Conviction

1

So confident was the target in his invincibility that Sam Fisher had little trouble finding him, and even less in determining how to best take him down. Then again, as jobs went, Romain Doucet wasn’t the toughest nut Fisher had ever cracked. Not even close, in fact. He did, however, rank high on Fisher’s “Waste of Humanity” list.

As he had been for the last hour, Doucet was holding court, as it were, on the bleachers beside a basketball court off rue Voltaire, under the shadow of the Cathedral of Notre-Dame. Physically, the Frenchman was impressive: almost six and a half feet tall, 270 pounds, with a weight lifter’s body. On the other hand, his powder blue gangsta-style tracksuit and gold chains were something less than magisterial.

Fisher, sipping coffee and reading his copy of L’hebdo du Vendredi, watched, trying to guess what topics someone like Doucet might be covering. Judging by the guffaws and gaping of his five compatriots, the man’s proclamations involved whatever women happened to stroll by on the sidewalk. Fisher caught only a few snippets of conversation, but most of Doucet’s comments seemed to be anatomical in nature. This was no surprise. In fact, it was Doucet’s lack of impulse control that had brought him into Fisher’s sights.

Romain Doucet fancied himself an up-and-coming Mafioso of sorts, though most of his crimes involved strong-arm robbery and burglary. But his crew was loyal and the residents of his neighborhood frightened, so Doucet never wanted for an alibi, and this, sadly, was the case in the recent rape of a local man’s fifteen-year-old daughter. The police had investigated, of course, but with no forensic evidence, and eyewitnesses placing Doucet elsewhere at the time of the crime, the city prosecutor had been forced to drop the case. The girl’s father refused to accept this, and word quickly spread that the father would be willing to pay for retribution. Reims was a relatively crime-free city, however; what few solicitors the father received had clearly been unequal to the task. For his part, Fisher had, over the last year, realized the mercenary business was one of feast or famine (too often the latter), so he had taken the job. Any other time and he would happily have done the job for free, simply because Doucet deserved it, but men of Fisher’s ostensible vocation weren’t known for their sentimentality, and he dared not show any now. Plus, the five thousand euros — almost seven thousand U.S. dollars — would cover his expenses for the next week or so, until he received his next payment from his German friend. What interested Fisher most, however, was one of Doucet’s side businesses: identity theft. If one knew where to look, money was fairly easy to come by, but not so with passable identity documents. For what he had to accomplish over the next month, he’d need plenty of those.

Rodolphe Vernier spent thirty-two years making his fortune from a chain of high-end brasseries in Paris and Marseille before retiring in 1999 and turning the business over to his sons. A widower, he retired to Reims, where he met his current wife. Shortly after they married, Vernier adopted the woman’s daughter, Marie. He loved the girl as his own, he’d told Fisher during their first meeting, and if not for his advanced age and prominence would have happily handled Romain Doucet himself. From any other man it might have come off as a boast, but the hard sadness in Vernier’s eyes told Fisher the man was telling the truth.

“You found him?” Vernier now asked Fisher. They were sitting on Vernier’s cobblestoned garden patio, beside a trickling fountain — a puffy-faced marble cherub spitting water in a high arc. “He was where I said he would be?”

“I found him,” Fisher replied in French. He wore a disguise, not a good one, but enough that Vernier would have trouble giving an accurate description: a ball cap that hid Fisher’s shaggy hair, dark glasses, and five days’ worth of stubble.

“You can do it?” Vernier asked.

“Yes. I won’t kill him, though.”

“No? Why not? If it is money—”

“It’s not money. Neither of us needs the trouble. If you hurt a deserving man, the police will smile in private; if you kill a man — even if he’s deserving of it — the prosecutors will force them to do their job. Trust me: When I’m done, Doucet won’t ever be the same.”

Vernier considered this, then nodded. “Do you want part of the money now?”

“No.” Again Fisher felt a pang of guilt: If not necessary to his larger mission, he would tell Vernier to keep the money. Handling Doucet was a necessary public service. Even so, Fisher now gave Vernier instructions on where and when to leave the cash. “Once I’ve done the job, I’ll pick it up. How is your daughter getting along?”

