The Paris Option

by Robert Ludlum

  As he was helplessly carried along in the big Sikorsky, he quit working on the ropes for a while, resting. The wound on his arm ached and burned. Still, it was superficial, more an annoyance than a danger, but it should be taken care of before infection set in. On the other hand, a much more pressing goal was simply surviving. Which brought his thoughts back again to Randi. He knew her only too well, and he was worried. Had she made it out of range before the missile hit? She would have waited for him and the Chambords as long as possible. When they had not appeared, her first instinct would have been to try to rescue them.

  God in heaven, he hoped she had not. Even if she had finally realized she had to run for it, she might not have escaped in time. His mouth went dry as he recalled how close he and Thérèse had come to dying…

  …Near the window of the dark villa…armed guards all around…Jon and Thérèse disarmed…

  Émile Chambord tells Mauritania, “The American has called in some kind of missile strike. We must leave. Tell your men to fire their weapons, make it sound like a fight. Then shout. Celebrate loudly as if you’ve killed Smith and my daughter. Hurry!”

  They fire bursts. Scream their slogans. Race from the villa, herding Jon and Thérèse toward the helipad. They reach the barracks, and the world detonates behind them. They are flung into the air. Thrown to the ground. Deafened by an explosive roar that hammers with the rush of a shock wave and tears at their clothes, their hair, their limbs. Tree branches and palm fronds fly. A massive wood door cartwheels overhead and slams down onto one of Abu Auda’s men, crushing him to death.

  When the ground stops heaving, Jon staggers up, bleeding from a head wound. His left forearm burns with pain. He searches frantically for a weapon.

  But Abu Auda trains his British-made assault rifle on Jon. “Don’t try, Colonel.”

  The survivors crawl to their feet. Amazingly, most are still alive. Thérèse is bleeding from her right leg. Chambord hurries to her. “Thérèse! You’re hurt.”

  She pushes him away. “I don’t know who you are anymore. You must be mad!” She turns her back and helps Jon.

  Chambord watches as she rips off the sleeve of her white suit. “What I do is for the future of France, child,” he explains earnestly. “You’ll understand soon.”

  “There’s nothing to understand.” She binds the wound on Jon’s arm and then the one on her leg. The blood on Jon’s forehead is a minor scratch.

  Mauritania interrupts, “She’ll have to understand later, Doctor.” He gazes around with the canny expression of a feral animal. He seems to sniff the air as if he can read intelligence on it. “They may strike again. We must leave immediately.”

  One of the terrorists gives a loud bellow of dismay. Everyone converges, staring at the Huey helicopter. Its rotors have been broken by debris hurled in the blast. The chopper is grounded.

  Chambord decides, “There’s room for five of us in the scout helicopter. You, of course, M. Mauritania, and your pilot. Plus Captain Bonnard, Thérèse, and I.” Mauritania begins to protest. He wants more of his own people. But Chambord shakes his head firmly. “No. I need Bonnard, and I won’t leave my daughter behind. If I’m to build another prototype, I need to go where I can work. A new DNA computer is our most pressing priority. I regret there’s room for no one else, but there it is.”

  Mauritania has to agree. He turns to his towering lieutenant, who has heard everything and is glowering with disapproval. “You’ll remain behind to lead the others, Abu Auda. Make arrangements to be picked up. I’ll have to take our Saudi pilot, Mohammed. He’s our best. You’ll rejoin us soon.”

  “What of the American, Smith? May I kill him now? It was he who—”

  “No. If he’s arranged for this missile strike, he must be even more important than I realized. You’ll keep him safe, Abu Auda.”

  Thérèse Chambord protests vehemently, but they force her aboard. The compact helicopter rises, skirts the disaster site, and heads north toward Europe. Abu Auda orders Jon’s hands bound, and the group moves at a brisk clip to the distant highway, where they are met by two covered pickup trucks. A long, jolting ride through the wind-swept inland desert finally ends at the noisy docks of Tunis. There they board a motorboat like the converted PT boat on which Jon stowed the day before. The ragtag group is exhausted, but their sense of urgency remains clear.

