He unfolded the papers he’d taken from Luca Lazio’s office. It was too dark to read, but he knew the words. A nicked renal artery had resulted in Emma’s losing six pints of blood. She would have been delirious when she’d been transported to the hospital, perhaps even near death. In agony, drifting in and out of consciousness, she’d given her name as Lara. Not Eva Kruger, not Kathleen O’Hara, and not Emma Ransom—all well-known, practiced aliases—but Lara. And after the surgery, when asked for her last name, she’d refused it.
Jonathan could come up with only one reason why.
Lara was her real name. She had no alias to accompany it. Only the truth. And the truth she must keep hidden at all costs.
Jonathan rose and sidestepped to the center aisle. He spent a moment staring at the altar, gazing up to the ceiling and the oils depicting the Fall of man, the Resurrection of Jesus, and the Second Coming.
Turning, he made his way to the front door. A wind had sprung up outside, and somewhere it made its way through a crack in the church walls, sounding a high-pitched keening. He stopped to listen, hearing his own fear in the shrill wail. Suddenly the wind died, and he felt his uncertainty go with it.
He opened the door and went onto the street.
46
Frank Connor paid off the taxi and presented himself to the doorman at the Diamond Club in Belgravia. “Tell Mr. Danko that Bill from California is here. I’ll be upstairs at the tables.”
Connor paid the exorbitant entrance fee and walked upstairs. The Diamond Club was a privately licensed casino catering to wealthy Eastern Europeans who had made the move to London in a big way over the past ten years. The club was divided into three floors. The ground floor offered an elegant bar and restaurant. The second floor housed the casino itself. And the third floor was reserved for private gaming and management.
Connor took a place at a blackjack table in the center of the room. At 1 a.m., action was lethargic, with no more than two dozen players scattered around the floor. Connor ordered a whisky and began to play cards. After three hands, he’d lost two hundred pounds. He signaled to the floor captain and informed him that he’d like to see Mr. Danko. The captain nodded politely and continued on his rounds. Ten minutes and another two hundred pounds to the worse, Connor still didn’t see Danko.
Enough, he told himself. He was done being polite.
Connor ordered a second whisky loosened his tie, and began to really play. In ten minutes he was up a thousand pounds. In an hour he was up five thousand. He asked for a cigar, and when the captain returned with a Cohiba, Connor told him to tell Mr. Danko that unless he wanted to continue having a very unprofitable night, he’d better get his Bosnian butt down here faster than he could say Slobodan Milošević.
The captain left. To prove his point, Connor bet all or nothing on the next hand and drew an ace over king. Blackjack.
Danko showed up sixty seconds later. He was tall and slim, dark hair slicked back off his forehead, his Slavic stubble kept at an appropriate length, and he looked much too comfortable in a white dinner jacket.
“Hello, Frank. Long time.”
“Sit down.”
Danko dismissed the dealer and sat next to Connor. “What are you doing here?”
“I need your help.”
“Look around you. I’m out.”
Connor glanced around the casino before coming back to Danko. “I see the same guy. You know Rome. I need you to do a job for me there. Are your passports still in shape, or do you need me to run something up for you?”
Danko smiled, no longer so comfortable. “Frank, listen, I appreciate your interest. It’s a compliment, I know. But I’ve moved on. I’m forty. Too old for that kind of work. Come on. Give me a break.”
“No breaks tonight. Tonight is a break-free zone. Know what I mean? Now come on, get your stuff. You still keep that nifty rifle upstairs? Let’s go on up to your office and I can fill you in on the details. Job pays ten thousand dollars.”
“I make that much in a day here.” Danko leaned closer, so that the smell of his cologne was ripe in Connor’s nose. “I gave you seven years. Where’s the American citizenship you promised? Where’s the resettlement to California? You strung me along and then dumped me when you didn’t need me anymore.”
“I rescued your bony ass from an internment camp when you weighed ninety-six pounds. You owe me.”
“Thank you, Frank, but I think that I’ve paid you back.”
