Dark Zone (35 page)

“Explosive value similar to the yield of the original equation,” said the team leader. “But in small bits—in the formula they look like variables, but I asked myself, Why would the variables be just of certain sizes? And of course, if they were packages or packets that you had to carry a certain way, say if you sewed up vests full of explosive, OK? Vests a man could wear, then remove and set at the proper position. That’s the way this formula is constructed, to figure out how many packets you need and where to put it. Now, if we substitute—”

“Johnny, tell me clearly: Are you saying that this formula is related to another attack on the Eiffel Tower or not?”

“The formula includes calculations for the tensile value of steel similar to the characteristics of the girder structure between the second and third
étage
of the Eiffel Tower,” said Johnny Bib.
“Étage
means ‘floor’ in French.”

“I remember my French, thank you very much,” said Rubens, snapping his underling on hold. He pressed the button on the communications selector on his belt, connecting himself with Hadash in Air Force One. “George, there’s a new development.”

80

The stairwell that extended upward from the second floor of the Eiffel Tower was far more exposed than the ones below, and Karr could feel the wind whipping at him as he trotted up the steps. There were five or six men above him, across the opposite pier. A pair of elevator shafts ran through the center of the structure to the top, but only one was being operated. Its car rose slowly past the cluster of painters.

Or supposed painters. Karr still hadn’t seen any paint cans or brushes or other equipment. Just coveralls that could hide quite a bit.

“Stand by for Mr. Rubens,” said Rockman.

“You sound out of breath,” Karr told him as he climbed. “If I didn’t know any better, I’d think you were the one climbing the stairs.”

“Tommy, I’m on the line with the national security adviser.”

“Hello,” said Karr. He quickened his pace as he turned the corner, trying to keep the painters in sight. There were roughly a thousand steps to the top; Karr had gone up about a third of them. The men were two-thirds of the way to the third
étage.

It looked to him as if one was taking off his coverall.

“What’s going on?” asked Hadash.

“We’ve just found a formula to damage the top part of the Eiffel Tower using six bombs placed together on one of the main girders,” said Rubens. “We’re going to alert the French authorities. I’d like you to—”

Karr cut him off. “You’d better do it quick,” he said, running up the stairway. “They’re wearing explosive vests under their coveralls. That’s how they got the explosives in.”

81

Mussa checked his watch as the train passed Charles de Gaulle Airport and began to pick up speed. It took roughly an hour to reach the Chunnel from Paris; they had a little over forty-five minutes to go.

Forty-five minutes to be caught.

The brothers would be at the Eiffel Tower by now. Those two were maniacs—imbeciles, to put it more accurately. They would have others just like them to help.

Forty-four minutes to go. Forty-four chances to be caught.

Was he losing his resolve? Had he suddenly become a coward?

Hardly.

“The dragon lady is in a terrible mood,” said Ahmed, coming back from the other car. “She thinks there was some foul-up with the ticket system and she will somehow be held accountable. The train was supposed to be sold out.”

Mussa suppressed a laugh. To expedite the plan, they had filed a large number of phony reservations, aiming to keep the train nearly empty. Even the second-class cars, normally overflowing, were less than half-full. He had planned the attack for this run because there were few “walk-ups,” or last-minute ticket buyers. Fewer passengers meant less chance at interference.

“You have to bring one of the carts forward with the drinks,” said Ahmed. “It has to go to car nine.”

Mussa selected the cart and backed it out of the holding area. It bumped sharply on the metal furring between the rug and aluminum flooring. The jerk shocked him, and for a millisecond he thought that he had taken the wrong cart and had somehow set off the explosives. This was impossible, yet for the tiny space of time he thought, he felt, he knew it had happened. Even when the shock of the moment passed, he found it difficult to breathe properly.

I am not a coward. I am a believer, and a great man. My father was a great man, and I am his son.

God is great.

