Prince of Fire (31 page)

He reached down and looked for the zipper. Locked.

“Just take it.”

In the tool well was a chrome-plated tire iron.

“What are you doing? Do you want your wife to die?”

Two sharp blows, and the lock snapped open. He unzipped the main compartment: balls of packing paper. Next he tried the outer compartments. Empty.

“Are you satisfied? Look at the clock. Take the bag.”

Gabriel lifted the bag out and placed it on the pavement. The girl had already started walking away. He extended the handle of the bag and closed the trunk, then set out after her. At the corner of the rue de Lyon they turned left. The station, set on a slight promontory, loomed before them.

“I don’t have a ticket.”

“I have a ticket for you.”

“Where are we going? Berlin? Geneva? Amsterdam?”

“Just walk.”

As they neared the corner of the boulevard Diderot, Gabriel saw police officers patrolling the perimeter of the station on foot and blue emergency lights flickering in the traffic circle.

“They’ve been warned,” he said. “We’re walking straight into a security alert.”

“We’ll be fine.”

“I don’t have a passport.”

“You don’t need it.”

“What if we’re stopped?”

“I have it. If a policeman asks you for identification, just look at me, and I’ll take care of it.”

“You’re the reason we’ll be stopped.”

At the boulevard Diderot they waited for the light to change, then crossed the street amid a swarm of pedestrians. The bag felt too light. It didn’t sound right rolling over the pavement. They should have put clothing in it to weigh it down properly. What if he were stopped? What if the bag was searched and they found that it was filled with balls of paper? What if they looked inside Palestina’s bag and found the Tanfolgio?
The Tanfolgio . . .
He told himself to forget about the empty suitcase and the gun in the girl’s bag. Instead he focused on the sensation he’d had earlier that day, the feeling that the clue to his survival lay somewhere along the path he’d already traveled.

Standing at the entrance of the station were several police officers and two soldiers in camouflage with automatic weapons slung over their shoulders. They were randomly stopping passengers, checking IDs, looking in bags. The girl threaded her arm through Gabriel’s and made him walk faster. He could feel the eyes of the policemen on him, but no one stopped them as they went inside.

The station, its roof arched and soaring, opened before them.
They paused for a moment at the head of an escalator that sunk downward into the Métro level of the station. Gabriel used the time to take his bearings. To his left was a kiosk of public telephones; behind him, the stairs that led up to the Le Train Bleu. On opposite ends of the platform were two Relay newsstands. A few feet to his right was a snack bar, above which hung the large black departure board. Just then it changed over. To Gabriel the clapping of the characters sounded obscenely like applause for Khaled’s perfectly played gambit. The clock read: 6:57.

“Do you see that girl using the first telephone on this side of the kiosk?”

“Which girl?”

“Blue jeans, gray sweater, maybe French, maybe Arab, like me.”

“I see her.”

“When the clock on the departure board turns to six fifty-eight, she’s going to hang up. You and I will walk over and take her place. She’ll pause for a moment to give us time to get there.”

“What if someone else gets there first?”

“The girl and I will take care of it. You’re going to dial a number. Are you ready?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t forget the number. If you do, I won’t tell it to you again, and your wife will die. Are you sure you’re ready?”

“Give me the fucking number.”

She recited it, then gave him a few coins as the clock turned to 6:58. The girl vacated her place. Gabriel walked over, lifted the receiver and fed coins through the slot. He dialed the number deliberately, fearful that if he made a mistake the first time
he would not be able to summon the number correctly again. Somewhere a telephone began to ring. One ring, a second, a third . . .

“There’s no answer.”

“Be patient. Someone will pick up.”

“It’s rung six times. No one’s answering.”

“Are you sure you dialed the proper number? Maybe you made a mistake. Maybe your wife is about to die because you—”

“Shut your mouth,” Gabriel snapped.

The telephone had stopped ringing.

“G
OOD EVENING
, G
ABRIEL
.”

A woman’s voice, shockingly familiar.

“Or should I call you Herr Klemp? That’s the name you used when you came to my club, isn’t it? And the name you used when you ransacked my apartment.”

Mimi Ferrere. The Little Moon.

“Where is she? Where’s Leah?”

“She’s close.”

“Where? I don’t see her.”

“You’ll find out in a minute.”

A minute . . .
He looked up at the departure board. The clock rolled over: 6:59
P
.
M
. A pair of soldiers strolled past. One of them looked at him. Gabriel turned away and lowered his voice.

“You told me if I came, you’d let her live. Now, where is she?”

“Everything will be clear to you in just a few seconds.”

The voice: he latched on to it. It drew him back to Cairo, back to the evening he’d spent at the wine bar in Zamalek. He’d been lured to Cairo for a reason—to plant a bug on Mimi’s telephone, so he could overhear a conversation with a man named Tony and capture the telephone number for an apartment in Marseilles. But had he been brought to Cairo for another reason?

She started to speak again, but the sound of her voice was drowned out by the blare of a station announcement:
Train number 765 for Marseilles is now boarding on Track D. . . .
Gabriel covered the mouthpiece of the receiver.
Train number 765 for Marseilles is now boarding on Track D. . . .
He could hear it through the telephone—he was sure of it. Mimi was somewhere in the station. He spun around and glimpsed her girlish hips flowing calmly toward the exit. Walking on her left, with his hand in the back pocket of her trousers, was a man with square shoulders and dark curly hair. Gabriel had seen the same walk earlier that morning in Marseilles. Khaled had come to the Gare de Lyon to witness Gabriel’s death.

He watched them slip through the exit.

Train number 765 for Marseilles is now boarding on Track D.

