by Cara Black
Good. Their presence might offer a deterrent. Or, the awful thought came, they’d be picked off like flies. Aimée shoved that aside. It wouldn’t come to that if she could help it. Or if the DST got here in time.
A woman in Kurdish dress stepped onto the stage. “I’m Leyla, Resource Director of the Institut Kurd, and it’s my great honor to welcome our guest, Jalenka Malat. Tomorrow she’s flying back to Ankara to put the Kurdish settlement proposal on the Turkish parliament’s agenda. A historic proposal that includes the teaching of the Kurd language in schools and reparations for forcible resettlement and for Kurd lands appropriated by the government.”
Deafening applause drowned out the rest.
Leyla smiled and held up her hand. “Please, I know you want to hear her, but remember Jalenka has graciously carved time out of her packed schedule to address your League which she deems of vital importance. Right after this, she’s addressing the media and our Institute members here on the topic of “To veil or not to veil: Muslim women’s role in modern society,” so I’d appreciate your keeping your questions brief.”
Aimée worked her way toward the windows. Think, think like an assassin, she told herself. How would one kill Jalenka . . . a quick thrust of a knife, the way Langois had been taken out, but that meant close contact with Jalenka and a quick exit during the confusion. It would depend on whether Jalenka walked among the crowd, but that would be after her talk if she had time to do so. Or would the attack come later, when she addressed the media during the reception?
What could happen right now? Iqbal and the women had lined up, a few arm’s-lengths apart, and stood below the stage. They now wore red and green armbands with the emblem of the Kurdish Women’s League, like an honor guard. No one questioned their presence; they took it for granted.
And then Jalenka, a small woman with reddish brown hair and sparkling eyes, wearing a black suit, appeared on the stage in a burst of energy.
“Thank you for coming,” Jalenka said in flawless French. “I’m humbled by your support. As many of you know, my husband Demir, a former member of parliament, has been in prison for five years. It’s through his urging that I campaigned and won the votes of his former constituency so I can carry on the work he started and further our goals for Kurds.”
Another round of deafening applause, and the audience stood.
Jalenka’s expression turned serious. “The eyes of the world will be on the Turkish Parliament when it considers this proposal. Turkey’s bid to join the EU will be turned down unless it can demonstrate respect for the Kurds’ human rights.”
No wonder Jalenka was a threat.
A fine sheen of perspiration beaded Aimée’s forehead. She caught Iqbal’s gaze. Her raised finger indicated several women in chadors. Old women with wrinkled faces, their chadors half open in the heat.
More applause, and Jalenka raised her hand. “Since the 1920 Treaty of Sèvres, forged in this country to establish a Kurdish territory for our people, France has been our friend and supporter. We all know the military dictatorship ignored this. But, with my French friends’ indulgence, I will now speak in Kurdish, a language forbidden in my country.”
Aimée edged along the windows. From outside came the scent of a late-flowering plane tree. She saw the copper wings of a hovering dragonfly and heard the sound of splashing water. An old man leaned out of a window opposite, watering red geraniums. A peaceful torpid afternoon.
She had to keep alert. Langois had been murdered amid thousands of people in a busy station before he could tell her . . . but now she’d never know. What she did know was that Yves had been murdered for this.
All the windows across the courtyard facing the Institut Kurd were closed, except one a floor up. But there was no movement there, just darkness.
Wednesday
NADIRA SQUINTED, EYEING the telescopic sight. A spiky-haired woman’s head bobbed in her crosshairs, blocking the podium. Where had she come from?
Nadira glanced at her watch. One minute. Barely enough time to realign. She shifted the rifle on the ledge, re-adjusted the mount and the sights.
Eight centimeters would do it. If only the bile didn’t threaten to rise up in her stomach. She steeled herself to concentrate, block everything from her mind but her target. She would do this; she’d been trained almost her whole life for this mission. The viewfinder appeared, the familiar markings, and the red center dot aligned on the target. A centimeter more to the right.
The charm on her neck caught. The tiny blue horse. And that warm afternoon—like this one—came back to her. A breeze fluttering the hospital’s window curtains. The nurse’s kind eyes as she pressed the charm into her palm, mumbling about lost childhood. . . .
