Now, it wasn’t just because I am a visiting retired military officer. In France, you see, all étrangers—foreigners—are required to fill out a similar form at each hotel where they stay. In the old days, these forms would be hand collected by flics—cops—and taken to a local police station, where they’d be bundled and shipped to Paris for examination. (In fact, poring over hotel registration cards was the device Freddie Forsyth’s Frog cops used to track the assassin in that great book The Day of the Jackal.) These days, the examination process takes place over fax machines, computer modem lines, and the Minitel system, a French invention that combines the best elements of phone, fax, video, and data transmission in one desktop instrument slightly bigger than a standard telephone. The system reacts a hell of a lot faster than it used to, which means it forces guys like me être alerte—to be on our toes.
Now, I wasn’t being paranoid here, I was just being prudent. The French have a very long history of keeping their eyes on visiting firemen. And I didn’t need that kind of trouble.
So I signed in, trying to remember whether or not I’d used my Captain Herman Snerd pseudonym in France when my boys and I tracked Call Me Ishmael Lord Brookfield and his tango pals to Beaulieu sur Mer, on the French Riviera, in Green Team. I’d forgotten to check this small but significant statistic before I’d left. If I’d signed the Snerd name anyplace, using another passport number, I’d be pâtée, which is how the French say dog meat, when they washed the alias through les computers.
My room wouldn’t be ready until after noon. It was just past ten hundred hours now, which gave me some time to kill. I asked for messages and was handed an envelope with Avi’s handwriting on it, even though the clerk said, “Colonel Ashcroft left this for you.”
While my standard multiple personality is aptly named Herman Snerd, Avi’s preferred alternate is Colonel Gordon Ashcroft, Royal Canadian Army (Ret). Now how the fuck he’s used such a straight-upper-lip Brit-sounding name and survived going in and out of the Arab world for so long, I do not know. But it has worked for him for years. He travels most often on a Canadian passport with a Quebec address, he speaks nothing but French (which, of course, he does as perfectly as he does Arabic and Russian), and he never has had a problem.
I examined the envelope casually. The security seal Avi’d left behind on it—a single hair cunningly placed on the right edge of the rear flap—hadn’t been tampered with. I slit the message open and unfolded a single sheet of heavy bond club letterhead. A brief note told me Avi had some urgent work to take care of—I interpreted that to mean that he had meetings with his AMAN people and that he also wanted to pick up our weapons and other supplies. It went on to suggest that we meet for a late lunch at La Petite Tour, a small, quiet restaurant he knew and liked on the Rue de la Tour, near Trocadero. If I had a problem with that, I could leave a message at the desk, as he’d be calling in during the late morning. Otherwise, Avi’s neat writing continued, he’d be waiting for me at 1430. It all sounded good to me, because I had things to do, too.
Interestingly, the late former director of French Intelligence, Alexandre de Marenches, in 1986 publicly referred to DST as Direction de la Sécurité du Territoire. That word change, if accurate, would broaden the DST’s mission—making it much more akin to Britain’s MI5, or the old Soviet KGB. Was Marenches’s slip of the tongue rehearsed, or was it a Freudian slip? We’ll never know, because he went to his grave without explaining it.
Chapter 13
IT WAS COOL OUT—THE SORT OF BONE-CHILLING DAMP MORNing for which Paris is famous in the autumn. But Paris, even cold and wet, beats Moscow—or just about anyplace else. I may not care for Parisians, but the city itself is always wonderful. I dodged speeding traffic on Boulevard Malesherbes, dashed across the Place St. Augustin and headed west, up Haussmann, toward the Arc de Triomphe. Just to be on the safe side, I jumped onto the metro at Miromesnil, rode one stop, got off at the last instant, and waited as the train pulled out of the station. So far as I could discern, no one was following me. It was improbable that I was a target at this point. But, as I have said many times, there is no being too careful.
