“It was great,” Huck said. “I’m rested and ready to go.”
“I’m glad to hear that,” Nick said. “This is Gaëlle Rochon, our guide to the Paris underground. She will be your right-hand man from here on out.”
“It’s a pleasure to meet you,” Gaëlle said to him in French. “I’ve heard so much about you from Nick.”
“Likewise,” Huck replied in French. “I am eager to see the sewers.”
“I am eager to show them to you,” Gaëlle said. “And to learn how they differ from yours in Montreal.”
“You’ve worked in the sewers?”
“No, but my father, my grandfather, and my great-grandfather were all sewer men,” Gaëlle said. “The sewer is like my second home. You’ll probably find this ridiculous, but sometimes I think I am more comfortable there.”
Huck felt color coming into his pale cheeks. He was in love. “I don’t think it’s ridiculous,” he said. “I feel the same way.”
“Would you like us to take you to your hotel to rest up?” Kate asked. “Or perhaps get you something to eat?”
“I’m here to work,” Huck said. “Show me the blueprints of the lab, a map of the streets, and take me to the sewers.”
“It’s nice to work with a pro,” Nick said.
Gaëlle drove them to a side street off avenue du Général Leclerc that was three blocks south of place Denfert-Rochereau. She parked behind a white van with a distinctive SAP logo representing the Section de l’Assainissement de Paris, the city sewer utility. It was a van that Nick had purchased and Chet had painted to look like the real thing.
They got out of the car and got into the van, where Gaëlle presented Huck with a set of genuine SAP overalls, boots, helmet, and the spade-like tool for sluicing sewage. Huck held the tool reverently, as if it were Excalibur.
“This is the Stradivarius of sewer tools,” Huck said. “I never thought I’d hold one of these.”
“You can have it,” Gaëlle said, slowly wrapping a rag around her neck to prepare for her descent.
“It’s an honor,” Huck said, breathlessly watching her knot her rag as if she were doing a striptease. He pulled a rag of his own out of his pocket and put it around his neck.
“You came prepared,” Gaëlle said, watching him tie his knot.
“I’m a sewer man,” Huck said. “And a Frenchman.”
“Québécois,” Gaëlle said.
“Are we really so different?”
“I don’t know yet,” she said. “But I’m looking forward to finding out.”
Kate rolled her eyes at Nick, and Nick smiled back.
“I’ve put the site plan of the Institut National pour la Recherche sur les Maladies Infectieuses and blueprints of the lab building in your bag with your flashlights and other equipment,” Nick said to Huck.
Nick had put a lot of effort into having the blueprints forged and the site plans altered to misdirect Huck so he wouldn’t know that they would actually be digging into the basement of a building outside of the institute’s property. Probably unnecessary, Nick thought. Huck wasn’t going to see much past Gaëlle.
“You’re not coming with us?” Huck asked, unable to hide his delight that he and Gaëlle would have the sewers to themselves.
“We’ve been down there already,” Kate said. “We know the general spot where we’ll be digging. We’d just be in your way while you figure out the technical details.”
“Scout the sewer, review the plans at your hotel, then let us know at breakfast tomorrow how long the dig will take, how many men you’ll need, and what equipment is required to do the job right,” Nick said. “Demand the best tools and don’t worry about the cost. Money is no object.”
Nick and Kate opened the back of the van, got out, slid the door closed behind them, and headed down the street toward the intersection with avenue du Général Leclerc.
“A match made in heaven,” Nick said.
“No kidding. Huck should be paying us.”
Nick took his phone out of his pocket. “Time to call Litija and get this robbery started.”
“Before you call Litija and we end up undercover again with the Road Runners, I’d like to know that Dad and his guys are out there watching. I don’t know why we haven’t heard from him yet.” She took out her own phone and dialed his number.
“Are you sure you want to call now?” Nick said. “It’s four in the morning in L.A.”
“He’s an early riser.”
