The Traitor: A Tommy Carmellini Novel

by Stephen Coonts

  Even though they chopped off Louis’ head, the revolutionary French were proud of the palace, and today’s French still are. They love to hold state functions here to show it off. The glory and grandeur of France, and all that.

  Bomb squad trucks were parked at some of the entrances. The explosives experts were searching every square inch. No doubt Abu Qasim and Henri Rodet knew they would, so I doubted if a basement full of dynamite was on their list of possibilities. I ran through every explosive possibility I could think of and rejected them one by one.

  Airplanes? Mobile antiaircraft missile batteries were already in position and being checked over by troops. I saw two and knew there were more. If the bad guys planned on crashing a plane into the building, or driving a truck through the gate to blow it up alongside the building, they would make a big splash in the news media and probably not kill a single politician. If that was the plan, there was little Willie or I could do about it except get out of the way. The truth was, if they did that, they would prove how impotent they were.

  They didn’t think of themselves that way. They needed a success.

  Snipers? The French had snipers on the rooftops. I saw uniformed men with rifles moving around up there.

  No, I decided, if an attempt was going to be made, it would be one man, or a small group, that came through the gate with passes. Politicians, cameramen, reporters, the château staff…or the military or police.

  Rather than go inside, I led Willie away to look at soldiers. Over the next two hours we saw a bunch. We were footsore and ready for a restroom when Willie finally complained. We headed inside.

  There was a stack of tourist brochures just inside the door; I picked one up. The usual tour-group guides had the week off, so we were on our own. A paramilitary cop with a submachine gun stood in every doorway. We met two groups of police with bomb-sniffing dogs working the rooms systematically, looking for anything out of the ordinary.

  The G-8 finance ministers were meeting in the library, and we were turned away. The working press was herded into another room a few doors down. We looked in there. The room had been set up for press conferences, which were going to be held later this afternoon when the ministers had some agreement to spin for the folks back home.

  We wandered along, looking at this, looking at that. The ceilings were way up there, like twenty-five feet above the floor, and everything was gilded in real gold, or painted to look like it. The gold was accented by white pillars and walls, although occasionally a brilliant color had been used for contrast. All in all, it was a hell of a palace, but I wouldn’t have wanted to live there back in the good old days, B.T.P.—before toilet paper. Those were chamber-pot days, long before running water. Makes me shiver just thinking about it. Maybe that’s why camping has never had much appeal to me.

  “Maybe you ought to get married,” Willie said, right out of the blue, while we were contemplating a huge painting of a queen with the royal children.

  The American philosopher Jerry Lee Lewis once said that too much sex drives a man insane. No joke. Willie had lost it.

  “Sarah’s pretty serious, you know,” he added, quite unnecessarily.

  “What would you know about marriage? I seem to recall that you are a lifelong bachelor.”

  “Thought about gettin’ married. Once. Years ago.”

  We strolled on, looking at paintings. I was kinda glad I didn’t have this kind of art in my apartment.

  “Was datin’ a redheaded nymphomaniac who owned a liquor store,” Willie said a moment or two later. “She was easy to get serious about.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “Well, to tell the truth, she wasn’t really a redhead. Dyed her hair and straightened it and made it stand up. Looked pretty good, actually.”

  “You never took her to the altar.”

  “Never got seriously into liquor, man. Beer’s my drink. But Sarah, she’s a nice woman. Gonna make some guy a wife for life.”

  “Let’s talk about something else, like global warming, the tax code, or who’s going to get to the Super Bowl.”

  When we got to the Hall of Mirrors, the big hall on the back of the building, we found another crowd. Workmen were setting up a huge conference table, a microphone system, enough lights to stage a rock concert, and a bank of television cameras. This was where the presidents and prime ministers were going to meet to talk about important political stuff. Under the constant scrutiny of a squad of paramilitary police, we walked slowly along looking at everything.

