The Paris Diversion

by Chris Pavone

  Just a couple more stops.

  One more.

  Only a few people disembark with him. He walks slowly, allowing the others to outpace him until he’s the last on the platform, and the train has pulled out, and the arrivals board refreshes itself: the next train is due in three minutes, the following one in seven.

  Three minutes is plenty of time.

  He climbs the stairs, turns into an exit-only passage that will remain empty for those three minutes. He checks the photo booth—it’s always possible there’s a tourist, or a pair of teenagers necking. There isn’t.

  He drops the bag with a thud, unzips it quickly. He removes a folded-up piece of green nylon, fluffs it open: another duffel bag. He takes off his sport jacket, puts it in this new duffel. Unbuttons his blue shirt, shoves that in too; now he’s wearing a white tee. Tosses in the eyeglasses, good riddance. Switches out the brogues for running shoes. He can’t help but notice the bloodstains in the treads of the leather shoes.

  Almost finished, still more than a minute to spare.

  He pulls on a black cap, the bill low over his brow. Places the blue canvas bag into the green nylon one, closes the bigger bag.

  Now he’s a completely different person, carrying a completely different bag.

  He slings the duffel over his shoulder and walks around the corner, where a surveillance camera is mounted from the ceiling. This camera is supposedly disabled, but better safe than sorry: he keeps his head down, face hidden. He descends to the platform for the train heading in the other direction, back toward his origin.

  There are more cameras down here, but he knows that if he waits at the front end of the platform, he’s out of their range.

  Wyatt has a theory about why he came all the way to Odéon just to change his clothes and switch bags, but he doubts it’ll ever be confirmed. “You’re not going to be told much,” the bearded American had told him. “Thus the large bonus. You all right with that?”

  “Honestly? I prefer it that way.”

  * * *

  He switches trains at a busy hub, navigates the throngs shuffling through the correspondance tunnels, the platforms where everyone listens to the service announcements, moaning and groaning, sending texts and making calls, Sorry, running late, please don’t wait…

  He lunges onto the new train, just one more anxious body in a heaving mass of frustrated commuters. A fresh force boards at the following stop, each station more crowded than the last, with different routes converging, all these lines forced to take up the overflow from the suspended line that runs under the rue de Rivoli. The number 1 is closed temporarily, due to a security issue.

  Security issue. That is one drastic understatement.

  Wyatt checks his watch. This is taking longer than anticipated. But this part of the schedule has built-in padding. It’s okay.

  After a mass exodus at Opéra, the crowd remains relatively sparse for a couple of stops, then gathers again at Strasbourg–St-Denis, where the subway meets the commuter rail. Then even thicker at the multi-line convergence at République, sardines now, everyone too uncomfortable, too delayed, too scared. It’s a buzzing mass of negativity here in this steel cylinder lurching through a burrowed-out tunnel underneath a panic-stricken metropolis.

  Wyatt is relieved that there are all these other passengers, the sweaty press around him, the jostling elbows, the inconsiderate backpacks, the roll-aboard bags clogging the aisles, everyone in everyone else’s way, short-tempered and impatient and unobservant, lost in their own inconveniences, their own multiplying problems. It’s too crowded for anyone to see much, to notice any bags that might be resting down on the floor, or under seats.

  As the train slows into the next station, Wyatt nudges the bag under the seat at his feet. He gives it a toe-shove, wedging it far under. He darts his eyes around, but no one seems to have noticed.

  The train stops.

  “Pardonnez-moi,” he says, making his way, “Pardonnez-moi” again, a chant on this pilgrimage to the exit, as much to keep himself calm as to be unnoticeable. No one notices normal courtesies. What’s noticeable is rudeness.

  He mumbles a final “Pardonnez-moi” and then he’s through the doors, onto the platform, and he forces himself not to glance back to see if anyone has noticed his abandoned bag, calling after him, “Monsieur, votre—”

  No one would do that. No one would imagine that the green bag was his, no one would have even noticed the thing, not yet, not with so many people surrounding the duffel, so many potential owners. The orphaned luggage won’t be remarked upon for at least a half-dozen stops, after the crowd thins as the train heads toward Créteil, it’ll be way past city limits before someone in uniform finally takes possession of it, opens the zipper…

  What will he find? A change of clothes, unremarkable. What will be suspicious is the phone, with a handful of numbers programmed into the contacts. One number is named Gare. Another Vendôme and another Triomphe and another Louvre. Also a contact for PDG—président–directeur général, what the French call a CEO. This number is the only one that has ever been called. Every day, in fact. Just a few seconds per call, each made using a special app that disguised the phone number.

  How long before investigators compare this bag’s contents to the surveillance footage of Wyatt at the bomb sites? Tomorrow? Next week? At that point, they will conclude that the bag was lost, something went wrong, that’s why the negotiations never commenced. Criminals are stupid; that’s why they’re criminals. That will be the moral of the story.

  If they ever start to search for the man in the footage, Wyatt will be long gone, back in Louisiana, straightening out McKayla’s past-due bills, looking like a completely different person. No one could connect this American military veteran to these surveillance images, this body of evidence, this terrorist plot. If it’s an American, it’s not terrorism.

