by Lee Child
a tan and a guileless smile. Rozan, presumably, the Israeli, no longer a suspect. He skimmed the remaining three across the table, in my direction. First up was a shavenheaded guy of about fifty, with a face as blank as a two-by-four, and dark eyes that tilted slightly at the outer corners. Mongolian blood in there somewhere.
‘Fyodor Datsev,’ O’Day said. ‘Fifty-two years old. Born in Siberia.’
Then came a guy who might have started out pale, but who had gotten lined and darkened by sun and wind. Short brown hair, a watchful gaze, a busted nose, and a half-smile that was either ironic or threatening, depending on how you chose to look at it.
‘William Carson,’ O’Day said. ‘Born in London, forty-eight years old.’
Last up was John Kott. Some people got bigger with age, bloated and doughy, like Shoemaker for instance, but Kott had gotten smaller, wirier, boiled down to muscle and sinew. His Czech cheekbones were prominent, and his mouth was a tight line. Only his eyes had gotten bigger. They blazed out at me.
O’Day said, ‘That’s his prison release picture. The most recent we have.’
An unsavoury trio. I butted the photographs into a stack and slid them back.
I said, ‘How are the Brits doing with their moat?’
Scarangello said, ‘They’re not going to enforce a mile perimeter. You know how densely populated Great Britain is. It would be like emptying Manhattan. It’s not going to happen.’
‘So what next?’
O’Day said, ‘You go to Paris.’
‘When?’
‘Now.’
‘As bait or a cop?’
‘Both. But mostly we need eyeballs on the crime scene. In case something was missed.’
‘Why would they show me anything? I’m nobody.’
‘Your name will get you in anywhere. I called ahead. Anything they’d show me, they’ll show you. Such is the power of O’Day. Especially now.’
I said nothing.
Shoemaker said, ‘You speak French, am I right?’
I said, ‘Yes.’
‘And English.’
‘A little.’
‘Russian?’
‘Why?’
‘The Brits and the Russians are sending people too. You’re bound to meet. Get what you can from them, but don’t give anything away.’
‘Maybe they’ve been given the same instructions.’
O’Day said, ‘We need a CIA presence,’ and Casey Nice sat forward in her chair.
Joan Scarangello said, ‘I’ll go.’
THIRTEEN
THEY GAVE US the same plane, but a fresh crew. Two new guys in the cockpit, and a new flight attendant, this one a woman, all of them in air force fatigues. I got on board straight out of the shower, in my new clothes from Arkansas, and Scarangello followed me five minutes later, showered too, in another black skirt suit. She had a small wheeled suitcase with her, and a purse. It was going to be an overnight flight, seven hours in the air plus six time zones, which would get us in at nine in the morning, French time. My usual armchair had been laid flat and butted up against the armchair opposite, which had also been laid flat, to make a couch. The same thing had been done to the pair of chairs on the other side of the cabin. There were pillows and sheets and blankets. Two long thin beds, separated by a narrow aisle. Which worked for me. Scarangello didn’t look so sure. She was a woman of a certain age and a certain type. I think she might have appreciated a little more privacy.
But first we had to sit on regular chairs, at a table, for takeoff, and then we stayed there, because the flight attendant told us there were meals to be eaten. Which didn’t match the surroundings. They were not the culinary equivalents of butterscotch leather and walnut veneer. They were not army issue, either. Or air force. They were burgers, in cardboard clamshell boxes, reheated in the on-board microwave, unrecognizable and off-brand, presumably bought from a shack near Pope’s main gate. Maybe right next to the Dunkin’ Donuts.
I ate mine, and then half of Scarangello’s, after she left it. Then she started working out how to get herself into bed without embarrassment. I saw her eyes darting all around, checking angles, looking at the lighting, figuring out where I would be and what I might see.
I said, ‘I’ll go first.’
