Dead Run (10 page)

Another hour went by. Then another.

The patrol began to be convinced there was nothing here. No bombs. No Helloco. Not even the usual kids hoping to party undiscovered by the catacomb security.

In Iraq rarely a day had gone by that they didn’t come across a lollipop, and the patrols had been hours of poking and prodding every suspicious-looking lump or dip in the ground. IEDs were the second greatest threat to Americans in Iraq. Will still had nightmares about those truffle hunts.

Now here he was in Paris hunting for explosives again.

And so was Taylor.

Up ahead a radio crackled, and an urgent voice said something in French that Will couldn’t follow.

“Did you get that?” he asked Arthur. Arthur had a better grasp of the language.

“I think they’re saying they’ve found something.”

“
Who
found something?”

Arthur shook his head. It was impossible to hear over the voices speaking excitedly in front of them. Everyone had stopped walking. One of the sniffer dogs suddenly sat back on its haunches and let out a long, bloodcurdling howl.

“What the hell?” Will looked at Arthur. Arthur’s face was pallid and alarmed in the faded light.

Arthur shook his head quickly.

In all his experience in Iraq, Will had never seen a sniffer dog react like that.

The thought no sooner registered than the ground began to shake. Bones clacked as they spilled like dominoes; people began to shout. Sand and water and bits of rock rained down from above.

“What’s happening, Brandt?” yelled Arthur.

“Retreat!” Will ordered. “Go back now.”

The men behind them began to fall back. The last thing Will saw before the lights went out was a grinning, hollow-eyed skull caught in the glare of his flashlight.

Chapter Seven

Taylor must have paced a hundred miles of hospital linoleum before the gray-faced doctor appeared at the end of the long hallway. It seemed the longest walk of Taylor’s life even though the doctor met him halfway.

“How is he?” Despite his effort, his voice shook. Of all the scenarios he had pictured, this one had been comfortably missing from Taylor’s imaginings. Will was too practical, too careful—and yet here he stood as Will had stood too many times before. It was ludicrous. It was impossible, but here it was.

“You are the partner of Monsieur Brandt?”

Taylor nodded, dry-mouthed, dry-eyed, heart banging away like it was going to snap its brackets, bracing himself for it. For the first time he understood why Will maybe felt he couldn’t go through it all again.

The doctor smiled briefly at whatever he read in Taylor’s expression. “
Non, non
, monsieur. Your friend, your partner, he will recover. He is not greatly injured. Shock and concussion, this is the extent of his injuries. A very lucky young man.”

The relief that washed through Taylor left him weak. If there had been something to grab, to lean on, he’d have reached for it. As it was, he stood there, trying to hide the fact that he wasn’t quite steady. In the background he could hear the hospital intercom and a calm voice summoning help for another emergency in a long night of catastrophes.

“Can I see him?”

“
Non, je regrette ce n’est pas possible
.” It was the same in every language.

Taylor wasn’t above pleading. “Just for a minute. I won’t disturb him.” He swallowed. “I just need to see for myself.”

With so many more gravely injured, so many crises to deal with, the doctor didn’t have time for this. The expression that crossed his face was a mix of impatience and reluctant sympathy. “Two minutes, monsieur. No more.”

Taylor nodded. Belatedly he remembered his manners. “Thank you.”

The doctor waved him on. Taylor passed the nurse’s station. They looked doubtfully at the doctor who again waved Taylor on, and then at last Taylor was standing beside Will’s hospital bed.

He barely registered the monitors, the IVs, the medical paraphernalia. He saw only Will, who looked like the fallen hero in a movie: bare-chested and pale. One of his hands was taped. There was a square white dressing on the side of his head. Not nearly the extent of repair work Taylor had been expecting. They hadn’t even had to shave much of Will’s hair. There was a scrape along his jaw and a bruise along his eyebrow.

He was caught between the desire to cry and to strangle Will. “Jesus, Brandt,” Taylor whispered. “You bastard. Why’d you have to do that?”

Will slept peacefully on. His long black lashes never stirred.

