by Gregg Loomis
Two train changes and forty minutes later, Lang exited the Opera station into the cold drizzle that characterizes Paris’s winters. His suitcase trailing behind him, he dodged traffic crossing one of the city’s busiest intersections, the place de l’Opera, and entered a nondescript building facing the ornate Opera Garnier. Inside, Lang passed an antique birdcage elevator to climb steps covered in worn carpeting. At the top he turned right, facing an old-fashioned glass door. He knew the opaque glass was the hardest bullet and blast proof available. He lifted his head, and the dim light reflected dully from the lens of a camera almost hidden in the shadows that hung from the ceiling like dull drapes.
Had he any doubts that the person he sought was still here, they were resolved.
A knock on the door caused it to silently open, leaving him facing another, this one of steel.
“Oui?” a woman’s voice asked from a speaker.
“Tell Patrick Louvere, Langford Reilly is here to see him.”
The voice switched to English. “He is expecting you?”
“I doubt that very much. Just tell him.”
Patrick Louvere was head of Special Branch, Direction Generale de la Securite Exterieure, DGSE, France’s equivalent of the CIA. The bulk of the counterespionage organization had years ago been moved to the fort at Noisy-le-Sec. Only Patrick’s division remained in the city. During Lang’s employment, the Agency had a long-standing distrust of its French counterpart. Operation Ascot, a plan to stir separatist action in Canada, had been devised by de Gaulle and carried out by DGSE’s predecessor. In 1968 the same organization had supplied arms to secessionists in Nigeria’s Biafra region to wrest control from U.S. and British oil companies at a cost of over a hundred thousand lives. All of that was long before Lang’s time. He had worked with Patrick in the days of the Cold War and they had become close friends. It had been Patrick who had performed the sad duty of informing Lang that his sister Janet and her adopted son Jeff had died in a blast in the place des Vosges in the Marais section of Paris, where she was visiting a friend. Patrick had also helped cut a great deal of the red tape associated with shipping their bodies back to Atlanta.
The steel door swung open, revealing a man in a dark suit of Italian cut, the creases of the pants razor sharp. His shirt was crisply starched and his shoes gleamed with polish. Lang and his first wife had often joked that Patrick had to change clothes two or three times a day to always look so fresh.
The two men stared at each other for perhaps a half a second before Patrick’s salon-tanned face broke into a smile of perfect teeth. “Lang! It is the great surprise.”
In the next second he held Lang in a bear hug of an embrace. Lang was thankful his friend remembered his aversion to being kissed by another man even if it was only on the cheek.
Patrick stepped back as if to confirm it was, in fact, Lang he held in his arms despite the still-visible cuts and bruises from Haiti, injuries about which Patrick was too polite to inquire. “You have come unexpectedly to Paris, yes?”
“I didn’t plan to be here until yesterday, yes.”
“But you did not let Nanette and me know.” Patrick clucked his disapproval. “We would have made the big dinner, opened the finest wines.”
“I hope we have time to go to dinner together.”
The Frenchman dropped his arms to his side, nonplussed. “Surely you have the time to make the dinner, no? Nanette will be furious if you escape Paris without seeing her.”
Lang glanced around, aware he was probably on several different cameras. “Actually, I have a bit of a problem I’d hoped you could help me with.”
“A problem?” Patrick’s bushy eyebrows arched like a pair of dancing caterpillars. “A problem of the heart, a woman, perhaps? It is a subject we French know well.”
Only then did Lang realize that Patrick didn’t know about Gurt and his instant family. “Er, not exactly. Can we go into your office to talk?”
Twenty minutes later, Lang was finishing his story as Patrick ground out the butt of a Gitane despite the no-smoking signs outside his office. The French tended to view government attempts to regulate personal conduct as unworthy of notice.
The part of the story the Frenchman found most interesting was that Lang was now living in what was domestic bliss with Gurt, a woman Patrick had more than once compared to one of Wagner’s Valkyries.
“Your recent adventure explains something I thought strange.” Patrick clicked the keyboard on his polished desktop, intent on the computer’s monitor. “Ah, here we are! Your Federal Bureau of Investigation has asked Interpol and police in a number of nations to be on the lookout for you. Is that right, lookout? ”
In view of what Gurt had told him, this should not have been a surprise, but the words still hit Lang like a punch in the stomach. “Huh?”
Patrick turned the screen so Lang could also view it. He was looking at a picture of a much younger version of himself, a photograph from his Agency days.
Underneath was a caption. Wanted for questioning by the Federal Bureau of Investigation as suspected part of criminal conspiracy to defraud and related crimes. Possibly armed and dangerous. Use extreme care. Detain.
Lang had never believed you could feel the blood drain from your face. Now he did.
Patrick used a finger to pull down a lower eyelid, the French gesture of incredulity. “So, my friend Lang is a big-time criminal, maybe like Al Capone?” He pantomimed firing a tommy gun. “No?”
Lang was far from amused. “No.”
The Frenchman became serious. “It is a measure of how badly your government wants you that they would turn on you. The question is, why?”
