The Paris Option Read online

  The farther he went, the heavier the ash grew, a ghostly blanket over buildings, trees, bushes, signs…everything and anything. Nothing was spared, left unsullied. At last he turned a corner and the site itself appeared—large, haphazard mounds of blackened brick and debris, above which three exterior walls towered precariously, dismal skeletons against the gray sky. He shoved his hands deep into his trench-coat pockets and halted where he was to study the dispiriting scene.

  The building must have been spacious, about the size of a warehouse. Dogs sniffed the ruins. Rescue workers and firemen dug grimly, and armed soldiers patrolled. The charred remains of two cars stood at the curb. Beside them, some kind of metal sign had been melted into a distorted fist of steel. Nearby, an ambulance waited, in case another survivor was found or one of the workers injured.

  Heart heavy, Smith waited as a soldier with a careful face approached and demanded identification. As he handed it over, he asked, “Any sign of Dr. Chambord?”

  “I can’t talk about it, sir.”

  Smith nodded. He had other ways to find out, and now that he had seen the devastation, he knew there was nothing he could learn here. It was lucky anyone had survived. Lucky Marty had. As he left, he thought about the monsters who had done this. Anger built in his chest.

  He returned to the rue du Docteur Roux and crossed the street to the old campus. Calming himself, he showed his identification at the kiosk there, where another Pasteur security guard and armed soldier controlled access. After a thorough check, they gave him directions to the office and lab of his old friend and colleague Michael Kerns.

  As he headed off past the old building where Louis Pasteur had lived and worked and was now buried, he was struck by how good it was to be back in this cradle of pure science, despite the circumstances. After all, this was where Pasteur had conducted his brilliant nineteenth-century experiments in fermentation that had led not just to pioneering research in bacteriology but to the principle of sterilization, which had forever changed the world’s understanding of bacteria and saved untold millions of lives.

  After Dr. Pasteur, other researchers here had gone on to produce critical scientific breakthroughs that had led to the control of virulent diseases like diphtheria, influenza, the plague, polio, tetanus, TB, and even yellow fever. It was no wonder the institute boasted more Nobel Prize winners than most nations. With more than a hundred research units and labs, the complex housed some five hundred permanent scientists while another six hundred from all corners of the globe worked temporarily on special projects. Among those was Michael Kerns, Ph.D.

  Mike’s office was in the Jacques Monod Building, which housed the department of molecular biology. The door was open. When Smith stepped inside, Mike looked up from his desk, where a mass of papers covered with calculations were spread before him.

  Kerns took one look at Smith and jumped up. “Jon! Good Lord, man. What are you doing here?” White lab coat flapping, Kerns came around the desk with the athletic grace of the Iowa Hawkeye running back he had once been. A few inches under six feet and sturdy, he pumped Smith’s hand vigorously. “Damn, Jon, how long’s it been?”

  “Five years, at least,” Smith reminded him with a smile. “How’s the work going?”

  “So near and yet so far.” Kerns laughed. “As usual, right? What brings you to Paris? More viruses for USAMRIID to hunt down?”

  Taking the opening, Smith shook his head. “It’s my friend Marty Zellerbach. He was hurt in the bombing.”

  “The Dr. Zellerbach who they say was working with poor Chambord? I never met him. I’m so sorry, Jon. How is he?”

  “In a coma.”

  “Damn. What’s the prognosis?”

  “We’re hopeful. But he had a nasty cranial injury, and the coma’s hanging on. Still he’s showing signs he may come out of it.” Smith shook his head again, his expression glum. “Is there any news about Chambord? Have they found him yet?”

  “They’re still looking. The blast really shattered the building. It’s going to take days for them to dig through it all. They’ve found some body parts that they’re trying to identify. Very sad.”

  “Did you know Marty was working with Chambord?”

  “Actually, no. Not until I read it in the paper.” Kerns returned behind his desk and waved Smith to an aged armchair in the cluttered office. “Just chuck those files onto the floor.”

  Smith nodded, moved the pile of folders, and sat.