Taylor stayed as long as the nurses allowed. He wasn’t doing anyone any good, including Will, but it was impossible to leave voluntarily. He stood leaning against the wall, watching Will sleep as closely as if he were going to be tested on how many breaths Will took in a minute.

They’d been lucky. Not everyone was that lucky. Arthur was still in surgery the last Taylor had heard, and the rumor was that two gendarmes had died in the collapse of the tunnel. Now the emergency services of the city were scrambling to make sense of the disaster.

When Taylor finally returned to Will’s apartment, he found a dozen messages from Tara on the answering machine, each terser than the last, indicating her escalating alarm.

It was past five in the morning, but she’d ordered them to call her regardless of the hour.

She answered on the first ring. Taylor debriefed her in clipped sentences.

“It’s all over the news. You should see the footage. It looks like a sinkhole swallowed a section of the city above where you all were. But
you’re
all right?” Tara insisted at the end of his succinct accounting.

“Yes.”

“Thank God. And Will is going to be all right?”

He was very tired. The words stuck in his throat. All he could manage was a grunt.

“Were you able to see him?”

Taylor pried out another assent.

“That’s good.” When he didn’t respond, she asked experimentally, “Does anyone there know about your relationship?”

“No. At least…not at the embassy. We kept it under wraps so we could continue working together. And then…”

Tara possessed a few diplomatic skills herself. “Don’t worry. Everyone knows you’re close. You were spending your vacation together. And the bond between partners is a TV cliché.”

Taylor confirmed wearily. Should he call Will’s family? He didn’t know. They’d never really discussed it. Taylor was the one with the penchant for winding up on the critical list. He wasn’t even sure Will had told his father and brother about their relationship. Definitely not the way to break it to them.

“According to the news, two police officers were killed. Why do people
do
things like this?”

“I don’t know.” He’d stopped wondering long ago. His was not to reason why. “I just wish you and the kids weren’t in Paris right now.”

“I wish
you
weren’t in Paris right now,” Tara retorted. “I’ve paid you enough hospital visits to last me a lifetime. Anyway, we’re only here for a couple of days, and we’re not big on tourist attractions.”

“Keep it that way. The word is, the last message was definitely anticapitalist and anti-American.”

“So what else is new? Isn’t hating Americans de rigueur? It’s like adding salt to a dish. No terrorist mission is complete without it.”

“You’re starting to sound like me.”

Tara laughed. “That’s what James says. Speaking of which, he’s signaling me to get off the phone so you can get some sleep.”

“Yeah. I’m beat. Tara, remember what I said about staying away from places Americans usually go. Skip the Louvre. No Euro Disney. No—”

“Roger wilco, little brother. We’ll stick to our
Parisian’s Guide to Paris
. Okay?”

“Okay.” Taylor yawned so widely he had to wiggle his jaw to realign it. “Night.”

“
Bonne nuit, mon enfant
.”

“And enough with the little brother stuff.”

Tara was laughing as she rang off.

Taylor went upstairs and stared at the neatly made bed. As tired as he was, the thought of facing that empty expanse of sheet and blanket was too much right then. Every time he closed his eyes, he saw again Will buried beneath that tumble of rock and earth and bone.
Bone
. Like a premade grave.

He pulled off his stained, torn shirt and tossed it into the trash. He was filthy and his hands were a mess. He’d been part of the panicked rescue effort that had attempted to dig into the collapsed cavern before emergency services had arrived. One thing for the French, they had top-notch disaster services. But then it was a city that had suffered a lot of grief in its two thousand or more years.

Taylor ran a quick, hot shower, closing his mind to the memory of a few hours earlier and that stupid, pointless quarrel with Will. The cuts and scrapes on his hands stung, but that was just proof he was still alive. Alive and lucky.

He turned off the taps and dried himself. Reminders of Will were everywhere, from the damp towel draped over the laundry basket to a glop of spilled hair gel.

Downstairs he made coffee and poured a healthy splash of Will’s bourbon into it. He got Will’s laptop out and started it up, hacking into Will’s accounts without trouble. He knew all Will’s password variations, as Will knew his.

