by Ben Coes
“What do you want?”
“To speak with him. It’s important.”
“He’s not interested.”
Beauxchamps’s phone went dead. He pressed a button on the side of the phone. A map came onto the screen. It showed a wide spectrographic of Europe, then slowly zoomed in.
He hit speed dial.
“I need a helicopter,” said Beauxchamps. “Pick me up in the park.”
* * *
The silver-and-black Panther AS440 cut sideways and swept over a last stretch of dark land at the outskirts of Saint-Tropez. It was past midnight. The pilot brought the Panther over the mansion, then hovered low and dropped slowly onto a stretch of grass near a back terrace.
Beauxchamps hit a button near the left side of the cabin. A hydraulic sound mixed with the echo of the slowing rotors. The door slowly opened and swept toward the grass.
“Wait here,” Beauxchamps told the pilot.
He stepped down the helicopter’s stairs onto the grass. In his right hand, he held a manila folder. He stared at the ground as he walked but didn’t look up. He came to a curving marble stairway that led up to the terrace. He sprinted up the steps. Seated on a chaise lounge was Dewey. He had on jeans, no shirt, and was barefoot. A few empty beer bottles were on the table to his left. He was staring at Beauxchamps. In his hands was a pump-action 12-gauge shotgun. It was aimed at Beauxchamps.
“A shotgun?” said Beauxchamps. “Interesting choice.”
“What do you want?” said Dewey.
“To speak with you.”
“Really? Let me guess, you’d like to invite me to a special ceremony and award me a ribbon?”
“I’m sorry for how the questioning went.”
“If I ever see Rousse again, I’m going to kill him,” said Dewey. “You can tell him that.”
“You need to put aside your anger for a few minutes and listen,” said Beauxchamps. “It’s important.”
There was a pregnant pause.
“You have one minute,” said Dewey. “Then I blow your right kneecap off.”
“I reran the ballistics on the slugs.” Beauxchamps took a step forward and extended the folder to Dewey. “The first analysis was run only on the ones that killed Lindsay, the presumption being that whoever killed Lindsay also killed the guards. Your gun was used to kill Lindsay and one of the guards, but the other agent came back with a different ballistic. There were two weapons used.”
Dewey took the folder but didn’t open it.
“It could mean anything. Maybe I had an extra gun.”
“Someone else was there. My guess is, you were framed to distract everyone, including you, but also DGSI and the United States government. There’s one other thing. You say you saw a woman in the room. We found evidence of a woman matching the description you gave. She checked into the hotel adjacent to the George Cinq a little while before Lindsay was killed. There’s a photo.”
Now Dewey opened the folder, flipping papers until he found one with a photo. He kept the muzzle of the shotgun trained on Beauxchamps as he stared at the photo under the dim light from the mansion.
“How’d she get in the suite?”
“She climbed,” said Beauxchamps. “I found a piece of her coat on the steel fence separating the two properties.”
“And you think she killed him?”
“Maybe. Probably. Maybe not. Who knows? If she did, it seems clear that she was either hired or sent by an intelligence agency, perhaps Russia. But perhaps she didn’t kill him. Maybe Lindsay was killed because of something she told him. The bottom line is, we need to find her.”
“And how do you suggest we do that?”
“I know where she is.”
Dewey was quiet for a few moments. He put the paper down and picked up a beer, downing it in two big gulps.
“We’re tracking the credit card she used,” said Beauxchamps.
“Are you guys going to try and find her?”
“No,” said Beauxchamps. “No one knows, other than someone who works for me, a man I trust. I don’t think you did it. But something’s going on and we have to find her. If she’s a foreign agent, we need to get her before she leaves the country.”
“I don’t work with people who don’t know what they’re doing.”
“I deserve that,” said Beauxchamps. “But I do know what I’m doing. I found you, didn’t I? Besides, you don’t have a choice.”
There was a long pause as Dewey stared at Beauxchamps.
“I’ll let you tag along, Beauxchamps, but if I find her, she’s America’s property. This has to do with our secretary of state.”
