“I guess so. What do you think, Jenna?”
“Works for me.”
The men finished their work at around two thirty.
After that, we inspected the “safe room,” as Tess had inaptly labeled it, in the rented apartment. It had a bank of monitors in the living room, each one labeled in both French and English to match the room, wall or door the camera was watching. There were also monitors for the motion detectors and two small lightbulbs, one red, one green, each set to flash in the safe room if someone crossed the threshold of, respectively, the front door or the door to the study.
“How does the feed get here?” I asked. “I didn’t see any wires.”
“It is all via encrypted radio,” Tess said.
We tried out the system. Jenna went downstairs and intentionally triggered the red and green lights. She stood and waved in front of each camera, and I could see her easily. The motion detectors worked, too.
“Tess, will they work if it’s dark in there at night?”
“We will let the lights stay on, but if they are extinguished, each camera also has an infrared ability. Donc, we will see in the dark.”
At that moment, Tess’s cell phone rang. She answered it, and I heard her say in French, after listening for a moment, “Yes, I can come there if it will not take long.” And then, shortly after that, “Now? If it will help find Monsieur Quesana, why not?”
“Who was that?” I asked.
“It was the judge. He says he has some small questions to ask me, to fill in some things.”
“Now?”
“Yes. I told him ‘why not?’ I will not be gone long. You can begin to get ready for the mouse while I am away.”
“We will wait for you to return,” Jenna said. “We need to be sure we are fully coordinated among us. But hey, tell the judge I said hello.”
“I think I will not do this,” Tess said, and left.
CHAPTER 42
Judge Roland de Fournis
I had enjoyed my full day off. It had been a long time since I’d taken such a day for myself. The next morning, still enjoying my leisure time, I did not rush into work as I usually did, but instead puttered around my apartment. After lunch, I finally headed for the courthouse, but dawdled along the way. I looked in shop windows and watched old women feed the pigeons in the plaza in front of Notre Dame. I even thought of going into the cathedral and lighting a candle for my parents, but decided to save it for another day.
When I finally got to the courthouse, went into my courtroom and sat down at my desk, I saw, lying on top of the red dossier I had been compiling, two manila folders. My greffier, who was already there, smiled at me, as if to say, “I can still do the impossible.”
I lifted up the first folder and read through the contents. Ten pages gave me a detailed history of what the general had been up to since he was a cadet at Saint-Cyr, the military academy that has, for the last couple of centuries, graduated most officers of the French Army.
The second folder contained the civil service employment history of Madame Devrais. It was only half a page long and ended when she was about twenty-five, as I had requested. Nothing about the file suggested that she had been involved in any way in spying or national security matters. Indeed, in her early twenties, she had been a mere clerk in the Foreign Ministry, although the dates and location of one part of her assignment there were very interesting indeed.
Not long after I finished reading the material, the general arrived for his appointment. It got off to a bit of a bumpy start. He sat down, waved the summons at me and said, “I have been talking to lawyers since I last saw you, and I think I can make out a good case that this summons is illegal.”
“Why?”
“For one thing, you’re beyond your proper jurisdiction. You were assigned a simple theft case. For another, you did not give me enough notice for this appearance. And for a third, as I told you before, I believe my current position gives me immunity.”
“Whatever your current position is, which you’ve still not made clear.”
“I can do that.”
“I’ll tell you what, Jean. All I want is some information. If you are willing to give it to me, we can do this informally today without your taking an oath.”
“And if you want it to be sworn testimony?”
“After hearing you out, if I need it under oath, I can call you back and we can find out before the court of appeal whether I have the authority to summon you.”
“Alright, let’s give it a try.”
“I apologize for not having any almond croissant for you today.”
“It’s not a problem. What do you want to know?”
I smiled. “Since this is an informal session, I’ll ask you an informal question: What the hell is going on?”
“I’m trying to find this guy who was kidnapped.”
“You’re not making much progress so far as I can see.”
“I am. I have found the source of the money with which this American bought the book.”
“Which was?”
“He borrowed one hundred thousand dollars from Bank of America.”
“Is that suspicious?”
“It could be. He has no history of borrowing money, and he didn’t specify in the loan what the money was for.”
“So?”
“It’s unusual. I’m sure the bank has done nothing wrong, but we now suspect that this is some kind of money laundering, possibly done for a gang in Russia that uses the purchase and sale of rare books as a way to move money around the world without suspicion.”
“I thought people like that were interested in washing millions.”
“This may be a starter effort—to see if he’s reliable.”
“Do you at least know where he is?”
“We do.”
“Where?”
“As I told you once before when you asked me this, I’m hesitant to give you any information along those lines for fear you’ll interfere.”