“There are a limited number of reasons why my government would want me and Gurt in custody,” Lang said. “The only one I can think of is they think we know something they either want to learn or don’t want to become public. As I told you, Gurt and I are the ones who gave our friend at the CIA this information about what’s going on in Haiti.”
Patrick pulled the blue box from a coat pocket and shook out another Gitane. “So, you cannot simply swear to say nothing?”
“You are in the business. Would you take someone’s word not to divulge that sort of information?”
Patrick lit the cigarette with a gold Ronson, sending a plume of blue smoke toward the ceiling. “It is not the same. In France, just like your friends the English, we would have put you under oath and warned of our official-secrets act. Violations of the act are punishable by prison. In your defense of free speech, you Americans have no such laws. That is why the most delicate of international affairs sometimes appears up on the evening news. That is also why your own people are trying to find you and Gurt.” He chuckled. “All governments are more alike than different, professing free speech while trying to limit it by one means or another.”
“I may or may not agree with your philosophy,” Lang said, “but I do need your help.”
Patrick, opened his arms wide, another Gallic gesture, this one of expansiveness. “But of course! You will stay with Nanette and me. No point in risking giving your passport to some hotel clerk to report to the authorities. But our hospitality is not the reason you are in Paris?”
“No, although I appreciate you risking problems with your government by not turning me over to mine.”
Patrick laughed as he stubbed out the Gitane. “Your CIA wants you. I believe it is the best interest of France to keep you for me to debrief on the serious situation developing in Haiti. Unless there is some formal extra, extra…”
“Extradition.”
“… extradition request, France is not obligated to meet every American demand, no?”
Lang was well aware of the glee the French took in frustrating its supposed allies, a tendency dating back to the Crusades and continuing through two world wars and the Cold War. He supposed there was a word for it. More important, for the first time, he was thankful for it.
Patrick continued. “You have told me your story but you still
have not told me of your reasons for being in Paris, since you assure me they are not romantic.”
Lang stretched out in his chair and groped in his pocket, producing the small plastic bag. He dumped the button on Patrick’s desk.
Puzzled, the Frenchman turned it over in his hand. “A button?”
Lang nodded.
“With number twelve on it. Twelve what? Could it be from the uniform of a flick in the Twelfth Arrondissement?”
“I don’t think Paris cops have the specific arrondissement on their uniform buttons.”
“But it is a military-type button, no?”
Lang returned the button to the baggie and the plastic bag to his pocket. “I think so. I believe it is from the uniform of Napoleon’s Twelfth Brigade. I found it in an ancient tomb in Alexandria. Bonaparte’s savants must have employed the army to do the heavy lifting in their archaeological work. I think they, the savants, may have found, or at least thought they had found, Alexander’s tomb.”
Patrick’s interest increased visibly. “And you think the tomb’s relics are what this man in Haiti, duPaar, wants in exchange for letting the Chinese set up a military base there?”
“It’s possible. DuPaar wouldn’t be the first person to believe whatever country possessed Alexander’s mummy could never be defeated. It’s the kind of legend a deranged dictator would love. And I’m fairly certain the Chinese didn’t rob the church in Venice for Saint Mark’s remains. They thought they were getting Alexander’s.”
Patrick pursed his lips, doubtful. “Alexander the Great in Saint Mark’s tomb? That is… what do you say… a pull?”
“A stretch. But not as much as you might think.”
Lang explained the theory set forth in Chugg’s book.
By the time he had finished, Patrick was shaking another Gitane out of the box. “And you believe if you can find these…?”
“If I can find the mummy, or whatever remains of it, or prove it no longer exists, duPaar will no longer tolerate foreign forces in his country.”
Patrick took a thoughtful puff, smoke streaming from his nose. “And that would hardly endear you to the Chinese, my friend.”
“Perhaps not, but if they no longer can keep a foothold in Haiti by reason of Alexander’s mummy, remains, whatever, they have very little incentive to continue efforts to get rid of me and Gurt. Like them or not, they are practical. Likewise, if the Chinese pick up their toys and go home, the U.S. government no longer has to worry about what I might say. In fact, they can take credit for avoiding a threat.”
Patrick opened his center desk drawer, poking through it with a pen as though he anticipated he might encounter something venomous. “Nanette has a friend whose husband teaches history at the Sorbonne, a pudgy, officious little academic. Nanette tells me he has just finished editing for publication a diary of someone, Bonaparte’s personal secretary, I think. Supposedly, this lecturer in history discovered a number of previously unknown facts about the emperor. Ah! Here is his card!”
Patrick held it between thumb and forefinger, the way one might hold a dead rat by the tail.
Lang took it, scanning the spidery print. “I’m not sure what he can-”
Patrick shut the drawer with a slam. “The man may be an ass but he has won several prizes for historic research. If Bonaparte’s savants found anything relating to Alexander, he would know about it.
“I will call to let him know you will visit him.” Patrick consulted a large gold Rolex. “But first, the oysters at the Restaurant de la Place de l’Opera are superb this time of year. They arrive daily from Honfleur. Come.”
It was obvious Patrick was not going to focus on anything beyond lunch, not until he was sated with Norman mollusks.
