Unacceptable Risk

by David Dun

  He heard sirens outside and knew that both the FBI and the fire department would be arriving. As he descended to the fifteenth floor, a man in a tailored blue suit with expensive shoes exited, obviously unconcerned.

  "There's no significant fire. Wastebaskets on the twentieth. Some asshole practical joker getting his kicks."

  "Yeah," Sam said. "Think I'll wait right here for the elevators to start again."

  "Suit yourself," the man said, electing to walk down the stairs. Sam walked into a hallway to find locked doors to a computer-processing facility. On a lark he went and knocked on a door. Soon a curious-looking Asian woman opened it.

  "Yes?"

  "I'm just checking that this floor is cleared," he said as officially as possible. He stepped past her, gently pushing through when she tried to stop him by holding his arm.

  Then, Sam had a minor epiphany. Gaudet and the French were in league—for the moment, at least, they were the same. The men on the street and in the tunnel were Gaudet men acting on French information.

  Chapter 18

  A man is distinguished by his strong spirit in a great storm.

  —Tilok proverb

  It was a bone-chilling, misty November evening and it felt like snow. At the bottom of Central Park, just off Fifth Avenue, there was a duck pond, and at its northern corner Michael stood in the dark waiting. After he and Grady said their good-byes, he had finally collected all his journals and sneaked away to California, taking only a couple of days to find a piece of property that was to his liking. There he waited with Sam's men, hoping to lay his hands on Gaudet and anyone else who had the tenacity to chase him to his hideaway. He had returned to Manhattan just for this meeting. It was 6:55 p.m. Time did not pass easily when the adrenaline flowed. The place was mostly quiet, except for seekers of solitude and lovers walking hand in hand, or the occasional homeless person. Michael had learned to recognize these wretched souls who slept in bushes, and fled the foot police.

  His nerves kept him alert, but he wished for a stash of coca leaves to chew, here in the urban equivalent of the jungle.

  From quite a distance he saw a man and a woman coming from the Fifth Avenue side of the park. The man wore a beret and had on a long coat. According to his verbal description, that would be Georges Raval and the woman on his arm was as mentioned in the e-mail.

  As the couple approached, he looked warily about, determined that if he saw others he would flee, but he saw no one this time. The man wore a bulky coat and he wondered if he too was wrapped in body armor. The woman wore a hat that looked to be of fur, or a look-alike material, and a heavy, stylish, long dress coat.

  "Georges?" he said quietly as the man drew close. This was the man he had met briefly in the apartment building.

  "Hello, good to see you again."

  The man's features were hard to make out in the dark; he still had the mustache and was a little under six feet, give or take. Even in the low light the woman seemed beautiful.

  "Shall we walk?" Michael said.

  "Yes. As you can see, I brought a friend, but you can trust her. Let me introduce you to Benoit, the love of my life."

  "I am very pleased to meet you both."

  "Benoit knows everything I am about to tell you."

  "Are you married?"

  "No. She is a prisoner in France, let out to find me. How's that for a shocker?"

  "That's a shocker."

  "We should do this quickly. You know about the work of Grace Technologies, yes? Altering brain cells to achieve personality changes."

  "Yes, I know generally."

  "You have heard of Chaperone?"

  "Yes. You created this miracle?"

  "I believe I'm the only person alive who understands it. Although the knowledge is incomplete. The molecule has not yet been fully mapped and therefore it isn't ready to be synthesized, although it can be used if a supply could be obtained."

  They were walking in the park and Michael led them into a darkened area and into some heavy brush and out the other side to an old bench in a small clearing on another path. "Let's sit here."

  "Are you sure it's safe?" Raval asked.

  "I'm sure," Benoit said, taking a very large pistol from her handbag.

  "God," Raval said, "I hate guns."

  "Let's continue," Benoit said.

  "My only regret," Raval said, "is that I don't know you

  better."

  Michael interpreted that as a need to trust him before divulging more. "I understand." He had a book bag, from which he removed three sandwiches. "Would you like something to eat? When you've been in the jungle as long as I have, it's hard not to carry food around with you."

  "I don't need much." Georges broke his sandwich in two and gave half to Benoit. He thanked Michael, then spoke of science generally. He seemed interested in the Amazon and all that it spawned. In moments they were eating and laughing like friends, and they hadn't mentioned Grace Technologies again or vectors or the like.

  When the food was gone, Michael turned the conversation serious once more. "You've been through hell. Perhaps afraid for your life. As for your friend, she seems to have an iron constitution. Perhaps she fears nothing."

  "All of the above," he said.

  "I fear French jails," the woman said.

  "Why don't you come with me. I've moved to the mountains of California, where it is lonely and beautiful. I have bodyguards you can trust."

  "Bodyguards?" Georges said.

  "You saw them in the Village, when we were attacked on the street. They are good men, and I'll be able to work there."

  "First we must be about other business," Benoit said.

  "What is that?" Georges seemed puzzled.

  "You are good scientists. But the rest of life escapes you both. It's part of your charm. There is a man, Sam. You both know him?"

  "Yes. He's the one with the bodyguards."

  "Well, Mr. Sam?" Benoit spoke loudly all of a sudden.

