The Paris Option

by Robert Ludlum

  He signaled Thérèse, and they sprinted across the broad tiled entry into the west wing of the old villa, not stopping until they reached the sharp turn toward the rear. They paused there, and Jon peered around the corner. He whispered in Thérèse’s ear: “No guards. Come on.”

  They dashed down the side hallway that was completely lined in magnificent mosaics, their pistols ready to fire if discovered. They stopped again, this time at the door to the former women’s quarters.

  Jon was puzzled. “Still there’s no sign of a guard. Why’s that?” he whispered.

  “Perhaps he’s in the room with Papa.”

  “You’re probably right.” Jon tried the door. “It’s open. You go first. Tell them you were set free and sent back to make him work even harder. The guard may believe that.”

  She nodded, understanding. “Here, take the gun. We don’t want to make them suspicious.”

  Jon considered, then took the Beretta.

  She straightened her shoulders and pushed the door open. She stepped in, crying out in French as she ran to him, the consummate actress: “Papa, are you all right? M. Mauritania said I should return—”

  Émile Chambord rotated in his desk chair and stared at Thérèse as if he were seeing a ghost. Then he saw Jon slip in behind her, the two weapons in his hands, sweeping the room in search of guards. But there were none.

  Mystified, Jon looked at Chambord. “Why aren’t you being guarded?”

  The scientist shrugged. “Why would they need to watch me now? They had you and Thérèse. I wasn’t going to destroy the prototype or escape and leave her, was I?”

  Jon motioned sharply. “Let’s get you out of here. Come on.”

  Chambord hesitated. “What about my computer? Are we leaving it?”

  “Leave it, Father,” Thérèse cried. “Hurry.”

  Jon looked at his watch. “We’ve got only five minutes left. There’s no more time.” He grabbed Chambord’s arm and pulled the scientist until he started hurrying on his own. They ran down the corridors, from one to another until at last they reached the grand foyer. There were accusatory voices outside the front door. Either the unconscious guard had awakened, or he had been discovered.

  “To the back!” Jon ordered.

  They had gone halfway when they heard more angry voices, these from the distant dome room, and then the noise of many running feet. Jon shoved his Sig Sauer into his waistband next to where he had put Thérèse’s Beretta. He pulled out the short-range walkie-talkie and pushed the Chambords to a window at the side of the villa.

  “We’ll go this way. Hurry!” Herding them, he flicked on the walkie-talkie. Urgently he relayed the good news to Randi in a whisper: “We’ve got Chambord. We’re fine and will be out in a couple of minutes. Call in the strike.”

  Randi had moved closer to the villa and was now crouched under a canopy of leaves in the shadows of the fragrant orange grove. She looked at her watch again, dreading the advance of the digital numbers. Damn. Heartsick, she saw that the ten minutes she had given Jon were up. The moon was behind a dark cloud, and the temperature was dropping. Still, she had broken out in a sweat. There were lights in the three windows of the female annex and under the towering dome, but she saw nothing else noteworthy, heard nothing.

  She looked at her watch again. Eleven minutes. She ripped up a handful of grass, roots and all, and hurled it into the night.

  Then her walkie-talkie gave a low crackle, and her pulse raced with hope as Jon’s voice reported in and finally whispered, “Call in the strike.”

  With a thrill of relief, she told him where she was hiding. “You’ve got five minutes. Once I call in—”

  “I understand.” There was a hesitation. “Thanks, Randi. Good luck.”

  Her voice seemed to catch in her throat. “You, too, soldier.”

  As she cut the connection, she turned her face up to the cloudy night sky, closed her eyes, and gave a silent prayer of thanks. Then she did her job: She bent to her radio transmitter and made the death call to the Saratoga.

  Jon stood at the villa’s window, waiting for Thérèse to crawl through. She froze, staring at her father. Jon looked back.

