Dark Zone

57

After he finished talking to Rubens, Karr went up to Montmarte to see the second cousin LaFoote had stayed with in Paris. It turned out to be a waste of time; the cousin wasn’t around and there was no way to let himself into the small street-level apartment without being seen. He went over and asked one of the nosier neighbors watching him from a nearby window if he knew where the man had gone; the woman answered civilly but curtly, telling him that Monsieur Terre’s uncle had died and he was most likely with the family.

“You see anybody else poking around?” Karr asked the woman in French.

“Tâtonner?” she answered, repeating the infinitive form of the verb poke.

Karr held his hands out and apologized for his poor French, first in French and then in English, claiming to be a Canadian from Montreal who knew the older Monsieur LaFoote and had hoped to find him with his second cousin. That got her to lighten up just a little, and she told him that Monsieur Terre kept mostly to himself, except for his very nice uncle — the age difference made him seem more an uncle than a cousin. It was the same uncle, LaFoote, who now was gone, to everyone’s great sorrow.

Tommy thanked her and borrowed a piece of paper to leave a note. He scribbled something and then went over to the cousin’s front door, slipping it into the crack — then placing a set of bugging devices on the sill so the Art Room would know if the place was broken into.

Tommy went back to the embassy to use the phones and see if any of the local intelligence guys had anything useful. After a few fruitless attempts to locate the priest, Tommy decided he would take a break and called Deidre. He got her answering machine and on the spur of the moment told her he’d be at the bar of the Ritz on the Champs Elysées at eleven if she wanted to have a drink. Karr had never been to the Ritz and didn’t actually know for a fact that the famous hotel had a bar. But what the hey.

Then he called the sister of LaFoote’s friend Vefoures, whom LaFoote had spoken to the other day in the car via cell phone.

“I’m a friend of Monsieur LaFoote,” he told her in French when she picked up. “I’m afraid I have bad news. Very bad news.”

When the woman didn’t answer, Karr told her that LaFoote had died and the police were investigating. When he finished, the woman asked what sort of friend he was.

“A new one,” said Karr, laughing — but only for a moment. “I admired Monsieur LaFoote very much. We were working together on something. I’d like to ask you some questions about it. And about your brother.”

“I don’t know much,” she said. And before Karr could say anything else she burst out crying. Her wails continued for quite a while; finally she hung the phone up without saying anything else. Karr decided the best thing to do was let her be.

Shortly before nine, Karr went over to Gare du Nord, the train station where he was supposed to meet LaFoote. He took two Marines from the embassy detail with him in plainclothes, hoping that whoever had killed the old French agent would be looking for him. But if someone was, neither Karr nor the Marines could spot the person. The Art Room grumbled about the lousy French video system, which covered only a small portion of the station, but even before the train from Aux Boix came in it was clear to Karr that the station wasn’t being watched.

The Marines liked the cloak-and-dagger stuff well enough to suggest he join them for a drink when they went off-duty. He took a rain check, heading back to the embassy to see how the French had reacted to the Desk Three briefing on the Eiffel Tower threat.

The reaction could be summed up in one word: Impossible!

Despite the detailed brief Desk Three had prepared, despite the high-level contacts and the comprehensive information, the French simply didn’t believe that the threat was anything more than American imagination run amok. Plots against the Eiffel Tower were very popular among crack-pots and terrorist wannabes, but no serious campaign against the tower had ever been undertaken. And besides, as far as the French were concerned, Middle Eastern terrorists had no beef with them — France was a vigorous defender of Arab rights. Yes, there might be some dissension of late as the French moved to work more closely with their American allies, but why would anyone want to destroy the Eiffel Tower?

Karr couldn’t really blame the French for not taking the threat seriously. He didn’t see all of the connections himself. Johnny Bib’s team had developed a theory that a car thief named Mussa Duoar had been working on a plan to topple the Eiffel Tower with a massive bomb blast at the base of the monument. Duoar seemed an unlikely terrorist: the man made a tidy living selling stolen automobiles, a fact that everyone in France except for the police seemed to know. More than likely the police did know it but had been paid to keep quiet; in any event, Duoar had escaped prosecution even though he had been investigated several times. Perhaps it helped that many of his cars seemed to have been stolen in Germany and England and then transported to France; few Frenchmen were the actual victims of his crimes.

Even with the lightweight high-yield explosive Vefoures had been working on, the analysts calculated that it would take a medium-sized bus to carry what was needed to destroy one of the four legs of the tower. That was a lot of explosives.

However, some of the materials needed to make the explosive had been purchased by a dummy corporation Duoar used in his stolen-car ring.

The CIA and State Department intelligence people at the embassy were divided about how real the threat was. Karr listened to them debate and tried to remain neutral, despite their prodding. Finally he just got up and left the embassy, walking out of the grounds and down the Champs Elysées toward the Ritz. He checked in with the Art Room as he walked.

“Nothing new,” said Telach. “You’d better get to bed.”

“Thanks, Mom.”

He turned off the communications system before she could protest.