The Paris Betrayal

by James R. Hannibal

  “Chaos.” Terrance spoke the word like a Greek chorus. He knew his lines in this recitation.

  “Chaos. The lament of my grandparents. ‘No one could have guessed,’ they said. ‘No one can control it.’ So, I vowed to prove them wrong. I watched. I learned. I studied the equations. And when I came of age, I joined the Company, because I thought the man who led us shared my determination to work for the greater good.”

  “But he didn’t.”

  “No.” Jupiter glanced up at him. “I showed him the data. I brought him the map to control, years in advance. We could have prevented the random devastation of the whole COVID-19 affair by creating an outbreak of our own—a controlled burn to stop a wildfire. But the Director turned me away, and we all felt the result.” His eyes returned to the photo of his parents. “The same as before.”

  Terrance turned the tablet, casting the glow of Dr. Kidan’s message across Jupiter’s face. “You didn’t need him. You led us here. You let the wildfire rage and now the world is primed.”

  “That’s right, Terrance. The world is primed. If Dr. Kidan has achieved success, then we stand at the threshold of a new era. Instead of a controlled burn, we’ll take complete control of the flames.”

  35

  Ben sipped his coffee in the back corner of Café Giga in Antwerp. The hot liquid stung his lips. The progressive thaw of frost injuries caused pain for hours, sometimes days. Tiny blood vessels in his lips fought to unclot themselves. Nerve endings in his fingers, sliced and split by ice crystals, reconnected with his brain and screamed their displeasure.

  He survived the night, but escaping the fields took time, still exposed to the cold. Now, sitting in the warm café with his coffee and a rented laptop, he could assess the damage. He had first-degree frostbite on his fingers, not too bad. But his nose and earlobes had reached the second-degree stage. For the next few days, he could expect constant pain and some visible side effects—temporary, but ugly.

  Not good.

  No one could deny looks play a part in the espionage game. Try gaining a mark’s trust with a pus-filled frost blister growing on the end of your nose. His new look would slow him down more than the pain.

  Ben set down the coffee and got to work, creating a single-use account for the email address he’d given Sensen. He tamped down his nerves, hoping against hope that a message awaited him with the details for a meet with Hale.

  Today’s spies communicate through nanotech with complex encryption algorithms and satellite channels with time-data multiplexing. But when it all goes wrong, there are fallback tricks. A temporary email account works in a pinch. The key is waiting to create the account until after the message you want to hide is sent to the account.

  Digital postmen are tenacious. Send a message to an imaginary account, and they’ll keep trying to deliver it for days. Neither rain nor sleet nor the infinite black of a nonexistent local-part@ domain will stop them from making their appointed rounds. While bouncing around cyberspace, undelivered, the message is unlikely to get intercepted, and it can’t reveal the recipient’s physical location. Once you’re ready to receive, create the account using a public hotspot, take the message, then delete the account and run.

  He finished creating the account. A welcome email from the server populated the inbox, but nothing more. Ben deleted it and waited, fighting off despair as he stared at the empty folder. “Come on . . .”

  The laptop beeped. Sensen’s email popped in. Relief flooded his chest. He didn’t even need to open the message. Using an old Company contingency trick, Sensen had coded the time and coordinates for the meet into the subject line.

  Ben jotted down the numbers, deleted the email account, and bolted. He kept his head low as he jogged across the street, wary of the sudden appearance of police cars.

  Nobody came.

  Why would they? The Company had no reason to come after him now. They could snatch him up at the meeting with Hale—or maybe put a bullet in his brain and be done with it. He didn’t care. He needed to see the Director, and Hale might make that happen. Plus, he wanted to pass on the information tying the Princess and the Behemoth to the Leviathan bombings. The Company analysts needed to take a deep dive into Sea Titan and see what they could dredge up.