Especially here in Paris. Of all our Western allies, the French are the most alert, suspicious, and watchful about American operations on their soil. Now, they will tell you indignantly that any foreign ops—l’Amérique inclusif—are contemptible violations of the great French Republic’s sovereignty, and up with zem zey wheel not poot.
Maybe. So far as I am concerned, however, the answer is more basic; old-fashioned Gallic paranoia about les États Unis—which is what they call the U.S. of A. in case you didn’t know.
You’ve probably heard it all before—the French insisting—loudly—that theirs is the finest culture, the best food and wine, the richest language, the most imaginative arts and letters; indeed, most French will even stipulate, in writing, that the best of everything is French.
But let me tell you a secret: deep down in their Frog souls, the French know they are inferior to the United States. Despite Renoir, Monet, or Toulouse-Lautrec; Racine, Molière, Voltaire, or Albert Camus; triple-crème, truffles, or Château Trotanoy, they are a third-rate power. And despite the Fox network, Chicken McNuggets, and plonk wine in boxes, we are a superpower. More evidence? Okay—we have not become a nation of Francophiles. When’s the last time you had a Kronenbourg beer and a side of foie gras at the Horse Shoe Curve (or whatever the name of your local watering hole may be)? But in the last two decades, the French have become totally Americanized—from le Big Mac to les jeans Levi’s to le Diet Coke, to le bière Budweiser, they have adopted our culture and lifestyle at the sacrifice of their own.
So far as I am concerned, that is a BFD (look it up). But to les Françaises, it is profoundly … galling. Bottom line? The French are saddled with a deeply rooted inferiority complex, which often makes them paranoid and unfriendly where Americans are concerned. Have you ever been to a restaurant in Paris where they absolutely refuse to speak English? Or stood in a bank on the Champs-Élysées while the teller, arms crossed, pretends that American Express traveler’s checks are not valid in his country? Behavior like that is symptomatic of French inferiority.
Moreover, despite all their Gallic pride and snappy military uniforms, the French are all too well aware of their sorry history as warriors during the twentieth century. They fought badly during the 1914 to 1918 war. During World War II they collaborated with the Germans. Their leadership—the Vichy regime headed by Marshal Pétain—was cowardly and cozy with the Nazis. In the fifties, they lost their colonies in a series of humiliating wars and guerrilla actions.
Bottom line? The French, because they feel inferior, have set out to prove their greatness and their Frenchness on the world stage, often with disastrous results.
They have “proved” it by using their special forces to sink the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior at harbor in Auckland, New Zealand (they got caught in the act, too, and were badly embarrassed).
They have tried to “prove” it by continued testing of nuclear weapons—a tactic that backfired and made them the object of international scorn.
And they tried to “prove” it by snaring a quartet of CIA NOCs—officers operating with nonofficial cover—engaging in industrial espionage a few years back, to show les Ètats-Unis that les Frogs were still good at something. (Actually, all that incident proved was that the CIA is as inept as the French in certain areas, industrial espionage being one of them … especially when a female NOC falls in love with her target and admits who she is and what she’s doing. Kind of makes you wonder about the CIA’s muchvaunted training program for operations officers, don’t it?)
Neanmoins, which is how they say notwithstanding all of the above around here, Americans—especially military personnel, business travelers, and expatriates—are targets in France. All of the French security and intelligence agencies, paranoid about any perceived or imagined violation of la sécurité de la République, spotlight them.
Well, f
riends, paranoia is contagious. I may have known I wasn’t being followed. But I still wanted to know I wasn’t being followed. So, when the station was empty, I bounded up the stairs, sauntered down the street, and quick-marche once around the block. My six was clean.
I jumped the metro at Iéna and took it two stops to Rue la Pompe, climbed off, walked through six blocks of imposing old Paris architecture that now housed a dozen or more embassies, and finally stood on Rue de Franqueville, in ft of the U.S. Mission to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which as I’ve already explained, is better known as USOECD.
