by Tom Clancy
“I need these altered,” Fisher replied, dropping the driver’s licenses for the Doucet gang down on the table.
Boutin waddled over, snatched up the licenses, studied each in turn, then shrugged. “Easy enough. You have pictures?”
Fisher handed him the strip he’d taken in a do-it-yourself photo booth.
“The usual names?” Boutin asked.
“No, these.” Fisher handed him a typewritten list.
“How soon?”
“How much?”
“Depends on how soon.”
“Later this afternoon.”
“Sixteen hundred for all.”
“Eight hundred.”
“Out of the question. Fourteen.”
“One thousand, and let’s be done with it. I’m sure you don’t want me here any longer than is absolutely necessary.”
This did the trick. Boutin waggled his head from side to side, thinking, then nodded. “Come back at five.”
Fisher walked the half mile toward the city center, to a Sixt rental car agency on Aristide Briand, rented a white Ford Fiesta, then drove north out of the city on the D931. He reached Verdun just after noon. One of the handful of forgers on par with Boutin lived in an apartment near the quai de Londres on the Meuse River.
During World War II, Verdun and Reims were informal sister cities, together having been fortified into a loosely connected defensive line. Verdun’s other claim to fame, one which was not found in many guidebooks, was that Adolf Hitler had served briefly in Verdun during World War I.
Fisher found Emmanuel Chenevier in a postage-stamp courtyard off his ground-floor apartment, apparently asleep in a redwood lounger, a copy of The Count of Monte Cristo lying open on his chest. As Fisher approached, Chenevier turned his head, shaded his eyes with one hand, and smiled.
“Afternoon, Sam.”
“Emmanuel.”
Chenevier was not only the one man in France who knew his true identity, but also one of the only “off the books” friends he had here. An old Cold War veteran, Chenevier had spent thirty years in the DGSE, the Direction générale de la sécurite extérieure (General directorate for external security). They’d become friends in the early nineties and had stayed in touch. Chenevier was a loyal Frenchman down to his bones, and while he knew Fisher had been disavowed, they’d struck a bargain: Fisher wouldn’t harm Chenevier’s beloved “Hexagone,” and Chenevier would keep his secret.
“Please sit down, Sam.” Fisher took the other lounger. “You cut your hair,” Chenevier said. “And your beard . . . I can’t recall the last time I’ve seen your face. You’re moving on?”
“Soon.”
“You need documents?”
“Alteration.”
“Our bargain still stands, yes?”
“Of course. Had a situation in Reims yesterday, but nothing you wouldn’t have done.”
Chenevier pursed his lips. “I saw something on the news this morning. Some injured men in a warehouse?”
Fisher nodded.
“They deserved it?”
“They deserved worse.”
“I have trouble imagining such a thing, Sam. As I recall, one of them had his arms and legs broken: tibia and femur in both legs, radius and ulna in both arms. They found him strapped to a table.”
“I thought there were three bones in the arm: radius, ulna, and humerus.”
“So there are. Sam, you frighten me sometimes.”
Fisher didn’t reply. Chenevier let it go. “Let’s go inside. I’ll make us some lunch.”
AFTERWARD, Chenevier looked through Fisher’s take from Doucet’s warehouse, separating the items into piles: credit cards, driver’s licenses, passports, and, as Fisher had already discovered, a surprise: thirty or so cell phone SIM (subscriber identity module) cards.
“These could be handy,” Chenevier said with a low whistle. “I’ll have to check them, of course, but if even a few are usable, you’ll be like a ghost. As for the credit cards—”
“Just need them for reservations. Hotels and cars.”
“I can do that. A few of the driver’s licenses might be of use—”
“Forget those. I’ve already been to see Boutin.”
Chenevier frowned. “He’s untrustworthy, Sam. And when he sees the news about that warehouse business . . .”
“I know. He won’t make the call until I’m gone, though.”
Chenevier smiled. “You’re right, of course. Monsieur Boutin has a finely honed sense of self-preservation, doesn’t he? Why go to him at all?”
“I need to shake the tree. See what falls out.”
“Ah, I understand. The passports are your safest course.”
