Pirate: A Thriller

by Ted Bell

  “He says they’ve found a body!” she cried over her shoulder.

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Paris

  THE DATE WAS NOT ACCIDENTAL. IT WAS THE FOURTEENTH of July. Bastille Day. History records that it was on this very day, in the year 1789, that the citizenry of Paris had stormed the Bastille Prison and brought about the surrender of King Louis XVI. Violence had erupted throughout the country. Following the “Terror,” many French nobles and men long accustomed to privilege in government, fearing for their lives and their ill-gotten fortunes, had fled abroad.

  Those who remained in Paris found themselves, usually with but a semblance of a trial, trudging up the blood-soaked steps to the guillotine. With each thunk of the heavy blade, the ancien régime saw that their collective necks were stretched thinner and thinner. The old guard quickly realized that it was no match for the new nation’s twin passions, Liberty and Equality, and took to their heels. That was the eighteenth century. The twenty-first had brought new, more volatile passions to old Europe and what the dailies heralded as the New France.

  Once again, a lot of heads were on the chopping block.

  A flat-screen television monitor, sitting atop a gilded ormolu desk in a corner of the French prime minister’s office, showed a live feed of the wild melee now occurring at Orly and Charles de Gaulle airports and at the train and bus stations of Paris. Chaos. At one of the bridges across the Seine, a sea of flashing blue lights and the red beacons of emergency vehicles. Smoke was curling from a burned-out tank and many overturned automobiles.

  At daybreak, CRS riot police, one of the groups still loyal to President Bocquet, had clashed with a mob of Bonapartists on the Pont Neuf. Seventeen banner-carrying citizens belonging to an Anglo-American society had died when the exploding tear-gas pellets and a hail of rubber bullets failed to stop their advance toward a protest rally near the Elysée Palace. The now-smoldering tank had opened fire and killed a dozen rioting students before three heroic youths clambered aboard and dropped Molotov cocktails down the opened hatch.

  Bonaparte was not watching these disturbing images on the monitor; he had eyes only for the restive crowd gathering beneath his windows. He had his head bent forward and his hands clasped behind his back in the familiar ancestral pose.

  “Those who ignore the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them,” Luca Bonaparte said softly, quoting Santayana to no one in particular.

  The quotation was not lost, however, on his companion.

  Bonaparte and a very well-dressed black gentleman stood before an array of tall windows overlooking the palace’s large interior courtyard. A narrow bar of sunlight sharply bisected Luca’s face; his eyes shone with battle fire. His somewhat cruel mouth was in shadow. In the courtyard and in the surrounding streets below, a seething mob heaved and surged over the cobblestones.

  The euphoric horde had been growing all morning, in both size and volume. New estimates were coming into the newly named prime minister’s quarters every half hour. The latest aide to enter Bonaparte’s gilded offices had calculated the crowd’s strength in this arrondissement alone at more than one hundred thousand electrified Frenchmen.

  “Vive le France!” the masses shouted. “Vive le roi, vive Bonaparte!”

  “They want a king,” the elegant black man observed.

  “They shall have an emperor,” Bonaparte said.

  This was the dream that had lain restive in his mind since the mock battles of boyhood. Luca’s lips curled into a wry smile as he lifted his gaze from this amorphous human mass to the sunlit palace wing on the opposite side of the courtyard. There, behind windows much like his own, he could almost make out the shadowy figure of Bocquet himself.

  Unquestionably, the current president of France was staring at the selfsame scene below with a growing sense of horror. Luca raised an ornate brass spyglass, bequeathed to this office by Napoleon himself, to his eye.

  He twisted the ring and brought the optics into crystalline focus.

  “Monsieur le President Bocquet and I share a similar view of this situation,” he said to the little black man. “Albeit our reactions to it may not be quite the same.”

  His companion chuckled appreciatively, his eyes glittering behind his gold pince-nez glasses.

  “Everything in life depends on your point of view, My Liege,” the man said in his deep new voice. The bone-rattling chuckle, like the nappy white wig, was an essential part of his new disguise.

  Bonaparte smiled in appreciation of the Chinaman’s bon mot.

