Tommy Carmellini 02 - The Traitor (15 page)

I ignored the crowd and tried to read a newspaper as I waited for my meal. Didn't make much progress. I kept thinking about Elizabeth Conner, wondering if she was a DGSE agent. Hmm ... How did a well-spoken American woman, if indeed she was an American, get hooked up with French intelligence? Or did she just get smitten by my handsome mug in passing and decide to check me out before she wasted any more time on me? Perhaps that was it.

The next morning I rode the subway out to the airport to meet Willie the Wire. He and I became partners in a lock shop in Washington after he got out of prison the last time. He was a slim, dapper black man twenty years my senior. From the age of fifteen, he worked as a bellboy in Washington hotels. He would probably still be doing it if he hadn't decided to carry out the guests' luggage and fence it before the guests checked out. He got remarkably good at picking locks—hence his nickname—although it was inevitable that sooner or later he would get caught.

He had gone straight since his last stretch in the pen and worked middling hard at running the lock shop, taking care of everything while I wasn't there and entertaining me when I was. We got along reasonably well, I thought, considering our age and background differential.

He spotted me instantly when he came out the customs door pulling his suitcase.

"Hey, Tommy."

"It's Terry."

"Huh?"

"I'm Terry while I'm here."

"Hell, I'll never remember that."

"How was your flight?"

"It felt like I was packed in a slave ship. Let's go see the Folies."

"Don t you want to get some sleep?"

'Hell, no. I want to see something."

They do the Folies at night—this is morning."

We got on the subway and rode it downtown, getting off at the Eiffel Tower stop. When we got to the thing, Willie stood there looking up. Since it soared from a wide base to a point, from the ground it looked as if it reached halfway to Mars. Willie craned his neck, watching the puffy clouds driven by the wind off the Atlantic and the intermittent patches of blue. Finally he tired of it and began ogling female tourists, examining the statues on the Seine bridges,
^w
atching the barges go up and down, looking over the whole scene.

Since I was on tour guide duty, I said, "I'll stay with your bag if you want to go up there."

"Naw. Been here and seen it—that's enough. Now tell me about this gig you got goin'."

"I need someone I trust to watch my back."

"Oh. Pray tell, who we gonna get to watch mine?"

"I will."

"Sure! I notice that you haven't told me what you got goin' down."

"Later."

Swine that I am, I didn't pass Grafton's tidbit about the murdered DGSE man on to Willie. Nor did I tell him the happy news that the French spooks knew I was Tommy Carmellini, CIA dude. He would have boogied immediately, leaving me to do Grafton's chores with the help of the three stooges. Okay, okay—they weren't stooges. Still, I wanted Willie the Wire behind me. He was high maintenance and whined a lot, but I trusted him; he knew that I'd kill him if he screwed me over. These other guys weren't true believers like Willie.

Willie eyed me suspiciously. "Ain't doin' no shootin' and ain't stoppin' no bullets. Not for a goddamn soul, includin' you."

I had had enough. "Want to go home now? You've been here and done it and there's a plane this evening."

Willie glanced up at the Eiffel Tower one more time, then waved that away. "I'll stick for a little while, but don't fool yourself, Tommy. The scene gets heavy, you can mail me a postcard in Washington—I'll be there when it arrives."

Right. I had been trying to convince myself that this gig was going to be a piece of cake. Maybe it would be. Besides, the change of scenery would be good for Willie, would broaden his horizons. God knows they could use a little broadening.

The next morning Willie Varner and I drove out to see Rodet's chateau. We went in the car.

"Since I didn't get a call from an emergency room or the morgue," I said, "I assume things went okay last night."

"After the Folies, I found a cozy little whorehouse. We mixed chocolate and vanilla. Made a lotta shakes."

"International relations."

"It was
'out, oui, bay-bee
all night long." Willie the Wire sighed contentedly, then yawned.

"So how do you like France?"

"Pussy's as pricey over here in frog-land as everything else."

"Socialism, I guess."

"One of the women told me it was taxes. They tax ever' damn thing over here, she said."

"Do you have any money left?"

"Still got a few euros burning a hole in my pocket. Just gonna lay around today restin' up—rechargin' my battery, so to speak—and goin' back tonight."

"Not tonight. I'm going to need your help."

We found the place where the power lines went into the property and backtracked to the first transformer.

With Willie at the wheel, I used binoculars where I could. We looked for security patrols, marked and unmarked, and surveillance devices. I could see cameras mounted in the trees inside the fence, but apparently none outside. After we had leisurely circled the entire estate, a circuit close to ten miles long due to the location of the bridges, we headed back for town.

"What do you think?" Willie asked.

"It can be done."

After I dropped him at his hotel so he could get some sleep, I headed back to my pad on the Rue Paradis.

I climbed the stairs making the usual racket, passed Elizabeth Conner's door and unlocked my garret on the floor above. After drawing the blinds on the window, I opened the backpack Al had given me and dumped the contents on the bed.

Someone had packed a wealth of goodies for me to play with. The first item I picked up was the scanner, which was battery operated. I turned it on and went around the apartment looking for bugs, the electronic kind. I didn't find any.

That didn't mean there weren't any; it meant that I didn't find them, if indeed they were there.

