Covert One 3 - The Paris Option (14 page)

“Which group, do you think?”

“I believe they were called the Black Flame.” He picked up what appeared to be a TV remote control, pressed a button, and Captain Bonnard stepped into the grand room through a side door. “Darius, would you be so kind as to prepare a copy of the file the Sreteacute; sent over about the bombing for Colonel Smith?”

“It will be waiting for him whenever he leaves, mon geacute;neacute;ral.”

“Thank you, Darius. What would I do without you, eh?”

Saluting, but smiling, the aide left the gilded room. General La Porte picked up the coffeepot. “Now, a second cup, Colonel, and tell me more about your friend. He is, I'm told, a genius, but with some sort of unfortunate affliction.”

The general refilled their cups while Smith described Marty's history. “Asperger's Syndrome makes it difficult for him to function in our world. He tends to avoid people, is terrified of strangers, and lives alone in D.C. Still, he's an electronic genius. When he's off his medication and in his manic state, he has insights and leaps of creativity that are dazzling. But if he stays off the meds too long, he borders on incoherence, and eventually he simply starts raving. The medicine allows him to function with people in daily practicalities, but he tells me it feels to him as if he's underwater, and his thinking, while still brilliant, is slow and painful.”

General La Porte seemed genuinely affected. “How long has he had this affliction?”

“All his life. It's not a well-known condition, often misdiagnosed and misunderstood. Marty's happiest when he's off his meds, but that's difficult for other people to be around. That's one reason he lives alone.”

La Porte shook his head. “Still, he's also a great treasure, eh? But in the wrong hands, a potential danger.”

“Not Marty. No one could get him to do what he didn't want to. Especially since they wouldn't know what he was actually doing.”

La Porte chuckled. “Ah, I see. That's reassuring.” He glanced at a clock in the shape of a temple that stood on a sideboardgreen stone and gilded columns and cherubs. He stood up, towering over Smith. “You've been most illuminating, Colonel, but I have a meeting and must leave. Finish your coffee. Then Captain Bonnard will give you that copy of the Black Flame file and see you out.”

As Smith watched the massive general leave, his gaze was drawn to all of the paintings, mostly of French landscapes, hung around the room. Many appeared to be of museum quality. He recognized two fine late Corots and a muscular Theacute;odore Rousseau, but he had never seen the large painting of a massive castle built of dark red stone. The painter had rendered it in intense and brooding shades of red and purple, where bright afternoon sunshine illuminated the angles in the stone walls and towers. Smith could not place the painting, and he did not recognize the style of any nineteenth-century French landscapist. Something about it, though, was unforgettable.

He stood up, raising his shoulders to stretch, not bothering to finish his coffee. Instead, he was already thinking about the rest of his day. He had not heard from Fred Klein, so it was time to check whether his cell phone worked.

He started for the doorway through which he had entered, but before he had taken two steps, Captain Bonnard appeared in it, file folder in hand, as quiet and unobtrusive as a wraith. The captain's accurate anticipation that he was leaving gave Smith a chill. Had Captain Bonnard been eavesdropping on the entire conversation? If so, he was a much more trusted employee than Smith had realized, or he wanted to know himself what Smith had told the general.

From the high, paned-glass window of the general's study, Darius Bonnard watched Smith climb into a taxi. He continued to watch until the vehicle blended into traffic and disappeared. Then he walked across the room, through the rectangles of morning sunlight that patchworked the parquet floor. He sat at his ornate desk, dialed his telephone, and tugged impatiently on his lower lip.

Finally a quiet voice answered. “Naam? ”

“Smith's gone. He's got the file. And the general is off to one of his meetings.”

“Good,” Mauritania said. “Did you learn anything new from the general's interview with Smith? Do we have any indication of who Smith truly is and why he's in Paris?”

“He stuck to his story that he was here merely to take care of his friend.”

“Is that what you believe?”

“I know Smith's not CIA or NSA.”

There was a pause at the other end of the line, and the sounds of a large, echoing space full of hurrying people indicated that Mauritania was on a cell phone. “Perhaps. Still, he's been a bit busier than that, wouldn't you say?”