Beauxchamps nodded.
“Fine. She arrived in Marseille last night. An hour ago, she got aboard the overnight train from Marseille to Frankfurt. We’ll get aboard at a later station, Lyon or Chalon-sur-Saône.”
“Okay. Can your guy give us a lift?”
“Yes. But you need a disguise. INTERPOL issued a Red Notice a few hours ago. Your photo is everywhere.”
60
NSA
SIGNALS INTELLIGENCE DIRECTORATE
Samantha and Follett were seated in Bruckheimer’s office. June was standing before a whiteboard. He picked up a black marker and quickly diagrammed the information that was known to them at that point. It looked like a spider, with lines coming off of a central body: Order 6.
June had used a black marker for every word but one: Casales, the dead Consular Operations agent was in red.
On speakerphone were Calibrisi, Polk, Perry, and a few others from the CIA, as well as Josh Brubaker, national security advisor, and White House chief of staff Adrian King. The two agencies were sharing notes about the investigation into Order 6, which everyone felt was critical to figuring out who killed Tim Lindsay.
That afternoon, Charles Bruner, the former head of the National Clandestine Service under William Casey, was meeting with King at the White House. Bruner, they all believed, knew something about Order 6, having left Langley for the State Department, where he ran Consular Operations.
In addition, Follett was meeting with another individual on the list of people who might know about Order 6, Andrew Flaherty.
But June believed they needed to do more.
“We need to run Consular Operations employees against PRISM, DS-300, and Stellar Wind,” he said, referring to three of NSA’s key software programs.
“I previewed it with Judge Wetherbee at the FISA court,” said Polk. “He was very opposed to the idea of simply running every Consular Operations employee through the NSA ringer. He called it a fishing expedition. You’re going to need to background them another way, Jesus.”
“We’ve looked at goddam everything,” said June.
“Actually, there is a way,” said Brubaker. “Title 50 of the U.S. Code. Specifically, Chapter 36, Subchapter I, Paragraph 1805. If the U.S. attorney general determines that an emergency exists, he may authorize the use of electronic surveillance before obtaining the necessary authorization from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. As long as the AG or his designee notifies a judge of the court at the time of authorization and applies for a warrant within seven days, it’s legal.”
“I’ll call the attorney general,” said King.
61
VILLA BLANCHE
SAINT-TROPEZ, FRANCE
One of Borchardt’s staff members, a woman named Lynette, cut Dewey’s hair—not too short, but short enough to look nothing like the photos of Dewey splashed across the newspapers and European news channels. She then colored it a very light gray, almost white. Lynette also made Dewey shave and then applied a deep base of light-colored makeup, which made his skin appear very pale.
For his wardrobe, Dewey found a hideous cardigan sweater in Borchardt’s closet. He also found a pair of eyeglasses with no prescription—designed to simply alter his appearance. They were horn-rimmed and oversized. He took a wooden walking stick from Borchardt. He didn’t want to project an old man, but rather someone in hi
s early sixties—a skier who’d twisted his knee one too many times.
Someone who knew Dewey—or a highly trained professional—might be able to recognize him, but most would not. He looked like a wealthy European on his way to the Alps for some very slow skiing. Wealthy, a bit bookish, and odd.
He and Beauxchamps walked quickly to the waiting Panther, its rotors already slashing the air, creating a din and blowing a hard wind over Borchardt’s lawn. They passed one of Borchardt’s security men nearby, Dewey nodding at him as he took the final steps toward the open door of the helicopter.
* * *
Yaron watched from the lawn as the helicopter carrying Andreas lifted off and cut into the darkening sky. He opened his cell phone and signed into his bank account, then removed another phone, a cheap disposable one he’d bought the night before. He dialed.
“Hello?”
“It’s me,” Yaron said, his British accent sharp and rough, Cockney.
“Hold on.”
A moment later, another person came on the line. “This is Nebuchar Fortuna. Where’s Andreas?”
“He just left.”
“Do you know where he’s going?”
