Scorpion Deception (6 page)

It would be impossible to go up the stairs to the roof. The sound of the roof door opening would alert the sniper. At that distance, and as a stationary target for an instant, the shot would be fatal. He needed another way onto the roof.

Moving on tiptoe down the carpeted hallway, he put his ear to the first apartment door. Through it he could hear a television. Someone was listening to a game show,
La Rue de la Fortune.
Wheel of Fortune. He went to the next apartment door and thought he heard someone talking inside. The third apartment was silent. It didn't look like it was wired for an alarm. Just to be sure, he knocked. If someone answered, he'd tell them he was
l'électricien
sent by the concierge to investigate a problem. But there was no answer. Using the Peterson key, he opened the lock and went inside.

The apartment was dark, quiet. He used a pocket LED flashlight to look around, but whoever lived there was out. The window overlooked the Avenue de Wagram. No good, he thought. The sniper was probably right above him, where he could cover the Place des Ternes and the Metro entrance and street. To have any chance, he would need to work his way over toward the other side of the building to try and come up on the sniper from behind.

Provided the sniper was alone and didn't have a spotter. Otherwise all bets were off, he thought, opening the window and climbing out, his toes on the sill so he could reach up to the ledge he had spotted from below.

The night was cool and clear. He slipped his toes into a crevice in the building's facade and pulled himself up by his fingers till his forearms and elbows rested on the ledge. The roof parapet was about a meter above the ledge, so he would have to crouch or crawl, heaving himself up till he could swing a leg over it. For a few seconds he dangled from his arms, gripping the ledge. Don't look down! he told himself.

A moment later he was lying flat on the ledge, staring down at the street four stories below, hoping he hadn't made a sound. He looked up, but saw only the top of the parapet and the sky. He listened intently. There was no way to know where the sniper was; he could be only a meter away.

Slowly, Scorpion moved onto his toes and knees, one foot behind the other, making sure to stay crouched below the top of the parapet. The ledge was barely six inches wide. He felt horribly exposed. Someone honked a horn below. For an instant he looked down, but it was just normal traffic. In the distance, over the tops of the buildings, he could see the upper part of the Eiffel Tower, glittering gold with electric lights. He took a breath. Time to move.

The footing was precarious; he crept slowly, one step at a time. It seemed to take forever to reach the corner of the building. Clinging to the side, he edged around the corner. The parapet on this other side was sloped and he had to hold on as he inched forward, conscious of the sound of traffic on the tree-lined street below. It would be the Boulevard de Courcelles, he thought. About ten meters from the corner he saw a mansard window, though he wasn't sure if it was real or decorative.

Time to decide, he thought. If the sniper was at the Avenue de Wagram parapet, coming over the top he would be to the side and behind him. Then, even if he made a sound, he would have time to aim before the sniper could turn around and shoot. Grabbing the edge of the window molding, Scorpion reached up to the pitched top of the parapet with his left hand. In his right, he held the Glock. It would all depend on which way the sniper was facing, he thought as he put the toe of his shoe into an indented part of the molding. He listened intently. No sound from the roof. Here we go, he thought. Pulling with his left hand, he leaped over the top of the parapet onto the slanted metal roof.

Landing, his feet at an angle, he snapped into a firing position and scanned the length of the parapet just as he heard the snap of a door closing. He whirled, ready to shoot, but the sniper was gone, out the roof door he hadn't wanted to use. He straightened. The rooftop was empty.

He made a tour of the parapet to make sure the sniper hadn't gone over onto the ledge on the Avenue de Wagram side. That was empty too. Then he ran to the roof door, readied himself to fire, and ripped it open. There was no one on the landing, but he could hear the elevator descending. The son of a bitch was getting away!

Scorpion raced to the stairs, took them three or four at a time, leaping down to the landings, then ripped around and down the next flight, racing the elevator. As he reached the second floor, he could hear the elevator door opening, then someone running on the tile floor of the front hallway. Leaping nearly the entire flight of stairs to the landing, he was just in time to see the front door close and an older woman—the concierge—opening her apartment door.

