It was not a voice he recognized—not his usual masseuse. He craned his head and looked at the substitute. “Where’s Mei?”
“Mei felt under the weather today, sir. I’m Zhen. It is OK?”
Zhen was even more beautiful than Mei, and her grip was stong and confident. Wu nodded contentedly. The elite and exclusive Caspara spa, newly opened in Beijing, hired only the very best: that was clear. He turned back, placing his head on the open headrest, and listened to the soothing piped-in sounds of bubbling water and softly plucked guzheng. He felt as if Zhen’s fingers were dissolving tension wherever they roamed.
“Excellent,” he murmured. “For the welfare of the ship, one must calm the turbulent seas.”
“That is our specialty, sir,” Zhen said softly. “Such tight muscles—you must have many burdens and responsibilities placed upon you.”
“Many,” Wu murmured.
“But I know just the thing, sir.”
“I am in your hands.”
The beautiful masseuse began to apply acupressure to the soles of his feet, and he felt a growing lightness suffuse his body. So dozy was the security advisor that he did not respond at once when a hypodermic needle was inserted just beneath the toenail of his left foot—the sharp sensation was so incongruous that, at least at first, it did not register. And then, moments later, a wave of utter relaxation suffused his body like a tide of numbness. In the next few moments, he could only foggily contemplate the difference between relaxation and paralysis. He felt dead to the world.
And then, as Zhen matter-of-factly confirmed, he was just dead.
Burton Lasker boarded the Georges V elevator with the smooth-faced young manager on duty. When they reached the seventh floor, the young man knocked on the heavy oak door, then unlocked it with a special key card. The two men strode through the rooms, seeing no sign of habitation. Then the hotelier stepped into the bathroom; his face was ashen as he stepped out. Lasker immediately rushed over and saw what the other man had seen. He gasped. It felt as if there were a balloon inside his chest, making it hard to breathe.
“You were a friend of his?” the hotelier asked.
“A friend and business associate,” Lasker confirmed.
“I am sorry.” The man paused awkwardly. “Help will arrive shortly. I will make the calls.”
Lasker stood rooted to the spot, trying to calm himself. Paul Fenton. His reddened, blistered body was slumped in the bathtub, naked. Lasker noticed the still-steaming bathwater, the emptied bottle of vodka propped by the basin—stage dressing that might confuse the gendarmerie but did not fool Lasker for a moment.
A remarkable man—a great man—had been murdered.
Lasker had a strong suspicion who was behind it, and when he went through Paul Fenton’s PDA, his suspicions were confirmed. It was the man Fenton had called Tarquin. A man Lasker knew all too well.
Tarquin had served in the Political Stabilization Unit, and Lasker—field name Cronus—had had the misfortune of serving with him on a couple of assignments. Tarquin had somehow imagined himself superior to his colleagues and was oblivious to how much support they selflessly gave him. Tarquin was known for his peculiar gift of reading people, a gift that some of the strategists at Consular Operations were overly impressed with. They couldn’t grasp what seasoned operatives like Cronus knew, as a matter of second nature: that operational success always came down to firepower and muscle.
Now Tarquin had killed the greatest man Lasker had ever known, and he would pay. He would pay with the only currency that Lasker would accept: his life.
What sickened Lasker was that he had once saved Tarquin’s life—not that Tarquin could be bothered to display anything akin to gratitude. Lasker recalled a humid, mosquito-ridden night nearly ten years ago, in the jungles of Jaffna, Sri Lanka. That night, he had risked his own life to charge in, guns blazing, and save Tarquin from a group of terrorists who were planning to kill him. Mordantly, Lasker remembered the bitter old adage: No good deed goes unpunished. He had saved the life of a monster—an error for which he would now make amends.
Fenton did not explain everything that he was up to—no visionary could be expected to. Once, when he had asked Fenton about the rationale of a particular deployment, Fenton had said to him lightly, “Yours is but to do and kill.”
It was no longer a laughing matter.
Lasker whisked through the transmission log of Fenton’s wireless PDA. He would send a message to the condemned man. First, though, calls would be made to the dozen or so “associates” that SSG had on the ground in Paris. They would be put on alert at once, precise mobilization orders to follow shortly.
