“The food’s good,” he said, and in spite of herself, she sputtered, laughing.
“Damn you,” she laughed. “So what is your name? Is it really Nick? Or is it Michael, or do you have one for every day of the week?”
He wiped his mouth with his napkin.
“I shouldn’t have come. It was stupid. Self-indulgent. I’m so very sorry,” he said, frowning. “We need to leave Paris. Both of us. Tonight.”
“What are you talking about? I’m not leaving.”
“Look, I know it sounds insane, but right now you’d be safer in Africa. I think you should go back to Dadaab. Now. Right away. I’m begging you.”
She examined him with her lion’s eyes.
“You know,” she said, “the Canadian nurse, Jennifer. She e-mailed me. She said the boy, Ghedi, the one you saved from Somalia, all he talks about is you. That you’re coming for him.”
“I will,” he said, his voice thick. He had to take a sip of wine to go on. “Have to clean this up first.”
“I don’t understand any of this. Why did you come tonight? Truly?”
He looked at her. Smooth golden skin, high cheekbones, and eyes like no one else’s.
“You know why,” he said, barely able to get it out. The effect she had on him was unbelievable.
“Tiens!” she whispered, mostly to herself. “Come on,” she said, taking his hand for him to get up.
“Where are we going?” he said, following her up and motioning to the waiter for the bill.
“My place. I’m going to rip your clothes off and have sex with you.”
As they headed for the door, the waiter, a Gallic half smile on his lips as if he knew exactly why they were leaving, handed him the bill, and Scorpion shoved a handful of euros at him.
“Why?” he asked as they nodded to the maitre d’ and stepped outside, the street dark and nearly empty except for the streetlights shining on the cobblestones and darkened shop windows.
“I don’t care whether you’re lying or telling the truth,” she said. “That was the sexiest proposition I’ve ever heard in my life.” They started walking toward the Place des Ternes when he stopped suddenly. He had spotted the brown Peugeot parked near the corner.
She looked at him, and he pulled her close as if to kiss her, his eyes quartering the Peugeot and the street. He put his lips to her ear.
“When we get to the Place des Ternes, don’t ask questions. Run down the stairs to the Metro without me. Make sure you’re not followed home. I’ll come later if I can. What’s the address?”
“What’s going on?” she whispered back.
“We’re being followed,” he said, and kissed her so long and hard he almost forgot what he was doing.
“Mon dieu,” she said, catching her breath. “Eight rue du Terrage, au troisieme etage. It’s in the 10th Arrondissement, near the Canal St. Martin.”
“I know the canal,” he said, taking her arm, the two walking together. He had spotted a glint of metal reflected from the shadows in a parked Renault Megane half a block behind them. As they walked toward the lights of the Place des Ternes, he could feel her trembling beside him.
In the center of the square was the entrance to the Metro, and next to it a shuttered flower stall. Scorpion spotted a front tail behind a tree near the stall. He didn’t have to turn around to sense the tail behind them. They were bracketed.
“Is this how it’s going to be?” Sandrine whispered.
“Je ne sais pas comment il va etre.” I don’t know how it is going to be. “Run!” he said abruptly, pushing her toward the Metro entrance. He had a sense of her running down the stairs as he whirled and kneeled into a shooting position, pulling the Glock from the ankle holster under his trouser leg.
“Ne bougez, trouduc!” he shouted at the shadow. Don’t move, asshole!
The shadow detached from the side of the flower stall and ran toward the Avenue de Wagram. A Middle Eastern-looking man in a windbreaker. Scorpion started after him. He needed him alive, he thought, running as hard as he could, wondering why the man hadn’t fired first.
The man, wearing a windbreaker, hopped onto a motorbike parked vertically between cars. Dodging a passing red Citroen, Scorpion raced toward the curb. He needed to get out of traffic and get a clean shot. He had almost reached the curb when he got his answer about why the man in the windbreaker hadn’t fired.
A bullet pinged off the cobblestones less than two inches from his foot. Scorpion dived between two parked cars and wriggled under one of them. He peered out from beneath the car. The shot had made no sound. Whoever fired must have been using a sound suppressor.
