The Take

by Christopher Reich

  “Seems they’re more desperate than we are,” replied Neill.

  “The person she called was in Yasenevo. I wasn’t familiar with the name, so I looked it up.”

  “Now you know who we’re up against.”

  “The SVR.” There he’d said it.

  “Sounds about right.”

  Simon exhaled loudly as he walked to the window. The sky was cloudless. The Arc de Triomphe was a few blocks in one direction. The River Seine in the other. All he had to do was say “I quit,” wire Neill back his money, and the job would be over. He could spend the rest of the day visiting the Louvre, strolling through the Jardin du Luxembourg, or even take the elevator to the top of the Eiffel Tower. He could be a tourist like everyone else in town at this time of year.

  And then what?

  He looked at his overnight bag and his case of electronic gear sitting by the door.

  And then he’d have failed. He’d have failed Ambassador Shea at the London embassy. He’d have failed Barnaby Neill, and he’d have failed his country. Of course, there was more to it than that. It was no longer just about the letter. Maybe, as he’d admitted to Nikki, it never had been. Should he quit, he’d no longer have the ticket he needed to go after Tino Coluzzi, and by “ticket” he meant the official permission. The monsignor would not approve of revenge for revenge’s sake.

  “I have a picture of her,” he said. “It’s blurry. I need you to clean it up.”

  “Send it over and I’ll do my best,” replied Neill.

  “Just do it fast. If she’s anywhere near me, I’d like to think I have a chance.”

  “Does she have any idea that you’ve seen her?”

  “Not that I’m aware of.”

  “And did she see you?”

  “There’s a chance she got a look at me in the bar. We have to assume that Falconi told her I was asking about Coluzzi, too.”

  “How long did you speak with him?”

  “A couple of minutes. Five tops.”

  “She’d have to be awfully perceptive to put two and two together.”

  Simon thought back on the past night. While she might not have noticed Falconi speaking with him earlier, she wouldn’t have missed Falconi, Jack, and the other two thugs escorting him outside for their little tête-à-tête. She might even have been standing in the crowd that had witnessed the fight. But that was Simon’s problem. “You’re right about that,” he said.

  “Keep at it. Try and be as quiet as possible.”

  “Things may get noisier when I hit Marseille.” Simon made it a point not to mention Nikki Perez. Neill had been clear in his instructions not to involve a foreign law enforcement agency. Simon justified asking for Marc Dumont’s help by not having revealed who his employer was or the true reason for his visit. He was certain Neill would object to his enlisting Nikki in his efforts. It was a rule never to disobey a client. He still needed her help, even if not entirely for the right reasons.

  “There’s more. I found several phone numbers in Falconi’s apartment. My guess is that they belong to Coluzzi. Falconi was his man in Paris. He’d have to know how to reach his boss. If Coluzzi uses any of the numbers, I want to know what he’s saying and where he is.”

  “That’s a tall order.”

  “A man like you should need one call to see it done.”

  “It’s not that simple.”

  “Are you saying the NSA doesn’t have the capabilities?”

  “I’m saying that the NSA has a backlog of requests a mile high.”

  “Then I’m guessing what’s in that envelope isn’t as important as you thought,” said Simon.

  “You might want to take that up with the person who dispatched Mr. Falconi.”

  “It’s time you told me what I’m going after.”

  “You know who’s involved. You’ve seen what they are capable of. I’ll let you use your imagination.”

  “Mr. Neill—”

  “Mr. Riske.” The voice was curt and commanding. “Listen to me. Once you know it, you can’t un-know it. There are people who wouldn’t be happy that you have that knowledge in your head.”

  “Are you one of them?”

  “I trust you implicitly or you wouldn’t have been offered the job.”

  “You sure about that?”

  “I’ll see what I can do about the phone numbers.”

  “Thank you.”

  “When are you off to Marseille?”

  “Nine. Arrive at one.”

  “Keep in touch.”