  Kerns continued, “I said I never met Zellerbach, right? But it’d be more accurate to say I never even heard he was here. He had no official appointment to the staff, and I never saw his name listed as being on loan or visiting. I’d have known about that. It must’ve been some private arrangement with Chambord.” Kerns paused. “I probably shouldn’t be telling you this, but I was concerned about Émile. This last year, he was acting strange.”

  Smith came alert. “Chambord was acting strange? In what way?”

  “Well…” Kerns pondered, then leaned forward like a conspirator, his hands clasped in front of him, resting on his papers. “He used to be a happy guy, you know what I mean? Convivial, outgoing, one of the boys, if you like, for all his seniority and fame. A hard worker who didn’t seem to take his work all that seriously, despite its importance. A very level head. Oh, eccentric enough, like most of us, but in a different way from last year. He had the right attitude—his ego was never oversized. In fact, once when a dozen or so of us got together for drinks, he said, ‘The universe will go on fine without us. There’s always someone else to do the work.’”

  “Self-effacing, and in many ways true. And it was after that he changed?”

  “Yes. It was almost as if he vanished. In the corridors, at meetings, in the cafés, at bull sessions, staff parties, all that. And it happened just like that.” He snapped his fingers. “He seemed to cut us all off, sharp as a slice with a knife. He’d disappeared, as far as most of us were concerned.”

  “Was this a year ago, about the same time he quit entering his progress data into the computer?”

  Kerns was astonished. “I hadn’t heard that. Damn, does that mean we have no idea what he accomplished over the last twelve months?”

  “That’s what it means. You know what he was working on?”

  “Of course, everyone knew. A molecular computer. I heard he was making big strides, too. That he might even get there first, in under ten years. It was no secret, so…”

  “So?”

  Kerns leaned back. “So why the secretiveness? That was what was so different about him. Secretive, withdrawn, distracted, avoiding his colleagues. Come to work, go home, return to work, nothing else. Sometimes he was here for days in a row. I heard he even had a good bed put in there. We just wrote it off to a hot line of research.”

  Smith did not want to appear too interested in Chambord, or his notes, or the DNA computer. He was in Paris for Marty, after all. Nothing more, as far as Kerns or anyone else was concerned. “He wouldn’t be the first to be so wrapped up in his work. A scientist who doesn’t feel that compelled doesn’t belong in research.” He paused and asked casually, “So what’s your theory?”

  Mike chuckled. “In my wildest moments, stolen research. Spies. Industrial espionage, maybe. Some kind of cloak-and-dagger.”

  “Did something happen to make you think that?”

  “Well, there’s always the issue of the Nobel Prize. Whoever creates the first molecular computer will be a shoo-in. Of course, that means not just money but prestige—the Mount Olympus of prestige. No one at the Pasteur would turn it down. Probably no one in the world. Under those conditions, any of us might get a little nervous and clandestine, protecting our work until we were ready to go public.”

  “Good point.” But stealing was one thing, mass murder, which the bombing had caused, was quite another. “There must’ve been something else, though, to make you think Chambord was worried about his work being stolen. Something unusual, maybe even suspicious, that triggered the idea.”


  “Now that you mention it…I wondered sometimes about a few of the people I spotted Chambord with once or twice outside the Pasteur. Also about a car that picked him up here some nights.”

  Smith allowed only a fraction of his interest to show on his face. “What kind of people?”

  “Oh, ordinary enough. French, well dressed. They were always in civvies, or I might’ve said they were military. But I guess if Chambord was making progress on his DNA computer, that’d make sense. The military would want to keep tabs on everything he was doing, if he’d let them.”

  “Natural enough. What about the car? Do you remember the year and make?”

  “Citroën, recent. Don’t know the exact year. It was big and black. I’d see it when I was working late. I’d be heading for mine, and a few times it’d drive up. The rear door would swing open, Chambord would duck and climb in—he was very tall, you know—and it’d drive off. It was odd, because he had his own little Renault. I mean, I’d spot the Renault parked in the lot after the big car drove off.”

  “You never saw who was with him in the Citroën?”