A spasm of profound grief passed over Lasker—and yet he could not allow himself grief until he had experienced vengeance. He summoned the discipline of his rarefied profession. A rendezvous with the condemned man would be established for sunset.
It would be, Lasker resolved, the last sunset Tarquin would ever see.
Caleb Norris pressed the OFF button of his cell phone. It was foolish that the CIA permitted the use of cell phones in headquarters at all, he reflected. Their presence nullified a great deal of the elaborate security precautions that were taken—like waterproofing a sieve. But at the moment, the circumstance suited him very well.
He fed various papers into the shredder beside his desk, retrieved his coat, and, finally, unlocked a steel-lined case secreted in his credenza. The long-barreled handgun fitted neatly into his briefcase.
“Have a great trip, Mr. Norris,” Brenda Wallenstein said in her familiar nasal voice. She had been Norris’s secretary for the past five years and devotedly followed the fashions of workplace injuries. When news stories started to appear about repetitive-motion disorder, she started showing up with special wrist braces and pressure bandages. More recently, she had taken to wearing special headphones, like a telephone operator, in order to spare her neck the perils of cinching up a handset. There had been a time, Norris vaguely recalled, when she started to develop scent allergies; that those allergies had failed to develop was only a function of her somewhat limited attention span.
Norris had long ago concluded that she simply preferred to imagine her job—which largely involved sitting at a keyboard and answering the phone—as being, in its way, every bit as hazardous as a tour of duty in the Marines. In her mind, anyway, she was obviously awarding herself as many “injuries sustained” badges.
“Thank you, Brenda,” the ADDI replied heartily. “I intend to.”
“Don’t get sunburned,” his secretary cautioned, with her unfailing instinct for identifying the dark sides of all situations. “See, down there they even have these little umbrellas so the drinks don’t get sunburned. Those rays are strong. I went online and looked up the weather forecast for St. John and the Virgin Islands, and it’s supposed to be nothing but clear skies.”
“Just what we like to hear.”
“Joshua and I went to St. Croix one year.” She pronounced the word to rhyme with stoics. “He got such a sunburn on the first day, he was smearing spearmint toothpaste on his face just to get cool. Can you picture it?”
“I’d rather not, if it’s all the same to you.” Norris briefly debated whether to take additional ammunition but decided against. It was a little-known fact about him that he was an excellent shot.
Brenda cackled. “Forewarned is forearmed, right? But St. John has gotta be just what the doctor ordered. Blue skies, blue sea, white sand. And I just checked—your car is here, waiting at the 2A bay with your luggage. Dulles shouldn’t even take half an hour at this time of day. Should be smooth sailing.”
She was right—for all her garrulity and self-imposed mortifications, she was actually quite efficient—but Cal Norris had left himself plenty of time at the airport. Even with all the right paperwork, checking a weapon could take some time. In the event, the line at Business Class moved fast.
“Good afternoon,” the airline clerk behind the counter said, in his programmed greeting. �
�And where are you headed for today?”
Norris slid his ticket across the counter. “Zurich,” he said.
“Skiing, I bet.” The clerk glanced at Norris’s passport and ticket invoice before stamping his board card.
Norris stole a glance at his watch. “What else?”
As he watched a gust sweep through the street outside the Musée Armandier, Ambler felt the BlackBerry vibrating in an inside coat pocket. It had to be a message from Fenton or one of his people, who had given him the device in the first place. He scanned its small screen quickly. A deputy of Fenton’s had called to arrange a meeting this evening—an outdoor rendezvous this time. As Ambler returned the device to his pocket, he felt a faint sense of unease.
“Where?” asked Laurel.
“Père-Lachaise,” the operative replied. “Not the most imaginative venue, but I can see its advantages. And Fenton never likes to meet in the same place twice.”
“Worries me,” Laurel said. “I don’t like the sound of it.”
“Because it’s a cemetery? It might as well be an amusement park—it’s a pretty heavily trafficked area. Trust me, I know what I’m doing.”
