Run
Dieter Schwarz
They found us.
Dieter watched as Flicka’s emerald eyes widened, watching the man who stopped in front of the van, laying his hands on the hood and staring inside at them.
Claude Brousseau. Dieter recognized the guy, one of Quentin Sault’s Monegasque Secret Service men, dammit.
Flicka said, in her sweet, soft voice, “Dieter—”
Dieter yelled, “Go!” but the van’s side door was already being pried open.
Aaron jammed the transmission into gear and called from the driver’s seat, “Do I run him over?”
“Push him!” Dieter answered.
The van rocked, and metal screamed. The guys outside had a circular saw with a whirling blade and a crowbar, and they were prying the metal door from the van as they went after the locks and hinges with the saw.
Dieter grabbed Flicka’s arm and pulled her onto the couch, shoving her behind him and plastering himself over her. Like hell, they were going to take her. They’d have to go through his dead body.
The van lurched under him, and he hung onto the back of the couch. He yelled to Aaron, “Get us out of here!”
The van nudged forward, the nose bobbing up a little. “They’ve put chocks under the wheels. I’ll have to gun it and kill the guy in front. Maybe.”
In front of the van, Claude Brousseau was still leaning on the hood and glaring at them. His dark eyes squinted with anger.
Dieter reached behind himself and tugged a gun from his waistband holster and a knife from the scabbard on his ankle. He muttered to Flicka, “Stay back.”
The van door screeched half-open.
Prying apart the metal had deformed it, and the men outside shoved the door to open it.
Quentin Sault, Mathys Vitale, and Jordan Defrancesco stood outside the van.
Defrancesco held a saw with both hands like a weapon and didn’t look up.
Dammit, Dieter could have used a call that Sault’s men were onto them. They’d probably followed the lawyer and then the van, dammit.
Mathys Vitale started to climb into the van through the opening.
Dieter pushed off behind himself and kicked Vitale in the face with his thick boot.
Vitale rocked back but kept coming, sneering through the blood pouring down his nose. Behind him, Sault drew a gun and aimed it above Vitale’s head at Dieter.
From behind Dieter, a gunshot blasted his eardrums.
He ducked, his hands going over his head. Gunpowder sparks stung his bare forearms and the back of his neck.
The Monegasque Secret Service men scattered.
Dieter looked back and saw Flicka swing a handgun toward the front of the van, pointing it at Claude Brousseau, whose eyes bugged out as he dove away.
Dieter yelled to Aaron, “Drive!”
Aaron yanked the steering wheel and jammed the accelerator. The van jumped the chocks and careened down the street.
Dieter started to pitch around the van, but he grabbed the headrest of the passenger seat and dragged the sliding door part way closed. The metal was too twisted to allow it to go any farther.
Aaron looked back through the rearview mirror at Dieter and the back of the van. “Any more gunfights going to happen back there?”
Flicka was holding the handgun out and away from herself, pointing at the floor with her finger pressed against the body of the gun, not on the trigger, a safe position.
Dieter said, “Flicka, hand that to me.”
“No.” She was staring at the gun in her hand.
“Where did you get that?”
“After you got dressed this morning, it was still in your backpack. I figured it was an extra one.”
“Where did you learn to load and shoot it?”
She shot him an angry look. “I lived with a Swiss sniper and an American gun nut for three months. Where do you think I learned to shoot it?”
“Rae is confined to bed.”
“There was video taken for critique of my form.”
He couldn’t help himself, and he grinned at her. “Why didn’t I know about it?”
“Welfenlegion only. Wulfie thought you wouldn’t approve, but of course, he taught his little sister to shoot a handgun. He probably would have done it sooner except that I lived in Europe after he moved to America. I already knew how to shoot a rifle, of course. I’ve had to open the Hannover sharpshooting competition with a rifle demonstration every year after Wulfie ran off to be a hermit.” She swallowed hard. “I never thought I would have to shoot a person.”
“If it helps, I think you missed. There was a brick wall behind them—”
“I checked the backstop.”
“Good, so I don’t think you hit anyone. I’ve never seen Sault’s Secret Service guys leap quite so quickly, though. You made quite an impression.”
“They were stupid, all of them. They should have run when they saw you with a gun.”
“They knew I probably wouldn’t shoot until they were in the van due to witnesses and closed-circuit, police television cameras.”
“Oh, no.” Her eyes widened again, and the gun drooped in her grip. “I messed things up.”
“The police will certainly be looking for someone firing a gun in Paris, but the main problem is that Quentin Sault saw you with me. I looked right into his eyes. He’ll be looking for both of us, now. He’ll have two trails to follow to lead him to you. We should proceed directly to the airport.”
“But now you can’t even use your passport. I’ve ruined everything.”
Dieter glanced at his backpack, where evidently Flicka hadn’t gone through all the pockets. “I have other passports we can use, passports with other names.”
Flicka’s hands tightened on the gun in her excitement. “You have counterfeit passports with fake names?”
That wasn’t what he’d said.
In the rearview mirror, Aaron glanced at him but kept driving.
The damaged van rumbled onto a main road and blended into traffic as well as it could.
