The Coil (23 page)

“How kind of you. How incredibly kind. Thank you very much.”

When he turned on his engine, Edith Piaf sang from his CD player, and they listened to a wise but sad melody of
amour
as he drove her up toward the street. This was where the danger of discovery was sharpest: She must not be seen leaving.

She sighed and groaned, reaching down to massage her ankle.

“Is it hurting, mademoiselle?” he asked with concern.

“Just a twinge.” She massaged enthusiastically, staying out of sight.

As he spun the steering wheel to the right, she counted to ten. When she finally sat up, they were safely beyond the hotel. She directed him two more blocks, and he left her in front of a shoe store she had done business with the last time she was in Paris.

She limped inside. When his truck disappeared, she ran out and used a public phone to call the hotel with an anonymous tip about a dead man in room 405. She stopped to buy a few items to disguise herself and hurried back toward the hotel, thinking about the woman killer.

The Paris police hustled in and out of the Hôtel Valhalla and assembled a barricade as the press pursued with cameras and microphones and notepads. Pedestrians stopped in the hot sunlight to stare. Wearing sunglasses and a black straw hat to accompany her dark slacks and jacket, Liz hid in a doorway beside another poster for the Cirque des Astres. The poster was a good-luck beacon, she decided. From here, she could observe not only the hotel and street but the female killer, too.

With grim satisfaction, Liz saw the woman's neutral mask had shattered. She radiated rage, from the knife-thin line of her lips to her slashing gestures, as she made a slew of cell calls, apparently issuing orders. Her sunglasses were locked on the commotion at the hotel at all times. Finally, she paused. Seemed to rally. She dialed again. This was a longer, more thoughtful call, and when she ended it, she appeared calmer, as if a decision that she liked had been reached.

Then what Liz had hoped to trigger happened: Still carrying her shopping bag, the woman marched off. Liz skirted around and followed, while a man who had been hovering at the barricade slid into the woman's place, continuing to surveil the hotel. As Liz trailed through the winding, confusing streets, the woman backtracked. She stepped into shops and exited through side doors. She rushed and slowed, trying to flush out a tail. The woman was very good.

Liz hung back, then she accelerated without appearing to rush. She took off the straw hat and put on Asher's beret. Took off her jacket and the beret. Put on the straw hat again. Automatic, instinctive, the past reached out and propelled her on.

For the most part, it was an invisible dance to the local crowds, and no one seemed to notice except a taxi driver, who paced Liz, his roof light on, looking for a fare. She studied his face, suspicious because one driver had picked her up twice. She did not recognize him. Still, she waved him on and watched until he stopped on the next block and picked up an older couple. Just then, the woman turned down another street, and Liz followed, the taxi driver slipping from her mind.

 

Under glowing street lamps, César Duchesne limped toward his safe house north of the Eiffel Tower. He still wore his flat taxi cap, and beneath that his miniature earphones. From his belt hung his CD player. The long, moist shadows of late afternoon drenched the sidewalk. His alert gaze moved constantly, sweeping traffic and people, alleys and parked cars. He did not expect to be stopped, certainly not identified, but one never knew. In a long life of clandestine activity, one learned to trust neither humanity nor one's luck.

He found the place on the CD that he wanted to rehear. As the Coil's chief of security, Duchesne was not only in charge of the operation, but also the sole monitor of the listening device in Liz Sansborough's cell. He was still trying to identify the woman's voice. She spoke English, but with a French accent.

“Come to me.”

“What?”
That was definitely Liz.

“Come to me, and we will release Sarah Walker. Take the elevator downstairs and walk out the front door of the hotel. I will meet you. A van will arrive—the same black van that picked her up. You want her to be free, don't you?”

He swore with disgust. He did not recognize the voice, and none of his people knew what she looked like. He listened again.

“Tish Childs. Angus MacIntosh. It could be Sarah Walker next. What's the harm in talking? Come down. You want to see her, don't you?”

“You killed him!”

Duchesne stopped the CD. He did not like this at all. For a moment, he felt his past so close it was inside his skin. It was the metallic scent of blood, the whiff of expensive perfume. It was also a sense of loss more profound than the memory of love. The blackmailing bastard's greed had killed Duchesne's wife and left Duchesne at first quivering, then yanked back into the underbelly. Now he lived with rage and resurrected skills he had been forced to hone again.

