Private Paris

by James Patterson

  “Probably for good,” I said.

  I took a step and raised the bedroom window shade, throwing light across the wood floor. By the discoloration, I could tell that there’d been a rug there by the bed, and by the scratches, a chair and table of some sort up against the wall.

  I mentioned it, and Michele said, “Drafting table.”

  I pushed up the sash, looked out the bedroom window, and saw that the apartment below had a window box with churned earth and freshly planted flowers. Something small and golden that I couldn’t make out sparkled in the dirt.

  But I was more interested in the Dumpster in the alley directly below the window. People who leave places for good throw away their trash and whatever else they don’t want before they move. I squinted. Was that a piece of a cell phone down there?

  Intending to go back to the alley, I wandered into the bathroom, finding it also stripped except for a short stack of newspapers on a shelf by the toilet.

  The papers were months old. Two were classified sections with circled ads for what Michele said were flea markets and junkyards. The other three were folded and featured partially done crossword puzzles. There were doodles of stars and geometric designs around the puzzles of the first two sections.

  But there were no stars or boxes around the third puzzle. Above it, however, there was a crude doodle in black felt pen that didn’t make sense. But when I turned it upside down, Michele’s breath caught in her throat.

  “It’s a study of a horse’s leg,” she said. “And look at the way it’s drawn. That’s the leg and rear haunch, positioned much as the statue of Al-Buraq was.”

  I immediately took a picture of the sketch and sent it to Louis Langlois and Investigateur Hoskins, along with a text that read, “Drawing of Al-Buraq’s leg,” and the address.

  I hit send, and we heard the dead bolt thrown.

  Then the front door swung open.

  Chapter 96

  FOR ME, EVERYTHING became simple then. Whoever was coming into the apartment was part of AB-16, and given the group’s actions until now, I had to assume they were armed, dangerous, and ready to kill, which meant I needed to be just as ready and just as deadly.

  Setting the newspaper and horse drawing aside on the vanity, I motioned to Michele to stay quiet and not move. Then I slipped to the transom and listened to footsteps that entered, and stopped. The front door shut.

  I took a peek and saw a big woman, short blond hair, dressed in hipster black. She had one of the bucket lids in her hands.

  Which meant if she had a gun, she couldn’t go for it easily. It was my opportunity, and I acted, stepping out into the hallway in a combat crouch, the Glock braced in two hands. We were no more than twenty-five feet apart.

  I couldn’t remember how to say “Get down on the floor,” so I yelled, “Asseyez-vous!”

  Sit down!

  She jumped in alarm, twisted toward me in panic. I yelled at her again. But instead of going to the ground, she whipped the plastic bucket lid at me like a big Frisbee. She must have had mad disc skills because the lid came whizzing at me with surprising snap and accuracy. I had to bat it out of the air, which gave her the chance to flee.

  “Damn it,” I said, and raced after her down the passage.

  I should have slowed down, taken my time. Instead, I barreled into the choked living area like a stampeding bull. The blonde darted down the entry hall at the same time I caught motion to my left and was immediately hit with a spray of short sharp bits of metal.

  Most of the shrapnel caught me on the right side of my face, and only reflexes prevented a piece from blinding me. It cut into my eyelid and blurred my vision. I lunged right, trying to get out of range so I could turn and shoot.

  But when I tried, I tripped against one of the big buckets. By the time I regained my balance and was fighting for a sight picture, it was too late.

  Haja Hamid had me dead to rights.

  Crouched behind several stacks of magazines that covered her chest, she was aiming a pistol with a sound suppressor at me.

  I froze.

  And she tapped the trigger.

  Her bullet smashed into the exposed grip panel of the Glock, just below my thumb. It was as if an electrified sledgehammer had hit my hand, causing it to close and inadvertently pull the trigger, discharging a round before the pistol slipped from my useless fingers and fell to the floor.

  Even in that crowded space, the sound was deafening, disorienting. Blood was blinding my left eye. My right hand had gone completely numb. And from wrist to shoulder, my muscles twitched and my bones burned.

