by Lee Goldberg
Ian immediately checked the departure board to see if there were any other flights that could get them to Paris sooner, but there were none. They were going to be stuck in Doha for six and a half hours.
Margo didn’t think it was a bad place to be stuck for a few hours, especially after being trapped for three days in a shipping container. But she wasn’t feeling the same urgency to get to Paris as Ian. So while she roamed the terminal, having coffee at the Qataf Café’s gold-plated counter and a BBQ Bacon Whopper at Burger King, Ian spent fifty dollars for access to the Oryx airport lounge so he could keep an eye on CNN for any breaking news from Paris and use one of their guest computers to do some research.
He learned from CNN that the president was still alive and would spend the final day of the G8 conference at the Élysée Palace, dine at 7:00 p.m. with the French president at the Eiffel Tower, and then fly back to Washington, DC, immediately afterward.
Ian decided that the president was probably safe while he was inside the Élysée Palace. That meant that the only time the president was in danger was in his motorcade going to the Eiffel Tower, while he was eating at the restaurant, and on the way to Orly, where Air Force One was parked.
The Élysée Palace and the Eiffel Tower were only a couple of miles apart on opposite sides of the Seine. Google Maps gave him three possible driving routes to the Eiffel Tower, depending on which one of three bridges the president used to cross the river. For the drive from the Eiffel Tower to Orly, Google Maps gave him only one likely route: the freeway. But the president might avoid the streets entirely and make both trips by chopper. He could land on the lawn of the Champ de Mars, the park in front of the Eiffel Tower, and depart from there after dinner.
The president would be traveling either in his nearly impregnable Cadillac limousine or a chopper that was fortified against all kinds of attack, so Ian ruled out an assassination attempt in transit. That left only one place for the killer to make his move.
Ian left the lounge and went to WHSmith, the English-language bookstore, to buy a Paris guidebook by Rick Steves. He’d watched so many episodes of Rick’s TV show as research that it felt like they were close friends. Rick would have his back in Paris. He tracked down Margo at the duty-free mall, found a seat under the teddy bear, and shared his reasoning with her.
“If the Chinese are going to take a shot at the president in Paris,” Ian said, “it’s going to be at the Eiffel Tower.”
“I’m sure the Secret Service and the French authorities came to the same obvious conclusion and are taking extreme security measures,” Margo said. “But let’s say that they missed something. How are you going to discover that flaw, track down the assassins, and stop their plot in six hours?”
“I’ll use my imagination,” he said.
“That’s all you’ve got?”
“That’s all I’ve ever had.”
“Then you better hope that you’re wrong,” Margo said. “Because we don’t stand a chance.”
Classified Location, Kangbashi District, Ordos, Inner Mongolia, China. July 7. 8:00 p.m. China Standard Time.
Pang Bao was at the computer in his office, deep into the time-consuming and tedious task of personally confirming the deletion of all the incriminating video and data files from the Hong Kong debacle, when there were two sharp knocks on his door. He recognized the knocks, delivered like body blows. It was Shek Jia, his subcommander.
“Come in, Jia,” he said.
Shek Jia opened the door and approached, her upper body slightly bowed in ingratiating supplication. “I’m so sorry to disturb you, sir.”
He knew from his own experience in her position that she wouldn’t be intruding unless the news was grave, potentially disastrous for him, and beneficial for her.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“We halted our surveillance on Ian Ludlow and Margo French, as you ordered. But we neglected to disengage our bots from automatically tracking data related to them, like their credit card purchases. We know where Ludlow and French are.”
“Back in the United States, I presume.”
“They were in Singapore yesterday and they are arriving momentarily in Paris.”
Upon hearing that last word, Pang fought back the urge to vomit. The implications of what Shek Jia said were so poisonous that his body instinctively wanted to purge for self-preservation.
Yat Fu was right all along.
