by James, Mark
“Admittedly, the marker is a bit crude,” he said, coloring the cardboards edges to match the shoes, “but it should be good enough to get you through the next two hours. It should give you another three inches. It might be awkward at first, but as I said, required.”
“There’s no other way?” she asked, knowing the answer as well as he did. The idea of their separating sent a chill through her.
He didn’t answer and only handed her the old clothes from their luggage. He took the Patterson passports and put them in the hat, taping them inside with the duct tape so they wouldn’t fall out. He put the hat back into the grocery bag with the empty cup and the rest of what he hadn’t used.
“The Surveillance-Net computers will be looking for both of us, together. Which means, tactically, splitting up is our best option. You’re three inches taller and back into your own clothes and are now Ms. Gillette.”
He handed her the passport, “Except you are no longer Ms. Gillette, the mistress of the gallant and ethically-challenged Mr. Holcomb. Rather, for the next two hours you’ll be the independent Jan Gillette, out for her first vacation in Paris.”
“And,” he said, looking down at the table, “I’m afraid we’re going to have to lose the guns.”
Lani stared down at the two ceramic handguns Jack had placed between them.
“Now I’m really thrilled,” she said, trying to laugh.
“Sorry, can’t be helped. Think it through: we don’t know what’s out there, namely, what standard security Nord Station has set up. We could pass through the security line, our luggage could be searched and, with these passports, we could still pass straight through. But if anyone finds the weapons, it’s all over. I’m not keen on dumping them either. Maybe Mac can get us something later, I don’t know, but for now it’s best not to be carrying.”
“What about you?” she asked.
He remembered back on Guilford’s instructions, “You can crouch as you walk. It should be nominally effective, for the time being. Not later, of course, the Surveillance-Net computer will figure that out in time – programming itself…but, yes, for now, it may not see that. Maybe you’re just a man with a limp, huh? Remember, the computer will be looking for you to come off a train, looking as you did when you went in, together. These will be its initial operating parameters. It’s a present-moment weakness.”
They needed to reduce those identifying variables: to be apart and away from each other, a tourist girl walking jauntily to her next train, an older man limping, using an electronic walker provided near the platform entry for public use.
They exited the train and entered the station from the platform, a flood of sounds hitting them from the chattering groups of tourists, from those late and running. Without a word, they split up and walked in opposite directions, heading towards opposite doors. She walked with energy in her steps, even though she was taut as a wire inside; he limped to the walkers, lined up on the side wall like luggage carts, fell into the seat, manipulated the electronic toggle and rode away, momentarily stopping at a trash receptacle to throw the grocery bag away.
She wanted to look back and knew she couldn’t. Maybe one of us will be caught… maybe we’ll never see each other again.
She could feel his presence behind her and moving away; could feel how, for the next critical hours, she would be alone. She pushed the thought from her mind and repeated the information Jack had given her. He’d said they couldn’t write it down, in case one of them was caught.
6th Arrondissement, 24 Rue de
Cherche-Midi, Saint-Germain-
des-Pres
She repeated the address in her mind, over and over, seeing it as a sanctuary, using it as a mantra to keep her mind and eyes from the orbs lined up on the rafters like gargoyles.
28
The Spanish assassin, Antonio Reis Cortez – variously known to his clients and intermediaries as Alberto Riviera, the Latin, Gabir Abi-Shetan, the Lebanese, Arnaud Mbah a Moute, the Cameroon – quietly descended the marble stairs of his home before dawn. It was only one of his many homes, this only one of his faces. The six languages he spoke melded with each other and he was often asked, “Where are you from?”
He was from nowhere, but would always give them the answer he sensed they wanted – and polite, always polite in the field while converging towards targets – and then move on. “Yeah,” they’d say, “I knew I heard something in that accent of yours. I lived in Tobago once…”
He opened the front doors and hit the Madrid heat. In his hand was a suitcase, ballistic Kevlar and sleek. Inside the suitcase was a compartment holding the truest extension of his self – a British-made L16B3 sniper’s rifle with integrated silencer. In another compartment were his second eyes: an ACOG Leopold Mk. III tactical scope.
The morning before, in his favorite room, he’d calibrated the rifle and scope, re-oiled the bearings to the slides on the tripod, readjusting them, handling them. Each of his homes possessed this special room – where his weapons and instruments were lined up in glass cases like a gallery.
Beauty, lethality – they were never far away.
The night before, he’d applied the White Orchid skin appliqués to his face and contoured the edges. He’d then applied the wash to his face, arms and neck, where his shirt wouldn’t cover. After the assignment was complete he was planning on vacationing in the south of France – in Provence, perhaps, or even Languedoc-Roussillon, he wasn’t sure – and by the time he returned and passed back beneath the Surveillance-Net eyes in Madrid’s Aeropuerto Barajas, he would be back to his truer color.
