by Kenneth Eade
They moved on to the bathroom, which was too small for the entire team, so Soussier delegated it to one officer, and accompanied the others to the living room and adjoining kitchen. There, every piece of furniture was upturned, the couch pillows extracted and examined, and even the armchair cushions, which were removable canvas covered pillows, were removed.
“Nothing here, sir.”
A voice from the kitchen chimed out, “And nothing in the kitchen.”
There was no computer equipment, no weapons, nothing of any kind which could connect Robert with either of the two murders they were investigating.
“Let’s examine le cave.”
The elevator to the basement was hardly big enough for two people, so Soussier rode it with the concierge to the basement floor. The rest of his search team took the stairs. When the doors opened on the dimly lit, dirt-floored basement, Soussier got a whiff of mildew which had taken hold of the wooden doors and remained there for years. His men were already waiting for him in the corridor, and the concierge led them all to Robert’s storage unit. Soussier thanked the concierge for her help as an officer with a heavy pair of bolt cutters snapped the shank of the thick brass padlock and it hit the dirt with a heavy thud. They illuminated two bright battery powered lights and adjusted their beams upon the interior of the locker.
One by one, every item was removed and examined. An old golf bag, which turned out to contain nothing but clubs, stacks of musty magazines, space heaters, and bottles comprising a halfway decent wine collection. Soussier caught the policeman who was moving the bottles examining the labels.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m sorry, sir. I’m French, you know.”
“We’re all French here. We’re looking for evidence, not the next good Bordeaux.”
One of Soussier’s team finally threw up his hands and made his report.
“There are no weapons here, sir.”
“Are you sure we’ve searched everything?”
“Yes, sir. No guns, no weapons of any kind.”
“He must have moved them.”
“Well, they’re not here.”
“Alright, let’s find him. Check with every hospital, veterinarian, and dentist in the area. Put the pressure on.”
“What area, sir?”
“The entire city of Paris. That son of a bitch has to be here somewhere.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Billy Joel belted out “We didn’t start the fire,” while a rhythmic beeping sound kept time with it. A blinding, brilliant light, like the first dawn’s sunlight through a window, increased in intensity, getting brighter and brighter until it stung Robert’s eyes. They flickered open and he looked up at a plain white ceiling. Feet were shuffling all over. He tried to move, but found himself bound. He was weak, thirsty. He tried to speak through the oxygen mask. His throat was parched and scratchy.
He heard muffled conversation. “He’s awake.”
A face appeared above him, covered with a hairnet and below the smile dangled a surgical mask.
“You’re a very lucky man.”
Robert didn’t feel lucky. He felt trapped, uncertain, but he was alive, and that was a good thing. He didn’t know if he was being tended to by the good guys or the bad guys, relative terms in his business, labels of opinion that didn’t reveal the shades or degrees of “goodness” or “badness.”
“When can I get out of here?”
“Whoa, whoa. You’ve been shot in the shoulder and leg. The bullets missed major arteries, but they bounced around quite a bit and messed some things up. You’ve had surgery on your shoulder to repair damaged tissue, and you have a hairline fracture of the femur.”
“Sounds like medical bullshit to me, doc. And it didn’t answer my question.”
“You should be in the hospital for about a week, then, depending on your physical therapy, I’d say you’ll be up and around on crutches in three.”
“Wonderful.”
Robert closed his eyes and dozed off. Suddenly, he felt the sensation of movement. He heard automatic doors opening and then he saw flickers of successive ceiling can lights as they wheeled the gurney through the hospital corridor. He looked up at the nurse, whose large breasts, despite their containment, were flopping around under her non-sexy white smock as she pushed him into the elevator. The elevator hummed and bumped to a stop, the doors opened, and she pushed the gurney out and into a room and closed herself inside. Over the next few minutes, she and another nurse feverishly and methodically hooked up monitors and checked his IV drip. Nurse “Big Boobs” released his restraints and showed him the call button and the bed adjustment. Then, both of them left the room and Robert dozed off again.
When Robert opened his eyes again, he reached for the bed control and raised the head of the bed. It was then he became aware, for the first time, he was not the only one in the room. Sitting in the corner was the man with no name himself.
“If you had followed instructions, you wouldn’t be here.”
“Hello to you, too. Don’t worry, there’s no extra charge for the other eleven jihadis.”
“What about the cop you wasted?”
“Collateral damage.”
Manizek shook his head with disgust. “What did I tell you? Didn’t I say to follow your instructions explicitly? There was only one target. You really fucked this one up.”
“Then you would have been fine with a massacre of hundreds of civilians at Galeries Lafayette?”
“That’s a French problem. Now it’s just a mess. Not only that, Paladine is all over the Internet again. I should just wash my hands of all this and let the French have you.”
Robert shrugged with his good shoulder. “Go ahead.”
Manizek leered, surprised. “Go ahead?”
“You heard me. I stopped giving a shit a long time ago.”
Manizek thought in silence for a moment. “You’ve made this my problem, so this time, and only this time, I’m going to clean it up. We can’t have an international incident over this.”