Dieter yelled over the road noise and wind blustering through the half-open door, “Give me that gun, and we’ll go to the airport soon.”
Flicka thumbed the cocked hammer and released it slowly. She threw a terrified look at the half-open van door. “I think I’ll keep it until we get to the airport.”
“You know what I said—”
“Yes, I know what you said, but they almost got in here, didn’t they? And if they can get in, they can take me out.”
“We’ll be on a plane for Las Vegas tonight,” he reminded her.
Flicka tucked the gun in the seat by her leg. “Then we’ll leave all the guns together right before we go to the airport tonight.”
Dieter turned around. “Aaron, do we have somewhere to hole up for a few hours?”
The driver said, “The same safe house, or the place where I’ve been staying.”
“Which one is closer to the airport?”
“Mine. Montparnasse.”
Flicka grumbled, “Great. If Pierre comes after me, we can hide in the catacombs.”
Dieter let himself smile. “Let’s go there.”
Aaron swung the van around a corner.
Dieter staggered to the back of the weaving van and climbed onto the couch beside her.
She leaned against him, and he wrapped his arms around her slim body.
“Don’t try to take the gun,” she said.
“I won’t, but you know I won’t let them take you.”
She looked at the mangled van door and buried her face in his shoulder.
Dieter held her more tightly, stroking her spun gold hair. “They would have to kill me first.”
“They would.” Her arms tightened around him. “I don’t want them to kill you.”
“That’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me,” Dieter said.
“No, it’s not.”
“Okay, it’s not.” Dieter frowned at the torn-apart door and the Parisia
n street flowing past outside. “Do you think the Triple-A rental car insurance will cover that?”
Flicka asked, “What’s rental car insurance?”
Just A Little Mental Trick
Flicka von Hannover
Wulfram taught me to lie about it.
I don’t think anyone else even suspected.
The new safe house, if you could call the flat a ‘house’ in any normal conversation, was smaller than the one-bedroom apartment in the Latin Quarter.
Aaron walked up the two flights of stairs and into the room with them to pack a backpack with the few things he’d left there. He called over his shoulder as he shut the door, “Call me when you need a ride to the airport.”
The studio apartment in the Montparnasse district was in a large, pre-war building that had been divided and sub-divided many times, leaving one small room and a bathroom, and that was all. A small kitchen area along one wall had a half-size fridge, a microwave, a small sink, and a square of countertop. A queen-size bed took up most of the room, with a loveseat and small television on a nightstand in the other corner.
The window opened to a view of Paris’s one true skyscraper, the fifty-nine-story Tour Montparnasse, a surging monolith that interrupted the graceful skyline of Paris. Flicka didn’t like it much. No one did.
Flicka ran her finger over the countertop and felt nothing but slick tile. “Aaron must not cook much.”
Dieter shrugged. “The cafes in this area are abundant and cheap. And—” He ducked to check the fridge and came up with a few items in his hands. “—Hummus doesn’t take much space.”
She laughed. “He lives on that stuff, doesn’t he?”
“If he could, he would.” He startled a little and checked his buzzing phone. “Dammit.”
“What?”
Dieter glanced up at her, wariness hovering in his gray eyes, and then he shrugged. “Here.”
The text was written in the Monegasque dialect of Italian, which Flicka read easily, and said, Sorry no warning. No time. We were watching the lawyer, and we followed the van you were driving. Grimaldi has been updated that the princess is with you in Paris and has called the French Prime Minister. Sault has ordered the Parisian police to trace your phone. Get rid of it. Triangulating now. There is a watch to all Paris police officers with your pictures. Go to ground. Get out of Paris if you can.
Dieter asked, “You finished?”
Flicka clenched her shaking hands into fists. “Yes. Jesus, Dieter. Pierre is Monaco. I know it sounds old-fashioned, but the royalty there is the country in a way that the old royalty isn’t anywhere else. Politicians are temporary. Pierre is more like the Constitution or the national symbol, like a bald eagle and the Statue of Liberty rolled into one for an American, or the royal family and the House of Commons and the crown jewels for a Brit. What would it be for the Swiss?”
“The Alps,” Dieter said, “the clean snow, the deep earth, the fresh air of the mountains and our alpine culture, and our neutrality in the world that sets us apart from it.”
“Yes. Pierre, and his uncle, and his brother and cousins are the font of Monaco. He can call anyone in any government, but especially here in France with the special relationship that France and Monaco have, and he can ask their government to do things. Pierre can control everything around us: the police, the military, intelligence services, the customs officials at airports. Everything.”
Dieter dug around in the nightstand drawer and came up with a small pad of scratch paper and a pen. He started scrolling through his phone and writing down numbers. “I’ve already put it on airplane mode, so it shouldn’t be pinging any towers. I’ll destroy it as soon as I can get these down.”
Flicka hesitated.
Even with Dieter, her Lieblingwächter, the man who had declared that he would stop a bullet for her, she hesitated.
Because Wulf had always hidden it.
Because when she was little, Wulf had told her to hide it. Other people wouldn’t understand. Just gloss over it. Pretend it wasn’t there. Pretend it was just a trick.
