“Food and drink have been inspected,” I suggested.
“Yep. And no one is in the building except authorized staff, news-people, security folks, and the political delegations from all over. Absolutely no tourists.”
“Sounds like you have it covered.”
“I’m just praying there was only the one bomb.”
He departed for the security command center, which was a trailer outfitted with three different global communications systems that sat by the door in the courtyard, right outside the main entrance. It had been obscured by the news trucks, so I hadn’t noticed it. Grafton assured me it was there, and I believed him.
It did figure that there was only the one banger. Two doubled the chances that one would be found; then the building would be searched like a Columbian nanny. But since I saw it that way, maybe there were indeed two. Or three.
The problem was that I was a little dizzy. I climbed down from the catwalk gingerly, making sure my feet were properly placed on the rungs. The irony of the moment made me want to cry. I’m a rock climber, for Christ’s sake, a cat burglar. I can free-climb a brick wall, and here I was, holding on to a ladder like a kid climbing an apple tree for the very first time.
Safely on the floor, I propped my head on the pillow and lay down on the blanket I had slept under the previous night. Closed my eyes and tried to ignore the pounding in my head. Tried to shut out the noise that seeped through the walls from all sides. Tried to sleep, but it didn’t happen. The person on my mind was Abu Qasim.
Grafton found Willie Varner in the basement kitchen watching the ceremonies on television. He was alone. “Carmellini still upstairs in the hallway?”
“He hasn’t come down.”
“The door is locked, right?”
“Yep. I checked a little while ago.”
“Don’t let anyone through that door to the servants’ hall. Anyone.”
“Got one of those radios for me?” Grafton was wearing a radio earpiece in his left ear and a lapel mike. The wires ran to a radio transceiver hooked to his belt.
“No. I got the last one they had.” He pulled out a cell phone, made sure it had a signal, and passed it to Willie. “This is Callie’s. Call me if anyone wants to go up. Just open the phone, push the green button, then the number 1.”
“Okay, boss.” Willie put the cell phone on the table.
“I don’t have a weapon for you, either. Think you can do this?”
Willie opened several drawers, searching. Finally he pulled out a large knife. “Yeah,” he said.
“Good man,” Jake said. He patted Willie on the shoulder, and went up the staircase that would take him to the main hall.
Willie Varner pushed the knife up his left sleeve. He opened the refrigerator, which held nothing of interest, then filled a glass of water from the tap. He eyed the television as he sipped it.
The helicopter settled onto the pavement in the vast square in front of the chateau, but no one got out. The rotors slowed and eventually stopped.
Jake Grafton was standing near the command center, adjusting his radio earpiece, when Pink Maillard’s voice sounded in his ear. “He wants to see us, in the bird.”
Jake clicked the transmitter button on his belt transceiver twice and began walking toward the helicopter. Maillard caught up with him and matched him stride for stride.
They walked past the media trucks, the paras and the waiting diplomats. A crewman wearing a helmet was standing beside the open door as they approached the helicopter. They climbed aboard and found the president of the United States and the U.S. ambassador to France, Owen Lancaster, seated side by side. The president pointed to the facing seats; Grafton and Maillard sat down.
“You found a bomb.”
“Yes, sir.” Jake described the cylinders and igniters and explained how they would work.
“So who has the radio control unit that would have set these things off?”
“Someone who is already here,” Pink Maillard said tightly. “The French have sealed this place off. No one gets in without a pass.”
“But our bomber probably already has a pass,” the president said.
“That’s right.”
“And it could be anyone,” the president mused. “Any politician, staffer, cook, policeman, soldier, reporter, cameraman …”
“Anybody,” Jake agreed.
“Have the terrorists got a Plan B?”
No one answered that question.
When the silence had gone on too long, Owen Lancaster said, “The French have given me assurances. They know the risks as well as we do.”
“Right.”
“Anybody,” Grafton repeated.
“Sweet Jesus,” the president muttered. He rose from his seat and climbed out the door of the helicopter.
Pink motioned to one of the Secret Service men who was getting off to follow the president. “Give me your pistol.”
The man produced it and passed it to Pink, who handed it to Jake Grafton.
Outside, the president walked toward the row of television cameras and waiting dignitaries.
The British prime minister was the last to arrive. He made his way into a foyer where he was greeted by the president of France. The two of them walked shoulder to shoulder toward the Hall of
Mirrors as the other G-8 leaders came in from the north wing of the building.
Grafton was already in the hall with his shoulders pressed against the back wall. He was amazed at the crush of newspeople, cameramen and bodyguards. The room filled quickly as the heads of government shook hands and seated themselves around the large conference table in the middle of the room.
Grafton watched the crowd and listened to the radio chatter among the security men. He didn’t have a good vantage point — he had three men with large videocams on their shoulders directly in front of him — and there was no way he could easily and unobtrusively move to a better one. That’s when he glimpsed a face he thought he knew on the other side of the room. Then it disappeared.
Henri Rodet pushed the button on the transmitter in his jacket pocket repeatedly. He glanced up, waiting… and saw nothing out of the ordinary. Well, the gas might be colorless.