It didn’t take long for me to see that they’d done the damage with a RPG—a Rocket-Propelled Grenade. Obviously, they hadn’t been able to get close to the building, because of the steel antiterrorist barricade that had been erected in the driveway. But they’d been able to park across the street and fire the RPG from a car directly into the firstfloor offices where the DIA officers who were concentrating their efforts on Russian Mafiya activities were located. None of the windows on the building had been fitted with the thick wire screen mesh that guards against RPG attacks. After all, this was Gay Paree, the City of Light.
After ten minutes I’d seen enough. I caught the metro back three stops to Alma Marceau, turned north and walked back past the Chinese embassy toward I’Étoile. Three blocks from the Arc de Triomphe, the wide street was cordoned off by barriers behind which stood submachine gun-toting soldiers in full battle gear. Beyond them I could see the forensics teams still at work picking through the rubble outside the entrance to the France-Israel cultural center, one of the targets that had been hit two and a half days ago.
There is a lot that you can learn by looking at the site of an explosion—if you know what to look for. I was able to see, for example, that the charge had been shaped. I knew that because, while the destruction to the building’s facade was concave—it looked as if it had been scooped up and out by the explosion and dumped on the sidewalk—there was very little damage to the street directly in front of the building itself. There was no huge, gaping hole in the ground the way there is with car bombs. And, judging from the lack of repair trucks on the scene, there’d been very little apparent damage to the electric lines, water mains, or sewers that ran under the nine lanes of Avenue Marceau.
My quick verdict: someone had broken inside, planted a shaped charge on the ground floor, and then set it all off remotely. Had the Israeli site been the target of the same sort of probes as USOECD had? I bet myself a hundred francs that when I asked Avi, his answer would be in the affirmative.
From the barricade, I cut north to the Champs—Élysées, turned west, then walked to Rue Marbeuf and jogged left, turned up Rue Clément-Marot past a nice-looking bistro named Chez André, and crossed Avenue George Cinq onto the wide street named for King Peter the First of Serbia.
There, I hinked left, then jinked right, until I stood across two lanes of tightly parked cars and two lanes of traffic from one of three adjoining turn-of-the-century gray stone buildings each six stories in height, replete with ornate frieze work between each floor, wrought iron balconies, and eight-foot-high windows. On the fifth level of the one I faced, a series of small, beautifully pruned trees adorned the widest of the balconies. Below, flower boxes added splashes of color to the gray stone and black wrought iron. Set into the facade next to the doorway was a large rectangular, polished brass plaque on which were engraved the words LANTOS & CIE., DEUXIÈME ÉTAGE.
The entrance itself was spectacular, too: a gorgeous pair of tooled antique walnut double-width doors, into whose right-hand panel had been built a third, single entry door, in the same style that is common to courtyard buildings all over Europe (remember—Andrei Yudin’s apartment house had a similar entry). The reason? Same as Moscow: the double doors allow cars in and out; the single door is for pedestrians. And positioned adjacent to the single door was an electronic keypad so that visitors could enter a code, and the automatically controlled lock on the single door would slip open.
It didn’t used to be that way. Almost every apartment house in Paris had a concierge—the accepted typecasting was a crusty, blunt, middle-aged woman—who greeted visitors, took in the mail and packages, cleaned the public areas of the building, and knew every secret of every occupant. For their work, concierges got a small stipend, and a free apartment on the ground floor. But these days, concierges are an endangered species. Instead, there are the modern, efficient, and wholly impersonal keypads. No one takes messages, holds your mail and packages, and keeps track of your business. And God help you if you or a guest forget the keypad code—because there are no intercoms, and no one to let you in.
I walked past the building, doing a quick target assessment as I went. Target assessment is a completely natural act for me. After all, I see things differently from you. You see structure—architecture, detail, craftsmanship. I see those things, too—but I evaluate them in a slightly different light. I appraise them for their potential demolition value. You see windows and balconies. I see clandestine exits and entries. You see a beautiful antique walnut door. I want to know how thick it is, so that I’ll know exactly how many feet of ribbon charge it will take me to destroy that door in a millisecond.