“Howdy-do,” Jake said.
“You sound awfully chipper for so early in the morning,” Kate said.
“I’m always chipper. Give me a second. I need to flush the toilette.”
“You’re talking to me on the toilet?”
“In the toilette,” Jake said. “I really had to go after all the running around you did this morning. But don’t worry, I had eyes on you while I was inside.”
“What are you talking about? Where are you?”
Nick tapped her on the shoulder and glanced across the street. She followed his gaze and saw Jake stepping out of a sanisette, a cylindrical gray hut on the sidewalk with the word toilette written on the side above a map of the neighborhood. There were hundreds of sanisettes throughout Paris and they were not only a place to relieve yourself but to find out where you were. The door to the public bathroom slid closed behind Jake like an elevator and the chemical self-cleaning cycle began inside.
Jake strolled down the street, not visually acknowledging her, continuing to talk on the phone.
“We’ve been here for the last three days,” Jake said.
Kate walked with Nick, parallel to Jake, as they all headed toward place Denfert-Rochereau. “Who is ‘we’?”
“Walter Wurzel is on the rooftop of the building behind me. He’s had you in his scope while I was in the toilette. Best sniper there is.”
He’d also taught Kate how to shoot a rifle when she was nine and they were all stationed on Guam. But she knew time had taken its toll on him.
“Does he still have cataracts?”
“That was years ago, and even half-blind he can still shoot the ears off a butterfly.”
As if to prove it, a laser-targeting dot appeared on Nick’s chest.
Nick looked down at the dot. “Friend or foe?” he asked.
Kate smiled. “It’s Walter Wurzel saying hello.”
Nick had met Walter in Kentucky a few years back on the Carter Grove scam. He’d proven that he was still a good shot on that job, and he’d had one eye patched at the time.
“Who else is on the team?” Kate asked Jake.
“You’re being tracked on foot by Antoine Killian, not that you’d ever know it,” Jake said. “He’s a founding veteran of the Brigade des Forces Spéciales Terre, the French special ops, and he’s the living definition of stealth. He’s invisible unless he wants to be seen. He blends into the shadows.”
Kate was so caught up in talking to her dad that she nearly collided head-on with a morbidly obese man wearing a beret, a tent-sized overcoat, and smoking a huge cigar.
“That was Antoine,” Jake said.
Kate glanced over her shoulder to see Antoine tip his hat to her from behind. He took up nearly the whole sidewalk. She looked back at her dad as she spoke into the phone.
“He must be four hundred pounds. How can he possibly disappear into the shadows?”
“Do you see him now?”
Kate whirled around again. Antoine was gone. He must have ducked into a building or a car, but he’d done it with surprising speed and agility, even for someone who didn’t measure his weight on an industrial scale.
“Impressive,” she said.
“I’ve brought in Robin Mannering, formerly of the British Army’s Special Reconnaissance Regiment,” Jake said. “He’s an expert driver, cold-blooded assassin, speaks five languages, and is irresistible to women. We call him the lady killer. He could always seduce a woman close to the enemy into telling us all their secrets. That’s him parked in the
Alfa Romeo convertible.”
The car was at the curb right in front of them. The smiling old man at the wheel had a spray-on tan, capped teeth, and was wearing a toupee. His face was pulled so tight that the double chin above his cravat might once have been his scrotum.
“What’s he do these days?” Kate asked.
“Seduces the wives and lovers of heads of state for MI6,” Jake said. “The man is a legend.”
Nick leaned close to Kate and whispered, “I think the man we just passed is wearing one of William Shatner’s old toupees and Mr. Ed’s teeth.”
“Please tell me this isn’t all you’ve got,” Kate said to her father.
“I have a dozen American commandos on standby in Kaiserslautern, Germany. They are armed and equipped for any situation on land or sea,” Jake said. “They can immediately deploy to almost anywhere in Europe within two hours.”