“Yes. I know precisely where he’s going.”
“Well, where?”
“I’m staring at my bank account,” said Yaron. “I’m not saying anything else until I see the wire hit.”
“Understood. Hold on.”
The phone was silent for nearly a minute.
“Try now,” said Fortuna.
Yaron refreshed the bank app on his phone. Suddenly the number jumped.
$5,000,000.00
“I want the rest of the money now. I don’t trust you.”
“We had a deal.”
“We still do. You want to know where Dewey Andreas is going, you pay me. Same deal, we’re just going to alter the terms of payment a little.”
“Fine,” snapped Fortuna. “Hold on.”
Again, a long pause. Finally, Fortuna came back on.
“Look again.”
Yaron refreshed the bank app again. The number indicating how much money he had in the account made an abrupt jump.
$10,000,000.00
“He’s on his way to a train station,” said Yaron. “He’s catching the Marseille overnight train to Frankfurt.”
62
LAYSAN
NORTHWESTERN HAWAIIAN ISLANDS
PACIFIC OCEAN
A white-and-red go-fast boat ripped across the dark waters at eighty miles an hour. The boat had departed from a private dock a few miles from Honolulu that morning. The boat had no running lights as it roared across the deep Pacific.
There were two men on the boat, both in their late twenties, both former U.S. Navy SEALs. They wore similar-looking outfits: jeans and dark T-shirts. The driver, Rogers, was smoking a cigarette despite the warm wind. He had night optics, but they were around his neck and turned off. The boat’s NAV system and the stars above were enough for him to see.
They reached Laysan at midnight. Laysan was one of the ten islands and atolls in the uninhabited Northwestern Hawaiian Islands.
They worked at night, removing several long steel weapons cases from the boat, along with sleeping bags, food, and communications equipment. When they were done unloading, they covered the boat with a camouflaged tarp so that anyone flying overhead, or searching via satellite, would see nothing.
The weapons cases held MANPADs, man-portable air-defense systems—shoulder-held surface-to-air missiles. There were ten missiles in all, all of them Stingers.
They set up their tents a few hundred yards inland, eating cold bread and sliced steak beneath a starry sky.
Rogers turned on the communications equipment before he went to sleep. He dialed a phone number.
“Hello?” came the voice.
“Mr. Flaherty, it’s Tommy,” said Rogers. “Joe and I are here and in position.”
“The flight course will be automatically uploaded directly into the firing sequence,” said Flaherty. “You simply need to press the trigger. However, I want in-theater redundancy.”
“We’ll both be firing,” said Rogers. “Joe’s MANPAD will be the one you guys control. I’ll target the plane on my own.”
63
MARSEILLE, FRANCE
The train moved out of Marseille as an early winter storm, predicted to blanket Europe in at least two feet of new snow, cast the first lazy flakes across a hazy sky, turning gray as night approached.
Romy looked at the clock above the door of the compartment. It was 10 P.M. She studied the train schedule. They would arrive in Frankfurt just before 6.
She’d been to Frankfurt many times. It was a city that would enable her to figure out her next steps. Large enough to hide.
But she was tired. The thought of running anymore made her eyes moisten again with tears. She sat and stared out the window at the passing countryside, eventually feeling her eyes grow heavy. She wanted to stay awake. She needed to think. What if she simply called the White House and told the operator everything she knew? Most likely, the operator would hang up on her, but there was a chance. Maybe they had to write down all messages? Surely if she said she was with Lindsay before he died, that a man named Charles Bruner was behind it all, they would report it to someone?
She could try, even though she knew it would be a waste of time. If they didn’t hang up on her, the message would be laughed at in some junior-level staffer’s office.
“Just stop thinking about it for a few minutes,” she told herself. “Rest. You need it.”
Even beyond the need to warn somebody about Bruner was the simple fact that she didn’t know where she was going or what she would do when she got there. She had no direction. She’d chosen the train arbitrarily, the first one leaving Marseille after she killed the man in the restaurant. She had no future. She had no past. She had the memory of Kyrie and that was all, a memory that was destroyed, her entire life ruined by a man she now realized was a stranger—a monster. She shut her eyes and drifted off to sleep.
