But then he felt Mfune’s slight elbow nudge, and understood. He couldn’t appear to be a fanatic in any way, shape, or form. That was the key to staying undetected as a scout, as a spy, and as a guerrilla warrior.
“I look forward to it,” the major said, sounding reasonable.
But as the colonel returned to her lecture, Sauvage was thinking that someday, after it was all over, he’d track down smug Colonel Greene and spray-paint “AB-16” all over her know-nothing face.
Chapter 7
THE SHOTGUN ROARED. The rear driver’s-side window exploded, throwing bits of glass and causing Kim to scream in terror, and me to dig for the Glock 19.
Louis reacted by showing us his mad skills behind the wheel.
At another time and another place, the head of Private Paris might have driven for a bank robbery crew or as a stuntman in the movies, because that shotgun blast caused him to unleash a series of maneuvers over the course of the next fifteen minutes that left me speechless and shaking.
The second after the side window exploded, Louis ducked down and threw the delivery van into a series of S turns, as if he were a skier in a slalom course, only going backward. Kim’s screams had died down to whimpers even as the Peugeot locked up its brakes and came after us in reverse. The Renault, however, was in third gear, in our lane, and coming at us at full throttle.
“Hold on to the handle above the door, Jack, and when I swing, shoot the tires of the closest vehicle!” Louis shouted.
Frantically cranking down the window, I grabbed the handle with my left hand and rested my right on the side-view mirror to steady the gun.
The bald, pale guy hanging out of the Peugeot was in our headlights now, aiming the shotgun left-handed. He touched one off, blowing out one of our headlights and cracking my side of the windshield into spiderwebs.
Louis didn’t flinch; instead, he spun the wheel and swung the rear end of the van around into that spur road we’d walked to get deeper into the project. As he did, the Renault floated into my pistol sights at twenty-five yards. I dropped my aim below the passenger-side front fender and squeezed.
The Glock bucked, and the bullet threw sparks off the lower fender. The second shot, however, was on target, and blew out the tire. The Renault swerved right toward the Peugeot, and I tapped the trigger a third time. The driver’s-side tire destructed. The front end of the car came down hard on the pavement, peeling strips of smoking rubber that spun crazily through the air.
The Peugeot’s rear end struck the Renault’s flank, and I was sure the pale shooter was going to sling off like a daredevil from a cannon. But the guy must have had uncanny reflexes and strength, because he managed to hang on.
Louis hit the brakes. We came to a bouncing, screeching halt in front of some of those gang members we’d passed earlier on foot. The whole lot of them were jumping up and down and cheering as if we were the best thing to happen in Les Bosquets in months, maybe years.
One of them yelled something in French that I didn’t catch, but Louis did, and he started laughing as he threw the little van into forward again, and pinned the accelerator to the floor. We passed other groups of immigrants who were now screaming those same words at us.
“What are they saying?” I yelled as we shot back out onto Avenue Clichy-sous-Bois, heading opposite the way we’d come in.
“Bad-Ass Plumbers!” Louis said, grinning, a little mania in his eyes.
I started laughing a little myself. Warm, good, crazy—the mix of emotions surging in me felt familiar, as if I was back on a mission in Afghanistan, mainlining on adrenaline, about to land my helicopter and a squad of marines in range of Taliban snipers and rocket grenades. Sometimes it was all about the risk.
Then I realized that I hadn’t checked on Kim and that she’d stopped whimpering. Fearing the worst, I twisted around fast and saw that she’d left her seat and gone back into the small cargo area to look out the rear door.
“Are you okay?” I yelled.
There was a flash of headlights behind us.
“Kim?”
She jerked her head around, mascara running down her cheeks, and said, “They’re coming.”
I undid my seat buckle and jumped into the back just as Louis took a hard left. It threw me off my feet and I crashed hard into the wall of the van, briefly stunned, until I saw Kim crawling toward me.
“Are you okay?” she asked, fighting back tears.
