by AD Starrling
Reid pulled away swiftly. ‘You’re bleeding,’ he said, glancing at my hand.
I looked down. ‘It’s only a flesh wound.’ I clenched my fingers distractedly, feeling strangely numb. It had been some time since I last killed so many men. I took a deep breath and tried to ignore the smell of death that clung to me. ‘How’s your leg?’
Blood had seeped through the bandage around his wound and stained his trousers.
‘I’ll live,’ said Reid gruffly. A patrol car raced past us, lights flashing brightly in the night. Another followed close behind it. We headed away from Capitol Hill. ‘They all dead?’ Reid finally muttered while he negotiated the evening traffic.
‘Yes,’ I replied in a neutral voice, cursing my foolishness. We must have triggered a silent alarm in Burnstein’s house.
The blare from my cell phone was loud in the silence that followed. It was Solito. ‘I heard there were shots fired at that house in Capitol Hill,’ the FBI agent said stiffly. ‘Tell me it wasn’t you guys?’ Voices and music echoed faintly in the background behind him.
‘I would be lying if I said we weren’t involved,’ I said carefully. Solito swore at the other end of the line. I waited a while. ‘I need another favour.’
There was a long pause. ‘You’re kidding, right?’ said Solito dully.
We met the FBI agent in an alley behind a bar in Dupont Circle; he had been out celebrating the retirement of a field officer and was still dressed in his work suit. His gaze kept straying to the blood on my hand while I explained my request. ‘I’ve been listening to the scanner. The cops have reported four bodies at the property,’ Solito said finally. ‘There was a lot of blood in the place, which makes them suspect there were even more bodies than the ones they found.’ He frowned. ‘No doubt they’ll call us in.’
A group of people walked past the mouth of the alley, drunken voices raised in song.
‘I know this probably doesn’t mean a lot to you at the moment, but they weren’t good men,’ I said quietly.
Reid grunted. ‘And we might as well tell you now. You’re probably not gonna be able to ID any of them.’
Solito stared at us impassively. A sigh left his lips and he removed a notepad from his rear pocket. ‘This is the last thing I’m gonna do for you guys,’ he muttered with a grimace while he scribbled swiftly on the paper.
‘Thanks,’ I said gratefully.
The address Solito gave us was for a house in Chinatown. We drove down Massachusetts Avenue, took a right on 5th Street and parked along a small side road. A couple of doors down, a narrow, nondescript, two-storey building stood sandwiched between an electrical store and a restaurant. Lights were still on in the electrical store. The restaurant was dark.
We left the Cruiser and walked to the house. I climbed the short flight of concrete steps and rang the bell to the left of the doorjamb.
‘Why are we here again?’ said Reid behind me.
Before I could utter a reply, the wooden door creaked open. A small, wizened elderly man peered at us through the narrow crack. ‘Can I help you?’ he said in thick Mandarin, squinting suspiciously in the glow cast by a nearby street lamp.
‘We’re here to see Yuan Qin Lee,’ I replied in the Zhongyuan dialect.
The old man’s eyes widened. ‘You speak Han Chinese?’ he exclaimed in broken English.
‘A little bit,’ I said with a faint smile.
‘Come in, come in.’ He beckoned us inside the building with a sharp wave of his liver spotted hand and closed the door behind us. We were faced with a narrow hallway that opened onto a long, cramped corridor suffused with the smell of cooking and cheap disinfectant. A few curious faces appeared in an open doorway to the left. The old man gestured frantically and shouted a few sharp words in Mandarin. The faces disappeared.
I glanced at the toys that littered the passageway. ‘Are you the patriarch?’ I asked mildly.
‘For my sins,’ grumbled the old man. ‘They all useless, the lot of them. Only one who make money is Qin Lee.’
We followed him to an alcove at the end of the hall. He pulled aside a curtain and revealed a hidden door that opened onto a dimly-lit flight of steps spiralling down to the lower level of the house.
The basement was much larger than the building above it; the walls appear to extend well beyond the actual boundaries of the property. I spied another door at the rear of the room before turning my attention to the rest of the extensive space.
