Not much of a question, except that the General answered by talking about General Grant’s campaign at the end of the Civil War. Even this was disjointed; the General stopped in the middle of a sentence and asked about Corey. The doctor glanced at Rubens, but Corey was a name even Rubens had never heard before.
He might have lied, but he couldn’t come up with one quickly enough.
The doctor asked a few more questions — they ranged from details of the General’s childhood to what he had just had for dinner — but the General remained silent, staring out the window. Finally, his lawyer suggested that perhaps it was time to go.
“They’re working on new drugs, aren’t they?” said Rubens as the three men walked down the hall.
“Difficult area,” said the doctor.
“Yes. But there’s hope.”
“We have to fully understand the mechanism of the disease — and the underlying structures it affects. But someday, yes.”
Rubens knew better than to ask if someday was in the General’s lifetime.
“I’m sorry I’m late,” said Rebecca, charging down the hall toward them. “Has the doctor come?” When she belatedly realized who Rubens was talking to, her face shaded red. “Doctor, I’m Rebecca Rosenberg, the General’s daughter. I’m sorry I’m late. It couldn’t be helped.”
Rubens almost snickered when she called herself by her maiden name, instead of Stein. That was a new development — undoubtedly related to the trial.
What did she possibly hope to gain? Didn’t she have enough money? How far did greed take a person these days?
“That’s quite all right, Ms. Rosenberg,” said the gerontologist. “Your father’s lawyer and Dr. Rubens have been showing me around.”
“Actually, it’s Mr. Rubens,” said Rubens, embarrassed at being mistaken.
“Billy does have two doctorates,” said Rebecca. “Including one my father urged him to get.”
“He always encouraged me,” said Rubens, unsure why she had mentioned that.
Was this all about jealousy? Maybe it wasn’t about money or making up with her father — maybe it was about getting back at Rubens for being close to her father.
“He was really an incredible man,” Rubens told the doctor. “I owe him a great deal.”
“I’m sure.”
The attorney gave Rubens another of his forced smiles, then nudged the doctor forward down the hall, asking when his report would be ready. Rubens heard him reply that it would be ready by the morning.
“I’m not going to move him,” Rebecca told Rubens. “Not to Mount Ina.”
Rubens wasn’t sure what to say.
“Mount Ina is a better facility,” he admitted. “But the General would rather die than live where his cousin lives.”
“I agree. Here.” She reached into her pocket. “I just want you to know, that if you’re concerned. .” Her voice broke, but she continued. “We don’t get along, I know. But you and Daddy do. Always. And… you care about him. When I started this, I wasn’t sure that was true. I thought because the agency wanted to control him — I know that they do, so you don’t have to deny it. But I don’t think you do. So I just want you to know, that when we do get the decision, you can still visit. Here. No strings.”
Rubens took the paper and began to read it. It was a letter on her lawyer’s stationery, attesting that she believed Rubens was a good friend to her father and should be allowed visiting privileges similar to those he had enjoyed as custodian. It was signed and notarized.
He suspected a trick. He looked up after reading it, but Rebecca was gone.
60
Karr took the bottle of sparkling water and stepped away from the bar, forcing his eyes away from the doorway. It was 11:30. Deidre hadn’t shown up.
The Ritz did have a bar, an expensive one called the Bar Vendôme.
Probably a great place to get stinking drunk, Karr thought. Too bad he couldn’t do that while he was on an operation.
Too stinking bad.
61
Mussa backed the van into the garage, nudging the gas for just a moment after slapping the vehicle into park. It was an old habit, taught by his uncle when he’d learned to drive. He’d heard a dozen times that it was bad for the car — and certainly unwise in a garage — but the habit was difficult to break.
Mussa got out of the truck. A surge of paranoia crept over him as he locked the garage, and he walked around the outside of the rented house, carefully checking to make sure that no one was lurking in the shadows. Satisfied, he let himself in, then checked each room, including the closets and under the beds, scanning for bugs. Satisfied, he sat in the living room and turned on the AOL instant messaging device he had obtained specifically for tonight. There was one message waiting:
Yes.
It meant that the brothers were ready to proceed.
Tomorrow’s itinerary was now set. Even if one element failed, the overall effect would be a masterpiece.
Mussa turned off the device and slid it into his pocket. He set three alarm clocks to wake him; one was a radio, another a CD player attached to a clock, the last a windup device that would go off even if the electricity failed. Little things could undo even the most elaborate plot, and Mussa did not intend to be undone.
Nostalgia replaced paranoia; he thought of the great difficulties he had overcome during the past few years and even the slights that would now be avenged.
The greatest was the murder of his father, but Mussa did not dwell on that. Nor, surprisingly, did he think about the sneers of the Frenchmen he met every day, the heathens who thought no believer could be their equal. He thought. instead of the smirks he had gotten from the Saudis when he had first expressed his desire to prove his faith and earn his place in Paradise.
They saw him as a useful idiot, a man whose network might be used — or, to put it more honestly, a man whose greed might be convenient but whose courage and faith were lacking.
He would laugh at them tomorrow.