He counted silently to ten, took a deep breath, and pushed the button on the other transmitter.
Nothing.
Mon Dieu! Perhaps he had accidentally switched transmitters. If so, the gas was coming out now. He kept counting… seven, eight, nine, ten! And pushed the button on the first unit again.
Nothing.
Had they found the bomb and disabled it? Or were the batteries dead?
“Jake, this is Pink. The French just got several hits on their radio receiver. Someone is transmitting on the bomb activation frequency. They didn’t get a location.”
“Pink, Grafton. I thought I just saw Rodet.”
“He’s in the hospital.”
“Maybe he’s out. It could have been someone else, but it looked like Rodet.”
“What’s he doing here?” This rhetorical question went unanswered. “I’ll check with the French.”
Grafton moved left, elbowing his way around the room as the president of France spoke into a microphone. He scanned the crowd. Rodet had disappeared.
“Papin says Rodet came through the gate twenty minutes ago,” Maillard told Jake over the Secret Service net. “He had a pass. No one told the gate people that it was invalid.”
Jake clicked his mike twice and kept moving, trying to find Rodet among the hundreds of onlookers.
The batteries, Rodet thought. They were always the technological weak link. Ten months they had been in place, through the heat of the summer.
At the top of the staircase to the basement he passed two paras, who nodded at him. He went down the stairs as quickly as he could. He was favoring his left side, but with the tight wrapping, it didn’t hurt too badly.
I’ll climb to the bomb. That is the best way.
As he entered the kitchen he glanced around. A slender blac
k man sat at the table. He had been watching the television. He rose.
“What are you doing here?”
Rodet went to the door that would admit him to the stairs to the servants’ hall. He removed a key from his pocket and inserted it in the lock.
“You can’t go up there! Get away from that door!” The black man came at him. He had a knife in his right hand.
Rodet reached into his coat pocket and grabbed the pistol. But it had no silencer. If he fired a shot here, it would bring an army of paramilitary police and security men. He palmed the pistol, and as the black man stabbed with the knife, he hit him in the side of the head. The man went down and stayed down.
Rodet looked at his side. The knife had gone through his coat, ripping it, but it hadn’t penetrated the vest.
He unlocked the door, went through, and pulled it closed behind him.
Stunned, Willie Varner levered himself from the floor and fought to clear his head. He had recognized Henri Rodet, stabbed him — and the knife hit something hard.
He struggled to his feet and grabbed the door handle. Locked. He had the key Grafton had given him. Swaying on his feet, he fished for it.
Should call Grafton, but no time.
He inserted the key in the lock, opened the door, and started up the stairs.
The commotion in the Hall of Mirrors got my attention. I could hear the sonorous French over the PA system, hear every word.
I was standing there in the hallway nursing my headache when I saw the man come up the stairs from the kitchen.
I turned toward him. Holy…! Henri Rodet!
I walked toward him.
He saw me, pointed his pistol at me and kept coming, closing the distance.
“You fucking bastard!” I screamed. I had the ray gun out, so I raised it and aimed. Rodet’s arm came up, the pistol in his hand.
I squeezed the trigger; the laser leaped across the space and hit Rodet in the chest.
He fired the pistol and something whacked me in the left arm. I released the trigger of the ray gun, steadied myself and pulled it again as I launched myself toward him.
I got the laser on his chest just as his pistol cracked a second time and Willie Varner shouted, ‘Wo, Tommy! He’s wearing a bomb!”
We were only twenty feet apart when the finger of God shot from my fist in a brilliant flash, strobed once…
Henri Rodet disappeared in a blinding explosion.
The expanding fireball raced toward me and smacked me like a giant hammer; I flew backward through the air … That was the last thing I remember. Everything went black.
Jake Grafton heard the muffled shots, barely audible over the PA system, then the dull whump of an explosion. Pieces of plaster flew off the wall behind the French president and several mirrors shattered.
The president paused just long enough to shoot a glance at the falling glass, then continued his speech without missing a word.
The crowd shuffled their feet, restless, but nothing else happened, so they settled down almost immediately.
Jake Grafton forced his way through the onlookers behind the cameras and made for the stairs to the kitchen as Pink Maillard’s voice sounded in his ears, giving orders to his men to enter the servants’ hall and report to him.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
When I awoke I was in a hospital bed. I moved my eyes — an IV bottle hung on a hook, sun streamed in a window. I tried to move, but the effort required was too great.
“He’s awake.” The voice was French, in heavily accented English.
Two women’s faces came into view. One I recognized: Sarah Houston.
“Hey, babe.” My voice came out a whisper.
“Hey babe yourself, Tommy Carmellini. Welcome back to the land of the living.”
I swallowed a time or two and worked my eyes around. My head … I couldn’t turn my head. I tried to lift my right hand; the effort required was huge. Then I got it going and lifted it to my head, which was swathed in bandages.
“You have a fractured skull. Bullet hole in your left arm, some burns, a ton of bruises — that’s about it.” Her face was maybe a foot from mine. God, she looked good!
