Echo of War

by Grant Blackwood

  “Spider-leg house,” Cahil said, staring at the cathedral.

  “What’s that?” Tanner replied.

  “That’s what Lucy called it when she first saw a picture of it,” Cahil said. His daughter had just started second grade. “Humpback spider-leg house.”

  Tanner laughed. “Who knows, maybe that’s the real translation.”

  “And they’re just too embarrassed to admit it?”

  “Could be.”

  When they reached the block on which the Bistro Cote Mer sat, they parted company. Tanner continued on and found the restaurant under a blue awning. Inside, the motif was French countryhouse, with whitewashed brick walls, undressed wooden columns, and walls painted in golds, blues, and reds. Above each table hung a wrought-iron hurricane lamp.

  Tanner gave his name to the hostess then found a seat at the bar and ordered mineral water. Five minutes later, the bell over the door tinkled and Frank Slavin walked in. He said something to the hostess, who pointed in Tanner’s direction. Slavin walked over.

  “Watts?”

  “Dan,” Tanner replied, extending his hand. Slavin was in his early fifties, paunchy, with a rosy face. He smelled of cigars. “Thanks for meeting me.”

  “Yeah.” Slavin took the stool next to Tanner. “Ain’t got much time.” The bartender wandered over and Slavin ordered a bourbon, neat.

  “Lunch?” Tanner asked.

  “No time.”

  “Pain aux noix et pomme, s’il vous plaît,” Tanner told the bartender.

  “What’s that?” Slavin asked.

  “Rye bread with walnuts and an apple, sliced thin.”

  “Huh.” Slavin gulped his drink; his hands shook.

  A drunk, or just nervous? Tanner wondered. “How long have you been stationed here?”

  “Two years. Get along okay with just English, I figure.”

  That told Tanner something. Either Slavin had no interest in France or no interest in his job. Tanner found the attitude mind-boggling. Slavin was living in a completely different world about which he wasn’t remotely curious.

  The bartender returned with a oval-shaped loaf of rye surrounded by wafer-thin slices of apple. At that moment, the door chimed again. From the corner of his eye Tanner saw Cahil walk in. He chatted with the hostess, then followed her to a table. In his left hand he carried a copy of Le Nouvel Observateur. The signal told Tanner that Slavin hadn’t been followed. However unlikely, Briggs had half-expected Slavin to report this meeting to the embassy’s security division, if for no other reason than to cover himself. That he didn’t have an escort could mean several things, but Tanner’s gut told him Slavin wanted this encounter over as quickly as possible.

  “Listen,” Slavin said, “I don’t know what I can do for you.”

  “Do you know Susanna Vetsch?”

  “Heard her name, that’s all.”

  “In passing or in reports?”

  “Both.”

  “When’s the last time anyone saw her?”

  “Two weeks ago, give or take.”

  Give or take? Jesus. “Do the gendarmie know about her disappearance?”

  “Whoa, nobody said she’d disappeared.”

  “This drop-out was expected?”

  Slavin shrugged.

  “Did they get the dump from her phone? Interview anybody … check out her apartment?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Tanner felt a knot of anger tighten in his chest. Left alone, Slavin was going to give him as little help as possible. Unless someone had dropped the ball, there was no way a controller would allow two weeks to pass without a check-in from an agent—especially from someone under deep cover.

  Tanner took a deep breath, then turned on his stool to face Slavin. He put his hand over Slavin’s glass and slid it away from him. “Here’s what I know, Frank: Susanna Vetsch was working deep cover for your FCI division under the alias of Susanna Coreil, probably posing as an American with links to wholesalers in the U.S. heroin market; the SDCB has been playing catch-up with organized crime since it started switching from gambling back to narcotics; ten days ago, there was a flurry of traffic between the embassy here and DEA headquarters in Washington talking about an agent code-named Tabernacle—Susanna Vetsch.”

  Slavin’s mouth dropped open. “Christ almighty, how do you know that?”