Then the woman moved. Thirty seconds, no time to realign her sights. Nothing for it, Nadira realized, but to take her out with the first shot.
Wednesday
AIMÉE COCKED HER head, about to turn toward the podium. She barely caught a glint. The briefest flicker at the window. She stared. She saw the unmistakable sight of a long-barrel rifle. Then it was gone.
Her adrenalin kicked in. She sprang into action, running the few feet toward the stage.
“Get down, Jalenka!” she yelled.
Jalenka paused, looked surprised, and glanced to her left. Aimée heaved herself up to the stage and tackled Jalenka, pulling her down behind the podium.
Short cracking noises. The podium splintered above them. Puffs of wood powder and metal. The wavering microphone screeched with static. Screams erupted in the audience. Aimée felt Iqbal crawling and hurling herself over Jalenka’s shoulders. More short bursts of noise. Rifle shots shredded the podium. Wailing and more screams.
“Get her backstage, Iqbal. Now. Sound the fire alarm.”
But Iqbal didn’t move. A fine blood spatter covered her pink scarf; her unblinking gaze was fixed on the ceiling. Aimée gasped. And then someone was crawling, pulling Iqbal’s lifeless form off Jalenka. The rifle fire had ceased. Someone on a cell phone was calling SAMU, an ambulance.
The assassin would escape if she didn’t hurry. Aimée got to her feet and ran down the aisle of terror-stricken women huddling on the floor. “Stay down,” she called.
She had to reach the assassin before the panicked women fled, choking the exit. Out in the foyer, she took the stairs two at a time, keeping in mind the location of the small window. She found a warren of little rooms and a library connected by a narrow dark hallway and kept going, winding to the left. She passed several doors, then tried the one with WC written on it. The rectangular window was open; there were smudged footprints on the closed toilet seat. Nothing else. Then she saw a backpack, a child’s, behind the toilet and grabbed it. Rooting inside, she found a cardboard box of bullets and a bottle of Orangina.
Her spine tingled. The assassin had used a child as a front . . . and then she remembered the child’s cries from the foyer that she’d put out of her mind. She ran down the stairs.
“Did you see a woman in a chador just now?” she asked one of the women spilling into the hall. The woman shook her head. Leyla, the director, rushed to her office and Aimée followed.
“They’re gone,” Leyla said.
“Who?”
“The little boy was asleep in the stroller and his nanny—”
“Did the woman have a bag, several bags . . . this one?”
Aimée held up the Lego backpack.
Leyla nodded, her face anguished. “A young nanny, so sweet, in jeans and tank top. I wanted her to wait. With all the chaos, I was going to help her after I—”
“Did she wear a chador?” Aimée interrupted.
Leyla shook her head.
A false lead again. Her hopes dashed.
“But I saw a chador trailing from her bag . . . what does it mean?”
Aimée ran through the throng of women, into the courtyard, and out into the street. She saw a taxi pulling away, a little boy’s blond head and a woman’s dark one just visible in the back window. The
n it was swallowed in traffic. In the distance, sirens hee-hawed. The flics, after the fact. She pulled out René’s car keys, threaded her way past a bus, and unlocked his car door.
She ground into first gear and took off. At least she’d seen the taxi’s direction. The afternoon heat hovered in a mist on sloping rue Lafayette. Then she saw the taxi, a blue Parisien, like so many others, waiting ten cars or so ahead at the intersection.
Several cars made right turns. She advanced and zipped across the intersection on a yellow light. An ambulance tore past with its siren blaring, and her mind went to Iqbal’s blood-spattered pink scarf. She couldn’t help feeling that it was her fault, such a waste. She’d prevented Jalenka’s assassination, but at a cost. And Yves . . . she couldn’t push away the image of the slit in his throat. Sickened, she wanted to mow the cars down and catch that taxi.
Langois’s words in the Gare du Nord spun in her head. “The way Yves kept staring.” She’d taken that to mean his informant was a worker and located Faroum, but what if Langois mentioned it because it had struck another chord . . . Had he been looking at a woman in a chador?
