going to take her phone, she might have taken out the chip.”

  “That’s a helluva long shot. I mean if she even thought to do that, we’re hoping to pick out a chirp from all the surrounding noise, and it’s what, maybe two seconds long before it burns out?”

  “I know,” she said, and buried her face into his chest underneath the sheets.

  He wrapped his arms around her, to protect her from the one thought he hadn’t put into words, that Andie might already have been killed. This was a side of her nobody else ever saw, an unguarded moment, a tiny tremor in the chin pressed up against his sternum. In another moment, he knew she’d have rebuilt the steely façade the rest of the world experienced.

  “Michael wants us to sit tight here, right? But that’s not what you have in mind, is it?”

  “I know the odds are long, but there’s no way I’m sitting quietly in some hotel room.” She rolled over and picked up the phone from the bedside table. “Breakfast for six,” she said, once someone who spoke English came on the line. “Coffee and fruit, too, please.”