  Chapter 40

  Nikki lived alone in a fourth-floor duplex on an unloved street a few blocks from the Montparnasse Tower. The apartment was barely three hundred square feet—a bit bigger than two shoe boxes stacked on top of each other, but not much. The bottom floor had a kitchen on one side and a living area on the other. A very steep, very narrow spiral staircase led to her bedroom on the second floor. To make efficient use of the space, she’d built a loft on which she slept. It had taken her a few weeks and several bumps on the head to learn not to sit up in the middle of the night. Below the loft she’d put a desk, a dresser, and a cabinet for her wardrobe. It was all a thirty-year-old detective earning twenty-five hundred euros a month could afford if she wanted to live in Paris, and she was proud of every square inch of it.

  Arriving a little after eight, Nikki slammed the door behind her and threw her keys on the kitchen table. The elevator was on the fritz and she was out of breath from running up three flights. She made her daily vow to quit smoking, and to prove it, dashed up the stairs to her bedroom. Panting, she undressed sloppily, leaving her clothes in a pile, and made the five-step journey to turn on the shower. The bathroom was the size of a toilet stall. There was no bathtub, just a shower so confining she had to hold her breath to turn around, and a vanity with a washbasin atop it.

  Waiting for the water to warm up, she went back to the closet and dug out her overnight bag. She threw in underwear, socks, a few T-shirts, and a clean pair of jeans. She found her favorite dress still wrapped in plastic, fresh from the dry cleaner. She smiled, thinking that at least she’d have one thing she looked nice in. She glanced up and caught herself in the mirror holding the dress close, almost hugging it, an expression of dreamy bliss pasted on her face.

  It was at that moment that she stopped.

  What exactly did she think she was doing?

  Since meeting Simon Riske, she’d done nothing but labor on his behalf. Commissaire Dumont had asked her to assist him, not be his slave. At first, she’d viewed the assignment as a welcome opportunity to escape her administrative punishment. The fact that she’d confiscated a kilo of heroin from Aziz François had earned her a few bonus points with the lieutenant but had also prompted a tongue-lashing for not having arrested him on the spot. It was only through Dumont’s intercession that she’d escaped an additional month’s desk duty. And now here she was, rushing to pack in order to once again aid Riske, this time at even further risk to her career.

  Nikki hung the dress back in her armoire and banished her dreamy expression to never-never land, where it belonged. She walked to the bathroom and tested the shower. The water was lukewarm. Suddenly reminiscent, she found herself dredging up memories of the last time she’d worn the dress. It was at Restaurant Guy Savoy when things had still been good between her and David. David Renard, the ace squash player she’d met on the courts, who happened to be the forty-year-old wunderkind of Lazard Frères. David, who—as her mother never ceased to remind her—was too good for her and “from another world entirely,” as if they still lived in the nineteenth century and there was no mixing between classes. She’d gone home with him that night. They’d made love in his maison de ville overlooking the Champs de Mars, the culmination of a six-week courtship defined more by the dates she’d cancelled due to the job than by the time they’d spent together.

  Lying in his bed, she’d decided that he could be “the one.” He was smart, tender, and witty, and he treated her like a lady. If he
wasn’t the greatest lover she’d had, he’d shown promise. Of course, she’d gotten a call from the lieutenant the next morning at six a.m., ordering her to a crime scene. She’d been dressed and out the door before David could complain.

  He called later that day to break things off. She made the mistake of asking why.

  “I like a woman who cooks me breakfast,” he’d said in all earnestness.

  Even now, the words stung. Her heart had been only partly broken and had mended quickly. It was her sense of self that had been shattered. How could she have been such a fool to fall in love with him? Only then did she realize that desperation, not affection, had governed her choice.

  Six months had passed since that day.

  Nikki climbed beneath the showerhead, turning sideways to close the folding door. Running a bar of soap over her body, she forced herself to take a more hard-eyed view of her feelings. The fact was, she knew nothing about Riske. He lied easily out of both sides of his mouth. She had no doubt that he was using her—with or without Dumont’s consent—and that he would continue to do so until he found Tino Coluzzi and retrieved that damned letter. She had no way of knowing if he would keep his word and help her to capture him afterward. Most likely, it was a smoke screen. Nikki reminded herself that she was a detective. The first rule of the job demanded that she not believe people.