Mussa pushed the cart into the passenger area of the train car. The clear plastic of the overhead rack caught his face in its reflections: a deep, worried frown. He forced himself to smile, or at least try to smile, and pushed forward, wheeling the cart to the end of the car. There were five people: an old woman, two young people in their twenties, a woman, and an older man in his fifties. The older man’s stare swept into Mussa’s face. Mussa felt himself wincing, as if the glance were a physical thing.

I can do this easily. I have built an empire and braved much greater dangers. I am a soldier of God, the one, true God.

He made his way between the cars, pushing the cart forward. The other steward, an Englishwoman, met him in car twelve and went with him to car nine. She had him help her set the trays in the vestibule at the end of the car. As he helped, someone came to use the nearby restroom.

Mussa glanced up as the man came through the door. As the man turned to go into the restroom, Mussa swore it was Donohue, the Irish assassin.

Impossible! He’s in Paris, killing Ponclare.

Mussa stared after him for a moment, then realized that the man had a mustache. His hair had also begun to gray. And now that he thought of it, wasn’t he a little taller than the former IRA man and thinner?

I cannot let my imagination run away with me,
Mussa told himself, turning to help the other attendant.

82

Karr was about twenty feet below the nearest man when one of the others pulled an MP-5 submachine gun from beneath his coverall. Tommy started to duck down but lost his balance and slid down the stairway.

Bullets ripped against the metal. Slugs ricocheted everywhere.

Karr’s chin slapped against one of the treads so hard he thought he’d been nailed by a bullet. He was surprised to find his face intact when he finally stopped sliding.

He jumped up, then ducked away as another burst bounced through the iron rafters.

“Get the French here, now!” he shouted. “And get the people down off the tower.”

Piped over the Art Room’s loudspeakers, the bullets sounded like a drummer’s rim shots off the side of a snare. Rubens gritted his teeth and turned to Telach.

“Why aren’t the French moving?” he asked her.

“We’re working on it.”

“Work faster, Marie.”

“We’re hearing shots at the Eiffel Tower?” asked Hadash over the line to Air Force One.

“Yes,” said Rubens.

“The French President is just coming up,” said Hadash. “I’ll leave the line open.”

“Of course,” said Rubens.

Karr, pinned down, guessed he was still two hundred feet below the third floor of the tower, with the terrorists twenty or so feet above him. Except for the one firing at him, they were moving upward.

From what Rubens had said, the plan would be to put all of the explosive charges together. Which meant there was a little bit of time to stop them.

Easy enough if he had a gun.

The gunfire had stopped; the man had started climbing again.

Karr jumped up and took the steps two at a time, reaching the next flight before a fresh fusillade of bullets rattled around him. As he crouched down, he saw a ladder welded against some of the supports; if he could get to it, he’d be out of the gunman’s line of sight.

After a long burst from the submachine gun, Karr pushed through the steps, jumping up and swinging across to the ladder. His hand slipped as he transferred his weight, and for a moment he hung suspended between the stairwell and the beam.

Then gravity took over, and he began to fall.

83

Donohue could not believe that Mussa was on the train with him—and in the uniform of a train porter. But surely it had been Mussa—he could see the look of recognition in his eyes.

Or was this simply more paranoia?

Donohue bent to the faucet to run some water over his face. He rubbed his eyes and cheeks but kept his fingers away from his mustache.

It had definitely been Mussa.

Was he following him?

Or making his own escape?

Whatever, someone knew where he was or at least the direction he was taking to escape. That was not good.

Donohue’s anger suddenly flared. He tightened his fists, trying to control it, trying to control himself. His plan was a good one—he was safe, surely.

Unless Mussa was following him to order his death.

He stared at the door. He had no weapon but his hands.

He would kill Mussa if he had to. Mussa and whoever he sent. Kill them gladly with his bare hands.

Nearly trembling with his anger, Donohue punched the large square button next to the door to let himself out.

