How had he not seen the impacts that produced so many bruises? A vow formed in his mind, and danced on his lips, preposterous in the absoluteness of its terms given their present circumstances, and yet he felt bound by it nonetheless: he would take better care of her in future, he would shield her from the brutality of the world. If only he could make it true.
“Can you reach it?” Marie Roussel whispered in the dark.
Andie’s knowledge of French was limited, but growing in surprising ways. It seemed to suffice to communicate with her fellow prisoner, and was good enough to lead their captors to take her for just another local at the museum. The dim light in the basement, filtering down from the open door at the top of the staircase, was barely enough to make out a furnace and a storage locker. They’d been zip-tied by the ankle to a low pipe running along one wall, and Andie extricated the GPS chip from her sock.
“It’s just barely… I can almost…” She was stretched out on the floor, her hand stretching for the lone electrical outlet in sight.
“There’s always the battery.”
“I’m pretty sure it’s dead.” One last effort and she managed to insert the strips of foil Marie had found in the van when her hood slipped.
“Magnifique,” Marie said, offering what little encouragement she could in dire circumstances.
“Now, just let me reach the chip over…” Andie stretched again, groping in the shadows, the plastic zip-tie digging into her flesh until it stung.
“Can you see?”
“Barely.”
Andie pulled herself up to reset for another attempt, and positioned the chip between two fingers.
“Your hands, they are bleeding.”
“Blood is salty. Maybe that makes it a conductor.”
“Let’s hope so,” Marie said, with the sort of laugh one indulges on the way to the guillotine.
“Ow, ow, ow,” Andie squealed, but softly, as she made one more stretch, and her ankle began to bleed, too. She found contact with the foil strips, and rubbed the chip across them, until her fingers started to feel the heat, and then two large sparks flashed and snapped from the outlet. “Merde! Ça fait mal.”
The lights upstairs had gone out, and angry voices echoed down to them. Heavy steps and curses in some foreign tongue warned of someone’s approach. Andie pulled herself back to a seated position next to Marie and the pipe, and flicked the chip into a pile of dust behind them. A man with a flashlight checked on them from the stairs, grunted and returned to the others. One of them must have found the electrical service box and flipped a circuit breaker, since the light from the door was restored.
“Ça a functionné?” Marie whispered.
“I hope so.” Andie removed her fingers from her mouth to speak. “It hurt enough, and that chip is toast.”
“Toast?”
“C’est brûlé, comme pain grillé.”
A mobile phone signaled an incoming call upstairs, and whoever took it initially put it on speaker. The voice was one that seemed familiar, speaking in French – they’d heard snatches of it before. Only some of the men could understand, and required translation into a Slavic-sounding tongue.
“Keep moving,” the voice said.
“You were supposed to lead them north,” one of the captors snarled in response.
“I have directed all assets to the Belgian border, and the Gendarmes have taken the bait.”
“Then what is the problem?”
“It appears there are other players in the game.”
“Other players… who?” the snarling voice demanded. He must have taken the phone off speaker, since the caller’s voice was no longer audible… or perhaps he’d walked into another room.
“Americains?”
Andie and Marie turned to each other. “Americains?” Andie whispered.
“Is that good or bad?”
“It depends on who it is.”
“Who do you think… FBI? CIA?”
In her heart, Andie knew who she hoped it was, even who she half dared to believe it might be: the Marines… or at least one particular marine. Was this mission too much to lay on Emily? Too much danger to place her in? She’d never really seen what her almost-daughter was capable of, except on a grainy North Korean video smuggled out of the Chinese intelligence service. Was she really a match for these men?
“Only two?” The men upstairs laughed at this information. “This is hardly a problem.”
To Andie, however, this only confirmed it, and her face grew warm, and she laughed too.
“What does this mean, only two?” Marie asked.
“It means my daughter is coming for us.”
Marie stared into her eyes, uncomprehendingly. “This is good news?”
Chapter 12
The Maze
“Look at the size of that line,” Perry groaned. From across the front parking lot, he could already see it snaking along. “… and there’s a security tent.”
Had they taken too long shopping for clothes? He’d been grousing about delays since nine o’clock, though they’d been prowling the streets since six. Emily had insisted on slipping out of the hostel through a back door before even the staff was awake.
“We want to enter when it’s crowded.”
Of course she was right, and when a tour group made up of elderly Asians began to take shape a few yards away, the broad outlines of her plan came into focus. He figured a distraction of some sort, a small jostle in the line, or a lost wallet or other personal item – it didn’t really matter what – might be enough to attach them to this group. It only needed to exceed the limits of the official tour guide’s language skills. Just as in the hostel last night, if Emily could find a way to make herself useful, they might manage to pass through the lighter scrutiny security guards the world over reserved for old people. His confidence in her resourcefulness seemed to be growing by leaps and bounds.
Earlier, when she’d dragged him from one little boutique to another, finally making him try on charcoal gray trousers at the FNAC department store, he’d protested.
“What’s wrong with the old ones?”
