The Pegasus Secret (2 page)

The fireman rubbed a grubby hand across his forehead. “If she was in there . . . Well, it will take our forensic people a few days to identify whatever’s left, probably have to do it by DNA.”

The security man sighed as his shoulders slumped. “I don’t look forward to making that phone call.”

The fireman nodded sympathetically. “Give me your card. I’ll personally see to it you get a copy of the report.”

“Thank you.” Louvere gave one final glance at the gaping cavern that only hours before had been one of the most desirable residences in Paris. Shoulders stooped as though bearing the weight of the world, he walked past the yellow fire trucks that seemed like living animals with each breath-like stroke of their pumps. A short way down the narrow street, a Peugeot was waiting at the curb.

Paris
Three days later

The driver reached over the seat to shake his passenger awake. The man in the backseat of the taxi looked even
more worn than most Americans the cabby picked up at Charles de Gaulle after a transatlantic flight: clothes rumpled, shirt wrinkled, face unshaven. Once the man was awake, his eyes were the true sign of weariness. Red- rimmed as though from a combination of grief and lack of sleep, they had a stare that seemed to focus on something a thousand miles away until he started counting out euros.

Stuffing the bills in his pocket, the driver watched the man enter a nondescript building across from the Place de l’Opéra.

Inside, the American passed antique elevators to climb worn steps to the second floor where he turned right and stopped. In front of him was what appeared to be an unmarked old-fashioned glass door. He knew the single translucent pane was the hardest bulletproof glass available. Slowly he lifted his head to stare at the ceiling where he was sure shadows concealed a camera. Noiselessly, the door slid open and he entered a small chamber facing yet another door, this one made of steel.

“Oui?” a woman’s voice asked through a speaker.

“Langford Reilly to see Patrick Louvere,” the man said in English. “He’s expecting me.”

As noiselessly as the first, the second door opened and Lang Reilly entered one of many offices of France’s security force. In front of him stood a man in a dark, Italian-cut suit. The shirt was crisp and the shoes reflected the ceiling lights. In years past, Lang and Dawn had joked that Patrick Louvere must change his clothes several times a day to look so fresh.

Louvere regarded Lang a moment through heavily lidded eyes, eyes that had always reminded Lang of a basset hound. “Langford!” he exclaimed, continuing in nearly ac- centless English as he embraced his guest. “It has been, what? Ten, fifteen years? Too long for friends to be apart.”
He stepped back, a hand still on each of Lang’s arms. “You should have called. We could have sent a car.”

Lang nodded. “A cab seemed the quickest way, but thanks.”

The Frenchman dropped his hands. “I cannot tell you how sorry . . .”

“I appreciate that, Patrick, but can we get started?”

Louvere was not offended by what most of his countrymen would have considered brusqueness. Americans were famous for getting to the point. “But of course!” He turned and spoke to someone Lang could not see. “Coffee, please, Paulette. This way, Lang.”

Lang followed him down a hall. It had been almost twenty years since he had last been here but other than newer carpet, as cheap and institutional as before, little had changed.

Happily, neither had his relationship with Patrick Louvere. Although their respective governments had frequent differences—the most vocal being the war with Iraq—the American and the Frenchman had remained steadfast friends. Patrick had gladly volunteered to do whatever he could for Lang’s sister, Janet, during her visit with a former school chum in Paris. Since Janet was bringing her adopted son, Jeff, the Frenchman had insisted on taking the young boy into his own home daily to play with his own children while Janet and her friend prowled the shops of Rue du Faubourg St. Honore. It had been Patrick’s phone call that had shattered Lang’s world for a second time.

The DGSE man ushered Lang into the same office he remembered and slid behind a desk clear of anything other than a slender file folder. Almost immediately, a middle-aged woman appeared with a coffee service and began to set cups on the desk. Although he felt he had consumed a tanker load of the stuff lately, Lang was too tired to protest.

“So, you are a lawyer now?” Patrick asked, obviously making conversation until the men could be alone. “You sue the big American companies for millions of dollars, no?”

Lang shook his head. “Actually, I do white-collar criminal defense.”

The Frenchman pursed his lips. “White-collar? Criminal?” He looked as distressed as if he had been forced to mention the words “Australian” and “wine” in the same sentence. “You defend criminals with white collars?”

“You know, crimes that involve business executives. Nonviolent: embezzlement, fraud, that sort of thing.”

“The kind of criminal that can pay your fee.”

“Exactly.”

The woman left the room, closing the door behind her, and Patrick slid the folder across the polished desk top.

Lang looked at it without touching it. “Still no idea who or why?”

Patrick shook his head sadly. “No, none. We found strong traces of aluminum, iron oxide and a nitrogen accelerant.”

“Thermite? Jesus, that’s not something some nutcase cooks up in his basement like a fertilizer bomb, that’s what the military uses to destroy tanks, armor, something requiring intense heat.”

“Which accounts for how quickly the building burned.”

Patrick was avoiding the subject of Lang’s main concern. The news, therefore, was going to be bad. Lang swallowed hard. “The occupants . . . you found . . . ?”

“Three, as I told you on the phone I was certain we would. Your sister, her adopted son and their hostess, Let- tie Barkman.”

Lang had known it was coming, but the irrational part of his mind had held a flicker of hope that somehow Janet and Jeff had not been there. It was like hearing a death sentence at the end of a trial where the result was a foregone
conclusion. It just couldn’t be possible, not in a sane world. Instead of Patrick across the desk, he saw Janet, her eyes twinkling in amusement at a world she refused to take seriously. And Jeff, the child his divorced sister had found in one of those fever-ridden countries south of Mexico, Jeff with the brown skin, dark eyes and profile that could have been taken from a Mayan carving. Jeff with his baseball cap turned backwards, over-sized shorts and high-top sneakers. Jeff, Lang’s ten-year-old best buddy and as close as Lang would ever come to having a son.

