Dark Zone (31 page)

The greatest was the murder of his father, but Mussa did not dwell on that. Nor, surprisingly, did he think about the sneers of the Frenchmen he met every day, the heathens who thought no believer could be their equal. He thought. instead of the smirks he had gotten from the Saudis when he had first expressed his desire to prove his faith and earn his place in Paradise.

They saw him as a useful idiot, a man whose network might be used—or, to put it more honestly, a man whose greed might be convenient but whose courage and faith were lacking.

He would laugh at them tomorrow.

62

The earliest train from Paris to Aux Boix on Friday left at 4:50 a.m.; Karr was one of only a half-dozen people on it. He got into LaFoote’s house through the back window and spent an hour looking around, without finding anything useful. Around 6:30 he snuck back out and walked to the village center, a short distance away. The mass Father Brossard was to celebrate wasn’t until eight, and so Karr had breakfast in a
patisserie,
a small local bakery. The woman who ran it had just taken a batch of chocolate macaroons from the oven in back when Karr arrived; he bought one and after the first bite pulled a twenty-euro note from his pocket to grab the dozen that were left.

The owner refused to sell him more than five. He took those, along with two croissants, and sat at one of the two tables in the window. Neither susceptible to flattery nor particularly talkative, the woman failed to respond to Karr’s attempt to make conversation. Finally he asked flat out if she knew LaFoote; she simply shrugged, then went to tend to her ovens.

There was a park near the center of town, cattycorner from the church. Karr imagined that retired people—like LaFoote, before he got involved in his crusade to find his friend—would spend at least part of the day on one of the three benches there. But if so, it was too early for them; Karr sat alone for a while, watching the light traffic. Around 7:45 an altar boy unlocked the front door of the church, peeked out briefly, then disappeared back inside. Karr got up and ambled over.

Deidre Clancy pulled on her robe as she got out of bed. Her stomach felt somewhat better than it had yesterday, but ...

She lurched forward, barely making the bathroom in time. By now, her stomach was completely drained, and she managed to expel only a small bit of fluid as she hung over the ceramic bowl.

Bad snails? Or the flu?

She’d gotten sick yesterday immediately after lunch at a fancy reception and lecture on the Postimpressionists at the Musée d’Orsay. It served her right for blowing off the class she was supposed to attend.

Deidre got up slowly, ran some water on her face, then walked shakily back to bed. The sun was up, but she was tired and there was no question of doing anything but sleeping for quite a while. She glanced at the blinking answering machine in the living room—she’d heard the phone ring several times but was in no condition to answer. She’d deal with it all later, or tomorrow, or next week, or never.

“Father Brossard?”

The priest, dressed in a simple black cassock, turned from the side altar where he had been fussing over some of the candles.

“Oui?”

“I was a friend of Monsieur LaFoote’s,” said Karr in French. “Can we talk?”

“You are the American?” said the priest in English.

“Jes suis Américain
,
oui
,” said Karr. “Yes, I’m an American.”

“The
American. Mr. Karr?”

“Yeah, that’s me,” Karr said. “LaFoote talked to you?”

The priest turned and began walking to the front. Karr got up and followed past the altar, entering the sacristy through a side door. Two altar boys were laughing about something as they came in; the boys immediately stiffened, standing at military attention as the priest cast a stern look in their direction. Karr smiled at them, but the boys remained stone-faced.

The priest continued to a narrow hallway and turned into a small, unlit room. He went to a file cabinet in the otherwise empty room and took out a brown envelope.

“Monsieur LaFoote gave me this a month ago,” said the priest in English. “He left a message the other evening that they were to go to you, not the police. His funeral is tomorrow.”

“He was a good man,” said Karr as the priest handed him an envelope.

“He was a sinner.”

“We all are, right?”

The priest didn’t smile. He walked stiffly back out into the sacristy, no longer paying attention to Karr. He scolded the boys in French, telling them their souls had just gained more black marks for whispering in a holy place.

There were a few people in the church now, a dozen or so, scattered around. Karr took a seat; as the service began, a woman slid in at the far end—he turned and realized it was the baker, who made no sign that she recognized him.