  “This is where it’s gonna happen, if it happens,” Willie declared. “While they’re all together. On television, even. This may be the only time they’re all together. Maximum impact.”

  I looked at the cops, at the television cameras, at the statues lining the walls, at the mirrors, at the vaulted gilded ceiling way up there. This room obviously inspired several generations of railroad station architects. But if Al Queda intended to strike here, how were they going to do it?

  If I knew the answer to that one, I’d be running the Secret Service, not wandering around with a daffy ex-con with marriage on his mind.

  We strolled on to the other end of the room and past the squad of paras. A couple nodded at us after they inspected our passes, which were hanging on a little chain around our necks.

  Behind them, covering the wall, hung a curtain that reached all the way to the floor. I had seen other curtains here and there throughout the building, but now the implications sank in. I felt the curtain and found the part. Easing it back a little, I saw a door. It wore a common European lock.

  “Look at that,” I said to Willie.

  He wasn’t impressed. “Hell, I could open that with a bobby pin,” he scoffed.

  “Got one on you?”

  He scrutinized my face. “Are you nuts? They’ll throw our asses outta here.”

  “We got passes and we know people. Do you have a pin?”

  “Yeah.” Willie removed one from his shirt pocket and straightened it out somewhat. I reflected that old habits die hard.

  He slipped behind the curtain while I stood there looking at the backs of the troops. Ten seconds passed, fifteen, then half a minute.

  “Got it,” he said in a barely audible voice. “Come on.”

  No one was watching me. I went through the curtain and the door, which Willie was holding open. He came in behind me and pulled the door shut until it latched. Then he grinned. “Still got it, dude. Still got it.”

  We were in a narrow hallway, perhaps four feet wide, lit by naked bulbs in fixtures on the wall just above head-high. The wire that ran from fixture to fixture was stapled to the wall.

  “Slave hallway,” Willie said softly.

  “The frogs didn’t have slaves.”

  “The hell they didn’t! They were all slaves—that’s why they had a revolution. Lead off. Let’s see where she goes.”

  We walked along and came to a ladder leading upward. We were inside the interior wall of the Hall of Mirrors. I consulted my tourist literature, which had a rudimentary map of the château’s rooms. We were between the Hall of Mirrors and the king’s bedroom. Sure enough, a few paces farther on, we came to a doorway that must lead to the king’s chamber. I said as much to Willie.

  “Want to look in there?” he asked.

  “No.” We walked on. The passage was endless. Doors opened into every room. Narrow stairs led up and down. We took one leading down, went down and down, and came to another passageway that led away in two directions. These servants’ passageways apparently led all over the building.

  “The kings and queens didn’t want the help parading through the big rooms,” Willie said.

  At the bottom of another staircase we found only a door, so we opened it. We were in a kitchen. Seated at a table were Jake Grafton and the French police inspector, Papin.

  “Ah, Terry. Willie. You’ve been exploring, I see. Come sit down, have a drink of wine.”

  Willie marched right over and parked his bottom. “Howd
y,” he said to the Frenchman as Grafton poured him a small glass of white wine. I accepted one, too.

  “How did you get into the passageways?” the Frenchman asked in good English.

  I jerked a thumb at Willie. He tossed his bobby pin onto the table.

  “I see.”

  This cop had obviously been around. I turned my attention to Grafton. “You think this Abu Qasim is going to try for paradise tomorrow?”

  “Perhaps, but I doubt it,” the admiral said. “However, someone might. Inspector Papin has been briefing me on Muslim fanatics here in France, which seems to have its share plus a few.”

  “Suiciders,” Willie said sourly, and slurped more wine. He drank it as if it were beer. The Frenchman didn’t seem offended.

  “Inspector Papin was telling me about the renovation of this building that was completed this past spring,” Grafton said. “All the rooms on the main floor were extensively refurbished.”

  He looked at me and I looked at him.

  “Tomorrow I want you and Willie in those servant hallways,” Grafton said.

  “Okay.”

