The Paris Option Read online

  “…I must fly away…Satan can’t outwit me! Not me! I will…”

  While Peter and the nurse continued to restrain Marty, the doctor nodded approval. “Try to keep him as quiet as possible. He’s been in the coma a long time, and we don’t want any relapses. The Mideral will take effect soon.”

  Peter talked quietly as Marty continued to rant, building his schemes and castles in the sky, all centered on the delusion that he was in Pluto’s underworld and had to outwit the devil himself. Soon he grew less physical and no longer tried to escape, and eventually his eyes turned dull, his lids drooped, and he began to nod.

  The nurse smiled at Peter and stepped back. “You’re a good friend to him, Mr. Howell. A lot of people would’ve run screaming from the room.”

  Peter frowned. “That so? Don’t have much backbone, do they?”

  “Or heart.” She patted him on the shoulder and left.

  For the first time, Peter regretted not having electronic communications or being able to bounce cell calls off a satellite. He wanted to let Jon and Randi know about Marty, while at the same time, he should call his contacts in the South of France, along the Costa Brava into Spain, and all the places a helicopter from Gibraltar could have flown to see what he could learn about General Moore’s last few hours. But they were best reachable by their cell phones.

  Frustrated, he sat down, sighed, and let his head fall forward into his hands. That was when he heard light steps behind him. Soft, evasive footsteps, and he had not even heard the door open.

  “Randi?” As he started to turn, he reached for the Browning Hi-Power 9mm in his belt. That tread was not Randi’s…. And he was too late. Before the weapon was in his hand, the cold metal of the intruder’s gun muzzle pressed firmly into the back of his head. He froze. Whoever it was, was skilled. Frighteningly adept, and not alone.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Brussels, Belgium

  Smith closed the cover of the last file folder, ordered a second Chimay ale, and sat back. He had dropped a note at the Café Egmont, telling Randi to meet him at the café Le Cerf Agile, where he was seated at a sidewalk table. It was his favorite café in the rue St-Catherine area of the lower city, not far from the bourse and what had once been the banks of the river Senne when this part of Brussels was a port to hundreds of fishing vessels. As this was still a fish-market area, seafood remained the order of the day in bistros here, even though the river had long ago been boxed inside a manmade channel and bricked over to become the boulevard Anspach.

  But the fish, the hidden river, and the food were far from Smith’s mind as he took a long draft of his dark ale and looked around. No other patrons were sitting outside, since dark clouds still rolled occasionally across the sky. But the rain had stopped an hour ago, and when Smith had asked, the maître d’ had wiped off this table and the two accompanying chairs. The other patrons had decided to take no chances that the heavens would open again in another deluge, which was fine with Jon.

  He liked being out here alone, out of range of prying eyes and ears. He had changed out of his uniform after he left SHAPE and now looked like any tourist in his tan cotton slacks, open-necked tartan shirt, dark-blue sports jacket, and athletic shoes. The shoes were important, in case he had to run. The jacket was important, to hide his pistol. And the black trench coat he had slung over the back of his chair was important, because it helped him to blend with the night.

  But now, as the sun fought the clouds for dominance of the afternoon sky, Jon was thinking about what he had learned at NATO. The file on Captain Darius Bonnard was revealing. Either La Porte did not know or he was protecting Bonnard by withholding the fact that Bonnard’s current wife—the Frenchwoman that La Porte had so admired—was not Bonnard’s first: While serving in the legion, he had married an Algerian woman. Whether he had converted to Islam was unknown. However, even after being commissioned, he took all his leave time in Algiers, where the wife and her family lived. There was no information about why Bonnard had divorced her. Since there were no divorce documents in the file either, Jon was suspicious. Like sleeper spies or moles, terrorists often established new identities in target countries while maintaining entirely different lives elsewhere.

  So Darius Bonnard, favored aide to NATO’s Deputy Supreme Allied Commander, was a German serving in the French army, once married to an Algerian woman, now away somewhere in the South of France—not all that far from Toledo.

