Without another word, she retrieved her purse from the closet and headed for the bathroom. When she emerged a short time later it was as Lynette.
He was dressed and waiting for her. His eyes swept her, flickered. The glance she gave him as she walked past him toward the door was cool, remote, professional.
Never look back: it was one of the rules. And as far as she was concerned, that included last night’s regrettable interlude with him.
“Let’s go,” she said.
23
As a little girl who more than once had been left to make her way across the vast metropolis that was Paris on her own, Bianca had learned that the best way to grasp the layout of the arrondissements was to picture the city as a spiral centered on the Seine. Clockwise around the innermost circle were the 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th arrondissements on the Right Bank, and the 5th, 6th and 7th arrondissements on the smaller Left Bank. The 8th, 9th, 10th, 11th and 12th formed the second semicircular layer on the Right Bank, while the second layer of the Left Bank was made up of the 13th, 14th and 15th arrondissements. The 16th, 17th, 18th, 19th and 20th arrondissements formed the last outer circle of the Right Bank.
Their hotel was located in the 8th arrondissement. The Champs-Elysees cut through the heart of the 8th from the Arc de Triomphe to the Place de la Concorde, which meant that tourists were as ubiquitous as ants and as a result the area never slept. Cafés were open and people were on the streets even at that early hour. It was cold and slightly misty when she and Colin hit the street, and still full dark. The monuments and Christmas displays were aglow and the streetlights burned, but harbingers of dawn could be seen in the pale ghost of the moon dipping low behind the Eiffel Tower, the “green men” who were already at work washing the pavement, and the garbage vans rattling about their business. The heavenly smell of the bakeries was almost enough to counter the fishy scent of the puddles left behind by the previous night’s rain.
Ordinarily, the thought of a fresh baguette spread with that to-die-for butter would have been enough to make her mouth water, especially since she’d given the designated power-bar-and-water breakfast a miss, but her knotted stomach made eating an impossibility. If anyone had known and asked, she would have said that she was too tense at the prospect of the coming job to eat. The truth was, she never got tense before jobs; if anything, she got her Zen on. Her stomach was in a knot because, although mentally she had resolved the emotional turmoil that the previous night’s disaster had caused, physically her body had not yet fully gotten with the program.
As much as she hated to face it, somewhere deep inside she was bleeding. The wound was fresh, and would require time to heal.
Nobody ever said life was going to be all sunshine and lollipops, she told herself savagely.
Her rendezvous with Park was to take place in the 4th arrondissement, a relatively short distance that ordinarily would have merited a long walk or a quick metro ride. Given the fact that whoever was hunting her was without a doubt still out there and an unknown number of people, including at a minimum Park himself, whoever he might have told and Colin’s handlers, knew the time and location of the meeting, which meant that they knew she was going to be at a fixed point at a fixed time, the streets approaching the rendezvous were liable to be fraught with peril and public transportation to the area would conceivably be watched. Plus, fully trusting in any plan that Colin had had a hand in formulating now seemed foolishly naive. She therefore opted for the safe and simple: she stole a car.
Since she was now Lynette, who would be traveling through Paris alone, Colin was on the other side of the street and a little way behind her when she stopped walking toward the nearby metro stop to jimmy the ancient Audi’s door. By the time she pulled away from the curb, he’d caught up.
“I thought the plan was to take the metro,” he said as he wedged himself in beside her. He barely fit. His knees pressed against the glove box and his head lacked maybe half an inch of brushing the roof. His shoulders were wider than the seat back. Like most French cars, the Audi was clown-car small, with a manual transmission. It reeked of cheap perfume. The heat sputtered fitfully.
“New plan,” she said. Her voice was without inflection. Overt hostility had no place in the working partnership that they needed to maintain until the job was done. Until it came to an end, their association was strictly business, and she meant to keep her side of the equation businesslike.
She refused to even allow herself to take pleasure in how uncomfortable he looked. Well, not very much pleasure.