Over her shoulder, headlights glared through the rear window. There was a sharp cracking noise and the window blew out, showering us with little chunks of shatterproof glass.
“Get them off of us, Jack!” Louis yelled. “Before they take our tires!”
That jerked me back fully alert. Scrambling by Kim, I got to the back door. Crouched below the window frame, I reached up and pushed the Glock out the hole the shotgun had made. I tilted the pistol toward the headlights and pulled the trigger twice.
There was a screeching of tires and the headlights retreated.
I can’t give you every detail of the chase that ensued in the next few minutes because I haven’t the foggiest idea what roads we took or when we turned or where. For me there was only those headlights and trying to shoot them out every time they got close, while Louis tried to shake them.
“Merde!” Louis shouted at one point. “Hold on!”
Cars skidded and honked all around us.
Cars crashed all around us.
Chapter 8
LOUIS RAN A red light, and we shot up onto National Route 3 south of the town of Sevran. I got up to peer out the hole in the rear window and saw five demolished vehicles in the two hundred yards of road leading to the highway ramp. The Peugeot and the bald guy with the rotary-mag shotgun had somehow gotten through the pileup unscathed. We had put distance between us, but they were still coming, and coming hard.
“You got to go faster!” I yelled.
“I’m going as fast as a Mia goes!” Louis shouted. “Sixty-eight top speed.”
We were screwed. I didn’t know the top speed of the Peugeot, but it was a safe bet it was a whole lot more than sixty-eight. Kim must have been thinking much the same thing, because she shouted, “How far can we go?”
“Fifty-two more miles,” Louis said. “Plenty of power.”
I stood in the back of the van now, left hand pressed against the roof, and punched out the rest of the glass with the butt of the Glock. The Peugeot was back there less than a quarter of a mile, weaving through traffic.
Louis managed to stay ahead of them through the interchange onto autoroute 4, a three-lane freeway heading south. But the additional lane thinned traffic and the Peugeot took advantage of it, charging after us at eighty, ninety miles an hour. The crazy pale guy hanging out the window didn’t seem to care when I shot at him and missed.
He raised the shotgun with one hand. I dropped just in time. Buckshot clanked and pinged off the rear door. I was going to jump up and return fire but then noticed that the Glock’s slide was locked open. The pistol was empty.
I pivoted, stayed low, and duckwalked past Kim, who was on the floor of the van, holding tight to the legs of the jump seat with her eyes closed. Louis was hunched over the wheel like some pinball wizard. Grabbing the backs of the two front seats to stabilize myself, I said, “I’m out of ammo. I need your—”
“No time,” Louis barked as he cut the Mia hard left into the fast lane before the Peugeot could get up alongside us again.
In the next moment, everything seemed to move slower, and I was hyperaware of everything around us. There was a bloodred BMW coupe in our lane, three car lengths in front of us, just beyond the nose of a blue flatbed truck to our immediate right. Beyond the truck, in the far right lane and two car lengths ahead, a woman in a silver Mercedes sedan was singing with her radio. To our left the guardrail flickered in the headlights of the Peugeot, which was closing in fast.
We started up a rise. The flatbed downshifted and slowed. The BMW sped up, opening space. In the rearvie
w, the bald, pale guy was aiming for our tires, and I held on tight, figuring we might be crashing in the next few seconds.
Without warning, Louis wrenched the wheel to his right. The bald guy shot and missed us, hitting the BMW’s tires instead. Our right rear quarter panel brushed the front bumper of the flatbed, which sent us careening into a clockwise 360-degree slide across the freeway.
It was surreal and blurred, almost like being in a helicopter when it’s going down. I held on for dear life, sure we were going to roll or collide hard with that Mercedes in the far right lane.
But Louis made a quick cut with the wheel and we missed broadsiding the Mercedes by inches. The van straightened out and we shot up the exit ramp for the D34 highway heading east.
I was shaking head to toe as we merged into Paris-bound traffic. In all my life I’d never seen a gutsier move than that one. Boxed inside the fast lane by the slower flatbed and the crippled BMW, the guys in the Peugeot never had a chance of following us.