  31

  PARIS. 11:01 A.M.

  The convoy rumbles by.

  How did the army respond so quickly? Did French intelligence have advance warning of the attacks? Were they already on heightened alert? Battalions pre-deployed in the city?

  Or is it possible that the bomb threats are something completely different. A false-flag operation? An excuse to impose martial law, to suspend civil rights, to purge the government, to expel the immigrants, to round up the usual suspects?

  When the tanks have passed, Kate cuts across the boulevard. She turns onto a quiet street, then again onto an even quieter one, narrow, tidy.

  She deposits her bike at a docking station, looks around, walks away. No one in sight. Kate doubles back to the corner, crosses the street in the other direction.

  Still no one.

  The entrance to the private street is barred with two gates, one for pedestrians, the other just wide enough for a single car lane, drop-offs and pickups only, no parking allowed, no way for anyone to lurk in a parked car, watching her. No way for anyone to lurk, period.

  The lock’s code is a number that Kate knows only in French. She memorized the string of digits in French, she tells it to people in French, it’s a sequence that’s lodged in her brain in this second language of hers, an expanding vocabulary of ideas that she expresses primarily in French, like the backup player who comes off the bench and, sometimes, is stronger. When Kate meets new people, even in English, she says “Enchantée” with a straight face. Enchanted to meet you.

  There are a few private residences on the short street, but mostly it’s professional—a psychoanalyst, a law office, cabinet de dentiste. It’s both busy and quiet.

  Finding this office space had been Kate’s first task for the Paris Substation. Someplace where freelancers and sources could come and go without attracting too much attention, somewhere private yet accessible, and convenient for Kate to meet the people she’d need to meet—a quick drink in a café, a blind pass in a park, a discr
eet encounter in a boutique.

  At that point she’d been living in Paris for more than a year, she thought she knew the city well. But looking around for the perfect spot, Kate discovered that she really knew only the same Paris that Dexter knew, the other expats too, a few finite sections of the central arrondissements and a couple of select suburbs. She wasn’t familiar with the greater city of working-class quarters and commercial ones and the residential faubourgs far from her own. She also couldn’t have told you the location of the Greek Embassy. Now she can.

  Downstairs in the small building, the rez-de-chaussée is occupied by an OB-GYN, pregnant women constantly coming and going. Kate is not concerned with pregnant women.

  Upstairs, the Paris Substation occupies a couple of rooms, a few desks, computer monitors, a landline that no one uses. Installing all the electronics was not simple, making sure everything was secure and would stay that way.

  Thierry, already at his desk, looks up when the boss enters. Kate raises her eyebrows, asking: do you know what the hell is going on? He shakes his head in reply, then turns back to his screen.

  More than a dozen items are strewn atop Kate’s desk, which at first glance—or second or third—doesn’t look particularly neat, keyboard and mouse, in-box and stapler, pencil cup and notepad and tape dispenser, all the normal things you find on a worktop. They’re not equidistant from one another, they’re not aligned in a grid, they’re not arranged in any noticeable fashion.

  Except they are.

  Moving from the front of the desk to the rear, each item is one centimeter farther away than the distance between the two previous items, as measured at their shortest gaps. Always. Every time Kate takes this seat, the first thing she does is check all the distances, using a tape measure in her top drawer. No one has touched anything, not today, not ever.

  Now she can start looking for answers.

  Her first call is to a man listed in her app under a different name, with a different address, as the proprietor of a catering outfit. “I cannot talk to you now,” he says. No bonjour, no nothing. “You know that.”

  She’s not surprised.

  Another call, to a supposed hairdresser: this one doesn’t even pick up.

  Another, another, another, almost no one picks up, and Kate doesn’t leave messages. Everyone has caller ID, so it’s clear that her sources don’t want to talk to Kate now, not on the telephone, not so she can ask questions. On a day like today, the only thing anyone wants from Kate are answers. She has none.

  The only people who answer are those who don’t know anything; “I don’t think” and “I don’t know” are how their sentences begin; “Sorry” is how they end.

  She’s getting nowhere, accomplishing nothing except proving to herself that she’s exhausting every possible resource before escalating to the next level. Sometimes that’s what you need to do.

  * * *

  Public transportation is going to be unreliable, cars won’t be productive, bicycles may not be fast enough. Today is one of those circumstances for which Kate saves the moped, which she now takes down the Chaillot hill, toward the river, where the luxury is a bit louder, the conspicuous-consumption flagships and five-star everything, a neighborhood catering to people who want—who demand—something special, if just anyone can have it they don’t want it, their cultural currency is unique experiences. Even though the hotels here, the restaurants, are mostly the generic variety of five-star posh that could be anywhere, menus indistinguishable, linens, obsequious staff, and everyone speaks English, it’s all the same, could be Mayfair, could be Madison Avenue.

  The old mansion is an imposing pile of blinding white limestone on a quiet side street that’s off the path beaten by most tourists. The business plan never anticipated much in the way of walk-in customers, casual browsers, people wandering in to buy group tickets to Versailles. Well-heeled globetrotters come here on purpose, looking for something specific, something special.

