Echo of War

by Grant Blackwood

  “Notice the taxis?” Cahil said.

  “You mean that there are none?”

  “Right.”

  Regardless of the country, taxis are often a bellwether of dangerous neighborhoods. Tanner recalled seeing a line of five or six taxis sitting along Rue St. Lazare. Evidently, if residents of the Pigalle wanted a ride, they had to walk to the frontier to find one. “Haven’t seen any gendarmes, either.”

  “You know,” Bear mused, “you always take me to the nicest places.”

  “I do my best.”

  Now in the heart of the Pigalle, they turned onto Rue Blausier, the block on which Susanna’s apartment was located. The building facades were painted in shades of sun-faded pastels and covered in graffiti, most of which Tanner couldn’t decipher.

  “Gang sign,” Cahil said. “Last year I ran across a report from the Renseignements Generaux—the gendarmie’s intell division. Seems the ETA and the FLNC have been moving north. Looks like we’ve found their new stomping grounds.”

  The ETA was the Spanish acronym for the Basque Separatist Party, a terrorist group that generally operated in southern France and northern Spain. The FLNC, or the National Front for the Liberation of Corsica, also operated in southern France and had gone in recent years from bombing government buildings, banks, and military installations to assassinating French officials in Corsica.

  “Christ, Briggs, what the hell was she doing here?”

  “Her job.” Tanner replied. With every step they were slipping deeper into the world in which Susanna had chosen to live, and with every step Briggs could feel the dull ache in his chest expand a little more. Perhaps it was best he’d never had children, he decided. To protect them from the dangers of the world, he might have been tempted to lock them in their bedrooms. Of course, there’d come the point when you had to let go, but how could that be anything but gut-wrenching?

  Briggs looked sideways at Cahil. “I don’t know how you do it, Bear.”

  “For one thing, my girls aren’t dating until they’re thirty-five.”

  Tanner laughed. “Does Maggie know that?”

  “We’re debating it.”

  They reached Susanna’s apartment building. Eight stories tall and no wider than two car lengths, it was painted a robin’s egg blue; in places the plaster and brick had been badly patched and repainted in dark blue. They looked like scabs, Tanner decided. An ancient Citroen sat listing at the curb, its wheels missing, one axle perched on the curb.

  “You see him?” Tanner murmured.

  “Yep. Ugly fella.”

  Sitting on a stool just inside the apartment’s foyer door was a man with great, sloping shoulders, no neck, and a square head. His oft-broken nose looked like it had been reset with a ball-peen hammer. He was, Tanner assumed, the apartment’s informal doorman/concierge/bouncer. It was common in some of Paris’s seedier neighborhoods for residents to donate a percentage of their rent money toward the upkeep of such gatekeepers.

  “Let’s see if we can get an invite,” Tanner said. Across the street a pair of prostitutes had been sizing them up. Tanner nodded at one of them, a mid-forties platinum blonde in a clear plastic miniskirt. Her panties were lime green. She cocked her head and jerked a thumb at her chest. Tanner nodded again and she strolled over.

  “Emmener Popaul au cirque?” the woman said.

  It took Tanner a few moments to dissect the words and reassemble them. He chuckled. “Mon éléphant est trés particulier du cirque,” he replied.

  “What?” Cahil asked.

  “She wants to know if I’d like her to take my elephant to the circus.”

  “Interesting way of putting it. Popaul is the name of your elephant?”

  “Evidently.”

  “And Popaul enjoys the circus, does he?”

  “She seems to think so,” Tanner said.

  “What’d you say?”

  “I told her my elephant was rather particular about his outings.”

  Bear muttered, “Welcome to the nastiest circus on earth, I’d say.”

  “Parlez-vous Anglais?” Tanner asked her.

  “Non … attente.” She turned and called across the street to the other woman, “Trixie, venir ici!” Trixie, a redhead in a pair of denim shorts the size of a handkerchief, trotted over. “Anglais,” the first one told her.

  “Where’re ya from?” Trixie asked in a Cockney accent.

  “Canada,” Cahil replied.