At the airport, he passed through the customs and security checks without incident – just another average person in more average clothes, the passport and photos in complete order. He saw the orbs outside of Charles de Gaulle Airport and looked down at his Paris tourist map as he walked to his car. It had been three months since he’d visited his Paris home and the tarp over the BMW M8 was mottled and dusty. It was nice that a target was finally in one of his hometowns, the convenience of it. It was also nice that he didn’t need to memorize the city streets, or prepare unfamiliar routes. He thought of the south of France, still trying to decide between the food of Provence or the wines of Languedoc-Roussillon. Of course, one of his girls lived in Avignon in the Provence region and that could very well prove determinant. He’d have to see how he felt after the kills. He always felt different.
It was still early evening when he drove into the private carport beneath his villa in the 16th Arrondissement. He carried his night bag upstairs and opened the long drapes. He washed his face and looked into the only mirror – yes, he would need some sleep. Gerard, his former mentor, had once told him he would one day grow tired of this life, this luxurious, vagabond life. “It’s the way of things,” Gerard had smiled two years ago, as they’d shared a coffee at their favorite café in Saint-Germaine. “You can’t escape it, Antonio, but you can choose when to leave it. Everyone retires at some point. Or is retired.” Gerard had not been able to abide by his own advice and was terminated in Monaco while tracking a false target – too old and sloppy for this work anymore. The Spaniard missed Gerard; he’d been his only true friend, albeit not of the normal sort. The Spaniard didn’t know ‘normal’ and he wouldn’t end in a dying heap like Gerard. He was certain of it.
He retrieved a bottle of Bordeaux from his cellar and took the elevator to the top floor, where the music was kept. There were no televisions in the house and no other mirrors. The Spaniard preferred not to look at faces.
He poured the wine, set the glass on the side table and walked over to the wall, carefully selecting a 1958 DECCA SXL series album of a Sibelius violin concerto, because the string tone was so pure. He placed the LP on the turntable and cued it, adjusted the volume on the Shindo Labs Petrus preamplifier and sat back in the chair, eyes closed, savoring the wine.
He began to visualize the killing place, the hostel window overlooking the park corner: the distance between the window and
the targets, the distance between the room and the Metro entrance. This was always his preparation; visualizing the movements before they happened, preparing his mind and body for synchronized motion as if an athlete. He saw the movements of the kill as a series of events, almost like photos, one after the other, the images flipping over in his mind to the beat and rise of the music, the orchestra around him, the purity of the strings.
He began the wait period.
†
“Is she still in there? Any of the lights on?”
Mac continued to stare into the stark white room. As a ploy, they’d decided to give Aisha a small window in her cell, another small manipulation, trying to coax a response. He’d pressed her during the first three interrogations after she’d been waterboarded, but since then had decided to lie back, waiting for her to make a move, to show herself.
“She’s in there, no doubt,” the NSA psychiatrist said. “She eats, instinctually responds to pain stimulus, etc. And all the tests show normal – EKG, all of them. Brain waves show increased theta activity, particularly in the right hemisphere, but that’s inconclusive and, frankly, it doesn’t mean very much.”
Mac noted that Aisha seemed different each time he came back to interview her. Or rather, each time she was more of something: more placid, calmer. It was striking, given how she’d been after her capture: tense, resistant.
The morning light streamed through the cell window in a single beam, lighting up the wall behind her. He continued watching as the doctor walked away. Inside the cell, Aisha took another bite of the rice and vegetables from the bowl, the spoon moving in a slow, perfect arc.
She didn’t look up as he entered the cell, continuing to stare into the bowl. He watched as her hand moved like a pendulum, almost gentle, the shine in the spoon nearly hypnotizing. She set the bowl down and said nothing more for the next four hours.
Inside, Aisha was still in the white dream in the white desert. It now stayed with her even while she was awake, even as she spooned the rice into her mouth.
Mac left the cell and walked down the hall to the meeting room. The night time orderly – an NSA employee assigned to watch Aisha from daybreak to dusk, to watch her wake, to bring her meals, to watch her eat and go to sleep – was already sitting at the table.
Mac knew that regardless of the doctor’s charts and tests – what the books and numbers told them – there were things that couldn’t be seen, things that happened in the quiet moments between people. Both orderlies were required to keep journals on their observations and to attend meetings with the psychiatrists every other day. Mac knew that deeper truths often existed between the lines, apart from what one might report or write down.
Yesterday, he’d met with the daytime orderly, a female NSA employee and a former U.S. Army Ranger. She’d been rigid in the way she sat, offering a ‘yes sir’ after each of his questions.
“Not really, sir. I did find her demeanor to be, well, distant,” the female orderly had said, finding the quietness of Aisha and her sloth-like movements disquieting, nearly disturbing. “It makes me uncomfortable, sir, that’s all. All of this waiting, her doing nothing.”
The male orderly now across from him was the female’s opposite. A new NSA recruit, he sat relaxed.
Mac went through the same series of questions.
“Not really, Mr. Director. Nothing that really stood out.”
“Are you sure?”
The male orderly hesitated.
“Yes?” Mac coaxed.
The orderly then talked about how Aisha never complained and that while she ate, one spoon to the next, it seemed like the cadence of a monk. He found her captivating, but not in the usual sense.