He quartered the area looking for the source of the shot. It hadn’t come from behind, from rue du Faubourg St.-Honore. Other than the man in the windbreaker, he had spotted no one and no one had followed Sandrine down the stairs to the Metro. So where the hell did the shot come from? he wondered, pulling off his jacket.
His thoughts were broken by the sound of an engine revving. Scorpion peeked out from under the car and saw the man on the motorbike cut into traffic. He flicked his jacket out toward the sidewalk while rolling the other way to the street, looking around wildly while snapping into a kneeling shooting position. He was about to fire when something moved, a shadow or a reflection; something out of the corner of his eye made him look up, and he just had time to roll back under the car as another bullet ricocheted off the cobblestones, barely missing his head. He heard a woman scream and saw another woman, crossing the street to the Metro with a small dog, look up. He watched her, the sound of the motorbike fading up the avenue.
The shot had come from a roof or upper floor apartment building on Avenue de Wagram near the little square. The middle-age woman with the dog shouted, “Aidez-moi! Police!”-Help! Police! — scooped up her dog and ran to the Metro stairs. A couple walking across the square ran back from where they’d come.
The shot had come from above on his side of the street, Scorpion realized. It had to be a rifle because even a marksman couldn’t have come so close while shooting from above at that distance with a pistol. Also, he wouldn’t have been in an apartment, because before he and Sandrine decided to take the Metro to her place, they hadn’t known they would be walking to the Place des Ternes. The tails must have spotted them heading this way, figured out where they were going, and the sniper-part of the front tail team-went into the apartment building above the pharmacy. He would have gone up to the roof for what should have been an easy kill. It was the red Citroen that saved him, forcing him to step aside, spoiling the sniper’s first shot.
Whoever they were, they were good. He wouldn’t get lucky again.
It was about four meters from under the car to the front door of the apartment house. A ledge between the top floor and the roof would give him some protection from the sniper shooting vertically down. There would be no time to ring the bell for the concierge; it would take perhaps seven or eight seconds to bump the front door lock with his Peterson universal key. He would only be vulnerable during the two or three seconds on the open sidewalk.
It would all depend on how fast the sniper’s reaction time was, he thought. Also, a pure vertical shot was difficult; the kind people almost never fired in their lives. The bullet would not have a curved trajectory. The sniper would have to adjust the sight lower than normal to hit the desired point of impact. Scorpion knew that moving fast, at night, he would present a minimal target from above, where all the sniper would see were his head and shoulders.
They’d set it up well, he realized. The man on the motorbike had been a decoy. Another few seconds, and if he hadn’t shoved Sandrine to the Metro stairs, the sniper would have killed them both. He had told her that knowing him would be dangerous, and she’d probably wondered if he was being melodramatic. He hadn’t expected it to be proven right so quickly.
Did the sniper know about the vertical trajectory? he wondered. One way to find out. Taking a deep breath, he rolled out from under the car and sprinted to
the apartment house door, a bullet drilling into the sidewalk behind him as he slammed himself flat in the doorway.
He had been right. The sniper overshot the point of impact by a few critical centimeters.
Scorpion used the Peterson universal key to open the door and enter the building. The hallway was typically Parisian: a patterned tile floor, flowered wallpaper, a staircase and narrow elevator. Gun ready, he pressed the button for the timed hall light and looked up the staircase. Nothing moved.
He pushed the button for the elevator, and using the noise as it started down to cover his footsteps, climbed the stairs, whipping around at every turn and landing, ready to fire. The timed hall light went off. He crept up to the top floor, his eyes slowly adjusting to the dark. Reaching the landing, he hesitated, peering into the darkness.
It would be impossible to go up the stairs to the roof. The sound of the roof door opening would alert the sniper. At that distance, and as a stationary target for an instant, the shot would be fatal. He needed another way onto the roof.