“Agreed.”
“I can get six to eight out of this bunch. When do you need them?”
“Day after tomorrow.”
“D’accord.”
“I can give you—”
“You can give me nothing, Sam.”
“Merci, Emmanuel.”
“You look tired. Tell me: Will you ever be able to go home again?”
Fisher considered this. “I don’t know.”
FROM Verdun, he drove north and west, meandering his way through the villages of Forges-sur-Meuse, Gercourt-et-Drillancourt, and Montfaucon-d’Argonne before turning back toward Reims. While he doubted he would be using an alternate route to the border, the more familiar he was with the countryside, the better. Chances were, his dash from Reims would take him straight to Villerupt and Russange, but he was also aware of the old adage “No battle plan survives contact with the enemy,” and unless he was wrong about Boutin, the enemy would soon be here.
Only two questions remained: How good would they be? And what would be their orders?
HE was back at Boutin’s apartment shortly after five. The forger had the altered licenses ready. Fisher checked them, then handed over the money. “Nice work.”
“I am aware. So, where will you go from here?”
“Who said I’m going anywhere?”
“I just assumed. . . .” Boutin gestured to the forged licenses.
Fisher shrugged. “Switzerland . . . Italy. I’ve got a friend who has a villa in Tuscany.”
“A lovely place, Tuscany. When will you be leaving?”
“Tomorrow or the day after.”
“Well, safe travels.”
FISHER left Boutin’s apartment and walked down the block to Jules, a clothing store on the corner of de Vesles and Marx Dormoy, and spent fifteen minutes perusing the racks by the window overlooking both entrances to passage Saint-Jacques until Boutin emerged from the courtyard. Being the devout indoorsman he was, the forger took the shortest route to the nearest cabine, or telephone booth, where he spent thirty seconds before retracing his route to his apartment.
Good boy, Abelard.
LIKE Emmanuel Chenevier, Boutin the Gnome would have little trouble with arithmetic. The man he knows as François Dayreis arrives at his apartment with five driver’s licenses, and within hours those same names appear in the news: a brutal assault on the outskirts of Reims. A lone perpetrator. François Dayreis was more trouble than he was worth—a customer whose continuing business was more a liability than an asset to Boutin. By the time he’d placed his anonymous call to the authorities, Boutin had probably suspended his business and secreted his tools and materials. If Dayreis was captured and tried to implicate him, all the police would find was an old man running a fly-tying business in his basement apartment. As is the nature of their trade, forgers know how to hide things.
Now came the waiting. Boutin would be visited; of that Fisher was certain. His cutout had been clear about that much. The timelines and scope of the response would be telling. Who? How many? And, most important, what were their rules of engagement?
Fisher checked his watch: almost 7:00 P.M. Boutin was savvy; he wouldn’t have said anything to the authorities about forged documents, but rather that he knew of the man described on the news. François Dayreis was his name. The report
would go to the local police, the Police municipale, who would pass on the tip to the Police nationale. As Doucet and his cohorts would have reported the theft of their driver’s licenses (but not the loss of their satchel full of stolen IDs, passports, and SIM cards), the Police nationale would assume the attacker planned to use the stolen licenses, which would necessitate the involvement of Interpol and the Direction centrale du renseignement intérieur (Central directorate of interior intelligence), or DCRI, France’s version of the FBI. From there, electronic ears would take note of the name François Dayreis and alarms would be raised. In all, Fisher estimated he had six hours before someone in the United States pushed the panic button.
3
FISHER was awoken by the cricket chirp of his iPhone. Having set the ringtone to match only one incoming number, he knew the alert meant visitors had arrived. He checked the time: 11:15 P.M. He sat up in bed and looked around, momentarily confused by his surroundings—the by-product of moving around so much. The decor and layout of chain hotel rooms tended to blur together.
The good news was that the visitors weren’t his but rather Boutin’s. The night before, Fisher had planted a homemade motion detector around Boutin’s apartment door: the tremble sensor from a vehicle’s antitheft GPS tracker wired to a prepaid cell phone. The tremble sensor was buried beneath Boutin’s doormat, and the cell phone buried against the wall a few feet away, its antenna jutting up among some weeds. Lacking the technological edge that working for 3E had provided, Fisher had, during the last year, become a fair inventor.
