by Jay Brandon
Arden grabbed Yvette, tripped her, and threw her down on the guard. Then she had Jack’s arm, pulling him out the door. Jack looked back and saw Yvette giving him an outraged look. He didn’t even have time to shrug in response.
Arden slammed the door closed, locked it, and threw the keys across the alley. “Come on!”
Instantly, the world seemed alive with the sounds of pursuit. “This way!” they both shouted, and Jack let Arden tug him her direction, thinking she’d had more time to check out the area before getting herself arrested. She ran in the direction of crowds, thinking they could lose themselves. To Jack they looked like everyone else in town, in jeans and tennis shoes, but the gendarme coming out the front door of the police station looked straight at Jack and Arden and yelled for them to stop. They didn’t. No longer hand in hand, they ran, turned the corner, jumped through people. They were in a shopping district, but not in the touristy part of town. Produce was being offered from wooden stands, and small shops sold essentials.
Arden darted into one, pulling his hand. This was a cafe, with only five small tables. Sleepy-eyed men barely glanced at them. Arden began arguing with Jack in French too rapid for him to follow, moving her arms and shoulders expressively. One man at a table smiled, but no one else seemed to pay attention. Jack slumped his shoulders, looking hangdog, but his act was wasted. No one was looking at him. The French didn’t seem embarrassed by a public quarrel the way Americans would be, nor did they seem interested in it.
Arden kept moving, through a swinging door into a small kitchen crowded already with a middle-aged couple. The man began shouting, adding to the general clamor, but the woman just leaned her cheek on her hand and frankly listened to Arden’s tirade, with a faint reminiscent smile.
Keep moving, that was the secret. They never stopped. Arden acted as if other people were mannequins in a stage set backing her performance. They went out the back door of the kitchen into another alley, where they turned left. Arden kept up whatever she was saying as they ran across the alley, tried two doors, and went through a third. They found themselves in a small storage room where they stopped to catch their breath. They were chest to chest, breathing hard.
“Which way is the—?” Jack panted.
“The what?”
“I don’t know, don’t you have a car or a way out?”
“I’m pretty sure they impounded my car when they arrested me.” She glanced at him. “Don’t give me that look. I got us out, didn’t I?”
“No, I think I did.”
They started out through another small shop, and saw a half-open door. Arden moaned. “Oh, look, a bathroom. I’m sorry, I’ve got to—”
“Go.”
“You first. You were inside longer, I can—”
“Go!”
She went inside. Jack was almost jumping from foot to foot now. He looked around the cluttered room. There was a small plant in a two-foot copper stand. The soil inside looked deep, and dry. Jack stared out the windows. They were alone.
Two minutes later Arden came out. “Okay, your turn. I’ll keep watch.”
“It’s okay. Come on.”
“Don’t you—?”
“No! Come on.”
“Macho man. God, James Bond. I can—”
“Come on!”
“Okay, okay. Wait a minute. What’s that smell?”
“Out, out, we’ve got to get out of here.” He grabbed her hand, hurried her toward the front door. This shop seemed to be closed, or at least empty of people, with the clerk taking a break. Arden looked out the small window beside the front door. A police car pulled up, with that whah-whah-whah European cop car thing. Without another word they ran back inside. They ran toward the back door, heard that same sound.
They looked at each other. No way out. One of them would have to sacrifice himself. Jack saw a small door down a narrow hall. “Quick!” She followed him as he ran. The small door gave, as he knew it would, onto a narrow staircase, going up.
“Come on!”
“Why?” She tugged at his hand. “There’s no way out up there. Why?”
“I don’t know. I always go up.”
As they pounded up the stairs, she asked, “Has this worked out for you in the past?”
Well, no. It was just an instinct. Monkey to the top of the tree. They were probably trapping themselves. But he couldn’t stop. At the top of the stairs they burst out into a hallway, ran down it. Doors left and right. Jack went left, Arden right. A few seconds later they ran into each other back in the hall. “No way—!” they both shouted.