  Still pondering, Jon reached for his ale and gazed up just in time to see Randi paying off a taxi a half block away from the café. He sat back, smiling, holding his glass and admiring the view. She was dressed conservatively in dark slacks and a fitted jacket, her hair pulled back casually in a ponytail. With her easy movements and slender figure, for a moment she looked like a teenager. She hurried toward him, vigorous and beautiful, and he realized he no longer thought of Sophia every time he saw her. It gave him an odd feeling.

  She reached the table. “You look as if you’ve seen a ghost. Worried about me? Sweet, but completely unnecessary.”

  “Where the hell were you?” he managed to growl through his smile.

  She sat and peered around for a waiter. “I’ll give you a full report in a minute. I’ve just come from Paris. I thought you’d like to know that I stopped to see Marty—”

  He sat up straighter. “How is he?”

  “He was asleep again and still hadn’t told Peter a thing.” As she filled him in about the relapses, she watched worry pinch his high-planed face and darken his navy-blue eyes. Jon could look like a predatory monster when things were going badly, especially if it was in the middle of action, but right now he was a man whose main concern was his friend. With his tousled dark hair and worry-wrinkled brow and the scratches on his face from when they were chased in Madrid, she found him almost endearing.

  “It’s all so much harder now that we can’t use our cell phones,” Jon grumbled. “Otherwise, Peter would’ve called to tell me all this himself.”

  “Everything’s a lot harder without our cell phones and modems.” She shot him a look of warning. The waiter was coming to their table. They stopped their conversation as she ordered a Chimay, too, but the Grand Reserve. As soon as the waiter was out of earshot, she asked, “Have you learned anything?”

  “A few things.” Jon described the file information about Darius Bonnard and his meeting with General La Porte. “La Porte might not know about the Algerian connection, or he could be covering for Bonnard out of loyalty. What did you get?”

  “Maybe what we need.” She was excited as she told him what she had learned from Aaron Isaacs, finishing with Dr. Akbar Suleiman’s illness.

  “You’re right. This is promising. Where is the guy?”

  “He’s postdoc and lives in Paris. Mossad says he’s still in the city. I have his address.”

  “What are we waiting for?”

  Randi smiled grimly. “For me to finish my ale.”

  Somewhere on the Coast of North Africa

  From time to time, a cool breeze blew through the large, whitewashed room of the sprawling Mediterranean villa, making the gauzy curtains billow. The villa had been designed to take advantage of even the lightest wind. Currents of air drifted continuously through the open arches that separated the rooms from the hallway at the isolated coastal estate.

  Deep inside an alcove, Dr. Émile Chambord worked over the ultrathin tubing and connections between his keyboard and the conglomeration of gel packs in their tray, feeder machine, flexible metal plate, monitor, and electronic printer that Mauritania and his men had carefully transported all the way here from his lab at the Pasteur. Chambord liked the alcove because it was sheltered from the constant breeze. Both temperature control and a complete lack of vibration were vital to the operation of his delicate prototype DNA computer.

  Chambord was concentrating. At his fingertips was his life’s work—his secret molecular computer. While he made adjustments, he thought about the future, both electronic and politi
cal. He believed that this rudimentary DNA computer was the beginning of changes most people were not educated enough to imagine, much less appreciate. Controlling molecules with the deftness and precision that physicists used to control electrons would revolutionize the world, ultimately leading to the subatomic realm, where matter behaved very differently from what people saw with their eyes or heard with their ears or touched with their skin.

  Electrons and atoms did not act with the straightforwardness of the billiard balls in Newton’s classic physics. Instead, they showed characteristics closer to fuzzy wavelike entities. At the atomic level, waves could behave like particles, while particles had waves associated with them. An electron could travel many different routes simultaneously, as if it were really a spread-out phenomenon like a wave. Similarly, an atomic computer would be able to calculate along many different paths simultaneously, too. Perhaps even among different dimensions. The fundamental assumptions of our world would be forever proved wrong.