Having adopted the habit of sleeping in his clothes, he had only to grab his rucksack and head for the door.
HIS hotel, the Monopole, was a couple hundred yards north of Boutin’s apartment, on place Drouet d’Erlon. The proximity was a risk, he knew, but having disposed of the François Dayreis alias and checked into the Monopole with one of Emmanuel’s superbly altered passports, he felt relatively secure.
Outside, the streets were deserted and dark, save the yellow glow of the streetlamps reflecting on the damp cobblestones. He walked north, turned right onto rue de l’Etape, then immediately left into passage Subé, which took him south along an alley lined with boutiques and side entrances to restaurants until he was within sight of rue Condorcet. He stopped a hundred feet short and found a darkened doorway. Across the street lay a kebab restaurant, and to the left of it the tree-lined northern entrance to the courtyard outside Boutin’s apartment.
From his rucksack he withdrew his EOS 1D Mark III. He affixed the AstroScope Night Vision, powered up the Canon, and brought the viewfinder up to his eye. In the greenish glow of the NV, he scanned the courtyard. Standing so still was the figure that he passed it twice before he realized what he was seeing. Japanese, medium build, shaved head—in his mid-twenties, too young to be bald. An aesthetic choice. Fisher zoomed in, switched the selector to burst mode, and pressed the shutter button. He stayed focused on the man, waiting to see if he was smoking or waiting for someone, but for a full two minutes the man stayed stock-still. Disciplined. The man had “operator” written all over him.
Fisher moved on, scanning deeper into the courtyard. There were too many trees. If he was right about the Japanese guy, there would be others. This one was covering the northern entrance to the courtyard. . . . Would he have partners at the west and south entrances? Time to move.
Moving with exaggerated slowness, Fisher backed out of his doorway and retraced his steps until he reached the intersection of passage Subé and passage Talleyrand, where he turned west. He emerged back on Drouet d’Erlon, just south of his hotel, turned left through the square, around the fountain at its center, then onto Marx Dormoy. Ten feet from the west entrance to the courtyard, Fisher stopped short. He scanned his flanks with the Canon, then moved up and peeked with the AstroScope around the corner.
Like the Japanese man, this one was hidden in the trees directly across from Boutin’s apartment door. She, too, was as still as a statue, save her eyes, which kept up a constant scan. Fisher shot a burst of her, then zoomed in and panned left. He stopped, panned back. In the NV, there was no way to be sure of the hair color, but the face looked familiar. . . . He zoomed in again. Kimberly Gillespie. Fisher lowered the camera from his face, took a deep breath, and squeezed his eyes shut. His situation had just gotten exponentially more complicated. Damn.
Fisher retraced his steps again: north to the square, then left and left again down rue Théodore Dubois to where it intersected rue de Vesles, then east for a hundred yards to the ATM just outside the courtyard’s southern entrance.
He ducked down, crab-walked up the alley gate, and peeked around the corner and into the alley.
He froze.
The third watcher was standing thirty feet away, just inside the archway. Fisher kept still, barely breathing, until his eyes readjusted to the darkness and he could see a silhouette of the figure’s face: thin and wiry with a hawk nose. Another familiar face? Fisher waited until the face rotated left, toward the interior of the courtyard; then he raised the AstroScope and zoomed in. The face turned again, back toward Fisher and into three-quarter profile. Fisher took a quick burst, then lowered the camera and froze. The man’s eyes seemed to fix on Fisher’s position. Five seconds passed. Ten. Thirty seconds. The face rotated again. Fisher ducked back and let out his breath.
He brought the Canon up to his face and switched on the LCD screen. He clicked through the last series of pictures. No mistake. He knew this one, too: Allen Ames. As it invariably did, the name caused Fisher’s subconscious to start whispering. Something about Ames didn’t sit right.
Fisher brought his mind back on track. So, three on overwatch, which meant at least one person inside talking to Boutin—no, there’d be two inside with Boutin, so five in all. One team leader and two pairs. A standard field team. There was no doubt about the opposition now.