At the end of the hall was a window. They were at it in a second. Down below, there were crashing sounds. Jack raised the window. There was a narrow alley below. Cobblestone street. The promise of broken legs.
They turned back the other way, heard the sounds of people filling the floor below. They stared at each other, the same thoughts crossing both their minds. Too many cops, no way to make a personal connection. “I’ll—” But no plan emerged.
They turned back to the window. Now there was a sound from below. Something filling the alleyway. A small truck that seemed to be filled with straw. Perfect. Jack looked behind them. Arden looked at him. He shook his head. Her eyes met his. They took each other’s hands, each put a foot up on the windowsill, and they stepped out the window. Arden screamed as they stepped.
The scream brought a French police officer, then another, up the stairs and down that hall to the window. The gendarme looked out and saw the truck going by. He screamed, the loudest sound on a noisy street, and everyone looked up at him. Some of his men appeared at the mouth of the alley and halted the truck. The policeman in the window made hand signals. Then he turned and gave explicit instructions to his subordinate, indicating the open doors along the wall. “Make sure they’re not hiding in the rooms, trying to fool us.” The young recruit nodded wisely, eyes narrowing. He stalked into the first bedroom as his captain turned and ran out down the hall.
When the captain reached the ground floor his men had the truck surrounded, the driver out on the sidewalk waving his arms and shouting while everyone ignored him. Another officer explained quickly that all the doors along this alley had been locked. “And we had men at both ends of the alley. There is no way they could have gotten past us.”
The captain nodded intently. He dropped to the ground and peered under the truck. He was a man who didn’t mind getting his uniform dirty in the performance of his duty. No one was clinging to the underside of the truck, but there was some kind of structure there, an extra appendage hanging down.
Plus all that straw in the back. And the cab of the truck itself. “Take it apart,” the captain said brusquely.
There was a shout from the open window that the fugitives had leaped through. The young recruit stood in it, waving his arm. “Not up here,” he cried. The captain waved him down, then stood frozen. Beside the young recruit, attached to the wall, was an old wooden fire escape. It went down, but also up, to the roof. It wasn’t vibrating, there was no obvious sign of passage. Nonetheless, the captain screamed in rage, looking up toward that roof.
As he ran that direction, splitting up his men, he thought, The scream. The woman’s scream. That’s what had drawn him into what he’d done, without even looking upward until now: the scream of a woman jumping out a window, even fading as if she were falling.
It had been perfect.
Two blocks away, Jack and Arden, having gone over the roof of the building and down the other side, had escaped capture for the moment, but they were on foot. Within a minute Arden found a Citroen with keys in it. “Two blocks,” Jack said. “We’ll just drive it a couple of blocks. I’m not stealing a car.”
They got in and took off, Arden driving. Jack looked back and saw a police officer emerge from a side street, putting his hands on his hips and staring first the other direction, then this way. Jack ducked his head. “Six blocks, tops,” he said.
“What do you think, Butch?” Arden and
Jack huddled in a shop doorway across from a train station. “Hop a freight, or bluff our way on board?”
“The thing is,” Jack answered immediately, “I really don’t know how to ‘hop’ a train. I don’t even think you can any more. I mean, look at them.”
The few trains they could see waiting in the yard were silver cylinders with no apparent handholds. Sleek and slippery and within a few yards of pulling out they would be going eighty miles an hour. Eventually a hundred and twenty. And no cattle cars or open baggage cars. Probably no unlocked doors one could open from the outside. The movies on which Jack and, apparently, Arden had been raised seemed useless here as training films.
“How hot are we?” Jack asked.
“I feel a little feverish.”
“I mean, I’m just a burglar, and you’re just someone who came to see me. Or did you do something else to get thrown in jail?”
Arden shrugged, which made him give her a double take. “I killed DeGaulle,” she confessed.
“So there’s really probably not that big a manhunt for us. Let’s just go in and buy tickets.”