64
LYON, FRANCE
The Panther descended from the sky, swirling the heavy snowflakes in a white eddy. Nighttime had settled like a dark quilt, black, white, and violent. The front edge of the blizzard announced itself in a line of snowfall, blown by fierce crosswinds, which the pilot struggled to navigate.
Dewey and Beauxchamps sat in the cabin, not saying much. A backpack on the seat held two sets of forged documents for Dewey, one Swiss, the other U.S., prepared by a contact of Borchardt’s and designed to withstand examination at border crossings or by police. They would deliver a clean back-pull when pushed against INTERPOL.
In a compartment at the bottom of the backpack were several magazines filled with bullets, along with a spare .45 pistol. Around his neck, a leather cord was looped through the trigger of a silenced Colt M1911A1. Dewey’s fixed-blade Gerber was sheathed to his left calf.
The chopper landed behind a large warehouse on the outskirts of Lyon, where Borchardt maintained a storage facility. Dewey and Beauxchamps climbed out and walked to a black van, idling, steam billowing from its tailpipe. They hopped in the back. One of Borchardt’s men was waiting in the driver’s seat.
“Philippe?”
“Hi, Dewey. We need to move quickly if you’re going to make the train.”
“Were you able to get skis and boots in my size?”
Philippe nodded toward the back. “It wasn’t easy. You have big feet. I also put a jacket in there and some decent gloves.”
“I need you to carry them on the train for me,” Dewey said to Beauxchamps. “A man with a walking stick doesn’t carry skis.”
“I’ll put them on the train for you. Where do you want them?”
“Near the front. A seat on the right. Put the boot bag on the seat and the skis on the rack at the front of the car.”
Dewey went into the station, walking slowly with the aid of the walking stick, entering through a different door tha
n Beauxchamps. He bought a ticket and sat down, pulling out a book he’d grabbed from Borchardt’s library. He pretended to read as his eyes slowly scanned the station.
At some point, Dewey heard a hum, so faint that most people wouldn’t have noticed. It was a chopper. Exactly five minutes later, a gorgeous blond-haired woman came in through the main entrance, dressed in a shiny red-and-blue Bogner ski jacket and black leather pants, with fur boots up to her knees.
Katie.
Just then, through a side entrance, another figure appeared. He had medium-length brown hair, tousled, and a week’s worth of stubble. He had on jeans, worn Timberland boots, and a bright orange Patagonia jacket. He was lugging a large snowboard bag. He looked to be in his twenties, maybe a college student or someone who’d just graduated. Though nighttime, he wore white-framed sunglasses.
Several females turned when he walked in.
Tacoma.
Tacoma dropped his gear, then scanned the station. His eyes passed Dewey once, then twice, each time hovering for a while longer. Finally, he grinned and walked over to the bench. A shit-eating grin crossed his lips.
“Bonjour, monsieur,” he said, sitting down next to Dewey.
Dewey pretended not to notice, trying to sew a bit of doubt into Tacoma’s assumption that he’d found him, despite the disguise.
“Monsieur,” said Tacoma, “I’m from the local newspaper. I’m writing an article on the sexual proclivities of old people, and I’d like to interview you.”
“You’re sick,” Dewey whispered under his breath. “Shut the fuck up.”
“Laughing’s good for you, Dewey,” Tacoma said quietly. “Isn’t that what the doc told you?”
“How the fuck do you know what the ‘doc’ told me, asshole?” Dewey leaned back, seething. “I knew they shouldn’t have sent you. This isn’t a fucking joke.”
A woman came over the loudspeaker, announcing the arrival of the overnight train to Frankfurt. A few minutes later, the low grumble of the arriving train could be heard. Dewey stood up and went outside, Tacoma following. There were several dozen people waiting for the train, most carrying ski equipment. Dewey noted Beauxchamps, farther down the platform, waiting to board.