To live as he had lived for more than four decades produced a sixth sense about the future. Although the operation appeared to be spinning out of control, it was necessary. How else to force the hand of the beast with the files? But the risks were high and growing higher, and he found himself doing something that surprised him: He worried. Until his wife was killed, he thought he had forgotten how.

He climbed the stairs of the old apartment building, dragging his right leg. He paused on the first landing, listening for the sounds of children above. One, a boy of about six, was fascinated by his limp. Jean-Luc wanted to be friends. But Duchesne had no friends, especially not vulnerable children. So now he paused to make certain Jean-Luc was not waiting.

When the only noise was of televisions behind the two doors on the landing, he continued up to the next floor, where he checked the filament above his door. It was still there, invisible to sight but not to touch. No one had broken in. He unlocked the door, stepped inside, and waited until his eyes adjusted to the shadowy gloom. He sniffed, could smell no one. Satisfied, he locked and bolted the door.

He took a can of tomato juice from the refrigerator. As he drank, he tapped Cronus's number into his special cell. When Cronus answered, Duchesne sat down wearily.

Call to Brussels, Belgium

“I have information, Cronus. My people checked Atlas, Ocean, Prometheus, and Themis. All were in Paris this afternoon when Baron de Darmond was killed.”

“In Paris? But it happened in Chantilly. So none could—”

“It's not that simple. We could find no one who'd admit seeing them leave central Paris, but that doesn't mean one or more didn't. Each could've taken a car, a bus, or the Métro. Remember, the police report says the meeting between the baron and his killer was a secret even from the baron's staff.”

“So you're saying anyone in the Coil could have killed him?”

“Any and all. Including you. You were in Paris, too. But then, so was I.”

Paris, France

Liz's quarry entered the Saint-Michel Métro station, where she boarded a train going north. At Réaumur-Sébastopol, the woman got out and ate an early dinner at an outdoor café. She appeared unhurried and unconcerned, but her gaze was never at rest, watching everything, studying faces.

Liz made herself eat, too, and followed again, this time onto line three, heading east, where the woman exited at the Gambetta station in the working-class twentieth arrondissement. When Liz emerged into the twilight, still following the woman, there were a dozen people between them, good protection. As a wind whipped the poplars and dusk deepened and a directory of African languages salted the air, Liz tracked the woman into Belleville's farthest outskirts, wondering what pulled her there.

 

With a violent thrust, Sarah hacked one final blow with the cutters. Her hands were numb claws, and her arms and shoulders ached, but she felt better than she had in two days. She peered up at the plywood. She had managed to cut away the wood from the nails on three sides—left, right, and bottom. As soon as her circulation returned, she would raise the plywood and see what the window opened onto. She was hoping for a fire escape, or a roof at a convenient distance below, or even a good strong tree.

She heard a noise and turned. “Asher! No—”

He was sitting upright on the gurney. “Told you I'm good. I was walking around my room at the hospital before those skunks decided to steal me. I'm slow, though. Dignified. You always wanted me to be dignified.”

“I did not. You're trembling.”

“Only because I have you in my sights. Never could resist you.”

“Asher,” she warned.

He grinned.

She sighed. “Oh, all right. You can help.”

As promised, he moved at a sedate pace. He stopped beside her, panting lightly, his expression hopeful. “I'm wishing for an elevator out there.”

“Wish away. I feel as if we're christening the
Queen Elizabeth.
”

“Better that than the
Titanic.
Although I'm sure the champagne was excellent.”

They exchanged an optimistic look and together lifted the plywood a few inches toward them, where it stopped, caught by the nails still embedded at the top.

“Here we go,” she said, lowering her back under the plywood. “I can do this myself. You be lookout. Tell me what you see out the window.”

Pain showed in his tight mouth. He nodded silently, backed up, and sank to her cot. “Good view from here. Front-row seat.”

She nodded, planted her feet wide apart, and used her whole body to lift. The plywood rose. Nails shrieked in protest. The wood bit into her back. Splinters and dust rained down.

