by Noel Hynd
There were shutters that would close on the two windows that overlooked the street. No point to be a target from across the street or a rooftop. When Alex inspected them, she saw that they too were reinforced with metal.
She put her foot to the ragged carpet in the apartment to test the floorboards. The wooden floor and steps in the hallway outside had creaked and sung like a choir with every footfall. The floor under the carpet was stable. She could have jumped on it and it wouldn’t have given a vibration.
“Concrete?” she asked.
“Above and below.”
That didn’t protect her from a bomb, but it definitely made one impractical. She checked the rear window. It was barred, though the bars could be unbolted from inside in case of fire. Cerny also explained that there was no access to the building from the roof. No exit from that direction either.
McKinnon gave her a new cell phone, specially designed. Someone on her surveillance team would be on it twenty-four seven. She didn’t even have to dial. Just open it and talk. It had a camera and a tracking device. She may have been a target, but she was a high-tech one.
“I’ll warn you,” Cerny said. “We’d put you in body armor, but then any shooter who detected it would sense the trap and aim for the head. So what good would that do?”
“We think he’ll come after you right away, LaDuca,” McKinnon said. “Probably tomorrow, maybe even during the day. For whatever reason, there seems to be some urgency in getting you killed.”
“I’m flattered,” she said with irony. “What in God’s name is it they think I know that even I don’t know?”
“We have no idea,” McKinnon said.
“What if he comes after me tonight?”
“We’re ready,” Cerny said. “We have backup teams all over the city. Stay in touch by phone and we’ll lead you to the nearest help if you need it.”
“It doesn’t take more than a second or two to fire a bullet,” she said.
“But it takes a while to set up a shot on a moving target in a city,” McKinnon said. “Kaspar is not on a suicide mission. He wants to hit you and get away. That makes him vulnerable. Even more vulnerable than you since he’s not watching for us.”
She was to go out to dinner with Lt. Rizzo that evening in Montparnasse at La Coupole, the atmospheric old haunt of Hemingway and the expatriate American writers of the 1920s. He would pick her up by car and drop her off after dinner. Rizzo would be her escort and act as her bodyguard also.
In the evening Cerny introduced her to a Frenchman named Maurice, a lanky Parisian cop who did extracurricular stuff the same way Rizzo did. Maurice was unshaven in a leather jacket and jeans. He didn’t seem to be the brightest man she’d ever met.
In any case, Maurice would be posted in the entrance foyer of her building, keeping an eye on whoever went in and out, while another local guy named Jean, whom she met at the same time, would watch the entrance at the restaurant. At the end of their twelve-hour shifts, others would rotate on and off.
“Do I get a weapon to defend myself in case you guys screw up again?” she asked.
Cerny reached to his attache case. He pulled out a box and handed it to Alex.
She opened it and found a Glock 9 with twenty-one rounds of ammunition, enough for a full clip plus a half dozen for good luck. She hefted it in her hand and looked around the table.
“Looks exactly like mine,” she said suspiciously. “The one I own back in Washington.” She continued to examine it. “Even has the same little nicks as mine. Imagine that.”
“What could make you feel more secure than having your own weapon?”
She looked at them angrily, not surprised. “If I knew you were going to burglarize me, I could have used some clothing changes too.”
They weren’t sure whether she was joking or not.
“You guys better know what you’re doing this time,” she said. “I can only be shot at so many times before I get hit.”
She clipped the holster to her waist of her skirt on the right side. There seemed no end to what had been put in motion in January.
SEVENTY-NINE
A t La Coupole, Alex sat across the table from Lt. Rizzo. The restaurant, which dated from the twenties, was pure art deco, with characteristic light fixtures on the many square pillars that held up the ceiling of the large, not-very-intimate room. Above the light fixtures were paintings that had been done by local artists in exchange for food and, more probably, drink all those decades ago. Alex wondered which, if any, of them had lived full, happy lives pursuing their muse.
She wore a black skirt, cut well above the knee, comfortable and flexible in case she needed to run for her life later. A light rain fell outside and added a gloss to the Boulevard Montparnasse. Against the rain she wore a pair of chic leather boots, which she had bought late that afternoon in a shop across the street from her lodgings. The boots were supple and flexible while still looking sharp.
They spoke Italian. “LaDuca” meant “the duchess” in Italian, Rizzo noted, a quirk he liked. He asked about the origin of her name. She explained about her father. She shied away from other personal information, however, and he did too; one never knew when a listening device had been dropped. But he did speak of his boyhood, growing up in the slums of Rome, learning English from his father who had been in a POW camp and how he had done his own stint in the Italian army. He amused her with a tale of blowing up a bridge in Spain in the 1970s, part of a prearranged NATO training exercise, but no one had warned the Spanish police.
“It all got blamed on the Basques,” he said with a snort, following an account of how his brigade of Italians had to hightail it to France in their socks.
In return, she told him about Venezuela and the slaughter in Barranco Lajoya. He listened seriously and offered condolences. They did not discuss Kiev. He knew the details of her loss and stayed away from the subject.