Kate stopped walking. “Because they’re stationed at Ramstein Air Base. Are you telling me you’ve got active duty soldiers involved in this?”
“They aren’t on active duty, at least not officially. Let’s just say they’re enterprising young men who are ready to handle situations that fall outside the boundaries of usual U.S. military jurisdiction. They’re the guys I trained to replace me and my team when we retired.”
“They’re doing black ops for the Pentagon and the CIA?” Kate asked.
“They wish they were. They’re bored out of their minds in Kaiserslautern. Regime change and extraordinary renditions have really slowed down under this administration. So they could use some excitement.”
“They could get court-martialed for helping us,” Kate said. “If they don’t get killed first.”
“Who do you think will be deployed for this mission if Jessup is able to push the button? These guys. So they’re in either way. Besides, nobody is going to slap their hands for thwarting a terrorist attack on America in their free time. It’s their job,” Jake said. “It’s not like they got drunk one weekend and deposed a dictator for fun.”
“You’ve done that?”
“Let’s just say there’s a capital in deepest, darkest Africa where you’ll find a guano-covered statue of a soldier who looks a lot like your old man,” Jake said. “Bottom line, you’re in good hands.”
“I know that. Keep a close eye on our people. I’ll let you know when the virus is on the move.” Kate hung up and looked at Nick. “Dad has our backs.”
“I never doubted it for a second. It’s showtime.” Nick took out his phone and dialed Litija.
—
Dragan Kovic knew five minutes into Nick’s presentation in the apartment on avenue du Maine that he’d made the right decision bringing the master thief into his scheme. Nick made the impossible seem ridiculously easy.
“The labs are primarily designed to keep viruses from getting out, not to keep people from getting in,” Nick said at the outset, flanked by his team of Kate, Joe, Gaëlle, and Huck. “The institute has some very elaborate security measures, but they made one key mistake. They built their basement lab in the middle of a honeycomb of tunnels that have existed for centuries. We’re simply going to stroll into one of those tunnels, dig a hole into the lab, take what we want, and be on our way.”
“During the dig, I’ll be in a van on the street and hardwired into the institute’s security system,” Joe said. “I’ll disable the alarms as soon as Nick enters the lab, and I’ll hijack the video feed so the guards will see an empty room.”
Huck told Dragan it would take at least twelve hours using a $12,000 Hilti DD 500-CA diamond coring rig to tunnel into the lab from within a municipal utility shaft full of electric, fiber-optic, cable, and telecom lines that ran parallel to the basement.
They would have to cut through six inches of concrete, twenty feet of limestone, and finally sixteen inches of heavily rebar-reinforced concrete to create a tunnel just large enough for a man with a pack to crawl through, a chatière as Gaëlle called it, a pet door.
“We’ll tap the electric lines and plumbing lines that run through the tunnel to power the coring rig,” Huck said. “We’ll have a second coring rig and a small, portable generator as backups in case the rig fails or we lose power.”
“What we need from you are five men,” Nick said to Dragan. “Three of them will be underground to help with the drilling and removal of the extracted cores, which can weigh over two hundred pounds.”
“The other two will be up on the street, acting as lookouts to alert Joe if there’s trouble or any police activity,” Kate said. “He’ll tip us off. We won’t have any radio or cellular signal in that part of the underground. We’ll communicate with Joe using a single phone that’s hardwired into a telecom line that runs through the shaft. We won’t be able to hear a thing with that drill going, so I’ll be manning it and we’ll install a flashing light to tell us when a call is coming in.”
Kate’s job, as far as Dragan could tell, was to watch Nick’s back. The only equipment that still had to be acquired were the diamond core drills, the track, an air blower to clear exhaust fumes, a backup generator, and three trucks painted to look like sewer and telephone utility vehicles. He could easily acquire all of that within a day.
