by AD Starrling
We took the roadster and headed east, past the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital and the Quai de la Gare. After crossing the River Seine at the Pont de Tolbiac, I turned right onto the Quai de Bercy and joined the Boulevard Périphérique. Eight minutes later, we entered the suburb of Montreuil.
The address was a detached house in a narrow road not far from the metro station. Lights were still on behind the ground floor windows when we pulled up some fifty yards from the property. After watching the place for ten minutes, I left the car, crossed the shallow fore garden and knocked on the front door. It was opened by an elderly gentleman.
‘Je peux vous aider?’ said the man in a frail voice, blinking in the porch light.
‘I apologise for bothering you at such a late hour,’ I replied in French. ‘I was passing through and thought I’d look up an old university friend, a person by the name of HE Strauss?’
‘Oh. I’m terribly sorry, I’m afraid I’m the only HE Strauss living at this address,’ he said with a weak smile. I thanked him and strolled back to the car.
‘Any luck?’ said Reid.
‘No. Let’s try the next address.’
The traffic had thinned out considerably and the drive to the 11ème arrondissement took less than ten minutes. The address was an apartment located in an old neoclassical building halfway down a quiet cul-de-sac. I parked the car at the entrance of the street and we sat watching the block. The curtains were drawn and the lights were off behind the large French windows on the second floor. They remained so for the next half hour.
‘Wanna check out the last place?’ suggested Reid. I frowned, but nodded nonetheless.
The apartment in the 7ème was owned by a Hélène Eveline Strauss, a teacher at a local elementary school. Her voice sounded thin and harassed on the speakerphone: the high-pitched screams of children rose in the background behind her. ‘Sorry to bother you,’ I said hastily after confirming her details and returned to the car.
‘No luck here either?’ muttered Reid.
‘No,’ I murmured thoughtfully. ‘Let’s go back to the 11ème arrondissement. I have a feeling that’s the place we want.’
We headed across the river. Moments later, I pulled into the empty parking space we had used previously. The apartment on the second floor was as dark as when we had left. A second after I turned off the engine, the front door of the building opened. A man walked out with a dog on a leash; he glanced curiously at the car when he strolled past us.
‘Fancy a walk?’ I said to Reid after a while.
He shrugged. ‘Sure. It beats sitting here the whole night. Besides, the friendly neighbourhood watch might call the cops on us if we hang around much longer.’
We left the roadster and walked down a narrow alley at the side of the building. It led to a gate behind the property. It took but seconds to scale the wooden palisade. We landed silently in a short, walled rear garden.
Lights from the first and fourth floors bathed a narrow brick patio in a golden glow. Flowerpots dotted the edges of the terrace and a set of four ornate metal chairs sat around a small cream table. Outlined starkly against the back wall of the apartment block was an elaborate, spiral iron fire escape. The lack of rust suggested that it was a fairly new addition to the otherwise grand and faded facade.
We negotiated the metal steps silently and paused next to an old sash window on the second landing. The soft tinkle of a piano drifted from somewhere above, while the smell of freshly brewed coffee and the babble of conversation rose from the floor below.
Reid removed the lock pick from his jacket and carefully carved a hole in the glass with a small, circular diamond cutter. He reached through the narrow opening and thumbed the internal lock of the sash window. There was a soft click.
It took both of us to lift open the heavy wooden frame: several layers of paint had done a good job of gluing it solidly to the casing. The cords and counterbalances creaked softly in the night when the pane finally moved in its runners. We climbed through the gap and stepped quietly inside the building, standing still while our eyes adjusted to the darkness.
A security light illuminated a common stairwell to our left. On the other side of it was a passage that ran parallel to the corridor we found ourselves in. There were four apartments on each floor, two to the front and two to the rear of the building. We headed for the one that faced onto the cul-de-sac.
As we passed the door of the apartment on our right, it opened quietly on well-oiled hinges. An old woman in a white nightdress appeared in the doorway and squinted at us. ‘Is someone there?’ she said in a frail voice, her tone hesitant. ‘Is that you, Hubert?’