If Yat’s perceived mistake was punishable by death, what penalty would Pang have to pay for causing the failure of China’s most ambitious covert operation in history? The asset in Paris had to be warned, but he was unreachable.
The same wasn’t true for the freelancer they’d hired to kill him.
“Get word to our freelancer,” Pang said. “Tell him to make contact with the asset and warn him that he may be exposed.”
The problem was that, by design, there were several layers of people between Pang and the freelancer. It could be hours before the freelancer got the message.
“You’re taking a big risk,” Shek said. “We have no idea how the asset will react to the message or the discovery that a freelancer was tracking him and the obvious purpose of it.”
“We have no choice. The asset needs to be warned,” Pang said. “The freelancer needs to be taken off the field immediately after delivering the message and replaced with another player.”
“Of course.”
Shek Jia walked out and Pang immediately vomited into his trash can.
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
Paris, France. July 7. 12:50 p.m. Central European Summer Time.
The Qatar Airways flight to Paris departed Doha promptly at 7:35 a.m. Ian fell asleep within minutes of departure and awoke when the plane touched down at Charles de Gaulle Airport at 12:50 p.m. They didn’t have checked luggage, so they made it through customs in thirty minutes. In the arrivals terminal, Ian went to a newsstand and bought a burner phone with cash rather than a credit card in case the CIA or anybody else wanted to track them in Paris.
Ian and Margo waited another twenty minutes outside the terminal for a taxi to take them to the Eiffel Tower.
The traffic on the freeway was slow and it took them over an hour to get into the city, where the congestion was even more nightmarish than usual, the taxi driver complained in broken English, due to street closures related to security for the G8 summit. The Eiffel Tower, and much of the area around it, was already closed to traffic in preparation for the presidential dinner. So were the Palais de Chaillot and the Jardins du Trocadéro, directly across the Seine from the Eiffel Tower, as well as Pont d’Léna, the bridge that connected the two shores.
The taxi driver thought the early street closures were overkill and cursed the foreign leaders for snarling Paris traffic. Why couldn’t they meet at the Palace of Versailles or, better yet, in a different city?
The closest their driver could get Ian and Margo to the Eiffel Tower was Place Joffre, the street that ran along the southeastern end of the Champ de Mars and the front of the École Militaire, an ornate building from the 1700s that, according to Rick Steves, was still an active military training institution.
Ian and Margo got out of the taxi, retrieved their matching carry-on bags from the trunk, and faced a postcard-perfect unobstructed view of the Eiffel Tower at the northwestern end of the Champ de Mars.
The borders of the tree-lined park were closed off with K-rails and patrolled by armed soldiers and officers with bomb-sniffing dogs. Police and military personnel vehicles were also parked along the gravel paths on either side of the park. But people were still permitted to wander through the Champ de Mars, at least for now.
Ian and Margo started to join the flow of people walking to the Eiffel Tower but they were immediately stopped by a pair of armed soldiers, who asked them to open their small rolling suitcases for inspection. Ian and Margo unzipped their suitcases, which only contained his jacket and her sweater.
“Why are you traveling with empty suitcases?” o
ne of the soldiers asked in a heavy French accent that immediately reminded Ian of Inspector Clouseau.
“We aren’t. Our luggage is back at the hotel,” Ian said. “We brought these with us because we’re going on a shopping spree and we don’t want to lug around a bunch of bags.”
The soldiers seemed satisfied with Ian’s answer and continued their patrol.
Ian and Margo zipped up their carry-ons.
“See?” Margo said. “Tight security.”
Ian couldn’t argue about that and they resumed their walk. It was possible, he thought, that the assassins might be masquerading as police officers or soldiers, but he couldn’t think of a way that he could flush out any imposters, so there was no point in trying, especially given his own absurdly limited time and resources. He had to narrow down the potential assassination scenarios to one that he and Margo could reasonably handle.