Louis clenched his fist and smiled his wild smile at me again.
“That, Jack,” he said proudly, “is how a plumber drives in Paris.”
I laughed, but then heard Kim Kopchinski say in a strained voice, “They knew I was there. How did they know? How could they?”
“Don’t worry, Mademoiselle Kopchinski,” Louis said. “I’ll call some friends at La Crim. Get you protection that—”
“No!” Kim shouted. “You call in the police and you might as well shoot me right here, right now.”
Chapter 9
8th Arrondissement
8:30 p.m.
LOUIS LANGLOIS PULLED us over on the Rue du Boccador. A man wearing a white chef’s shirt and apron smoked a cigarette to one side of an open door, and a petite woman in a neat gray suit waited on the other side. Louis waved to her, and she made a small beckoning motion.
“Her name is Elodie,” Louis said. “She takes care of everything, Jack.”
“What is this place?” Wilkerson’s granddaughter asked before I slid back the Mia’s side door.
“Kitchen entrance to Alain Ducasse’s restaurant at the Plaza Athénée,” Louis said. “That door gives us access to the room service elevator. No one will know you are here. It’s how the famous and the infamous go in and out.”
Kim hesitated and then nodded to me. I opened the door and we moved quickly toward the hotel’s rear entrance. I’d stripped off the plumber’s coverall and retrieved my blue blazer so I fit in somewhat at the ritzy address in the heart of Paris’s fashion center. But Kim looked as though she’d been sleeping in her old clothes for days.
Elodie didn’t seem to care. “Bonsoir, Monsieur Morgan,” she said brightly, and then bowed to Kim. “Madame.”
The chef, a lean, handsome guy in his thirties, stubbed out his cigarette, smiled, and gestured toward the open door and the sounds of pans and dishes rattling. “Please,” he said.
Elodie led the way inside, and within seconds we were weaving through a state-of-the-art kitchen and a feverish pack of young men and women in white toques cleaning up after the evening service. Several of the kitchen staff glanced our way, but then saw the chef coming behind us and returned to their jobs with renewed vigor.
Elodie took us to a service elevator and punched the button for the eighth floor.
“At Monsieur Langlois’s request, Monsieur Morgan, we have moved your things to a new suite with two bedrooms and a generous sitting area,” she said. “You’re lucky we had it available. Several Saudi princesses are arriving with their entourage tomorrow and will take over the entire seventh floor.”
“That work?” I asked Kim.
Hugging her chest as if suddenly cold, she nodded, but it was with little enthusiasm. We got out on eight and trailed Elodie to a door.
“A beautiful suite,” Elodie said, sliding an electronic key card.
She pushed open the door and we entered a spacious living area with black-and-white art deco furniture and French doors that opened onto a small balcony.
“You have a view of the Eiffel Tower from the balcony and your bedroom,” Elodie told Kim.
“Storybook,” I said.
Kim said, “This looks like the room Carrie stayed in during the last few episodes of Sex and the City.”
The concierge laughed. “No, that’s down on seven, and almost always reserved, I’m afraid. The Saudi women love staying there.”
Elodie quickly showed us the suite’s features, and left us with assurances that we could call her anytime during the night, and that room service was available twenty-four hours a day. After she left, I went through the place again, checking the windows and doors, including a locked one that Elodie said led to a third bedroom, should we need it.
Kim, meanwhile, had gone to the minibar and opened two splits of Stolichnaya vodka. She poured them both in a glass, took a long draw, shuddered, and carried it and her knapsack out onto the balcony.
I used the toilet, picked up a menu, and heard a knock at the door. Louis lumbered in, scratching at his salt-and-pepper beard, looking as though he’d just been roused from sleep instead of jacked up after a high-speed car chase.
“She say anything yet?” he asked quietly.
“Just giving her a little space,” I replied.
