The Traitor: A Tommy Carmellini Novel

by Stephen Coonts

  Nada groaned. His eyes were unfocused, his muscles slack. He was going to have the sorest neck in town for a week or so, which was his tough luck. I stuck his ID card back in his shirt pocket and left him there. We had been in the closet about fifteen seconds.

  As I came out of the closet there were two of them striding toward me, young dark men, black eyes and unruly hair, no extra weight. They were sizing me up as they came—I could see it in their eyes. They made no attempt to avoid me or get out of my way. They separated just enough to get around me, and I heard one of them jerk open the closet door.

  I bolted.

  A couple topped the stairs and blocked the way, a portly man and white-haired woman. I spun around in time to set myself as the two Arabs raced toward me, digging hard. I went left and nailed the one on the left with a right to the jaw.

  I ran back toward the cafeteria.

  Now, I am a reasonably fast runner for a man of my size, and the guy who had come at me on my right side had had to reverse his momentum while his colleague went sliding face-first along the floor. Yet in two mighty bounds he was on my back, dragging me down.

  I smacked my head against the floor, and that about did it for me right there. I saw stars from the impact and probably went about half out for a couple of seconds. I struggled to rise and actually got my feet under me.

  Ahab the Arab was all over me. He slugged me in the face and gut, repeatedly. Through my haze I could hear a woman screaming.

  I managed to latch on to one of Ahab’s arms. Got him above the wrist and used his momentum to slam him into the wall. He went to the floor, temporarily stunned.

  I tried to move and couldn’t. With my head ringing like a bell, it was all I could do to stand there.

  The woman sucked in a deep breath and screamed again.

  I swayed, almost fell, and caught myself.

  Ahab got it together and rose from the floor. Still sucking air and too stunned to run, I watched him produce a knife from a sheath in his pants and come at me holding it blade up. The fucker was going to gut me like a fish.

  Maybe his bell was ringing, too, because he came charging as if he expected me to hold still while he ripped me from crotch to brisket. I didn’t. I grabbed at the wrist that held the knife and threw him with a rolling hip lock. He went over the railing and through the opaque glass wall.

  As the glass flew in every direction, he fell the long two stories to the main floor of the museum, screaming all the way. The scream ended abruptly with a serious thud.

  I lost my balance and sat down hard.

  The guy I had nailed with my fist, Ahab’s pal, got up slowly. He took a long look at me, the hole in the glass wall, and the portly guy and out-of-air woman, then bolted down the stairs.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  The police got my name, Terry G. Shannon, from my passport and took a statement. Fortunately for me, I had witnesses for most of it. The tourists were German, and they described the attack.

  Five minutes after the police arrived, Muhammed Nada came staggering out of the janitor’s closet. His neck was so stiff he couldn’t turn his head. If he knew I had stolen his phone, he didn’t mention it. The cops took him away for questioning.

  I lied a little about ol’ Muhammed. I told the detective that all three of them jumped me, and I slugged Nada first, and I didn’t know where he went after that. Then I shifted to the truth: I was trying to flee but the other two persisted.

  “At first I thought they intended to mug me,” I said earnestly. “But now…I don’t know. They may have been terrorists, looking for a tourist to beat up and rob for political reasons.”

  It was a lot of bullshit, of course, but my witnesses backed every word. They also latched on to the terror thing and ran with it.

  The cops wanted to take me to a hospital; I refused. My head cleared and I was left with only a headache. I figured that with a night’s sleep, I’d be good as new. An hour after the incident, they turned me loose.

  They were still cleaning up the mess on the main floor when I left. Luckily the guy who did the swan dive through the clock didn’t hit anybody when he arrived down below. The cop upstairs said he held on to his knife all the way down.

  I hailed a taxi and rode over to the embassy. No one followed me, or if they did, they were so slick that I didn’t spot them.

  Jake Grafton was still in the SCIF, huddled with Sarah Houston. I told them about Muhammed Nada and presented his cell phone, and I told them about the other two.