He said, “Lynette wouldn’t steal a car.”
“Lynette would already be dead.”
“Probably. Still—”
“The time and location of the meeting with Park might have leaked. And the people from last night are still out there. If they find out about the meeting, if anyone hunting Lynette finds out about the meeting, watching the streets and public transportation leading to it is a no-brainer. A rental car might get pinged, but a stolen car? No way. Getting as close as we can in a stolen car before Lynette joins up with Park on foot makes it far more difficult for anyone to take her out before she even gets to the rendezvous.”
He frowned, then gave a slow nod. “Makes sense.”
“I tend to do that.”
She could feel him watching her, but she didn’t look at him. Instead she kept a wary eye out for possible danger as she drove. The mansard roofs and gables and balconies of the centuries-old buildings lining the streets offered plenty of concealment for a sniper. Pedestrians were little more than dark silhouettes moving along the sidewalks: they could be anybody carrying anything. Headlights of the oncoming and following vehicles made it impossible to see inside them. The only good news was, any would-be assassin was equally unlikely to be able to spot them, or to see inside the Audi.
“Parc Marceau,” he said as she reached the first of many roundabouts. “Front entrance.”
“I remember.” As he’d told her on the way down the hotel stairs, it was the location of the dead drop. “Is the associate dropping off the weapons part of the team you have lying in wait in hopes of catching Mason?”
“No. Entirely separate.”
“Want to explain that team to me? Like how big it is? And where it is now?”
“Six of my men, plus a fair amount of technology, have been combing Paris for Thayer since we arrived.” He held up a hand to silence her when she opened her mouth with every intention of blasting him over the fact that this had been taking place behind her back. “Before you get going, let me stipulate that they don’t know anything about you being in Paris, as Bianca or as Lynette, or about what you and I are doing. They don’t even know that I’m in Paris. All they know is that Thayer is suspected to be here, and their job is to find him.”
“My, you do have a lot going on right now, don’t you?” Okay, too much snark. Rein it in.
“It’s called multitasking.”
The insouciance with which he said that had her brows snapping together.
“Does Durand know?” Her tone was brusque.
“That I’m hunting Thayer? He hired me.”
“Does he know about me?”
The slight hesitation before he answered told her everything she needed to know.
“Yes. Not that you’re posing as Lynette, but that you’re working with me.”
She would at least have given him a partial bonus point for telling the truth if she hadn’t suspected that he’d recognized his own hesitation, known she would put the correct interpretation on it, and thus concluded that an honest answer was his best choice.
Sometimes knowing each other’s thought processes as well as they seemed to was a bitch.
“Not to burst your bubble, but an awful lot of people have been trying to catch Mason for an awful lot of years. Nobody’s succeeded yet.”
He shrugged. “It takes a village.”
That was so annoying that Bianca clamped her lips shut rather than reply. She drove the remainder of
the short distance to the Boulevard de Courcelles in silence. The entrance to the park was illuminated but unguarded. A few people on the sidewalks, a few cars traveling in both directions on the wide street, but no one who appeared to pay the least attention as she pulled over and stopped in front of the park.
“Tick-tock,” she said with a glance at the dashboard clock. The time was 5:16 a.m. They had a little less than forty-five minutes in which to make it to the meeting.
He nodded and got out. The long gray overcoat he wore made him look like a businessman, or a banker. A tall, athletically built one. Frowning, she watched him walk across the pavement, past the classical stone rotunda that marked the entrance, toward one of the massive iron gates that, so many hours before opening time, were closed and locked. Darkness swallowed him up, but she knew what he was doing: retrieving the weapons stash from a trashcan beside the gate. Her pulse quickened as a couple with a dog and then two women who looked like they were making for the metro walked past, but they didn’t so much as glance in his direction, or hers. Then he was on his way back, a shadow separating from the other shadows. The long duffel bag that now hung over his shoulder could have held anything from exercise equipment to laundry.
