Tommy Carmellini 02 - The Traitor (44 page)

"Maybe you ought to get married," Willie said, right out of the blue, while we were contemplating a huge painting of a queen with the royal children.

The American philosopher Jerry Lee Lewis once said that too much sex drives a man insane. No joke. Willie had lost it.

"Sarah's pretty serious, you know," he added, quite unnecessarily.

"What would you know about marriage? I seem to recall that you are a lifelong bachelor."

"Thought about gettin' married. Once. Years ago."

We strolled on, looking at paintings. I was kinda glad I didn't have this kind of art in my apartment.

"Was datin' a redheaded nymphomaniac who owned a liquor store," Willie said a moment or two later. "She was easy to get serious about."

"You're lying."

"Well, to tell the truth, she wasn't really a redhead. Dyed her hair and straightened it and made it stand up. Looked pretty good, actually."

"You never took her to the altar."

"Never got seriously into liquor, man. Beer's my drink. But Sarah, she's a nice woman. Gonna make some guy a wife for life."

"Let's talk about something else, like global warming, the tax code, or who's going to get to the Super Bowl."

When we got to the Hall of Mirrors, the big hall on the back of the building, we found another crowd. Workmen were setting up a huge conference table, a microphone system, enough lights to stage a rock concert, and a bank of television cameras. This was where the

presidents and prime ministers were going to meet to talk about important political stuff. Under the constant scrutiny of a squad of paramilitary police, we walked slowly along looking at everything.

"This is where it's gonna happen, if it happens," Willie declared. "While they're all together. On television, even. This may be the only time they're all together. Maximum impact."

I looked at the cops, at the television cameras, at the statues lining the walls, at the mirrors, at the vaulted gilded ceiling way up there. This room obviously inspired several generations of railroad station architects. But if Al Queda intended to strike here, how were they going to do it?

If I knew the answer to that one, I'd be running the Secret Service, not wandering around with a daffy ex-con with marriage on his mind.

We strolled on to the other end of the room and past the squad of paras. A couple nodded at us after they inspected our passes, which were hanging on a little chain around our necks.

Behind them, covering the wall, hung a curtain that reached all the way to the floor. I had seen other curtains here and there throughout the building, but now the implications sank in. I felt the curtain and found the part. Easing it back a little, I saw a door. It wore a common European lock.

"Look at that," I said to Willie.

He wasn't impressed. "Hell, I could open that with a bobby pin," he scoffed.

"Got one on you?"

He scrutinized my face. "Are you nuts? They'll throw our asses outta here."

"We got passes and we know people. Do you have a pin?"

"Yeah." Willie removed one from his shirt pocket and straightened it out somewhat. I reflected that old habits die hard.

He slipped behind the curtain while I stood there looking at the backs of the troops. Ten seconds passed, fifteen, then half a minute.

"Got it," he said in a barely audible voice. "Come on."

No one was watching me. I went through the curtain and the

door, which Willie was holding open. He came in behind me and pulled the door shut until it latched. Then he grinned. "Still got it, dude. Still got it."

We were in a narrow hallway, perhaps four feet wide, lit by naked bulbs in fixtures on the wall just above head-high. The wire that ran from fixture to fixture was stapled to the wall.

"Slave hallway," Willie said softly.

"The frogs didn't have slaves."

"The hell they didn't! They were all slaves—that's why they had a revolution. Lead off. Let's see where she goes."

We walked along and came to a ladder leading upward. We were inside the interior wall of the Hall of Mirrors. I consulted my tourist literature, which had a rudimentary map of the chateau's rooms. We were between the Hall of Mirrors and the king's bedroom. Sure enough, a few paces farther on, we came to a doorway that must lead to the king's chamber. I said as much to Willie.

"Want to look in there?" he asked.

"No." We walked on. The passage was endless. Doors opened into every room. Narrow stairs led up and down. We took one leading down, went down and down, and came to another passageway that led away in two directions. These servants' passageways apparently led all over the building.

"The kings and queens didn't want the help parading through the big rooms," Willie said.

At the bottom of another staircase we found only a door, so we opened it. We were in a kitchen. Seated at a table were Jake Grafton and the French police inspector, Papin.

"Ah, Terry. Willie. You've been exploring, I see. Come sit down, have a drink of wine."

Willie marched right over and parked his bottom. "Howdy," he said to the Frenchman as Grafton poured him a small glass of white wine. I accepted one, too.

"How did you get into the passageways?" the Frenchman asked in good English.

I jerked a thumb at Willie. He tossed his bobby pin onto the table. 1 see.

This cop had obviously been around. I turned my attention to Grafton. "You think this Abu Qasim is going to try for paradise tomorrow?"

"Perhaps, but I doubt it," the admiral said. "However, someone might. Inspector Papin has been briefing me on Muslim fanatics here in France, which seems to have its share plus a few."

"Suiciders," Willie said sourly, and slurped more wine. He drank it as if it were beer. The Frenchman didn't seem offended.

"Inspector Papin was telling me about the renovation of this building that was completed this past spring," Grafton said. "All the rooms on the main floor were extensively refurbished."

He looked at me and I looked at him.

"Tomorrow I want you and Willie in those servant hallways," Grafton said.

"Okay."

He slid a ray gun across the table. It looked like the one I used at the Rancho Rodet.

"The batteries all charged up?" I murmured.

"Yep."