  “Never. But at the time, I was tired and was thinking about getting home.”

  “Did the Citroën bring him back?”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  Smith thought it over. “Thanks, Mike. I can see you’re busy, and I don’t want to take any more of your time. I’m just looking into Marty’s activities here in Paris, to get an assessment of his health before the bombing. Sorry to get so far off track with Chambord. Marty’s got Asperger’s Syndrome, and he’s usually fine, but since I haven’t talked to him in a while, I just want to make sure. What can you tell me about Chambord’s family? They might know more about Marty.”

  “Émile was a widower. Wife died about seven years ago. I wasn’t here then, but I heard it hit him hard. He buried himself in work then, too, was aloof for a while, I’m told. He has one child, a grown-up daughter.”

  “You have her address?”

  Kerns turned to his computer and soon provided it. He cocked his head at Smith. “Her name’s Thérèse Chambord. I gather she’s a successful actress, stage mostly, but a few French flicks. A stunner, from what I’ve heard.”

  “Thanks, Mike. I’ll tell you how things go with Marty.”

  “You do that. And we’ve got to have a drink together at least, before you go home. With luck, Marty, too.”

  “Good idea. I’d like that.” He stood up and left.

  Once outside, Smith gazed across the big campus toward the smoke, blowing thin against the clouds. He shook his head and turned away, heading back to the street, his mind on Marty. Using his cell phone, he called the Pompidou Hospital and talked to the ICU head nurse, who reported that Marty remained stable, fortunately still showing an occasional sign that he might wake up. It was not a lot, but Smith held close the hope that his longtime friend would pull through.

  “How are you feeling?” she asked.

  “Me?” He remembered the blow to his head when he fell. Now it all seemed a long time ago and, compared to the devastation at the Pasteur, unimportant. “I’m doing fine. Thanks for asking.”

  As he hung up, he reemerged onto the rue du Docteur Roux and considered what he had learned from Mike Kerns: For the past year, Émile Chambord had acted like a man in a hurry, like someone with a secret. And he had been seen with well-dressed men who could have been military types out of uniform.

  Smith was mulling that when he had a feeling he was being watched. Call it what you will—training, experience, a sixth sense, a subliminal impression of an image, paranoia, or even parapsychology…. But there was that tingle on the back of his neck, the slight shrinking of the skin.

  They were out there, the eyes observing him. It had begun the instant he had stepped out onto the sidewalk.

  Chapter Six

  Captain Darius Bonnard could almost smell the camels, the dates rotting in the sun, the goat-fat stink of couscous, and even the rank but miraculous odor of stagnant water. He had changed out of his captain’s uniform and was now wearing a civilian suit, lightweight but still too heavy for the apartment where he had just arrived. He was already sweating under his blue pin-striped shirt.

  He gazed around. The place looked like the inside of every bedouin tent in which he had sat miserable and cross-legged from the Sahara to all the godforsaken desert outposts of the former empire where he had served in his time. Moroccan rugs covered every window and lay two deep in a cushion on the floor. Algerian, Moroccan, and Berber hangings and artifacts decorated the walls, and the leather and wood furniture was low and hard.

  With a sigh, the captain lowered himself to a chair inches off the floor, grateful that at least he was not expected to sit cross-legged on the floor. For a moment of déjà vu, he half-expected hot sand to gust from under the tent’s walls and burn around his ankles.

  But Bonnard was not in the Sahara, nor in a tent, and he had more pressing matters on his mind than an illusion of camel dung and blowing sand. His expression was fierce as he warned in French, “Sending that man to kill Martin Zellerbach in the hospital was a stupid move, M. Mauritania. Idiocy! How did you think he’d pull it off and escape successfully? They’d have caught him and flayed the truth out of him. And with Zellerbach’s doctor friend there, too. Merde! Now the Sûreté has doubled their alert, and it’ll be ten times more difficult to eliminate Zellerbach.”