“Keep going,” Mac said, “there are no wrong answers here.”
“Well, and this is going to sound crazy, but she’s calming. I know what she did, those horrible bombings. It’s just that I can’t make out the connection between those events and her. The feeling of her, I mean. Maybe when she first came here, not anymore.”
The orderly paused and Mac waited.
“I think she knows something,” the orderly finally said, his voice lowered.
As he said it, he looked down as if looking into a mirror. He didn’t tell Mac about the dreams he’d been having, about his fiancé waking him up in the middle of the night and telling him he’d been talking in his sleep.
“What?” Mac asked, leaning closer, “What does she know?”
Did Aisha know something about another attack?
The orderly looked straight at him, seeming to look beyond where they were.
He said, in a near whisper, “Something terrible…something wonderful.”
†
The gas station attendant held out his hand.
“I have it right here,” Jenny Huff smiled, fumbling with her pile of change. She’d withdrawn $2,456 from her savings account before she’d left and had broken many bills at the hotels, diners and truck stops on her way to this one, Jerry’s Route 121 Quick-shop, a run-down filling station converted into a run-down deli just outside of Alma, Kansas, another spot on the map.
She’d driven across most of Kansas, seeing the stainless steel prisms of the newest fracking derricks on the horizon, the wind-swept farms, the passing faces of the farmers worn and lined, like she’d once seen in a documentary on the dust bowl. Would President Walker really do what he said, declare a national emergency and tell these people that their land was too burnt, the soil too fragile to farm, the animals having gone without water too long? Would we force them from their churches, the only land they’d ever known, from the cemeteries of their ancestors?
The seas were rising and Kansas was burning. Was there any reason left in this world?
She slowed and passed through another small town, some of the shops on the downtown square shuttered, even their ‘for sale’ signs faded.
Three hundred miles later, she pumped more gas in another small town, the sun blinding, the damning voices of her in-laws haunting her like these ceaseless winds across the plains.
But she cannot stop: something inside is telling her it is for Dan, telling her it is for her children.
She turns to see a boy and his sister running from an RV, playing in the burnt grass at the side of the station as their father lets their dog smell about.
Yes, on the surfaces, the world could seem normal.
†
Jack exited Nord Station and headed west, down Rue de Maubeuge before turning south. Lani exited east and then, as planned, followed a parallel path – past shops and banks, restaurants and bookstores, all a blur – until she found her own taxi.
So far, she’d been safe, the orbs in the station seeming dormant. Were they even operational? Mac had said two hours. She fell into the taxi and it felt like a cocoon.
Watching the shops blur pass, she repeated the address: 6th Arrondissement, 24 Rue de Cherche-Midi, Saint-Germain-des-Pres.
“How do you know of this place?” she’d asked Jack when they were still on the train.
“I stayed there for a month one summer, fifteen years ago. The lady who owns it – she’s elderly now – is a good friend. We’ve exchanged letters for years. She’s never sent an email to anyone her entire life – despises computers – so there’s no trail between us. I always paid her cash for the rent – no paper trail either. I called her with the encrypted Go-Phone that Mac gave us. She said the keys are in the same place.”
The taxi stopped and Lani looked up at the building, noting the address. “Yes, here,” she said, handing over the fare and stepping from the cab, trying not to appear rushed, wanting desperately to get inside.
The ornate building, more of a villa, had a fleur-de-lis pattern carved around the base with a border separating two designs of granite. She went up to the right of the door and counted three medallions down and slid the central emblem away. She hoped that the key would be gone, telling her that Jack was already there.
She saw the glint and removed th
e two keys. The deadbolt resisted, finally giving way as she entered a portico, a diamond pattern of marble on the floor leading up the entry stairs to a door above. At the top, she passed into another hall and found the door, #24. An older man passed behind her as she returned his hello, ducking inside the apartment.
The apartment was beautiful, even in the shadows and with only the afternoon light coming through the muslin drapes. It was how every American would envision a Paris home: silk drapes pulled to the sides, high molded ceilings, a medallion above a chandelier and a marble fireplace with a Constable-like landscape painting hanging above it.
She hesitated to turn on the lights, remembering that she didn’t know this place. Suddenly, she could only think of one thing: Where was Jack?
If he’d been captured, what would she do? Would she stay to the plan, keep the meeting with Garneau, or try to find him, or run again?
She heard an effort at the latch behind her and turned to see the knob turning. She’d forgotten to lock it after she entered, as Jack had told her.
Coming through the door, Jack was smiling as big as she’d ever seen, perhaps wondering why the keys were gone and yet the door was still unlocked.
They said nothing and only held to each other, the tension draining away.
She pulled back. “Beat you here,” she said, ribbing him. “So, partner, where ya been?”
“Well,” he joked, “first there was the Louvre. Passed by, couldn’t resist. Then there was that great wine bar, big party. After that, the Eiffel Tower – you know, great this time of day.”
She held him tight and laughed into his chest, forgetting the orbs, the evil in men’s hearts, the world.
29