The bathroom was through the galley, all the way in back, ahead of the luggage hold, where they had stashed her bag. I used the head and brushed my teeth, and walked back to the bedroom area, and chose the bed on the starboard side. I took off my shoes and socks, because I sleep better that way, and I lay down on top of the blanket, and I rolled on my side and faced the wall.
Scarangello took the hint. I heard her go, all stiff swishing from wool and nylon, and then later I heard her pad back, softer, probably in cotton, and I heard her get in bed and arrange the sheets. She made a little sound, somewhere halfway between a sleepy murmur and a cough, which I took to be an announcement, like OK, thanks, I’m all set now, so I rolled on my back and looked up at the bulkhead above me.
She said, ‘Do you always sleep outside the covers?’
I said, ‘When it’s warm.’
‘Do you always sleep in your clothes?’
‘No choice, in a situation like this.’
‘Because you have no pyjamas. No home, no bags, no possessions. We had a briefing about you.’
I said, ‘Casey Nice told me that.’ I rolled back towards the wall a little, adjusting my position for comfort, and something dug into my hip. Something in my pocket. Not my toothbrush, which was in my other pocket. I lifted up and checked.
The pill bottle. I cupped it in my palm, and looked at the label, in the dim light, purely out of interest. I guess I was expecting allergy medicine, perhaps carried in anticipation of spring pollens in the woods of Arkansas, or else painkillers, perhaps carried after dental work or a muscle strain. But the label said Zoloft, which I was pretty sure was for neither allergies nor pain. I was pretty sure Zoloft was for stress. Or for anxiety. Or for depression or panic attacks, or PTSD, or OCD. Heavy duty, and prescription only.
But it wasn’t Casey Nice’s prescription. The name on the label wasn’t hers. It was a man’s name: Antonio Luna.
Scarangello said, ‘What did you think of our Ms Nice?’
I put the bottle back in my pocket.
I said, ‘Nice by name, nice by nature.’
‘Too nice?’
‘You worried about that?’
‘Potentially.’
‘She did fine in Arkansas. The neighbour didn’t get to her.’
‘How would she have done if you hadn’t been there?’
‘The same, probably. Different dynamic, similar result.’
‘That’s good to know.’
‘Is she your protégée?’
Scarangello said, ‘I never met her before. And I wouldn’t necessarily have chosen her. But she was who we had at State, so she fit the bill.’
I said, ‘These world leader guys risk getting shot all the time. It’s the cost of doing business. And protection is better than ever now. I don’t understand the big panic.’
‘Our briefing indicated you’re a competent mathematician.’
‘Then your briefing was incorrect. High-school arithmetic was as far as I got.’
‘Area of a circle with a fourteen-hundred-yard radius?’
I smiled in the dark. Pi times the radius squared. I said, ‘Very nearly two square miles.’
‘Average population density in major Western city centres?’
Which was neither math nor arithmetic, but general knowledge. I said, ‘Forty thousand people per square mile?’
‘You’re behind the times. Closer to fifty thousand now, plus or minus. Parts of London and Paris are already seventy thousand. On average they’d have to lock down tens of thousands of rooftops and windows and a hundred thousand people. Can’t be done. A gifted long-range rifleman is their worst nightmare.’
‘Except for the bulletproof glass.’
Scarangello nodded in t
he dark. I heard her head move on her pillow. She said, ‘It protects the flanks, but not the front or the rear. And politicians don’t like it. It makes them look scared. Which they are. But they don’t want people to know that.’
It’s not the same with a sniper out there.
I asked, ‘Did anyone know for sure the glass would work?’
Scarangello said, ‘The manufacturer claimed it would. Some experts were sceptical.’
My turn to nod in the dark. I would have been sceptical. Fifty-calibre rounds are very powerful. They were developed for the Browning machine gun, which can fell trees. I said, ‘Sleep well.’
Scarangello said, ‘Fat chance.’