They reached the Bassins du Champ de Mars, a fountain in the roundabout in the center of Avenue Joseph Bouvard, a wide boulevard that crossed the park but was now closed off to traffic. Tall, temporary cyclone fencing and K-rails prevented people on foot from getting any closer to the Eiffel Tower, which was two hundred yards away, so hundreds of people filled the empty street, angling for position to take selfies with the Eiffel Tower in the background.
The trees that lined the park were so densely packed that they were like tall hedges. Ian could imagine a camouflaged sniper hiding in the trees, but he doubted a man could get up there now or go unnoticed by the patrols or their dogs. The security teams were probably even using heat-seeking technology to find anybody who might be hiding in or near the park. The apartment buildings on either side of Champ de Mars had certainly been searched and locked down and had police snipers posted on the rooftops watching for trouble. So Ian ruled out those obvious assassination scenarios.
He looked back the way they came and saw only two buildings: the École Militaire and farther beyond, a monolithic office tower. Both buildings had completely unobstructed views of the Eiffel Tower. But the École Militaire was full of military personnel. There was no way a sniper could sneak inside. So that left the skyscraper.
Ian checked his guidebook and learned from Rick Steves that the building was Tour Montparnasse, the only skyscraper in central Paris. If Ian were writing this story, that’s where he’d put his killer. His story instincts hadn’t failed him yet.
“Come on,” Ian said and led Margo back the way they came. “We need to catch another taxi.”
“Where are we going?”
Ian pointed toward the skyline in front of them. “There.”
“The big, ugly skyscraper.”
“Tour Montparnasse. It has a direct line of sight to the Eiffel Tower. The only other buildings that do, the military school in front of us and the Palais de Chaillot behind us on the other side of the Seine, are locked down.”
“That building is miles away,” Margo said. “Do you honestly believe a sniper can shoot somebody sitting at a table in the Eiffel Tower from there?”
“Anything is possible,” Ian said.
“No, it’s not. Can a dog write a novel? Can you rub two sticks of butter together and make a fire? Can a fish live without water, grow a beard, or sing show tunes?”
“What does any of that have to do with our current problem?” They reached Place Joffre again and Ian scanned the traffic for an unoccupied taxi.
“I’m trying to inject reason and rationality into the discussion.”
“By asking if a fish can grow a beard and sing show tunes? What’s reasonable about that?”
“You’re missing my point,” Margo said.
“I certainly am.” Ian spotted a taxi and waved to the driver, who saw him and angled toward the curb.
“What makes you think that building isn’t locked down, too?”
“That’s what we’re going to find out.”
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
The Louvre, Paris, France. July 7. 4:30 p.m. Central European Summer Time.
Maurice Kwok couldn’t understand why the Mona Lisa was the most famous and valuable painting in the world. She was a drab woman in dull clothing. There was nothing physically appealing about her. In fact, she was freakish, missing her eyelashes and eyebrows. The only possible reason Leonardo da Vinci could have painted this portrait was for the money. However, that didn’t explain why it was so revered by everybody else.
He’d met a hooker in Bangkok with an elaborate snake tattoo that wrapped around her entire torso, its head nestled between her breasts, its forked tongue flicking one of her nipples. Her skin deserved to be in a bulletproof case, hanging in the Louvre, admired by millions, instead of mounted on a wall in a back-alley apartment in Macau where only Kwok could gaze upon it. She was a true work of art far more beautiful than Mona Lisa, which was why he’d kept her skin rather than let it decay with her corpse.
But Kwok couldn’t visit Paris and miss the most celebrated painting on earth. He was glad he’d come to the Louvre, not because he got to see the dreary hag up close, but because it allowed him to spot the man tailing him, a pallid Frenchman with a hook nose. The man inadvertently revealed himself after Kwok passed through a large tour group to get to another gallery. Hook Nose had to rush through the crowd not to lose him.
