Trust Me

by Jeff Abbott

  He checked his cell phone as they walked outside and retrieved a text message: Meet at the Eiffel Tower for Aubrey one hour after your plane lands. Mouser grabbed the phone, read the message. Luke yanked the phone back.

  ‘But they don’t know I’m here,’ Mouser said.

  ‘No.’ But considering Quicksilver’s reach – it would not surprise him. But let Mouser be surprised.

  ‘The Eiffel Tower. How touristy,’ Mouser muttered in a low growl. ‘I’ll take your phone.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t want you calling them and letting them know I’m with you.’

  He’d thought of trying to text just the word Mouser or help to the number that had just called him. To warn Quicksilver. He hesitated.

  ‘I will kill you the second you pull a fast one on me,’ Mouser said. ‘Give me the phone.’

  Luke gave it to him.

  Mouser put a steel grip on his shoulder. ‘Come on. I have a ride for us.’

  The car sat in the parking garage in a back corner. Mouser found keys in a container locked under the bumper. It was a Mercedes sedan, gleaming, high-end.

  He opened the trunk. Inside were bags and cases. Some were long and narrow, marked with the logo of a British golf club manufacturer. Luke figured they were not golf clubs. Weapons. Someone had given this man an armory and driven it to the airport for him. So Mouser had allies in France.

  The Night Road was bigger than a mere group inside America. He had only researched American extremists, but if those domestic terrorists were linked to, cooperating with, other extremists around the world… the thought was frightening.

  ‘Get in the car,’ Mouser said.

  Luke obeyed. Mouser didn’t slide behind the wheel; rather he seemed to be studying the phone. As though he’d gotten an email. He turned his back to Luke. Thirty seconds later he slid into the car, an angry look on his face.

  Mouser roared out of the garage.

  48

  Mouser had taken one of the long cases from the car’s trunk. He slipped an earpiece into Luke’s ear, saying, ‘I’ll be able to hear your every word. Dump this and you’re dead.’

  ‘Where will you be?’

  ‘Watching. Don’t screw this up or I’ll shoot you, accounts or not. You play nice, you and Aubrey walk.’

  No, Luke thought, you’re the one who’s going down. But he turned and walked toward the tower. When he glanced back, Mouser was gone. He had not counted on Mouser being able to eavesdrop on his conversation. This made his plan much harder. And if he dumped the earpiece, he had no doubt: Mouser would shoot him, and Aubrey. He had to think of another way to warn Quicksilver.

  The base of the Eiffel Tower was broader and the plaza wider than Luke remembered. He saw French soldiers with assault rifles wandering the sprawling grounds, scanning faces in the scattered crowd of hundreds of tourists and sightseers, watching for the unusual or the threatening. A kiss of sunshine came through the late spring clouds.

  His phone rang. He answered it.

  It was Aubrey’s voice, scared. ‘Luke.’

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Yes. I’m going to give you your directions now.’ She steadied her voice. ‘Walk away from the river, away from the Tower, go toward the half-circle where the tour buses stop. You’ll see me.’

  He could see in the distance, past the walkways and the low shrubberies, a wide loop of street, a double-decker bus parked, tourists not bothering to get off the bus but snapping photos of the grand tower. ‘All right.’

  In his other ear, he heard the whisper of Mouser’s voice: ‘If you warn them, I’ll shoot first and learn to live without the money.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, as if to both Aubrey and Mouser.

  So much for his brilliant trap. He had brought this maniac to the meeting, and he could only hope that the Quicksilver people had spotted his uninvited guest. If they hadn’t… then he was going to have to talk through the meeting without handing over the encrypted thumb drive, get Aubrey, and figure out a way to get the Quicksilver people and Aubrey to safety.

  He walked past a beggar woman, with outstretched hands who said, ‘Speak English?’, past a fellow wearing a belt of cheap Eiffel Tower replicas that jingled. He glanced around to see if he could spot where Mouser had gone.

  To his right was another pathway that led to a shuttered gazebo and a playground that was unoccupied. Beyond that was a large wide walking and jogging trail; and beyond that was a cluster of grand mansions, one of which, he remembered from strolling around here before, was the Czech Embassy. He didn’t think Mouser could hide there, so he cast his gaze toward the half-circle, looking for the spot where Mouser would be and trying to spot Aubrey in the dozens of faces.