  Three streets from the café, Ben hopped a tram toward Antwerp Central Station. Hunching over with an arm wrapped around a standing pole, he studied a waterproof map of Europe from his go-bag. Some quick math decoded the string of numbers from the email, giving him the rendezvous time and coordinates. Ben traced a finger down a line of longitude. Zürich. He could refine the rest later. He had eight hours to reach northern Switzerland. With the right train, he could be there in five.

  36

  A Dutch police diver with the top half of his dry suit hanging from his midsection showed Duval the screen of his camera, thumbing through pictures of a beat-up Peugeot at the bottom of the frozen Haringvliet lake.

  “That’s it,” Duval said, nodding. “That’s the one. She’s missing a mirror.”

  The diver chuckled and flipped to the next picture. “She’s missing both.”

  “Even better.”

  Out on the ice, spotters watched anxiously from the edge of a freshly cut hole. A man surfaced and slapped what looked like an ID badge into one of their hands. They conversed for a moment, and then the spotter relayed the message over his radio.

  The man with Duval acknowledged the transmission and frowned. “They still haven’t found the body.”

  A buzz from Duval’s phone interrupted them. “Excuse me.” He turned away to answer, but the caller had already hung up, somehow leaving a pdf file behind. Interesting. The contents made Duval smile. He clicked off the screen and touched the man’s arm. “Keep looking. Our man is down there somewhere.”

  Renard joined Duval on the way back to their rental car. “I heard you identify the Peugeot. I guess our hunt is over.”

  “Not in the slightest.”

  “But you said—”

  “I know what I said.” Duval looked over his shoulder to be sure the Dutch team was out of earshot. “But I have reason to believe Calix survived. For now, tell me what you learned about the girl—Clara Razny.”

  “Still considered missing back home. I spoke to the dockworkers and port security here. No one saw her. And the local police tell me she was not in the car when it went down.”

  Duval considered this for a long moment. “Okay. Contact our liaisons in the Belgian, Dutch, and German police forces. Give them her description. Tell them to watch the morgues.”

  “You think he killed her?”

  “Fits his track record. Besides, she was deadweight.”

  The sergeant regarded him for a long moment. “Sounds like you’d have done the same.”

  “In his shoes, Sergeant. I’d have done the same in his shoes. If you want to catch a criminal like Calix, you have to think like him.”

  “I see.”

  “If you’re done questioning my methods, how about showing me your progress on the cottage, eh?”

  This snapped Renard from his contemplative stare. He fumbled with a hardened police tablet—the unit’s mobile office—and brought up a file. The first page showed a business headshot of a striking blonde. “The owner is Gabrielle Leblanc, thirty-one years old. A corporate security consultant, working mostly from home.”

  “So Calix knew she’d be inside.”

  “Possibly. There are two homes. She has a flat in Meudon. The cottage is a recent acquisition. The neighbor’s caretaker told me he saw her and Calix there together once before. To him, they seemed a happy couple but . . .”

  “But what?”

  “The fire brigade found a body inside. Calix killed her. And if not Ms. Leblanc, then someone else.” Renard swiped to the next page, a coroner’s photo of a blackened corpse. “Female. The height, weight, and age match. But the fire destroyed her fingerprints, and our people found no dental or DNA records.”

  “It’s her,” Duval sa
id, taking the tablet. “Who else would it be?” He stared at the charred face until the weight of Renard’s discomfort became too great to bear. The man had always been squeamish. Duval flipped on through the file past her car registry, work history, birth certificate. He stopped when he came to a pair of side-by-side images—a candid shot of Leblanc harvested from a social media page and a police body-cam shot of Calix and his hostage at the Paris standoff. “What’s this?”

  “A hunch. I was looking for similarities between the women he’s drawn to. I thought perhaps if I could find a pattern, we might—”

  Duval lowered the tablet. “There is no pattern. Calix attacked the victim at his flat with chemicals, then lit the place on fire. He kidnapped Ms. Razny and made her watch while he blew up his girlfriend’s cottage. With the girlfriend still in it. He is a madman.” Duval opened the driver’s side door and motioned for Renard to get behind the wheel before heading around the hood to the passenger side. “Get in. We’re going.”