“What's there?” she asked.

“Stars. It's night. The stars are out.”

She did not like the sound of that. With the nails loosened, she pushed the plywood farther up until she could slide under it. She looked down and repressed a gasp. They were six stories up, the street a rush of car roofs and streaking lights. The sidewalk seemed to be at the bottom of a dark well. There was no elevator, no fire escape, no rooftop, no tall tree, not even a rope. They were six stories above a sure plunge to death.

Simon's steps were long and angry as he returned to his car. Too many deaths, too many unexplained events, and now he was worried about Sarah. This was the chronic tension of the endless, pitiless wait that was the lot of real spies. Waiting alone on some dark bridge or godforsaken street corner for an asset. Waiting in an empty room for a courier to deliver instructions or new credentials or an escape route from an alien city.

As soon as he had returned to Paris, Simon drove straight to the photo shop of a colleague—Jacqueline Pahnke, formerly of French intelligence—and dropped off his MI6 miniature camera. As he hurried back to his car, he checked his cell and found a single message, a disturbing one, from Sarah:
The people who hired that janitor in London may know you planned to go to the baron's today. I don't have to tell you they're dangerous
…. But he had seen nothing at the château to indicate anyone there had been warned to watch for him or that the baron's murder was related in any way to his being there.

Then came the next unsettling event: He dialed Sarah's cell, and a man answered.

“Yeah?” The man had an American accent.

Simon's brows rose. “Who are you?”

“A friend. Who's this?”

“Tell Sarah it's Simon.”

“Hold on.” A noisy clatter as the phone was set down. The voice returned. “She's busy. She says she'll phone you back. Give me your number.”

That did it. Simon swore and hit the
OFF
button. Sarah already knew his number, which meant some stranger had her cell. He jumped into his car, and sped to her hotel, where an army of gendarmes had cordoned it off. He had to show his MI6 ID to persuade them to reveal a tourist had been found murdered in a room registered to an American couple—Asher Flores and Sarah Walker.

But Sarah had said Asher was not in town. What in bloody hell was going on?

Now Simon fought heavy traffic north. Horns blasted, drivers shouted, but he ignored all of them. He found the phone booth Sarah had described at the intersection of the rue de Bassano and the Champs-Elysées. As she had predicted, there were a dozen notes. The problem was, none was from her.

Perhaps Sarah was held up somewhere. Perhaps…He shook his head.
What crap.
Her cell was in the hands of a stranger. There was a dead tourist in her hotel room. And Asher was in Paris, or at least he had been.

Something had happened all right, and it was all bad.

He bought an
International Herald Tribune
and chose an outdoor table at Chez Paul, where he could watch the glass booth. He forced himself to eat dinner as he scrutinized every face and body type that passed. When he finished the meal, he opened the paper. The G8 meeting on Monday dominated the news. Hideously boring. He turned pages, glancing up every few minutes, reading everything and remembering nothing, until finally, buried in the back, a two-paragraph story about Viera Jozef's death jumped out.

A wave of sorrow washed through him. No photo this time, and it was little more than a rehash of yesterday's news, with finger-pointing by local police and a few heartrending quotes from her brother. The whole thing made his chest knot. Life was not only impossible to understand but far too fleeting.

He paused as an image of himself as a child flashed into his mind. His mother tucked his hand protectively into hers while Sir Robert stood next to them in his three-piece suit, sheltering them with an umbrella as rain pelted down like artillery. He had felt safe then. Perhaps such a sense of safety was, in the end, possible only for a child.

He continued flipping through the paper. With a lurch, he saw Sarah's mug shot, with a short piece about the murder of Tish Childs in London. But the photo was labeled
Elizabeth Sansborough,
and the story quoted police sources that a pistol discovered in a nearby alley was registered to Elizabeth Sansborough, Santa Barbara, California.

Simon frowned. Liz's photo. Liz's gun. Still, he could not believe Liz would have had anything to do with Tish's murder, so there was only one logical answer: Tish's real killer must have planted the pistol. But if Sarah were telling the truth about pursuing the Carnivore's files on her own, for her own reasons, why would the killer frame Liz?