Vernier shrugged. “A bit better, we think. She is seeing a therapist. She has started talking to us, taking an interest in things. I want to thank you for—”

“Thank me by forgetting me. Forget me. Forget you hired me to do this. Don’t talk about it to anyone. No bragging. For the next twenty-four hours, go out with your family and be seen. Do you understand?”

“An alibi.”

“Yes.”

Vernier studied Fisher for a few seconds. “Aren’t you going to threaten me — tell me not to talk to the police?”

Fisher gave him a hard smile. “You won’t tell the police.”

“No, I suppose not.” Fisher held his gaze until he said it again: “I won’t.”

“They will come see you, ask you questions. Don’t be too quick with your alibi. Let them do the legwork. Tell them you’re not sorry about what happened to Doucet, but you and your wife and daughter are just trying to move on with your lives. For a while everyone will assume you’re responsible. Stick to your story and it will pass. Understood?”

“I understand.”

“Keep your eye on the news Sunday. Leave the key for me later tonight. I’ll collect.” On Fisher’s instructions, Vernier had left a manila envelope containing the money in a locker he’d rented at a local hostel. Once certain Fisher had in fact done the job, Vernier would leave the key under a bird feeder in the backyard.

Fisher stood up and extended his hand to the Frenchman. “Good luck to you.”

“And you.”

Doucet and his gang of five had watched too many episodes of The Sopranos, and perhaps the Godfather trilogy a dozen too many times, going so far as to have their own social club/communal apartment: a 2,500-square-foot Quonset-style warehouse in a largely abandoned industrial park on Reims’s western outskirts. Every weekend night, after trolling the city’s bars, they returned to the warehouse — sometimes with women they’d picked up but more often alone — where they drank and watched bad kung fu movies until dawn.

Fisher tailed them on foot for an hour, just long enough to be sure they were sticking to their Saturday-night routine of barhopping, then walked back to his car and drove to the industrial park. He found a spot a half mile from the warehouse, then walked the remaining distance, making a complete circuit of the side streets before spiraling inward to the bolt-hole he’d scouted earlier. It was nearly eleven, so the area was dark and quiet. He found the thicket of trees that bordered the warehouse’s loading ramp and settled down to wait. He had time to think.

In the space of a year his life had taken a dramatic turn. Not that he hadn’t expected it, but the adjustment had been tougher than he’d anticipated. Before… now, he thought. Before: a covert soldier, a Splinter Cell for Third Echelon, the NSA’s top secret operations branch. Now: a countryless mercenary. A murderer. No, it was worse than that, wasn’t it? He was a man who had betrayed and murdered one of his oldest and finest friends: Lambert. None of it seemed real, as though the whole thing were a fuzzily remembered movie he’d seen long ago.

Someday, perhaps, the truth would come out and the situation would be judged differently, but today wasn’t that day, and there was no guarantee that day would come at all. For now he would deal with what was in front of him and keep looking for the light at the end of the tunnel. At this thought, Fisher smiled. What was that old saying? “Be careful the light at the end of the tunnel isn’t an oncoming train.”

Overhead spread a rumble of thunder, followed moments later by a flash of lightning to the south. A soft rain began to fall, pattering on the leaves around him. He pulled up his hood and kept watching.

Shortly before 1:00 A.M., Doucet’s rust-on-white, hubcapless Citroën Relay van pulled into the driveway alongside the warehouse and followed it to the circular turnaround behind the loading dock. With a soft squealing of brakes, the Relay pulled to a stop twenty feet from where Fisher crouched. From inside, there came laughter and shouting. No female voices, as far as Fisher could tell. The Relay’s side door slid open, and the Doucet gang came tumbling out, each of them barely negotiating the step down to the tarmac. This, Fisher thought, was going to be disappointingly easy. In his weeklong surveillance of the gang, he’d seen no guns but plenty of knives and truncheons. The two acts of violence he’d witnessed — group beatings administered to passersby for some slight, real or imagined — had confirmed what Fisher had already guessed: Doucet and his gang were bullies, but they were also good street fighters. No matter. Tonight good wasn’t going to be good enough, and he had no intention of letting it descend into a fight — at least not a fair one. No such thing in this business.

