Murder at the Lanterne Rouge (30 page)

Sad. “That’s why you need this to find the killer, Prévost. This should help.”

“So you just happened to tap into the homeless network?”

“
Mais non
, I just asked my weatherman for help.”

W
ITH THE RAID
less than two hours away, and no answer on René’s phone or word from Meizi, she turned the corner heading to Pascal’s atelier. At least she’d get Saj started on isolating sounds in the microcassette recording. One step closer to finding the killer.

Her phone vibrated in her pocket. She looked at the incoming number. Unknown.

Her hope rose. If this was Meizi on the pay-as-you-go phone, she could give her the specifics about the raid, what disinformation to feed Tso. Assure her that her friends and family were safe.

“Meizi?” she said.

A man’s throat cleared. “You gave me your card.”

She recognized Cho from the metal store. “Monsieur Cho?”

“I think the symbols in the diagram …” He paused, choosing his words.

“
Oui
, go on.”

“I think they represent a fiber-optic cable, one like I read about.”

“And you’re telling me now?”

“No repeaters, which would give it very high bandwidth. Triple what’s in use right now.”

What did that mean? “So you’re saying what?”

“A pipe dream so far, but single fiber-optic cables like these could stretch the length of the Atlantic without a relay system.”

“That’s a good thing?”

“Revolutionary.” Another pause. “The girl showed it to me.”

“A girl?” She stepped back and bumped into the dripping wall. “Wait a minute, you mean the diagram I showed you …”

“Not that. Another one. The girl didn’t know what to do with it. She was afraid.”

“What does she look like, Monsieur Cho?”

“She found this by accident in the sweatshirts she sewed. The dead man put them in her pile.” He went on to describe Meizi. “She didn’t realize until the other night.”

“And you didn’t tell me?” There was silence on the other end. “Where’s the diagram, Monsieur Cho?”

“I don’t know.”

“Who else knows?”

“No one.” Pause. “I’m telling you because Monsieur Colles helped me. And I think you’re the only one who can protect her.”

“Why?”

“Tso’s men are on the streets looking for her.”

I
N THE TOWER
, she handed Saj the microcassete. “Can you clean this up and try isolating a voice from the background sounds?” Tired, her shoulders heavy, she stood in Pascal’s tower atelier. “It’s a garbled recording from either Samour’s or the killer’s phone. We need to hear it.”

“René’s grabbing a scanner at the office,” Saj said, sitting up and punching his cell phone. “I’ll tell him to pick up a sound-tracking program.”

While he did that, she scanned the laptop screens. “But that was on Coulade’s screen saver.” She cleared the papers and diagrams aside on the trestle table.

“Samour used the trebuchet picture for his screen saver,” Saj said. “Hiding his message under multiple layers of encryption. See how the computer assigns every pixel three numeric values? They correspond to the amount of red, green, or blue in the
color the pixel displays. By changing those values by a shade, Pascal hid the ones and zeroes of computerese in the picture’s pixel numbers, but without altering the picture’s appearance.”

Hiding it in plain sight.

“It’s steganography, embedding messages within images. The point of encryption is to hide the content of the message. Using his great-aunt’s password, I found the key to unlock the encryption program.
Alors
, it’s a bit more complicated than that and took me a while, but …” Saj pointed at the screen. “The Latin’s quite simple.”

“The ingredients, you mean?”

He nodded. “Sulphur, lead, sand, and it goes on.”

Her eyes locked on the emblem above the formula: letters intertwined in a symbol. Her mind raced. She’d seen that before.

“Hold on.” She pulled out Pascal’s book. Found what she was looking for. “
Et voilà
, that’s the glassmakers’ guild emblem. So this is proof he’d found part of the lost formula and come up with …”

“This portion.” Saj clicked the screen to reveal a modern diagram. “According to my postmodernist programmer, that’s part of a fiber-optic formula. One of incredible strength and clarity. So strong that information could go hundreds of thousands of kilometers without repeaters, like relay stations, in one piece.”

That echoed what Cho said.

“Worth millions,” Saj went on. “The military, governments, private sector, everyone wants this. Didn’t he contract with the DST?”

She still had doubts. “Could he have stolen a trade secret, incorporated and refined it?”

“Intellectual property from the guild expired a few centuries ago,” he said. “But trade secrets? I don’t know.”