Dragan was staring at an iPad that Joe, the alarm and video expert, had given him. Joe had already hacked into the institute’s surveillance system, and Dragan was watching the lab in real time. He had the sense that the scientists were working on something highly critical today, and that the man in charge was riding them to quickly produce results.
“I think this woman wants to kill her boss,” Dragan said, pointing to his iPad screen. “You can see it in her body language.”
Litija looked over his shoulder. “That suit doesn’t do anything for her figure. You can’t tell she has a body at all.”
“See how the man in charge keeps looking at the wall clock,” Dragan said. “They are racing against time on something.”
“Or maybe he just wants to go to lunch,” Litija said.
Dragan handed the iPad back to Joe. “Very impressive.”
“Joe still has work to do,” Nick said. “He has to do the hardwiring he talked about. We’ll do that, and the underground prep work, on Friday night disguised as utility workers. We begin the dig on Saturday afternoon, and finish in the predawn hours on Sunday. I’ll stroll into the lab, pick up the sample, place it in a secure, temperature-controlled container, and bring it up to the street.”
“We’ll take it from there,” Litija said.
“And then what happens?” Kate asked.
“We celebrate our success,” Dragan said, well aware it wasn’t the answer Kate was fishing for. “I have to commend you all on your brilliant planning.”
The expertise and swift action that Nick brought to the scheme was beyond Dragan’s wildest expectations. Now the smallpox outbreak in Los Angeles could happen within a few weeks instead of months or years. Zarko’s death was definitely a worthwhile sacrifice.
“My men will arrive tonight,” Dragan said. “You’ll have the equipment and vehicles you requested by the end of the day tomorrow. You’ll all be working out of this apartment until the job is complete. Litija will see to anything else that you might need.”
Dragan would talk to her later to work out the details of transporting the smallpox to his lab. He gestured to Nick to join him by the front door of the apartment, away from the others.
“I want Litija in the van with Joe so she can keep an eye on everything,” Dragan said.
“You mean on me,” Nick said.
“She will work with the lookouts and be an extra set of eyes on the institute security cameras,” Dragan said. “Her job will be to keep you safe and assure the success of the robbery.”
“Kate thinks that’s her job.”
“It’s her job underground and Litija’s job above.”
“I’ve always wanted two women to stay on top of me,” Nick said. “When do I begin betting my savings against the market?”
“Why L.A.?”
“It’s Hollywood. Celebrities are America’s royalty. It will be much more terrifying to see the bodies of famous people than complete strangers. On top of that we kill two for the price of one.”
“I don’t understand,” Nick said.
“When a famous actor dies, so do the beloved characters that he plays. But it gets even better than that.”
“We’ll kill some adorable puppies, too?”
“We won’t just be killing actors, but the hopes and dreams embodied in the movies they made. That’s certain to terrify and depress the market worldwide, not just in the U.S. We’ll be sure to short a lot of entertainment industry stocks.”
“You’ve really thought this out,” Nick said.
“And you’re making it all possible,” Dragan said, clapping Nick on the back. “You’re even better at this than you say you are.”
“I don’t like to brag,” Nick said and rejoined his team.
Nick and his people were very talented, and if this wasn’t going to be Dragan’s final crime, maybe he wouldn’t have decided to have them executed immediately after the robbery. He was already feeling a twinge of regret as he left the apartment, and they weren’t even dead yet. Dragan went down the spiral staircase and thought about his decision.
If he spared them, could he take the risk that one of them might talk before or after the smallpox outbreak in L.A.? No, of course he couldn’t, and he was angry at himself for even considering the notion. It was ridiculous and stupid. Did he feel anything for the thousands of people, perhaps tens of thousands, who would perish in Los Angeles? Absolutely not. So what difference did a few more corpses make?
None at all.
Dragan stepped outside, walked across the sidewalk, and got into his black Maserati GranTurismo Sport parked at the curb. It was a good thing that he was becoming a billionaire and retiring soon, he thought. He was beginning to get soft.
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