  Mouser had walked down the broad jogging path in the shadow of the Tower, Allee Leon Bourgeois, after sending Luke on his way to the rendezvous. The allee was not busy; a few joggers, iPods insulating them from the world. He scanned the area, looking for the best point to make his stand. To his right, shaded trees bordered the allee, with an empty playground and a shuttered gazebo that sold treats on warmer days. He walked with complete purpose, which was always the most convincing camouflage. He went to the back of the gazebo, stepped onto an electrical unit, and climbed onto its green roof. He would not be concealed for long; anyone on the allee who looked up would see him sprawled on the roof, but the joggers were absorbed in their solitary orbits. That’s the problem with everyone today, Mouser thought. They’re all in their own world, oblivious to civilization around them descending into hell.

  He slid the rifle free from the golf bag. Just a matter of seconds and his work would be done. He put the crosshairs on Luke’s head.

  Luke tried not to panic. So where was she? A flock of tourists herded and moved between him and the bus, which pulled out, to be replaced by another bright-red bus.

  ‘Speak English?’ another woman asked him. He ignored her and pushed past a small group of Japanese visitors. And saw Aubrey, several yards away, on the edge of the walkway. Aubrey wore a raincoat, a heavy hat on her head, her face pale and gaunt.

  And standing next to her was a man who turned and met his gaze.

  His dead father.

  Luke froze. Blinked. No. The man was bald; his dad had a full head of graying hair. But the eyes. The mouth, set in a nervous frown. The nose, straight as iron.

  He stared at Luke. Luke felt as though the crowded acreage of the Tower contracted, the mass of people around him fading to a misty blur, the hum and rumble of Paris devolving to a giant white-noise hiss. Mouser said something in his earpiece and Luke could not register a single word. The air left his chest; his knees buckled. He kept standing through sheer force of will.

  This could not be. But it was. His father did not smile at him, but he closed his eyes, as though conscious of Luke’s pain, as though it were a wave he could feel or hear or taste. Ten years. Ten years of grieving, and missing his father, feeling his absence like a raggedy gap in his chest, and clutching a piece of silver as his father’s last gift of presence in his life.

  His father’s words on their last parting: I’ll miss you every moment. They rang and echoed in his head. It had all been a lie, the kind of monumental lie that did not just sting feelings but cut down to heart and bone. A lie that undid lives.

  His father was alive. He was here. The shock suffocated him until his chest began to ache. Heat burned the back of his eyes. He took two steps to start running toward his father… but then he remembered where he was. Not just in the gray light of the Paris morning. He was in the crosshairs of a terrorist’s gun.

  Every plan and stratagem vanished from his mind. A tremble took his body. ‘Dad?’ he said, more gasp than word. No. It was too much to ask. He couldn’t do this any more. But he had to.

  ‘What?’ Mouser asked in Luke’s ear.

  He couldn’t let Mouser close his trap. He had to think past the maelstrom of emotion.

  ‘I said damn. I don’t see her.’ Luke blinked.
He felt tears on his face before he realized he’d shed them. ‘They’re not here. We should go. I’ll just give you the money. Please, let’s go.’ He turned to walk away.

  ‘I see her. The woman you were with in Chicago. Straight ahead of you, standing with some bald guy. What the hell’s the matter?’ Mouser said in a low growl of menace.

  ‘That’s not her.’ He could think of nothing else to say.

  ‘Luke. Don’t you fuck with me.’

  Maybe he won’t recognize Dad, he thought. Maybe he doesn’t remember everyone he kills.

  A man he didn’t know stopped in passing, grabbed his arm. ‘Luke, it’s okay.’ He recognized the voice as that of the Frenchman who’d spoken to him on the phone.

  Luke tried to shake his head. ‘Get them out of here. Please get them out of here.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Sniper, run, scatter.’ Luke bolted toward his father and Aubrey. ‘Aubrey, Dad, run! Run!’

  ‘Dad?’ Mouser hissed into his earpiece. ‘What the hell game you-’ and then he stopped, as words no longer mattered.