He sat back, thinking, not liking at all the conclusion he was reaching: If the French or English coppers made her, it would not matter what her name was, at least not at first. That mug shot looked exactly like her. She had been in London at the time of the murder. And with the blackmailer's impressive resources, she would be a doable target if she were taken into custody.

Simon's chest contracted and his mouth went dry. Sarah had been expertly set up to be eliminated.

When his cell rang, his relief was profound. He snapped it open. “Sarah?”

Instead, it was Jacqueline Pahnke, announcing his prints were ready. “You are being unfaithful to me,” she accused. “Who is this Sarah? I will hurl her into the Seine.”

Quickly, Simon adjusted, assuming his devil-may-care attitude. “How could you doubt me, Jackie? Sarah's merely a code name for a very middle-aged accountant with no hair. Did the prints turn out well?”

“
Mais oui.
But they look so boring,
chéri.
Whatever do you want them for?”

“Don't worry your pretty head about it.” Simon waited for the explosion. He had known her to slice a man's ear off for less.

Instead, there was a chuckle. “You are such a clown, Simon.”

He made his tone sad, despairing. “Exposed,
je suis desolé.
” And smiled into the phone, transmitting it into his voice. “I'll be right there.” He closed his cell. Instantly, his expression turned grim.

He inspected the phone booth once more and hurried off. His Peugeot was three blocks away. As always, he approached alertly, scanning for surveillance. Satisfied, he inspected the car's locks and tires. At last, he climbed behind the wheel, started the engine, and pulled out into the street. He did not want to leave, but the photos might give him the answer to who had killed the baron, which could lead to the killer who possessed the Carnivore's files. If Sarah really were in trouble, perhaps it would lead him to her. With luck, he would have the blackmailer's identity within the hour.

As he drove off into Paris's glossy night, he puzzled again at the name Hyperion. That was what the killer had called the baron. He must not forget. The name sounded significant, a clue somehow to the blackmailer's identity.

 

In his black Citroën, Gino Malko followed the Peugeot through Paris's nighttime streets, hanging back a good quarter of a mile, where he was certain he would not be spotted. The bicyclist in Chantilly had planted not a magnet but a miniature GPS tracking device under the Peugeot, and Malko himself had just added a second GPS tracker for backup, concealed inside the rear fender.

He glanced down occasionally at the screen of his Go-Book MAX laptop, which showed not only the sports car's current route but a history of everywhere it had been since Chantilly. Accurate to within two feet, using a signal bounced off GPS satellites that regularly circled the earth, the electronic map also listed street addresses and the length of time the car stopped at each location.

Gino Malko liked this. He approved of technology and science and the advantages it gave a man of his profession. As he drove, he saw this as his pattern—always reaching forward, very different from how he was raised in steamy Jacksonville, Florida, where his Russian grandfather worked in the shipyards from sunrise to sundown, when he was lucky enough to have a job. He was the one who had shortened the family name, Malkovich, to Malko.

Gino had been fond of the old man, whose optimism was too large for his purse or his family's patience. Each January, his grandfather bought a new Cadillac, funded by loan sharks, who inevitably repossessed it by March. When they tired of his charm and vows, they killed him. That was when Gino learned that optimism could kill.

By then, his Italian mother had broken a beer bottle over the head of her drunken husband—Gino's father—and taken him and his two sisters to Miami, where she worked as a “hostess” in one of the clubs in Little Havana. From her, he learned that hard, humiliating work did not provide a living. By the time he was twelve, he was on the streets, running with the drugheads and the hookers and the immigrants. He hated the filth and hunger, but whenever he slipped over to Miami Beach, where the rich played and the rest of the world served them, his problems evaporated. His pulse raced with excitement, because there he saw affluence in fascinating, showstopping display.

Because he was not optimistic, Malko could not be daring. Still, he wanted the world of the extremely wealthy. In fact, he felt protective of it. The rich had qualities he would never have. So he went to work as simple muscle for a gangster who bought beautiful women and mansions, lawyers and politicians. But the first time Malko was sent out to “talk,” he got too excited and whacked the guy. It was a mistake, but it paid off in a promotion. After that, he was officially an enforcer.