“He could simply be concerned about avenging his friend, as he told the general.”

“Well, I suppose we'll know soon enough.” There was a cold smile in the terrorist's voice as he continued, “By the time we've discovered the truth of Jon Smith, it'll no longer matter. Heeverythingwill be as irrelevant as a few more grains of sand upon the Sahara. Whoever he iswhatever he or any of them intendwill be too late.”

The dark-haired woman had slowly and meticulously searched Mauritania's entire silent apartment and found nothing. The terrorist and the others she had seen come and go were careful. In fact, she found nothing of a personal nature. It was as if no one actually lived here.

As she turned toward the door to leave, a key turned in the lock. Her heart pounded, and she sprinted away. Across the living room, she slipped into the narrow space behind the rug that covered the far window and listened as the door opened and someone entered. The footsteps stopped abruptly just inside the doorway and remained unmoving for some seconds, as if the newcomer sensed something wrong.

To the woman, it seemed that the breathing of the unseen person was like the slow switch of a rattlesnake's tail. She drew a 9mm Beretta from under her skirt, careful not to touch the rug that hid her. She must not make it move.

She heard a careful footstep. And a second. Coming toward the windows. A man, and small. Mauritania himself? In her narrow space, she listened. Mauritania was good, she had known that all along, but not as good as he thought. A quick, normal walk would have been quieter and more deadly. Harder to react to. He had guessed the best places to hide, but he moved too slowly, giving her time to prepare.

Looking warily around, M. Mauritania studied the room, an old Russian-made Tokarev TT-33 7.62mm pistol in his hand. He heard nothing, saw nothing unusual, but he was sure someone either was here or had been here, because he had seen marks of tampering on the locks to the doors to the building and apartment.

He glided delicately to the first window and quickly drew back a corner of the heavy rug covering it. The space behind was empty. He repeated the maneuver on the second and last carpet, the Tokarev ready to fire. But that space was also empty.

The woman looked down and saw it was Mauritania. Her Beretta was in her hand, ready in case he gazed up. She was hanging in a compact ball from a single titanium hook she had carried under her skirt and, once she realized her danger, had silently implanted over the top frame of the high window. There was no way he could react fast enough to raise his pistol to shoot her before she killed him. She held her breath that he would not look up, as her muscles strained to keep herself in a tight knot. She did not want to kill him, it could be a setback for her investigation, but if she had to

A suspended few seconds passed. Onehellip;twohellip;and he stepped back and allowed the rug to drop into place.

She analyzed his retreating steps, quick now, into the other two rooms. Then there were a few moments of silence, and she heard something heavy being dragged. It sounded as if a floor rug was being pulled back. When a board creaked and clattered, she suspected he had decided whoever had broken into the apartment was gone, and it was safe to retrieve something from a secret hiding place in the floor she had missed.

There were two soft clicks as the apartment door opened and closed. She waited, listening for another sound. For a sense of movement. There was nothing.

She dropped down to the windowsill. Her body was cramped from hanging in the clenched ball, but as she straightened she glanced out the windowMauritania stood alone across the street, watching the building, waiting.

Why was he still here? Why was he watching the building? She did not like that. If he really believed his “visitor” had left, he would be gone, toohellip;unless he was particularly security-conscious right now because of whatever he was up to.

She had a sudden, chilling insight: He had retrieved nothing; he had left something behind.

Stiff as she was, she did not hesitate. She raced across the living room to the back room of the bizarre apartment, pulled a rug down to expose the rear window, hurled the window up, and climbed out on the fire escape.

She was almost to the bottom when the floor above exploded in a sheet of flame.

She slid down the rest of the way and ran left through another building to the front where she peered out into the street. Mauritania still stood across the street from the now-burning building. She smiled grimly. He thought he had eliminated a tail. Instead, he had made a mistake.

When he turned and walked away at the first sound of the fire engines, she was not far behind.