  The crack of the bullet hummed through the air, the dirt kicking up at Luke’s feet. He stopped, nearly fell. A second shot boomed in the air, and now panic rippled through the crowd approaching the Tower.

  ‘Sniper!’ Luke screamed. Another shot and people scattered, screaming, knocking into each other as they fled. He looked back at the Frenchman – he was racing across the grass toward where the shots came from, a weapon drawn, and then he was cut down, a bullet slicing through his throat.

  Luke got knocked off his feet by a line of tourists scrambling back toward their bus at the sound of the gunfire. His sunglasses fell from his face. Feet trampled him and agony rushed up from his hand, boots landed on his scalp, his cheek. He fought to his feet. He saw his father and Aubrey, surrounded by three men in black, guns jammed to the back of their heads, being shoved through the chaos of the crowd.

  This was a trap. The Night Road had wanted to flush out their enemy, and now they had. Luke had handed Quicksilver to Mouser-who wasn’t working alone.

  ‘Dad!’ Luke yelled. Luke saw the group headed rapidly toward the bus drop-off, borne along by the rest of the fleeing crowd. Luke struggled to catch up with them. He broke free of the main crowd and saw his father and Aubrey being shoved into the back of a van. The van was marked with a logo of a cake and read TROIS PETITS GATEAUX. Three Little Cakes.

  The doors slammed and the van peeled out onto the road. Luke cut across the grassland and ran out onto the broad, tree-lined walking trail, trying to keep the van in sight on the street.

  But suddenly the van wheeled hard and zoomed right. Along the allee, heading directly toward him. The driver was pointing at him. Coming back for him.

  Luke turned and ran, back toward the Tower. He shot a panicked glance over his shoulder and he could see the driver’s face, frowning in concentration, teeth gritted, intent on running him down.

  He had nowhere to hide. The van veered past him, a rifle butt from the window slamming him, knocking him over. The van skidded to a stop. He heard the shrill high cry of the police sirens booming across the air, through the trees, closer to the Tower, the armed guards clearing out the people, hunting for the unseen source of the shots. No more shooting; Mouser was gone. Of course. His buddies could finish the work.

  ‘Help me!’ Luke yelled. ‘ Aidez-moi!’ But in the panic, no one heard him.

  One of the black-suited men jumped out of the van, raced toward Luke, gun drawn, screaming at him – in English – to get in the van. He saw in a flash Aubrey and his father, facedown on the van floor.

  Make the creep come to you, Luke realized. The thought came with shimmering clarity. The past few days had awakened a brutal, long-drowsing instinct in him, as though the bookish web-surfer who had never thought about the reality of danger had been whittled away. Seeing his father, alive, changed him, changed everything. He was not going to lose him again.

  Luke went flat on the ground. The gunman ran up to him and Luke timed it to the second, spun and scissor-kicked hard. It was awkward but forceful enough and the gunman stumbled. Luke delivered a pile-driver kick into the gunman’s groin. The guy grunted in agony and folded and Luke kicked him in the head without hesitation and wrenched the gun from him. He ran toward the van, gun raised.

  One of the gunmen inside the van leveled a pistol at him. Then he saw Aubrey launch herself from the floor, claw at the gunman’s arm. The doors slammed and he heard the sound of a shot fired inside the van.

  He fired at the van’s tires, hitting too high, nailing the bumper. Then a swarm of people fleeing ran between him and the van, and he couldn’t risk another shot. He rammed his way through the crowd, trying to get close enough to shred a tire.

  But the van revved and accelerated, knocking through the thinning crowd. They’d run out of time to execute the grab on him, with French police swarming around the grounds. The van blasted onto Avenue Charles Floquet and was gone.

  Luke tucked the stolen gun under his jacket and ran. His mind raced. Mouser. Mouser would know where they would be taken.

  The sniper fire had ended, as far as he could tell. Which meant it was too risky for Mouser to stay in place. Mouser would have to run and wouldn’t he run to the Mercedes? If he couldn’t rendezvous with the Night Road team in the van after using Luke as bait, he would have to make a fast escape in the chaos. But with the immediately snarling traffic as pedestrians and every bus in the area fled, and police shutting down roads, the sedan they’d driven to the Tower would offer a difficult solution for escape. No sniper wanted to be caught in the mother of all traffic jams.