“Retournez à l'intérieur, madame!”
Go back inside! he shouted as he raced past her and out the front door. A man with a rifle case was running hard toward the Metro entrance. Scorpion took off after him.

The man leaped down the stairs to the Metro, causing people coming up to stare at him. Scorpion raced across the street, nearly getting sideswiped by a BMW. He ran down the stairs, holding his Glock in his pocket. The man with the rifle case had already gone through the turnstile; he wasn't there.

Scorpion used a one-day ticket to go through the turnstile, then had to choose which tunnel platform:
PORTE DAUPHINE
or
NATION.
No way to know which platform the sniper had gone to. Trains came by every couple of minutes. If he chose wrong, he might give the sniper a shot at him, or the man would get away and he'd never have a chance to find out who was after him—whether it was Bern or something else. Only if it wasn't Bern, how the hell had they picked up on him in the middle of Paris?

Time to choose. Two passageways:
NATION
would be the train heading east into the 11th Arrondissement;
PORTE DAUPHINE
was the shorter part of the line, he could see from glancing at the map. The next stop that way was Charles de Gaulle–Étoile. If he were the sniper, he would try to lose someone in all the traffic and people on the Champs-Elysées and around the Arc de Triomphe, and so he sprinted down the passage to the Porte Dauphine platform.

He stopped at the opening to the platform and crouched low. A young woman a few feet away looked at him, and seeing him take the Glock out of his pocket, started to run. Scorpion grabbed her by the arm. She tried to twist away, terrified.

“J'ai besoin de votre miroir de maquillage,”
he said. I need your makeup mirror. He took her handbag, opened it, and poking around, pulled out a small mirror case. He handed the bag back to her as she stared at him, wide-eyed. He put his finger to his lips as she continued to stare as if he was insane, then bolted and ran toward the exit. He could hear the sound of her high heels click-clicking behind him as he bent low and held the mirror out, close to the floor, angled so he could see the platform.

A train was coming but on the other side, going toward Nation, the noise covering any other sounds. On his side, the platform was long and curved and there were only a dozen or so people waiting. Then he spotted the sniper in the mirror. He was a young man in a black Façonnable jacket, Iranian, by the look of him. Then he turned and Scorpion got a better look.

It was the man with the seaman's cap, the motorcyclist from Hamburg. The one who had killed Harandi.

Scorpion counted eight people on the platform between himself and the sniper, who glanced his way, without being able to see him, in the direction the sniper would have to take were he to come after him. Pulling his hand with the mirror back, Scorpion glanced over his shoulder toward the Metro entrance. There was no way of knowing if there were more of them. The train on the other side pulled away, reminding him that the next train to Porte Dauphine would be coming any second. Once it did, he would have to put himself out in the open on the platform or lose the sniper for good.

He eased the mirror back out again. There were the same eight bystanders and the sniper, for the moment not looking toward him, but down the track. Then Scorpion heard the Porte Dauphine train approaching.

He stepped out onto the platform and sprinted at the sniper, who whirled and frantically began opening the rifle case. He pulled out a large sniper rifle.

It looked like a Russian rifle, Scorpion thought, running; a VKS Vychlop with a silencer. How the hell had the bastard missed?

The bystanders, staring, were about to get killed.

He screamed at the top of his lungs:
“Attention! Fusil! Police!”

As the sniper swung the rifle into aiming position, some of the bystanders screamed and ran; the others stood there, frozen. Scorpion threw himself onto the platform floor in a prone position, aimed the Glock and fired at the sniper's thigh. He needed him alive.

The sniper staggered but did not go down. He re-aimed as Scorpion fired again, hitting him in the shoulder this time. Scorpion rolled to the side as the sniper fired and barely missed, the bullet tearing a jagged scar in the concrete platform next to his ear, then came up to his feet and ran toward the sniper again.

