by Barry Eisler
“I don’t like it. You don’t know what’s out there.”
“That’s why I want to have a look. They’re not after me, remember? Anyway, if I see something I really don’t like, I’ll head back in and we’ll reconsider.”
Delilah told the waitress that Zut!, she really needed a smoke but had forgotten her cigarettes; could she hit the waitress up and thank her in the tip? The waitress smiled understandingly and produced a Gauloise Blonde. Delilah requested a lighter, and that was forthcoming, too. I put four twenty-Euro notes on the table, which would cover the meal if we had to bug out, nodded to Delilah, and went to see whether there was anything to my suspicions.
I kept as far left as possible as I headed out of the restaurant, maximizing my view of the street to the right, then cut the other way just before I got to the door, widening my view left. I saw nothing, but any reasonably competent surveillance would have accounted for a maneuver like mine before taking a position.
At the threshold of the door, I could see there were no immediate problems to my left, so I immediately swept right. Twenty meters down the street, on the opposite side, I saw Ferret Boy, leaning with his back against the dark stone façade of the École de Garçons, bathed in shadows.
Houston, we have a problem.
This was the quiet end of Rue Saint-Louis-en-l’Île, far from the gravitational force of Notre Dame. There were few stores down here, just some galleries, all of them closed and almost all of them dark, and the opposite side of the street was occupied entirely by the lightless monolith of the École. The only illumination came from a few widely spaced yellowish streetlights affixed to the façades of the old buildings on one side of the narrow street and the École on the other. The nearest cross street was Rue Poulletier, sixty meters to the left. When we departed, we wouldn’t just be walking out into the dark. We might as well be entering a tunnel.
Well, that’s the thing about the dark and tunnels. They work both ways.
I noticed another guy walking toward Ferret Boy. They did nothing to acknowledge each other, but they both looked the same to me: young, Arabic, somehow jumpy. I fired up the cigarette and gave no sign that I had particularly noticed them or particularly cared.
To my left, ten meters down on the opposite side of the street, was a panel truck. Could have been a coincidence, but I didn’t like it. I couldn’t see on the other side of it, but I had a feeling someone else was leaning against a stone wall in the dark there.
I tracked a few degrees further left. All the way down at the corner of Rue Poulletier was another guy. I didn’t think it was a hit before, but now I was nearly sure it wasn’t. No one needed this kind of manpower for a hit. And with that panel van parked where it was, I was starting to think it might be a snatch. Overall, compared to a hit, I rated a snatch as a positive. More people to deal with, true, but they would be constrained in their actions.
Also, as I’d told Delilah about Ferret Boy initially, these guys didn’t feel like pros to me. In which case, Delilah must have been right. Whoever had hired them didn’t know who she really was, or what she was capable of. They’d be assuming they were here to grab a helpless woman, maybe after knocking down her feeble dinner date.
Dinner for two at Auberge de la Reine Blanche? Eighty Euros. Being underestimated by the punks outside? Priceless.
I puffed on the cigarette for a few minutes without inhaling. I hadn’t smoked since I was a teenager, and a coughing fit would have been bad for my cover. When I judged I’d been there long enough, I pinched off the filter, which had my DNA on it, and shredded the rest of it on the sidewalk with the sole of my shoe. Then I went nonchalantly back inside. I handed the waitress her lighter. If she was annoyed that I had smoked the cigarette Delilah had asked for, she gave no sign of it.
I sat down and said to Delilah, “It’s not a hit. I’m guessing a snatch.” I told her about the panel truck and the disposition of forces.
She listened quietly. When I was done, she said, “It doesn’t make sense. How could they have found me? No one followed me here. I’m certain of that.”
I glanced at the python shoulder bag slung over her chair back. “Your cell phone?”
“But you said they look like amateurs. How could they have tracked my cell phone?”