More questions loomed. How had this assassin known of their Gare du Nord meeting? How did she keep one step ahead every time? So far, each theory she’d come up with had failed to work. She went back to Yves’s words . . . “an insidious network” . . . What if this assassination attempt was only the first act? She had to catch the assassin and find out.
The taxi crossed Place Franz Liszt and turned into the ninth arrondissement, down a clogged narrow street of elegant art nouveau buildings now connected to street-level copy shops and dry cleaners. The taxi stopped, stuck in traffic. She hoped the woman wouldn’t jump out and take off on foot. Horns sounded and traffic moved once more. She grabbed a pen and on her palm wrote down the first three numbers from the ID number on the taxi’s side. It sped off before she could make out the rest. She kept three cars behind it, skirting the rond-point, drove down rue Rodie and through a soot-stained alley into a maze of winding thread-like streets and small squares. She glanced at her fuel tank: just above empty.
Now the taxi headed across rue des Martyrs, passing a fish store, a boulangerie, and a café jammed with afternoon patrons. A nanny with her charge, returning to a posh quartier.
Her cell phone rang.
“Aimée?” René’s voice sounding peeved. “I’m at Gare du Nord.”
Merde, did she forget to pick him up?
“I’ve come back early to talk to the real estate agent.”
She set her phone on the leather-upholstered seat, put it on loudspeaker. “Sorry, René, but I’m tied up right now.”
“Tied up? Knowing you, you’re off on some wild-goose chase.”
“I’m tailing the assassin who just tried to kill Jalenka Malat.”
“Assassin?” She heard his intake of breath over the phone. “No wonder the flics are questioning everyone. But how . . . ?”
“And who may have stabbed Yves’s photographer.”
“What’s that got to do with you?”
“You’ve missed a lot, René. I found Jalenka’s name on a bit of paper hidden in Yves’s wallet.”
“And that means?”
“The assassin killed Yves because he knew of the plot. Jalenka just missed being killed at the Institut Kurd a minute ago. But a young Kurdish woman on the podium wasn’t as lucky.”
“You mean you saw the assassin?”
“A little more than that. She’s a couple of taxis ahead of me now, using a child—”
“Where are you?”
Aimée kept one eye on the taxi, the other on the street signs. “Headed uphill on rue Notre Dame de Lorette.”
“Rue Notre Dame de Lorette, quick,” Aimée heard René shouting at a taxi driver.
“I’m jumping in a taxi. Keep talking, stay on the line, and don’t do anything foolish.”
Her? What about him?
“But what can you do—”
“I’m a black belt, remember?” he said. “We can sandwich her.”
“She’s got a high-powered rifle,” Aimée said, “She might take the child hostage.”
Or arm herself with explosives, return, and walk into the reception.
“So you have a plan?”
“Playing it by the hem of my skirt, René.”
“As usual,” René said. “Whatever you do, don’t stop the car when she gets out, keep going.”
“The taxi’s heading into Place Saint Georges.”
And then the bus ahead of her stalled. Horns honked and drivers stuck their heads out the windows shouting. Fuming, she punched the steering wheel. No where to go, no way to turn. Stuck.
She left the phone, jumped out of the car and ran, weaving her way among the stopped cars surrounded by the black billows of bus exhaust. When she reached the corner, the taxi had disappeared.
BACK ON THE crowded street, traffic moved and a chorus of horns greeted her. Irate drivers yelled, shaking their fists, as they were jammed behind the Citroën. She turned on the ignition, ground into first. The car shot ahead, sputtered, then died. The red fuel arrow was on empty. Stupid, how stupid. She’d lost the assassin and blocked the street. Now there was a lynch mob of drivers behind her.
She set the gear in neutral and opened the door. One hand guiding the steering wheel, she began to push. Nothing. Vintage Citroëns weigh a ton. Sweat broke out under her arms and she heaved again, hearing more shouts behind her.