  I realized that Haja was shouting at me, and that in shock, I’d gone to one knee, holding my useless arm. She came at me. The blonde returned. She shouted, but Haja couldn’t hear, or wasn’t listening.

  Haja was getting a better angle. Maybe she’d aimed for my hand at first because she wanted to find out how much I knew before killing me. But my gun going off had ended that idea.

  The shot would bring the police, and she had to be gone when they came. She would kill me now to cover her tracks. I could see it in her nickel-gray eyes when she stepped out from behind the stacks of magazines, raised her pistol, and aimed, two feet away, no more.

  “Haja! Don’t!”

  Those were the first words I heard clearly after my gun went off, and they hadn’t come from the blonde.

  Michele Herbert was standing in the mouth of the hallway, afraid, but insistent when Haja turned to her.

  “Don’t shoot, Haja! It’s me, Michele!”

  Seeing Michele surprised and broke something in Haja. Her arms, hands, and pistol began to sink.

  It registered in my daze, and once again my marine training kicked in. I let go my damaged hand, and lunged at her.

  My left shoulder hammered the side of her left knee. Haja crashed sideways. Her gun went off as she fell. I went frantic then, and scrambled up on top of her, straddling her legs. I saw her pain and hatred of me, and the fact that she no longer had the pistol.

  But she’d found a nasty chunk of metal, and swung it hard at my head. I blocked it with my good arm, stunned at the raw power of her blow. Then she bucked against me. With her ironworker strength she damn near threw me off.

  Then she hit me in the face with the butt of her palm, caught me right under the jaw, and rocked me. She cocked back that hunk of metal again, meaning to finish me off.

  Flinging out my left hand again, I caught the inside of her elbow, and then used the only other weapon I had.

  My head became my hammer. I swung it with every bit of my remaining strength and felt my forehead crack and crush the bridge of her nose.

  When I lifted my head, she was addled, and there was blood gushing from her nostrils. But I hit her a second time, just to make sure.

  Panting, drenched in sweat, my face slick with sweat and blood, I heard something, and looked to my right in time to see the blonde. She gripped a three-foot piece of angle iron, which was already in full swing at my head.

  Halfway through the arc, I heard a thud.

  The blonde hunched up and let go of the iron piece. It flung through the air, clipped my ear, and hit something behind me. Dumbly, she looked at me, and then down at her chest before going down in a breathless heap.

  “Jack?” Michele said weakly. “Help. Me.”

  I pivoted. She was sitting up against a piece of busted furniture. Haja’s pistol was in her lap, and her hands were clasped across her belly and blouse, where a dark rose of blood had bloomed.

  Chapter 97

  14th Arrondissement

  6:12 p.m.

  SHAREN HOSKINS PULLED her car over in front of La Santé prison. She climbed out, came around the back door, and opened it for me.

  I was in handcuffs. My face was swollen and held together by thirty-two stitches. A black patch covered antibiotic cream smeared over my sewn eyelid. My arm was in a sling, and my spiral-fractured wrist in a cast.

  A dull throb had returned to my fingers and low
er forearms as Hoskins led me, Juge Fromme, and Louis Langlois toward the security entrance.

  Louis’s doctor friend had figured out that he’d slightly dislocated the head of his tibia, and had snapped the bone back into place. But it was still so sore he could only walk as fast as the magistrate’s top speed.

  My chief concern, however, was Michele Herbert, who was still in surgery. I had put her there, gut shot, and it was killing me. The fact that I was walking up to prison doors instead of in vigil outside the operating room was killing me too. To my way of thinking, you owe a person who takes a bullet for you, and then saves your life by putting a bullet through someone else.

  Two high-level French intelligence officers met us on the other side of security. The shorter, balder one introduced himself as La Roche. The taller, paler one told us his name was Rousseau. Both were probably operational handles.

  “You are here as a courtesy, Morgan,” La Roche said in perfect English.