So close. They were so close, except for this missing piece.

She hit René’s number. “How soon will you get here, René?”

“Just left Meizi. I’m grabbing a scanner and sound program from the office,” he said.

“Tso’s men are looking for her.”

Pause. “Didn’t you take care of him?”

“Thought I did. The snake wiggled out.” Aimée paused. “Meizi told you about the diagram she found,
non?
”

“What?”

A sinking feeing hit her.

“Samour put a diagram in her pile of sweatshirts.”

“How do you know that?”

“Cho the metallurgist.”

“Who?”

Worried, she pulled on her coat, headed to the door. Meizi had kept the information back from her and René. She grabbed her bag. “Prévost’s informer. But she didn’t say anything?”

Green light from the laptop screen smudged the tower’s walls.

“You’re implying Meizi thinks it’s valuable, that she’d use it as a bargaining chip with Tso?” René said, his voice rising. “But you’re wrong, she trusts us to help her.”

Then why hadn’t she called? Right now a terrified Meizi wouldn’t know the deal Aimée had made with Prévost. She might give Tso any information to protect her family. Get caught in the raid.… Aimée hoped it wasn’t too late. She had to convince her, get the diagram.

“Let me know the minute you isolate the voices, okay?”

She slammed the tower door.

A
IMÉE IGNORED THE
hotel elevator and took the stairs two at a time. She knocked on Meizi’s door. No answer.

“Meizi, it’s Aimée.”

A maid pushed a cleaning cart down the hallway.

“Forgot my key,” she smiled. “Mind letting me into my room?”

“Who says you’re a guest here?” The maid’s eyes narrowed in suspicion. “People pick up their keys at reception.”

After a tip, Aimée figured. Aimée gestured to the room list hanging from the cart.

“See room number 32, Sitbon,” she said, flashing Martine’s press card. “My friend’s asleep. Do me a favor and open the room.”

The maid shrugged. With a ten-franc tip, she unlocked the door.

The duvet was ruffled and soap stained the mirror over the lavabo. Meizi had forgotten a red sock.

What did she expect? Tso’s men were after Meizi. She had to find her before they did. Before the raid. If only Meizi had confided in her or René. Trusted them and just stayed here safe.

She rooted in her bag for Tso’s cell phone. Scrolled down the list of numbers he’d called. She’d work from that. First she needed a Chinese speaker.

But Monsieur Cho didn’t answer his phone. Panicked, she ran out of the hotel room and down the stairs, narrowly missing an elderly couple in the hallway.

• • •

“
S
’IL VOUS PLAÎT
,
Madame
,” Aimée asked the same Slavic-cheekboned receptionist.

The receptionist stood with her back turned at the whirring fax machine. Aimée scanned the lobby for watchers. It was deserted.

“Madame?” Was the woman ignoring her on purpose?

“Your friend’s gone out,” she said.

“How long ago?”

“Said to tell you she’s getting a cell phone.”

And walking into danger. But not if Aimée could stop it. She stepped out the front door, and at a glance took in parked cars and pedestrians but no vans. As she passed the Métro at Arts et Métiers she noticed a parked van on the boulevard. Wires and antennae. A surveillance van. Minutes later she reached Chez Chun’s fogged-up windows, caught her breath and entered.

“Madame Liu,
s’il vous plaît
.” A waitress slicing smoked duck behind the takeout counter jerked her thumb toward the back.

Madame Liu, who was stirring a pot of congee, looked up. Her black curls didn’t move. She frowned. “I get health-code violation if customer here.”

“Please, I need to talk with you, Madame.”

Steam rose and pots clattered.

“Busy now. My cook sick.”

Aimée glanced around. The small kitchen was a hive of activity—workers at the range, washing dishes, waitresses grabbing plates.

“How will you keep your
resto
open without these people?”

Alarm crossed the little woman’s eyes. “You try to shut me down?”

“I want to help so you won’t be shut down.” Aimée took Madame Liu’s wiry arm and led her past sacks of rice to the rear
door. A damp alley. Her mind went back to last night, the plastic, fighting to breathe. She shook it aside.

“
Alors
, Madame, we’ll help each other.”

“I answer your questions before.”

“Within an hour the police will raid the quartier,” Aimée said. “Spreading the net to catch big fish like Tso, but your little fish will be caught too. Unless you help me.”