Doucet emerged from the van. Despite the chilling rain, he wore red nylon Nike track pants and a tight white T-shirt that accentuated his muscles.

“Hey, André, get the damned door open, huh!” he yelled.

André hurried up the loading-dock steps to the door. He looked up, noted the dimmed light fixture Fisher had disabled earlier, and gave it a tap with his finger. The light stayed dark. Another tap. Still dark.

“André!” Doucet drunkenly stumbled toward the steps. “Forget that!”

André got the door opened, and Doucet stepped through, followed by the rest.

Fisher gave them ten minutes to settle in, grab a fresh round of beers, and start whatever kung fu movie was on the night’s playbill; then he shed his rucksack and retrieved the pair of two-by-fours he’d stashed under a pile of leaves earlier that day. He walked down the driveway to the front of the building and braced the first two-by-four under the front door’s knob, then returned to the rear and did the same to the loading-dock door. He returned to the trees and retrieved his rucksack.

At the top of the loading ramp, he boosted himself onto the railing, then, with one hand braced on the wall, leaned forward until he could reach the defunct, car-sized air-conditioning unit affixed to the warehouse’s back wall. Once he had a good grip on the unit, he stepped off the rail with his left foot and placed it on a flange jutting from the AC unit. He followed with his other hand and foot, then boosted himself atop the unit. From there it was a short climb up the utility ladder to the roof. Walking catfooted, he crossed the corrugated sheet metal until he reached the skylight; this, too, he’d already surveyed. He’d found it unlocked, but the hinges were squeaky, so he’d fixed them with a few squirts of silicone grease from a flip-top travel bottle. He lowered himself flat, pressed his ear to the sheet metal, and listened: laughter and, in the background, melodramatic martial-arts shouting and tinny movie music. Fisher lifted the skylight hatch until it rested against the roof, then slipped his legs through, feeling around until his right foot found a ladder rung. He climbed down a few feet, reached up, and closed the skylight, then climbed down to the floor. He was in a closet adjoining the bathroom. The previous owner had turned the warehouse’s raised office area, which occupied the rear third of the space, into an open apartment that now overlooked the Doucet gang’s social club — a collection of tattered recliners and couches clustered around a fifty-inch LCD TV.

Fisher pressed his ear to the door. He heard no one in the bathroom. He opened the door, took a moment to grease the hinges, then stepped past the toilet and sink on the right and eased open the exterior door; this one made no noise.

Directly ahead of him, spanning the width of the loft apartment and ending at a set of steps along the opposite wall, was a waist-high steel railing. To his right were a small kitchen, a breakfast nook, and a laundry area, each separated by a hanging mustard yellow bedsheet. The loft’s width was divided every ten feet by load-bearing stanchions.

Clink. A dish. Fisher froze.

As he watched, one of Doucet’s men — Pierre, it looked like — appeared, moving from right to left. He trotted down the stairs and out of sight. Fisher eased forward along the short wall until he could see over the railing. The gang was all there, still drunk and clearly entranced by the movie, occasionally shouting curses at characters and standing up to mimic a particularly pleasing kick or punch.

Fisher returned to the closet, retrieved what he needed from his rucksack, then shut the door, leaving it cracked open. Now he would let nature do its work.

The wait was short. Ten minutes later he heard the clunk of feet coming up the steps. Ten seconds later the bathroom door swung open. Through the gap between the closet door and the jamb, Fisher saw the one known as Louis walk in. Fisher let the man position himself before the toilet, then swung open the door, stepped out, and tapped him hard behind the ear with a lead-and-leather sap. Louis dropped straight down. Fisher caught him by the collar and lowered him noiselessly to the floor. He quickly secured Louis’s feet and hands with plastic flex-cuffs, then flushed the toilet, ran the faucet for a few seconds, and moved into the kitchen.

He opened the door under the sink, knelt down, stuck his head in the cabinet, and then called in guttural French, “Hey, Pierre!”