84

Tommy Karr saw colors and then brown, felt nothing and then fierce pain. His head snapped forward and he twisted, broken in half.

The moment pushed outward and then collapsed, time bending and twisting in three different directions at once.

He wasn’t falling anymore.

He was across a beam, and the world was on a slant.

He’d fallen onto the grid work. The fall had knocked the wind out of him and battered his body, but considering the alternative, he was in
great
shape.

Gradually, Karr recovered his breath. He’d fallen only a few feet, slipping down to one of the cross members, landing like a noodle across it. His head had jammed against a metal screen. His left leg hung free, but his right rested on one of the tower lights, twisted in thick cable that connected the light to the others nearby.

“OK,” he said aloud, “let’s get this show on the road.” But he couldn’t move.

He couldn’t find his hands. They seemed to be severed from his body. Finally he managed to turn his head and see his fingers gripping the meshwork near his face. Karr moved them slowly, then pushed his head back against the stabs and jolts at his neck.

“Go, let’s go,” he told himself. “Go, go, go. Come on, Tommy!”

He forced himself to start climbing.

The screen ran up the side of one of the girders near the elevator. While the rectangular holes were too narrow for footholds he found he could push his toes against the metal for traction.

The terrorists were clustered above, no longer paying attention to him. He pushed himself to move faster, but his head spun and he had to stop for a moment, rest.

The elevator began moving downward. Two of the terrorists swung down from above the girder where the others were working—they’d been on the top floor, which probably explained why the police hadn’t tried to get down from above.

Karr watched impotently as the two men began firing at the elevator. The machine continued downward as the bullets sprayed through it. He saw the face of a woman screaming and blood splattered against the glass doorway as the gondola disappeared below.

Kill them. Throw them off the tower. Now!

He started moving again.

The air around him exploded as the helicopters swooped in, one raking the side of the tower with its 7.62mm machine gun. Karr gripped the wire, the structure reverberating with the torrent of bullets the wash from the rotor.

A voice told Karr to leave, to get out of there now. It took a moment for him to realize it was the Art Room.

“There’s a helicopter firing on them!” he shouted.

“Get down!” yelled Rockman. “Get out of there. Go!”

Yeah,
right, Karr thought.
Move and I’m dead. I don’t even know why I’m not dead now

The terrorists began firing back. Between the forest of iron grids and the buffeting winds, the helicopters had a hard time getting their bullets close to the terrorists. Finally one of the terrorists above slumped against the beam.

Two figures came down from farther up, down on the stairs. They were policemen.

“Tell the cops they’re almost directly above the terrorists,” said Karr.

“What cops?” said Rockman. “There are no policemen on the third level.”

“Are you talking to the French or what? There are two cops or gendarmes or whatever...”

One of the men had a case in his hand. White smoke flared from the stairs and there was a huge explosion—the man had fired an antiair missile point-blank into the fuselage of one of the helicopters. The craft pitched hard to the right, then disappeared.

85

Johnny Bib admired his boss—William Rubens was, he had to admit, one of the few people in the organization who truly appreciated the worth of a prime number. Still, Johnny had long ago concluded that Rubens was not a “people person.” Johnny was willing to dismiss his rude behavior as a result of the pressure of the present operation. Still, Rubens irked him so much that he lost his entire train of thought. So when Blondie ran into the room waving a computer DVD-R disk in her hand, Johnny Bib had no idea what she was talking about.

“The computer that accessed the library. It’s part of a network in a printing plant. They back up their drives several times a day on RAID-5 disk arrays,” she said.

“What do you mean?” asked Johnny.

“The computer system that was used to access the library: it had a backup system that wrote files to two disks at once. They uploaded the formulas, probably because they had to work them at times the library computers weren’t up. There were copies on the drive. They must have erased the originals, but I have some copies of deleted backups. They didn’t erase them all, Johnny. They did it on some sort of schedule, but they didn’t get parts of the temporary backups. There is a whole set of files they never erased.”