There were three photocopies in the envelope. The top two were bank account statements for Vefoures from, as LaFoote had said, a small Austrian bank. There were regular wire deposits of two thousand euros a week, along with irregular withdrawals. The statements were several months old.

The third sheet was a copy of what looked like a signature card for another account at a different Austrian bank; rather than a full name the signature was a single letter: P. Instead of a name and address as contact information, there was a phone number. The account number matched the account the wired deposits had been made from.

Karr pulled out his PDA. He went online to the World Wide Web and tapped into a commercial Web site that had a reverse address lookup. The number wasn’t listed. He tapped the screen lightly and got into the NSA’s comprehensive address search engine.

It took nearly sixty seconds for the database to come back with an ID on the phone number: Jacques Ponclare.

63

Donohue turned right when he reached the top landing and walked down the hall to the second apartment. He paused, pulling on a set of latex gloves, then slipped the owner’s key out of his pocket and placed it into the lock. The mechanism was old and the key worn; he had to jiggle it and lean forward to get it to work.

The apartment smelled musty, as if its owner had never once opened the windows in the fifty years she had lived there. The smell made Donohue gag slightly as he came in; he associated it with his own childhood in Londonderry, a place where every memory evoked disgust. He was soon over it, moving quickly to the closet where he had placed his weapon the day before.

The
Direction de la Surveillance du Territore,
or DST, had its official headquarters at 1 rue Nélaton, some blocks away. But for a variety of reasons, including security, low-key suboffices had been found in the city. Ponclare, like some of the other section leaders and their teams, worked out of a bunkerized basement in the middle of what looked like an ordinary residential block. This made a mass attack on the DST difficult—but it presented certain advantages for anyone clever and bold, like Donohue.

Ponclare had only just arrived at work and typically would not leave his office for at least two hours—perhaps not for three or four—but the assassin had to be ready. His escape had already been complicated by the American President’s plans to visit Paris later that day.

From what Donohue knew of Mussa Duoar, it was likely that the visit had been somehow factored into the assassination of the French official. Donohue believed that Mussa primarily acted as a conduit for orders from an organization outside of France, though he was enough of a snake that one could never be too sure. So long as his fee was paid, Donohue would not bother to inquire too deeply.

He began assembling the Barrett sniper rifle, a fifty-caliber American-made gun that fired a round capable of penetrating an engine block. The weapon was not his favorite, but it was necessary because of the distance and the fact that Ponclare might choose to drive one of the armored Peugeots available to him.

When Donohue finished setting up his rifle, he went to the bathroom. He avoided the shower where he had placed the body of the woman who had lived here after killing her yesterday. Despite the fact that he had wrapped her in plastic bags, there was already a distinct odor of decay; this, too, reminded him of the slums where he had grown up, and he flushed the toilet with disgust.

An hour and a half to go. He would wait.

64

As demanding as they were, his responsibilities as head of Desk Three were only part of William Rubens’ job at the National Security Agency, and there was always a stack of paperwork waiting for him in his office. So when Marie Telach told him she wanted to update him in person on what Tommy Karr had found, he asked her to come up to his office. The few minutes he saved meant he could finish reviewing a half-dozen briefs, and by staying here he could initial a small stack of papers. Telach always looked a bit out of sorts when she came upstairs, blinking her eyes like a gopher pulled from her hole.

“Circumstantially at least, it looks bad for Ponclare,” she told him when she arrived, detailing the money trail they had fleshed out from Karr’s information. The chemist Vefoures had been paid from a bank account in Austria that seemed to belong to the French DST Paris security head, Ponclare. That fit with the story that Karr had been told by Vefoures’ friend LaFoote, that Vefoures had been brought back by the government for a secret project. The source of the money wasn’t clear—it came from an Algerian bank whose owner could not, for the time being at least, be traced.