Instead, she saw as he got back in the car and opened it to check the contents out by the uncertain light of the streetlamps, it contained top-of-the-line firepower: a Sig Sauer P226 MK25 pistol and a SCAR-H standard assault rifle plus accessories for both as well as a wealth of ammunition.
She was already driving away as he slipped a magazine into his Glock, chambered a round and restored it to his ankle holster. Then he checked to make sure the Sig Sauer was loaded, thrust it into the holster that came with it and strapped that on beneath his coat. Finally, he slipped the Desert Eagle plus extra mags into his coat pockets, screwed the suppressor can onto the SCAR-H and slipped the weapon back into the duffel so that, when the time came, it could be carried along a street and into a building without attracting attention.
She watched him handling the weapons enviously.
The unfortunate thing about being Lynette was, there was nothing much she could do about any trouble they might encounter. Defending herself in any effective way would immediately give the imposture away. If shit hit the fan, she needed to react as Lynette would. A pistol, for example, wasn’t happening because Lynette wouldn’t have one or, if she had managed to acquire one, know how to use it properly. Same thing with any kind of martial arts moves. The tools in her garter belt were off-limits, too. And the situation would have to get dire—as in, her life would have to be on the line—before Colin came into play.
Because if Park and crew even suspected that she wasn’t Lynette, the operation would fail. And, somewhat to her own surprise, she was discovering that she wasn’t going to let that happen. Her own problems, many and varied though they were, paled in significance to the threat a nuclear strike posed to the world. She was committed to doing her part to stop that if she could.
“Here.” He passed her a disposable phone that he’d pulled out of the duffel. “This is for you to use to verify the payment, or at least to be seen trying to verify the payment. If the money doesn’t transfer right away, don’t hang around waiting for it. Once you hand over the ChapStick, get out of there.”
“I don’t need you to tell me how to do my job.” Her voice was flinty. She paused, then added with cold precision, “Park doesn’t get the ChapStick until the money shows up in the account. Otherwise, he might get suspicious.”
Colin’s lips thinned, but he didn’t argue. They both knew that the importance of the operation merited taking all but the most egregious risks.
Traffic picked up as they neared the 4th arrondissement. Driving along the shiny black ribbon of the Seine in the shadow of the gorgeously illuminated Notre Dame Cathedral, Bianca was thankful for the anonymity of the Audi. They were just one of dozens of vehicles speeding through the city in the predawn darkness. At the Pont Louis Philippe she turned away from the river. The Rue de Rivoli, which was where the meeting with Park was supposed to take place, was not far away.
He said, “I’ll have eyes on you from the moment you step out on the street. If you need me, sing out.”
She responded with a curt nod. They would be in contact via the earrings and the ring. The plan was for him to be in an apartment overlooking her meeting with Park with the rifle trained on the action. When the meeting was over and the ChapStick and money had changed hands, she was to walk to the nearest metro stop, board the train and get off at the Eiffel Tower, where she and Colin would meet and she would be whisked out of France.
From the moment she met with Park, she would be in acute danger.
The Rue de Rivoli was one of the most heavily trafficked avenues in Paris. It was home to world-famous shops, innumerable cafés and restaurants, small parks, the Louvre, the Tuileries and an iconic golden statue of Joan of Arc, among many other must-see attractions. So early in the day, most of the shops and the museums weren’t yet open, but the parks teemed with exercise enthusiasts, the cafés and bakeries overflowed with people grabbing breakfast and the sidewalks as well as the street itself were busy with pedestrians and vehicles as commuters headed in to work early to beat the crush of rush hour traffic that would begin in earnest in about an hour. To add to the congestion, an exhibition of some sort seemed to be setting up in the small square around Saint-Jacques Tower, which was almost directly across from the newsstand where she was to meet Park.
By way of the first round of countersurveillance, she idled for a moment next to the curb in front of the Tower under the guise of watching the assembly of what proved to be about a dozen large white tents. What she was really watching was the newsstand, which was open and busy. No sign of Park yet. No sign of anything suspicious. She did a visual sweep of the adjacent sidewalks and street: nothing of interest.