Moving on tiptoe down the carpeted hallway, he put his ear to the first apartment door. Through it he could hear a television. Someone was listening to a game show, La Rue de la Fortune. Wheel of Fortune. He went to the next apartment door and thought he heard someone talking inside. The third apartment was silent. It didn’t look like it was wired for an alarm. Just to be sure, he knocked. If someone answered, he’d tell them he was l’electricien sent by the concierge to investigate a problem. But there was no answer. Using the Peterson key, he opened the lock and went inside.
The apartment was dark, quiet. He used a pocket LED flashlight to look around, but whoever lived there was out. The window overlooked the Avenue de Wagram. No good, he thought. The sniper was probably right above him, where he could cover the Place des Ternes and the Metro entrance and street. To have any chance, he would need to work his way over toward the other side of the building to try and come up on the sniper from behind.
Provided the sniper was alone and didn’t have a spotter. Otherwise all bets were off, he thought, opening the window and climbing out, his toes on the sill so he could reach up to the ledge he had spotted from below.
The night was cool and clear. He slipped his toes into a crevice in the building’s facade and pulled himself up by his fingers till his forearms and elbows rested on the ledge. The roof parapet was about a meter above the ledge, so he would have to crouch or crawl, heaving himself up till he could swing a leg over it. For a few seconds he dangled from his arms, gripping the ledge. Don’t look down! he told himself.
A moment later he was lying flat on the ledge, staring down at the street four stories below, hoping he hadn’t made a sound. He looked up, but saw only the top of the parapet and the sky. He listened intently. There was no way to know where the sniper was; he could be only a meter away.
Slowly, Scorpion moved onto his toes and knees, one foot behind the other, making sure to stay crouched below the top of the parapet. The ledge was barely six inches wide. He felt horribly exposed. Someone honked a horn below. For an instant he looked down, but it was just normal traffic. In the distance, over the tops of the buildings, he could see the upper part of the Eiffel Tower, glittering gold with electric lights. He took a breath. Time to move.
The footing was precarious; he crept slowly, one step at a time. It seemed to take forever to reach the corner of the building. Clinging to the side, he edged around the corner. The parapet on this other side was sloped and he had to hold on as he inched forward, conscious of the sound of traffic on the tree-lined street below. It would be the Boulevard de Courcelles, he thought. About ten meters from the corner he saw a mansard window, though he wasn’t sure if it was real or decorative.
Time to decide, he thought. If the sniper was at the Avenue de Wagram parapet, coming over the top he would be to the side and behind him. Then, even if he made a sound, he would have time to aim before the sniper could turn around and shoot. Grabbing the edge of the window molding, Scorpion reached up to the pitched top of the parapet with his left hand. In his right, he held the Glock. It would all depend on which way the sniper was facing, he thought as he put the toe of his shoe into an indented part of the molding. He listened intently. No sound from the roof. Here we go, he thought. Pulling with his left hand, he leaped over the top of the parapet onto the slanted metal roof.
Landing, his feet at an angle, he snapped into a firing position and scanned the length of the parapet just as he heard the snap of a door closing. He whirled, ready to shoot, but the sniper was gone, out the roof door he hadn’t wanted to use. He straightened. The rooftop was empty.
He made a tour of the parapet to make sure the sniper hadn’t gone over onto the ledge on the Avenue de Wagram side. That was empty too. Then he ran to the roof door, readied himself to fire, and ripped it open. There was no one on the landing, but he could hear the elevator descending. The son of a bitch was getting away!
Scorpion raced to the stairs, took them three or four at a time, leaping down to the landings, then ripped around and down the next flight, racing the elevator. As he reached the second floor, he could hear the elevator door opening, then someone running on the tile floor of the front hallway. Leaping nearly the entire flight of stairs to the landing, he was just in time to see the front door close and an older woman-the concierge-opening her apartment door.
“Retournez a l’interieur, madame!” Go back inside! he shouted as he raced past her and out the front door. A man with a rifle case was running hard toward the Metro entrance. Scorpion took off after him.
The man leaped down the stairs to the Metro, causing people coming up to stare at him. Scorpion raced across the street, nearly getting sideswiped by a BMW. He ran down the stairs, holding his Glock in his pocket. The man with the rifle case had already gone through the turnstile; he wasn’t there.
