The Traitor tc-2

by Stephen Coonts

After I dropped him at his hotel so he could get some sleep, I headed back to my pad on the Rue Paradis.

  I climbed the stairs making the usual racket, passed Elizabeth Conner’s door and unlocked my garret on the floor above. After drawing the blinds on the window, I opened the backpack Al had given me and dumped the contents on the bed.

  Someone had packed a wealth of goodies for me to play with. The first item I picked up was the scanner, which was battery operated. I turned it on and went around the apartment looking for bugs, the electronic kind. I didn’t find any.

  That didn’t mean there weren’t any; it meant that I didn’t find them, if indeed they were there.

  I began an inch-by-inch search of the walls, floor and ceiling of the apartment. The job took several hours. I was looking for a hidden camera, or for a bug that could be turned on and off remotely. I moved furniture, disassembled the lamps, removed and reinstalled all the protector plates on the electric sockets and light switches, took off and inspected the air vents, went over the floor and walls with a magnifying glass and pulled the innards out of the television. It was tiring, tedious work. Fortunately there was no telephone or I would have had to take it apart to check the circuitry. When I finally got everything back together and back in place, I was ready to certify the apartment as bug-free. Not that I cared if anyone overheard me humming in the tub or brushing my teeth — I just wanted to know if anyone was curious enough about me to bug the place. Apparently not, and that was good.

  I was still bothered by the fact that Conner was in the apartment directly below mine. One of the things she could have done was merely put a listening device on her ceiling, which was my floor. With a simple computer, such a device could be made to work as well as a microphone in my bedroom lamp. That would be a cheap, easy way to keep me under surveillance.

  I felt like a racehorse waiting for the gate to open. Tonight was going to be busy. With nothing better to do, I went for a run.

  That evening Sarah Houston ate dinner with one of the FBI forensic accountants in Paris going through Oil-for-Food bank records. They ate at a small restaurant he selected from a guidebook. He had asked her to dinner, and she thought, What the heck, so here she was. It wasn’t as if he were a toad; he was clean-cut and good-looking, with a square jaw and good teeth, and he didn’t have any visible tattoos or piercings. She kept a smile on her face and listened to what he had to say. Someone once told her that this was the way to do it: Men need women to pay attention.

  “The thing that attracted me to accounting was the beauty of the logic,” Wally Slayton told her as they worked on an appetizer of pate de campagne. “Who knew that this career choice would put me in the thick of the action? Enron, HealthSouth, WorldCom, Tyco — I’ve worked ‘em all. Very exciting, let me tell you.”

  “Lots of travel,” Sarah Houston managed.

  “Oh, yes. I’ve got enough frequent flyer miles for a round trip for two to Tahiti.”

  “Next vacation.”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  The waiter served the coq au vin and refilled their wineglasses. “This Grafton,” Slayton remarked after he had told her about some of his more memorable vacations. “Do you really think he knows what he’s doing?”

  She deflected the question. “I haven’t thought about it.”

  “He doesn’t think like an accountant, I can tell you that.”

  Sarah Houston picked at the entree and helped herself to more wine. “I suppose not.”

  “Accounting requires a logical mind and the ability to pay attention to details. Grafton…” He raised an eyebrow, then abandoned the admiral to his fate. “I’ve worked with some of the best prosecutors in the world. It’s amazing to watch them in action. Dynamic personalities, brilliant strategists. You can feel the electricity when they’re around… ” He went on, naming names, regaling her with his experiences in the midst of legal combat. Had he but known about Sarah Houston’s past legal adventures, he would have probably been tactful enough to pick another subject. Maybe.

  Sarah finished the wine in her glass and stifled a burp. She had a headache.

  A few raindrops hit the windowpane beside the table and ran down to puddle on the outside sill. She stared at the puddles and thought about Tommy Carmellini.

  I ate a light dinner at a little restaurant I had been walking past. They decided I was a barbarian when I refused wine and insisted on Coke — with ice.