“Maybe they’re working for someone a little more sophisticated than they are. Someone who provided your whereabouts and turned the risky part over to them. What I don’t get is, why would someone want to snatch you? I mean, if they want to take you, it’s because they know who you are. If they know who you are, they don’t outsource it to a handful of punks from La Goutte. They bring in professionals.”
A moment passed, then she said, “I think I know what this is.”
“What?”
“I can’t tell you.”
I felt the blood drain from my face. “Delilah. I’m about to walk out that door with you into I don’t know what. I don’t care what. Now you don’t have to thank me for that. But Goddamn it, you do have to tell me what you know so I can be as prepared as possible for whatever it is I’m about to deal with.”
Another long moment passed. “You’re right,” she said. “I’m sorry. I just—”
“Forget it. Who are they?”
“For the last year, I’ve had to spend time with a wealthy man. A Saudi. A financier. You can imagine what he finances.”
“Okay.”
“He’s very well connected. Which is why I was assigned to him. When my organization had learned what it needed to learn through me and had acted on the intelligence, I broke the connection with him.”
“He never knew you were using him?”
“No. He thought it was just an affair. The problem was, he became obsessed with me. To get him to stop contacting me, I told him I was in love with someone else. He still wouldn’t stop. So I told him if he didn’t leave me alone, I would tell his wife of the affair. He’s a very pious man, or pretends to be, and his piety is critical to his influence. So it was a serious threat.”
“How did he take it?”
“He was enraged.”
“Enraged enough to want to do something in response?”
“He’s a selfish man,” she said. “And cruel. The kind of man who, if he couldn’t have something for himself, would try to keep it from anyone else.”
I exhaled long and hard, trying not to imagine the psychic price she must have paid for repeatedly offering her body, and even a simulacrum of her mind, to someone who obviously repulsed her.
“You know,” I said, “it wouldn’t have hurt for you to tell me that before we were trapped in a restaurant with an ambush waiting outside.”
She said nothing, and I wondered if she could sense what I’d really been thinking. Probably she could.
“All right,” I said. “Never mind. This guy… is he connected enough to track you to Paris?”
“He knows I live in Paris. I didn’t try to hide that.”
“Does he know your particulars?”
“Of course not.”
“Is he connected enough to find out? To track a cell phone?”
“Yes.”
“Then what do you think these guys are here for? Kidnap you? Take you back to Saudi Arabia, put you in a harem?”
She looked at me, her face expressionless. “I think they’re here to hurt me.”
“Hurt you how?”
She cocked her head as though in wonder at how thick I was, then said, “If you and two or three other thugs had a woman alone in a panel van and wanted to hurt her in the worst way possible, wanted to ruin her for anyone else, what would you do?”
I didn’t answer. There was nothing to say.
“Well,” she said. “I imagine that’s how they’re planning to hurt me.”
I was quiet for a moment. Then I said, “When this is done, I want you to tell me who the Saudi is.”
“No. I don’t want you involved.”
“I’m already involved. I’m not going to let you walk ou
t there alone.”
“My organization will take care of it. Let’s just focus on tonight.”
I wanted to press the point, but she was right. About the tonight part, anyway. The rest we could figure out later.
“All right,” I said. “I only saw one on the right, but there was another guy mobile so there could be two. Could you handle two on your own?”
“Yes.”
“Then here’s how we’ll play it. If I go with you, and the ones on the left see me help you drop the opposition on the right, I lose the element of surprise if they come after us. If I hang back, and anyone pursues you, they’ll have to get through me, and they won’t even understand I’m a real obstacle until it’s too late. Okay?”
She nodded. “It’s a good plan.”
“So we walk out together and kiss goodnight at the door. You go right, I hang back. If you need help, I’m close enough to back you up. If you don’t, I’ll mop up the others.”
Suddenly she looked alarmed. “You can’t kill them. Not unless you absolutely have to.”
I tamped down my frustration. I wasn’t used to having to consult on this kind of thing. I said, “Don’t make this harder than it has to be, okay? We’re up against four. Maybe more. We don’t know if they have weapons, we don’t even know for sure what this is about. When I hit these guys, I don’t want them getting back up. If you’re smart, you’ll do the same.”