Kwok strolled through the museum, pretending to admire the works of art while actually checking to see if more than one person was shadowing him. After a few minutes of wandering through the gallery, he was convinced that if anybody else was watching him, it was from the security cameras. To test that theory, he left the Louvre and went to the Metro station, where he caught the subway train toward Porte d’Orléans. Hook Nose stayed with him, but loosely, taking a seat in a different car. Nobody else paid any attention to Kwok, who was satisfied now that he had only one man on his tail.
Who ordered the surveillance? Surely it wasn’t a law enforcement or intelligence agency. If they suspected what he was here to do, they would have mounted a more robust effort and certainly wouldn’t have used someone as careless as Hook Nose. So that left only one possibility: This was Kwok’s assassin, the man hired to kill him later tonight, keeping an eye on his eventual target.
Hook Nose was an overeager fool, but getting somebody like him was the risk you took when you hired a freelancer. And Beijing knew that, so Kwok assumed there was redundancy. There were probably two or three backup freelancers waiting in the shadows for him if he eluded this idiot. And he would. The only question was whether to kill Hook Nose now or later.
Tour Montparnasse, Paris, France. July 7. 4:45 p.m. Central European Summer Time.
The driver dropped Ian and Margo off at a bus stop at the Rue de l’Arrivée entrance to Tour Montparnasse.
The office tower was in the center of a large plaza, an island amid several intersecting boulevards, that had a Galeries Lafayette department store at one end and the Gare Montparnasse train station on the other.
Ian eyed the people streaming in and out of Tour Montparnasse. “The building doesn’t look locked down to me.”
“That should tell you something,” Margo said. “Do you really think you’re the only person in Paris who has noticed that this building has an unobstructed view of the Eiffel Tower? The French and American Secret Service know it, too, and obviously aren’t concerned.”
“They don’t have my imagination.”
“But they know that two miles is the longest distance ever recorded for a sniper kill shot.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because a Canadian sniper in Iraq made the shot while I was in weapons training at the Farm. All the instructors were talking about it,” Margo said. “I watched the taxi driver’s odometer on the way here. We’re 3.5 kilometers from the Eiffel Tower, which is over two miles. So your imaginary sniper would have to match or break a world record to make that shot, and that’s assuming he can even get the president in his crosshairs.”
“Maybe he’s not using a rifle,” Ian said.
; “What else is there?”
“A missile,” Ian said. “The sniper wouldn’t need to get the president in his sights. The president would just have to be in the restaurant.”
“A missile,” Margo said.
“It’s possible.”
“Only in a Straker novel.”
“We’ll see.” Ian headed for the Montparnasse lobby.
Margo tagged along after him. “What do you intend to do? Search the entire building for a rocket launcher?”
He ignored her question and went inside. The stark lobby was clad in marble but had the sterile, austere ambiance of a post office. The elevator banks were behind a counter, where four uniformed guards checked people’s IDs against the visitor list on their computers. A dozen visitors were lined up in front of the security counter in a lane marked by two velvet rope barriers. There was a separate line for people going straight up to the observation deck and restaurant on an express elevator.
Ian went to the tenant directory and scanned the names. What he saw gave him a chill.
“We only have to visit one office,” he said and pointed to the bottom of the list. “Look who’s on the forty-fifth floor.”
She did and her body stiffened when she saw the name.
Wang Studios.
CHAPTER FIFTY
“Shit,” Margo said.
“Are you convinced now that the president is in danger?”
She didn’t have to say yes. It was written all over her face. Ian took out his phone and started taking pictures of the tenant list.
“What are you doing?” Margo asked.
“Getting the names of every tenant on the forty-fifth floor.”
“Why?”
“We have to get up there and we can’t do it without an appointment,” Ian said. “We need to find somebody who will invite us up.”
“What are we going to do when we get up there?”
“I don’t know yet.” Ian put his phone back in his pocket and walked outside. Margo kept up with him as he crossed the plaza to Rue de l’Arrivée and stopped at the curb.