The car rolled. And stopped, like a stubborn shiny black beetle, refusing to budge. Right by Garvani’s pigeon-spattered bust mounted on a pedestal. Elegant, well-maintained hôtel particuliers surrounded small, circular, tree-lined Place Saint Georges. Two Metro entrances on opposite sides were hidden discreetly by the trees. The Theatre Saint-Georges with its neon billboard angled away unobtrusively on the sloping street toward the church.
She turned around. “How about helping me if you want to move?”
Horns honked but no one got out of their car. The waiter from the one outdoor café on Place Saint Georges, in his long white apron, set down his serving tray and shook his fist at the cars. A faint breeze stirred the diesel fumes and plane-tree leaves.
He enlisted another waiter and, shirtsleeves rolled up, heaving and grunting, they helped her roll the Citroën off to the side.
“Merci.”
“Our pleasure, Mademoiselle, it happens all the time,” he said, his brow glistening with sweat. “Such a classic. Self-leveling hydro-pneumatic suspension makes the drive smooth, and it’s wonderful rounding corners.” He gazed with appecia-tive eyes at the Citroën. “Own a 1972 myself. You belong to the club?”
“Club?” she said, perspiration clinging to her shoulder blades. “It’s my partner’s car.”
He pointed to papers in the side front-door pocket. “Permettez?”
Unsure of what he meant, she nodded, eager to get going.
“Aaah, of course,” he said, displaying car club certificates. “Monsieur Friant, I know him from the rally.”
“My bill, s’il vous plait?” said a man sitting at the nearest marble-topped round table.
“Excusez-moi.”
She opened the car trunk, found the metal liter gas can, and shook it. Heard a swishing sound. Thank God, René kept spare gas in the trunk despite its illegality. She poured the gas into the fuel tank. An audience of smoking and drinking patrons from the café terasse watched her, glad of the entertainment in the doldrums of a summer afternoon. Frustrated, she angled the can higher so it poured faster. The pungent gasoline fumes joined the band of wavering humid heat.
A glass shattered in the café, someone said “Merde!” and all eyes turned. But she had the feeling someone was studying her. Watching her. Cold fear gripped her, as she thought of the assassin who had disappeared up the street. The assassin would have seen Aimée in her sights, could have noted her following in the Citroën. Instead of being the hunter . . . was she now the hunted?
She scanned the
patrons who had returned to their drinks and conversations. The feeling had gone. Her imagination? Just nervousness? She capped the fuel can, put it back, closed the trunk, and walked past the townhouse of La Paiva, the celebrated courtesan who later became a marquise. The entranceway of the building, now converted to apartments, lay deserted except for a gardener spraying water from a hose at a green clipped hedge.
Puzzled, she walked back to the car.
“Where are you, Aimée?” René was saying over the phone in the front seat.
“In front of a café,” she said. “I lost her. But I met your car-club friend. See you at the office later.”
She picked up her phone. Punched in the number. Now the DST couldn’t ignore her.
SHE FILLED THE fuel tank at nearby Pigalle, then headed back to the tenth arrondissement to a Turkish restaurant off rue du Faubourg du Temple, Bordereau’s colleague’s meeting place of choice.
A henna-haired older woman guided her to an empty back table and handed her an oversize menu. Murals of the Bosporus and Topkapi Palace lined the walls. She heard voices raised in the kitchen, then taped Turkish music with the twang of a saz, a mandolin-like instrument, filling the otherwise empty restaurant.
A man slid into the chair opposite her. He wore a green jogging suit. Muscular, mid-thirties, and not an ounce of fat on him. Brown-eyed, hair to match. Anonymous. He’d pass for another jogger on the Canal Saint-Martin.
“The pide’s excellent,” he said. “So’s the esme, their specialty.”
“Coffee’s fine.”
He snapped his fingers, glanced at the woman, and settled back in his chair.
“Bordereau apologizes, but you can give me your little presents, now.”
“Your name?”
“Call me Sacault.”
She hated dealing with the elite terrorist squad, had only forged a connection with Bordereau because she trusted him. This wouldn’t have happened if they’d listened to her. Now they would.
The woman set two Turkish coffees in small cups on the table and left. Two men walked into the restaurant. “We’re closed,” she said and ushered them out.