  There was only silence.

  "No one knows we are here," Georges said.

  "One of the reasons I love you is that you do not understand what we are dealing with. We probably could have a UN convention with the people in these woods."

  "Right here," a voice said. Michael recognized it as Sam's.

  "So, at last we meet." Benoit said. "I would enjoy seeing the man who put me in jail—or at least this man's current disguise," Benoit said.

  The bushes moved. "Yep. That'd be me."

  "This better be good," Agent Ernie Dunkin said. "I have half the French Embassy and various mercenaries or emissaries or diplomats or spooks or whatever handcuffed to trees in Central Park. I can hardly wait to hear the screaming in the morning."

  "I promise you that this will be interesting." The group was in several cars headed to FBI headquarters. Ernie and Sam shared a backseat. A young man was driving. Normally, Ernie drove his own car, but Sam didn't ask about the unusual arrangement.

  "Let's not go to the FBI. I have a meeting room at the Park Plaza."

  "A meeting room?"

  "Bear with me, Ernie. None of this is going to be orthodox. None of it."

  "I don't like this."

  "Look, I really needed you to help get us out of Central Park without a gunfight. But we have to be free of you to solve this case and then to put it back in your lap."

  "You're telling me that you just needed a babysitter in Central Park and now I get nothing?"

  "Ernie, you're going to get everything on your doorstep. Without the CIA."

  "Without the CIA? Then it's overseas too."

  Sam nodded.

  "I never really liked your shit. I prefer to solve my own crimes. But for some reason I put up with it."

  "You like getting all the glory. It's no mystery."

  "Yeah, well, there better be glory. This is post 9/11 and we don't screw around like we used to."

  "Come on. You stretch the rules even more and you have much looser rules. You're just a hell of a lot more ti
ght-assed about appearances."

  Ernie fell silent and Sam knew he was vacillating between rage and intrigue.

  "This could be the biggest one of the career?" Ernie finally asked.

  "That's right."

  "Delivered right in my lap?"

  "Have I ever failed you, Ernie?"

  "Don't give me that crap."

  They lapsed into silence again.

  "Take us to the Park Plaza. Drop these gentlemen off. Take me home." Then Ernie got on the radio and had the guys in Central Park released so they could go make their protestations of outrage. He chuckled, which at times like this was uncharacteristic.

  "Let me in on the joke," Sam said.

  Ernie got back on the radio.

  "Listen up all you loyal agents of la-la land. You be sure and let it slip that you are the New York City Police Department."

  "We already said FBI," a voice came back.

  "So, be creative about contradicting yourself."

  "Ooh," Sam said with a smile. "You're good."

  The room in the Park Plaza seated ten. Benoit, Georges, Sam, and Michael sat inside along with the attorney that Benoit had requested. His name was Stan Beckworth and he specialized in immigration. Outside waited a dozen of Sam's hired help, spread up and down the hallway.

  Benoit spoke up immediately when they sat down.

  "I need to speak with Sam and the attorney alone."

  "Why?" Georges asked.

  Benoit turned to him. "I have told you that this is the one thing on which I will not compromise."

  It was clear to Sam that the woman meant it.

  "All right." Georges sighed.

  "Why am I here?" Michael asked.

  "You were the source of the original material that went into Chaperone," said Benoit. "What we need from you now is a counterfeit version of your 1998 journal."

  "It was more work to make the phony journal than the real one, even using real journals as a template," Michael said. "The fake set includes a previously known salamander in place of the sponge. Now, what do you want all this for?"

  "You'll know soon enough," Benoit said. "I will appreciate it if you get that journal here right away. Thank you, gentlemen."

  Michael and Georges left the room.

  At that moment Sam's mother, Spring, Tilok Talth and psychologist, entered the conference room. Sam had fifteen hours to figure out if Benoit Moreau was for real and, if he and his mother drew a favorable conclusion in that regard, to make a plan. Or perhaps they would just be fitting into Benoit's plan.

  Without preliminaries, the session began.

  The meeting place could have been anywhere, but Benoit began as instructed by Gaudet at Grand Central Station, where she boarded the # 7 to Flushing, Queens. Dressed in the clothing that had been sent by Gaudet, exactly according to instructions, she wore a beige London Fog overcoat over a camel St. John knit dress, with a light brown hat that supported a matching net veil. On her feet she wore cream-colored flats and thigh-high white nylons with a garter belt. The undergarments were vintage Gaudet. On the tips of her curled fingers she held a tiny locator transmitter that was not part of Gaudet's proscribed accessories. She stood midtrain, midcar, and waited for events to unfold. Around her was an assortment of people, all seemingly going about ordinary business. There were no shifty-eyed men in trenchcoats. Among the many passengers was, however, a young man dressed in a conservative three-button business suit and wearing a woolen overcoat reading the Wall Street Journal. He looked exactly like a commuting lawyer or investment banker, and he never looked up until the Vernon Boulevard/ Jackson Avenue stop, the first in Queens. There he folded over his newspaper in the fashion of a delivery boy and placed a rubber band around it. Even before the train halted, he rose, walked past her, and effortlessly placed the folded Journal under her arm. She slid her hand inside the paper and felt what she determined to be a small, rectangular box. It turned out to be a tape recorder with an earpiece. She inserted the earpiece and pushed the play button.