We landed in bright spring sunshine at Le Bourget, which the flight attendant told us was the busiest private airfield in Europe. The plane taxied towards two black cars parked on their own. Citroëns, I thought. Not limousines exactly, but certainly long and low and shiny. Five men were standing near them, all a little windblown and huddled and flinching from the noise. Two were obviously drivers, and two were gendarmes in uniform, and the last was a silver-haired gentleman in a fine suit. The plane rolled on and then stopped, and a minute later the engines shut down, and the five guys straightened up and stepped forward in anticipation. The flight attendant got busy with the door, and Scarangello stood up in the aisle and handed me a cell phone.
‘Call me if you need me,’ she said.
‘On what number?’ I said.
‘It’s in there.’
‘Are we going different places?’
‘Of course we are,’ she said. ‘You’re looking at the crime scene and I’m going to the DGSE.’
I nodded. The Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure. The French version of the CIA. No better, no worse, overall. A competent organization. A courtesy call on Scarangello’s part, presumably, and probably a high-level exchange of information as well. Or lack thereof.
‘Plus I’m bait,’ I said.
‘Only incidentally,’ she said.
‘Casey Nice came with me to Arkansas.’
‘Seven feet away.’
I nodded again. ‘Which is harder in apartment doorways.’
‘He’s in London,’ Scarangello said. ‘Whichever one it is.’
The plane door opened and morning air blew in, cool and fresh, lightly scented with jet fuel. The attendant stood back out the way, and Scarangello went first, pausing a second on the top step, every inch the visiting dignitary. Then she continued down, and I followed her. The silver-haired guy in the suit greeted her. They obviously knew each other. Maybe he was her exact equivalent. Maybe they had done business before. They got in the back of the first Citroën together, and one of the drivers got in the front and drove them away. Then the two gendarmes in uniform stepped up in front of me and waited, politely and expectantly. I fished my stiff new passport out of my pocket and handed it over. One guy thumbed it open and they both glanced at the printed name, and the photograph, and my face, and then the guy gave it back, two-handed, like a ceremonial offering. Neither one of them actually bowed or clicked his heels, but a casual observer would have sworn both of them did. Such was the power of O’Day.
The second driver opened the door for me and I slid into the back of the second Citroën. He drove me away, through black mesh gates, past a terminal building, and out to the road.
Le Bourget is closer to downtown, but the giant civilian Charles de Gaulle airport is farther out on the same road, northeast of the city, so traffic was bad. There was a crawling nose-to-tail stream of cars and taxis, all of them heading for town. Most of the taxi drivers looked Vietnamese, many of them women, some of them with lone passengers in the back, some of them with groups fresh from joyful reunions at the arrivals door. Straddling the road were overhead electronic signs warning of congestion, and advising attention aux vents en rafales, which meant beware of some kind of wind, but I couldn’t remember what rafales meant exactly, until from time to time I saw cars suddenly rocking on the road and flags suddenly snapping on the buildings, and I recalled it meant gusts.
My driver asked, ‘Sir, do you have everything you need?’
Which in an existential sense was a very big question, but I had no immediate requirements, so I just nodded in the mirror and stayed quiet. In fact I was hungry and short on coffee, but I figured those problems would resolve themselves fast enough. I figured the morning flights from London would get in a little after me, and the morning flights from Moscow later still, and that the Paris cops wouldn’t want to schedule three separate dog-and-pony shows at the crime scene, so we would all go there together, which meant I would likely have time for a decent breakfast before my Russian and British counterparts showed up. I would be taken to a hotel to wait, no doubt, something suitable for a police department budget, and there would be cafés nearby, all of them pleasant. Paris was a pleasant city, in my opinion. I was looking forward to the day ahead.
Then it arrived.