  And the rest of it? The immediate attraction she’d felt toward him. The desire he stirred in her when standing close. The fear he could conjure with a look of his eyes. She imagined running her hand across his muscled chest, then lower. Her breath left her and she needed a hand to steady herself.

  And what was that? she thought, stunned at the sudden rushed beating of her heart, the near giddy flood of emotion.

  “No,” she said aloud, standing taller. Emotions lied. Emotions deceived. Like people, they were not to be trusted. Her loyalty was to the PJ, not Riske. Her first order of business was to call the lieutenant and tell him everything she knew about Coluzzi, so he might alert their counterparts in Marseille. Consequences be damned. She would atone for her sins and finish her punishment with equanimity and grace.

  And then? Sooner or later someone would bring in Coluzzi. The thought of another benefiting from her efforts made her sick to her stomach.

  “No,” she said again, louder this time. “This one is mine.”

  The answer had been there all along. She would use Riske as he was using her. Next time there would be no question whose name would be listed at the top of the arrest report.

  Happier now that she’d decided on a course of action, Nikki climbed out of the shower, dried her hair, and dressed for the day. She glanced at her un-smiling, un-dreamy reflection in the mirror. She liked what she saw. A cold, calculating professional.

  Reaching for her pistol, she looked once more at the half-filled overnight bag sitting on the floor.

  And Riske?

  Nikki grabbed her dress from the armoire and threw it in her overnight bag, along with her pistol and ammunition.

  Que será, será.

  She had fifteen minutes to get to the Gare de Lyon.

  Chapter 41

  Did you get the numbers?” Barnaby Neill asked a technician seated at an electronics console in the mobile surveillance center. “Send them to NSA lickety-split.”

  “Already done, sir. Confirmed receipt. Substation Five. Western Europe.”

  “Make sure the duty officer patches us into their feed in real time. If these phone numbers really are Coluzzi’s, I don’t want to wait to find out about it. I want to hear every word he says, as he says it.”

  Neill stood up to stretch, careful not to hit his head against the roof. The van was a Mercedes Sprinter with blacked-out windows and fitted with a standard surveillance package. There was a StingRay, similar to Simon’s, if many times more powerful, a directional microphone hidden beneath the van’s opaque turret, high-def cameras linked to facial-recognition software, and much, much more. All with direct access to the new combined intelligence database code-named “Beast,” which linked together the combined resources of the CIA, the Pentagon, the FBI, and a dozen other three-letter agencies, including the DEA, ICE, NGA, and IRS. It had taken 9/11, fifteen years of haggling, dozens of false starts, and twenty billion dollars, but the United States intelligence and law enforcement communities were finally functionally integrated.

  Ten years earlier, he’d needed a month to shepherd a request for information from one agency to another. Today, he could do it in a few seconds from an automobile traveling at eighty miles per hour along a highway three thousand miles from Washington, DC. That, concluded Neill, was progress.

  “What can you do with the picture?” he asked a second tech seated on the opposite side of the van.

  The technician brought up the photograph of the Russian woman taken in the lobby of Falconi’s apartment building. He cropped the photo close to her face, then applied a variety of filters and sharpeners, serving to amplify and clarify the pixel count. When he’d finished, he had a near-perfect, full-frontal portrait. “That’s as good as we’re going to get.”

  “Pretty little thing, isn’t she?”

  “Better than the girls I was at the Farm with.”

  The Farm being the CIA’s training compound in rural Virginia.

  “Hush,” said Neill. “That’s unpatriotic. Let’s see if she shows up in any of our registries.”

  “May take a minute.”

  The van hit a bump and Neill put out a hand to steady himself. He walked forward to the driving cabin. “Everything ready for our departure.”

  “The bird is on the tarmac. Flight crew aboard and waiting.”

  “Outstanding.”