“How long have I been here?”
“Four days.”
I thought awhile, trying to remember. I recalled Willie shouting, and the explosion. “How’s Willie?”
“Oh, he’s okay. Got singed some, but only his head was sticking up above the stairwell. They kept him for a couple of days, then sent him home. He’s back in Washington.”
“Good. Another week in the whorehouses would have finished him off.”
She sat on a chair beside the bed and grasped my right hand. “The summit is over. The French never told the press about the bomb. They explained that there had been a minor accident in the next room, and that was that.”
“Minor accident…”
“I’m supposed to call Grafton when you wake up.”
“Don’t hurry. I want to look at you awhile.”
She had a good smile. In fact, her smile reminded me of my mother’s, back when I was young. And I really liked her eyes, which were big and brown. Say what you will, brown eyes are the best.
“Hey, babe,” I said. “When we get back to the States, what say you and I move in together?”
The smile widened. “Yes,” she said, and kissed me.
Jake Grafton brought his wife, Callie, when he came. After the three of us visited awhile, Callie excused herself and the admiral pulled the chair over to the bed. They had me cranked up and told me I was going to sit up the next day, but I wasn’t there yet.
“Do you know you’re in the same hospital that Henri Rodet checked himself out of?”
That thought hadn’t occurred to me. I told him so.
“He shouldn’t have gotten onto the chateau grounds, and wouldn’t have if the French had told their security folks that he had been fired. But this being France, they were afraid someone would leak it to the press and questions would be asked that would embarrass the government. So they still haven’t told anyone that he was fired. Only that he died in an accident.”
“Don’t you love it?” I said.
“It turns out that the morning the summit began, Rodet had a visitor here in the hospital. The ministry had pulled the guards since Rodet was no longer on the team, but, as I said, they didn’t tell anyone, including the guards.” Grafton gave the French Shrug. “The visitor stayed about fifteen minutes. No one could discover how he arrived or how he departed, except for the fact that Rodet apparently drove a stolen car to the Conciergerie, went up to his office for a few minutes, came down and drove off. The stolen car was found parked at a subway station a couple of stops from Versailles.”
“This visitor. Abu Qasim, you think?”
“Perhaps. It’s a possibility, anyway. The French investigators couldn’t get a description. They fingerprinted the room, but two days later, after the room had been cleaned twice. It was hopeless. No one who saw the visitor had any reason to remember what he looked like.”
“Nondescript,” I muttered.
Jake Grafton leaned back in his chair and exhaled a bushel of air. “Boy, would I like to have been a fly on the wall when those two talked. Maybe the visitor was going on to the chateau with the radio transmitters to set off the bomb. Maybe he was wearing the vest containing a bomb. Maybe Rodet insisted that he go in the other man’s place. We’ll never know.”
“So this Qasim, if he exists, is still out there.”
“Yep.” From an inside pocket Grafton produced a picture. It was actually a computer-drawn picture of a face. “Recognize him?”
The face was of a man in his forties, perhaps fifty, clean shaven, intelligent, with regular features. “Well…”
“Sarah made this from the photo you took of the old man in the park.”
“Abu Qasim,” I said.
“Perhaps,” Grafton said, and pocketed the picture.
I thought about it awhile; about terrorists and trait
ors and bombs. This really wasn’t a world I wanted to live in. Who the hell would? “I want out of the agency,” I said a bit later. “I’ve had enough.”
“That was our deal. We’ll keep you on the payroll until the docs say you’re well, then … What are your plans?”
“Don’t have any.”
“I’ll be back to see you in a couple of days to see how you’re doing.” The admiral held out his hand, and we shook. “Thanks, Tommy,” he said.
A couple of weeks passed before the French doctors were willing to let me leave the hospital. They took my bandages off and I got my first look at my new, pink hide. My arm healed up and so did the gash in my leg. I felt like a new man. Looked like one, too.
Since the Graftons were in Europe for another six months, the admiral said Sarah and I could use his beach house in Delaware until we got a place of our own. He even gave me a key, which I thought was a nice gesture. Shape I was in, it would have taken me an hour to pick the lock on his door.
So we flew home and landed at Dulles. Someone from the agency met us and drove us to Delaware. Grafton had called ahead, and the guys had my old red Benz coupe parked in his driveway.
The first few days were great; then Sarah got bored and started talking about going back to work. She had to have something to do, she said, and someone was going to have to support us. She lasted through the weekend, but Sunday afternoon I drove her to Maryland and dropped her off at her place. She kissed me and told me she’d see me on Friday night. I drove back to Delaware alone. I’d been alone most of my life, but this time it felt different.
I managed, though. I got out on the beach every morning, watched storms come in, walked for miles and thought about things. It was winter, so the winds were raw and it rained almost every day. Rain or shine, I walked the beach. I worked my jog up to a run and began increasing the distance every day. I worked out at a gym in town. The football wars were entertaining; I didn’t read the newspapers or watch the news on television. Life was very pleasant, especially on the weekends, when Sarah came over to the beach.
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