  “Dog’s bollocks! Canadians are cheap.”

  “We’re different,” Tanner replied.

  “Care for a bonk, then?”

  “I’d rather talk about it off the street, if you don’t mind.”

  “Right.”

  Trixie and the other woman, whom Trixie called Sabine, led them to the foyer, muttered something to the gatekeeper, then led them up to the second-floor landing. Trixie pushed through a door and gestured them in. The room was lit by a single hanging bulb. In each corner of the room was a bare mattress. A pair of stained and torn armchairs sat before a coffee table made from stacked bricks and planks.

  “What’s your pleasure, gov?” Trixie asked.

  “Something tells me you’re not from here.”

  “Liverpool. Pay’s better here. What’s your pleasure?”

  “Information,” Tanner replied.

  “Core love a duck!” Trixie turned to Sabine and fired off a few sentences in French. Tanner caught the phrase “Nancy boys” before Trixie turned back. “Information or shaggin’, you still pay.”

  Tanner pulled a hundred-dollar bill from his pocket and held it up. “U.S. okay?”

  Quick as a snake, Trixie snatched it from his hand. “Brill! Ask away.”

  “We’re looking for a friend of ours—Susanna. She lives on the fourth floor.”

  “Suzie? Sure, we know her. She your old lady?”

  “Family.”

  “Haven’t seen her about for a while.” Trixie translated for Sabine, who shook her head. “Non.”

  “When was the last time you saw her?”

  “A fortnight or so.”

  “Anyone with her?”

  Trixie frowned, scratched her head; flakes of dandruff swirled in the glare of the lightbulb. “Not that I recall.” She put the question to Sabine, listened to her answer, then said, “Right … now I remember. There was a bloke we saw around. Tall, off-color skin. Had this one eye, too, like somebody’d taken a blade to the corner.” Trixie used her index finger to pull down the corner of her eye. “You know?”

  Tanner nodded. “Does he have a name?”

  “Not that I heard. Nom, Sabine?” Sabine shook her head, then fired off a reply. Trixie nodded, then said to Tanner, “Sabine heard them arguing once and thought he sounded German.” Trixie grinned; one of her teeth looked like a lima bean. “Sabine’s an international girl, ya see.”

  “I can see that. He sounded German—how? Accent, words, what?”

  Trixie listened, then translated, “Words, she says. Curse words. She knows those.”

  “Did he drive a car?”

  “Didn’t see one. Would’ve noticed that.”

  Cahil asked her, “What about the guy downstairs? Would he know anything?”

  “René? Worth an ask, I guess.”

  “Thanks,” Tanner replied. “Has anyone been in her apartment in the last couple weeks?”

  “Couldn’t say for sure. We’re out a lot, ya see. I’ll ask Rene that, too.”

  Tanner pulled another bill from his pocket and handed it across. “We’re going to have a look around her place. Do you have any problem with that?”

  This time Sabine was quicker than her partner, as she snatched the bill away. Trixie glared at her then said, “Long as you don’t nab off with nothin’.”

  “We won’t.”

  “Have at it.”

  Susanna’s apartment was only slightly more welcoming than Trixie and Sabine’s. The undressed brick walls wer
e painted a bright yellow, which improved the mood of the space, but the furniture was equally sparce and soiled. In the corner was a futon frame and mattress covered in a black comforter. A withered houseplant sat on the windowsill, its stalks drooping down the wall. Tucked against the opposite wall were two cardboard boxes Susanna had obviously been using as a chest of drawers. A side door led into a small kitchenette. Tanner walked through, flipped on the overhead light, and watched as dozens of cockroaches scurried for the baseboards He opened the fridge and found it empty.

  “Wow,” Cahil murmured.

  “Let’s get started,” Tanner replied.

  Fifteen minutes later they were done. The search turned up nothing. If Susanna had disappeared voluntarily she’d taken pains to cover her trail. If she’d been taken, someone had sanitized her apartment. Of course, the apartment’s anonymity may have simply been good tradecraft on her part: Without the trappings of daily life to exploit, anyone digging into her identity would have little to pursue.