  After I returned to the apartment, I mounted a bug on the floor. It had a dish receiver on it, one that acted as a collector of vibrations. I plugged the lead into the amplifier, which weighed about half a pound, plugged the unit into a wall socket, turned it on and put on my earphones. After I adjusted the controls, I found myself listening to a television program in French and the sound of footsteps and doors closing in this building and the hotel next door. The headphone cord was about ten feet long. Still wearing the phones, I got out the infrared goggles, made sure the batteries were charged, put them on and fired them up.

  The goggles were the latest and greatest. I’d worn them for months in Iraq. When properly adjusted, the wearer could look through a normal visual obstruction, such as vegetation or a wall, and see if there was a heat source beyond it, such as a person or animal. I walked to the window and stood looking at the buildings across the street.

  The exterior wall still radiated some heat, but it was fading. Fortunately autumn had arrived in Paris. Poorly insulated hot-water pipes stood out in bold relief. I could also see a stove cooking, several hot plates and people. I stood looking at the human figures as I played with the gain on the unit.

  I could see them easily. They appeared not as mere blobs of color but as humans, with every limb in clear view. Consequently I could get a pretty good idea what they were doing by their posture and estimated position in the rooms.

  I couldn’t see anyone across the street who might be using binoculars or whatever to look at me. When I was pretty sure that I wasn’t being watched, I bent over enough to see into the apartment below. I could see Conner clearly, watching television, and through the bugs, I could hear the TV.

  Okay, I was a high-tech pervert.

  In a few minutes Conner turned the television off. A bit later she went to the bathroom and — well, you know. Gentleman that I am, I took off the goggles. Pretty soon she began making noises like she was brushing her teeth. I watched her finish washing teeth and face, get undressed and take a bath. The hot water in the tub obscured her figure.

  After a while I saw her climb into her bed and heard it creak. There were no more noises. I turned off the goggles and laid them on my desk.

  Who was Elizabeth Conner?

  Finally I stowed the toys in the backpack and got dressed for the evening.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The night was cold, almost freezing. I was sitting in a car with Willie the Wire examining Rodet’s chateau through the night vision goggles. I couldn’t see any people on either the ambient light or infrared setting.

  “It’s three o’clock,” Willie said. “How long you gonna wait?”

  “I don’t know. I wish I had a few more nights to scope out this place.”

  The night vision goggles were amazing. Even though evergreens and branches obscured much of the lawn, I could see a dog wandering along, stopping, moving at random, then lifting a leg on something. Actually I could see his thermal image, which is almost the same thing.

  As we sat there Willie had been regaling me with his romantic adventures. “Fella I know gave me some of those four-hour peter pills,” he informed me now. “I took one last night.”

  “Four hours?”

  “You know, the ones they advertise on TV. You get a hard-on that lasts more than four hours, you gotta go see a doctor.”

  “Talk about a great advertising campaign!”

  “I don’t know how the doc gets it down. Don’t want to find out, neither.”

  “Gives you a different perspective on technical progress, doesn’t it?”


  “We’re marchin’ on to the happy ever after.”

  The dog was probably going to spend the night outside. No sense waiting. I just hoped he was alone. “Okay, give me the backpack.”

  Willie dug it out from behind the passenger seat. I took off the goggles and looked it over. I had packed it, but I wanted to check where everything was one more time. I was going to have to locate most of this stuff by feel.

  Inside the pack were two small two-way radios, each built into a headset that contained an earpiece for the wearer’s right ear and a small boom mike that stuck out a couple of inches. I turned them both on, then handed one to Willie. As we put them on, I heard him say, “You get caught in there, I’ll send you a card every year on your birthday.”

  “You don’t even know when my birthday is,” I replied, and heard my own voice in my ear.

  “The Fourth of July, then.”

  “You have the grenade?”

  “The gonad cooker? Yeah, but I’m thinking about throwing it.”