  “That’s not what you should be worrying about. Your worry, Frank, is me—me and a distraught father back home who’s willing to do anything to get his daughter back. Here’s how it’s going to work: If I walk out of here feeling like you haven’t done your best to help, I’m going to start making some calls. Within the hour, the State Department and the DEA are going to start getting phone calls from reporters asking about a missing agent and a DEA bureaucrat named Frank Slavin who doesn’t seem to give a damn.”

  “You can’t do that. You can’t blackmail me.”

  “Think of it as incentive. There’s a young woman lost somewhere out there. This is your chance to help. Don’t misunderstand me: I’m not looking for the DEA’s deep, dark secrets—just something that will help me find Susanna Vetsch.”

  “I already told you, I don’t know anything.”

  Tanner shrugged. “Have it your way.” He stood up, pulled some franc notes from his pocket, and dropped them on the counter. “Good luck to you.”

  “Wait, wait … Okay, listen, I’ll give you what I know, but the truth is, this thing is way above my pay grade. She’s missing, I know that, and it’s got a lot of people scrambling.”

  Tanner sat back down. He signaled the bartender to refill Slavin’s drink. “Let’s start at the beginning: Who first pushed the panic button, and when?”

  Tanner questioned Slavin for another thirty minutes, until certain the man was holding nothing back. In fact, Slavin didn’t know much; his knowledge had come secondhand as he routed messages between FCI command and DEA headquarters in Washington. Tanner’s hunch about Susanna’s assignment involving French organized crime was correct, but Slavin had no specifics.

  “Last question,” Tanner said. “The only address I have for her is a blind DEA mail drop. Can you get me her address?”

  Slavin nodded. “Yeah. You planning on going there?”

  “Yes.”

  Slavin gulped the last of his bourbon. “Watch yourself. She lived in the armpit of Paris.”

  6

  Royal Oak, Maryland

  An hour after leaving Washington McBride and Oliver arrived at a waterfront ranch-style house in Dames Quarter, three miles across the bay from the Root estate. Oliver pulled into the driveway and stopped behind the ERT—evidence response team—van. Standing on the porch were an elderly man and woman; beside them a chocolate lab paced back and forth, whining and sniffing the air. The man pointed his thumb up the driveway. Oliver nodded his thanks and they walked on.

  At the head of the driveway they found a meadow of knee-high Broomsedge grass and wild rye; beyond that, a rickety dock surrounded by cattails. McBride caught the scent of rotting bait fish in the air. One of the ERT technicians met them at the foot of the dock while two more agents in yellow chest waders stood in the water, peering through the reeds and under the dock. The mud along the shore was as dark as coffee grounds, with a hint of red, stained by the tannin in the cypress roots. A fourth technician knelt in the mud photographing something there.

  “What’ve you got, Steve?” Oliver asked.

  “About an hour ago the owner called the Somerset Sheriff’s Office and reported his boat missing—a fourteen-foot Lund with a trolling motor. They called Wicomico and they called us—they figured the timing coincidence was worth a look.”

  “Was it?”

  The technician grinned. “There’s boot prints all over the place, Collin. Three men, I’m guessing.”

  “Good enough to cast?”

  “I think so. My gut reaction: They’re the same as the one’s at the Root place.”


  “How about the boat?”

  “Coast Guard’s looking for it, but I wouldn’t hold your breath. About a hundred yards from shore the bottom drops to a couple hundred feet.”

  McBride looked around. “How about nearby roads?”

  “There’s a fire road and a boat ramp about three hundred yards to the southeast. I’ve got a couple guys looking around.”

  “What kind of motor did the boat have?” Oliver asked.

  The technician frowned. “Uhm … electric, I think. Why?”

  “They’re quiet.”

  “Oh, gotchya. I’ll call you when I get the casts compared.”

  “Thanks.”

  Oliver and McBride walked a few feet away. Oliver plucked a cattail, brushed his index finger over the nap, tossed it away. “Smart SOBs. Odds are, they didn’t pick this boat by chance.”