  “So one guy made a big mess on the main floor, the other dude ran, and Muhammed Nada went off to tell lies to the French police,” I said in summation. “Mind if I sit down?”

  Grafton took a look at my noodle while Sarah got the telephone numbers from Nada’s cell phone. “Got a nice goose egg there,” he said. “I thought I told you not to get hurt or hurt them badly.”

  “I tried.”

  “Lucky for you there were only three of them,” Sarah said over her shoulder, without looking around.

  “I’m slowing down as I get older. Happens to everybody.”

  My hands were still shaking from the adrenaline overdose and I was jittery. Sitting quietly watching Sarah work seemed to help. My headache gradually eased, too.

  “Keep your eyes peeled for those guys,” Grafton said. “They may try again.”

  I thought about that awhile. The problem, as usual, was that Grafton doesn’t tell people what’s going on. He knows, but he doesn’t tell. Of course, a guy could always ask. I thought about that, about the pros and cons. It’s not that Grafton is intimidating, either physically or morally. It’s just that…well, he’s the admiral, if you know what I mean.

  I sat there thinking about things and worked myself up to it. “What’s going on here, Admiral?” I asked.

  He gave me a look, sort of measuring the height and width and breadth of my soul. “A lot of people want to know about Rodet’s spy.”

  “What was in the note you gave him?”

  “The name of the spy.”

  I guess I must have gaped. “Where did you get the name?”

  A slow grin spread over Jake Grafton’s face. “If I tell my secrets I won’t have any.”

  That was a pretty snarky answer, if you ask me. Still, I could see that he wasn’t going to say any more, so I dropped the subject.

  Grafton managed to smile for Carmellini, but he wasn’t feeling chipper. The fact of the matter was that he didn’t know whether or not he knew the spy’s name. Sure, the CIA database had coughed up a name from an interrogation—they hadn’t told him the name of the informant or how the information was obtained or who the interrogator was, all information necessary to properly evaluate the intelligence. And yes, the name had been used by a known Al Queda lieutenant who someone else said had once attended the Sorbonne.

  Even if Henri Rodet had known an Algerian named Abu Qasim once upon a time when they both were young, and Qasim had attended the Sorbonne, that didn’t make Qasim a spy. Yet the Sorbonne had no record of Qasim under any of the names he was reputed to use. Henri Rodet certainly had the reach to make university records disappear, he reflected, and there was no reason to do that unless one wanted to eradicate evidence that Abu Qasim had ever existed.

  Rodet could have had Professor Heger killed…could have done it himself, for that matter. Or Qasim could. But why? Because the professor knew Qasim’s name?

  It was possible, Jake concluded. So he had written Abu Qasim’s name on a slip of paper and passed it to Rodet, who didn’t bother to look at it in Jake’s presence.

  If Rodet called and wanted to talk, then Grafton would know.

  And he would only be on first base. What Grafton really wanted—needed—was access to the intelligence Qasim was giving Rodet. If he was.

  Why wasn’t Rodet cooperating with Western intelligence?

  One thing was for certain: With the arrest of the Veghel gang, the secret was out. Middle Eastern men had picked up him and Carmellini when they left the
Conciergerie; Carmellini had someone’s agent living in the apartment under him—and then there were Claude Bruguiere and Professor Heger, shot in the head. Maybe the foreign powers didn’t yet suspect Rodet of having a spy, but everyone knew Al Queda had sprung a leak somewhere.

  Rodet must have known what would happen when he told George Goldberg about the Veghel bunch, and yet he did it anyway.

  Jake Grafton looked at the calendar. The G-8 summit was next week. He took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. Maybe there was no intelligence to share. Perhaps that was the answer. He hoped it was.

  It was a pleasure watching Sarah work on the computer. It only took her thirty-five minutes to hack into the main telephone records and come up with names and addresses for the telephone numbers from Nada’s phone.

  When she finished, Jake Grafton took the computer printout and studied it. Finally he lowered it and looked at Sarah. “Why don’t you and Tommy go to dinner? A nice restaurant, very public, so everyone can see you. Look happy.”