I began an inch-by-inch search of the walls, floor and ceiling of the apartment. The job took several hours. I was looking for a hidden camera, or for a bug that could be turned on and off remotely. I moved furniture, disassembled the lamps, removed and reinstalled all the protector plates on the electric sockets and light switches, took off and inspected the air vents, went over the floor and walls with a magnifying glass and pulled the innards out of the television. It was tiring, tedious work. Fortunately there was no telephone or I would have had to take it apart to check the circuitry. When I finally got everything back together and back in place, I was ready to certify the apartment as bug-free. Not that I cared if anyone overheard me humming in the tub or brushing my teeth—I just wanted to know if anyone was curious enough about me to bug the place. Apparently not, and that was good.

I was still bothered by the fact that Conner was in the apartment directly below mine. One of the things she could have done was merely put a listening device on her ceiling, which was my floor. With a simple computer, such a device could be made to work as well as a microphone in my bedroom lamp. That would be a cheap, easy way to keep me under surveillance.

I felt like a racehorse waiting for the gate to open. Tonight was going to be busy. With nothing better to do, I went for a run.

That evening Sarah Houston ate dinner with one of the FBI forensic accountants in Paris going through Oil-for-Food bank records. They ate at a small restaurant he selected from a guidebook. He had asked her to dinner, and she thought,
What the hec\,
so here she was. It

wasn't as if he were a toad; he was clean-cut and good-looking, with a square jaw and good teeth, and he didn't have any visible tattoos or piercings. She kept a smile on her face and listened to what he had to say. Someone once told her that this was the way to do it: Men need women to pay attention.

"The thing that attracted me to accounting was the beauty of the logic," Wally Slayton told her as they worked on an appetizer of
pate de campagne.
"Who knew that this career choice would put me in the thick of the action? Enron, HealthSouth, WorldCom, Tyco—I've worked 'em all. Very exciting, let me tell you."

"Lots of travel," Sarah Houston managed.

"Oh, yes. I've got enough frequent flyer miles for a round trip for two to Tahiti."

"Next vacation."

"Oh, yeah."

The waiter served the coq au vin and refilled their wineglasses. "This Grafton," Slayton remarked after he had told her about some of his more memorable vacations. "Do you really think he knows what he's doing?"

She deflected the question. "I haven't thought about it."

"He doesn't think like an accountant, I can tell you that."

Sarah Houston picked at the entree and helped herself to more wine. "I suppose not."

"Accounting requires a logical mind and the ability to pay attention to details. Grafton . .." He raised an eyebrow, then abandoned the admiral to his fate. "I've worked with some of the best prosecutors in the world. It's amazing to watch them in action. Dynamic personalities, brilliant strategists. You can feel the electricity when they're around .. ." He went on, naming names, regaling her with his experiences in the midst of legal combat. Had he but known about Sarah Houston's past legal adventures, he would have probably been tactful enough to pick another subject. Maybe.

Sarah finished the wine in her glass and stifled a burp. She had a headache.

A few raindrops hit the windowpane beside the table and ran down to puddle on the outside sill. She stared at the puddles and thought about Tommy Carmellini.

I ate a light dinner at a little restaurant I had been walking past. They decided I was a barbarian when I refused wine and insisted on Coke—with ice.

After I returned to the apartment, I mounted a bug on the floor. It had a dish receiver on it, one that acted as a collector of vibrations. I plugged the lead into the amplifier, which weighed about half a pound, plugged the unit into a wall socket, turned it on and put on my earphones. After I adjusted the controls, I found myself listening to a television program in French and the sound of footsteps and doors closing in this building and the hotel next door. The headphone cord was about ten feet long. Still wearing the phones, I got out the infrared goggles, made sure the batteries were charged, put them on and fired them up.

The goggles were the latest and greatest. I'd worn them for months in Iraq. When properly adjusted, the wearer could look through a normal visual obstruction, such as vegetation or a wall, and see if there was a heat source beyond it, such as a person or animal. I walked to the window and stood looking at the buildings across the street.

The exterior wall still radiated some heat, but it was fading. Fortunately autumn had arrived in Paris. Poorly insulated hot-water pipes stood out in bold relief. I could also see a stove cooking, several hot plates and people. I stood looking at the human figures as I played with the gain on the unit.

I could see them easily. They appeared not as mere blobs of color but as humans, with every limb in clear view. Consequently I could get a pretty good idea what they were doing by their posture and estimated position in the rooms.

I couldn't see anyone across the street who might be using binocu-

lars or whatever to look at me. When I was pretty sure that I wasn't being watched, I bent over enough to see into the apartment below. I could see Conner clearly, watching television, and through the bugs, I could hear the TV.

Okay, I was a high-tech pervert.

In a few minutes Conner turned the television off. A bit later she went to the bathroom and—well, you know. Gentleman that I am, I took off the goggles. Pretty soon she began making noises like she was brushing her teeth. I watched her finish washing teeth and face, get undressed and take a bath. The hot water in the tub obscured her

figure.

After a while I saw her climb into her bed and heard it creak. There were no more noises. I turned off the goggles and laid them on my desk.

Who was Elizabeth Conner?

Finally I stowed the toys in the backpack and got dressed for the evening.