FOURTEEN
WE CROSSED THE Périphérique, which is Paris’s version of D.C.’s Beltway, where the city changes from a Eurotrash mess outside to a vast living museum inside, all tree-lined streets and grand preserved buildings and ornate ironmongery. We came down the rue de Flandre, and onward, aiming for the gap between the Gare du Nord and the Gare de l’Est railroad stations. Once there the driver went into full-on urban mode and dodged left and right through tiny side streets, before coming to a stop at a green door in a narrow alley off a road named rue Monsigny, which I figured by dead reckoning was about halfway between the back of the Louvre and the front of the Opéra. The green door had a small brass plaque next to it which said Pension Pelletier. A pension was a modest hotel, somewhere between a rooming house and a bed and breakfast. Suitable for a police department budget.
My driver said, ‘They’re expecting you, monsieur.’
I said, ‘Thanks,’ and opened the door and climbed out to the sidewalk. The sun was weak and the air was neither warm nor cold. The car drove away. I ignored the green door for the time being and stepped back out of the alley to rue Monsigny. Directly opposite me another narrow street came in at a tight angle, creating a small triangle of surplus sidewalk, and like all such unconsidered spaces in Paris it had been colonized by a café, with tables and chairs set out under umbrellas, and like all such Paris cafés at that time of the morning it was about a third full of patrons, most of them inert behind newspapers, and empty cups, and plates dusted with croissant flakes. I stepped over and sat down at a vacant table, and a minute later an elderly waiter in a white shirt and a black bow tie and a long white apron came over, and I ordered breakfast, a large pot of coffee as anchor, accompanied by a croque madame, which was ham and cheese on toast with a fried egg on top, and two pains au chocolat, which were rectangular croissants with sticks of bitter chocolate in them. Tough duty, but someone had to do it.
Two tables away a guy was reading the inside of his morning paper, leaving the front page facing me, and I saw from the headline that the assassination panic was indeed over, like Casey Nice had said it would be. Tomorrow it will be yesterday’s news. An arrest had been made, the perp was in custody, the matter was resolved, the world could relax. I was too far away to read on into the fine print, but I was sure the story would be all about a lone fanatic with an unfamiliar North African name, an amateur, a crackpot, no connections, no need to worry. That should calm things down. Which will give us time and space to work.
I ate my food and drank my coffee and watched the mouth of the alley. The vents en rafales kept on coming, periodically, the umbrella above my table flapping furiously for a second, and then subsiding. Plenty of people passed by on foot, on their way to work or from the store, carrying sticks of bread, or walking tiny dogs, or delivering mail or packages. The waiter cleared my plates and brought me more coffee. Then eventually a black Citroën similar to my own nosed into the alley and stopped at the green door. The passenger in the back paused a beat, no doubt being told They’
re expecting you, monsieur, and then he climbed out and stood still on the sidewalk. He was a guy of average size, maybe fifty years old, with a fresh shave and short salt-and-pepper hair neatly combed, and he was wearing a plaid muffler and a tan Burberry trench coat, below which were pant legs of fine grey cloth, probably part of a Savile Row suit, below which were English shoes the colour of horse chestnuts, buffed up to a gleaming shine.
Which made him the Russian, I thought. No Brit operative would dress that way, unless he was trying out for a part in a James Bond movie. And the new Moscow had plenty of luxury apparel stores. Apparatchiks had never had it better. His car backed up and drove away. He looked at the green door for a moment, and then just as I had done he turned away from it and headed out towards the café, checking its patrons as he walked, his eyes moving left and right and resting on each person less than a split second before moving on to the next. Quick and dirty assessments, but evidently accurate, because he walked straight up to me and said in English, ‘Are you the American?’
I nodded and said, ‘I figured the Brit would get in before you.’
‘I didn’t,’ the guy said. ‘Because I left in the middle of the damn night.’ Then he stuck out his hand and said, ‘Yevgeniy Khenkin. Pleased to meet you, sir. You can call me Eugene. Which would be the direct translation. Gene, for short, if you like.’
I shook his hand and said, ‘Jack Reacher.’
He sat down on my left side and said, ‘So what do you make of all this shit?’
His diction was good, and his accent was neutral. Not really British,