  “Put it in position, right at the base of the pole, then drive off. There’s a sixty-second delay — that’ll be plenty.”

  “Why me?” Willie whined. “How come I got elected for this?”

  “I knew you could do it. But with fried gonads and a petrified dick, you’re going to be in a hell of a shape when you get home.”

  I had put tape over the switch that activated the car’s interior dome light when the passenger door was opened, so the light stayed off when I opened it.

  I checked my watch. Eight minutes after three. “One hour from now. Right here.”

  “I’ll be here.”

  I closed the door and walked away. Willie got the car under way. It was about a mile to the pole with the transformer on it.

  The lane along the fence was deserted. There hadn’t been a car in two hours. The temperature was in the midthirties, and there was a breeze blowing. My black jacket, pullover wool cap, and gloves felt good. As I walked I got a Snickers bar out of my jacket pocket and stripped off the wrapper. The wrapper I put back in my pocket. I swung my arms to get the blood circulating.

  The dog had scented or heard me. He was behind the brush, but with the goggles, I could see his thermal image, which appeared as a shape, with the hotter spots more intense. His tail was almost a shadow, yet his tongue was quite prominent. He was silent, paralleling the fence.

  I came to the spot I wanted, where a tree limb had come down on the barbed wire that topped the chain-link fence. This was where I would cross.

  The dog was over there, pointed right at me, waiting, not even growling. He was big, at least fifty pounds. And oh, yes, this one was well trained, waiting silently there in the darkness in the hope I would cross that fence and he could have the pleasure of tearing my throat out.

  I toggled the goggles from the thermal to the night vision setting. It took a few seconds for an image to appear. Now the yard and trees and shrubs glowed with a greenish light. I could see everything except the dog, which was behind a clump of bushes. I moved along another ten feet or so to a gap in the dark limbs. The lights of the house glowed like headlights in the goggles. I found myself squinting. I tossed the candy bar over the fence. I saw and heard it hit a tree branch, then drop in the fallen leaves that coated the ground.

  Here came the dog. Now he was in view. I watched him sniffing that candy bar. I was pretty sure he would eat it. No doubt he was trained to avoid raw meat, the logical bait. Never saw a dog yet that didn’t like Snickers bars.

  He looked like he was eating. His head was down.

  I was waiting for him to lie down when I heard a distant pop, like a backfire, and all the lights in the chateau went out. The place became instantly dark, lit only by outside ambient light. Willie had popped the electromagnetic grenade, which emitted one short, intense pulse of energy. That pulse tripped the circuit breaker in the transformer.

  The dog moved a little, walking slowly, then stumbled, tried to rise, and lay still.

  The drug should keep him down for an hour or so, if he ate the whole bar. I could only hope he did.

  I switched the goggles to infrared, scanned carefully, then went up the fence with my hands, grabbed the limb and scrambled across. I checked the dog, which hadn’t moved. Then I dropped to the ground.

  Silence.

  After one last scan on infrared, I switched the goggles back to night vision. The dog lay under a tree. I pulled him over under a bush, just in case someone came looking. Then I jogged across the lawn for the house.

  Approaching the house, I found a tree and got behind it. Now I shifted the goggles back to infrared. The walls of the house were cool. I played with the control knobs, adjusting the setting. I wanted to see people inside, if there were any to see. The insulation of a building’s exterior walls would interfere with infrared transmissions, a fact the user had to understand and work with.

  Still, the goggles were magic. The insulated interior hot-water pipes became visible as fixed lines. I saw the glow of the kitchen: The stove still retained a detectable amount of heat even though it had probably been off for hours.

  Someone was moving around inside on the first floor. I could see the human figure walking … going down a set of stairs — to the basement, probably, to check the circuit breakers or fuses.

  There was another figure, faint, apparently in a room on the far side of the house. It was sitting. I stared and reached for the goggle controls. Oh, he or she was putting on shoes. Or boots. There was no time to waste.