  Being this careful takes a tremendous amount of mental and emotional energy, and Tanner found himself wondering how Susanna had borne the stress. He’d been in this position before. If you lose your way for even a short while or let your self-discipline waver, the lines between the real you and the character you’re playing begin to blur. Beyond that lay paranoia and depression, and quick on their heels come the mistakes and lapses of judgment that got you killed.

  My god, Susanna, where are you? Tanner wondered. “Anything?” he asked Cahil

  “Clean as a whistle.”

  “Here, too. Let’s go downstairs and check on Trixie.”

  Tanner took a final look through the kitchen cupboards, then turned to leave. He stopped. He turned back and opened one of the cupboards. Drawn on the inside of the door in blue ink was what looked like a cartoon dog; beneath it were twelve digits: 774633998127.

  Cahil walked into the kitchen and peered at the cupboard. “What’s that?”

  Tanner smiled, chuckled. “That’s my girl.”

  “What?” Cahil repeated. “It’s a dog.”

  “It’s a goat—Susanna’s goat.”

  “A goat. Wonderful. What’s that do for us?”

  “If we’re lucky,” Tanner replied, “it’s going to tell us where she went.”

  8

  Royal Oak

  It had become something of a morbid tradition for Joe McBride, this watching of the clock as the forty-eighth hour passed and a case tipped down the slippery statistical slope. He’d started the practice ten years before in Minneapolis as a desperate mother and father waited for a ransom call that had never come.

  Now he sat beside Jonathan Root at the kitchen table as the wall clicked over to 11:58. Root wasn’t watching it, but was staring into space as he’d been doing for the better part of two days. His hands were wrapped around a long-cold cup of coffee.

  Statistically, most ransom-driven kidnappers make contact within a few hours of the abduction. The wilier and/or cruder the perpetrator, the longer they wait, but after twenty-four hours the likelihood of contact begins to drop until the forty-eight-hour point, at which time the odds plummet. In the history of kidnapping, ransom demands made outside the “golden forty-eight” are rare.

  Having learned the hard way to never lie to a client—even to save them some heartache—McBride had given Jonathan Root the statistics, but he’d also added a caveat: “Rules are made to be broken. Nothing is set in stone.”

  Root had simply stared at McBride, then nodded blankly, said, “Sure, sure,” and turned away.

  The former DCI and Washington powerhouse was withdrawing into himself, McBride could see, and he imagined the nature of Root’s profession was working against him. As a spook, it had been his job to envision worst-case scenarios and come up with contingency plans. Problem was, there was no contingency plan for this, no manual or committee Root could consult if the worst came to pass and his wife was found dead—or never found at all. Root had seen the worst of humanity: images of atrocities in Rwanda; suicide bombings in Haifa; public executions of captured American soldiers in Afghanistan … It was all there in his memory, a sieve through which his hope was being filtered.

  Unbidden, McBride felt his mind switching gears. If the worst happens, he’s going to need help. He won’t ask for it. He’ll have to be pushed into it—coaxed back into life. Left alone, he’ll sit here alone in the dark and let himself die.

  After parting company with Oliver at Quantico, McBride had driven back to the Root estate to walk the grounds. As much for Root as for himself, he’d guided the former DCI through the event again, trying to pick out a thread of something useful. Together they walked through the house, Root giving him a running monologue of the sights, smells, and sounds of that night. Occasionally Root would stop beside a knickknack or a photo and relate its story to McBride. Without exception, Amelia Root was the main player in each tale. She was the nexus of Root’s life, McBride realized.

  Root picked up a picture of him and Amelia standing in a fishing boat, smiling. His arm was around her waist as she struggled to hold aloft a Coho salmon. “She was so proud of that thing,” Root murmured, tears in his eyes. “She wouldn’t let anyone help her—she even netted it herself. You know, just the other day she was …” Root trailed off, blinked a few times as though coming back to reality, then walked on.