The Cafeacute; Deuxiegrave;me Reacute;giment Eacute;tranger was on the rue Afrique du Nord, one of the serpentine streets that circled below the great dome of Sacreacute;-Coeur. Smith unbuttoned his trench coat and sat alone at a small table in the corner, taking a long drink of his demi and eating a roast beef sandwich as he studied the Second Bureau's dossier on the Black Flame. The cafeacute;'s owner was a former Legionnaire whose leg Smith had saved in the MASH unit during the Gulf War. Displaying his usual hospitality, he saw to it that no one bothered Smith while Smith read the file from first word to last. Then he sat back, ordered another demi, and mulled what he had learned:

The “small” evidence against the Black Flame was that the Deuxiegrave;me Bureau, acting on the tip of an informant, had picked up a former member of the terrorist group in Paris just an hour after the Pasteur's bombing. Less than a year ago, the man had been released from a Spanish prison for his part in long-ago crimes attributed to the Black Flame. After he and his associates were arrested, the Black Flame dropped from sight, apparently no longer active.

When the Bureau grabbed him in France, he was armed but swore he was completely out of polities, working as a machinist in Toledo, Spain. He claimed he was in Paris simply to visit an uncle, knew nothing about the Pasteur's bombing, and had been with his uncle all day. There was a Xerox of a photo of him. According to the date, the photo was shot when he was taken into custody. He had heavy black brows, thin cheeks, and a prominent chin.

The uncle confirmed the man's story, and the police's subsequent investigation failed to turn up evidence that directly connected him to the bombing. Still, there were a few holes, since the man had several hours unaccounted for that day. The Bureau was holding him incommunicado and interrogating him around the clock.

Historically, the Black Flame's center of operations was always mobile, never settling in a single spot for longer than a week. The organization favored the Basque provinces of the western Pyrenees: Vizcaya, Guipuzcoa, and Alava in Spain, and, only occasionally, Basse-Pyrenees, France. The most frequent choices were in and around Bilbao and Guernica, where the majority of the Black Flame's sympathizers had lived.

As a movement, the Spanish Basque nationalists had only one goal separation from Spain into a Basque Republic. Failing that, the more moderate groups had occasionally offered to settle for an autonomous region within Spain. The Basques' desire for independence was so strong that, despite their extremely devout Catholicism, they fought against the Church during the Spanish Civil War and supported the secular left-wing Republic, since it promised them at least autonomy, while the Catholic fascists would not.

Smith wondered how the bombing of the Pasteur Institute in Paris might figure into that long-standing goal. Perhaps it was to embarrass Spain. No, probably not. None of the Basque terrorist acts had yet shamed Spain.

It could be that the point was to incite friction between Spain and France, which might ultimately make possible convincing the French government to pressure Spain to accede to Basque demands. That made more sense, since it was a tactic that had been used by other revolutionaries, although with only varying degrees of success.

Or had the French Basques decided to unite with their brothers and sisters south of the border, spreading the terrorism into two countries, in the hope that by carving their new country from small areas of both, they would encourage the French, who would lose less, to force the Spanish to make a deal? Of course, there was the added incentive that the involvement of two nations could trigger the United Nations and maybe the European Union to lean on both Spain and France to find a solution.

Smith nodded to himself. Yes, that might work. And a DNA computer would be invaluable to terrorists, giving them a compelling weapon for many purposes, including convincing governments to capitulate to their goals.

But assuming the Black Flame had Chambord's molecular machine, why attack the United States? It made no sense unless the Basques wanted to force the United States to support their objective and increase the pressure on Spain. But if any of that was true, there should be contact and demands. There had been none.

As Smith continued to consider it all, he turned on his cell phone, hoping to hear a dial tone. There was one. He dialed Klein's secret, secure number in D.C.

“Klein here.”

“Are all of the wireless systems back up?”

“Yes. What a mess. Discouraging.”

“What exactly did he do?” Smith asked.

“After he took down the Western utilities grid, our phantom hacker got into the key code of one of our telecommunications satellites, and the next thing our people knew, he'd infiltrated the whole spectrum dozens of satellites. The FBI's forensics team threw everything they had and knew at him, but he broke every code, figured out every password, acted as if firewalls and keylocks were jokes, and zeroed in on the army's wireless transmissions. The speed was blinding. Unbelievable. He cracked codes that were supposed to be uncrackable.”