Monitors lined two long tables along the sidewalls, their screens flickering oddly under the harsh light from the dozen fluorescent strips that crowded the low ceiling. A bank of hard drives hummed next to a large air vent, dark monoliths in the otherwise well-lit room. Scores of cables crawled along the concrete floor, connecting the extensive collection of hardware that dwarfed the basement.
A young man with horn-rimmed glasses and shiny black hair sat hunched over a table in the middle of the room. The frames around his eyes glinted under a spotlight.
‘Qin Lee?’ I called out. The young man looked up sharply. Almond-shaped eyes narrowed behind the lenses. ‘Solito sent us.’
He stared at Reid and me for a couple of beats before carefully putting down the document he had been working on. He removed a pair of latex gloves from his hands, rose from the chair and spoke a few words to the old man. The latter glanced at us hesitantly, nodded once and left.
Qin Lee waited until the door closed at the top of the stairs. ‘What do you want?’ he said with a heavy frown.
I indicated Reid. ‘I need some passports for him, amongst other things.’
Reid’s eyes narrowed. ‘I already have a passport,’ he said.
‘You need new ones,’ I replied. Reid held my gaze for several seconds. A sigh left his lips: he knew not to ask for the reasons why. Yet.
I turned to Qin Lee and listed the additional items I required. The young man pursed his lips and studied me curiously. ‘This will cost you.’
‘Money’s not an issue,’ I said briskly. ‘When can you have the documents ready?’
Qin Lee shrugged. ‘Day after tomorrow, at the earliest.’
‘We need them tonight.’ I paused at his shocked expression. ‘Like I said, money isn’t an issue.’
Two hours later, we walked out of the house with three fake passports and a document wallet.
‘You know, it would help me a lot if I knew what was going on behind that thick skull of yours once in a while,’ Reid muttered moodily once we were inside the Cruiser.
I glanced at him and started the engine. ‘What do you want to know?’ I said mildly.
‘Well, for one thing, why the hell did you just fork out a small fortune for those forgeries?’
‘Because I suspect we’re going to need them before the week’s over,’ I replied.
Reid grunted. ‘Why? Where are we going?’
‘France.’
His eyebrows rose slightly. ‘Any particular reason?’
‘The last paper Strauss published was from UPMC, the Université Pierre et Marie Curie in Paris,’ I explained. ‘I want to know why Burnstein and the Crovir First Council are so interested in this person.’
Reid gazed ahead thoughtfully. ‘You sure about this?’ he said after a while.
I hesitated. ‘It’s the only clue we’ve got.’
Reid nodded briskly. ‘When do we leave?’
I took out the cell and dialled the Vauquoises’ number. ‘Hello, Pierre? It’s Lucas.’ I paused and listened. ‘We’re fine. Look, we need to get to Paris. Can you help? ... No, commercial flights are out of the question. This has to be discreet.’ There was a longer pause while I waited for Vauquois to return to the phone. I pulled a pen and paper out of the glove compartment and wrote down the address he dictated. ‘Thanks, Pierre. Give my love to Solange.’
We headed north of DC and reached the private airstrip that Vauquois had directed us to outside Baltimore around midnight. The only plane on the tarmac with lights on was a white Cessna 750.
I parked the Cruiser inside the hangar next to it and followed Reid to the aircraft. A tall, trim, middle-aged man with silver-streaked brown hair came down the steps to meet us when we entered the shadow of the plane.
‘Are you Pierre’s friends?’ he said in an amiable voice.
‘Yes, we are,’ I replied. We shook hands.
‘I’m Jim, your pilot.’ He glanced at our bags. ‘Will this be all?’ I nodded. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Come aboard.’
Thirty minutes later, we were airborne. As the east coast fell away beneath us, I turned to the documents I had printed at Qin Lee’s place; before the Crovirs surprised us in Capitol Hill, I had forwarded the photograph from Burnstein’s computer to a fake email address on a separate server. The research articles by HE Strauss and generic information about the UPMC had been freely accessible on the internet.
‘Wake me up when we get there,’ mumbled Reid across the aisle. He lowered his seat into a comfortable position and closed his eyes.
I spent the next two hours poring over the information in Strauss’s papers. Occasionally, my gaze would stray to the black and white print of the man and the woman in the restaurant.