  One side of the street level is dominated by a plate-glass window, TRAVELERS INTERNATIONAL BOOKING SERVICE in black lettering with gold outline. Kate puts her hand on the doorknob, turns, pulls. The glass rattles, but the door doesn’t budge. She turns the knob the other way. Pushes. Still nothing.

  Through the window, Kate meets the eye of the woman sitting at the first of three desks, who reaches down, buzz, the door unlocks.

  “Bonjour Madame Anderson.”

  Kate catches a sound bite of news before the young woman mutes her computer’s speakers, then turns to Kate wearing a professional smile and a nametag that reads MANON. This office has already been open for a half-hour, but on a day like today Manon probably wasn’t expecting any customers yet.

  Manon taps on her keyboard, squints at her screen. “I do not believe we have anything for you?” She uses a key to unlock a drawer filled with boarding passes, travel dossiers, long itineraries with contact numbers and addresses and instructions, opera tickets, backstage passes, SIM cards, the occasional passport stamped with foreign visas. And for special clients like Mme. Anderson, the agency is willing to provide extra services that cost the office practically nothing while generating ample goodwill. Like accepting international courier packages, envelopes of various shapes and sizes that are delivered by mail, by messenger, sometimes by the inscrutable woman who works upstairs.

  “I want to arrange a new trip,” Kate says.

  “Très bien Madame. To where, please?”

  “Beirut.”

  The smile remains on the woman’s face, but she doesn’t say anything. Beirut has not been a popular tourist destination recently. Plus this travel agency is owned by a New York magazine conglomerate, and its mostly American clientele doesn’t tend to book trips to Beirut from Paris.

  “Do you have a colleague who is familiar with Beirut?”

  Manon’s smile sags, but doesn’t disappear entirely. “Oui.” She’s wearing a headset connected to a keypad, which she jabs using the eraser end of a pencil, protecting her perfectly manicured nails. She rotates in her chair, spinning away so the customer can’t hear this in-house interaction, low voice, an economy of words.

  “C’est bon,” Manon says, rearranging her smile. Everything is very good. “Un moment.”

  * * *

  “Madame?” It’s another woman standing back there, young and dark-haired and attractive, though not as put-together as Manon, not as blown-out and made-up, not as consumer-facing. This more serious-looking woman assesses Kate from across the room, and Kate in turn sizes her up.

  “S’il vous plaît,” this woman says, indicating the open door.

  They don’t shake hands or introduce themselves. It would be impossible for anyone to tell whether or not these two women have met before. Kate steps into a small office, its walls lined with international travel posters—Afrique, Suède, Brésil, Italie. No windows. A modern, functional desk.

  “How can I help you, Madame Anderson?”

  “I would like to arrange a trip to Beirut,” Kate repeats. She can smell the woman’s cigarettes coming off her hair, her clothes.

  “How many people?”

  They are still standing, awkwardly, next to the desk. Kate wonders if she’s going to be offered a seat. “There are five of us,” Kate says. “Myself, my husband, three children.” This fabrication—she has only two children—is one part of the code.

  “And do you have a preferred hotel?”

  “I do. The Kempinski.”

  And this is the other. The codes are for the benefit of other people who might be in this quasi-public space; you never know. There are no other customers in this room, but the codes are the protocol, and the protocol is sacrosanct.

  “Très bien.”

  This woman opens a deadbolt at another door at the far end of the office, and Kate follows her out of the grim little space into a grand one, the mansion’s polished lobby of
marble floors, ornate moldings, soaring ceiling, crystal chandelier. Up a sweeping staircase to the premier étage, a wide hall lined with glossy black doors. She unlocks the first of these doors using a key card.

  This room is extremely large and cluttered, a few desks strewn around, filing cabinets everywhere, screens and keyboards and a dusty typewriter wedged into a corner, maps and posters and corkboards and even a couple of oil paintings, all hung with no apparent plan. It looks like a small-town newsroom run by an eccentric, thirty years ago. Kate had imagined something else, something twenty-first-century, high-tech.

  The woman shuts the door behind her, says, “Je m’appelle Inez.”

  “Kate.” They shake hands.

  It’s not just the room that’s defying expectations, it’s this person too. Is this young Frenchwoman really running the Paris bureau of an American clandestine service? Kate had envisaged a middle-aged man from the East Coast. Then again, Kate too is someone who runs the Paris bureau of an American clandestine service.

  Inez turns back to the door, reaches up to the locks. As a matter of habit, Kate glances at the woman’s ring finger, and notices that she isn’t wearing a wedding band. What Inez is wearing is a shoulder holster, and it isn’t empty.

  “Please, Kate, take yourself a seat.”

  A wall-mounted television displays an anchorman sitting at a desk, a crawl that proclaims TERRORISME À PARIS, a screen that’s split with video from a helicopter at a great distance, an overhead image of the Louvre that communicates practically nothing, not unless there’s a large explosion, which is probably the point of this angle: to record the explosion.