When the gangster was sent to prison, Malko moved on to Memphis, then to Atlanta, and eventually to Chicago. Along the way, he picked up manners and how to dress and learned some French—he already spoke Spanish and Russian. In Chicago, he went independent, easily sliding into the underworld, where word of mouth was the only advertisement. He had impressive word of mouth. Jobs sent him across America, coast to coast, and he made more money than he had ever imagined back in Jacksonville. Sometimes he thought about his grandfather and what the loan sharks had done to him. He pitied the old man, but now he understood why he'd had to die.

As Malko stopped at a red light, he checked the electronic map. Following the Peugeot was child's play. But the driver was another matter. Each time the man parked, he walked. By the time Malko got there, he was gone. The man was well trained—that was obvious from the first time Malko saw him, when he had chased Malko all the way to the top of the Lindenhof.

Malko needed to know who he was. He had snapped a digital photo of him outside the Hôtel Valhalla and sent it by e-mail to private and government data banks, to which his employment secured unlimited access. There had been no match. He had lifted fingerprints from the Peugeot's door frame, but again nothing. He asked for and received via e-mail a copy of the Peugeot's rental agreement, but the renter paid in cash, and the driver's license turned out to be fake.

Ordinarily, Malko liked a challenge. But not today. He had no identity for his prey; worse, he had no idea what he wanted.

 

Jacqueline Pahnke's business was in Paris's popular Marais district, near the elegant Place des Vosges, where brick and stone buildings from the seventeenth century towered elegantly around the leafy plaza. The night was close and muggy. As Simon passed a barbershop, one of the barbers stepped outside with a bowl of sudsy water and a cloth. Dressed in the traditional full white apron, he nodded a greeting and went to work cleaning the glass on his front door, readying the shop for morning.

Simon nodded back, his steps quickening as he closed in on Jackie's shop, two doors away. The lighted interior showed through the plate-glass window, displaying the usual accoutrements of a photo studio—cameras, flashes, tripods. When Simon opened the door to the narrow old shop, a bell tinkled, announcing his arrival.

Jackie came from the back, rushing as if he were the most important customer in the world. Bristling with vitality, she was nearing fifty. Her pale hair was short and framed her oval face. She had pushed her reading glasses up into her hair.

“What I have for you!” she exclaimed in English as Simon shook her hand.

“Qu'est-ce que c'est?”

“Talk the English. It's better for my language skills. Someday I will learn your barbaric tongue very well. Come.” She beckoned, leading him back through the clutter of a business run by an artist. She offered photographic printing services as well as selling the usual stock of camera items, but her heart was in her own photographs. That was evident from the dramatic black-and-white landscapes and character studies that hung high on the walls—her private showroom.

Through a door at the back was her workroom. It was simple, with cabinets, counters lined with supplies, and wires strung across one corner, from which film and prints hung, drying. An odor of chemicals tinged the air.

“This is the stack.” She pulled a pile of prints toward the center of a worktable. Most were eight-by-tens, while three were sixteen-by-twenties. “Sit, sit. All those numbers. These are the only ones that interest.” She picked up the oversized prints, each showing a different part of the photo wall in de Darmond's office. He was in every picture. “I made them very big so you could see the faces well. Who is this man? He thinks much of himself, does he not? Perhaps I know him?”

“You've probably seen him in the papers or on television. Claude de Darmond.”

She considered. “Ah, yes. Indeed. I notice it now. He's that famous banker. The one who plays polo and goes to all the important horse races. Baron de Darmond,
oui
?” At one time, she had worked for French intelligence. On her last job, and his first, they had met. She cocked her head. “So you're after the grand baron?” She frowned. “Oh, no. He is dead today. Murdered! I saw it on the television!”

“Yes, I heard.” Simon sat at the desk, eager to work. “Photographing his wall was a lark. Doubt there's anything useful in that hodgepodge of glitterati. Probably nothing here either.” He tapped the remaining papers, sincerely hoping he was wrong.

She cocked her head. “Not for an instant do I believe you, Simon. You wouldn't go to the effort otherwise. I will not ask when you took the photos.”

He grinned. “I'm erratic, remember? I don't always have a good reason for what I do. Just ask my boss.”