  On the boat, they blindfold him. He sees none of the long trip across the Mediterranean. He falls asleep again despite the slamming of the boat against the waves, but as soon as the boat lands, he is instantly awake, craning his head to listen. They hustle him out on deck, still blindfolded, where he hears many voices speaking Italian and guesses they must be in Italy. They board the Sikorsky helicopter to fly to an unnamed location that could be anywhere from Serbia to France…

  Now as Jon sat blindfolded in the helicopter, waiting for them to either run out of gas or land, he wrestled with his tormenting thoughts: Was Randi alive? Where were Peter and Marty? From what Thérèse knew, she and her father had been the only prisoners in the villa until Jon arrived. Jon hoped they had not been captured, that Peter had somehow saved Marty, and that they were safe. His only comfort was that the molecular computer had been pulverized in the missile blast.

  Now he must stop Émile Chambord before he built another. It had been a shock to learn Chambord had been working with the terrorists all along, apparently the instigator of an elaborate—and very successful—charade to fool not just national governments but also his daughter. In a perversion of a great scientific achievement, he was scheming to build another molecular computer so he could use it to destroy Israel. Why? Because his mother had been Algerian? Part of Islam? Jon remembered Fred Klein’s report: His mother raised him as a Muslim, but he showed little interest in religion as an adult. There had seemed no reason to consider that bit of information salient, since Chambord had never shown religious tendencies.

  As Jon thought about it all, he remembered Chambord’s stint teaching in Cairo just before he returned to the Pasteur, and that Chambord’s wife had died not long ago. A reacquaintance with Islam, plus the life-changing loss of a beloved spouse. Belief shifts in later years had happened to others, and they would happen again. Forgotten faith could reach out and reclaim, especially as one aged and faced personal tragedy.

  Then there was Captain Darius Bonnard, who had a similar background: Married to an Algerian woman when he had been in the Foreign Legion. When commissioned, his leaves spent in Algiers with, maybe, a first wife he had never divorced. A double life? It certainly seemed more than possible now. And, too, there was his job—within whispering distance of the top echelons of NATO and the French military. He was one of the invisibles—the quiet, efficient aide to a general. Although he had far more access than most, he was seldom in the limelight, unlike his general.

  Chambord’s and Bonnard’s lives made a new kind of sense when looked at with the hindsight of Chambord’s shattering revelation: “I’m not with them…they’re with me!”

  The scientist’s prototype was destroyed, but not his knowledge. Unless someone stopped him, he would build another. But that would take time. Smith held on to that morsel of hope. Time to find Chambord and to stop him. But first he had to escape. Behind him, he resumed trying to loosen the ropes that bound him.

  Paris, France

  Marty was awake, gratefully out of his hospital gown, and dressed in clothes Peter had brought back after making contact with MI6—a pair of shapeless dark brown cord pants, a black cashmere turtleneck despite the warmth of the hospital room, athletic shoes with racing stripes along the sides, and his ubiquitous tan wind-breaker. He looked himself up and down and pronounced himself appropriately attired for anything short of a formal dinner with the prime minister.

  Randi had returned to the room, too, and the three friends wrestled with the issue foremost in their minds—how to find Jon. Without any formal agreement, they had simply decided that Jon was alive. Eyes sparkling, Marty volunteered to go off hi
s meds and devote himself to solving the problem.

  Randi agreed. “Good idea.”

  “Sure you’re up for it?” Peter questioned.

  “Don’t be a dolt, Peter.” Marty looked offended. “Does a mastodon have tusks? Does an algebraic equation require an equals sign? Gee.”

  “Guess so,” Peter decided.

  The room phone rang. Randi picked it up. It was her boss at Langley, Doug Kennedy, on the secure scrambled surface phone line. He was not encouraging. She listened, asked some pointed questions, and as soon as she hung up, she reported what he had learned: The ground assets in Algeria said there was little unusual activity of any kind, not even smugglers, except perhaps in Tunis, where a known smuggler’s high-speed boat had left some five hours after the strike for an unspecified destination with a dozen or so men on board. One of the men, however, was reported to be a Europe an or American. There had been no women among them, which pretty much ruled out Émile Chambord, who was certainly traveling with Thérèse. He would not have left her, or at least Randi and Marty did not think he would. Peter was not so sure.