Reid and I froze on the landing. I held my breath, aware that she only had to raise her hand to touch my face. Seconds later the old woman frowned, sighed softly and closed the door.
We carried on more cautiously down the corridor. Silence greeted us when we stopped outside Strauss’s apartment. I tried the door handle; it twisted easily in my grip. I glanced at Reid. He was already reaching for the Glock. I slid the wakizashi from its scabbard and pushed the door open with the tip of the blade.
The interior of the apartment was inky black and as still as a tomb. The air was stifling and overlaid with a faint stench of decay. We paused just inside the doorway while our eyes adjusted to the gloom. The low rectangular outlines of furniture slowly appeared around us. To the left, the grand, ceiling-high French windows loomed behind sets of heavy brocaded curtains.
Reid switched on a pen torch. Dust motes danced in the narrow beam as it swept across the vast space.
A drawing room occupied half the width of the apartment. It had a beautiful vaulted ceiling and a stone fireplace, and had been tastefully decorated with an eclectic collection of old and opulent furnishings. Large double French doors at the rear opened onto a dining room and a kitchen.
We traced the smell of putrefaction to a garbage holder and the half open fridge: the internal light cast a pale glow on the linoleum floor and partially illuminated the kitchen cabinets. Inside, the shelves were well stocked. A glass of rancid orange juice stood forlornly on the countertop. At the other end of the drawing room, a corridor led to a master bedroom, a bathroom, a study, and a smaller second bedroom.
Although the apartment bore a general air of untidiness to be expected of a busy scientist, it also showed signs of having been carefully searched. The hard drive of the computer in the study had been wiped clean. Documents lay scattered haphazardly within wallets and folders inside the drawers of the writing desk and the filing cabinets that stood around the walls of the study. In the drawing room, the phone messages had been deleted, while a digital camera with its internal memory erased lay on the coffee table.
‘You noticed the pictures?’ murmured Reid with a frown.
I nodded warily. Dotted around the apartment were dozens of photo frames. They were all empty. Only the paintings in the drawing room and bedrooms had been left untouched.
‘Lucas,’ Reid said quietly seconds later.
We were inside the master bedroom. I looked to where he directed the torch beam. On the rear wall, next to an oil canvas reproduction of Degas’s 1888 “Dancers”, was a spattering of dried blood.
There was a small, perfectly round hole scant inches from it. It looked very much like the entry point of a bullet.
‘Crovir Hunters?’ said Reid.
‘Probably.’ My gaze shifted from the crimson droplets to the Degas. I crossed the floor and carefully lifted the painting off the wall. I traced a small, faded rectangular mark on the rear of the gilded frame with the tips of my fingers. Something had been taped to the back of the painting.
I looked at the space behind the headboard. It was empty. I put the painting back on the wall, knelt down and peered under the bed. Reid joined me and shone the torch across the floorboards.
The light glinted off something metallic, half obscured by a dust covered suitcase.
I leaned down further and reached for the object. My fin
gers closed around something hard and cold. I lifted it to the light.
It was a key attached to a strip of adhesive tape. Bloody fingerprints covered the metal. Beneath them were engraved the letters CNRS and the numbers 129.
Chapter Seven
We left the apartment minutes later and took the stairs to the ground floor. A row of letter boxes flanked the wall just inside the front doors of the building. There was mail inside HE Strauss’s box.
It was past one in the morning by the time we returned to Gustav’s place. I switched on a table lamp in the drawing room and we went through the handful of letters we had collected from the 11ème arrondissement. They were all addressed to Monsieur or Professeur Hubert Eric Strauss. Most of them were bills. There were a few invitations to forthcoming international symposiums and conferences on molecular genetics.