“You got money? Because they took mine when—”
“Excuse me a second.” Jack went into a men’s room and was gone for a while. When he came out his face was very blank. In one hand he clutched some Euros, and in the other he carried a small key ring. Arden stared at him. “How did you do that? How did you keep anything through a police search?”
“Forget it.”
As he walked past, Arden turned and continued to stare. “I mean, the folding money I understand. But the keys?”
She followed him into the train station and past the ticket windows to a row of lockers. “You’re kidding,” she said aloud.
Jack said nothing. He went into the second row of lockers, mostly hidden from view of passersby, and straight to an upper one. He opened it with the small key and pulled out a wallet, a small cell phone and charger, and an overnight case, black leather, the kind a sophisticated traveler would carry. Jack put the phone into the bag and peered into the locker. He seemed to be looking for something, but didn’t find it.
Arden, hands on hips, said, “You keep a stash in the train depot in Nice?”
Jack closed the locker door. “Doesn’t everybody?”
Jack bought them tickets, feeling as if he were glowing radioactively. Security was much tighter than it had been pre-9/11, but not like an airport. As they moved toward the train Jack looked fidgety.
“What’s the matter?”
“I wish I had my PSPII.” Jack’s fingers were moving involuntarily.
“Just as well you’re leaving it behind,” Arden said carelessly. “That’s probably how they were tracing you all over Europe.”
Jack stopped and stared blankly. As they mounted the stairs he turned and looked back at the moderately busy station. No one seemed to look back at him. Nevertheless, Jack gave his head and shoulders a paranoid duck as he went through the door.
Jack had spent the extra money for a very small private carriage. They didn’t say much until the train was moving. Jack looked out the window, musing. Arden didn’t know everything he had been through in the last twenty-four hours, and didn’t know what he planned now. She had to ask what he was thinking.
Jack looked up at her. “You left Yvette locked in the jail.”
“We needed to distract the guard.”
“We could have knocked him unconscious, taken his gun, and brought her with us. She could have been useful.”
Arden stood up and looked back at him over her shoulder. “Oops,” she said, and went out the door of the compartment, heading for the communal bathroom.
CHAPTER 10
Alicia Mortenson called Janice Gentry once Alicia and Craig were on their way. “I’m sorry, dear, that was inexcusable, the way we just walked out.”
“Thank you,” Janice agreed.
“The fact is, we didn’t want to announce exactly what we’re doing to everyone in the room, and to Craig and me it was obvious. You know too, don’t you?”
Back at headquarters, Janice stood with the landline phone to her ear. She was exhausted, but somehow Alicia’s voice conveyed energy. Janice stood up straighter. She let her mind go blank. A soft breeze seemed to blow across her face, pleasantly scented.
Eyes closed, she smiled. “Of course,” she said.
It was as if Alicia had projected an image into Janice’s mind, across miles of phone line. Because Janice was certain she knew what she meant, and where the couple had gone.
“There you go, dear,” Alicia said in that voice that would have made her the greatest kindergarten teacher of all time.
“All right, well, you two be careful.”
“We will. And don’t worry about the Chair, Janice. I think she may be all right. Maybe she just had to go put in an appearance at her day job. It is important to look normal.”
“Yes,” Janice said slowly, wondering if Alicia was conveying her another message and Janice wasn’t getting it. She wasn’t sure exactly what the eighty-seven year old Gladys Leaphorn’s “day job” was. She had worked at Langley for years, as an administrative assistant on whom a series of deputy CIA chiefs had come to rely. Shortly before her retirement she had transferred out west here, to North American Defense Command. But in this crisis could she just go pop in at NORAD and say, “Hi, I think I left something in the closet”?
Well, anyway. At least she knew Alicia and Craig were safe. And what they were doing.
The Mortensons set up shop at one of their old stands in Vienna, Virginia, a very upscale suburb of D.C. A million-dollar home in this neighborhood was mid-size. Nice but nothing fancy. They stayed in one such, the vacation home of an old friend who was staying huddled in California until someone explained what was happening now. Then the Mortensons started placing phone calls to friends and acquaintances, most of whom sounded glad to hear from them. The Mortensons were listening for the sound of someone who was not.