Scorpion used a one-day ticket to go through the turnstile, then had to choose which tunnel platform: PORTE DAUPHINE or NATION. No way to know which platform the sniper had gone to. Trains came by every couple of minutes. If he chose wrong, he might give the sniper a shot at him, or the man would get away and he’d never have a chance to find out who was after him-whether it was Bern or something else. Only if it wasn’t Bern, how the hell had they picked up on him in the middle of Paris?
Time to choose. Two passageways: NATION would be the train heading east into the 11th Arrondissement; PORTE DAUPHINE was the shorter part of the line, he could see from glancing at the map. The next stop that way was Charles de Gaulle-Etoile. If he were the sniper, he would try to lose someone in all the traffic and people on the Champs-Elysees and around the Arc de Triomphe, and so he sprinted down the passage to the Porte Dauphine platform.
He stopped at the opening to the platform and crouched low. A young woman a few feet away looked at him, and seeing him take the Glock out of his pocket, started to run. Scorpion grabbed her by the arm. She tried to twist away, terrified.
“J’ai besoin de votre miroir de maquillage,” he said. I need your makeup mirror. He took her handbag, opened it, and poking around, pulled out a small mirror case. He handed the bag back to her as she stared at him, wide-eyed. He put his finger to his lips as she continued to stare as if he was insane, then bolted and ran toward the exit. He could hear the sound of her high heels click-clicking behind him as he bent low and held the mirror out, close to the floor, angled so he could see the platform.
A train was coming but on the other side, going toward Nation, the noise covering any other sounds. On his side, the platform was long and curved and there were only a dozen or so people waiting. Then he spotted the sniper in the mirror. He was a young man in a black Faconnable jacket, Iranian, by the look of him. Then he turned and Scorpion got a better look.
It was the man with the seaman’s cap, the motorcyclist from Hamburg. The one who had killed Harandi.
Scorpion counted eight people on the platform between himself and the sniper, who glanced his way, without being abl
e to see him, in the direction the sniper would have to take were he to come after him. Pulling his hand with the mirror back, Scorpion glanced over his shoulder toward the Metro entrance. There was no way of knowing if there were more of them. The train on the other side pulled away, reminding him that the next train to Porte Dauphine would be coming any second. Once it did, he would have to put himself out in the open on the platform or lose the sniper for good.
He eased the mirror back out again. There were the same eight bystanders and the sniper, for the moment not looking toward him, but down the track. Then Scorpion heard the Porte Dauphine train approaching.
He stepped out onto the platform and sprinted at the sniper, who whirled and frantically began opening the rifle case. He pulled out a large sniper rifle.
It looked like a Russian rifle, Scorpion thought, running; a VKS Vychlop with a silencer. How the hell had the bastard missed?
The bystanders, staring, were about to get killed.
He screamed at the top of his lungs: “Attention! Fusil! Police!”
As the sniper swung the rifle into aiming position, some of the bystanders screamed and ran; the others stood there, frozen. Scorpion threw himself onto the platform floor in a prone position, aimed the Glock and fired at the sniper’s thigh. He needed him alive.
The sniper staggered but did not go down. He re-aimed as Scorpion fired again, hitting him in the shoulder this time. Scorpion rolled to the side as the sniper fired and barely missed, the bullet tearing a jagged scar in the concrete platform next to his ear, then came up to his feet and ran toward the sniper again.
The man was struggling to raise the Vychlop for another shot. The train was coming fast, not far behind him, the bore of the rifle’s silencer opening looking big as a tunnel to Scorpion. But the sniper was too close, and instead swung the rifle at Scorpion’s face.
Scorpion blocked it and started the Krav Maga disarm, curling his right arm around the weapon, creating torque on the forearm while smashing his left elbow into the man’s face. He twisted the rifle away then smashed the butt of the weapon into the sniper’s face, staggering him sideways. As Scorpion reached to pull him close into a choke hold, the Iranian, seeing the train almost there, suddenly lurched sideways and off the platform.
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