  A male voice instructed her to exit the train and she managed to make it out of the car, just ahead of the closing doors. The next instruction was to board the next train heading back to Grand Central Station. When she arrived at the appropriate track, she stopped, caught her breath, and then smiled.

  Before her stood at least twenty women dressed exactly as she, all approximately her size. It struck her as quite an accomplishment for Gaudet, given his security requirements. She couldn't imagine what the women had been told. All of them acted as though nothing untoward or unusual was happening, but the other commuters were commenting and nodding at one another with perplexed smiles as they all entered the train. The other similarly dressed women also had earpieces and a tiny cord disappearing into purses or pockets. On the train they all stood and she was instructed by the voice on the recorder to stand in the middle of the herd.

  It was an eerie ride to Grand Central surrounded by look-alikes. They had standing room only and heard plenty of comments about the matching outfits, but none of the women responded. One know-it-all gentleman asserted with great confidence that the Daughters of the American Revolution were having a convention.

  The male voice on the recording instructed Benoit to exit at Grand Central and to follow the man with the cigar. She looked around among all the brown hats and finally in the far corner of the car spotted a man with an unlit cigar in his mouth. They made eye contact. The next time she looked, the cigar was gone. His clothes—dark suit and dark, long coat—were nondescript, so she would need to watch him closely. The train came to a stop, the doors opened, and all of the women exited and seemed to explode in various directions. In front of Benoit was the cigar man, who once more made eye contact and then moved off at a brisk walk. Benoit followed and others of the women were moving along with her. They rounded a corner and headed down a wide hall to what Benoit knew to be the great hall of Grand Central Station. Not twenty feet away, three of the other brown hats hurried off to various destinations of Gaudet's choosing. There were shops along either side and the man veered into a jewelry shop and then stepped through a door that was opened barely a foot, allowing entry into the side of a boarded-up storefront. About twenty feet before reaching the door, Benoit brushed a display and purposely dropped the transmitter. Sam had warned her that at the first enclosure they would probably check her for transmitters.

  After Benoit had entered, and before the man closed the door, a woman dressed exactly as Benoit slid past her and then backed out through the same door Benoit had just entered, yelling, "Je dois juste aller pisser." Benoit was amazed at the resemblance.

  It would look to an observer exactly as if Benoit had stepped into a closed-to-the-public area and then backed out.

  They stopped and a man with a wand went over her body checking every beep. They took the gun from her purse. Cigar man led her back through a construction site that was at the moment without any workers and through a back door into a narrow hall that ran behind all of the shops. They walked down the hall about two hundred feet and came out in the back of a store in a tiny office area. There the man left her, but not until he had shown her into a small bathroom. There were fashion magazines here that Gaudet enjoyed. Unlike some men, he liked looking at women in clothes, unless he had his knife and was able to cut them off personally. She was grateful that they had chosen a bathroom as the waiting area. She began to flip through a magazine, but the tension in her broke her concentration; her mind always went back to Gaudet and her upcoming encounter and the words that she would use, and the way she would use her body. After an hour had passed, a woman came and opened the door.

  "I'm sorry, but I need to search you for transmitters."

  Benoit was used to being searched and even the rubber gloves and the body cavity search did not irritate her. But it worried her because she wouldn't have anything in a body cavity unless she had done it intentionally, and that was a strong indication that Gaudet no longer had complete trust in her.

&n
bsp; "I need to search the handbag," the woman said. Benoit pulled out the lipstick and other cosmetics, credit cards and cash.

  She wondered if the woman had any inkling about Gaudet. Maybe she had met Trotsky, but probably she dealt with a contractor who had never met or even spoken to Gaudet. The woman left and Benoit returned to the bathroom and waited another hour. At the next knock on the bathroom door, she found a small, slender man in a rumpled sport jacket, with shaggy brown hair that hadn't been trimmed in a good while.

  "For the next part of your little excursion, you will need to get in this," he said, pointing to a large crate mounted on a dolly. He seemed grim; she decided he would make a good undertaker.

  There was a ladder and she assumed correctly that she would need to enter the crate from the top. Fortunately, there was another ladder down the inside and a chair, and she found that she could sit inside the crate with about the legroom of an economy-class airline seat. There was even a light to read by and another array of magazines.

  The man closed up the crate while she flipped nervously through these fashion magazines. For about ten minutes there was complete silence and then the crate began to move. Then it stopped. She surmised that they were making a final check for any sign of a tail.

  The stress was a pressure inside her that felt like it could explode. Trying to undo evil, it turned out, was much harder than doing it. There was a suspense in reaching for the light that did not exist when wallowing in the darkness. Sam had warned her about that. Always she had relied on her own strength plus nothing and rejected any spiritual dimension to life as the invention of the crackpots who wanted to exploit the weak. It was one of the few things about which she and Karl Marx could have agreed. The opiate of the masses was a perfect description. But since her time in prison, new possibilities had begun to occur to her. Spring had hit a body blow to her mind and spirit.