  He slid a ray gun across the table. It looked like the one I used at the Rancho Rodet.

  “The batteries all charged up?” I murmured.

  “Yep.”

  I checked that the power was off, then pocketed it. Papin had his head turned and didn’t seem to notice.

  “What are you guys going to do about ol’ Henri?” I asked the police inspector.

  Papin shrugged. “I am just a policeman,” he said.

  “Next week, after the summit, Henri Rodet will be asked to retire for medical reasons,” Grafton said.

  “Next week?” That just slipped out.

  “The government doesn’t want a breath of scandal now, during the summit.”

  “I see.”

  “If he refuses to retire, he will be fired,” Grafton added. “He’ll retire, I think. The authorities don’t have enough evidence to prosecute him.”

  “Prints on the gun? The magazine? Ammo? Suitcase? Computer?”

  “None, they tell me. Wiped clean.”

  “You’re joking.” I could see that he wasn’t, so I added, “Hairs on the uniform? DNA?”

  Grafton shrugged. “If there is an attempt made on the lives of the G-8 leaders and somehow it can be tied to him, that decision could change, of course.”

  “Gotta have evidence,” Willie declared, and slurped more wine.

  I was thinking of Marisa. “Very civilized,” I said, and nodded at the inspector.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  As Willie attacked his second glass of wine, Inspector Papin glanced at his watch and excused himself. Watching Willie slurp it kinda bothered me, too.

  Grafton waited until the policeman was out of the room. Then he said, “If you were going to kill eight world leaders, how would you do it?”

  “Wait until they were all in one place,” Willie said, “then blow it up. While the television cameras watched.”

  “The only place all eight will be together on television is upstairs in the Hall of Mirrors. Oh, Wednesday evening they’ll all go to a state dinner hosted by the French president at his residence in Paris, but that won’t be televised live.”

  “It’ll be here,” Willie Varner insisted. “While the world is watching.”

  I agreed with Willie. Still…“The bomb squads have had dogs in the building all day.”

  “Indeed they have, but dogs are trained to smell certain types of explosives. No dog can be trained to find everything in the chemical cornucopia that can be made to go bang.”

  We discussed it and decided to start in the basement and work up. We found a door to the dungeon, all right, a damp, dark place of massive stone walls and iron beams. The beams were at least a century old, installed to replace the original oak beams, yet the iron looked serviceable. It had been painted recently with some kind of red rust inhibitor.

  Grafton had a pocket flashlight, and we used that to supplement the poor light from the overhead light fixtures. The fixtures and wires looked as if they dated from the nineteenth century. We found the remnants of ancient cells that probably once held political prisoners, back when the musketeers were dashing and slashing.

  “The dungeon,” Willie whispered.

  After my recent jail experience, the place gave me the shivers—and an uncomfortable, closed-in feeling.

  It seemed to get to Willie, too. “Man could get that clause-trophoby in a place like this,” he remarked at one point. “People musta been smaller back in them days.”

  “How much explosive would it take to knock out the supports and bring down the building?” I asked Grafton. He was a naval officer; he must know more about explosives than I did.

  “A few hundred pounds if it were placed right. A whale of a lot more if it were just packed in here.”

  “They don’t have to bring down the building,” Willie pointed out.

  “That’s right,” Grafton admitted with a sigh. “But I don’t think there’s anything here. Let’s go upstairs.”

  When we got back to the kitchen, the door to the stairwell was locked. As Willie worked on it with the bobby pin, I said, “A man could go far with a thing like that.”

  Willie opened the door with a flourish.

  “All the way to the penitentiary,” Jake Grafton said as he walked by.

  We walked the passageways looking at everything, not that there was a lot to see. The floors were wooden, the walls and ceiling plasterboard, and there were lights and wires and doors. That was it. So we walked along looking for discontinuities, something out of the ordinary, such as a floorboard that had been removed and replaced, a section of the wall that had been repaired, anything. It was time-consuming and tedious, and, of course, we found nothing.