  The porch had a roof. I trotted over, found the balcony, leaped to the rail and pulled myself to the roof. Almost lost the goggles. I paused to readjust them and tighten the straps.

  Once I reached the side of the house above the porch I realized that the house was built of cut stone. There was probably little or no insulation in the walls. This shack was a couple of hundred years old, at least.

  There was a window overlooking the roof, and a peek through it revealed no heat sources in the room. Which was good. I didn’t want someone wrapped in a comforter to start screaming when I made my entrance.

  I flipped the goggles back to ambient light and waited for the picture to blossom. The window, two panels of panes, was locked, of course. I forced a shim into the gap between the panels and started prying.

  Just as I felt the latch give, I heard a whistle. High-pitched. Then a human whistling. Now a male voice called for the dog. I couldn’t make out the critter’s name, but the tone of voice was the same in any language.

  I eased the window open and stepped through.

  Once I was inside with the window closed and latched, I looked down onto the lawn. The man had a flashlight and was casting the beam around, calling the dog.

  If he found him, this gig was going sour fast.

  I put the goggles back on the infrared setting and began looking around for heat sources. The interior walls were wooden, and much thinner than the cut-stone exterior walls, so I had to diddle with the adjustment knob.

  There was a person in the next room, obviously lying down. No, two people, apparently in bed together — and not moving. Asleep, I hoped.

  No one in the hallway beyond the door, which wasn’t locked. I opened it and scanned the dark hallway.

  There were at least six bedrooms leading off the hallway. Only the one beside me contained a person.

  Out in the hallway I looked downward, trying to see if there were people on the floor below.

  No.

  The hallway and stairs were carpeted. Still, I eased down the stairs, staying to one side in case there was a creaky board. A building this old, I bet there wasn’t a nail in it — just pegs.

  Taking my time, exploring, I worked through the lower floor. There was a kitchen, a formal dining room, a couple of sitting rooms, a library with a television, a couple of small bathrooms that looked like they might have been closets way back when, an office and a master bedroom suite. The master suite contained people, two, apparently asleep. Mounted in co
rners in every room were surveillance cameras, and here and there a motion detector. Without power they were useless, but if the power came back on…

  There was a safe in the office, a floor-mounted job about three feet high. I noted the brand and model number, just in case Jake Grafton got another big idea.

  Then I attacked the office. Working as quickly as I could, I installed a key logger on the computer keyboard cord, under the desk and out of sight, then installed audio bugs on the curtains, up as high as I could reach, and put one mounted on a pin on the back of an upholstered chair. It would be good to know who was using the computer, so I installed three video bugs facing the desk. They would essentially cover the room.

  “There’s a car coming.” That was Willie’s voice in my right ear.

  I headed for the library, then the sitting rooms and dining room, and installed audio bugs in each one. These were top of the line, so small that they fit nicely on the head of a pin. I worked a couple into the edges of the carpets.

  “He’s slowin’ down and lookin’ me over, Tommy.”

  The bed room was the place I wanted into, though, and there were people in there. I tried the doorknob. It was locked. As I bent down to examine it with the goggles on the ambient light setting, I heard a noise: a door closing somewhere in the building.

  Back to infrared. As I waited for the picture to change I groped for the stairs.

  I had just reached them when I saw him, coming around the corner from the kitchen. He had a flashlight, which looked like a tiny glowworm in infrared. He opened a doorway and began descending the stairs.

  “Okay, he’s goin’ on. Might call the police, though. Maybe you’d better hurry up and get your sneaky ass out of there.”

  Call it intuition, but I just knew the man in the house was going to the basement to fire up an emergency generator.

  Flipping the goggles to ambient light, I came back down the stairs and made for the kitchen and the door that led out the back, the one the man had just entered. It was unlocked, of course. I pulled it shut behind me.

  Turning, I saw a dog coming at a dead run, a speeding green shape against the light green background, and, quicker than thought, he was there! I just had time to set my feet. He growled as he leaped for my throat.