Why was a senior member of the Crovir Councils so concerned with a scientist involved in research in genetics and molecular biology? Sure, Burnstein was the head of a biotechnology corporation, but the security measures surrounding the information on Strauss suggested that the President and CEO of GeMBiT Corp had a more vested interest in the professor than pure academic curiosity. More importantly, what did it have to do with the Crovir Hunters’ renewed attempts on my life? The timing of the events was too close for this fact to be a coincidence. And where did Olsson feature in all of this?
Somewhere over the Atlantic, I closed my eyes and was lulled into a troubled sleep by the drone of the Cessna’s engines.
Eight hours after we left Baltimore, we landed on a deserted airfield thirty miles outside Paris. The local time was 15:00. ‘Pierre called,’ said Jim when he opened the aircraft door. ‘He said he would arrange transportation for you.’
We unloaded our bags and bade the pilot goodbye. As we stood on the tarmac and watched the Cessna dwindle to a speck on the skyline, on its way to Le Bourget Airport to fuel up, the distant backfiring of engines alerted us to approaching vehicles. We turned and gazed down the strip.
A black Jaguar XK120 roadster was making its way rapidly across the uneven asphalt towards us. Not far behind it was a dusty, mustard-yellow Citroën 2CV. French hip-hop music blasted loudly out of its open windows.
The roadster braked to a halt a few inches from our legs. An energetic young man with blond hair and blue eyes leapt out of the driver’s seat. ‘Bonjour! Vous êtes Lucas?’ he said with a blindingly white smile.
‘Oui,’ I replied guardedly.
He threw the car keys across to me. ‘Compliment de Monsieur Vauquois!’ he shouted over his shoulder as he jogged over to the 2CV. The bearded youth behind the wheel of the Citroën gave us a brief nod and pulled his shades down. We watched the car do a screeching U-turn and hurtle erratically down the runway. The rap lyrics faded slowly in the distance.
Reid studied the roadster with raised eyebrows. ‘Do all immortals have a thing for nice cars, or is it just you and the people you know?’ He dropped our bags in the boot of the car and climbed into the passenger seat.
‘What can I say? We like the classics.’ I slipped behind the wheel and ran my fingers lovingly over the dashboard and the gearbox. Pierre and Solange had left the vintage car with some friends in Chantilly when they moved to New York: they still used it whenever they visited France. It had been a while since I drove the old antique.
Despite the heavy Saturday afternoon traffic and Reid’s occasionally acerbic comment on my driving, we made Paris in just under an hour: the old back roads had not changed much in the few decades since I had last been to the capital. I crossed the Boulevard Périphérique near the 16ème arrondissement, went over the Place du Trocadéro and headed steadily for the Pont d’léna.
‘Nice,’ said Reid, staring ahead. The Eiffel Tower rose impressively at the head of the Parc du Champ de Mars in front of us.
The traffic slowed when we hit the Boulevard Garibaldi and the Rue Froidevaux. By the time we reached the 13ème arrondissement and pulled to a stop opposite an apartment building halfway down a narrow side street, the sky was starting to redden. I got out of the roadster and smiled faintly while I studied the well-preserved green Renault 5 Supermini taking center stage in the allocated parking space in front of the edifice.
I crossed the sidewalk to a pair of mahogany double doors and pressed the buzzer for apartment 3A. Seconds later, a gruff voice barked a mildly disgruntled ‘Oui?’ through the speakerphone.
‘C’est Lucas,’ I said loudly.
There was a pregnant pause. ‘Lucas?’ Surprise elevated the pitch of the man’s voice. ‘Nom de Dieu!’
Moments later, the doors to the building slammed open. The figure on the threshold stared, goggle-eyed, before engulfing me in a bear-like embrace. ‘My word, Lucas! You haven’t changed at all! What’s it been, ten, twelve years?’
I grinned at the short, portly middle-aged French man with the thick moustache. ‘About that.’
A retired detective who used to work at the headquarters of the French National Police, Gustav Lacroix was one of the few mortal friends the Vauquoises and I had maintained contact with since we left France. Although the Frenchman often joked that we appeared to have discovered the secret whereabouts of the Fountain of Youth, I had a feeling he sometimes suspected our somewhat unearthly origins. Still, he never asked us questions.
I glanced at the Supermini. ‘I see you still have the old car.’