“I wish I shared your confidence,” Caston said. “Fenton’s a goddamn wild card. His whole arrangement with the federal government is a can of worms. Had my office look into it a bit, and it seems they buried it under black box appropriations. A high-level shroud—nothing I can penetrate while I’m here. But I’d love to have a chance to review those numbers. Damned irregular, I’d bet.” He blinked. “As for a rendezvous at Père-Lachaise with people like that? That goes beyond the category of risk and into the dark realm of uncertainty.”
“Caston, dammit, I already live in the dark realm of uncertainty,” Ambler said, flaring. “Or haven’t you noticed?”
Laurel reached a hand over to his. “I’m just saying be careful,” she said. “You still don’t know what these people are really up to.”
“I’ll be careful. But we’re getting close.”
“Close to finding out what they did to you?”
“Yes,” Ambler said. “And close to finding out what they may have planned for the rest of the world.”
“Take care of yourself, Hal,” she said. With a side-glance at Caston, she leaned forward and whispered in Ambler’s ear, “I really don’t have a good feeling about this.”
BEIJING
“We must get the message to President Liu,” Wan Tsai said, the horror in his gaze further magnified by his convex wire-rimmed glasses.
“But what if Comrade Chao’s death really was an accident?” Li Pei asked. The two had convened in Wan Tsai’s office, in the Hall of Diligent Government. “What if it was?”
“Do you believe that?” Wan Tsai demanded.
A faint chest rattle was audible as the older man exhaled. “No,” he said. “I don’t.” Li Pei was in his late seventies but suddenly looked older still.
“We have all gone through the proper channels,” Wan Tsai said, not for the first time. “We have all raised the alarm. Yet I find that he is already in the air, halfway there. We must get him to come back.”
“Except he will not come back,” Li Pei wheezed. “We both know that about him. He is as wise as an owl—and as stubborn as a mule.” A mournful look passed over his age-etched countenance. “And who knows whether he might confront even greater dangers at home.”
“Have you spoken to Wu Jingu, Chao’s colleague?”
“Nobody seems to know where he is at the moment.” The economist swallowed hard.
“How can that be?”
Wan Tsai shook his head in a shuddering motion. “Nobody knows. I’ve spoken to everyone else, though. We all want to think what happened to Chao was an accident. None of us truly can.” The economist ran a hand through his thick, graying hair.
“It’s not too soon to start wondering about Wu Jingu as well,” the old man said.
A harrowed look threatened what remained of Wan Tsai’s composure. “Who is in charge of Liu Ang’s security retinue?”
“You know who,” the wily peasant said.
Wan Tsai closed his eyes briefly. “The PLA, you mean.”
“A unit under PLA control. It comes to the same thing.”
Wan Tsai looked around him, at his own sprawling office, at the grand Hall of Diligent Government, at the facades of the Zhongnanhai that were visible from his outer window. The doors, the walls, the gates, the bars—every implement of security struck him as a tool of imprisonment.
“I will speak to the general in charge,” Wan Tsai said abruptly. “I will appeal to him personally. Many of these generals are men of honor, on a personal level, whatever their political views may be.”
A few minutes later, he had secured a connection to the man in whose safekeeping President Liu Ang currently was. Wan Tsai made no secret of his anxieties, admitted that they were not yet founded upon evidentiary certainty, and implored the man to have his retinue convey to Liu Ang an urgent message.
“Have no worries on that score,” said the PLA official in a harsh, Hakka-inflected Mandarin. “Nothing could be of greater importance to me than the state of Liu Ang’s security.”
“Because I cannot stress enough that all of us who work with Liu Ang are extremely concerned,” the economist said, not for the first time.
“We are in complete agreement,” the PLA official, General Lam, said reassuringly. “As people from my village say, ‘Right eye, left eye.’ Trust that our beloved leader’s safety will be my personal priority.”
At least Wan Tsai thought that was what the general said. The man’s heavy accent made the word “priority” sound almost like another, seldom-used Mandarin word, which meant “plaything.”