  “Is this part of the assignment?” Sarah asked with a frown. I swear, that woman could squeeze the romance from a wedding cake.

  “Yes,” Grafton assured her.

  “So Uncle Sugar is paying the bill?” I asked brightly, even though I knew the answer.

  “You’re on per diem,” Grafton said flatly. Yep, that was the answer I knew.

  “I had the dining room at the George V in mind, but I guess that’s out,” I remarked sadly. Sarah was looking at my reflection in the glass behind her computer. “How about a Big Mac and fries?” I said.

  “I know a place,” she replied, and turned off her cyberbox.

  Amazingly, my headache had disappeared. The prospect of spending the evening with a beautiful woman always perks me up.

  The place Sarah knew was a bateau that cruised the Seine. We wound up on a dinner cruise, for which we had to pay extra. We went dutch, since we were both getting a per diem.

  If there were any Middle Eastern types following us, I didn’t see them. Didn’t look very hard, either. We ended up at a table on the top deck. Fortunately we both wore jackets and there wasn’t much wind or we would have frozen.

  Sarah was attentive—not flirtatious, just attentive. She listened to every word I had to say, looked into my eyes, didn’t even mention work or computers or the events of the day. I watched the wind play with her hair and told her she was lovely. She smiled.

  After dinner we had a liqueur, then danced to a combo that played slow jazz as the boat made the return journey down the river toward its berth on the quay below the Eiffel Tower. Sarah felt good in my arms. Very good. We were young, this was Paris, and that night the future seemed to stretch away toward a glowing horizon.

  As Grafton walked back to his apartment, he thought through the problem one more time. Rodet’s agent must be someone he had known a long time. If it wasn’t Qasim, it was someone else he had known from Algeria or his school days.

  Qasim’s name had never appeared in any of the DGSE’s official traffic, encrypted or unencrypted. Of course, spies are routinely given code names, but none of the code names that the DGSE used seemed to match an agent with an ear in Al Queda councils. None of the employees of the agency, some of whom had been on the CIA payroll for years, had ever mentioned such an agent, nor even said they suspected that such a person might exist.

  If Rodet had an agent, when did Rodet hold his hand? Spying is the most solitary of the human occupations, and one of the most dangerous. A spy alone was a case of a paranoia waiting to happen; controllers needed to hold their spies’ hands occasionally, tell him or her that they were doing fine, that all was well, their work was valuable and the nation appreciated the sacrifice that the spy was making. When and where did Rodet hold hands with Qasim?

  Grafton climbed the stairs to his flat and inserted the key in the door. As he was fumbling with it, he heard the telephone ringing, then Callie’s voice.

  He opened the door and closed it behind him.

  The telephone was in the kitchen. He walked toward her voice. Callie saw him, then said, “Here he is now.”

  She listened for a few seconds, then held out the telephone to Jake. He raised his eyebrows.

  “A man,” she said silently, moving her lips.

  He took the telephone and held it to his ear.

  “Jake Grafton.”

  “We talked this morning at my office, Admiral. Perhaps it would be beneficial if you and I took time tomorrow for a personal chat.”

  Rodet!

  Dinner was the first meal Callie had fixed in her Paris apartment, so she tried to keep it simple—and elegant. The wine merchant in the next block selected a bottle of wine that he assured her was superb, at a reasonable price.

  Jake was in a good mood, so dinner went well. He smiled and complimented her on her efforts and raved about the wine. It was all very pleasant, although she knew he didn’t know a mediocre wine from a good one. Jake Grafton was a beer man.

  After dinner he wanted real, American coffee, though, as he always did. Machines capable of making American-style coffee were unavailable in Europe, so Callie had mailed herself a new Mr. Coffee still in its box before she left the States.

  Jake took an experimental sip of the hot, black brew and sighed contentedly.

  An hour later they were walking on the boulevards, enjoying the sights and sounds of Paris, when Callie asked, “Why did you bring Tommy Carmellini to France, anyway?”