No response.

“Hey, Pierre!”

“What?”

“Gimme a hand here. Something’s wrong with the sink!”

Footsteps thumped up the stairs, then across the floor into the kitchen. Head still inside the cabinet, Fisher stuck his hand out and waved Pierre forward. He knelt down to join him, and as his head slid inside, Fisher brought his seven-inch Gerber Guardian dagger up and laid the edge under Pierre’s jawline.

“Not a word,” Fisher whispered, “or I’ll open your throat for you. Nod if you understand.”

Pierre nodded.

“No matter what happens, your friends won’t be quick enough to save you. Understand?”

Another nod.

“We’re going to stand up and move to the bathroom. Nice and quiet now…”

Fisher got Pierre on his feet and herded him into the bathroom. When Pierre saw Louis’s prostate form, he stiffened and started to turn around, but Fisher was ready with his sap. With a groan, Pierre dropped in a heap atop his friend. He bound them together, flex-cuffed hands and ankles interlocked.

Two down. Three to go.

Had this been a Third Echelon-sanctioned mission, his standard operating procedure would have been anonymity above all: no muss, no fuss, no footprints. In this case, however, disruption was everything. Romain Doucet was about to experience, in a dramatic way, the law of cause and effect.

Fisher made no attempt to hide himself coming down the stairs. Even so, he’d nearly reached the bottom before Doucet noticed him. “Who the hell are you?”

“Meter reader.”

“What?”

“Census taker.”

Now Doucet and the other three — Georges, Avent, and André—were on their feet.

“How did you get in here?” This from Avent. The top of his right ear was missing; the crescent shape suggested he’d been Mike Tysoned.

Fisher circled the group, keeping them on his right with a couch between them. He kept his eyes fixed on Doucet. No one would move without a sign from him.

“I said, how did you get in here?”

“Pierre and Louis let me in,” Fisher said. “You can ask them yourselves when they wake up.”

Four pairs of eyes darted up to the loft, then back at Fisher. The fact that Doucet was still talking rather than attacking told Fisher the Frenchman dealt poorly with uncertainty. This brazen stranger in his house had upset the order of things. Had interrupted his Saturday night.

“This is a mistake, asshole,” Doucet growled. “Do you know who I am?”

“You mean aside from a general dirtbag? No, I can’t think of a thing.”

“You’re dead, mister! Georges, call the others and get them over here. We’re going to need help burying this guy.”

Georges pulled the cell phone from his pocket and dialed. He stared at the screen, then frowned. “No signal.”

Fisher pulled a cigarette-pack-sized black box from his jacket pocket and held it up for them to see. “GSM signal jammer. Range is about thirty feet. You might have better luck outside.”

At Doucet’s nod, Georges headed for the door. It didn’t budge.

“Almost forgot,” Fisher said. “I locked us in.”

“Locked us in?” Doucet repeated with a smirk. “Why the hell would you want to do that?”

“I don’t want any interruptions.”

Georges had returned to Doucet’s side. The four of them glared at Fisher. Doucet said, “You’ve got five seconds to get out of here alive.”

Fisher let the half smile he’d been wearing fall from his face. “Stop running your mouth, Lurch, and let’s get to it.”

Fisher barely got the words out before Doucet stepped forward, grabbed the arm of the couch, and tossed it aside as though it were a plastic chaise lounge. Fisher heard the distinctive snick of a switchblade opening a split second before Avent charged. The man was fast, but predictable, telegraphing his moves with his shoulders. He slashed wide at Fisher, who stepped back far enough to feel the blade’s passage under his chin but close enough that a quick step forward brought him inside Avent’s circle. He grabbed the knife arm at the wrist and the elbow, then dropped his own hips and twisted, putting all his weight into the torque. Avent’s arm shattered at the elbow. From the corner of his eye, Fisher saw movement — two smaller figures, Georges and André—so he spun again, levering the screaming Avent’s arm until he came around into their path. Fisher kicked Avent in the back of the knee, dropping him, then shoved him into Georges’s legs. Georges stumbled forward. Fisher met him, sidestepping left to keep Georges between himself and Doucet. As he drew even with Georges’s head, Fisher lashed out with a side fist that landed on the point of his jawbone, just below the ear. There was a muffled crack as the bone shattered. Georges gasped and went down, writhing. Seeing his two comrades down, André hesitated, but only for a moment before he, too, charged in, arms flailing in windmill punches. Fisher took a step back, waited until André’s weight was on his lead foot, then toe-kicked him in the kneecap, shattering it. As he pitched forward, Fisher rammed his knee forward, catching him on the point of the chin. His head snapped back and he slumped backward, unconscious.