“Think, John. We can’t leave four bodies, or more, outside a restaurant where we just had dinner, where we’ve eaten, what, eight, ten times before? The police will get a description. An attractive blonde and a Japanese guy, you want to be worried about the police looking for something like that every time we share a kiss on the Pont de Sully?”
Goddamn it, she was right. I was letting those images of what they would do to her in the truck affect my judgment.
I blew out a long breath. “You’re right.”
“I mean it,” she said, knowing me, realizing how I was feeling.
“I get it. I’m not going to kill anyone.”
But I’ll make them wish I had.
“If the plan is to get you into the truck,” I said, “that’s the center of gravity of this thing. So when you’re done taking care of business, you keep going in the same direction you started. Away from the truck. I’ll handle my end, you just get out of Dodge. You understand?”
“Yes,” she said. There was no need to affect protest. She was good, but she knew I was better. Sending the target back into the center of the op would have just been stupid.
“Good. And don’t go back to your apartment when it’s done. We don’t know how they tracked you. If it’s your mobile, they could have logged your movements to your apartment, we don’t know. So when we’re done—”
“Yes, I’ll turn it off and remove the battery. Where do you want to meet?”
“There’s a park, by Sully Morland Metro.”
“The Square Henri-Galli.”
“Yes. The playground inside it, the monkey bars—I’ll meet you there and we’ll figure out what to do next. But like you say, first this.”
“Okay.”
I rotated my neck, cracking the joints, and popped my knuckles. I felt a surge of hot adrenaline spread out from my gut and it felt like coming home.
“All right,” I said. “You ready?”
She nodded and we stood. She pulled on the cream suede jacket that earlier she’d hung on the back of her chair, slipped one arm and her head through the strap of her shoulder bag, and eased the Hideaway onto the first two fingers of her right hand, concealing it alongside the shoulder bag. I drained the last two inches of wine remaining in my glass, but didn’t swallow it, instead holding it in my mouth. Delilah bid the waitress au revoir, merci, and we walked to the door, each of us eyeing the area outside. Just beyond the threshold, we paused, facing each other, and kissed in the French style, one cheek, then the other, giving each of us two opportunities to see what was waiting a little way down the street.
I squeezed her arm and she moved off, her footfalls echoing quietly on the stone sidewalk in the dark, and there was something about the sound as it faded away that almost could have panicked me. I hadn’t expected it to be so hard to let her walk alone into whatever she was facing. I suddenly wondered if I’d made a mistake, if the odds weren’t better with us sticking together. But too late to go back now.
I took out my mobile as though to make a call, using it as an excuse to linger in front of the restaurant a moment longer. I kept my head down but my eyes up and saw the two on my end of the street start moving in our direction. They weren’t even looking at me. They were completely focused on Delilah. Bad enough that they’d underestimated her. But thinking I was a civilian, too… this just wasn’t going to be their night.
I glanced right. Someone had stepped out of the gloom in front of Delilah. I heard him say, “Désolé.” Someone else had peeled himself off the dark wall of the École and was moving to flank her. Delilah’s arm moved in a blur and the first guy stumbled back, clutching his face, crying out, “Ah! Putain de merde!” She’d slashed him with the Hideaway. I hoped across an eye.
The second guy, obviously not understanding what had just happened or not having time to process it, reached her and grabbed her wrist, pulling on it as though trying to haul her in the direction of the truck. Delilah pulled the other way and the guy braced with his forward leg, straightening his knee. I saw it coming a second beforehand: she chambered her forward leg and blasted a stomp kick into his outer knee, blowing it outside in. As the guy shrieked and crumbled to the ground, something an old instructor had once said popped up crazily in my mind—Actually, the knee bends both ways, it’s just that one of them requires surgery afterward—and then Delilah was running, and I heard footfalls to my left.