  Chambord had produced a pistol. He was pointing it at Jon. “Step away from him, child,” Chambord said, the pistol leveled steadily at Jon’s chest. “Lower your weapon, Colonel.” He’d had it in his jacket pocket.

  “Papa! What are you doing?”

  “Shhh, child. Don’t worry. I’m making things right.” He took a walkie-talkie from his other pocket. “I’m serious about your weapon, Colonel Smith. Put it down, or I’ll shoot you dead.”

  “Dr. Chambord—” Jon tried, puzzled. He let his weapon drift down, but he did not release it.

  Chambord said into the walkie-talkie, “West side. Get everyone out here.”

  Jon saw the shine in Chambord’s eyes. The glow of excitement. They were the eyes of a fanatic. He remembered the detached, almost dreamy expression he had seen on the scientist’s face when Mauritania had discovered them. With a flash of insight, Jon understood: “You weren’t kidnapped. You’re with them. That’s why all the work to make you look dead. That’s why there was no guard on you just now. It was all an act with Mauritania, to make Thérèse think you were a prisoner.”

  Dr. Chambord spoke with disdain: “I’m not with them, Colonel Smith, they’re with me.”

  “Father?” Thérèse questioned, her face full of disbelief.

  But before Chambord could respond, Abu Auda, three of his men, and Mauritania appeared on the run. Jon raised his weapon and grabbed Thérèse’s from his belt.

  Randi checked her watch. Four minutes. Suddenly there was noise from the building. Shouts and running feet. She held her breath as shots rang out, followed by a burst of automatic fire. Jon and Thérèse had no automatic weapons. She was afraid to think, but there was only one possibility: Jon and the Chambords had somehow been discovered. She shook her head, denying it, as two more bursts of automatic fire spit noisily in the distance.

  She leaped to her feet and tore across the grounds toward the villa. Then came another awful sound: From inside, she could hear triumphant laughter. Shouts of victory, praising Allah. The infidels were dead!

  She froze. Unable to think, to feel. It could not be. But all of the gunfire after the two initial early single shots had been automatic. They had killed Jon and Thérèse.

  A great sorrow washed over her, and then a towering rage. She told herself sternly she had no time for either. It was all about the DNA computer. That it must not remain in the terrorists’ hands…. Too much was at stake. Too many other lives.

  She turned on her heel and ran away from the villa, racing as if all of the hounds of hell were pursuing. Trying not to see Jon’s face, the dark blue eyes, the laughter, the outrage, all of the intelligence. His handsome face with the high, flat cheekbones. How his jaw would knot when he was angry—

  When the missile landed, the explosion threw her forward ten feet. The percussive blast was thunderous all around her head and inside it and a windy heat at her back. It was almost as if she had been hurled away by an angry demon. As debris shot through the air and fell in a dangerous rain, she crawled under the branches of an olive tree and covered her head with her arms.

  Randi sat with her back to the perimeter wall, watching red and yellow flames lick up toward the dark sky from where the white villa had stood nearly a mile away. She spoke into the radio. “Call the Pentagon. The DNA computer is destroyed, and Dr. Chambord with it. There’s no more danger.”

  “Roger, Agent Russell. Good work.”

  Her voice was dull. “Also tell them Lieutenant Colonel Jonathan Smith, M.D., U.S. Army, died in the explosion, as well as Dr. Chambord’s daughter, Thérèse. Then get me out.”

  She switched off the transmitter and gazed up at the slowly moving clouds. The moon peeked out, a silver orb, and then it was gone. The stink of death and burning debris filled the air. She thought about Jon. He had taken a chance a
nd known the risk. It had come out against him, but he would not complain. Then she began to cry.

  Part Three

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Beirut, Lebanon

  CIA agent Jeff Moussad moved warily through the rubble of South Beirut, an officially denied area. The air was dusty, and the mountains of brick and mortar on either side reflected the sad story of the long civil war that had torn apart Lebanon and destroyed Beirut’s reputation as the Paris of the East. Although the downtown heart of the city was rebuilding, and several hundred international firms had returned, little progress was in evidence here in this largely lawless no-man’s-land of the grim past.