Once he was on the net, though, Taylor found himself at a loss. Where did he go from here? The only lead they had was Helloco, and that trail was cold any way you looked at it.

He typed Helloco’s name into the search engine. Pages and pages of results flashed up. Everything from a Wikipedia page to a number of books and documentaries. Yet Taylor had never heard of Helloco until he’d read that article in
American Cop.

But then, as terrorists went, Helloco was relatively small potatoes. Especially in a country like France, which had a long and intimate acquaintance with terror—starting with their own bloody revolution. The French had suffered years of attacks by Algerian independence fighters and were currently coping with the ongoing threat posed by Islamist extremists. So a few car bombs and the loss of one small museum thanks to the acting out of a handful of disgruntled Bretons probably fell more under the heading of Significant Irritation than Terror.

Taylor read the translated Wikipedia article on Helloco, wondering who maintained the page. It was a regurgitation of Helloco’s political “manifesto” and an account of how he’d destroyed his various targets. The article wasn’t flattering, exactly, but it wasn’t critical either. There was very little information about Helloco’s early years, which made Taylor suspicious as to whether Helloco or someone close to him monitored the account.

One thing Taylor had learned in the DSS was that criminals great and small tended to share one characteristic: an oversized ego. Maybe that was one of the requisites for believing what you wanted was more important than the rights of others.

He followed the links on the Wikipedia article to the other members of Finistère—they also had Wikipedia pages, but the information on Gabriel Besson, Jean-Louis Roland, Paul Jacquard, Brice Didier, and Marie Laroche was even sketchier than the information on Helloco.

Taylor rubbed his eyes and drank more coffee. None of this connected in any way with Yannick Hinault.

Had LAPD managed to come up with a warrant to search Hinault’s home yet?

Taylor resumed his search. Wikipedia even had a stub article—if you could call it that—on the gardener who had died when the explosives Yann Helloco was preparing for a new political “statement” had blown up the country house where members of Finistère were hiding out. Guillaume Durand had been twenty-four years old with no apparent political leanings nor any particular ambitions when he died. Just an ordinary young man.

Yet someone had thought it worth starting a Wikipedia page on him. Was that significant or not?

The police on two continents would be doing their job. He needed a different angle. A fresh angle. He clicked back to Helloco’s page and pondered the minimal personal information.

Before Helloco had turned to activism, he’d studied art. According to both Wikipedia and Inspector Bonnet, Helloco’s work had shown great promise.
Il a eu une passion grande pour la peinture et l'art
, according to the nameless Wikipedia author.

Maybe that was the angle they needed?

One thing stood out. Finistère had never been a major political movement, and it had not been a large organization. The membership had extended beyond Besson, Roland, Jacquard, Didier, Laroche, and Helloco, but those six had formed the nucleus, the body of the snake—and Helloco had been the snake’s head. Besson and Roland were still serving prison sentences. Jacquard and Didier were dead. Laroche was…a chick. So even if Helloco was back from the dead, there wasn’t much of an organization to resurrect.

In fact, the idea of these remaining senior citizens racing around Paris and planting bombs was just, well,
incroyable
, as they said here.

So what the hell was going on?

Why
was it important to someone to make it look like Helloco was still alive and that Finistère was back in action?

Taylor clicked on one of the Helloco links leading to
École nationale supérieure des beaux arts
. His lips parted. What the…? He copied the introductory paragraph, pasted it into Babel Fish, and pressed Translate.

Associated in various ways with New Realism, the artists of such international political movements encouraged a do-it-yourself aesthetic and valued simplicity over complexity. Painters such as Helloco included a strong current of anticommercialism and an anti-art sensibility in their work, disparaging the conventional market-driven art world in favor of an artist-centered creative practice.

Yeah. Whatever. That still didn’t explain why every damn painting Helloco did was of a graveyard or a grave.

* * *

“There’s been a development,” RSO Stone informed Taylor when he crawled groggily out of an exhausted sleep three hours later to answer the shrilling phone. “Get over to the Prefecture of Police ASAP. Inspector Bonnet is waiting for you.”