  We had been at it an hour and were in the south wing of the building when two paras came along with a bomb-sniffing dog. They looked at our badges, then looked us over while I eyed the dog—it wasn’t interested in us—edged by, and went on.

  “We’ll never manage to walk through all these passages,” Grafton remarked. “Let’s go back to the main building where the summit meeting will be held.”

  “In the main building on the main floor, in the passageway between the king’s bedroom and the Hall of Mirrors, there are ladders—actually just boards nailed to the wall,” I told him. “A dog couldn’t climb them.”

  “We’ll try that,” Grafton said.

  The first ladder we came to went up into the ceiling, yet the trapdoor was screwed shut. We walked along, looking. There were three ladders, and all three had secured trapdoors.

  “I saw some hand tools in the kitchen, Tommy.” Grafton told me where they were, and away I went. I found them and paused for a drink of water, then headed back.

  I took off my coat, got up on the middle ladder, and started screwing. Ten screws, with paint covering the heads. It took a while.

  I got the honor of going up first. When I opened the trapdoor in the ceiling, it was dark as a tomb above me. I stuck my head up and felt around, found a switch, and flipped it. Way up high, a naked bulb illuminated among the rafters and braces. The space between the massive uprights of the walls of the Hall of Mirrors and the king’s bedroom was crisscrossed with wooden braces that stabilized everything and tied the whole building together. It was dusty and gloomy up there. There was only that one bulb, and in that huge dark space, it looked like a firefly in the night.

  “We’re going to need a flashlight,” I said.

  Grafton, who was below me on the ladder, passed up a small pocket flash. “Callie always packs these when we go anyplace, just in case the power goes out.”

  I took the flash, put it in my shirt pocket, and climbed into the loft. Grafton, then Willie, followed.

  There were spiders and webs. Didn’t look as if anyone had been up here in a while.

  Willie cussed as he climbed. “This is my good suit, I’ll have you know. Paid near two hundred dollars for
it. It gets ripped, I’m gonna bill the gover’ment. Grafton, just want you to know.”

  “He got it at the Salvation Army,” I said.

  “That’s a damn lie.”

  Near the top of the ladder was a catwalk. I climbed up on it. The lightbulb was in a ceramic fixture screwed to a rafter. Scanning the flash around, I could see that the rounded ceiling of the Hall of Mirrors was suspended from the rafters and joists and braces. The joint work looked superb to me. I could see by the different shades of the wood, and the texture, that the beams were of various ages. Across the space was the outside wall of the château; the beams and boards there butted into the masonry.

  “Bet some of these boards are as old as the building,” Grafton muttered as he joined me on the catwalk.

  I looked down the ladder. Willie was going back down to the passageway below.

  “Hey,” I called.

  “You don’t need me up there. I’m too old for this shit, anyway.”

  Grafton took the flash and went down the catwalk, looking at everything. I followed along. We went all the way to the end of the catwalk and worked back to the other end. It was a nice distance, at least a hundred feet, but the room below was huge.

  All we saw was beams and dust and spiderwebs and sawdust from the construction last winter and spring. Finally Grafton sat down on the catwalk. I did, too. We could hear chairs being set up in the hall below, plus some other banging and clanging.

  “Maybe we figured this wrong,” Grafton said disgustedly. “Maybe it won’t be a bomb. Maybe a submachine gun, a pistol, something for the evening news.”

  “Who’s going to pull the trigger?”

  “A cop? A paramilitary guy? A fake cameraman? I don’t know.” Grafton smacked his fist on his thigh.

  “If that was the plan, Rodet wouldn’t have needed a scapegoat,” I told him. “Maybe we should go over to the hospital and sweat the guy, make him an offer he can’t refuse.”

  “I know you didn’t really mean that, but don’t say those things. By three o’clock in the morning I’ll be ready to do it.” Grafton idly played the beam of his flashlight back and forth over the timbers.