Connor considered this. “I can offer twenty thousand.”
“Frank, it’s time to go.”
Connor tried to pull Danko closer, but managed only to knock over his whisky and spill it onto Danko’s dapper jacket. “You may even know the target,” he continued, undeterred. “Emma Ransom. Remember her?”
“No, Frank. I don’t remember anybody or anything. That’s how you taught us.”
Danko lifted a hand, and two doormen were at the table a second later. “Take Mr. Connor downstairs,” he said. “Help him find a cab.”
“I’m still playing cards, you ungrateful Slavic piece of shit.”
“Time to go.”
Connor rose aggressively and one of the doormen grabbed him by the shoulders. Connor shook him off, then gathered his chips. Leaving, he flung a five-hundred-pound marker at Danko.
It missed.
47
They were trouble. Emma knew it at a glance.
The crew of Muslim toughs had rounded the corner just ahead and were headed straight for her, already whistling and calling out names.
“Hey, girl, you better watch out,” one called out in Arabic. “Not safe for a Western girl all by herself.”
“Maybe she needs somebody to protect her,” added another. “A real man.”
“Bitch!” said the last, as if ending the argument.
There were six in all, and they wore the urban attire popular among disaffected French youth: baggy pants, oversized athletic jerseys, gold chains. There was nowhere to turn, nowhere to run, even if she wanted to. She fumed. She was not in the mood for a confrontation. Not tonight. Not when she had the black on. Not when even the friendliest smile might set her off, let alone a bunch of terrorists in training. She cursed the boys at headquarters. You decide to set up shop in a quartier louche, you have to expect that this kind of thing might happen.
The banlieue of Seine-Saint-Denis, in the northeastern outskirts of Paris, was a neighborhood of immigrants. A neighborhood where the poor came and went. A neighborhood that the police avoided. It was past two in the morning, but the streets still had plenty of life left in them. Neon lights advertised an all-night falafel shop. A cluster of men stood nearby, smoking. Keeping her eyes on the gang of toughs, Emma pulled her shoulder bag closer to her body and kept walking. The bag contained her work clothes, the camera, her purse, and, of course, her weapon.
The gang circled her, following her up the street.
“We’re talking to you, ma’am,” another said, this time in French. “You visiting, or did you move in? I’m sure we haven’t seen you before.”
Emma kept her pace, rounding a corner. She paid their catcalls no heed. She knew what it was like to be young and ungoverned and wild, with too much time on your hands and not enough money. “Excuse me,” she said, spotting her building, making to cross the street.
“Not just yet.” It was the leader, if there was one. A homely boy of nineteen or twenty, Algerian by the look of his hawk nose and shadowy eyes. He stood in front of her, blocking her path. He wore a tank top, and his arms were enormous. She spotted a tattoo of a dagger on his neck. A convict. That explained the arms. He’d had plenty of time to pump iron in the prison yard.
“I said, ‘Excuse me.’” Emma stepped around him, but he slid over to block her once more. She straightened up, sensing a tension that had not been there a minute before. “What do you want?”
“To talk.”
“It’s late. I need to get home.”
“Why don’t you come to my crib?” sai
d the leader, moving in, getting into her space. “Just you and me. Don’t worry, I’ll have you home in time for morning prayer.”
“That won’t be necessary. You kids run along now.” She was baiting them and couldn’t stop herself. She had the black on. Tonight, no one gave her shit.
The others were moving in, too. She checked over her shoulder. The street was empty. No falafel joints or tattoo parlors here. Just dark storefronts. In the distance she heard the crash of a bottle breaking and a woman’s hysterical laughter, giving way to a scream. Something clicked inside her.
“Don’t be a hard case,” said the leader. “Why don’t you hang with us?”
“And you can give us your bag while you’re at it,” said another. “We’ll deliver it to your room for you.”
A hand reached for the bag and she yanked it away. “The bag stays with me.”