  After the successful completion of the Sotheby’s affair, Hu Xu had shed Madame Li forever. In her place, a foppish African diamond merchant from the Côte d’Ivoire. This smart white-haired gentleman with the startlingly white teeth and the coal-black face had a polished manner and was impeccably dressed. He wore a well-tailored light grey woolen three-piece suit, a patterned red Hermès tie, and mirror-polished black wingtip shoes. A gold watch chain spanned his little belly. And his voice had miraculously dropped from a clipped soprano to a broad basso profundo.

  Earlier that morning, the reigning president of France, Guy Bocquet, had appeared on his balcony. Weaned on decades of the adulation of the French populace, he had been shocked at the reaction to his appearance at the balustrade. Sensing the brittle mood of the mob, he had wisely stepped back inside. He hurriedly conferred with his closest political and military advisors. Something must be done. Bocquet could feel his city, his country, his dominion, veering out of control.

  And his lifelong friend Honfleur’s corpse was hardly cold!

  The mood everywhere inside this presidential wing of the Elysée was understandably tense. At 6:00 A.M., Bocquet had ceased taking Bonaparte’s telephone calls. The last one Bonaparte had made attempted to reassure the president of his new prime minister’s unflagging support at this extremely difficult moment in history. Did the president wish him to step out onto his own balcony and attempt to pacify the mob? In the face of this dripping transparency, Bocquet had hung up without a word. He had then called upon his generals, some present and others by telephone, and ordered Bonaparte arrested.

  One of the generals present, Lebouitillier, had swiftly but discreetly disappeared from the suite of rooms and down a long corridor. In a forgotten cloakroom that he frequently used for the purpose, the general whipped out his mobile phone. He was put straight through to Prime Minister Bonaparte and informed him of Bocquet’s orders.

  “On what charge?” Luca demanded of General Charles Lebouitillier, the loyal (to him) commander of the Ville de Paris Defense Corps.

  “Sedition, Excellency,” the general said. “Also, suspicion of murder.”

  “Of whom?” Bonaparte asked. It was not a facetious question. He had murdered, or caused to be murdered, many men in the last few months. The president himself was complicit in some of those crimes. Thus his need for clarification before responding.

  “Your predecessor, Excellency. The late prime minister Honfleur.”

  “I see. Is Bocquet still planning to address the cameras at noon?”

  “Yes, sir, he is.”

  “Two hours. Very well. Slip back into his office. Assure him that plans are well under way for my immediate arrest and imprisonment. Tell him he still has the general army, air force, and the media. How soon will your division be here at the palace?”

  “My Third Armored Division left HQ for the palace ten minutes ago. Another division has already begun forming up at the bridges. They will reinforce CRS riot police already in place. A large mob is heading down the Boul St. Mich, ripping up cobblestones and looting. I estimate they should arrive at the bridge in fifteen minutes, Prime Minister.”

  “Tell me about this mob.”

  “Led by that damned fool L’Espalier. Carrying banners, huge Chinese puppets with your face on them, shouting treason and murder, that it was you killed their beloved Honfleur. Calling for your head, Prime Minister.”

  “Any sign of violence from this insurrectionist mo
b and your men are to fire upon them without mercy. A rebellion must be put down at all costs. For the well-being of the state. You understand me, General?”

  “Certainly, sir.”

  “However, I must make it clear to you that this latest writ to preserve the peace with armed force comes directly from the hand of the president himself. I hold the original copy with his signature in my hand. Convey this to all: It is the president alone who has ordered you to fire on our own people. Not me. I want the media to know that the president has not consulted me in this matter. And that, time and again, I have registered my fervent opposition to murdering our citizens. I am a man of the people. Any questions at all?”

  “None, sir. God bless you. Vive le France.”

  “Good. Keep me posted. Vive le France.”

  Luca turned to the Chinaman. “I will save this country if I have to kill every damn citizen to do it,” he said.

  “Spoken like a true visionary,” Hu Xu replied without a trace of irony. “There’ll be no blood on your hands, Excellency. Bocquet will do it for you. His cannons will send them running to you for salvation.”