Craig managed to reach Don Trimble, but it took a while. “How are things in Salzburg?”
“Ominously quiet,” Trimble answered. “Huge security apparatus, of course, but not much trust among the various groups, so they’re overlapping and leaving gaps.”
“Seen anyone we know?” Craig meant other Circle members, perhaps of the European branches. They would seem inevitably drawn to the city that was soon to be the political center of Earth.
“A few acquaintances, no one who seems to have a clue.”
“Jack?”
“No. Have any of you heard from him?”
“I don’t think so. We’re temporarily away from headquarters.”
“You are?” Trimble said quickly. Craig frowned at Alicia. She frowned back as if she had heard not only the whole conversation but also what her husband was thinking. “Where are you?” Trimble asked.
Alicia shook her head at Craig, which was hardly necessary. “California,” Craig said. “Thinking about hopping to Malaysia. I think maybe Jack was up to more there than he let on.”
“Good idea,” Trimble said. “But everyone else is still at headquarters, aren’t they?”
“Most all.”
They ended the call a few minutes later without chitchat or farewells. Alicia said immediately, “What’s wrong?”
“I don’t know. Next time you call him and listen to his voice. He just seemed a little too anxious to know where everyone is. And he had absolutely nothing useful to tell me even though he’s at ground zero on the scene.”
“Maybe he just hasn’t learned anything. I never did think Don was the fastest horse in the stable.”
Craig laughed. “Or maybe there’s nothing to learn there.” He looked at his dead cell phone. “Damn it, Don, that was badly played. You should have given me something, something to let me know you’re still on the team.”
Alicia said, without conviction, “Maybe he was being overheard.”
Craig took her hand and gave it a quick kiss. “I’m going
to lunch with the Russian ambassador. You?”
“Just some shopping.”
He looked at her sharply. Alicia smiled. “With the Secretary of State’s mistress.”
They parted without goodbyes or backward glances. They were so close they didn’t even feel apart when they weren’t together. They almost thought with the same mind. But unfortunately they didn’t share eyes.
About 10 p.m. a porter came by and made the small train compartment into two beds, one above and one below. Jack and Arden stood in the narrow corridor looking at each other while he worked, neither of them speaking. They had had a hectic, exhilarating hour before boarding the train, but before that they had just sat in a cell for hours. Neither was physically tired. They were very keyed up, and not just from fear of pursuit. Jack’s eyes stayed on her face. Arden looked very young, only tracings of lines beginning around her eyes. Her blue eyes took him in, absorbed him, drew him in to her. He wondered what she was seeing. He felt so much older than he had a month ago. Old and suspicious. She looked at him with what he should have known was affection, but he didn’t trust her at all. Couldn’t. His body did, though. He found himself drawing closer to her.
The porter coughed discreetly, moving between them and out of the way. Jack tipped him a bill without looking at it, probably way too much, from the way the porter chuckled. Or maybe that was just from looking at the two of them.
Arden swallowed. He could see her throat move. “I’m going for a walk,” she said.
“Good idea.” He stopped swaying toward her.
She took off, moving briskly and swinging her arms. Jack got undressed, mostly. His overnight bag hadn’t contained pajamas for either of them. He turned on the small light at the head of the bed and tried to read the one paperback in English he’d found left on the train, a Danielle Steele novel. He had already read enough to understand why someone had left it behind, but there was nothing else to do. Soon he came to a love scene, put the book aside, turned off his light, put his hands behind his head, and looked out the window. France flashed by, dim and smeared by speed. Farmland, widely scattered houses. Like all lonely people, Jack imagined that the people inside those houses were happy. Tired from honest labor, ignorant of sinister forces at work in the world, unconcerned about anything larger than produce prices. So he imagined, and he envied them.