  “Going where? We have nothing to guide us.”

  “I told you. I have reason to believe Calix survived. I’m tired of following his footprints. And now a reliable source has given me a glimpse of his future—a time and a place. We have the opportunity to get there first.” He slapped the roof and dropped into the passenger seat. “Drive fast. We’re going to Zürich.”

  37

  Clara waited for Sensen in the chalet’s great room. She had no intention of being murdered in her sleep. Otto slept upstairs. When she’d returned from her eavesdropping, he’d given her worried looks, but Clara had settled him down again. And she’d snuck away as quietly as possible. She didn’t want him to see what came next.

  She nodded off once, maybe twice. Hard to say, sitting up in Sensen’s leather chair, waiting for death. She had no illusions of besting a trained assassin, but she had skills—more than Sensen suspected for sure. And perhaps that gave her enough of an edge that she could make him suffer a little before she died at his hand. She only wished she could make his spymaster, Ben’s precious Director, suffer too. Not for herself, but for sacrificing Ben despite all his loyalty.

  Sensen walked down the steps as the gray-green of early morning lit the room. First light. If nothing else, the man was precise.

  He only looked at her for a moment, turning his attention to the hall closet as he descended the last few steps, yet she could feel him keeping tabs on her. “You’re up early,” he said. “Trouble sleeping?”

  “You could say that.” Clara became aware of her posture. She had slumped in the chair more than she realized before he came down. She adjusted, trying not to be obvious, hoping he didn’t notice her hand sliding into the cushion beside her thigh. “Cold night. Maybe breakfast will warm me up.”

  “You’re on your own, I’m afraid. I need to go out.”

  “For the day?”

  “For several.” Sensen drew a carbon-fiber rifle and a briefcase from the closet and laid them both on the credenza between the kitchen and the door. He broke the weapon down into parts that fit into the case’s custom foam.

  “Going hunting?”

  “Correct.”

  The boldness of his answer shocked her—his actions too, checking the weapon’s scope before seating it in the foam. Had he no shame, no need to mask his intentions? She should kill him right now, no matter who he supposedly worked for. Her hand tightened around the revolver’s grip. “You’re hunting Ben.”

  Sensen halted his work for a moment, but did not turn. “You should not listen uninvited at your host’s door. It is bad manners.”

  Clara swallowed, but she said nothing. Did he know, or was he fishing?

  “I don’t blame you. The situation is . . . difficult. And you succumbed to the Gastdruck.”

  “I don’t speak German.”

  He closed the case. “Yes, I know. Perhaps I should have switched to my native tongue when I heard you tromping like a small elephant in my hall.” Sensen set the case near the door and reentered the closet, appearing a moment later with a black leather jacket and a matching backpack. “Gastdruck is the exhaustive pressure of being a good houseguest. Do you Slovakians have a similar word?”

  “No.”

  “Pity.”

  What was his game? Bore her first, slit her throat later? The backpack looked well stuffed. She guessed the assassin, like Ben, always kept a go-bag on hand.

  “I left ham and butter in the refrigerator. Bread and dog food in the larder. Fish and chicken in the freezer.” He shouldered the pack. “I imagine you know how to use an oven, correct?” He lifted the briefcase and opened the front door.

  She didn’t understand. No knife? No silenced gun? Perhaps he’d poisoned the ham. “You’re leaving?”

  “We already established that.”

  “I thought you were going to kill me.”

  Sensen shook his head without turning to face her. “This is the problem with listening to only one half of a conversation.”

  “But you’re going to kill Ben. I didn’t misunderstand that part. What else is the sniper rifle for? This Director you both work for. I heard he was a good man, but he’s a monster.”

  “The Director only wants a safer world. And he’ll do what’s necessary to achieve that goal.” Sensen walked out. “I’ll see you when I return.”

  “Wait!” She bolted up from the chair, gun leveled.