Things were playing out in her mind in three dimensions now. The first was the present, in a nostalgia-laden restaurant on Paris’s Left Bank where the relics of eighty years ago-in addition to the painting on the pillars, portraits of Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Kiki of Montparnasse, Man Ray, and Foujita-haunted the walls. Amidst this, Jean sat near the door, poised and intent, his eyes fixed on comings and goings.
The second dimension was one step beyond the immediate present, the notion that at any given moment a bullet could find her, putting her into the same earthly blackness that had consumed Robert. For the first time, she really considered what death would be like. It occurred to her that she might have just days, hours, or minutes to live.
But beyond that, even as she conversed with Rizzo in the forefront of her mind, her mind played out its own recent memories. This evening had taken on its own madness and it gripped her. She thought of Robert and his funeral, of the chaos in Kiev, and the massacre in Barranco Lajoya, and she thought of the six slain missionaries, Father Martin, and her friends back in Washington who would probably be playing basketball that night.
Then dinner was finished. She was conscious of the Glock she wore on her hip, concealed carefully under a light jacket.
She reminded herself that she had loaded the weapon and even chambered the first round. The Glock had a concealed hammer, but it was there, back and ready to fall and fire the round. All that prevented it doing so was the safety catch, which she could snap to “fire” with her thumb as she drew the weapon. This practice was dangerous, but the second or two needed for the operation of the slide to chamber the first round might make all the difference between-it was best not to think about what came after “between.” In her mind she went through the reflexive motions of using it.
She ordered a Caesar salad, while he had a blanquette de veau, thus confirming her suspicion that Italians largely lived on veal. He matched her stereotype for stereotype, and neither was completely wrong.
“ Voi americane sempre mangiano delle insalate, perche non vogliono ingrassare,”
he said with a smile. You American women always eat salads because you don’t want to get fat. “ Ma e chiarissimo que per Lei non c’e pericolo a proposito di quello ”-but it is clear that you’re in no danger of that.
“That’s because we do eat salads,” she answered with a laugh.
For a moment Alex wondered if he was hitting on her, but from his expression it was simply a compliment, and she felt flattered. Of course, she realized that any compliment of a young woman by an Italian male was at least a potential hit.
It didn’t bother her. In some ways, it made her felt normal again. And shortly after, Rizzo began to speak affectionately of his own lady friend, Sophie, who would be joining him in three days.
Coffee, the check, and then they were out the door, leaving. Jean had her back and Rizzo found a taxi.
The driver took them back to the apartment building on the rue Gueneguad.
Rizzo stepped out first and scanned the quiet block.
“Check your telephone,” he said to her. “I’ll check mine.”
They both checked. The devices worked. Then, as they stood there, a shadow moved in a sturdy black Peugeot that was jammed into a parking spot twenty feet from her front door.
In a light rain, a window on the driver’s side descended.
Startled, Alex’s hand went to her gun.
“ Va bene,” Rizzo said in Italian. It’s okay.
From the driver’s seat in the car, Michael Cerny gave Alex a small and almost playful salute. “The block is clear,” he said. “You’re fine.”
“Maurice is inside the building?” she asked.
“Talked to him ten minutes ago,” he said.
“And he was alive when he was talking to you?” she needled.
“He sounded like he was,” trying to make light of it. “I didn’t specifically ask, though.”
“Very funny,” she said. But she relaxed slightly.
Rizzo gave her an embrace. She walked the rest of the way down the street to her door, tuned into the sound of her own footsteps on the sidewalk.
She stopped, tried to take a sense of the situation, and arrived at the big blue double doors that led into her building.
A nagging instinct told her that all hell was about to break loose. She looked back and saw Cerny give her another wave.
To enter she punched a numeric code on one of those keypads that all Paris apartments now had-the days of the concierge who lived next to the door and let people in who rang were long gone-and pushed the door open.
Quiet as the grave, she thought as she stepped inside, and if I’m not careful, only once removed from one.
EIGHTY
S he pushed her way in and the light clicked on. The doors closed behind her. There was coolness to the stairway. She waited a moment and then realized why. Someone had left the window open on the first floor landing, one flight up.
Probably Maurice. But where was Maurice?
She paused for a moment, her senses alert to possible danger. Then she continued to the steps. An open window had allowed some rain to fall inside and the effect was soothing. It had been stuffy earlier in the stairwell.
She started up the steps. The sound of her footsteps echoed on the plaster walls and the wooden stairs. Lord, she was tired. Her brain buzzed with the events of the day.
She arrived on the first floor landing.
The floor was damp from the rain and she made a note to speak to Maurice. She could give him some friendly advice on home maintenance.
Well, no matter. The building was quiet.
Too quiet?
On the landing one flight up, she pushed the window shut and locked it. There was water on the floor. Someone was going to slip. She had been told that Maurice kept towels and mops in the closets on the landing. She decided to do her good deed for the day. She would drop a towel and quickly glide it over the floor with her foot, lest the next resident slip on this mess.
She stepped to the closet.
The door was stuck.
Her gaze gravitated downward. She caught the faint outline of crimson that was flowing from under the closet door.