Something slipped out from the pile of correspondence and fell to the floor. I picked up a small rectangular board. It was a postcard from Italy. Dated twelve days ago, it depicted the Faraglioni rock formations off the Amalfi coast and was signed ‘A’: the message read ‘See you soon’ in neat feminine writing.
‘No phone calls have been made from Strauss’s apartment in the last month,’ said Reid, studying one of the bills. ‘Before that, there were twelve calls made to the same number in the space of a week.’
I looked at the figures that preceded the telephone number and frowned. ‘That’s a Swiss dialling code.’
One of the letters was from Strauss’s bank. It confirmed that a sum of 100,000 Euros had been transferred to an account in Zurich, as per the professor’s instructions. The transaction was dated four weeks ago.
Reid’s eyebrows rose. ‘Does this mean he’s in Switzerland?’
‘I don’t know.’ I took out the key we had taken from Strauss’s apartment and studied it thoughtfully. Judging from the bullet hole and blood, the professor was in more than a little trouble. I had been hoping to find some answers in Paris. Instead I only had more questions. ‘I think we should take a look at the Gif-sur-Yvette campus tomorrow.’
Having decided it was best to leave Paris before the Sunday traffic clogged up the arteries of the city, we caught a few hours’ sleep and were up again at the crack of dawn.
‘Are you sure you can’t stay for longer?’ said Gustav while he cleared the breakfast table. The Frenchman looked despondent at the news of our early departure.
‘I’m afraid not,’ I replied with an apologetic smile. ‘The trail will get cold if we leave it any longer.’
We bade goodbye to the retired detective and left the 13ème arrondissement shortly before eight. I headed west across the River Seine and soon joined the N118 highway. Twenty minutes later, I pulled up outside a 24-hour cafe with internet facilities. While I searched for maps of the CNRS campus, Reid looked up the NCIC database and Interpol’s site. ‘Well, you haven’t made the wanted lists yet,’ he said after a while.
‘I’m glad to hear it,’ I said wryly.
Located in the Science Valley of the Yvette River some twenty miles south-west of the French capital, at the gateway to the Parc de la Vallée de Chevreuse, the town of Gif-sur-Yvette was home not only to the CNRS but also to the Centre Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique, the CEA, Commissariat à l'Énergie Atomique, Supélec, L’École Supérieure d'Électricité, the LGEP, Laboratoire de Génie Électrique de Paris, the Centre Nationale d'Études and the National Police Academy. The CNRS campus was on a one hundred and sixty acre estate within the town itself. At nine in the morning, the grounds were practically deserted.
We headed for a four-storey edifice to the north of the site that housed the main laboratories of the Centre de Génétique Moléculaire. It took a couple of minutes to override the security system at the back of the building. Once inside, we found an administration office on the ground floor. A staff board on the wall indicated that the professor worked in a laboratory two levels up. We took the stairs and entered a long corridor tiled in white and smelling strongly of antiseptic.
‘This kinda reminds me of a hospital,’ said Reid as we walked down the cool and clinical hallway.
‘Ah-huh,’ I said, glancing at the names on the doors.
‘I hate hospitals,’ Reid muttered under his breath.
We turned into a side passage. At the end of it was a door with a nameplate engraved with the words “Prof. HE Strauss.”
Beyond it was a lab. Bar the complex machines that crowded the cluttered worktops and the humming fridge cabinets lining the walls, it was empty. A dry wipe board filled most of the rear of the room: it was filled with complicated numbers, diagrams and equations joined by interlinking arrows and question marks. Next to the board, another door opened onto a small office.
Paper overflowed from the in-tray on the desk. There was a print of Gustav Klimt’s “The Kiss” on the wall; a year planner overrun with memos hung lopsidedly to the right of it. An empty picture frame stood adjacent to a dying cactus plant on the window sill.
A careful search of the drawers and filing cabinets produced nothing useful: there was no mention of CNRS 129 anywhere. Loose wires on the floor and a pale rectangular patch on the desk indicated that Strauss had had a computer in the office.
‘This key has got to be for something here,’ I said tensely.