But they needed to destroy that phone as soon as possible. Minutes might count.
Flicka said, “Give me the phone.”
Dieter looked up. “Why?”
“Just give it to me.”
He handed it over, watching her.
Flicka sucked in a breath and looked at the list of contacts, the names and numbers, on the screen. She made sure to notice each one, the spelling, and the rhythm of the phone number and email addresses.
Then she scrolled up the screen and did it again.
And again.
And some more.
In her head, the numbers sorted into patterns and colors, even notes of music, and they all stuck in her memory.
She handed the phone back to him. “Destroy it.”
Dieter asked, “What’s the phone number for Aiden Grier?”
She told him the number, from the country code to the last digit, and explained, “It’s just a trick. It’s just a silly thing to memorize strings of numbers.”
“Did Wulfram teach you this trick?” he asked.
Flicka bit her lip. “Yeah,” she admitted.
Dieter looked her straight in the eyes. “I see.”
She had a feeling he saw everything. “It’s just a stupid mental trick.”
When she had been in grade school and living with Wulfie as her guardian, he had asked her for her help in memorizing Russian vocabulary words. He had known almost immediately that she could do the trick, too, and had warned her about flaunting it. Other people didn’t understand. Within a few days, she’d realized he could do it, too. They played at Russian vocabulary, pretending to get words wrong, to practice how to not get caught.
Dieter dropped the phone on the tile floor and drove his heel through it again and again, smashing it to bits until the battery was lying separately from the broken glass of the screen and the soldered circuit board, which was cracked and bent.
Flicka said, “You could have just pulled the battery and SIM card.”
He shrugged. “Didn’t have one of those little screwdrivers.”
“That’s effective, anyway.”
“Sure is.”
“I guess we could go to a library or somewhere that has public computers to buy the airline tickets.”
“I’ve tasked someone else to purchase our tickets. They’ll call when they’ve nailed down the departure time.”
She gestured to the smashed phone on the floor. “Call us on what?”
Dieter pointed to an actual, landline telephone sitting on the nightstand by the phone. “All of our safe houses have one of those.”
“Wow. I knew they still existed, but I never thought I’d see one in real life.” She walked over and cautiously poked it as if it might jump at her. She wished she had a stick to poke it with, just for comedic effect.
Dieter chuckled. “A lot of flights to the States leave in the late morning or early afternoon because you’re traveling with the sun. The plane arrives on the East Coast about three hours of clock time after it leaves here, even though the flights take nine hours or so. We’ve probably missed most of the flights for today. I suppose we’ll have to hole up here for the afternoon and tonight.”
Flicka said, “We could go shopping.”
Dieter raised one dark blond eyebrow in real horror. “You want to go shopping?”
She risked an experimental sniff inside the shirt that he had bought for her in Montreux the previous morning. Yeah, not good. “You know, if we’re going to be on a plane with a bunch of other people, we might want something fresh to wear. Maybe we should check in some luggage, anyway, to blend in. I can do my makeup before we go out. And we can wear the hats and sunglasses. There aren’t a lot of police in this section of Paris. They’ll be watching the airports and train stations the most. Do you think Pierre tracked the car?”
“Aaron doubled-back and did some other maneuvers to throw them off on the way here, if they
had a tail on us.” He sighed. “I would bet that Quentin Sault had all their men attack the van, and no one was in a chase vehicle in case we got away. Sault’s operational planning is terrible. We could go out. Indeed, if they tracked the phone here, we should leave for a few hours to see if anyone tries to get in.”
Flicka fretted. “Money.”
Dieter smiled and patted his wallet. “Operational procedure. I have a selection of small, unmarked bills. Aaron passed them to me last night.”
Relief crept up Flicka’s neck, and she smiled. Her world had been falling apart for two days, and she couldn’t save herself or do anything to help. Shopping, she had some control and knowledge about. “Okay. Let’s go shopping.”
Dieter smiled at her. “Not too expensive. No designer boutiques.”
“Oh, honey, just because I know all the designers doesn’t mean that I’m a snob. I can shop anywhere. Let’s go!”
Shopping in Paris
Flicka von Hannover
We all have our specialized skill sets.
And indeed, Flicka could shop anywhere.
Dieter did some due diligence surveillance from the windows before they left the apartment, and he staged some items in the room, placing things just so and pointing at the corners of the room or the windows, before they went shopping. He pasted one of Flicka’s blond hairs across the door and its frame with spit.
Flicka skipped along the sidewalk with him, craning her neck at the display windows as they passed bohemian boutiques and interesting little shops.
In a tiny shop off a side street, she found some very nice slacks and blouses in good fabrics that she would have worn any day of the week. In another, they found some nice button-down shirts and trousers for Dieter, whom she bullied into first trying them on and then showing her.
When he walked past her, imitating the long-legged strut of runway models, she laughed at him, and he looked around quickly to make sure no one had seen.
It was nice when Dieter allowed himself to be silly. He wasn’t able to very often, what with keeping her brother from getting shot and all.
In Shining Armor Page 15