I checked that the power was off, then pocketed it. Papin had his head turned and didn't seem to notice.

"What are you guys going to do about oP Henri?" I asked the police inspector.

Papin shrugged. "I am just a policeman," he said.

"Next week, after the summit, Henri Rodet will be asked to retire for medical reasons," Grafton said.

"Next week?"
That just slipped out.

"The government doesn't want a breath of scandal now, during the summit." I see.

"If he refuses to retire, he will be fired," Grafton added. "He'll

retire, I think. The authorities don't have enough evidence to prosecute him."

"Prints on the gun? The magazine? Ammo? Suitcase? Computer?"

"None, they tell me. Wiped clean."

"You're joking." I could see that he wasn't, so I added, "Hairs on the uniform? DNA?"

Grafton shrugged. "If there is an attempt made on the lives of the G-8 leaders and somehow it can be tied to him, that decision could change, of course."

"Gotta have evidence," Willie declared, and slurped more wine.

I was thinking of Marisa. "Very civilized," I said, and nodded at the inspector.

chapter TWENTY EIGHT

As Willie attacked his second glass of wine, Inspector Papin glanced at his watch and excused himself. Watching Willie slurp it kinda bothered me, too.

Grafton waited until the policeman was out of the room. Then he said, "If you were going to kill eight world leaders, how would you doit?"

"Wait until they were all in one place," Willie said, "then blow it up. While the television cameras watched."

"The only place all eight will be together on television is upstairs in the Hall of Mirrors. Oh, Wednesday evening they'll all go to a state dinner hosted by the French president at his residence in Paris, but that won't be televised live."

"It'll be here," Willie Varner insisted. "While the world is watching."

I agreed with Willie. Still... "The bomb squads have had dogs in the building all day."

"Indeed they have, but dogs are trained to smell certain types of explosives. No dog can be trained to find everything in the chemical cornucopia that can be made to go bang."

We discussed it and decided to start in the basement and work up. We found a door to the dungeon, all right, a damp, dark place of massive stone walls and iron beams. The beams were at least a century old, installed to replace the original oak beams, yet the iron looked serviceable. It had been painted recently with some kind of red rust inhibitor.

Grafton had a pocket flashlight, and we used that to supplement the poor light from the overhead light fixtures. The fixtures and wires looked as if they dated from the nineteenth century. We found the remnants of ancient cells that probably once held political prisoners, back when the musketeers were dashing and slashing.

"The dungeon," Willie whispered.

After my recent jail experience, the place gave me the shivers— and an uncomfortable, closed-in feeling.

It seemed to get to Willie, too. "Man could get that clause-tro-phoby in a place like this," he remarked at one point. "People musta been smaller back in them days."

"How much explosive would it take to knock out the supports and bring down the building?" I asked Grafton. He was a naval officer; he must know more about explosives than I did.

"A few hundred pounds if it were placed right. A whale of a lot more if it were just packed in here."

"They don't have to bring down the building," Willie pointed out.

"That's right," Grafton admitted with a sigh. "But I don't think there's anything here. Let's go upstairs."

When we got back to the kitchen, the door to the stairwell was locked. As Willie worked on it with the bobby pin, I said, "A man could go far with a thing like that."

Willie opened the door with a flourish.

"All the way to the penitentiary," Jake Grafton said as he walked by.

We walked the passageways looking at everything, not that there was a lot to see. The floors were wooden, the walls and ceiling plasterboard, and there were lights and wires and doors. That was it. So we walked along looking for discontinuities, something out of the

ordinary, such as a floorboard that had been removed and replaced, a section of the wall that had been repaired, anything. It was time-consuming and tedious, and, of course, we found nothing.

We had been at it an hour and were in the south wing of the building when two paras came along with a bomb-sniffing dog. They looked at our badges, then looked us over while I eyed the dog—it wasn't interested in us—edged by, and went on.

"We'll never manage to walk through all these passages," Grafton remarked. "Let's go back to the main building where the summit meeting will be held."

"In the main building on the main floor, in the passageway between the king's bedroom and the Hall of Mirrors, there are ladders—actually just boards nailed to the wall," I told him. "A dog couldn't climb them."

"We'll try that," Grafton said.

The first ladder we came to went up into the ceiling, yet the trapdoor was screwed shut. We walked along, looking. There were three ladders, and all three had secured trapdoors.

"I saw some hand tools in the kitchen, Tommy." Grafton told me where they were, and away I went. I found them and paused for a drink of water, then headed back.

I took off my coat, got up on the middle ladder, and started

screwing. Ten screws, with paint covering the heads. It took a while.

I got the honor of going up first. When I opened the trapdoor in

the ceiling, it was dark as a tomb above me. I stuck my head up and

felt around, found a switch, and flipped it. Way up high, a naked

bulb illuminated among the rafters and braces. The space between

the massive uprights of the walls
of
the Hall of Mirrors and the

king's bedroom was crisscrossed with wooden braces that stabilized

everything and tied the whole building together. It was dusty and

gloomy up there. There was only that one bulb, and in that huge

dark space, it looked like a firefly in the night.

"We're going to need a flashlight," I said.

Grafton, who was below me on the ladder, passed up a small

pocket flash. "Callie always packs these when we go anyplace, just in case the power goes out."

I took the flash, put it in my shirt pocket, and climbed into the loft. Grafton, then Willie, followed.

There were spiders and webs. Didn't look as if anyone had been up here in a while.