‘Pah! I wouldn’t trade it for any of these new fancy schmancy contraptions.’ Gustav’s eyes glinted when he spotted the roadster. ‘On the other hand, I wouldn’t mind getting my fingers on that little beauty.’ He greeted Reid like an old acquaintance and ushered us inside the building. ‘So, what brings you to Paris?’ he said once we were inside his apartment.
I glanced at Reid. ‘We have some business in town,’ I said vaguely.
A wry smile appeared on the old detective’s face as he studied our expressions. ‘Ah. I see.’ He placed a tray of freshly brewed coffee on the low table in the living room. ‘I take it it’s the kind of business you can’t talk about.’ I nodded once. He sat down in a large, padded armchair. ‘Well, if there’s anything I can do to help, don’t hesitate to ask.’
‘Thanks.’ I reached for one of the porcelain cups and took a gulp of the hot, fragrant liquid; the familiar taste flooded my mouth, bringing back memories of lazy summer days spent in the French capital. ‘Actually, I do have a question,’ I said after a while. Gustav looked at me expectantly. ‘Have there been any—unusual incidents in the city of late?’
The detective’s eyes widened. ‘In Paris?’ His tone was strangely bemused.
I smiled. ‘Sorry, that was a stupid question. What I meant was, something—out of the ordinary, mysterious—unnatural even?’
Gustav frowned and shook his head. ‘No. Not that I’ve heard of anyway. But, tell you what, my nephew Christophe works at the DCPJ, la Direction Centrale de la Police Judiciaire. You haven’t met him before; he just moved to Paris from Lyon. He’s coming over for dinner tonight. He might know something.’
Christophe Lacroix turned out to be a much taller and slimmer version of his uncle. It became quickly evident that his warm, chocolate-brown eyes and loose demeanour belied a sharp intelligence, while experience had bestowed a somewhat sardonic twist to his smile. ‘You’ve known my uncle for long?’ he said curiously while we sat at the dining table and sipped wine from a fine bottle of Cru Beaujolais.
‘Yes,’ I replied in a carefully neutral tone.
‘Gustav mentioned that you wanted to know of any strange events that may have occurred in the city recently?’ he continued.
‘Ah-huh,’ I said with a noncommitta
l nod.
Christophe Lacroix leaned back in his chair. ‘What do you do for a living?’ he said, watching us lazily over the rim of his glass.
Reid glanced at me guardedly. ‘We’re private investigators.’
The French detective’s gaze never wavered from my face. The brown eyes had narrowed thoughtfully. ‘Oh? And what exactly, may I ask, are you investigating in our lovely Ville-Lumière?’
Brief silence followed. ‘It’s a missing person’s case,’ I said levelly.
‘Really?’ Lacroix sounded unconvinced. ‘Why don’t you tell me more? I might be able to help.’
I smiled. ‘I’m afraid that’s impossible. Our clients are very—particular. They would like to keep this as low-key as possible.’
Lacroix frowned. Just then, Gustav entered the room, placed a large casserole dish in the center of the table and lifted the lid. Steam billowed out and was followed by the fragrant aroma of slow cooked meat and vegetables. ‘Voila! My famous Coq au Vin. Dig in!’
The conversation turned to more mundane matters. Gustav’s nephew finally took his leave just after ten, blaming an early start the next day. He paused in the doorway and studied us carefully. ‘In response to your earlier query, no, there haven’t been any unusual incidents in the city of late. None that has attracted the attention of the DCPJ anyway.’
‘Thank you,’ I murmured gratefully. Fifteen minutes later, we rose from the table and headed for the front door.
‘Here, this is the spare key for when you get back. I’m afraid one of you will have to sleep on the sofa. The guest room only has a single bed,’ Gustav said apologetically as he let us out of the apartment.
Earlier that evening, I had looked up the HE Strausses listed in Paris in the retired detective’s White Pages. There were five of them. Although the Center for Molecular Genetics, the principal research lab where Strauss was assigned, was located on the Gif-sur-Yvette campus some twenty miles south-west of the French capital, instinct told me that the professor quite likely kept a place in Paris. I ruled out the Strausses who lived too far from the center of the city and not within walking distance of a train station or metro. That left only three: one in Montreuil, and two within the Boulevard Périphérique, in the 11ème and 7ème arrondissements.