  The German let out a sigh. “Dieses Mädchen.” He lowered his head, growling at the flagstones. “Sie geht mir auf den Keks.”

  Her finger tightened on the trigger. “I told you. I don’t speak German.”

  “I said, you’re getting on my nerves.”

  “I can’t let you kill my friend.”

  “You understand nothing.” He dropped his case and had a handgun out and pointed at her head before it hit the flagstones.

  Clara froze. She should have shot him in the back when she had the chance. Now? Could he dodge bullets? Could she?

  Sensen echoed the voice in her head. “If you pull that trigger, Clara, you will die.” His eyes flashed down for a nanosecond, then returned to hers. “You cross this threshold and leave my protection? You die, because I will not be responsible for you. That is your reality. Your best and safest move is inaction. Enjoy my house. Get rest.” He frowned, gesturing upward with his chin. “Your dog is happily asleep upstairs, correct?”

  What did Otto have to do with this? Clara nodded.

  Sensen kept his gun steady while bending at the knees to recover his briefcase. “Then perhaps you should leave him be.”

  “You’re saying I should let sleeping dogs lie.”

  “I’m saying you need to stay out of my way.” Sensen lowered his gun and walked off, letting the door fall closed.

  Clara tracked him through the front window with the revolver’s front sight, begging herself to pull the trigger and unable to do it, until he disappeared into the detached garage. Moments later he sped away on a classic black motorcycle.

  She stood there, pointing her gun at an empty drive for another thirty seconds, or perhaps five minutes. She didn’t know. And then she ran upstairs and woke up the dog.

  38

  JUPITER GLOBAL INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX

  The squeaking drove Terrance mad. Watching through successive hallway security cameras, he tried for more than a minute to identify which of the two stainless steel breakfast trolleys had the bad wheel. The second—had to be. Both were pushed by nurses in full biohazard protective gear. He checked the time in the screen’s upper left corner and keyed the microphone hanging at his shoulder. “Hurry up, ladies. You know how he hates delays.”

  The first nurse kept her head low and quickened her steps. The second, who Terrance decided must have the squeaky wheel, shot an I’m going as fast as I can scowl at the camera.

  Terrance gave a tiny shake of his head, huffing to himself. “Death wish.”

  The words elicited a cough from Dr. Kidan, standing beside him, though the sound might have doubled as a
whimper.

  He offered the Pakistani microbiologist a reassuring smile. “Not you, Doctor. Keep your answers brief and to the point, and you’ll be fine.”

  “But my predecessor—”

  “Made mistakes. Don’t repeat them.”

  A bead of sweat broke out on the biologist’s forehead.

  Good. Terrance liked maintaining Jupiter’s reputation as a man with a low tolerance for incompetence. It kept things running smoothly. He keyed the mic and made sure to let his own impatience shine through. “Where are my trolleys?”

  Long windows set into the observation room wall gave the appearance of two-way mirrors looking into side-by-side apartments. An illusion. The windows were LCD screens, showing feeds from tiny cameras in the patient facility across the compound. The two apartments currently in view were in the incinerator section.

  A floor-to-ceiling panel slid open in the kitchenette section of each apartment, revealing the trolleys.

  “Thank you. About time.”

  Both patients rolled out of bed when the trolleys appeared—a learned response. They’d been taught by experience that if they didn’t move quickly enough, the panel would close and not open again until the next meal. Patient E Prime crossed his rooms with rapid steps and wheeled his trolley out. Patient C Prime moved slower. Understandable, given his place in the experiment. They wore matching tank tops and shorts, and with each having committed to daily showers and shaves, they looked quite different from the men Terrance had recruited at the Valencia soup kitchen.

  A red box flashed on his tablet, and he nodded to Kidan. “He’s here.”

  Jupiter entered from a door at the far end. The microbiologist took a step, as if to meet him halfway, but Terrance caught him with a backhand to the chest. “Don’t.”

  “How are our friends this morning?” Jupiter paced along the false windows, watching the subjects lift the silver domes off their platters.