So, as I glanced up at the building that housed Werner Lantos’s corporate headquarters, I wasn’t admiring the friezes and hand-wrought ironwork. I was making mental notes about the four small, state-of-the-art television cameras that were suspended just below the second-floor balcony. It took me seven paces—just enough to see past a truck that was double-parked in front of the building—to determine that their field of vision encompassed the entire width of the building, as well as the sidewalk in front of it. In another six paces I learned that two cameras were on gimbals, which allowed them lateral and vertical movement, and that they had zoom lenses. Three paces later, I was certain that the other two were stationary—which meant they probably had wide-angle lenses.
A red and white placard next to the doorway proclaimed the fact that security at Lantos & Cie was provided by a company named SECOR. That was good news and bad news. The bad news was that Lantos’s security monitoring was done by professionals. That would tend to make things difficult (but certainly not impossible) for the CIA or Mossad or Russian intelligence gumshoes who probably had tried to get inside Lantos & Cie to plant their various listening devices. It’s a constant battle. You sweep the location weekly—or even daily—and the opposition keeps trying to bug your ass.
The good news was also that Lantos’s security monitoring was done by professionals. You see, rent-a-cops don’t get paid very much, a reality that tends to make them less than assiduous in the pursuit of their duties. So, while the security cameras might be state-of-the-art, the security folks who monitor them tend to be run-of-the-mill. It’s a combination that makes life much easier for sneak-and-peekers like me.
I continued walking. To the left of the entry was a small bookstore. To the right was a store whose awning bore the legend Le Petit Marché du Vin—the little wine market—a small wine bar. Just to the right of the wine bar were the building’s drainpipes—which could be climbed to gain entry to the starboard-most windows on each floor. The bookstore had a metal awning that also could be scaled. But the cameras would easily pick up anyone trying to make a vertical incursion.
I ambled down to the end of the block, turned the corner, took out a small notebook and a ballpoint pen, and made notes. Then I slipped paper and Montblanc back into a pocket, and wandered back the way I’d come. This time I took a good look at the street in front of the building. Almost directly opposite my target, three of the square manhole covers the French like so much sat in the middle of the roadway. I crossed over and examined them as I passed. One was a sewer cover. Below the other two were power and water lines. It was altogether possible that I could gain entry to the building through one of ’em.
I edged between the double-parked truck and tightly parked cars and walked in front of the
building entrance, moving deliberately so as not to attract the attention of the gimbaled cameras, and concentrating on the keypad to the right of the doorway. It was an old Siemens electric unit with ten buttons and a—shit—I stopped short, one step before dropping into a tucking hole in the sidewalk.
I guess the French don’t believe in red flags and flashing lights. At my feet was a mere six-inch-high barrier of steel—the rim around an elevator shaft. I peered down. Ten feet below me, two men were wrestling a large wooden barrel into the subterranean darkness.
I stepped back a foot and looked through the curtained window. They were setting up for lunch inside the small café. Suddenly, from behind me, a voice called my name. “Captain Marcinko—”
I turned to see Werner Lantos emerge from the rear of a black, four-door Citroën Xantia station wagon that had pulled in front of the double-parked wine-delivery truck. Lantos pushed ahead of the four bodyguards who were attempting to shield him inside the tried-and-true diamond pattern, stepped onto the curb, and headed toward me.
He had your regulation, political-issue SES (check the Glossary) on his face. In his left hand he carried a Nokia cellular phone. His right arm was extended; his hand anticipating a shake, was open. “Well, Captain, I hadn’t expected to see you again so soon—especially in Paris.”
Frankly, I hadn’t expected to see him, either, although I didn’t say so.
“Le Petit Marché du Vin—it’s a good little restaurant,” he said, his thin, aristocratic nose shifting vaguely in the direction of the wine bar’s curtained window. “Simple, but nicely balanced menu. They serve a wonderful steak tartar, and a great plate of andouillette. They even bottle their own wines—bring them in from Burgundy by the barrel.”
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