“I’ll decide that,” said the leader. He stood inches away, his eyes close enough for her to see that one was half green and half brown. Then he made his mistake. He reached out and took her arm. Not forcefully but firmly and with no mistaking his intent.
It was all the provocation Emma needed.
She hit him on the bridge of the nose, her knuckles extended. The blow was so quick that he didn’t see it coming. It landed solidly and she felt the cartilage collapse, heard the septum break. He stumbled back a step, falling to his knees as the force of the blow registered, his nose broken, blood running copiously from his nostrils. She threw a kick into the chest of the man behind her, the one she’d sensed was the most violent of the group. It landed squarely on his sternum. He dropped like a sack of potatoes, winded, eyes looking as if they were about to pop out of his skull.
That’s all it took. The others backed off.
Disgusted with herself, Emma crossed the street and entered her building.
It was a monument to anonymity, a ten-story HLM—habitation à loyer modéré—built forty years ago and untouched since. The lobby was stifling and reeked of hashish. Emma walked to the elevator and waited five minutes for it to come. The stairwell was across the foyer, but she knew better than to walk up five flights. She didn’t care about the doped-up residents she might find. It was the stink of stale piss she hated. It reminded her of home and the past. And the past was the only thing that still frightened her.
The elevator arrived. She rode to the fifth floor. Apartment 5F was at the end of the hall. She had the key in one hand. The other was buried inside her bag, clutching a compact Sig Sauer P238.
Inside, she locked the door, taking care that the double bolt was secured. She dropped the bag on the kitchen floor, then knelt and dug out her pistol, checking that a bullet was chambered, safety on, before setting it on the counter. The place was a dump, just like the place she’d stayed in the night before, in Rouen. Welcome back to the other side, she muttered. Division would never have allowed a place like this. It wasn’t the money. It was a question of security. To put an operation at risk because of a bunch of neighborhood hoodlums was beyond reckless.
And what about her own behavior? Picking a fight when she should have walked away. Reckless was just the beginning.
She opened the refrigerator. A stuttering bulb threw light on a plate of cheese speckled with mold and a quart of rancid milk she could smell from where she stood. She closed the door, swearing under her breath. The least they could do was put a little something in the fridge for her. Some yogurt, maybe a jar of pickles, even some mineral water. Even, God forbid, a bottle of wine. This was France, after all.
Her stomach groaned and she felt her muscles clench with hunger.
The memory hit her like a hammer.
A gangly girl in a torn woolen dress. Auburn hair cut short, uncombed and hopelessly tangled. Rebellious green eyes peering out from a face ragged with eczema. She was standing in the school kitchen, her hands held out for punishment. At her feet lay a fractured porcelain bowl and the fistful of gruel she’d scraped from the bottom of the pot. The black belt lashed her palms, and then it lashed other parts of her. And though her body cried out, it was her pinched, complaining stomach that hurt most.
Emma laughed at her mawkish sentiment. Others had had it worse. But somewhere inside her, she heard the name Lara, and she rushed to lock away the memory.
She made a tour of the flat, stopping in each room to listen at the walls. It was a formality. She could hear the voices of her neighbors without putting an ear to the chipped and barren concrete. Noise was good. Quiet was bad. Quiet meant fear. And fear meant the police.
She returned to the kitchen and searched through her purse for something to eat. She found a stick of gum and some allsorts she’d bought in London on the way to meet Jonathan. She emptied the licorice into her hand and ate it, piece by piece. She had to admit it. She’d picked a glamorous profession.
Just then there came a knock at the door. Emma passed through the kitchen, picking up the pistol. Three knocks followed. She put her eye to the spy hole and recognized the sullen disheveled figure on the other side. She opened the door. “Nice place you’ve got here, Papi.”
“The flat isn’t ours,” he said, brushing past her. “It belongs to our friends from Tehran. Complain to them.”
“I don’t care who it belongs to. It’s a risk to place a safe house in such a squalid quartier.”