62
The earliest train from Paris to Aux Boix on Friday left at 4:50 a.m.; Karr was one of only a half-dozen people on it. He got into LaFoote’s house through the back window and spent an hour looking around, without finding anything useful. Around 6:30 he snuck back out and walked to the village center, a short distance away. The mass Father Brossard was to celebrate wasn’t until eight, and so Karr had breakfast in a patisserie, a small local bakery. The woman who ran it had just taken a batch of chocolate macaroons from the oven in back when Karr arrived; he bought one and after the first bite pulled a twenty-euro note from his pocket to grab the dozen that were left.
The owner refused to sell him more than five. He took those, along with two croissants, and sat at one of the two tables in the window. Neither susceptible to flattery nor particularly talkative, the woman failed to respond to Karr’s attempt to make conversation. Finally he asked flat out if she knew LaFoote; she simply shrugged, then went to tend to her ovens.
There was a park near the center of town, cattycorner from the church. Karr imagined that retired people — like LaFoote, before he got involved in his crusade to find his friend — would spend at least part of the day on one of the three benches there. But if so, it was too early for them; Karr sat alone for a while, watching the light traffic. Around 7:45 an altar boy unlocked the front door of the church, peeked out briefly, then disappeared back inside. Karr got up and ambled over.
* * *
Deidre Clancy pulled on her robe as she got out of bed. Her stomach felt somewhat better than it had yesterday, but…
She lurched forward, barely making the bathroom in time. By now, her stomach was completely drained, and she managed to expel only a small bit of fluid as she hung over the ceramic bowl.
Bad snails? Or the flu?
She’d gotten sick yesterday immediately after lunch at a fancy reception and lecture on the Postimpressionists at the Musée d’Orsay. It served her right for blowing off the class she was supposed to attend.<
br />
Deidre got up slowly, ran some water on her face, then walked shakily back to bed. The sun was up, but she was tired and there was no question of doing anything but sleeping for quite a while. She glanced at the blinking answering machine in the living room — she’d heard the phone ring several times but was in no condition to answer. She’d deal with it all later, or tomorrow, or next week, or never.
* * *
“Father Brossard?”
The priest, dressed in a simple black cassock, turned from the side altar where he had been fussing over some of the candles.
“Oui?”
“I was a friend of Monsieur LaFoote’s,” said Karr in French. “Can we talk?”
“You are the American?” said the priest in English.
“Jes suis Américain, oui,” said Karr. “Yes, I’m an American.”
“The American. Mr. Karr?”
“Yeah, that’s me,” Karr said. “LaFoote talked to you?”
The priest turned and began walking to the front. Karr got up and followed past the altar, entering the sacristy through a side door. Two altar boys were laughing about something as they came in; the boys immediately stiffened, standing at military attention as the priest cast a stern look in their direction. Karr smiled at them, but the boys remained stone-faced.
The priest continued to a narrow hallway and turned into a small, unlit room. He went to a file cabinet in the otherwise empty room and took out a brown envelope.
“Monsieur LaFoote gave me this a month ago,” said the priest in English. “He left a message the other evening that they were to go to you, not the police. His funeral is tomorrow.”
“He was a good man,” said Karr as the priest handed him an envelope.
“He was a sinner.”
“We all are, right?”
The priest didn’t smile. He walked stiffly back out into the sacristy, no longer paying attention to Karr. He scolded the boys in French, telling them their souls had just gained more black marks for whispering in a holy place.
There were a few people in the church now, a dozen or so, scattered around. Karr took a seat; as the service began, a woman slid in at the far end — he turned and realized it was the baker, who made no sign that she recognized him.
There were three photocopies in the envelope. The top two were bank account statements for Vefoures from, as LaFoote had said, a small Austrian bank. There were regular wire deposits of two thousand euros a week, along with irregular withdrawals. The statements were several months old.
The third sheet was a copy of what looked like a signature card for another account at a different Austrian bank; rather than a full name the signature was a single letter: P. Instead of a name and address as contact information, there was a phone number. The account number matched the account the wired deposits had been made from.
Karr pulled out his PDA. He went online to the World Wide Web and tapped into a commercial Web site that had a reverse address lookup. The number wasn’t listed. He tapped the screen lightly and got into the NSA’s comprehensive address search engine.
It took nearly sixty seconds for the database to come back with an ID on the phone number: Jacques Ponclare.
63
Donohue turned right when he reached the top landing and walked down the hall to the second apartment. He paused, pulling on a set of latex gloves, then slipped the owner’s key out of his pocket and placed it into the lock. The mechanism was old and the key worn; he had to jiggle it and lean forward to get it to work.
The apartment smelled musty, as if its owner had never once opened the windows in the fifty years she had lived there. The smell made Donohue gag slightly as he came in; he associated it with his own childhood in Londonderry, a place where every memory evoked disgust. He was soon over it, moving quickly to the closet where he had placed his weapon the day before.