Colin had been doing the same thing. Now he said, “It’s twenty till. Drop me off in that alley up there.”
Bianca nodded and drove on. Moments later she pulled into the dark and narrow alley he’d indicated, where he got out. The headlights picked up a dumpster, a stray cat and a couple of men walking separately toward the street they’d just left. Nothing out of the ordinary about them, but still she looked them over warily. At this point, an attack could come from anywhere.
Colin slung the duffel bag over his shoulder, then bent down to look in through the open passenger door at her.
“I’ll give you the go-ahead when I’m in place,” he said. The smile he gave her then was a little crooked, a little wry, and way too intimate for their decidedly not-intimate relationship. “You’re the best female operative I’ve ever seen, but you’re not bulletproof. Try not to get yourself killed out there.”
Her lip curled at him. “Bite me, fanboy.”
He laughed and shut the door. Just as well, because that limited her response to a killing glare directed at his retreating back.
Fortunately, she’d found her center again when, five minutes later, he spoke in her ear: “I’m here.”
“Nothing yet.” Her voice was crisp, emotionless, as befitted what they were to each other: strictly fellow operatives.
“Same.”
By that time she’d parked the car, walked back to Saint-Jacques Tower and stopped at a café across the street from it. From there she could see the newsstand and the area around it. So much hustle and bustle surrounded the setting up of the exhibit, which she felt safe in concluding from the paintings being carried inside the tents must be related to art, that she was, she felt, totally inconspicuous despite (or perhaps because of) the brightness of the stolen red coat she wore. Klieg lights were being switched on inside the tents, making them glow like Japanese lanterns, and tall heaters had been delivered and were being hooked up. Generators hummed, and workers were in the process of festooning the small iron fence around the square with bunting. As she watched, a trio of white delivery trucks with the words École des Beaux-Arts scrawled in large ele
ctric-blue letters on their sides pulled up to the curb in front of the tower. The École was one of the premier art schools in Paris, and she assumed that the trucks contained more items pertaining to the exhibit.
“Your coffee, mademoiselle,” the server said in French.
“Merci.” Bianca took the steaming cup. More as a cover than because she had any desire for coffee, she sipped from it as she turned away from the counter to cast a searching glance up and down the street. Traffic, both vehicular and pedestrian, grew heavier by the minute. Half a dozen patrons browsed the newsstand. None looked familiar. None looked suspicious.
There was no sign of Park.
Colin said, “Two lookouts in place, almost certainly from Park’s camp. One standing by the Pascal statue. One seated to the right of the newsstand. Black puffy coat, newspaper.”
Bianca spotted the men in question, the one bundled in a black parka, the other sitting on a bench with a newspaper. Both discreetly scanned the area around the newsstand.
“I see them,” she said. For Park to have lookouts in place was only to be expected. They were a precaution on his part rather than a threat to her. The type of operative she was watching for would not be so easily spotted.
“Here he comes. Across the street, passing the giant nutcracker beside the hat shop.”
By he, Colin meant Park: Bianca saw him exactly where Colin had said he was, walking purposefully along the sidewalk past Le Chapeau Parfait, bodyguards trailing.
Her final act as Lynette was at hand.
Her senses immediately heightened. Everything from the pale stone of the soaring Tower to the shiny hoods of the cars to the mostly grays and blacks of the coats of the pedestrians on the sidewalks to the bright colors of the magazines in the newsstand’s racks grew more vivid. Snippets of conversation, shuffling footsteps, the rumble of traffic, the jingle of money changing hands, all clarified and separated into individual tracks of sound in her head. She could feel the weight of the crisp winter air against her cheeks. The smell of exhaust and cigarettes and coffee grew sharper. She took one more unwanted sip of coffee—the brew was hot and newly bitter—pitched the remainder and stepped out of the café to get a better view.
The Fifth Doctrine: The Guardian Series Book 3 Page 22