  Luca laughed. He’d developed something approaching affection for the little madman. He said, “Well, are you ready to play your next role on the world stage, my friend?”

  Hu Xu bowed slightly from the waist. “Give me but a minute, Highness,” he said, and turned away.

  He opened the alligator valise he had carried into the office ten minutes earlier. In it were all his worldly possessions at the moment, including, in a black mesh cage, a medium-sized brown rat gnawing with spiky little teeth on a hunk of bone. At Sotheby’s, he had sliced off one of Hubert’s fingers as a treat for his pet. He took the rat from his cage and cradled him in one arm, stroking the sharp ridge of his slick back. Hu Xu looked up at Luca, beaming.

  “Would you hold my little kamikaze a second, while I prepare his harness? His name is Chou, by the way.”

  “Hold that disgusting animal? Good God, no,” Luca said, “are you insane?”

  It was a moot point and Hu Xu let it go. “All right, back in your cage, mon petite Chou,” he said, putting the oily creature back inside. Out of the valise came a small wooden spool mounted on a tiny leather harness of his own design. The harness was adjustable, with Velcro fasteners, and looked to be a good fit for the rat Chou. On the spool, about one hundred feet of ceramic wire with a thin gel coating. The wire was clad with rubbery, plasticized C4 explosives. “Bomb wire” was a creation perfected by the labs aboard the Hong Kong headquarters of General Moon.

  The idea of the rat belonged to Hu Xu.

  He carefully unfolded an old blueprint, an elevation and schematic of the Elysée Palace done at the time of the last restoration. The section he needed was heavily marked with red pencil. It showed a small anteroom just off the Salon Napoleon where even now cameras were being set up for Bocquet’s address to the nation. It was Bocquet’s standing practice of many years to sit alone at a simple wooden table in the small room and read his prepared remarks aloud, one final time, before entering the grand salon.

  “We have two hours,” Bonaparte said, looking at his watch.

  “This shouldn’t take long,” Hu Xu said, stripping off his jacket, waistcoat, and tie. He removed a white coverall from his case and stepped into it. He yanked up the plastic zipper and then placed the flat blue hat of the palace Maintenance brigade on his head. Luca opened a locked drawer and snatched up a high-level security badge with Hu Xu’s blackened face and signature already laminated in place. In addition, he gave the Chinaman a special security authorization from the president’s office in the event that the man was challenged at any point during his mission.

  Hu Xu slid the laminated ID card into its sleeve on his breast pocket. He wasn’t expecting to be challenged, but he’d spent an hour in front of his mirror practicing the sort of outraged gutter French that would send anyone who bothered him scurrying for cover. He placed the hungry rat, Chou, into a smaller case, the one Maintenance used for tools and other standard equipment.

  “You can keep the bag,” Hu Xu said, handing Bonaparte the alligator-skinned valise. “It’s a good one. Well. I leave you to your destiny.”

  “Au revoir et bonne chance, Master Hu Xu,” Luca said, taking the man’s offered hand. “We shall work together again. For the glory of our two nations.”

  Ten minutes later, Hu Xu was alone in the anteroom off the salon. Eight leather chairs stood around a heavy writing table in the center of the room. He had locked both doors from the inside. In the excitement gripping the palace, his passage through the hallways had gone wholly unnoticed. He knelt in one corner, behind a large settee, and used a small hacksaw to cut through the baseboard of the wall. He then punched a fist-sized hole in the plaster with a ball hammer. Fetid air escaped. He now had access to the wall’s interior. He stuck his hand inside and determined that his blueprints were correct: There was a good three inches of space between the walls.

  “Be patient,” he whispered to the rat, Chou, “your moment of glory is coming.”

  In the courtyard beyond the small room’s ground-floor windows, he could hear the mob chanting Bonaparte’s name. One side singing his praises, the other cursing his name, they were united only by a common loathing for America. There was a rising hysterical note in the chorale he hadn’t heard earlier. Well, it was certainly out of his hands now. As he neared his exit, Fate was taking the stage.