“An international incident? You mean like the war in Iraq? Weapons of mass destruction? Benghazi? Libya?”
Manizek ignored him. “We have to get you out of here.”
“Doc said I’d be here for a week.”
“No way. Too hot. You’re bugging out today.”
“What do you mean? I’m done.”
“You’re not done. There’s one more remaining on your contract.”
“What, you can’t count?”
“You don’t get credit for those other assholes you took out. Only the target.”
“That’s bullshit.”
“Whatever. I don’t have time to wipe your nose now. Just get over it. We have to get you out of here.”
“Where am I going?”
“The where is figured out, and it’s classified. The how, well, we’re still working on that.”
Without any further word, the man with no name stood up and walked out the door.
“Hey, wait!”
Nobody answered. Robert pressed his call button and, almost immediately, a nurse came running in.
“Tout va bien?”
“Yes, everything is fine. The man that just left, is he still out there?”
“What man, monsieur? We didn’t see any man.”
“You didn’t see the man who was in my room?”
“No, monsieur. You haven’t had any visitors.”
The man with no name was, apparently, a ghost. Just like Robert.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Nicolas Soussier didn’t have any evidence that Robert had been involved in the Galeries Lafayette attack, but it didn’t prevent him from looking for him. He set up a dragnet all over Paris to find and detain Robert for questioning. His men made inquiries at every police station, hospital and morgue in the city. But it was the overreaching arms of the United States government, the ones that can extend themselves through the gaps of any net, that shielded him from Soussier’s inquiries. The hospital R
obert was in was no ordinary one. It was a very small facility, a safe house in its own right. There were no records, no reports, and nobody knew it even existed. The outside of the hospital appeared to be an ordinary warehouse in a grimy banlieue of Paris, not far from the Charles de Gaulle Aeroport.
At 10 p.m. a truck rolled up to the warehouse and backed to its loading platform. An attendant pulled the roll-up door and swung an inside door open, revealing what looked like a duplicate of Robert’s hospital room. A nurse rolled Robert into the truck on a gurney and locked it into place on a special track in the floor of the vehicle.
“Aren’t you coming with me?”
The nurse laughed and squeezed his hand. ‘Not me, but someone else will.”
“I’ll bet she won’t be as pretty as you.”
The nurse smiled and waved to Robert as the attendant swung the large interior door closed. From the outside, this door contained a 3x5-foot faux mini-warehouse, chock-full with construction materials. Packed convincingly in the back of it were cut edges of drywall which looked like stacked sheets. Anyone who opened the roll-up door to snoop around would see the building materials and never suspect the truck was a mobile hospital.
Robert’s pain meds had started to wear off, but he didn’t call for more. They put a dull edge on his senses. He wasn’t used to putting his life in someone else’s hands and he didn’t trust Manizek at all. As the pain came rocking back, Robert greeted it like an old friend – a reminder he was still alive.
Five hours later, Robert felt the truck come to a stop. The attending nurse, who had hardly paid attention to him, announced they had arrived.
“Where?”
“We’re very close to Metz. You will recover here.”
***
Francois massaged Robert’s leg vigorously and pushed it toward his torso, stretching the muscle. Robert wasn’t homophobic, but he was tired of this touchy, feely nonsense from the muscle-bound therapist.
“Francois, no offense, but I can’t take this physical therapy shit anymore. I need to work out myself before all my muscle turns to fat.”
“But Monsieur Robear, you have been shot…”
I know that, you dolt.
“…You cannot run before you walk. You cannot fly before you have your wings…You…”
“I get it, I get it. But can we move up to the next level already? I don't have time to sit around.”
“Monsieur, you are not sitting around. Physical therapy is a process. The body needs to heal.”
Robert groaned and made a face, then motioned his head toward the multi-purpose weight machine in the room.
“Why don’t I saddle up on that horse over there and give it some process?”
“I’m afraid your leg is too weak and your shoulder cannot take the pressure of the resistance.”
“I’ve got two shoulders and two legs, you know.”
“I guess you could work the other two a little, but you must promesse not to strain yourself.”
Robert felt like a kid. “I promise, Francois.”
Cross my heart and hope to die.
“It is good for the cardiovascular systeme on the one hand, but on the other, there is the probleme of muscle imbalance.”
Robert swung his legs off the bed, feet on the floor. “Let’s try it without the crutches this time.”
“No, Monsieur Robear, it is much too early.”
“You said the quicker I get to walking, the better. Let me stand at least.”
Francois nodded, and helped Robert to stand. He put a crutch under each armpit.
“How about just one?”
Robert gave the second crutch back to Francois and propped himself on the one under his left shoulder.
Lucky I got shot on both sides.
***
Ted Barnard had been avoiding Nathan Anderson. He had to think of a spin for the Galeries Lafayette covert operation. Potentially, both of their heads were on the chopping block and they had to get their stories straight for the president. Barnard passed the buck to the man with no name.
“Greg, what the fuck happened? One guy was supposed to disappear and now we’ve got a potential incident.”
“Ted, don’t worry, I’ve got everything under control.”
“We can’t afford our asset to be compromised.”
“Everything is under control.”