‘Well, whatever it is, it ain’t in this room,’ Reid said with a shrug.
We left the lab and started to explore the rest of the building. At the end of a corridor on the ground floor, we found a staff changing room. My eyes widened as I gazed upon the rows of lockers. Aware of the rising beat of my heart, I walked swiftly along the aisles, looking for 129. Frustratingly, the lockers were not arranged chronologically.
I finally found 129. The door hung loosely from its hinges. It was also glaringly empty. ‘Looks like someone got here before us,’ said Reid.
I frowned. Something about the door did not look quite right. I slowly traced the metal numbers with a finger.
‘What is it?’ said Reid.
‘This isn’t the right one,’ I replied slowly, staring at the faint but fresh marks in the heads of the screws that secured the middle number to the door.
Two aisles down, we found locker 139. I tried the key. There was a faint click from the lock. ‘He swapped the numbers around,’ I said, opening the door to the closet. I reached for the brown package taped to the roof inside.
‘Smart guy,’ murmured Reid. ‘He must have known they were after him.’
The envelope contained a memory stick and an A5 journal. There was an inscription on the inside page of the thick volume. ‘“Hope this brings you inspiration”, signed “A”,’ I quoted quietly.
‘This the same “A” from the postcard?’ said Reid.
‘The handwriting looks similar,’ I murmured. The first entry in the journal was dated two years previously. I leafed through the well thumbed pages.
The diary seemed to be a chronicle of Hubert Strauss’s work over a period of twenty months. It also appeared to be a reflection of the scientist’s state of mind and life during that time: numerous red-inked annotations and diagrams crowded the narrow margins, with memos, letters and email printouts stuck randomly between the sheets.
A clink sounded outside the door to the locker room. A second later, it opened. The sound of shuffling feet and the slow squeak of wheels followed. Someone started to whistle softly under their breath.
I motioned Reid wordlessly around the aisle. We circled the room carefully until we reached the open doorway and paused: a janitor stood mopping the floor to our right, his back to us. We left silently and exited the building through the rear door.
In the half hour since we had arrived on the campus, more people had ventured outside. Peals of laughter and the babble of conversation rose towards the blue skies: a group of students had laid picnic baskets on a blanket under some elm trees and were making the most of the autumn sun.
We turned and headed for the car. It was another minute before we notic
ed the men tracking us.
‘I make four of them,’ I said quietly, hands hanging loosely at my sides. I could feel the weight of the guns under my coat. The roadster was still some hundred feet away, in the shadow of another building.
‘There’s a fifth guy behind the oak tree up on the left,’ Reid observed casually.
Despite the tension humming through my body, I kept my expression carefully neutral. ‘They must have been watching Strauss’s office.’
Reid nodded, his lips tightening in a grim smile. ‘How do you wanna play this?’
I thought for a moment. ‘Divide and conquer is always a good plan.’
‘On the count of three?’ said Reid. I shrugged. Seconds later, we parted and headed briskly in opposite directions.
The Crovir Hunters’ first bullets cracked through the air close on our heels. We turned and exchanged fire. Shouts of surprise and alarm followed from the bewildered students. As more gunshots echoed to the blue skies, panic gripped the campus. By the time the screams started, Reid and I were already running.
I skidded behind an elm tree and stood rock still while rounds thudded into the other side of the trunk. Reid dropped to his heels a short distance away, in the lee of a white van. ‘Cover me!’ I shouted, indicating the Jag. He nodded, turned, dropped to one knee and let out a volley of shots.
I ran for the car. Bullets thudded into the ground behind me: a splatter of soil hit the back of my legs. I leapt over a low crash barrier, landed on my feet and kept running. A dark figure appeared in my left peripheral vision. I raised my gun and fired, still racing for the roadster. I was about seven yards from the vehicle when a faint whistling noise suddenly rose behind me. Before I could make sense of it, the world exploded in a wave of bright light and deafening sound.