  Jeff was armed and in disguise, on assignment to contact an important asset, whose identity and location had been discovered in the notes of a fellow CIA agent who had died in the infamous attack on the Pentagon of September 11. His difficult mission—akin to finding a needle in a silo of needles—was largely possible because of new sources of intelligence that the U.S. government had been developing in everything from familiar tools like the U-2 spy planes and the constellation of secret spy satellites orbiting overhead, to commercial satellite photos and remote-controlled spy drones.

  Since there were no road markers, Jeff was relying on a specially programmed Palm Pilot to find his way to the right cave carved into the debris of what had once been some kind of building. He paused in dark shadow to check the Palm Pilot again. The viewing screen showed the streets and alleys of this section in live video relayed from one of a new family of pilotless aerial drones. Those upgraded, unmanned aircraft provided real-time images of an area over vast distances through satellite communications. This was a major improvement from when a drone could provide up-to-the-minute intelligence only if a radio signal could be beamed directly back to the base from where it took off.

  Because of the changing geographical chaos here in South Beirut, a stranger would be easily confused. But with the live video feed and the directional lines that told exactly which turns to make, Jeff followed a sure path for perhaps a quarter of a mile. But then gunfire exploded nearby, followed by footsteps behind him. His pulse accelerated, and he darted quickly into the shadow of a smoke-blackened tank that had been twisted and burned in some long-ago firefight. Straining to hear, he pulled out his pistol. He needed to get to the asset’s lair quickly, before he was discovered.

  He checked his Palm Pilot. His destination was not much farther. But as he studied the next turn, the unthinkable happened. The Palm Pilot went dark. He stared at it, stunned, his chest tight. He had no idea where he was. Cursing under his breath, knowing he was lost, he hit buttons, and the usual fake information that he carried in the Palm Pilot appeared—phone numbers, appointments. But there was no communication from the drone to tell him where to go later, or how to return to base. The connection had died.

  Frantically, he tried to remember the exact location of the next turn. When he was sure he remembered correctly, he moved on past a collapsed building, rounded the corner, and crossed toward what he hoped was his final destination. As he emerged onto a leveled area, he looked nervously for the cave entrance. He never found it. What he did see was the muzzle flashes of four assault rifles…and nothing more.

  Fort Belvoir, Virginia

  Just south of Washington, D.C., stood historic Fort Belvoir, now a state-of-the-art site for some one hundred tenant organizations—a Who’s Who of the Department of Defense. Among its most clandestine residents was the main receiving station for satellite information for the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO). Created in 1960 to design, launch, and operate U.S. spy satellites, the NRO was so highly secret that it was not even officially acknowledged until the 1990s. Large and powerful, the NRO’s multibillion-dollar annual budget exceeded the yearly spending of any of the nation’s three most powerful espionage kingdoms—the CIA, the FBI, and the NSA.

  Here in the rolling hills of suburban Virginia, the NRO’s information-receiving station was a hotbed of cutting-edge electronics and analytical manpower. One of the civilian analysts was Donna Lindhorst, raven-haired, freckle-faced, and exhausted from the last six days of being on high alert. Today she was monitoring a missile-launch facility in North Korea, a country that was not only considered a serious potential threat to the United States and its allies, but one that had made development of longer-range missiles a high priority.

  A longtime NRO employee, Donna knew that spy satellites had roamed the skies for some forty years, many orbiting a hundred miles above the planet. Traveling at mach 25, these billion-dollar birds flew over every spot on the face of the Earth twice a day, taking digital snapshots of places that the CIA, government policymakers, and the military high command wanted to see. At any one time, at least five were overhead. From civil war in the Sudan to environmental disasters in China, America’s satellites provided a steady river of black-and-white images.