  Rousseau said, “Despite the fact that you broke enough laws to get you thrown in jail for thirty years, you risked your life multiple times to catch Hamid, and France owes you that much.”

  “The handcuffs necessary?” I asked.

  Juge Fromme cut the intelligence officers off before they could reply, saying, “The minister of justice himself says those cuffs are staying right where they are until Mr. Morgan is placed on a jet leaving France.”

  La Roche shrugged.

  Admitting defeat, I asked, “Has she said anything?”

  “Hasn’t had the chance,” La Roche replied. “You busted her up pretty good, but the doctor says she’s coming around. They’re moving her to an interrogation room as we speak. Investigateur Hoskins? We’d like you to conduct the initial interrogation, along with Juge Fromme. All on tape, of course.”

  Hoskins said, “Why me? Why not some big counter-terror expert?”

  “Because this began as a murder case,” Rousseau said. “You know the details better than we do, so I want you to question her about the killings at the same time you ask about her accomplices, and their future plans.”

  “Back and forth,” said La Roche. “Keep her off-balance. If we have questions, we’ll text you to come out of the room to hear them. Can you do that?”

  “I’ll try,” Hoskins said, and the magistrate nodded.

  Soon after we started walking, Rousseau moved beside me and said, “There are a few things I don’t understand.”

  “Only a few?” I said, wincing at my sutured and bandaged cheeks.

  “Two, then. How did Professor Herbert know Haja Hamid? And how did you track her down so fast?”

  As we made our way through the ruined halls of the old prison, I explained that Haja had attended the academy of fine arts on a scholarship for one year. Michele Herbert, an upper classman at the time, had been Haja’s student adviser. She described Haja as an angry woman right from the start, someone who made life difficult for just about everyone she met. At the same time, she was passionate about her art, and had gravitated to metal sculpture and welding almost immediately.

  Haja, Michele said, liked to play with fire and hammer heated metal, as if she were burning and beating her inner demons when she was working. After the first year, she left to go to a welding school.

  “Haja told Professor Herbert that she’d learn all she needed to know there,” I told Rousseau as we reached the ultra-max security wing, where Ali Farad, the imam, and the others caught up in the AB-16 conspiracy were being held.

  “Haja dropped off Michele’s radar when she left,” I went on. “The last the professor heard, she’d gone off to work somewhere in the south of France. When Michele saw the picture of the woman outside the mosque and recognized her, she called up the alumni office at the academy of fine arts, and asked if it had a forwarding address for Haja on record. There was one, and I blundered us into the hornet’s nest that got Michele shot.”

  “I know her surgeon,” Rousseau said. “She’s in good hands.”

  The other intelligence officer asked, “Did the professor know what Hamid was angry about back in school?”

  “Michele didn’t know,” I said. “Haja wasn’t the kind who opened up.”

  “Did Herbert ever hear her speak of hating France, or supporting radical Islam?”

  “She remembered Haja as happy to be in France, glad to have left Africa, so Michele figured her anger was personal. And Islam? Michele said Haja was adamantly nonreligious, and apolitical. Do we know exactly where she’s from, by the way? The professor couldn’t remember.”

  “Niger, in sub-Saharan West Africa,” La Roche said. “By birth she’s Tuareg, a desert nomad. On her citizenship application she listed no religion, and her occupation as ‘welder and artist.’”

  We stopped near two doors guarded by counter-terrorists.

  “People do change,” said Rousseau. “Investigateur Hoskins, Juge Fromme: your job is to show us how much. Give us five minutes to get in position, and then go in.”

  Chapter 98

  THE FRENCH INTELLIGENCE officers led us into a soundproof booth that faced a two-way mirror into an interrogation space turned ICU.

  Wearing a prison gown, Haja Hamid sat semi-upright in a hospital bed. She was lashed to it with restraints. An IV ran into her left arm. Her nose was bandaged and the rest of her face looked as though it had plowed into a brick wall. You could barely see her eyes for the swelling.

  A nurse was taking her vitals. Haja had refused all pain medications.