  There had been one positive sign, though. Earlier in the day Root had accepted a lunch invitation from his next-door neighbors, Raymond Crohn and his wife—the people that had sounded the alarm after the kidnapping. Root had been reluctant, but then agreed at McBride’s urging. When Root returned, McBride could see some of the tension had melted from his face.

  The clock began bonging. As if on cue, McBride’s cell phone trilled. He walked into the living room and answered. It was Oliver: “We’ve got something, a hit on the hiking boot.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Salisbury. We rousted the store owner; he’s going to meet us.”

  McBride copied down the address, said, “I’ll meet you,” then hung up.

  “What is it, Joe?” Root said from the doorway. “Did you find her?” he whispered.

  McBride walked over and laid a hand on his shoulder. “No, but we’ve got a lead. We’ve got our foot in the door. Try to get some sleep. I’ll call you the second I know something.”

  The town of Salisbury, population 23,000, was nine miles from the Root estate. Twenty-five minutes after leaving, McBride pulled into a parking space in front of Norwich Camping Outfitters. Ten minutes after that Oliver pulled in beside him. A man in pajama bottoms, slippers, and a red sweatshirt emblazoned with “Salisbury State University” got out of the passenger seat and hurried to the store’s front door.

  McBride asked Oliver, “What’s up?”

  “The company that makes the Stonewalker asks its retailers to send in the names of customers. They use it for direct mail promotions, customer satisfaction surveys—that sort of thing.”

  After obtaining a copy of the list, Oliver sorted it by state and time frame, taking only those purchases made within the last month in D.C., Maryland, Delaware, and Virginia. He then filtered the list through the FBI’s database. Of the sixty-seven Stonewalkers sold in the last month, two were bought with credit cards that had been reported stolen; of these, one report turned out to be a case of misplacement, the other genuine theft.

  As Oliver’s team went to work on the lead, the report on the footprints found on the Dames Quarter road came in. The tires were identified as Bridgestone 225/75R14s, standard equipment for 1999 Ford Econoline vans. A regional check showed theft reports on fourteen Econolines, none more recent than two months ago. All the vans in question had either been recovered or had been identified as having been disassembled at chop shops.

  “Rental?” McBride guessed.

  “Right,” said Oliver. “However good these guys were with the kidnapping, they got sloppy with their l
ogistics. We checked rental agencies that handle Econolines. Two days ago a Hertz office in Ellicott City outside Baltimore reported one of theirs overdue. The credit card used was reported stolen later that day.”

  “Stolen how?”

  “That’s the interesting part. Both cards were lifted by pickpockets.”

  “You’re kidding me.”

  “The Baltimore and Ellicott City police are looking for the van. We’re working on getting the credit slip from Hertz.”

  “So what now?”

  “Now we hope our luck holds and we get a match on the signatures. Fingerprints would be better, but … Well, hell, if we get prints, I’ll start going to church regularly.”

  McBride understood. The chances were good that Amelia Root’s kidnappers had arrest records. Generally, kidnapping is a learned behavior, not something your average law-abiding citizen dives into on a whim. If this lead turned up a suspect’s name, they’d be back in the race. “Jesus, could we be that lucky?”

  “A little good luck on our part, a little stupidity on their part … Who knows.”

  A minute later the store owner poked his head out the door and waved at them. They went inside. The owner had turned on the lights; lying on the glass counter was a credit card receipt.

  “I only touched the edges like you said,” the owner offered.

  Oliver pulled a clear plastic evidence bag from his coat pocket, laid it flat on the counter, and nudged the receipt inside. He looked at McBride. “Follow me back.”

  The agent from Elucott City arrived at Quantum twenty minutes behind McBride and Oliver, who sat together in a conference room, sipping coffee and staring at the walls as technicians from both Latent Prints and Questioned Documents processed the receipts. Shortly after two A.M. the conference room door opened and the techs walked in. The man from QD laid the two evidence bags on the table and slid them across to Oliver.

  “You’re golden,” the tech announced. “Both signatures were forged by the same person. I make him male, right handed, early to mid-twenties—I can give you more once I get it into the computer.”