“You mean other than they look like you slept in them, and we don’t have time for dry cleaning? And, of course, there’s this.” She slipped a finger through a popped seam just below his right pocket, and when he stooped to examine it, he also noticed a small tear above the knee.
He tried on the trousers, and a pale blue shirt, and let the sales girls make much of him. Emily looked on with a smirk, the headscarf giving her the air of a cancer survivor, especially since her eyebrows were barely visible over those dark eyes, without the rest of her hair to give them context. With the sunglasses to conceal her eyes, and the scarf worn with a little more drape around her face, she might be mistaken for a stylish Iranian émigrée. She was happy to trade on either misapprehension, until the moment she could remove the scarf and unveil her new look.
She’d insisted on wandering the Place du Marché Notre Dame, among the many alleys lined with food stands. Bread, cheese, fruit, she filled the pack with a typical tourist’s picnic. More camouflage for the audience she’d anticipated all along.
“Always the chess player,” Perry muttered, as they angled to position themselves behind the Asian tour group. One of the older ladies stumbled, and Emily helped her up, and whispered something to her, as she settled her shoulder bag more securely. The other women, who dominated the group, gathered round and made a fuss, and Emily smiled and bowed her head, and made a little gesture toward him. The women cackled and looked him over, and it felt a bit like an inspection. Their nods and smiles suggested that they approved.
At the right moment, when they reached the security tent, she removed her sunglasses and offered the pack for inspection, hoping they’d wave the two of them through with only a cursory glance. One of the old ladies in the group even reached out for her and said, “Watashitachi to issho ni kite kudasai.” The trick had worked, and the guide was grateful for Emily’s earlie
r assistance, and now the old ladies didn’t want to lose it either. Perhaps they even wanted to dote on a young couple. At some point, Emily would have to extricate them from the group, but for the moment, at least, they provided useful cover.
The tour led them through the royal apartments, the private theater, the king’s personal library and study, and Perry noticed a brass equinox rail in the parquet floor. The tour guide explained that Louis XIV was an avid astronomer.
“When the rail casts no shadow, that means it’s the equinox,” Perry added for Emily’s benefit.
“The only sunlight that ever hits it comes from this window, right?” she asked.
“I doubt the glass in the panes creates much distortion… and maybe he opened the window.”
“Sure, but the light only comes through the window a few hours a day. What about years when the equinox happens at night?”
“Perry nodded. “Yeah, I expect most equinoxes were not directly measureable on the rail. But he could figure out when it happened by comparing shadows from before and after.”
The last stop on the tour, before they rejoined the mass of people in the public rooms who hadn’t booked tours, was the royal toilet.
“It’s one of the first flushing toilets,” the guide tried to say, in Japanese, to a group of uncomprehending faces. Everyone looked to Emily for assistance, including the guide, and she obliged. By this time, the old ladies would laugh at anything she said, and amid the cackling and tittering at her explanation, Perry nudged her, too.
“It’s a flushing toilet.”
“I figured that part out,” he said. “This is the private ‘throne’ room. But what were they all laughing about?”
“It meant the king no longer had his ‘movements’ in public, before the courtiers, you know, for their inspection.”
“What the… what kind of looney bin were they running here?”
“The guide said one of Louis’s first innovations was to chase the courtiers out of his crapper, and it may have allowed him to take back more of the power of the crown… so to speak.”
The larger crowds in the public rooms made it easy to leave the tour group behind, though a few of the old ladies were sorry to see them go, and even whispered kind words in Emily’s ear. Soon enough, they managed to extricate themselves from the palace, and approached the gardens by the upper terrace. From that point of view, they could sketch in their minds the plan of the gardens, a formal set of large blocks, with hedges and fountains, formal plantings juxtaposed with more rustic arrangements, all products of the artifice characteristic of the French court.
A broad avenue pointed to a grand cruciform canal glistening in the midday sun, nearly a kilometer from the terrace where they stood. To the left and right, forest-like areas could be seen, shaped by gravel paths in geometric patterns
“There, in the Girandole Grove…” Emily struggled with the guidebook. “The map shows a café, but I can’t quite see it from here.”
“Is that where we meet him?”
“Yes, I think so… but I don’t like the look of this place. The distances are huge.”
“We’ll be exposed if this goes south,” Perry said. “It may not be possible to escape.”
“If it’s a trap, we should split up.”
Perry pointed into the distance. “We could meet over there, to the right of that fountain, you see, the crowds…”
“We might be able to lose a pursuit in a crowd. The rest of this place is so manicured, ducking into the trees isn’t going to help.”
“If the crowds don’t do the trick, we might circle back to this exit,” she said, pointing to the end of the Boulevard de la Reine.
“None of this looks good. Is it too late to ask Michael to make a different arrangement?”
Emily had already cleared the first couple flights of the main stairs leading into the gardens, and probably hadn’t heard his wise suggestion, or perhaps wouldn’t let herself hear anything that might delay the search for Andie. Reckless? Certainly, but Perry didn’t have the heart to argue the point. He knew her well enough, and this was what he had signed on for, to back her play, whatever the risks.