  At its most basic, today’s computer was simply a set of wires arranged in one direction, a layer of switches, and a second set of wires aligned in the opposite direction. The wires and switches were configured to fabricate logic gates…but the kinds of wires and switches made all the difference. Chambord had succeeded in using DNA molecules to function as AND and OR logic gates, the basic computational language of electronic computers. In earlier experimental DNA machines created by other scientists, one of the insurmountable problems had been that the rotaxane molecules, which was what they used for gates, could be set only once, making them suitable for read-only memory, not random-access memory, which required constant switching.

  That had been the so-called impossible niche that Chambord had filled: He had created a different molecule with the properties that would make a DNA computer work. The molecule was synthetic, and he called it Francane, in honor of France.

  As Chambord turned from his apparatus to make mathematical calculations in his notebook, Thérèse appeared in the archway. “Why do you help them?” Her eyes were angry but she controlled her voice as she studied her father. He looked very tired as he bent over his calculations.

  He sighed, looked up, and turned. “What else can I do?”

  Her full lips were pale, all the dynamic red lipstick worn off days ago. Unbrushed and uncombed, her black hair no longer hung in a satin sheet. She still wore the slim white evening suit, but now it was torn and dirty. The high-necked, off-white silk blouse was flecked with blood and what looked like grease, and the high-heeled, ivory pumps were gone. Her shoes were bedouin slippers. They were her one concession; she had refused to accept even a change of clothes from her captors.

  “You could say no,” she told him tiredly. “None of them can operate your molecular computer. They’d be helpless.”

  “And I’d be dead. More important, so would you.”

  “They’ll kill us anyway.”

  “No! They’ve promised.”

  Thérèse heard the desperation, the grasping at straws. “Promised?” She laughed. “The promise of terrorists, kidnappers, murderers?”

  Chambord closed his mouth, refused to answer. He returned to his work, checking the connections of his computer.

  “They’re going to do something terrible,” she said. “People will die. You know that.”

  “I don’t know that at all.”

  She stared at his profile. “You’ve made a deal. For me. That’s it, isn’t it? Your soul in exchange for my life.”

  “I’ve made no deal.” Still her father did not look up again.

  She continued to stare, trying to fathom what he must be feeling, thinking. What he was going through. “But that’s what you’ll do. You’ll make them let me go before you help them accomplish whatever it is they want.”

  Chambord was silent. Then he said quietly, “I won’t let them murder you.”

  “Isn’t that my choice?”

  Now her father whirled in his chair. “No! It’s my choice.”

  There were soft footsteps behind Thérèse. She flinched as Mauritania arrived at the archway, gazing from her to her father and back again. Armed and glowering, Abu Auda stood sentry behind.

  Mauritania was solemn. “You are wrong, Mademoiselle Chambord. When our mission is accomplished, I have no further need of your father, and we will announce our triumph to the world so the Great Satan can know who brings his downfall. There will be no reason to care what you or your father can tell. No one is going to die, unless they refuse to help us complete the mission.”

  Thérèse sneered. “Perhaps you can fool him, but not me. I know lies when I hear them.”

  “It pains me that you do not trust us, but I have no time to persuade you.” Mauritania looked at Chambord. “How much longer before you are again ready?”

  “I told you I needed two days.”

  Mauritania’s small eyes narrowed. “They are nearly passed.” He had not raised his voice since he arrived, but that did not dispel the menace that burned from his gaze.

  Paris, France

  The towering Tour Montparnasse with its complement of other tall, upscale buildings along the boulevard Montparnasse receded as Smith, Randi, and Hakim Gatta, a terrified lab assistant from L’Institut Pasteur, walked deeper into the back streets of Paris, where the new bohemians worked and lived among the spirits of the old. The sun had set, and the last glowing embers of the day gave the sky a somber gray-and-yellow cast. Black shadows stretched across overgrown spring gardens and cobbled streets, and the scents of liquor, marijuana, and oil paints mingled in the air.