We went to the open doors to the balcony, finding Kim looking at the Eiffel Tower and putting an unlit cigarette to her lips. She unsnapped that silver rectangular jewelry piece from the chain around her neck and pressed at it with her thumb. A lid shot back, revealing the workings of a lighter.
She thumbed it to a flame and took two deep drags off the cigarette before Louis said, “You want to tell us about it?”
Kim turned and looked at us with that glassy, faraway stare I’d seen on marines I was airlifting out of combat.
“I’d rather not tonight,” she said. “I just need to sleep.”
I said, “If you don’t tell us what’s going on, we can’t protect you.”
She drained the vodka and said, “In the end, no one can protect me, and if I tell you, no one will be able to protect you either.”
“But no one knows where you are now,” Louis said.
“It doesn’t matter,” Kim said, pushing by us. She got both splits of Glenlivet scotch this time.
“You made it sound as if police are involved in your problem.”
“If you get them involved, I’ll have another problem.”
I sighed in exasperation. “You’re not looking out for yourself.”
Her laugh was hard and short. “That’s where you’re wrong, Jack. I most definitely am looking out for myself. Now, if you don’t mind, I’m going to go enjoy my view of the Eiffel Tower, take a shower, and get some sleep.”
She went into her bedroom and shut the doors behind her.
Chapter 10
FOR SEVERAL MOMENTS I thought about barging in on her and demanding that she tell us what was going on. We’d damn near died coming to her rescue. We had a right to know.
I saw Louis’s frustration and said, “Why don’t you go home, my friend? I’ll take the night shift.”
“I have a man outside, and I’ll be back first thing in the morning,” he said, handing me a new loaded magazine for the Glock and then leaving.
The shower was still running on Kim’s end of the suite when I ordered a strip steak and pommes frites from room service. I’d no sooner hung up than my cell phone rang. Sherman Wilkerson was calling.
“Do you have her?” he asked, sounding anxious.
“I do. She’s fine. Taking a shower.”
“She’s terrified, Jack. Am I wrong?”
“No, you’re right.”
“Did she say why?”
“Not yet.”
“Can you protect her?”
I chewed the inside of my cheek, and considered informing him of the gun battle and car chase that had ensued after we took Kim from Les Bosquets housing project, but I knew it would only worry him.
“We can, but how long are
we talking about?”
“As long as it takes,” Wilkerson said. “In Paris, and back here in Malibu.”
“Sherman, with all due respect, that could get very expensive.”
“I don’t care what it costs,” he shot back. “For that I’ll pay anything.”
“Okay, Sherman,” I said. “I just needed to understand the ground rules.”
“Is there anything I can do on this end to help?”
“I’ll call tomorrow once I’ve had a chance to talk to her.”
“Don’t worry about the time difference. And tell her I love her, Jack.”
“I’ll do that, Sherman,” I said, and heard the line click.
I checked my watch. It was 10:30 p.m., which was 1:30 p.m. back in Los Angeles. I hesitated, punched in Justine Smith’s number, and waited.
Justine used to work as a psychologist on contract with the criminal justice system in L.A. But a few years back she came to work at Private, where she has become one of our best investigators. And once upon a time, before I screwed it all up, we were lovers. Now she was seeing Emilio Cruz, another of my operators in Los Angeles. It had been awkward between the three of us for nearly six months now, and the second I heard Justine’s voice I realized nothing had changed since I’d been overseas.
“Jack?” Justine said.
Even over the static on the international connection, her voice filled me with a sense of regret, of things that could have been if I hadn’t been such a stubborn idiot and let her walk out of that part of my life.
“Hey,” I said. “You holding down the fort?”
“No barbarians at the gate, if that’s what you mean,” Justine replied. “I finished up the Dawson case. And Del Rio is handling the CTI thing.”
Rick Del Rio was my closest friend. We’d crash-landed together in the marines and he’d been with me from the day I launched Private. Del Rio broke his back the previous fall, and had only just returned to work.
“How’s he doing?” I asked.