A rural highway in Georgia
The previous evening
The men blocking the road had given the matter some thought. They had chosen a place the highway narrowed slightly just before a bridge over some nameless creek. There was no chance Gurt could pull around them without hitting the bridge abutment or going into the water itself.
She gave the latter possibility an instant’s thought. The big Hummer’s high ground clearance and four-wheel drive just might be enough to get it across the water. She dismissed the idea. She had no means of knowing how deep the water was but it was a certainty winter rains and any ice melt had not diminished its flow.
Instead, she kept her foot on the gas despite frantically waving flashlights and the echo-tinged shouting of a bullhorn.
Two questions occupied her mind as she bore down on the blockade: where was the weakest spot and did the government want her badly enough to use deadly force?
The second was answered by a burst of automatic rifle fire well over the Hummer’s roof, warning shots only. The staccato blast brought Manfred wide-awake with a yelp of fear. She had only a fraction of a second to take a hand from the wheel, reach behind the front seat and make sure he was secure in his child’s seat.
“Mommy!” he shouted in terror.
There was no time for him to say anything else.
Gurt was aware of figures scattering like a covey of frightened birds as she aimed the Hummer at the narrow space between sheriff’s cruiser and the unmarked car. Now she would find out if the massive Hummer’s superior weight would push through the lighter vehicles. With a sound of shrieking sheet metal, the Hummer split the two apart like an ax cleaving a log. The impact tried to snatch the wheel from her hand.
Then her world went white as the air bag exploded into her chest, driving her back against her seat and blinding her forward vision. Using the edge of the road she could see through the side window, she kept on the pavement as she used one hand to tug the balloonlike air bag aside. Ahead, she could see into multiprismed fractions as the windshield had become a spiderweb of refracted light.
She could feel something dragging against the right front wheel. A fender, she guessed. Manfred was howling with fear but otherwise seemed fine. A thin trail of steam was jetting from a radiator even the big grill had not been able to completely protect. A quick glance at the gauges showed engine heat creeping toward the red as oil pressure fell off. She must have ruptured a line or holed the oil pan.
She next checked the mirrors. It was too dark to see exactly what damage she had caused but it was apparently enough to prevent pursuit for the moment. She needed to put as much distance between her and the people at the bridge as possible before the engine seized.
She took the first dirt road she could see by her one remaining headlight. Cresting a small rise, she saw another, smaller unpaved path, actually no more than parallel tracks leading toward a shedlike structure.
She turned in, the scraping sound against the right front wheel louder. She stopped in front of a ramshackle wooden building, shifted into park, put on the brake and got out. She left the engine running for fear it would not restart. In the beam of the single light, she saw a tractor and an aged pickup truck. She had arrived at some farmer’s machine shed.
Shifting her attention to the Hummer, Gurt could now see the grill had been pushed back into the radiator where the spume of steam was hissing. A fender had indeed been crushed against the right front tire.
None of this interested her as much as what she could not see.
Crossing in front of the car, she opened the passenger door.
Forcing herself to ignore Manfred’s pleas to be freed from his car seat, she removed a flashlight from the glove box, knelt and began to examine the underside of the SUV.
It took her less than a minute to find a soap-bar-sized box just under the driver’s door. She recognized it as one of a number of commercially available wireless devices with GPS capabilities, the kind used by long-haul trucking companies for both security and driver location. It could be tracked by anyone with Internet access and a password. The following car Jake had spotted was only closing the rear door of a preset trap once she had entered a section of the highway with no turnoffs. Like chasing fish into the net.
Her thoughts were interrupted by the thumping of rotor blades. Her pursuers might have been disabled on the ground but they had managed to get a helicopter airborne and this locator beacon was going to lead them straight to her.
From the rate at which the sound was growing, they would be here in minutes.
Place de l’Opera, Paris
The Honfleur oysters had been as good as promised but gastronomy had hardly been on Lang’s mind. He had hardly savored the fruits de mer, a whole lobster, crab, shrimp, mussels, clam and whelk with tart shallot-vinegar sauce, warm loaf of rye bread and dairy-fresh butter.
“Only a single glass of Muscadet?” Patrick asked. “It is a marvelous vintage.”
Lang looked around the ornate, rococo dining room complete with mural on the ceiling. Most of the patrons were men in business suits. Several had much younger women with them. Lang would have bet this was not the French version of National Administrative Professionals Week.
He would have liked nothing more than to get a little tipsy on the sweet wine and retire for a nap. “Regrettably, I have a busy afternoon, what with seeing professor”-he reached into a pocket to remove the card-“Henri D’Tasse.”
Patrick had shamelessly helped himself to the last of the Muscadet, shaking the bottle slightly to make certain not a drop remained. He gave a reproachful look that reminded Lang that at table, the French do not favor discussions of anything not pertaining to the food, the wine or the cheeses. Comparisons with other dishes or meals, the last time that particular vintage had been enjoyed, which establishment did the best version. Lang had actually witnessed a couple screaming threats of divorce sit down to dinner. The conversation immediately switched to a calm debate of the relative merits of Livarot versus Pont l’Eveque cheese.