Lang did nothing to wipe away the tears running down his cheek. “Who would want to . . . ?”

From somewhere Patrick produced a handkerchief. “We don’t know. The Barkman woman was a rich American divorcée living in Paris, but as far as we can tell, she had no ties to political extremists. In fact, we can find no one among her friends who even knows what her politics were. Your sister was a doctor, a . . .”

“Juvenile orthopedist,” Lang supplied. “She spent a month out of every year working in third-world countries where her patients couldn’t afford medical care. Jeff was orphaned by an earthquake. She brought him home.”

“She also was divorced, was she not?”

Lang leaned forward to stir his coffee. It gave him something to do with hands that seemed useless in his lap. “Yeah, guy named Holt. We haven’t heard from him since they split seven, eight years ago. She kept his name ’cause that’s the one on her medical degree.”

“And obviously robbery was not a motive, not with the total destruction of the house.”

“Unless the thieves didn’t want anyone to know what was stolen.”

“Possible,” Patrick agreed, “but Madame Barkman had an extraordinary alarm system with interior burglar bars. Part of
having lived in your New York, I suppose. The place was like, like . . . like the place where Americans keep their gold.”

“Fort Knox,” Lang supplied.

“Fort Knox. I would guess the intent was to destroy rather than steal.”

“Destroy what?”

“When we know that, we will be close to knowing who these criminals are.”

The two men stared at each other across the desk, each unable to think of something appropriate to say, until Patrick leaned forward. “I know it is small comfort to you, but the fire was intense. They would have died instantly from having the air sucked out of their bodies if the explosion did not kill them first.”

Lang appreciated the thought behind the effort and recognized it as a well-intentioned lie.

“The case is actually within the jurisdiction of the police,” Patrick went on. “I don’t know how long I can continue to convince them we have reason to believe it was the act of terrorists.”

Lang wanted the case in the hands of the DGSE for two reasons. First, his friendship with Patrick was likely to evoke more than the routine effort to see the case solved. Besides, the French security force was one of the world’s best. Second, the Paris police was a morass of political infighting. Peter Sellers’s
Pink Panther
rendition of the inept Inspector Clouseau had some basis in fact.

Mistaking Lang’s thoughts for uncertainty, the Frenchman continued, “Of course, every resource . . .”

“I’d like to go to the scene,” Lang said.

Patrick held up his hands, palms outward. “Of course. My car and driver are yours for as long as you wish.”

“And do you have any idea what they did the day before . . . ?”

Patrick touched the folder. “It is routine to check such things.”

Lang pulled the file over and opened it. With eyes stinging from tears as well as lack of sleep, he began to read.

Paris
The same day

Lang left his friend’s office to go directly to the Place des Vosges. Being here, the last place Janet and Jeff had been alive, somehow brought him closer to them. He paused a long time in front of the blackened cave that was number 26. Head bowed, he stood on grass that had been scorched brown. With each minute, his resolve to see the killers exposed and punished increased. He was deaf to the sound of the grinding of his own teeth and unaware of the scowl on his face. Residents, delivery men and the curious increased their pace around him as though he were potentially dangerous.

“I’ll get them myself if that’s what it takes,” he muttered. “Fucking bastards!”

A uniformed nanny behind him broke into a trot to get the pram and its cargo as far away as possible.

His next stop was to a mortician recommended by Patrick. The service was professional, cool and devoid of the oily faux sympathy dispensed by American funeral directors. He paid for two simple metal caskets, one only half-size, and made arrangements to have the bodies shipped back to the States.

He tried hard but unsuccessfully not to think about how very little of Janet and Jeff those European-shaped boxes would contain.

There was no rational reason to track his sister’s last
hours other than a curiosity he saw no reason to deny. Besides, his flight didn’t leave till evening and he didn’t want to impose on his friend’s hospitality. Credit card receipts electronically summoned by Patrick provided a road map of Janet’s last day. She had visited Hermès and Chanel, making relatively small purchases: a scarf, a blouse. Probably more interested in souvenirs than haute couture, Lang decided. He did little more than peer through windows at mannequins too thin to be real and draped in outfits that exceeded the average annual American income. The number of Ferraris and Lamborghinis parked curbside dispelled any doubts he might have had as to the extravagance of the goods inside the shops.

The last credit card receipt led him to the Ile St. Louis. Overshadowed literally and economically by the adjacent Ile de la Cité and its towering Notre-Dame cathedral, the St. Louis was a quirky neighborhood in the middle of the Seine. Lang remembered eight blocks of tiny hotels, twenty-seat bistros and small shops filled with oddities.

Leaving Patrick’s car and driver in one of the parking spots so rare along the narrow streets, Lang climbed out of the Peugeot in front of a patisserie, inhaling the aroma of freshly baked bread and sweets. He walked southeast along Rue St. Louis en l’Ile until he came to an intersection where the curbs were even closer, Rue des Deux Points. He was trying to match the address on the receipt but street numbers were either hard to see or nonexistent. Luckily, there was only one shop displaying the sign
magasin d’antiquités
, antique shop.

An overhead bell announced his entry into a space crowded with the accoutrements of civilization from at least the past hundred years or so. Oil lamps as well as electric ones were stacked on sewing tables along with piles of dusty magazines and flatware tied in bunches. Bronze and marble statues and busts of goddesses and
emperors paraded up and down aisles covered in shag carpet and oriental rugs. Lang resisted the image of cobwebs his imagination created.

The single room smelled of dust and disuse with a hint of mildew. Careful not to dislodge a record player and recordings that Lang guessed dated from the 1950s, he turned around, looking for the proprietor.