The man was struggling to raise the Vychlop for another shot. The train was coming fast, not far behind him, the bore of the rifle's silencer opening looking big as a tunnel to Scorpion. But the sniper was too close, and instead swung the rifle at Scorpion's face.

Scorpion blocked it and started the Krav Maga disarm, curling his right arm around the weapon, creating torque on the forearm while smashing his left elbow into the man's face. He twisted the rifle away then smashed the butt of the weapon into the sniper's face, staggering him sideways. As Scorpion reached to pull him close into a choke hold, the Iranian, seeing the train almost there, suddenly lurched sideways and off the platform.

The train came with a roar of air, its brakes squealing above a woman's high-pitched scream as the front car smashed into the Iranian, flinging the body forward onto the track like a rag doll before rolling over it.

H
e stood in the shadow of a doorway across the street from her building. She had said “third floor,” which in France means the fourth floor as Americans count. Her building was brick with wrought-iron window balconies with flower pots, and at the end of the street a stone arch led to the Canal St. Martin. He could smell the water from here.

There was a light in the window of what had to be her apartment. She was waiting for him and he wanted to go up, but he knew this was as close as he was going to get, and that he would remember standing in the street looking up at her window for a long time. He called her on his cell.

“Allo,”
she answered. And in English: “Is it you?”

He didn't answer. Just hearing her voice, knowing he was as close as he would ever get, was like nothing he had ever felt before.

“Where are you?” she asked.

“Across the street.”

“Come up,
je t'en prie,
” she whispered. Please. “We have to talk.”

“I can't. Did you hear?”

“The death in the Metro? It was on the
télé
. Was it you?”

He didn't answer. He could hear her breathing over the phone.

“Witnesses in the Metro said he was going to shoot,” she said. “You had no choice. I hate this.”

“So do I,” he said.

“What are you going to do?”

“You need to leave Paris now. Tonight,” he said.

“I could go back to—”

“Don't say it! Don't tell me where. Don't tell anyone. Your phone could be bugged. Just call a taxi and go, now.”

“And you?” she said.

“I'm going too. I won't be able to contact you, and don't try to reach me. When it's over, if I'm still alive, I'll find you.” With a pang, he remembered those were the same words he had used with the boy, Ghedi. “You'll probably be married with three children.”

“I wish,” she said. Then softly, “No, I don't.”

“If you never want anything to do with me again, I'll understand. It'll probably be the smartest thing you've ever done.”

“Who said I was smart?”

“I'm so sorry about this.”

“You're sorry. Is that the best you can do?”

“I don't regret a damn thing,” he said, and clicked off.

He stood in the shadow of the doorway and waited. He wanted to be sure no one would follow her when she left. A cool breeze came from the canal, and he stepped farther into the doorway, out of the wind. Looking up at the lit window, he saw her shadow moving on the curtains. He hoped to God she was packing. His eyes scanned the street again. There were no watchers at either end or on any of the roofs.

Finally, a taxi pulled up outside her building and its interior light came on. He tensed watching the driver make a call on his cell phone. The light went out in Sandrine's apartment. A minute later she came out of the building, pulling a rolling suitcase behind her. The taxi driver put the suitcase into the trunk and then they were gone.

The street was empty. Checking his iPhone, Scorpion located a youth hostel near the Gare du Nord that catered to backpackers and college students. He walked on the quai next to the canal, where it was virtually impossible for anyone to follow without him spotting them.

Turning up a side street, he walked for blocks past shuttered shops, his footsteps echoing in the deserted street. He had never felt so alone, and all he could think about was Sandrine. How he had upended her life and how quickly she understood what she had to do, even if she didn't understand what was really going on. There's steel in her, he thought. A lot more going on there than just a doctor with a pretty face.

There was traffic on rue du Faubourg St.-Martin. He stepped into the lobby of a cheap hotel and had a sleepy concierge call a taxi that dropped him off at the Gare du Nord train station. Waiting till the taxi left, he walked through the terminal, doubling back to make sure he was completely clean, then walked to the youth hostel.