Next: transportation. They wouldn’t rely on taxis or mass transit, which meant rental cars, at least two of them. Using the AstroScope, Fisher scanned up and down rue de Vesles; the street was under partial construction with temporary NO PARKING signs every thirty feet. The cars would be close, but not too close. A quarter mile or less.
Fisher started walking.
It took fifteen minutes. On rue de Thillois, a few hundred yards southeast of Boutin’s apartment, he found a blue Opel and a green Renault parked nose to tail. Both bore Europcar CDG stickers—Paris’s Charles de Gaulle airport. This told him something. Someone had been lazy with tradecraft.
Fisher walked to the park across and down the street and found his spot: a bench sheltered by the low-hanging boughs of a tree with a clear sight line to the cars. He did a quick circuit of the park, checking approaches, exits, and angles; then he returned to the bench, pulled a rolled-up newspaper from his pocket, lay down, and covered himself with a hobo blanket. He completed the disguise with a half-consumed bottle of wine, which he placed on the ground beside the bench’s leg.
Twenty minutes later the Japanese man and Kimberly appeared to the east on rue de Thillois. They were a quarter mile away and heading toward the cars. Fisher looked around. Where are you? . . . There. Fifty yards to the west, at the corner of rue des Poissonniers, stood a wiry figure. Ames. Good tradecraft. Kimberly and her partner—Fisher had started thinking of him as a Japanese Vin Diesel—would do a walk by of the cars, looking for signs of tampering or surveillance while Ames did the same from his static position.
At the next intersection, Kimberly and Vin split up: Kimberly going straight ahead, Vin crossing over. As she passed the Opel and the Renault, she reached up with her left hand and adjusted her beret: an “all okay” signal to Vin, who replied by taking his right hand out of his pocket. Vin reached Ames’s corner and turned left. Kimberly kept walking, crossed the intersection, then took up position in a sunken doorway before a pharmacy. She muttered something—into her SVT (subvocal transceiver), he assumed—then went still, watching. This, Fisher knew, would be the final check-in with Vin
and Ames before everyone rallied back at the cars. A nice bit of discipline. It was all too easy to dismiss such precautions as excessive—which they often are—but overcautiousness was an operator’s best friend, one of those habits that would, if you stayed in the business long enough, save your life one day. Fisher had seen the lack of it kill plenty of otherwise good spooks.
Who would it be? Fisher wondered. So far he recognized two of the three opposing players. Would he recognize the other two? He’d know soon enough. He tried to look ahead, tried to visualize the surrounding streets as a chessboard, placing Kimberly and Ames on their respective squares. Vin was still moving, probably circling the block; they’d want to triangulate on the cars’ position. . . . There. Vin appeared at the intersection to the west and stopped, taking up a static overwatch post. That meant the team leader and the remaining team member would be coming from the north, probably down rue Jeanne d’Arc.
As if on cue, two figures turned the corner opposite Vin and started toward the cars. Fisher remained perfectly still. The team would be at its most alert now, as it reunited. Eggs in a basket.
When the new pair was fifty feet from the cars, Vin, Ames, and Kimberly left their posts, collapsing toward the cars. The newest pair, a man and woman Fisher could now see, reached the Opel. The woman, a blonde, peeled off and walked around to the driver’s side. Vin was right behind her, getting into the rear as the woman unlocked the doors. The man walked around the front of the Renault to the driver’s door. Kimberly walked past Fisher’s position, got in the front passenger seat as Ames got in the rear. Fisher lifted the AstroScope, focused on the Renault’s driver, shot a burst, then lowered the camera.
Within seconds, the cars pulled out and drove down the block. At the intersection the Renault headed north, the Opel south. Once the engines faded, Fisher called up the last batch of shots on the Canon’s LCD. In all but two of the pictures the driver’s face was partially obscured by a patch of reflection on the Renault’s windshield. The last two were enough. Fisher smiled. Ben Hansen. A decent choice for team leader. Nice to see you alive, Ben. Fisher hoped he didn’t regret playing a part in this.