  But the Paris subway, the Metro, was close by. He could be wrong. But Mouser would want safety more than retrieving an asset like a car; it was the terrorist way. He headed for the sign indicating the Metro.

  49

  Luke followed part of the fleeing mass of people and ran to the Champ de Mars Metro station across the street from the Tower, hurried down into the tunnel. The lines to buy a ticket were long and he jumped the turnstile, apologizing to the man in front of him. No one seemed to care about his lack of a ticket in the rush to get away from the shooting. It was a big station, different colored signs pointing to different lines, and then he caught an edge of what looked like Mouser’s burr haircut making a turn. He followed, cutting through the crowd.

  Mouser. For sure. He headed for a station with a yellow line, an RER station with the large trains that traveled the lines running parallel to the Seine. The crowd – dozens thick – pressed forward as a large double-decker train pulled into the station. Children cried, people talked in a hubbub. Panic steamed the air. No one looked at Luke, even glanced at him. He was the cause of it all and he felt as small and anonymous as an ant.

  He lost sight of Mouser. He pressed the earpiece Mouser had put in his ear but heard nothing. Mouser had killed the connection. Luke threw it on the floor. He didn’t want Mouser reactivating it and hearing him.

  Luke went on tiptoe and surveyed the dozens of faces stretching away from him in a jostling human quilt. Damn it. Then he saw Mouser. Thirty feet away and to his left, scanning the crowd himself, his head slowly turning toward Luke’s position.

  The sunglasses that helped camouflage Luke on the plane were gone, lost in the scuffles. Luke ducked, crowding a young woman who spat a volley of outraged French that questioned Luke’s basic intelligence. Her hair was a spike of black dye; her boyfriend next to her had shaved off his hair. A pair of sunglasses sat on his head.

  The roar of an approaching train sounded. The crowd eased forward bare centimeters.

  ‘Are you trying to kiss asses?’ Luke thought he heard the boyfriend say. Luke ignored the comment and stayed kneeling on the floor.

  The double-decker train stopped and the doors slid open.

  The human tide surged forward. Luke grabbed a fistful of Drummond’s dollars from his pocket, handed them to the boyfriend, and said in bad French, ‘I would li
ke to buy,’ then continued in English, ‘your sunglasses’, pantomiming the shades.

  ‘What is wrong with you?’ the boyfriend said. ‘No. I don’t want your dollars.’

  But the girlfriend laughed and pulled the shades from his head, stuck them on Luke’s face. She grabbed the money. ‘There you go. I bought them cheap for him on the street. Now I can buy a dozen more in ugly matching colors.’ Her English was good. She gave Luke a thoughtful, measuring stare, as though trying to guess his motives for the bizarre offer.

  From behind the dark lenses, Luke watched Mouser moving toward a seat on the ground car. Luke knew if he stayed on the ground car Mouser would see him, sunglasses or not. So he went up the steps, following the girlfriend and the boyfriend, his heart a piston in his throat. Mouser could get off at any station and he would lose him; he couldn’t easily monitor who got off and on the ground car. He stood near the stairs; it was his only hope. If Mouser came to the stairs and glanced up, he’d see Luke. Then Luke was dead.

  If I lose him, how will I ever find Aubrey and my dad?

  My dad. The words were like two muffled explosions in his chest. The entire past ten years of his life had been a charade. His father was alive.

  Now that he had time to think, a hard bite of anger closed on his heart. Why? Why would his father pretend to leave his wife and child – why would he abandon them to a man like Henry Shawcross? Why would he let his wife and child suffer through a devastating grief? Why would he hide behind the deaths of his friends?

  Luke had thought he didn’t know the real Henry; he clearly didn’t know his father, either. The realization felt like a punch in the stomach. He shook his head, as though physically clearing the thoughts from his mind. No. If he pondered this now emotion would drown him. Grief and bewilderment could wait.

  The train jolted forward, people crowding on the stairs.

  ‘Are you still enjoying my sunglasses, crazy man?’ the boyfriend said, in serviceable English. He had apparently decided to indulge his girlfriend’s whim. ‘You want to buy a shirt next? Nice pants?’