  “I want a lawyer,” she told the nurse, sounding like someone with the worst cold in history.

  The nurse ignored her.

  “I want a lawyer,” Haja said again. “I know my rights.”

  The nurse continued to ignore her. When the door opened and Fromme and Hoskins entered, the nurse immediately nodded and left.

  “I want a lawyer,” Haja said.

  “In due time,” Fromme replied, painfully moving into a chair.

  “I know my rights.”

  “You don’t know your rights,” the magistrate said firmly. “You have committed murder and acts of terrorism against France and her people, so the normal rules and rights don’t apply. You’ll see an attorney when I say you can.”

  “Which means the more you cooperate, the sooner you see your lawyer,” Hoskins said, taking a seat by the bed.

  “This is wrong,” Haja said.

  “So is killing innocent people because they represent the best of my culture,” Fromme said.

  Haja said nothing for several moments before spitting out her words. “France is doomed no matter what you do to me. The Prophet’s warhorse is in the skies and the dark Muslim horde is coming for you. You are already in a state of siege that will not end until France and all of Europe are taken.”

  “That’s your goal?” Hoskins asked. “An Islamic republic in France?”

  The sculptor hesitated, seemed to come to some decision, and then nodded. “Inshallah. We are willing to martyr ourselves to see that day come to pass. Every one of us. And our numbers grow every day.”

  “She’s brazen,” Louis remarked on the other side of the mirror. “Hasn’t denied a thing.”

  Hoskins said, “Did you know Henri Richard?”

  “The opera director?” Haja said rather quickly. “Not personally, no.”

  “Never came into contact with him?”

  “No.”

  “Who killed him?” Juge Fromme asked.

  “I don’t know,” Haja said. “Things in AB-16 are kept cellular. We often don’t know what other cells are doing for the cause.”

  “Who do you take orders from?”

  “Allah,” she replied.

  “On earth,” Hoskins said.

  “As it is in heaven, I take my orders from God.”

  “Did Allah design the graffiti tag?” Fromme asked.

  “An instrument of God did,” she said.

  “But you built the statue,” Hoskins said.

  “I was an instrumen
t through which Allah expresses himself. If God wills it, it shall be done.”

  The magistrate seemed to tire of this line of questioning, and returned to the murders. “Did you kill or participate in the murder of René Pincus?”

  “Me? No. I’m guilty of the statue and nothing more.”

  “Bullshit,” I said.

  “You were seen leaving the scene of a bombing,” Fromme said. “The witness, Jack Morgan of Private, is willing to testify.”

  “I’ve got nothing to say about that,” Haja said.

  “I’m sure the prosecutors will have a lot to say about it,” Hoskins snapped. “And whose body burned in the linen factory fire? Was it Paul Piggott? Epée?”

  Haja’s puffy eyebrows rose at the question. “I have no idea who that is, and body? Some bum must have snuck in after I left.”

  Hoskins looked irritated. “Is this a game to you?”

  “No,” the sculptor snapped. “This is war.”

  Chapter 99

  IN THE OBSERVATION booth, Rousseau, the taller intelligence officer, said, “That’s one war you are going to lose, bitch.”

  Haja asked for water. While Fromme poured it for her and held the cup and straw to her lips, I remembered something from earlier in the day.

  “Do you have access to the list of evidence seized at her apartment?” I asked La Roche.

  “It’s still being processed,” he replied. “From what I understand, there was so much stuff the floors were about to cave in.”

  “I told La Crim about a busted cell phone I saw in the Dumpster beneath her bedroom window,” I said. “Has anyone analyzed it yet?”

  La Roche pondered me a moment, and then said, “I’ll find out.”

  He left the room, and was not present when Hoskins said, “Were you involved in the killing of Lourdes Latrelle?”

  “No,” Haja said. “That was another cell of believers.”

  “Minister of culture Guy LaFont?” Fromme asked.

  “No, though I heard it might be coming.”

  “From?”

  “Amé, my dead friend, and martyr.”