“I’ll not press it for the moment. But how did you figure it out?”
“The kidnappers have been clever, using throw-away phones and moving around a lot. But they recently slipped up by using one of those phones twice in a thirty-minute period from the same location: the first time to send a message to the professor and the second time to send one to someone else. We were lucky and able to triangulate more closely, using a drone nearby.”
“Well, I will ask again, where are they?”
“Do you promise on your oath as a judge not to interfere?”
“I promise.”
“And do you promise not to tell the busybody professor and her friends?”
“I promise that, too.”
I looked over at my greffier to be sure she was quietly transcribing the conversation. I had promised not to take the general’s testimony under oath. I hadn’t promised not to make a record of it. One of the great things about the notebook computer the greffiers use is that you can’t tell if they’re transcribing or just working on something else.
“They are in a small town near Digne-les-Bains in a converted barn,” he said.
“How near to Digne?”
“I’m going to leave that unsaid.”
“Are you going to try to rescue him?”
“Soon.”
“How soon?”
“Not today, not tomorrow, not the day after that, but soon.”
“How will you do it?”
“We will use the GIGN.”
Those initials stood for the Groupe d’Intervention de la Gendarmerie Nationale, a military unit known for its special tactics, body armor and aggression. It was a highly professional and meticulously trained group that had rescued lots of people. But there was always the risk that this time it would fail and the hostage would die.
�
��Jean, that group would not have been my first choice in what seems to be a pretty run-of-the mill kidnapping, not a terrorist plot.”
“We’ve been monitoring their activity and we think it’s appropriate.”
“Who is ‘we’?”
“I’m working with the Brigade Criminelle.”
“So I have heard.”
He started to get up. “I hope you’ve appreciated my candor. Now I have some things to attend to.”
“I have a couple more quick things. First, do you know where the book is?”
“No. I wish I did. I could exchange it for the hostage.”
“There’s also something that puzzles me about this whole thing.”
“Which is?”
“It seems, from what I’ve been told, that this inscription in the book is almost certainly a fake. So why does anyone want it?”
He shrugged and threw up his hands. “I don’t know. Some people are crazy and hope against hope that it is not fake? I really have no idea.”
“I see.”
He started to get up again. “Are we done now?”
“Just one more. Do you know a young woman named Olga Bukova?”
He sat back down. “Yes, of course.”
“Why ‘of course’?”
“She’s my niece. My brother’s daughter.”
I was stunned. After a few seconds of silence, in which I wasn’t able to speak, I asked, “What is she doing involved in all of this?”
He sighed deeply. “I have been trying not to get involved with her and her project, but I suppose this was inevitable.”
“Do tell.”
“My brother, Victor, wanted to buy the same book that, apparently, Oscar Quesana bought. But Oscar got there first. So my brother wants to buy it from Oscar at a good profit for Oscar. Oscar refuses to sell.”
“And so your brother kidnapped him?”
“No, no, not at all. My brother, you see, is stuck in Russia for the moment. Some kind of trouble with the government. So he sent his daughter, Olga, to find Monsieur Quesana and up the offer to three times what Oscar paid for the book.”
“Is that why she was at the hotel?”
“Apparently.”
“I’ve been told that the hotel he was staying at was secret. Did you tell her where to find him?”
“No, and I didn’t initially know where he was staying. As you probably know by now if you’ve been told the whole story, Tess Devrais had a Christmas Eve dinner party. The book was apparently there, and Olga saw it somehow. She told me that she put a very tiny GPS tracking button on it, and later followed Quesana to his hotel. And then to Digne.”
“So you had nothing to do with it?”
“Nothing. I wish she’d go home to Russia. I’m going to make her do that as soon as I find her. I don’t know where she is at the moment.”
I thought about telling him that I knew where she was, but then thought better of it. After all, he was the witness, not me. I also decided not to mention that I’d just been told that she did not speak French or English, which raised the question of how she was going to negotiate with Monsieur Quesana.
“One more question.”
“Yes?”
“If she’s your brother’s daughter, why do the two of you have different last names?”
“My parents divorced when I was four. My brother and father stayed in Moscow. My mother and I moved here and she changed our last name to be less Russian. At the time, being Russian was not a plus.”
“So you are not Olga’s father.”
“Whatever would make you think I am?”
From the expression on his face, I had just proposed to him something totally false, idiotic even.
“Your presence in Moscow around the time she was born,” I said.
“I don’t know how you have found that out, but whatever inferences you have drawn from it are totally false. She is my brother’s daughter.”
He got up and left without even saying au revoir. After he had departed, I asked my greffier, “What do you think?”