Mature chestnut trees and fifteen foot tall boxwood hedges formed the alleys of the Girandole Grove, too dense to squeeze through easily, and too long between intersections to make escape on foot feasible. With each step, he rehearsed again the options he’d worked out from the higher perspective of the terrace, but no amount of anticipatory vigilance could bolster his confidence.
With a tug on her scarf, and an adjustment to her sunglasses, she turned to Perry for some sort of reassurance. He pulled the fabric around to cover a few hairs behind one ear, and placed both hands on her shoulders to steady her, and fix her with his gaze.
“We can do this.”
He couldn’t see her eyes, but the tiniest tremor shook her lower lip. Before he could react, she threw both arms around his neck and hung there for a moment; and he pulled her close, to feel her body against his, to feel the rise and fall of her chest, maybe even to hear the beating of her heart. Could he really hear blood coursing through arteries and veins? That seemed improbable, but it’s how he felt.
“That must be him,” Emily said, and tugged him along with a hand curled inside his. “Tan jacket, yellow shirt.”
There were no empty tables in the outdoor seating area. Metal chairs stood on pea gravel, shaded by the canopy formed by the chestnuts, while waiters and busboys moved about with trays held at shoulder height, and the gabble of tourists in different languages drifted past his ears, uncomprehended.
“May we join you?” she asked, with one hand placed tentatively on the back of a chair. “All the other tables are full.”
“Please, be my guests,” the man said, loudly, in a British accent. Then he added, in quieter tones, no longer intended for public consumption, and with a glance at his watch, “We don’t have much time. You should have been here twenty minutes ago.”
Perry felt a tremor at these words. The false accusation, the suggestion that they were late, seemed intended to put them off-balance from the start. His instincts told him something was wrong with this contact. Could he be trusted? But he was not an operative, and perhaps this was just the ambient emotional noise of the demimonde these people work in. His were not professional instincts, if there even was such a thing.
“What do you have for us?” Emily asked.
“Not here. Follow me,” he said, and rose to lead them back into the wider alleys of the grove.
At the first turning, some thirty meters or so from the café, before the man could step out onto the lighter, crushed shell surface of the main diagonal path, Perry felt the tug of those pesky instincts again. He slipped a hand under their contact’s elbow and pulled him back with a sharp tug.
“Not that way. Too exposed.”
Emily turned to catch his eye, and he feared the expression he might find on her face. But it was clear she shared his suspicion. Even if he were wrong about this guy, it was an error they would make together.
“Get off me,” the man protested. With his athletic build, he might have put up some resistance, though he’d have been no match for a battle-hardened Navy SEAL, and perhaps he sensed this.
“It’s quiet, and private, down here,” Perry said, indicating a side path that led to the service entrance of the café, and enforcing his suggestion with a firm squeeze behind the elbow. “We won’t be disturbed.”
Their contact thought of attracting some noisy attention from the tourists milling about waiting for a table, until Emily jabbed a sharp knuckle under the bottom rib just above his kidney, and he winced in pain. “Let’s keep it quiet, or this can get a lot more painful. No need to disturb all these good people.”
Perry reached around the man’s back, and assisted him behind the building and out of sight, looking for all the world like two men sharing a joke at someone else’s expense. Emily took the occasion to massage a muscle on his lower back, and repeated her qu
estion: “What do you have for us.”
Through the foliage, Perry spied what he’d half-expected to see, several men in official looking suits hustling through the seating area, jostling tourists.
“Were they meant for us?”
“I rather think they were looking for me,” the man said, now perhaps more willing to open up.
“For you?” Emily arched an eyebrow. “What on earth for?”
“Your little lark back there in Paris has caused quite some consternation among the Sécurité. They’ve already expelled dozens of diplomats.”
“Seems like a bit of an overreaction,” Perry said. “It’s not like we killed anyone. We even stuck around long enough to heimlich one of the cops.”
“You embarrassed them, in the museum and later, in the escape… and this is an election year. The French are more tense than I’ve ever seen them.”
“So you hoped to curry favor with them by turning us over?”
“Of course not,” he replied, with as much indignity as he could manage.
He freed himself from the vise of Perry’s hands, and shrugged his jacket into better shape across his shoulders. There was no room for him to slip past them and back to the café tables, since Perry had made sure to occupy the space. Emily reached for his hand in what might have passed for an affectionate gesture, and rolled it over, palm up.
“Is that your message, that we’re persona non grata?” she asked.
“No, not exactly. My boss spoke to your boss at CIA…”
“We don’t work for the CIA,” Perry interrupted, and Emily cleared her throat.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “What does your boss want us to know?”
“Then I have no idea why the head of the world’s largest intelligence apparatus would go to such lengths to communicate with a couple of civilians.” The man paused to size Perry up. “You I get. Special forces?” When Perry said nothing, he turned to Emily. “But you are much harder to read. Some kind of military training, but there’s something else…”
Emily yanked his hand up, now bent sharply at the wrist, her thumb pressed into the fleshy bit at the base of the middle finger, and he winced in pain. She raised it even higher and his eyes teared up.
Girl Stalks the Ruins Page 14