  “Don’t you like him?”

  “Oh, he’s all right, in a dangerous sort of way. But he’s too flip, too cool.”

  Jake nodded. “Remember that time in Hong Kong when you were kidnapped?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “Carmellini volunteered to help rescue you. He didn’t have to come with me.”

  “You never mentioned that before.” She walked along in silence. “I knew he was there, but I guess I never thought about how or why he came with you.”

  “He’s a good man to have around.”

  “Like Jake Grafton?”

  Her husband laughed.

  After the cruise boat tied up, Sarah and I had a devil of a time getting a taxi and ended up walking across the bridge and along the boulevards toward her hotel. No tail did I see. I was walking along with my hands in my pockets when she reached for my arm and held on to it. When I smiled at her, she smiled back.

  I thought about kissing her in the lobby, thought I shouldn’t, then did it anyway. She didn’t slap me—just kissed me back, looked into my eyes and said good night.

  Outside on the sidewalk I realized I was flat out of juice. Now the adventure at the museum came flooding back, and I looked around suspiciously for wild-eyed Semitic types. Didn’t see any then, either.

  I gave the bellman ten euros and asked him to find me a taxi.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  When I awoke the next morning, I was so groggy it took me a long moment to get oriented. For some reason Sarah Houston was on my mind. Isn’t it crazy how a woman who has shoved you out of her life can pop back into your psyche at any old time?

  I tried to forget about Sarah and concentrate on the here and now. Grafton hadn’t given me an assignment for today, other than checking on the guys monitoring the Rodet bugs, so I figured this might be a good time to tag along after my neighbor, Elizabeth Conner. It would be interesting, if nothing else, to learn what she did with her time when she wasn’t listening on her ceiling bug to me snore or bathe. A quick squint through the infrared goggles revealed that she wasn’t downstairs, so I figured she was out for her run.

  I called Willie Varner. The phone at his room in the hotel rang and rang. He got it on the eleventh ring.

  “Yeah.” I had awakened him from a sound sleep.

  “Hey, got a job for you. I need some help tailing a woman today.”

  “Oh, man, I ain’t a mornin’ person, and I got this jet lag disease, and I just got in bed an hour ago. Been tomcattin’ around, y’know? How about this afternoon?”
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  “How about now, Willie? I need some help, man.”

  He consented with poor grace. I gave him the address and told him to step on it.

  I scrubbed the molars and got dressed as quickly as I could. I actually put on three shirts, each atop the other, and finished off with a hooded sweatshirt. The sweatshirt had a pocket in front, so I stuffed a baseball cap in there. I was putting on my shoes when I heard her door slam. She was back.

  She was in the shower when I loaded my goodies in my backpack, stuffed my digital camera in my pocket, put on my windbreaker and shades, and locked the door behind me. The day was terrific—clean, clear and crisp, with a pleasant breeze in the street. The red, shiny Vespa looked wanton and wicked. Man, with a toy like this and a great city to ride it in, what was I doing wasting my time on other stuff? I left it locked up. If Conner went into a subway and I had no immediate place to park the scooter, I was screwed. Nope, it looked like a walking day.

  I zipped over to the parking garage and ditched my backpack in the trunk of the rental. I thought it might be safer there than in the apartment.

  My first problem was picking a spot to await Conner’s pleasure. There were actually three Metro stations within easy walking distance—one to the left as you departed our building and two to the right, toward the Rue du Faubourg St. Denis. The most likely station that she might use, I thought, was the Gare de l’Est, a major station where three lines converged. Leaving our street, she would turn left on the Rue du Faubourg and walk two blocks to the Metro station, which was, of course, immediately in front of the railroad station. From the Gare de l’Est Metro station she could take the 4 train to the Left Bank, Sorbonne district. Or she could turn right on the Rue du Faubourg and go down a couple of blocks, then a block over to the Château d’Eau station on the Rue de Strasbourg, which was also on the 4 train line.