  Marty made a face. “No one like Émile abandons a child, you ridiculous man.”

  “She’s pushing forty,” Peter noted dryly. “She’s no child.”

  “To Émile she is,” Marty corrected him.

  There had been few U.S. ships or aircraft in the eastern Mediterranean at the time, the Saratoga having left its position the instant it launched its missile. It had turned off all surface-to-air radar so as not to allow back-tracing and had run dark, steaming straight north to put as much deniability as possible between it and the Algerian coast before the certain uproar from the Arab countries began.

  “That could have been Jon on the smuggler’s boat,” Randi decided. “It was the kind of craft the Crescent Shield used to cross the Mediterranean to Algeria. On the other hand, the terrorists could have had some Americans among them.”

  “Of course it was Jon,” Marty declared. “There can be no doubt.”

  Peter said, “We’ll wait for what my people tell me, shall we?”

  Marty was standing at the window, watching the Paris street below. His mind was in a race against time, soaring through the stratosphere of his imagination as he sought a solution for how to find Jon. He closed his eyes and sighed happily as lights flashed in a variety of vivid colors, and it seemed to him that he was lighter than air. He saw shapes and heard sounds in a kaleidoscope of excitement. His freed self was soaring toward the magical heights where creativity and intelligence joined, and ideas far beyond the scope of ordinary mortals were waiting to be born like infant stars.

  When the phone rang, Marty jumped and frowned.

  Peter headed for it. “My turn.”

  He was right. The information was delivered in a crisp London accent: A British submarine, running deep, had surfaced less than ten miles from the Algerian villa moments after the blast. In fact, it was the blast’s shock wave, transmitted through the water and picked up by the sub’s sonar, that had prompted its rise. With its radar fixed toward the villa, it had identified a small Hughes scout helicopter leaving the vicinity some fifteen minutes after the strike. Five minutes later, the sub dove again, concerned it might be discovered.

  Meanwhile, on land, a passing MI6 informant had spotted two pickup trucks exiting the area, driving west toward Tunis. The informant had reported the news to his contact in hopes of being paid, which he had been, and handsomely. It was not cost-efficient to be niggardly in the spy trade. Finally, the captain of a British Airways jet en route from Gibraltar to Rome had observed a small helicopter of the same model flying from the direction of Oran toward the Spanish coast in an area where the captain had never seen a helicopter. Thus, he had entered it in his log. A quick check by MI6 revealed that no scheduled, or even authorized, helicopter flights had been made from Oran or any place near it that night.

  “He’s alive,” Marty boomed. “There’s now no doubt.”

  “Let’s assume that’s true,” Peter said. “But we still have the problem of contacting him, and which course do we pursue? The unauthorized helicopter flying to Spain, or the smuggler’s boat out of Tunis that carried a possible American?”

  “Both,” Randi decided. “Cover all bases.”

  Meanwhile, Marty had retreated blissfully again into the fertile fields of his mind. He could feel an idea forming. It was almost tactile, as if he could stroke it with his fingers and taste it on the tip of his tongue. His eyes snapped open, and he paced around the room, rubbing his hands with excitement. And skidded to a stop to do a little dance, his plump body as agile as an imp’s. “The answer’s been in front of us all along. Someday I need to study the nature of consciousness. Such a fascinating subject. I’m sure I could learn a thing or two—”

  “Marty!” Randi said, exasperated. “What’s your idea?”

  He beamed. “We’ve been utter fools. We’ll do as we did before—place a message on the Asperger’s Web site—OASIS. After that unpleasant Hades mess, how could Jon forget that’s how we stayed in touch before? Impossible for him to not remember. All we need do is compose a message that will baffle everyone but Jon.” He screwed his florid face into a knot as he considered.

  Peter and Randi waited. It did not take long.

  Marty cackled with joy. “I have it! ‘Coughing Lazarus: Sex-starved wolf seeks suitable mate. Must have own location. Eager to meet, ready to go. What do you want to do?’” He watched their reaction with eager eyes.

  Randi shook her head. “I have no idea what that means.”

  “I’m at sea, too,” Peter agreed, avoiding Marty’s gaze.