“A risk, is it?” Papi straightened up, suddenly looking a little more like the career officer he was. “Seen any police cars around? Any prying eyes? I didn’t think so. We couldn’t be in a safer place, even if you did have to teach the local welcoming committee a lesson.”
“You saw?”
“Of course I saw. You think I stay here?” He swung the large leather bag he was carrying onto the counter and rolled his neck, as if loosening his muscles. “What did you expect? A shiny ops center with analysts at their desks and a three-meter screen on the wall? You’re part of my team now. We operate under the radar. Not too different from your former employers, though I dare say we’re more ambitious.”
“And the laptops?” asked Emma. “Did you decrypt the hard drives before they hit the kill switch?”
A smile twisted Papi’s pale lips. Using both hands, he withdrew a sheaf of papers thick as a phone book from his bag. “Behold the Queen as only her intimates may see her.” The papers landed with a thud. “Final construction drawings signed by the managing engineer himself. Downloaded directly from their innermost sanctum. Every hallway, every window, and every door. One hundred percent accurate.”
Emma ran a hand over the detailed schemas, recognizing the outlines of the nuclear power plant she’d visited earlier that same night. “You’re welcome,” she said.
“Up yours, too,” Papi mumbled.
For two hours they pored over the drawings, rehearsing the operation. They studied the security building Emma must pass through to enter the complex, her path to the reactor containment building, and, most important, the ways to get into and out of the spent-fuel building. They brought up the photographs Emma had taken earlier that night and studied them on Papi’s own laptop, a sleek MacBook Pro. Like everyone else at home, he coveted American products.
Finally he talked about the placement of the explosives.
“You’ll set two devices,” said Papi. “The first carries a charge of two kilos of RDX with a dash of nitro to add a little oomph. Put it in the right place and it will blow a hole three meters in diameter out of the wall. That’s more than enough to suit our purposes. The second is bigger. Three kilos of HMX. It’s the latest and greatest. Ten times as powerful per cubic centimeter as Semtex. A bit unstable, though, so don’t bang it about. When you set the timers, make sure that there is a differential of at least six minutes between the first and second blasts. We need that time for the water to drain.” Papi turned over the drawings of the spent-fuel building and regarded Emma. “Give yourself adequate time to leave the premises. Once the water escapes the cooling tank, those rods will be shooting off more gamma rays than the fac
e of the sun. When the HMX goes off, you don’t want to be anywhere near the place. Any questions?”
“What about the inspector’s credentials?”
“Right here.” Reaching into the bag, he withdrew a packet and spilled its contents on the countertop. “Your name is Anna Scholl,” he said, sorting through the identification cards and selecting an Austrian passport and driver’s license. “Born Salzburg, 1975. Graduate of the Hochschule St. Gallen in Switzerland. You’ve worked for the IAEA for two years. You started in the administration department and were transferred nine months ago to Safety and Security, Inspections Directorate.”
Emma studied the photograph inside the passport. It was her executive look. Short hair. Rimless glasses. Plenty of makeup.
“INSC’s offices are located in La Défense. They’ll check you at the entrance against her picture in the IAEA database. A man named Pierre Bertels will meet you at ten a.m. He runs their credentials department.”
Emma studied the piece of paper. It read, “International Nuclear Security Corporation, 14 Avenue de l’Arche, La Défense 6, Paris.”
“What about the real Anna Scholl?”
Papi’s gray eyes flashed a warning. “She won’t be a problem,” he said stonily.
“Good,” responded Emma, with equal dispassion. “And you’re sure this Bertels won’t call Vienna to double-check?”
“As sure as I can be. His company doesn’t work for the IAEA directly. Their clients are the power companies, not the regulatory bodies. The whole procedure shouldn’t take more than an hour. I’ve brought you something to wear.”
Papi took a garment from his bag and laid it on the kitchen table. It was a svelte black two-piece wrapped in protective plastic from the dry cleaner.
Emma picked it up and held it at arm’s length. “If I cross my legs, you’ll see my privates.”
Rules of Vengeance Page 26