  The missile-launch facility in North Korea that Donna was studying was high-danger priority right now. All the United States needed was for some rogue nation to take advantage of the current uncertain electronic situation. And that was what might be happening right now. Donna’s throat was dry with fear, because the images she was monitoring indicated a heat plume like those emitted by rocket launches.

  She studied the screen nervously, cuing the satellite to focus on the area longer. Known in the spy trade as an Advanced Keyhole-class satellite, it could take a photo every five seconds and relay it almost instantly through Milstar satellites to her monitor. This placed enormous demands on data relay and image processing, but she had to know whether that plume was real. If it were, it could be an early warning of a missile attack.

  She leaned anxiously forward, running digital scans, reading the data, homing in until…The screen went blank. All the photos were gone. She froze a moment in utter shock, then pushed her chair back and stared terrified at the wall of screens. All were blank. Nothing was coming through. If the North Koreans wanted to mount a nuclear attack against America, nothing would stop them.

  Washington, D.C.

  The mood in the offices and all along the corridors of the West Wing was of quiet jubilation, a rare Thanksgiving in May. In the Oval Office itself, President Castilla had allowed himself a smile, unusual these past few harrowing days, as he shared the same measured exultation with his room full of advisers.

  “I don’t know exactly how you did it, sir.” National Security Adviser Emily Powell-Hill beamed. “But you really pulled it off.”

  “We pulled it off, Emily.”

  The president stood up and walked from around his desk to sit on the sofa beside her, a casual act of fellowship he seldom indulged in. He felt lighter today, as if a crippling load had been lifted from his shoulders. He peered through his glasses, favoring everyone with his warm smile, gratified to see the relief on their faces as well. Still, this was no cause for real celebration. Good people had died in that missile attack against the Algerian villa.

  He continued, “It was everyone here, plus the intelligence services. We owe a great deal to those selfless heroes who work in the lap of the enemy without any public recognition.”

  “From what Captain Lainson of the Saratoga told me,” Admiral Stevens Brose said, nodding to the DCI—the Director of Central Intelligence, “it was CIA operatives who finally got those bastards and destroyed that damned DNA computer.”

  The DCI nodded modestly. “It was primarily Agent Russell. One of my best people. She did her job.”

  “Yes,” the president agreed, “there’s no doubt the CIA and others, who must remain nameless, saved our bacon—this time.” His expression grew solemn as he gazed around at his Joint Chiefs, the NSA, the head of the NRO, the DCI, and his chief of staff. “Now we must prepare for the future. The molecular computer is no longer theoretical, people, and a quantum computer will be next. It’s inevitable. Who knows what else science will develop to threaten our defenses, and to help humanity, I might add? We have to start right now, learning how
to deal with all of them.”

  “As I understand it, Mr. President,” Emily Powell-Hill pointed out, “Dr. Chambord, his computer, and all his research were lost in the attack. My information tells me no one else is close to duplicating his feat. So we have some leeway.”

  “Perhaps we do, Emily,” the president acknowledged. “Still, my best sources in the scientific community tell me that once a breakthrough like this has been made, the pace of development by everyone else is accelerated.” He contemplated them, and his voice was forceful as he continued. “In any case, we must build foolproof defenses against a DNA computer and all other potential scientific developments that could become threats to our security.”

  There was a general silence in the Oval Office as they solemnly considered the task ahead and their own responsibilities. The quiet was shattered by the sharp ringing of the telephone on the president’s desk. Sam Castilla hesitated, staring across the room at the phone that would ring only if the matter were of great importance.

  He put his big hands on his knees, stood up, walked over, and picked up the receiver. “Yes?”

  It was Fred Klein. “We need to meet, Mr. President.”

  “Now?”

  “Yessir. Now.”

  Paris, France

  In the exclusive private hospital for patients undergoing plastic surgery, Randi, Marty, and Peter had gathered in Marty’s spacious room. The muted noises of traffic from outside seemed particularly loud as the painful conversation paused, and tears streamed down Marty’s cheeks.