  McBride nodded. “Agreed. They did their homework: Steal the boat across the county line and hope the Somerset and Wicomico sheriffs aren’t big on information sharing. One thing that bothers me, though: Why scuttle the boat?”

  “I was wondering the same thing.”

  “They grab Amelia Root, put her in the boat, cross the bay to the fire road … Gotta figure it’s about two A.M. by then, which means they could’ve had the boat cleaned up and back here by three—long before the owner would wake up and notice anything. So whatdya think? Either they got behind schedule and had to scuttle it, or they didn’t think it through.”

  “Neither makes sense,” Oliver said. “They put a lot of preparation into this. We know they were out of the house by midnight, and the trip across the bay’s only a few miles. Even with a small trolling motor it wouldn’t have taken more than an hour. Then again, who knows? Maybe they got lost in the fog.”

  “Or they scuttled it to lose physical evidence.”

  Like blood, McBride thought. This wouldn’t be the first time a kidnapping had gone bad right out of the gate. Blood in the boat would likely mean Amelia Root was dead; otherwise there would be no reason to hide the evidence, for if pushed during negotiations the kidnappers could provide proof she was still alive. In fact, McBride had found a little blood left at the scene tends to put the spouse or parent in a more … malleable state of mind for a ransom call.

  “They don’t strike me as either sloppy or crude,” McBride said. “She’s too valuable; they wouldn’t have let anything happen to her.”

  “I agree. Then what the hell is the deal with the boat?”

  “I don’t know.” Something else, maybe, something we’re not seeing, McBride thought.

  Twenty minutes later, the lead technician called them over to the dock. The team on the fire road had found something. With Steve in the lead, they walked across the meadow, through a copse of maple and oak, and emerged onto the fire road to where another of the technicians was kneeling in the dirt.

  “Tire tracks,” he called. “A van or truck, probably. We’ll get elimination casts from the neighbors.”

  “How far’s the boat ramp?” Oliver asked.

  “About a hundred yards that way.”

  “So, let’s put it together: They park here and split up. Three go to the dock to steal the boat, three more to the ramp to wait. They link up, do their business at the Roots’, come back to the ramp with Mrs. Root, and put her in the vehicle.”

  McBride picked up the narrative. “While they’re doing that, a couple of them take the boat into the bay, scuttle it, and swim back.”

  Oliver looked to the tech who’d found the tire tracks. “How soon will you know something?”

  “There’s not enough to cast, but I can high-res the digital pictures. By the end of the day I should have a generic match. I’ll take grass samples, too. See how it’s crushed along here?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Depending on the rate of drying, I might be able to nail down the time.”

  “How close?”

  “No more than an hour.”

  McBride whistled through his teeth. “You can do that?”

  “Quamico’s got a greenhouse with over six hundred varieties of grass. If you mow it, we’ve got it. Between weather conditions, soil type, chlorophyll content, we can tell a lot.”

  “Can you help me get rid of my dandelions?”

  “Sorry.”

  Oliver’s cell phone trilled. He answered, listened for a minute, then disconnected. “Quantico. The boot casts from the Roots’ are ready.” He turned to Steve. “How long do you need for your casts?”

  “Another half hour and they’ll be ready to move.”

  “We’ll meet you there.”

  Three house later they were standing in one of the FBI’s laboratories at Quantico staring at a computer monitor. Displayed side-by-side on the screen were digital pictures of boot print casts taken from the Root estate, the dock in Dames Quarter, and the fire road.

  “No doubt about it,” said Steve. “Same boots. We were even able to match the stride pattern and heel pivot on most of them. These are our guys.”

  “Did you match them against the guards?” asked Oliver.

  “Yeah, they’re all eliminated. Here’s the interesting thing: See how the tread patterns on the first five look random—chaotic?”

  “Yeah.”

  “They cross-hashed the soles—my guess is with a hacksaw blade. It’s gonna make identifying them a bitch.”