For a long ten seconds Doucet stared at Fisher, his chest heaving, the veins in his beefy neck pulsing. He glanced around, gave Fisher a sneering grin, and then walked over to one of the recliners. Beside it lay a cricket bat. Doucet hefted the thirty-eight-inch, three-pound length of white willow and squared off with Fisher again.

“Want to run now, asshole?” Doucet asked.

“No, thanks. In fact, that bat will suit my needs perfectly. I’m going to take it away and use it on you.”

“How do you figure?”

Fisher let the smile drop from his face. “You’re still running your mouth.”

Doucet charged. He hadn’t taken two steps before Fisher’s Gerber was out of its sheath. Doucet’s left leg was just coming forward when the dagger slammed, hilt deep, into his thigh. The left foot came down and immediately slipped from under the Frenchman as though he’d stepped onto an ice rink. He went down, knife hilt first, into the concrete. Then came the screaming.

It took ten minutes to get Pierre, Louis, Georges, André, and Avent cuffed and arranged on the couch. Doucet, who’d received a sedating tap from Fisher’s sap, was barely conscious, moaning gibberish as Fisher secured him to the sturdy oak coffee table, wrists and ankles cuffed to the legs.

Fisher made himself a cup of tea, sat down in one of the recliners, and waited until the others regained consciousness. Doucet was the last to come around. Fisher had bound the thigh wound using a sweatshirt he’d found stuffed between the couch cushions. Fisher’s aim had been true: The Gerber had struck no arteries, just muscle.

Pierre was the first to speak. “What the—”

“We’re done with questions, gentlemen. Now’s the time for answers. You run a thriving identity-theft business. I want to know where you keep your stock.”

Louis said, “We don’t have—”

Fisher silenced him with a raised hand. He picked up the cricket bat from beside his chair, then stood up and walked over to Doucet, who gaped at him. “I’m going to start hurting your boss,” Fisher said. “How badly is up to you. The quicker you give me what I want, the less pissed off he’s going to be at you.” Fisher brought the cricket bat level with his waist, extended his arm, let the bat hover over Doucet’s kneecap for a moment, then let it drop.

Crack!

Doucet screamed. Fisher let him get it out of his system, then said, “That’s not even broken, guys. Next time I’m going to put a little heart into it.”

“Tell him,” Doucet said.

No one spoke. They looked everywhere but at their boss.

“Tell him, or God help me!”

Louis said, “Behind the dryer. There’s a satchel.”

“Don’t go anywhere,” Fisher said, then went upstairs, retrieved the valise, and came back down. “One more piece of business. Romain, you’ve been misbehaving—”

“I didn’t—”

“Shut up. You’ve been misbehaving and now it’s time to atone. I’m going to do some things to you, and it’s going to involve a lot of pain, but you’ll survive. While you’re recuperating, I want you to remember this night. If you so much as litter or steal a magazine or curse at an old woman, I’ll come back here and kill you.” Fisher looked at the others, staring at each face in turn. “All of you. And I’ll take my time doing it, too. Understood?” Six heads nodded.

Doucet said, “Hey, hey, you don’t have to do this. I can give you—”

“There’s nothing you can give me, and there’s nothing you can say. You’re a bully. Bullies’ brains are wired differently. To truly get it, you need an unforgettable lesson.”

“Please, don’t—”

“Too late for that,” Fisher said. He hefted the cricket bat, tested its weight, then walked closer to Doucet, who was openly sobbing now. “Don’t worry,” Fisher said. “You’ll pass out quickly.”