He glanced at Palestina. She was looking at the clock. Judging from her expression, she knew now that Gabriel had told her the truth. She was a few seconds away from becoming a
shaheed
in Khaled’s jihad of revenge.

“Are you listening to me, Gabriel?”

Traffic noise: Mimi and Khaled were moving hastily away from the station.

“I’m listening,” he said
—and I’m wondering why you seated me with three Arabs in your nightclub.

Train number 765 for Marseilles is now boarding on Track D.

Track D . . . Track Dalet . . . Tochnit Dalet . . .

“Where is she, Mimi? Tell me what—”

And then he saw him, standing at a newspaper rack at the Relay newsstand at the east end of the station. His suitcase, a rolling rectangular bag of black nylon, identical to Gabriel’s, stood upright next to him. They’d called him Bashir that night in Cairo. Bashir liked Johnnie Walker Red on the rocks and smoked Silk Cut cigarettes. Bashir wore a gold TAG Heuer watch on his right wrist and had a thing for one of Mimi’s waitresses. Bashir was also a
shaheed.
In a few seconds Bashir’s bag would explode, and so would several dozen people around him.

Gabriel looked to his left, toward the opposite side of the platform: another Relay newsstand, another
shaheed
with a bag identical to Gabriel’s. He’d been called Naji that night. Naji:
survivor.
Not tonight, Naji.

A few feet away from Gabriel, purchasing a sandwich he would never eat, was Tayyib. Same suitcase, same glassy look of death in his eyes. He was close enough for Gabriel to see the configuration of the bomb. A black wire had been run along the inside of one arm of the pull handle. Gabriel reckoned that the release button on the handle itself was the trigger. Press the button, and it would strike the contact plate. That meant that the three
shaheeds
had to press their buttons simultaneously. But how were they to be signaled? The time, of course. Gabriel looked at Tayyib’s eyes and saw they were now focused on the digital clock of the departure board.
6:59:28 . . .

“Where is she, Mimi?”

The soldiers sauntered past again, chatting casually. Three Arabs had entered the station with suitcases packed with explosives, but the security forces hadn’t seemed to notice. How long would it take the soldiers to get their automatics off their shoulders and into firing position? If they were Israelis? Two seconds at most. But these French boys? Their reaction time would be slower.

He glanced at Palestina. She was growing more anxious. Her eyes were damp and she was pulling on the strap of her shoulder bag. Gabriel’s eyes flickered about the station, calculating angles and lines of fire.

Mimi intruded on his thoughts. “Are you listening to me?”

“I’m listening.”

“As you’ve probably guessed by now, the station is about to explode. By my calculation, you’ll have fifteen seconds. You have two choices. You can warn the people around you and try to save as many lives as possible, or you can selfishly save the life of your wife. But you cannot possibly do both, because if you warn the people, there will be pandemonium, and you’ll never be able to get your wife out of the station before the bombs go off. The only way to save her is to allow hundreds of other people to die—hundreds of deaths in order to save a wreck of a human being. Quite a moral dilemma, wouldn’t you say?”

“Where is she?”

“You tell me.”

“Track D,” Gabriel said. “Track Dalet.”

“Very good.”

“She’s not there. I don’t see her.”

“Look harder. Fifteen seconds, Gabriel. Fifteen seconds.”

And then the line went dead.

T
IME SEEMED TO CRAWL
to a stop. He saw it all as a streetscape, rendered in the vibrant palette of Renoir—the
shaheeds
, their eyes on the departure clock; the soldiers, their shoulders slung with submachine guns; Palestina, clutching the handbag that held a loaded Tanfolgio nine-millimeter. And in the center of it all he saw the pretty Arab girl walking away from a woman in a wheelchair. On the track stood a train bound for Marseilles, and five feet from the spot where the woman waited to die was an open door to the last carriage. Above him a clock read 6:59:50. Mimi had cheated him, but Gabriel knew better than most men that ten seconds was an eternity. In the span of ten seconds he had followed Khaled’s father into a Paris courtyard and filled his body with eleven bullets. In less than ten seconds, on a snowy night in Vienna, his son was murdered and his wife forever lost to him.

His first move was so compact and rapid that no one seemed to notice it—a blow to the left side of Palestina’s skull that landed with such force that Gabriel, when he pulled the handbag off her shoulder, was not sure whether she was still alive. As the girl collapsed at his feet, he reached inside the bag and wrapped his hand around the grip of the Tanfolgio. Tayyib, the
shaheed
closest to him at the snack bar, had seen none of it, for his eyes were fixed on the clock. Gabriel drew the weapon from the bag and leveled it, one-handed, at the bomber. He squeezed the trigger twice,
tap-tap.
Both shots struck the bomber high in the chest, flinging him backward, away from the explosive-laden suitcase.

The sound of gunfire in the vast echo chamber of the
station had the effect Gabriel had expected. Across the platform, people crouched or dropped to the ground. Twenty feet away, the two soldiers were pulling their submachine guns off their shoulders. And at either end of the platform the last two
shaheeds
, Bashir and Naji, were still standing, their eyes fixed on the clock. There wasn’t time for both.

Gabriel, in French, shouted: “Bomber! Get down! Get down!”

A firing lane opened as Gabriel aimed the Tanfolgio at the one called Naji. The French soldiers, confused by what they were witnessing, hesitated. He squeezed the trigger, saw a flash of pink, then watched as Naji spiraled lifelessly to the floor.

He ran toward Track D, toward the spot where Leah sat exposed to the coming blast wave. He clung to Palestina’s handbag, for it contained the keys to his escape. He glanced once over his shoulder. Bashir, the last of the
shaheeds
, was heading toward the center of the station. He must have seen his two comrades fall; now he was trying to increase the killing power of his single bomb by placing it in the center of the platform where it was still most crowded.