TWENTY-EIGHT
Le Cimetière du Père-Lachaise was established, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, on the hill of the old Champ l’Évêque and was named for Louis XIV’s confessor, Father Lachaise. Now, it was the resting place for legendary figures—Colette, Jim Morrison, Marcel Proust, Oscar Wilde, Sarah Bernhardt, Edith Piaf, Chopin, Balzac, Corot, Gertrude Stein, Modigliani, Stephane Grappelli, Delacroix, Isadora Duncan, and so many others. Deathstyles of the rich and famous, Ambler mused as he entered.
The cemetery was vast—well over a hundred acres—and webbed with cobbled walkways. Especially in winter, it could resemble an arboretum of stone.
He glanced at his watch. The meeting was to take place at 5:10. In Paris, during this time of the year, the sun set at around half past five. Already the light was fading rapidly. He shivered, only partly because of the cold.
You never agree to a rendezvous chosen by the other party. Basic protocol. But in this case he had no choice. He could not drop the thread.
On the map, Père-Lachaise was sectioned off into ninety-seven “divisions,” like miniature counties, but the main routes had names and the instructions had been quite specific about which to take. Carrying a black backpack, Ambler dutifully went from the avenue Circulaire, the ring road along the outer periphery of the cemetery, to the avenue de la Chapelle and made a left on the avenue Feuillant. All the roads and walkways—each lined with mausoleums and tombstones like little houses—made it seem like a village. A village of the dead. Some of the tombs were in red granite, but most were carved slabs of pale limestone and travertine and marble. The grayness of the early evening added to the sepulchral air.
He did not visit the specified rendezvous immediately; instead, he walked the pathways surrounding it. The trees were plentiful but largely leafless, of little use for concealment. Still, Fenton could have positioned security guards behind the larger edifices. They could also have been interspersed, in plainclothes, among the tourists and visitors, also plentiful.
Ambler approached a nearby bench, a structure of green enameled steel slats, and, with a casual inconspicuous motion, left a black backpack underneath it. He strolled away and took up an observation post across a diagonal path and behind one of the larger stone memorials. Then h
e ducked into a kiosk marked WC, removed his jacket, and put on a sweatshirt. He exited swiftly, stepping around the kiosk and behind a ten-foot stone memorial for one Gabriel Lully, where he could observe without being observed.
A little over sixty seconds later, a denim-clad young man in a brown leather jacket and black T-shirt stumbled past, sat down on the bench and yawned, and then resumed a seemingly aimless walk—but as he walked away, Ambler could see that the backpack was gone.
The young man with the leather jacket was one of the Watchers and had done what Ambler had predicted, albeit with surprising fluidity and economy of movement. They had observed Ambler leaving the backpack in place and, intent on learning why, had dispatched someone to retrieve it.
The item was, in fact, filled with birdseed. It was a play on a tradecraft term: birdseed referred to anything of no actual value that might be used to attract the attention of enemy agents. They would understand the ruse as soon as the pack was opened and the bag of sunflower seeds and millet examined.
Meanwhile, however, Ambler had identified one of the sentries—one of the Watchers. He would follow the young man and see whether he led him to others.
Walking down another cobbled path, Ambler was now wearing jeans, a gray sweatshirt, and horn-rimmed glasses with clear glass lenses. His other clothes were folded tightly in the small nylon zip-bag he carried on a shoulder strap. He was utterly inconspicuous.
Or so he hoped.
He kept pace with the black-shirted Watcher, twelve yards behind him and to the left, and followed him through another square, a space where all manner of visitors—day trippers, tourists, art historians, even locals—congregated. The young man with the leather jacket and the black T-shirt was walking with a studiedly casual saunter. He glanced to his left and to his right; few people, however professional, would have registered the nearly imperceptible looks of recognition and acknowledgment, from a large woman to his left and a small, weedy-looking man on his right. But Ambler did. They were Watchers, too; then Ambler stole another glance at the large woman. She had mouse brown hair, cut short, and wore a lined denim jacket. Like many in the cemetery, she had a large pad of paper and a charcoal pastille, equipped to take “rubbings” of tombstone inscriptions. Yet he could tell at a glance that she was faking it; her eyes darted rapidly, attentive to her surroundings but not to the carved stone before her.
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