  “You said five,” McBride replied. “What about the sixth?”

  “The sixth is a whole different story. It was cross-hatched like the others, but not as heavily, and the underlying tread pattern is different. It looks new, too.”

  “How new?”

  “A couple weeks, I’d say.”

  “And the tread pattern?”

  “A gem. See the overlapping dollar sign shape to them? That’s pretty uncommon.”

  Oliver said, “Uncommon enough to—”

  “Yep,” Steve replied, then tapped the keyboard. A website’s homepage popped up on the screen. In the center was an animated GIF of a rotating boot. “Meet the Stone walker, gentlemen, the Cadillac of hiking boots. Starting price: three hundred bucks. Number of retailers within a hundred mile radius: twelve.”

  Oliver clapped Steve on the shoulder. “Great work.”

  “Now what?” McBride said.

  “Now we canvass and pray our guys did their shopping locally.”

  7

  Paris

  Whether by choice or by assignment Tanner didn’t know, but Susanna Vetsch had chosen to live in Paris’s worst neighborhood. Called the Pigalle, it was located in the Montmartre quarter, north of Rue de Provence and south of Boulevard de Clichy. Though safer than it once was, the Pigalle was still considered the city’s red light district, with block after block of burlesque clubs, sex shops, and heavily made-up—and often heavily medicated—putain only too happy to service customers in the Pigalle’s warren of shadowed alleys and deep doorways.

  However Susanna had come to the Pigalle, the choice did make sense. Not only was it the home of all things carnal, but the Pigalle also boasted the city’s highest rates in street narcotics traffic, strong-arm robberies, burglaries, sexual assaults, and gang violence. If Susanna had been trying to submerge herself in the underworld of Paris, this was the best place to do it.

  As dusk settled over the city, Tanner and Cahil left the St. Beuve and boarded the 13 Metro at the Sevres Babylone exchange and rode it north across the Seine to the Gare St. Lazare exchange, where they got off. They were at the southern edge of the Pigalle and Tanner wanted to walk the area as evening fell. Nothing spoke better of a neighborhood’s subculture than how its character changed from day to night.

  They walked up Rue St. Lazare to Square de la Trinite then turned north onto Rue Blanche. One by one the streetlights began to flicker on, casting the sidewalks in pale yellow light. Garish neon signs above the clubs and taverns glowed to life. The apartment buildings were tall and narrow, looming over
narrow sidewalks and blackened doorways. The alleys were dark slits between the buildings, most no wider than a man’s shoulders. Trash and empty bottles littered the gutters. Echoing up and down the streets, voices called to one another, mostly in French but with a smattering of Arabic, Chinese, and English thrown in.

  As Tanner’s eyes adjusted he could see movement in the darkness of the alley two figures joined together, pressed against the brick; the scuffed tip of a gold sequined boot. From behind the glowing dot of a cigarette a voice called, “Veut quelques-uns?” Want someone?

  “Je n’ai pas envie,” Tanner called back and kept walking.

  “What’d she want?” Cahil asked.

  “I’m not sure she was a she.”

  “What did it want?”

  “I think it liked the cut of your jib.”

  Cahil grimaced. “Oh, man.”

  Tanner chuckled.

  As they turned right onto Rue Pigalle proper, a half dozen smiling and waving Gypsy teenagers skipped across the street toward them. “Don’t let them put their hands on you,” Tanner whispered to Cahil. “They’re the best pickpockets in Europe.”

  “Allo, allo,” one of the teenagers called.

  “Four le camp!” Cahil growled at them. “Casse toi!” Beat it! Piss off!

  The group stopped in its tracks, was silent for a moment, then turned and trotted back across the street. Tanner glanced at Bear in surprise. “Been practicing, I see.”

  “Only the vulgar stuff.”

  The street began curving upward. Here the streetlights were farther apart At the edges of each pool of light Tanner could see figures in huddled discussion; hands would come together then part, and the figures would go their separate ways—money into one hand, drugs into the other.