But was it really Ponclare’s? The account had been set up only a few days before the first payment to Vefoures and had only been used to pay him. A preliminary search of the phone records showed that Ponclare had not called the bank from his office or the home number listed on the account. And there were no large transfers from any of Ponclare’s accounts, nor any sudden transfer in for that matter.

“Perhaps he is extremely prudent,” said Rubens.

“Or maybe it was set up to make it seem like a legitimate project to the chemist, and point suspicion at Ponclare if discovered,” said Telach.

Rubens turned to the computer at the side of his desk and punched the keyboard, bringing Ponclare’s resume up in front of him. The man had worked for the French security service for three decades and had, at least according to his superiors, done a decent job. But he had no flashy results ; he was clearly more bureaucrat than artist.

Ponclare had served briefly in Africa, where his service overlapped with LaFoote’s. His job there seemed primarily to facilitate budget cutting; besides LaFoote, several dozen officers and foreign agents were let go during Ponclare’s short tenure and no one replaced.

“Is there any connection with the car thief?” Rubens asked.

“Mussa Duoar? Not that we can see.”

“Do they have accounts at the same banks?”

“No,” replied Telach.

“The transfer from Morocco?”

“Duoar doesn’t use any bank there.”

“Nothing at all?”

“Neither there nor Algeria.”

“What about Ponclare’s father?”

“No. Duoar was just a child when Ponclare Senior went back to France. Duoar’s father was active in the resistance movement against the French,” she told him, “but he died after the country gained its independence.”

“How?”

Telach shrugged. “Murky circumstances. Officially, an accident. Unofficially, it may have been something else. He was in police custody shortly before he died. We’d have to do quite a lot more checking to clarify what happened, and even then, I don’t know that we’d get a true answer. Do you think it’s relevant?”

Probably not, Rubens thought. He was grasping for connections, trying to see the whole pattern. “All right. The CD-ROMs that Tommy sent back last night?”

“Formula for a very potent bomb. Different ways of constructing large bombs and shaping them. Some of them are rather large—two hundred pounds, three hundred pounds. Various formulas the experts are analyzing.”

“Has Johnny Bib’s team examined the hard drive that Dean and Lia got from the library yet?”

“The drive just arrived. It’ll take a while.”

Rubens got up and began pacing, trying to ward off his fatigue; he hadn’t slept now in quite some time.

The information about the account transfers added little, if anything, to what they already had—unless Ponclare had some theory on why he was used.

Someone would have to ask him about it. In person, to catch his reaction.

There was a chance that Ponclare was involved with the terrorists. Rubens couldn’t disregard that. He needed someone he could trust to put this to him, perhaps catch him off-guard with it. And it had to be done directly, without going through channels.

The French, of course, would raise a stink. So would he, if the situation were reversed.

“Where’s Tommy?” Rubens asked Telach.

“On a train back to Paris,” she said. “He should be there in about twenty minutes.”

Twenty minutes—and then another twenty or thirty in traffic to get over to the DST headquarters.

Karr wasn’t the best person for this job—he was clearly prejudiced.

Dean was the man he wanted. He trusted his judgment.

“Send Mr. Dean over. Tell him to go to Ponclare and talk to him personally. Tell him what we’ve found. Dean can offer to have the information faxed to him as he’s speaking. We’re looking for a reason he would be used—someone he’s wronged, revenge, something like that. Tell Mr. Dean that I’m going to be very interested in his personal assessment of Ponclare’s reaction. Have Lia go with him.”

Rubens paused.

“Yes, it is a long shot, Marie,” he added. “But we have to fill in the blanks somehow.”

65

The Eiffel Tower stood a short block from the Seine River, its legs spread over a large concrete and stone plaza. On the other side of the tower sat a long park called the Champ de Mars. The French had blocked off the side streets around the park with concrete barriers. Two large dump trucks had been placed on the street behind the tower, closing it off. Another truck and some wooden barricades had been placed on the river side of the tower. Hidden from view were two military vehicles with antitank weapons aimed at the approaches. Dean had his doubts that the weapons could be brought to bear in time, but it was obvious that the French hadn’t completely dismissed the Americans’ warning, contrary to what the Art Room had told him.