  Marty rubbed his hands together with satisfaction. “If you don’t, no one else will either.”

  “That’s all fine,” Randi said, “but you’d better tell us the code anyway.”

  Peter said, “Just a moment, I’m beginning to see part of it. ‘Coughing Lazarus’ must refer to ‘Smith’—Smith’s Cough Drops, of course. And ‘Lazarus’ is Jon again, because like Lazarus we’re hoping Jon’s risen from the dead.”

  Randi chuckled. “So, ‘Sex-starved wolf’ implies a ‘randy howl,’ yes? Randi and Howell. ‘Seeks suitable mate’ is easy. A mate’s a pal, a friend, and we’re looking for our friend Jon. ‘Must have own location’ means we’re asking where he is. ‘Eager to meet, ready to go’ is obvious. We want to meet him, and we’ll go wherever necessary. But I don’t quite get ‘What do you want to do?’”

  Marty arched his brows. “That,” he announced, “was the easiest part. I thought better of you both. There’s a famous movie line everyone knows: ‘What do you want to do tonight—’”

  “Of course,” Peter said, recognizing it. “From the movie Marty. ‘What do you want to do tonight, Marty?’ So that means you.”

  Marty rubbed his hands. “Now we’re getting someplace. So my message, translated, is simply: ‘Jon Smith: Randi and Peter are looking for you. Where are you? They’ll meet you wherever you say.’ And it’s signed Marty. Questions?”

  “Wouldn’t dare.” Peter shook his head.

  They hurried downstairs to the office of Peter’s friend, Lochiel Cameron, the hospital’s owner and chief surgeon. Dr. Cameron listened, left his chair, and Marty took over the desk, where Dr. Cameron’s computer sat at the corner. Marty’s fingers flew over the keyboard as he quickly found www.aspergersyndrome.org and entered his message. Then he leaped up and paced behind the chair, his eyes fixed on the screen.

  Dr. Cameron glanced at Peter as if to ask whether he should administer a new dose of Mideral. Peter shook his head, all the while watching Marty for a sign that he was slipping dangerously near detachment from reality. As time passed, Marty paced faster, grew more agitated, waved his arms wildly, and muttered to himself in a voice that grew louder as the words grew more meaningless.

  Peter finally nodded to Cameron. He told Marty, “Okay, lad. We’ve got to face it. You’ve had a good run, but it’s time to pacify those nerve endings.”<
br />
  “What?” Marty spun around and narrowed his eyes.

  “Peter’s right,” Randi agreed. “The doctor has your pill. Take it, Mart. That way you’ll be in good shape if things get tense.”

  Marty frowned. He looked them both up and down with disdain. But at the same time, his quick mind registered their concern. He did not like it, but he knew that the medication bought him time for when he wanted to soar again.

  “Oh, very well,” he said grumpily. “Give me that awful pill.”

  An hour later, Marty had returned to sit quietly in front of the computer screen. Peter and Randi kept watch with him. There had been no answer from Jon.

  Chapter Thirty

  Aalst, Belgium

  Outside the old market town of Aalst stood the country estate of the Brabant branch of the La Porte family. Although the town had grown into a bustling suburb of Brussels, the La Porte estate had retained its classic grandeur, an artifact from a long-ago time. It was called Hethuis, “Castle House,” in honor of its—and the family’s—medieval heritage. Today the walled courtyard was filled with the chauffeured sedans and limousines of NATO military leaders and members of the Council of European Nations, which was meeting this week in Brussels.

  Inside the main house, General the Count Roland la Porte was holding court. Like his pedigreed estate, La Porte appeared large and magnificent where he stood before the walk-in fireplace in the baronial main room. Around him, period weapons, heraldic coats-of-arms, and the canvases of great Dutch and Flemish painters—everyone from Jan van Eyck to Pieter Brueghel—hung from the dark, paneled walls.

  EU Commissioner Enzo Ciccione, recently arrived from Rome, was giving his opinion in English: “These satellite problems of the Americans are frightening and have made many of us rethink our views, General La Porte. Perhaps we have indeed become too dependent upon the United States and its military. After all, NATO is essentially the same animal as the United States.”