I turned, slipping my phone back into my pocket. There were two of them, hauling ass to catch Delilah or to help their buddies or both. The one in the lead barely glanced at me as I stepped into the street on an intercept course. As he came abreast of me, sprinting, I rotated my hips and launched my right arm into his path at neck level, catching him full in the throat with the forward edge of my hand. I felt something break in his cricoid cartilage and another crazy thought—that had to hurt!—flared and disappeared somewhere in my consciousness. Then his feet were sailing past me and I dropped my weight, guiding the back of his skull into the stone street where it connected with a satisfying crack.
The second guy pulled up short just a few feet away, his eyes bulging, his circuits obviously jammed with the effort of trying to work through how a simple plan had just gone so incredibly wrong. His right hand went to his front jeans pocket, and before he could access whatever weapon he had there, I spewed a mouthful of wine directly into his face and eyes. He cried out in pain and disgust and stumbled back, his hand still groping at his pocket. I swept in, simultaneously securing his right wrist with my left hand and catching the collar of his leather jacket with my right, spun counterclockwise, and blew his legs out from under him with harai-goshi, a classic and powerful judo throw. I used the collar grip to bring his head toward the ground faster than his body, and the back of his cranium crashed into the street like his partner’s with a satisfying and doubtless disabling crack. I released him, stood, and stomped his right hand, turning his metacarpals to mush and thereby rendering his weapon hand useless, maybe permanently so.
I glanced behind me. The two men Delilah had dropped were still down. I glanced the other way. The truck was quiet. Either it was empty, or whoever was inside didn’t realize what had just happened to his buddies. I strode over to the back door and gave it two brisk raps with my knuckles. “Open up,” I said in French. “There’s been a problem.”
I heard movement inside, then the door started to swing out. I grabbed the handle and flung the door wide, and the guy who’d been opening it spilled out onto the street with a startled cry. As he came to his knees, I grabbed his hair with both hands and shot a knee into his
face, then a second time, and again. By the third shot, his arms had dropped away and I was supporting dead weight. I let go and he slumped to the street, his head smacking the fender of the truck with a theatrical clang along the way.
As I used the hem of my jacket to wipe down the handle I’d grabbed, the driver’s door blew open. I immediately moved counterclockwise around the truck, buying myself time and distance in case whoever it was had a weapon. But then I heard the sound of feet and saw the guy’s back as he turned left on Rue Poulletier, and I realized he was running away. He would have been better off driving, but maybe he’d thought I was the police, or maybe he’d just panicked.
I went after him. It wasn’t carefully planned, just an impulse, born of cold rage at what would have been happening in that truck if things had gone the way they’d planned. And it wasn’t as though I wanted to stick around the crime scene anyway.
He headed west on the Quai d’Anjou. I thought he would break right over the Pont Marie, but he didn’t, he just kept going, I suppose thinking he could outlast me. He wasn’t much of a runner, though, and it wasn’t long before his pace was slackening. By the time we had reached Rue Le Regrattier, he was going not much faster than a man who was running late for an appointment, which, other than his loud panting, he might in fact have been. I could have overtaken him there, but wanted a quieter place, somewhere we might have a moment alone.
On the short riser of stone stairs that led to the Pont Louis-Philippe, he stumbled and collapsed. I circled around him as I approached, watching his hands, making sure they were empty. There were a few people around but not so near as to present a problem.
“Okay, okay,” he said in French, coming to his feet. He was panting, doubled over, his hands on his knees. “Please. Okay.”
I looked around again to ensure we were alone, then smacked him in the side of the head—a blow to establish dominance, not inflict damage. “You know who you fucked with tonight?” I said. “GIGN.”
He blanched at that. The Groupe d’Intervention de la Gendarmerie Nationale was the French Gendarmerie’s elite counterterrorism unit. GIGN operators had a reputation for toughness, and were especially feared in the Parisian slums. If you were an illegal, and I was betting this guy was, a GIGN operator was just about the last person in the world you wanted taking a personal interest in you.