“I think he’s telling the truth but not the whole truth.”
“I agree. The question is, which part of the truth did he leave out? That is what I have to figure out.”
“How are you going to do that?”
“I’m not sure. But to start with, I want to confirm something with the chief of the Brigade Criminelle. His number is in the computer. Could you get him on the phone?”
“Of course, Monsieur le juge.”
He picked up the phone immediately—most people do when they hear a judge is calling—and disappointed me. He said that General Follet was indeed working on a special investigation of a kidnapping. He didn’t know the details, but assured me that all the proper protocols were being followed.
His call showed me, once again, that not all hunches pan out.
Next, I picked up the phone, called Madame Devrais and asked, if she were not too busy, if she might drop by sometime in the next hour. I told her that there were a few details of the case I needed to wrap up, and she might just have the answers. I added that it might help find Monsieur Quesana. She didn’t ask what details, and said that, certainly, if it would help to find Monsieur Quesana, she would be happy to come. I could tell from her tone of voice, though, that she was wary.
For the next little while, I busied myself with some administrative matters. Then there came a knock on the door, and Madame Devrais entered. Without waiting for an invitation, she sat down in the witness chair.
“Bonjour, Monsieur le juge, what can I do for you?”
“I have been reading your civil service personnel file.”
“I am surprised they gave it to you.”
“Only the part before you turned twenty-five.”
“Ah, that perhaps makes sense. Did you find it interesting reading?”
“Only in part.”
“Which part?”
“The part that says you were a file clerk in the Foreign Ministry posted for two years to our embassy in Moscow.”
“And?”
“In itself, that is not so interesting, although I do assume, given what came later for you, that you were actually doing something besides filing.”
“That could be. Are you interested in what I filed?”
“No, but I am curious if you speak Russian.”
“I can do ‘entrance’ and ‘exit,’ and ‘hello’ and ‘goodbye,’ but beyond that very little. My ‘filing,’ if we call it that, was electronic in nature, and I was discouraged from mixing with the locals. I rarely left the compound except for some special missions.”
“I see.”
“So what are you interested in, Monsieur le juge?”
“What I am interested in is a coincidence because I have also been reading General Follet’s file.”
As I said that, I watched her closely to see if she had any reaction to it. There was none. Apparently, my inquiry during our last conversation about how long she had known the general had steeled her, should the topic come up again, against displaying even the flash of emotion she had let slip the last time.
“What coincidence?”
“You and he were posted to Moscow, at the embassy, at exactly the same time. He was a military attaché; you were a clerk. You were each there for almost two years. And you both left on, it would appear, the same day, twenty-one years ago next month.”
“I don’t truly recall that we arrived at the same time. We did leave at the same time.”
“And why was that?”
“We were both about to be expelled from the country for various actions of which we were suspected by the Russian security services. We preferred to remove ourselves from Russia before that could happen. He had full diplomatic immunity; mine was more limited in scope.”
“Were you lovers?”
“I have an inclination to tell you that it is none of your business and far beyond the scope of your inquiry.”
“I can understand that inclination. But it is not mere voyeurism that inclines me to ask. If I were to tell you that your answer would not be recorded and not go in this dossier”—I held the red folder up for her to see—“would you be more inclined to answer?”
She sat for a moment, clearly thinking about it. “Are you promising on your oath as a judge that your greffier will not transcribe what I say and that you will not put it in the dossier and will not speak of it to anyone else?”
“Yes.”
“What about Madame?” She gestured toward my greffier.
“I will not transcribe it, and I will also keep your secrets,” Marie said.
“Alright then, I will tell you, since it seems important to you. Yes, we were lovers. Although it was not a complete secret. It was known to a few others at the embassy at the time.”
“Others also in a certain type of employment?”
“Yes.”
“Thank you for your candor.”
She started to get up, assuming we were done. “I don’t know why this is so important, Monsieur le juge, but if you have nothing further, I need to go now.”
“I do have one more question.”
“Yes?”
“Are you Olga’s mother?”
She was still standing up, but betrayed no bodily surprise at my question. “That is a crazy idea.”
“Yes, but is it true, Madame?”
“No. Whatever made you even suspect it?”
“I obtained her birth certificate from the Russian consulate—they were happy to oblige—and I noted when I read your file earlier today that Olga was born two weeks before you and the general left Moscow.”
“And you think I agreed to put my own child up for adoption?”
“It was a possibility.”
“It is nonsense. I had never met Olga—or even heard of her—before the general brought her to Christmas dinner at my apartment. And I would never put a child of mine up for adoption.”
“Eh bien, I apologize then for bringing this up. But tell me, do you know who Olga’s mother is?”
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