  At last the nervous little bottle-washer, Hakim, muttered in French, “This is the street. Can…I leave…leave now?” He was a little over five feet tall with a mass of curly black hair, soft brown skin, and furtive black eyes. He lived above Dr. Akbar Suleiman.

  “Not yet,” Randi told him. She pulled him back into the shadows, where Jon followed in three quick steps. “Which building is it?”

  “N-number fifteen.”

  Jon said, “Which apartment?”

  “Th-third floor. In back. You promised you’d pay me, and I could go.”

  “The alley is the only other way out?”

  Hakim nodded eagerly. “The front entrance, or the alley. There’s no other way.”

  Jon told Randi, “You take the alley, I’ll go in.”

  “Who put you in charge?”

  Hakim started to back away. She grabbed his collar and showed him her gun. He flinched and stopped moving.

  Jon watched. “Sorry. You have a better idea?”

  Randi shook her head reluctantly. “You’re right, but ask next time. Remember that discussion we had about politeness? We’d better move. No telling how long he’ll be there if he learns we were inquiring about him at the Pasteur. You’ve got your walkie-talkie?”

  “Of course.” Jon patted the pocket of his black trench coat. He hurried off along the narrow sidewalk. The lighted windows of the four-, five-, and six-story apartment houses were beacons above the deep valley of the street. At No. 15, he leaned back casually against the building and watched. Men and women were sauntering off to bars and bistros or perhaps home. A few couples, young and old, held hands, enjoying the spring twilight and each other. Jon waited until no one was close enough to observe him, and he made his move.

  The building’s outer door was ajar, and there was no concierge. He took out his Walther, slipped inside, and climbed the stairs to the third floor. The door of the rear apartment was closed. He listened and after a moment heard the sound of a radio in a distant room. Somewhere inside, someone had turned on a water tap and he could hear water rushing into a basin. He tried the door, but it was locked. He stepped back and examined it—a standard spring lock. If there were a dead bolt and it was locked, too, he would have a lot harder time getting in. On the other hand, most people were careless, not engaging the dead bolt until they went to bed.

  He took out his small case of picklocks and went to work. He was still
working when the water stopped running. There was a thunderous noise, and a fusillade from inside tore through the door inches above Jon’s head. As needlelike pieces of wood shot through the air, pain seared Jon’s side, and he dove to the floor, striking his left shoulder. Damn, he’d been hit. A wave of dizziness swept through him. He scrambled up to a sitting position, leaning back against the wall across from the shattered door, his Walther out and covering it. His side throbbed painfully, but he ignored it. He stared at the door.

  When no one came out, he finally unbuttoned his coat and pulled up his shirt. A bullet had torn through his clothes and the flesh above his waist, leaving a purple gouge. It was bleeding, but not badly, and nothing serious had been damaged. He would deal with it later. He left the shirt out; the black fabric of his trench coat hid the blood and bullet holes.

  He stood up, the Walther ready, stepped aside, and tossed his case of picklocks against the door. Another fusillade smashed and splintered more of the wood and metal, this time destroying the lock. Screams, shouts, and curses from above and below filled the stairwell.

  With his right shoulder, Jon slammed through the door, dove to the side, rolled, and came up with his pistol in both hands. And stared.

  A small, attractive woman sat cross-legged on a shabby couch facing the door, a large AK-47 in her hands, the weapon still aimed at the door. In apparent shock, she stared at it as if she had not seen him smash through.

  “Put the weapon down!” Jon commanded in French. “Down! Now!”

  Suddenly the woman snarled, leaped up, and swung the Kalashnikov toward him. He kicked, knocking the assault rifle from her hands. Grabbing her arm, he turned her around and pushed her ahead of him as he searched the apartment room by room.

  There was no one else there. He put the Walther to the tiny woman’s head and snarled in French, “Where is Dr. Suleiman?”