  “Sir,” called the photo tech. “We have a hit.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “Valentina Asanova. Ph.D. candidate in electrical engineering at Moscow State University. Graduate of the foreign intelligence school. Assigned to Directorate S, Department 9. First spotted in Dubai 2008, as part of the team believed to have assassinated a key fund-raiser for Hezbollah. Suspected of taking part in that car bombing in Sana’a in 2016.”

  “That mess?” An extremist group backed by the Russians had detonated a car bomb in the center of a large religious gathering near the Yemeni capital, killing over two hundred people. The problem had been that the gathering was a wedding when the intended target was attending a funeral.

  “Last known assignment to be in Mumbai. Officially retired from duty last year. Reputation as being reckless with no regard for collateral damage.”

  Neill wrung his hands. Oh, Vassily, he thought. We’ve got you hook, line, and sinker. “Looks like she’s back, though I’m betting it’s unofficially. Did Mr. Riske provide her number as well?”

  “He did.”

  “Let’s see where she’s hiding.”

  The technician input Valentina Asanova’s phone number into his computer. The number was sent to the National Security Agency at Fort Meade, Maryland, where it was surreptitiously uploaded to a satellite operated by Russphon, the handset’s service provider. The satellite “pinged” the number. Less than a second later, the GPS coordinates of the handset appeared on the screen, along with an address. “She’s presently at the Gare de Lyon.”

  “Isn’t that a coincidence?” The van came to a halt and Neill gazed out the window at a large nineteenth-century terminus building with a clock tower similar in style to Big Ben. It was the Gare de Lyon.

  “Shall we contact Riske and tell him about the Russian?” the technician asked.

  Neill didn’t respond. He’d had eyes and ears on Riske since he’d left London. He’d had a man in the lobby of the George V when Riske checked in and another at police headquarters when he’d met Commissaire Dumont. One of his men had followed Riske to Le Galleon Rouge and witnessed the fight outside the bar and, later, Riske’s visit to the ER.

  So it was that Neill knew Riske was working closely with Detective Perez. He was more than a little pe
eved that Riske hadn’t told him, but he wasn’t surprised. Everyone had his own agenda. Nothing was ever just business. It was always personal. But then he’d bet on that all along.

  “Sir?”

  Neill looked away, mulling his options. He had an agenda as well, and he was no longer sure if it was compatible with Simon Riske’s.

  “Can we at least send him the picture of her?”

  “Quiet,” said Neill. “Unless you want the man to hear you.”

  “Sir?”

  Across the street a taxi had pulled up and disgorged a single passenger. He was a trim, dark-haired man dressed in a tailored blazer and slacks. Neill watched as Simon Riske paid the driver and set off at a determined clip toward the terminus.

  Riske was his bird dog, not his retriever. His job was to flush the adversary out of the undergrowth, nothing more. So far, he was doing an admirable job. If the phone numbers found at Falconi’s house did, in fact, belong to Coluzzi, Neill wouldn’t need Riske much longer. He’d catch Coluzzi himself.

  Neill saw no reason to offer help when help wasn’t needed.

  “Mr. Riske is fine on his own,” he said.

  “Yes, sir.”

  Neill put a hand on the driver’s shoulder. “Let’s get to the airport. The plane’s waiting.”

  Neill arrived at Orly Airport thirty minutes later.

  The van passed through a special security gate and drove across the tarmac to the Gulfstream jet parked anonymously at the far corner of the airfield. Unlike Valentina Asanova, Neill did have a plane at his disposal.

  He’d be in Marseille in a little more than ninety minutes. Well ahead of his bird dog.

  Chapter 42

  Nervous, flighty, and fatigued from a poor night’s sleep, Tino Coluzzi parked his car and walked the three blocks downhill to the port. The sky was a flawless blue. A light breeze scalloped the sea’s surface. Gulls wheeled and turned overhead, crying lustily. The beautiful morning failed to lift the mantle of dread. A Russian assassin had killed Luca Falconi, his best friend. Worse, Falconi had seemingly told her everything he knew about him and about Le Coual. And in case that wasn’t enough, Simon Ledoux, a man he’d thought dead and buried these long years, was not only alive but on his way to find him.