  As Captain Bonnard ranted, the second man in the room, whom the captain had called M. Mauritania, the only name by which he was known in the international underworld of spies and criminals, remained expressionless. He was a stocky figure, with a round face and soft, well-manicured hands below the cuffs of a white shirt impeccably shot from the sleeves of a pearl-gray English suit direct from some custom tailor on Savile Row. His small features and bright blue eyes contemplated Bonnard and his outrage with the long-suffering patience of someone forced to listen to the incessant barking of a dog.

  When the captain finally finished his tirade, Mauritania, who wore a French beret, tucked a lock of brown hair behind his ear and answered in French, in a voice as hard as his hands were soft. “You underestimate us, Captain. We’re not fools. We sent no one to assassinate Dr. Zellerbach at the hospital or anywhere else. It would’ve been stupid to do at any time, and more than stupid to do now, when it’s quite possible he’ll never regain consciousness anyway.”

  Bonnard was taken aback. “But we decided there was no way we could take the chance of letting him live. He might know too much.”

  “You decided. We decided to wait. That’s our choice to make, not yours,” Mauritania said in a tone that ended the matter. “In any case, you and I have more important matters to consider.”

  “Such as, if you didn’t send that assassin, who did? And why?”

  Mauritania inclined his small, neat head. “I wasn’t thinking of that. But, yes, it’s a concern, and we’ll discover all we can in the matter. Meanwhile, we’ve studied the notes of the research assistant, which you gave us. We find they coincide precisely, if sketchily, with Chambord’s own data and reports. Nothing appears to have been forgotten or lost. Now that we have them, there should be no trouble from that direction. They’ve already been destroyed.”

  “Which will keep our activities nicely secret, as I told you,” Bonnard said, a touch of colonial condescension in his certainty. He heard it and did not care. “But I’m not at all sure about allowing Zellerbach to live. I’d suggest—”

  “And I,” Mauritania cut him off, “suggest you leave Zellerbach to us. You must pay attention to greater dangers, such as the police investigation into the ‘suicide’ of Chambord’s assistant. Under the circumstances, more than the police will be asking questions. How is the official probe into the suicide proceeding?”

  The Mauritanian had pulled Bonnard back, and for a moment the captain fought his disgust. But on the other hand, the reason he was doing business with the underworld leader was that he needed someone tough and
savvy, as relentless as himself. So what else should he expect? Besides, he saw the logic of the question.

  He forced himself to sound more accommodating. “I’ve heard nothing. But after the assistant ran away when he spotted your men, he stopped for petrol. The people at the station reported the assistant had heard about Émile Chambord’s death and was distraught, actually in tears. Devastating grief. That should give the motivation. He couldn’t go on without his mentor.”

  “You know nothing more? Not even from your French army headquarters?”

  “Not a word.”

  Mauritania considered. “That doesn’t worry you?”

  “No news is good news.” Bonnard gave a cold smile at the cliché.

  Mauritania’s nose wrinkled with disgust. “That’s a Western proverb as dangerous as it’s stupid. Silence in a matter such as this is far from golden. A suicide is difficult to fake well enough to fool police detectives with any brains or experience, to say nothing of the Deuxième Bureau. I suggest you or your people find out what the police and secret service actually know about the assistant’s death, and find out quickly.”

  “I’ll look into it,” Bonnard agreed grudgingly. He adjusted his weight, preparing to stand.

  But Mauritania raised his small hand, and, with a sigh, Bonnard sank back down onto the low, hard chair.

  “One more thing, Captain Bonnard. This friend of Zellerbach’s…What do you know about him?”

  Bonnard would soon be missed from work and wanted to leave. He controlled his impatience and said, “The man’s name is Lieutenant Colonel Jonathan Smith. He’s an old friend of Zellerbach’s, a medical doctor, and was sent here by Zellerbach’s family. At least that’s what Smith told the hospital, and from what I’ve been able to learn from my other sources, it’s accurate. Zellerbach and Smith grew up together in some place called Iowa.” He had trouble pronouncing it.

  “But from what you’ve also told me about the assassination attempt on Zellerbach at the hospital, this Dr. Smith acted more like a man with combat or police experience. You say he came to the hospital armed?”