  With any luck at all, someone would pull a gun and shoot a palace guard. Then President Bocquet’s troops would open fire on the mob. At that point, Luca Bonaparte would step in front of the guns himself. A single raised hand would silence them. Bonaparte would ride to glory on the shoulders of the people, the savior and hope of all France.

  A new and glorious beginning.

  That was the plan, anyway. Hmm. He crawled around the table to the opposite side of the room and made a fresh hole of the same dimension there. He then withdrew a foil-wrapped block of Roquefort cheese from the tool kit. Unwrapping it, inhaling its fragrant aroma, he placed the cheese on the dusty floorboards inside the wall. He then tacked the baseboard back into place and used a bit of sawdust in a brown shoe-polish base to hide any trace of his alterations. He rocked back on his haunches and admired his work. Perfect.

  “Hungry?” he asked the rat. He already knew the answer. He had been starving him for forty-eight hours.

  Scurrying over to his original hole, where Chou waited impatiently in his cage, he took out the spool of C4, ran off a foot or two, and tacked the bitter end to the wooden floor just inside the opening. Next, he clipped a detonator to the wire and set it to receive a radio signal rather than one from the default mode, a digital timer.

  All that remained was to strap Chou into his little harness.

  “Ah, my pretty one,” he said soothingly as he took the rat out of his cage. “Your time to shine at last has come.” The rat was one of several that Hu Xu had mission-trained for just such work in China. His technique of using rats to run explosive lines behind walls, under floors, and over ceilings was in its infancy. Hu Xu was using the assassination of the president of France as an early test bed of the protocol. It was a singular measure of his confidence in his abilities.

  General Moon was deeply interested in the success of this mission, naturally. China’s plans and the meeting of its long-term energy needs depended in large measure on the succession of Bonaparte to the office of president of France. Although Hu Xu was supremely confident, he had chosen the rat that had demonstrated the most courage and ability to overcome unseen obstacles once it left his sight. Chou had been first in her class. She had arrived from Hong Kong by diplomatic courier just the night before. Chou could smell the cheese on his fingers and nipped greedily at them, drawing a bit of blood. Tsk-tsk, he said to the rat, soothing her.

  He secured the Velcro straps under Chou’s belly. The rat’s tiny claws were snickering on the polished hardwood floor, desperately trying to gain purchase. C
hou now had the scent of the Roquefort wafting through the walls from the far side of the room. Nothing would stop her now.

  She would literally go through walls to achieve her objective.

  Hu Xu placed the squirming rat inside the hole. The animal paused on its haunches, pawing the air, sniffing the dank odors within the ancient walls, her wet black nose held high and twitching feverishly. Then, she rocketed away with a hum of wire, the spool on her back spinning furiously as the C4 unwound. The rodent raced through the dark, compacted rubble of centuries in search of her supper.

  “Pauvre petite Chou,” he whispered to himself. Poor thing. The rodent would soon be suffering grievous constriction and spasms in her circulatory system. He had spiked the cheese with just enough rat poison to kill a small dog. Don’t want her retracing her steps now, do we?

  No. Covered in soot, dust, and debris, the rat finally reached her target. She ripped the foil aside and began gnawing furiously at the pungent supper, wolfing down the pride of Roquefort. Her spool was empty. A hundred feet of high-velocity explosive wire now encircled the room. There was enough plastique C4 in these walls to bring down a good-sized building.

  Chou expired on the spot.

  The assassin carefully replaced the last bit of baseboard and meticulously erased any trace of his alterations. Only then did he look at the new Tank watch on his wrist. It had taken him only twelve minutes to set the “rat trap,” as he called his new technique. Hu Xu unzipped and stepped out of his coveralls and doffed his hat. Returning that wardrobe to the tool case, he stood and straightened his tie, inspecting himself in a large gilt mirror.

  His blackface needed a little touch-up, which he did, but otherwise this new being he inhabited would serve him well for a day or two in London. He’d booked a suite at the Dorchester, a luxurious hotel he found conveniently located just across Park Lane from Hyde Park. Because General Moon’s daughter had failed yet another assignment, he had an appointment with a certain Lord Alexander Hawke. This British gentleman, codenamed “Pirate.”