“Good, because if he gets rolled up we’re screwed.”
“It’s taken care of.”
Barnard hung up the phone, confident he could fill Anderson in and smooth things over. The man with no name was an expert in stage management. Barnard never questioned his methods because they always achieved results. And he didn’t care (or dare) to know how they got done.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
The more time he spent cooped up, the more he felt like a prisoner. He was not much of a reader, so the offer of books to read didn’t interest him much. He didn’t like television – whatever was on it was usually stupid and the news was always filled with fake news and propaganda, although in France it was a little better than in the States. Through his window he would look out at the Moselle River and wonder what it would be like to ambulate the streets of the 3,000-year-old town, if he could only walk. Above anything, Robert was fascinated with history; especially military history; and Metz had a ton of it. He promised himself to get off his crutches and evade his captors long enough to get a decent tour of the old walled Gallic Roman city.
Every day, Robert forced himself out of bed and walked to the window and looked out onto the river and the rest of the town, longing to feel it with his own feet. As he worked out on the weight machine, he felt himself becoming stronger and stronger as time passed. Finally, he couldn’t stand it any longer. He had to get out.
Robert had medical caretakers, not keepers. There were no locks on his door. He could simply walk out of there, so he did. He waited for nightfall, and then left his room. The apartment was quiet. Only one attendant was on duty, and he was there mainly for logistics. Robert passed by the living room and saw the man asleep in a chair in front of the television. He slipped by him and into the foyer, where he rummaged through the coat closet. He found what he was looking for – a light coat – a little long for him, and baggy, but it would be perfect for what he had in mind. He draped the coat over his shoulders and slid the crutch under his arm and buttoned the coat over it in front, concealing the extra appendage. From his powers of observation he knew exactly where they kept the keys. He opened the small drawer in the foyer table and extracted them. Two seconds later, he was out the door. It was too simple.
Robert wandered the deserted narrow stone streets of the old town. A restaurant named L’Escalier had closed but the lights were still on. The busboy was stacking up the chairs inside that had spent the entire day on the street. A middle-aged guy was leaning against the wall, smoking. He passed by two girls on the corner who were chatting and paid him no mind.
Robert imagined these same streets that now tried to accommodate automobiles filled with horses and carts. New technology had come with the internal combustion engine, but the streets had stayed the same. One century colliding with the next. He continued meandering through the narrow streets toward a gold glow in the distant sky. He navigated toward the source of light. When he turned the next corner, the glowering spires of a massive gothic cathedral bathed in light revealed itself as the source.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
After two weeks, there was finally a break in the monotony. As he was accustomed to in the military, before daybreak, Robert was awakened and told he was leaving by car to Munich. From there, he would take a series of trains to Istanbul. Another man with no name, although much lower on the food chain, supplied him with his transportation as well as his new identity, complete with passport and a tourist visa to Turkey. Even with the new credentials, air travel was too risky due to facial recognition software.
The driver with no name also proved to have the same when it came to perso
nality. He was like a robot. That suited Robert just fine. He had nothing to say and wasn’t about to make anything up just for the sake of useless conversation. He sat silently in the passenger’s seat, looking out the window and listening to the hum of the engine and the faint rumble of the tires against the road.
The crack of thunder, a blinding flash of light and the spatter of rain against the windshield woke Robert from a light sleep. He opened his eyes to the rhythmic flapping of the wiper blades and could see a large storm front looming in the distance, periodically crackling with bolts of lightning. He glanced over at the driver, who was peering through the downpour. The rain pelted the car in torrents and the driver slowed, straining his eyes to see the road ahead and turning an eye to Robert, who showed him no sympathy.
“Do you want to stop for a bite to eat, perhaps?”
Robert thought about it, then it appeared that the guy was still alert, so he politely declined. He couldn’t bear the thought of sitting silently with this zombie at a cafeteria table.
“I’ll grab something at the train station.”
“Suit yourself.”
When the door opened at the train station in Munich, he finally felt his independence. For the last two weeks he had felt like he was in jail. He cruised the station, looking for something to eat, but the only things that seemed to be for sale at that hour were hot dogs. He ordered two with a plate of fried potatoes at the station’s cafeteria. He picked up the hot dog, wondering why they were so popular there.
Germans must love hot dogs. But why make a fuss out of it, and so many different kinds? A tube steak is a tube steak.
He waited without incident, though not without worrying. Anything could happen at any time. He circled several times around the station to make sure he was not being followed. When he was relatively sure it was safe, he hung out in a different part of the station, well away from the track for his train to Zagreb.
At last call, he proceeded to board the train to Zagreb, which left Munich at 11:36, while looking about for any signs of a tail. Like all the trains in Germany, it left on time. For Robert, nothing, not even a train ride (especially that) was simple. His natural paranoia, combined with the artificial paranoia of having seen so many “tragedy on train” movies, from Murder on the Orient Express through Silver Streak, demanded that he sleep lightly, with one eye open, even though he had a private sleeper car all to himself. But travel fatigue, combined with the darkness out the window and the gentle rumbling of the train put him to sleep right away, and he didn’t wake up until the porter announced their imminent arrival.