The Direction de la Surveillance du Territore, or DST, had its official headquarters at 1 rue Nélaton, some blocks away. But for a variety of reasons, including security, low-key suboffices had been found in the city. Ponclare, like some of the other section leaders and their teams, worked out of a bunkerized basement in the middle of what looked like an ordinary residential block. This made a mass attack on the DST difficult — but it presented certain advantages for anyone clever and bold, like Donohue.
Ponclare had only just arrived at work and typically would not leave his office for at least two hours — perhaps not for three or four — but the assassin had to be ready. His escape had already been complicated by the American President’s plans to visit Paris later that day.
From what Donohue knew of Mussa Duoar, it was likely that the visit had been somehow factored into the assassination of the French official. Donohue believed that Mussa primarily acted as a conduit for orders from an organization outside of France, though he was enough of a snake that one could never be too sure. So long as his fee was paid, Donohue would not bother to inquire too deeply.
He began assembling the Barrett sniper rifle, a fifty-caliber American-made gun that fired a round capable of penetrating an engine block. The weapon was not his favorite, but it was necessary because of the distance and the fact that Ponclare might choose to drive one of the armored Peugeots available to him.
When Donohue finished setting up his rifle, he went to the bathroom. He avoided the shower where he had placed the body of the woman who had lived here after killing her yesterday. Despite the fact that he had wrapped her in plastic bags, there was already a distinct odor of decay; this, too, reminded him of the slums where he had grown up, and he flushed the toilet with disgust.
An hour and a half to go. He would wait.
64
As demanding as they were, his responsibilities as head of Desk Three were only part of William Rubens’ job at the National Security Agency, and there was always a stack of paperwork waiting for him in his office. So when Marie Telach told him she wanted to update him in person on what Tommy Karr had found, he asked her to come up to his office. The few minutes he saved meant he could finish reviewing a half-dozen briefs, and by staying here he could initial a small stack of papers. Telach always looked a bit out of sorts when she came upstairs, blinking her eyes like a gopher pulled from her hole.
“Circumstantially at least, it looks bad for Ponclare,” she told him when she arrived, detailing the money trail they had fleshed out from Karr’s information. The chemist Vefoures had been paid from a bank account in Austria that seemed to belong to the French DST Paris security head, Ponclare. That fit with the story that Karr had been told by Vefoures’ friend LaFoote, that Vefoures had been brought back by the government for a secret project. The source of the money wasn’t clear — it came from an Algerian bank whose owner could not, for the time being at least, be traced.
But was it really Ponclare’s? The account had been set up only a few days before the first payment to Vefoures and had only been used to pay him. A preliminary search of the phone records showed that Ponclare had not called the bank from his office or the home number listed on the account. And there were no large transfers from any of Ponclare’s accounts, nor any sudden transfer in for that matter.
“Perhaps he is extremely prudent,” said Rubens.
“Or maybe it was set up to make it seem like a legitimate project to the chemist, and point suspicion at Ponclare if discovered,” said Telach.
Rubens turned to the computer at the side of his desk and punched the keyboard, bringing Ponclare’s resume up in front of him. The man had worked for the French security service for three decades and had, at least according to his superiors, done a decent job. But he had no flashy results; he was clearly more bureaucrat than artist.
Ponclare had served briefly in Africa, where his service overlapped with LaFoote’s. His job there seemed primarily to facilitate budget cutting; besides LaFoote, several dozen officers and foreign agents were let go during Ponclare’s short tenure and no one replaced.
“Is there any connection with the
car thief?” Rubens asked.
“Mussa Duoar? Not that we can see.”
“Do they have accounts at the same banks?”
“No,” replied Telach.
“The transfer from Morocco?”
“Duoar doesn’t use any bank there.”
“Nothing at all?”
“Neither there nor Algeria.”
“What about Ponclare’s father?”
“No. Duoar was just a child when Ponclare Senior went back to France. Duoar’s father was active in the resistance movement against the French,” she told him, “but he died after the country gained its independence.”
“How?”
Telach shrugged. “Murky circumstances. Officially, an accident. Unofficially, it may have been something else. He was in police custody shortly before he died. We’d have to do quite a lot more checking to clarify what happened, and even then, I don’t know that we’d get a true answer. Do you think it’s relevant?”
Probably not, Rubens thought. He was grasping for connections, trying to see the whole pattern. “All right. The CD-ROMs that Tommy sent back last night?”
“Formula for a very potent bomb. Different ways of constructing large bombs and shaping them. Some of them are rather large — two hundred pounds, three hundred pounds. Various formulas the experts are analyzing.”
“Has Johnny Bib’s team examined the hard drive that Dean and Lia got from the library yet?”
“The drive just arrived. It’ll take a while.”
Rubens got up and began pacing, trying to ward off his fatigue; he hadn’t slept now in quite some time.
The information about the account transfers added little, if anything, to what they already had — unless Ponclare had some theory on why he was used.
Someone would have to ask him about it. In person, to catch his reaction.
There was a chance that Ponclare was involved with the terrorists. Rubens couldn’t disregard that. He needed someone he could trust to put this to him, perhaps catch him off-guard with it. And it had to be done directly, without going through channels.
Dark Zone db-3 Page 24