She yanked the door open. Maurice, or what remained of him, slumped forward from a crouched lying position to a sprawling one. Her eyes riveted on the hole in his head just between the eyes. Then, she quickly took in the two bullet wounds to the chest. The gunshot wounds to the body were probably the first ones, followed by the head wound, which was the coup de grace.
The bullet had passed through his skull and exited from the rear and into the wall, bringing some inevitable blood, fragments of bone, and brain splatter with it. His face was smashed in from the force of the bullet, which was probably point blank. From the size of the hole, it was clear that the bullet had been high powered.
Suddenly, the lights went off. Her first impression was that she had taken too long to climb the stairs and that the lights, as they did in European hallways, had turned off automatically. But then she realized someone had manually cut the power.
Meaning, someone was waiting for her. She had walked into a trap. Her left hand went fast for her gun, snapping the safety catch to “fire.”
In the darkness, the door to her own apartment opened one flight above. She heard the heavy footsteps of a man rush outward. Simultaneously, the blue doors down below opened and she heard someone else rush in.
Cerny? Rizzo?
She was in the middle, trapped in the darkness. Was the intruder below her savior or assassin? From above there was a flash and a brutally loud retort. A bullet crashed into the woodwork of the steps a few feet from her. Then there was a second shot at her and then a third.
Her hand whipped upward as she ducked away from where she had stood. She went into a low crouch, pointed her weapon upwards, and pulled the trigger. Either God guided her hand or just plain dumb luck prevailed.
Or maybe it was her years of training, because the agonized profane scream from the top of the stairs, followed by a torrent of obscenity in Russian-not Ukrainian but Russian!-told her that she had hit her target.
Alex heard the man’s body slump toward the wall. Then in the darkness she saw the erratic wavering flash of his pistol and heard the ear-splitting “bang” as he fired twice rapidly again and still tried to kill her.
The bullets shattered against the wall above her. One hit several feet above her head. The other passed so close to her right ear that she felt it go by. The impact sprayed powdered wood and concrete from the wall.
She steadied her own weapon. She could see a silhouette in the darkness and fired twice at the midpoint of it. She hit the target, heard the impact of the bullets and then heard the tumbling crashing sound of the man’s body on the stairs. All this rose above the sound of other heavy footsteps rushing upward from below.
She shifted her position, standing now. She leaned flat, her back to the wall.
“Rizzo? Cerny?” she asked.
Mistake. The response was the repetitive flash and loud bang of an automatic weapon and more shots impacting against the wall behind her.
She lowered her own weapon, fired toward her second assailant, and scored another hit. She heard a howl of pain and the clunk of his weapon hitting the floor, followed by the heavier thud of his body, followed by groans and cursing.
She heard the weapon rattle across the wooden floor and drop down two or three steps. She moved toward her only possible escape. She raced down the stairs and tried to step past the fallen body. The man who had tried to kill her cursed profanely and grabbed at her. Clearly she had not hit him in a vital spot.
He slashed at her body. With a powerful arm, he brought her down.
She fell hard to a knee. He cursed her in Russian. He had one strong hand on the shoulder of her jacket. His other hand, wet with blood, pushed at her throat. She threw an elbow at him and made contact. But he still fought, cursing in Russian that he would kill her. She could tell that the other hand was grasping for his gun.
She swung downward again w
ith an elbow and smashed at him with the hand that held her gun. Both blows landed hard, catching him on the side of the face, then on the side of the skull. She felt his grip on her weaken. She swung hard again with the hand that held her weapon. It cracked across his forehead.
His grip on her shoulder weakened. She followed with the same elbow crashing downward, pile-driver style, onto the top of his skull.
She fought and pulled away. She struggled to her feet. In the dim light from the outside, she then saw him access his gun. Alex had no choice. She pushed her Glock to the man’s chest and pulled the trigger. The bang was enormous, and she could feel the spray of blood as his body tumbled away and sprawled backward.
She felt sickened but kept moving.
She found her way to the door, swung it open, and found the street blocked by another huge man. For an inexplicable second they glared each other in the eye.
“Kaspar,” she said, recognizing him from Kiev.
“Alex LaDuca,” he said calmly.
Once again, Alex was faster. She brought her knee up and caught him hard between the legs. He bellowed and reached for his weapon. She hit him again, chopped at his hand to freeze it. She knew he had a huge advantage in physical force. If she gave him the slightest chance to overpower her, she was dead. In turn, she knew she had the advantage of speed and surprise: he hadn’t expected her to survive the trap inside the building. She kicked him in the shins, then the kneecap. Somehow she thought of Robert and the carnage in Kiev as she was fighting.
Where was Rizzo? Where was Cerny?
Kaspar staggered. He slumped slightly.
She smashed him across the back of the neck, and with all the strength that remained in her, she shoved at him. He staggered backward into a car but rebounded like a tiger. He kicked at her and got lucky, catching her in the wrist, sending her Glock flying from her hand. Her wrist was hit so hard that it felt frozen. Her fingers wouldn’t move. Kaspar lunged at her gun. She chopped him hard behind the neck then followed with a kick to the ribs. Momentarily he blocked her access to her own gun.