Conviction

3

Fisher was awoken by the cricket chirp of his iPhone. Having set the ringtone to match only one incoming number, he knew the alert meant visitors had arrived. He checked the time: 11:15 P.M. He sat up in bed and looked around, momentarily confused by his surroundings — the by-product of moving around so much. The decor and layout of chain hotel rooms tended to blur together.

The good news was that the visitors weren’t his but rather Boutin’s. The night before, Fisher had planted a homemade motion detector around Boutin’s apartment door: the tremble sensor from a vehicle’s antitheft GPS tracker wired to a prepaid cell phone. The tremble sensor was buried beneath Boutin’s doormat, and the cell phone buried against the wall a few feet away, its antenna jutting up among some weeds. Lacking the technological edge that working for 3E had provided, Fisher had, during the last year, become a fair inventor.

Having adopted the habit of sleeping in his clothes, he had only to grab his rucksack and head for the door.

His hotel, the Monopole, was a couple hundred yards north of Boutin’s apartment, on place Drouet d’Erlon. The proximity was a risk, he knew, but having disposed of the François Dayreis alias and checked into the Monopole with one of Emmanuel’s superbly altered passports, he felt relatively secure.

Outside, the streets were deserted and dark, save the yellow glow of the streetlamps reflecting on the damp cobblestones. He walked north, turned right onto rue de l’Etape, then immediately left into passage Subé, which took him south along an alley lined with boutiques and side entrances to restaurants until he was within sight of rue Condorcet. He stopped a hundred feet short and found a darkened doorway. Across the street lay a kebab restaurant, and to the left of it the tree-lined northern entrance to the courtyard outside Boutin’s apartment.

From his rucksack he withdrew his EOS 1D Mark III. He affixed the AstroScope Night Vision, powered up the Canon, and brought the viewfinder up to his eye. In the greenish glow of the NV, he scanned the courtyard. Standing so still was the figure that he passed it twice before he realized what he was seeing. Japanese, medium build, shaved head — in his mid-twenties, too young to be bald. An aesthetic choice. Fisher zoomed in, switched the selector to burst mode, and pressed the shutter button. He stayed focused on the man, waiting to see if he was smoking or waiting for someone, but for a full two minutes the man stayed stock-still. Disciplined. The man had “operator” written all over him.

Fisher moved on, scanning deeper into the courtyard. There were too many trees. If he was right about the Japanese guy, there would be others. This one was covering the northern entrance to the courtyard… Would he have partners at the west and south entrances? Time to move.

Moving with exaggerated slowness, Fisher backed out of his doorway and retraced his steps until he reached the intersection of passage Subé and passage Talleyrand, where he turned west. He emerged back on Drouet d’Erlon, just south of his hotel, turned left through the square, around the fountain at its center, then onto Marx Dormoy. Ten feet from the west entrance to the courtyard, Fisher stopped short. He scanned his flanks with the Canon, then moved up and peeked with the AstroScope around the corner.

Like the Japanese man, this one was hidden in the trees directly across from Boutin’s apartment door. She, too, was as still as a statue, save her eyes, which kept up a constant scan. Fisher shot a burst of her, then zoomed in and panned left. He stopped, panned back. In the NV, there was no way to be sure of the hair color, but the face looked familiar… He zoomed in again. Kimberly Gillespie. Fisher lowered the camera from his face, took a deep breath, and squeezed his eyes shut. His situation had just gotten exponentially more complicated. Damn.

Fisher retraced his steps again: north to the square, then left and left again down rue Théodore Dubois to where it intersected rue de Vesles, then east for a hundred yards to the ATM just outside the courtyard’s southern entrance.

He ducked down, crab-walked up the alley gate, and peeked around the corner and into the alley.

He froze.

The third watcher was standing thirty feet away, just inside the archway. Fisher kept still, barely breathing, until his eyes readjusted to the darkness and he could see a silhouette of the figure’s face: thin and wiry with a hawk nose. Another familiar face? Fisher waited until the face rotated left, toward the interior of the courtyard; then he raised the AstroScope and zoomed in. The face turned again, back toward Fisher and into three-quarter profile. Fisher took a quick burst, then lowered the camera and froze. The man’s eyes seemed to fix on Fisher’s position. Five seconds passed. Ten. Thirty seconds. The face rotated again. Fisher ducked back and let out his breath.

He brought the Canon up to his face and switched on the LCD screen. He clicked through the last series of pictures. No mistake. He knew this one, too: Allen Ames. As it invariably did, the name caused Fisher’s subconscious to start whispering. Something about Ames didn’t sit right.

Fisher brought his mind back on track. So, three on overwatch, which meant at least one person inside talking to Boutin — no, there’d be two inside with Boutin, so five in all. One team leader and two pairs. A standard field team. There was no doubt about the opposition now.

Next: transportation. They wouldn’t rely on taxis or mass transit, which meant rental cars, at least two of them. Using the AstroScope, Fisher scanned up and down rue de Vesles; the street was under partial construction with temporary NO PARKING signs every thirty feet. The cars would be close, but not too close. A quarter mile or less.

Fisher started walking.

It took fifteen minutes. On rue de Thillois, a few hundred yards southeast of Boutin’s apartment, he found a blue Opel and a green Renault parked nose to tail. Both bore Europcar CDG stickers — Paris’s Charles de Gaulle airport. This told him something. Someone had been lazy with tradecraft.

Fisher walked to the park across and down the street and found his spot: a bench sheltered by the low-hanging boughs of a tree with a clear sight line to the cars. He did a quick circuit of the park, checking approaches, exits, and angles; then he returned to the bench, pulled a rolled-up newspaper from his pocket, lay down, and covered himself with a hobo blanket. He completed the disguise with a half-consumed bottle of wine, which he placed on the ground beside the bench’s leg.