Madame Liu’s eyes narrowed. “Not my business.”

“The staff’s your business,” Aimée said. “If you don’t believe it, see for yourself. Go near République, out on rue Beaubourg. Check out all the parked surveillance vans.”

Madame Liu’s fingers crabbed the dishtowel in her hands. Weighing her options, Aimée figured.

“Or do you like paying protection money to buy Ching Wao’s Mercedes?” Aimée tapped her heel on the damp cobbles.

A shout came from the kitchen. Madame Liu’s brows knitted in alarm.

“
Mais alors
, Madame, there’s not much time.”

Madame checked her watch. A long moment passed before she nodded. “What you want?”

Aimée explained what she wanted her to do. Asked Madame to repeat it. Satisfied, she handed Tso’s phone to Madame.

Madame Liu glanced at her watch again. Nodded and hit the first contact number. She spoke the brief message in Wenzhou dialect. Then the same message again for the next three numbers.

“Remember what I said,” Aimée said. “Close in ten minutes. Only inform people you trust.”

Madame Liu nodded.

“You catch killer for great-auntie?”

“Not yet.” Aimée pulled out the phone’s memory chip, ground it on the cobble under her heel. Pulled her own out and left a message for Prévost.

Aimée turned to head down the alley.

“But I see that girl,” Madame Liu said. “Tonight.”

Aimée froze.

“Man follow her on street.”

“One of Tso’s men?”

Madame Liu shook her head. “Maybe Frenchman. I don’t know.”

“What did he look like?”

“Coat, hat, I don’t see face. Bag of crumbs, like he feed the pigeons.”

Few people fed pigeons this late at night in the winter. The RG or the
flics
? Or …

“Which way did she go, Madame?”

“Toward Métro.”

A
IMÉE RAN, CELL PHONE
to her ear. “René, please tell me Meizi’s with you.”

“With me? I’m meeting her near Square du Temple.” René’s voice mounted in worry. “Meizi told me everything. The diagram …”

This felt wrong. “You mean Meizi told you over the phone, on the street?”

“
Bien sûr
. It’s safer for her to come to the tower, that’s why …”

Bread crumbs to feed the swans in the square’s pond. Of course. And it was coming together. Samour’s killer’s next victim.

“A man’s following her, René,” Aimée said. “Hurry, I’ll meet you there.”

She clicked off. Saved her breath, wishing with every step she hadn’t smoked that cigarette.

At rue du Temple she met a locked gate; the Square du Temple closed early in winter. She looked both ways, then hoisted herself over the side fence. Through the spindle of bare tree branches she saw the glass-roofed, green-metal band shell, home to classical music in summer, now forlorn in the mist.
The frost-tipped grass, the playground, and the statue of Béranger obscured by the low-lying fog.

The waterfall gurgled, slipping over stones and feeding into the pond, whose surface was a dull, opaque shimmer of broken ice. A lone swan glided and disappeared. Somewhere a bird trilled. The park, deserted in the dark, cold evening, held night sounds: splashing water, framed by distant traffic.

Aimée shivered, stamped her feet. Nervous, she continued around the pond’s mud-rimmed edge. Saw floating bread crumbs.

“Meizi?” she called, alarmed.

No answer.

Aimée exhaled a plume of frost.

A dark figure moved in the shadows. She heard footsteps, snapping branches. Coming closer.

An attacker?

Then splashing farther away. A scream.

Aimée broke into a run, her heart racing.

“Meizi?”

Furious splashing. A figure ran from the bushes, but she could only make out a dim outline in the darkness.

Meizi yelled, thrashing in the water.

Aimée reached down and grabbed Meizi’s arm. Pulled her up on the mud bank from the pond. Frightened, Meizi backed up, catching her foot on a root.

“Aimée? Someone tried to at—attack me,” said a shaking Meizi.

Tso, or someone else? “Hurry, someone’s watching you.”

Her teeth were clicking in the cold, her jeans dripping at the pond’s edge. “I twisted my ankle, I can’t make it.”

“You need to try.” Aimée nodded toward the low fence. The glow of a cigarette tip by the bare branches. “I’ve worked out a deal with the
flics
to protect you, Meizi. But we have to hurry. You’re being followed.”