Twenty minutes later the Japanese man and Kimberly appeared to the east on rue de Thillois. They were a quarter mile away and heading toward the cars. Fisher looked around. Where are you?… There. Fifty yards to the west, at the corner of rue des Poissonniers, stood a wiry figure. Ames. Good tradecraft. Kimberly and her partner — Fisher had started thinking of him as a Japanese Vin Diesel — would do a walk by of the cars, looking for signs of tampering or surveillance while Ames did the same from his static position.

At the next intersection, Kimberly and Vin split up: Kimberly going straight ahead, Vin crossing over. As she passed the Opel and the Renault, she reached up with her left hand and adjusted her beret: an “all okay” signal to Vin, who replied by taking his right hand out of his pocket. Vin reached Ames’s corner and turned left. Kimberly kept walking, crossed the intersection, then took up position in a sunken doorway before a pharmacy. She muttered something — into her SVT (subvocal transceiver), he assumed — then went still, watching. This, Fisher knew, would be the final check-in with Vin and Ames before everyone rallied back at the cars. A nice bit of discipline. It was all too easy to dismiss such precautions as excessive — which they often are — but overcautiousness was an operator’s best friend, one of those habits that would, if you stayed in the business long enough, save your life one day. Fisher had seen the lack of it kill plenty of otherwise good spooks.

Who would it be? Fisher wondered. So far he recognized two of the three opposing players. Would he recognize the other two? He’d know soon enough. He tried to look ahead, tried to visualize the surrounding streets as a chessboard, placing Kimberly and Ames on their respective squares. Vin was still moving, probably circling the block; they’d want to triangulate on the cars’ position… There. Vin appeared at the intersection to the west and stopped, taking up a static overwatch post. That meant the team leader and the remaining team member would be coming from the north, probably down rue Jeanne d’Arc.

As if on cue, two figures turned the corner opposite Vin and started toward the cars. Fisher remained perfectly still. The team would be at its most alert now, as it reunited. Eggs in a basket.

When the new pair was fifty feet from the cars, Vin, Ames, and Kimberly left their posts, collapsing toward the cars. The newest pair, a man and woman Fisher could now see, reached the Opel. The woman, a blonde, peeled off and walked around to the driver’s side. Vin was right behind her, getting into the rear as the woman unlocked the doors. The man walked around the front of the Renault to the driver’s door. Kimberly walked past Fisher’s position, got in the front passenger seat as Ames got in the rear. Fisher lifted the AstroScope, focused on the Renault’s driver, shot a burst, then lowered the camera.

Within seconds, the cars pulled out and drove down the block. At the intersection the Renault headed north, the Opel south. Once the engines faded, Fisher called up the last batch of shots on the Canon’s LCD. In all but two of the pictures the driver’s face was partially obscured by a patch of reflection on the Renault’s windshield. The last two were enough. Fisher smiled. Ben Hansen. A decent choice for team leader. Nice to see you alive, Ben. Fisher hoped he didn’t regret playing a part in this.

Hansen would want to talk to the still-recuperating Doucet and company, but it was after midnight, well past visiting hours at the Centre Hospitalier Universitaire, so the visit would have to wait until morning — assuming they’d gotten into Reims late. If so, that left Hansen two options: settle in for the night or visit Doucet’s warehouse and see what they could see. Fisher guessed the latter; Ben Hansen was proactive, to put it mildly. A “bulldog” was perhaps a better term. Though the police wouldn’t have found anything of use at the warehouse, Team Hansen would be looking for altogether different evidence.

Fisher let five minutes pass, then walked back to Boutin’s block. It was time for another field exam. From the trees beside the kebab restaurant, he watched Boutin’s courtyard for fifteen minutes. Nothing moved. He moved in.

In the glow of his red-hooded penlight, he lifted the doormat. The tremble sensor had been moved, ever so slightly. Fisher checked the cell phone. It, too, showed signs of having been touched. Fail, he thought. Someone — probably Hansen — had either spotted or looked for the sensor. Having found it, he and his team should have doubled back and set up on Boutin’s courtyard to see if anyone came to collect the device. So far, it was a mixed report card: some good tradecraft but some dumb mistakes and a missed golden opportunity.

Fisher drove to Doucet’s warehouse and drove around the industrial park until he spotted the team’s cars; this time they’d parked a quarter mile apart. Hansen was learning.

He found a scrap yard, parked beside the hurricane fence enclosing the lot, then shook the fence a few times until certain no guard dogs were present. He then climbed atop the car, scaled the fence, and dropped down to the other side. On the west side of the dirt lot was a car compactor, next to it a crane with a glassed-in control booth. He climbed the ladder and slipped inside. A quarter mile to the north, over the tops of the stacked cars, he could see Doucet’s warehouse. He lifted the Canon to his eye and zoomed in. For five minutes nothing moved, and then, from the skylight hatch on the roof, a darkened figure appeared. Then a second. They padded across the roof and down the same air-conditioning unit he’d used to gain entry two nights earlier.

In the corner of the AstroScope he saw a glimmer of light. He panned that way but saw nothing, so he returned his focus to the warehouse. Another glimmer. He snapped around in time to catch it.

In a parking lot across the street from Doucet’s warehouse, a lone black Range Rover sat under a tree. Fisher zoomed in and adjusted the NV contrast until two man-shaped silhouettes came into view. He couldn’t make out faces, but there was no mistaking the object the passenger was holding: a spotting scope. Aimed at Doucet’s warehouse.