Fear No Evil

Chapter 44

I wobbled on my feet and had to put my hand out on the wall of the elevator to keep from collapsing. Clearly, they were taking me to identify Bree’s body.

As the elevator doors closed, I breathed in through my nose again and smelled that same vile odor I associate with autopsies. We rose. My stomach churned. I thought I was going to be violently ill in the small space.

Bree is dead. Why else bring me to a morgue?

The elevator stopped. The doors opened into a large, high-ceilinged space that bustled with a good fifty agents, most in plainclothes and carrying pistols in shoulder harnesses or hip holsters, working phones and making notes in French on huge whiteboards set up all around the room.

Here and there stood several large video screens. One showed a 3-D rendition of what I assumed was a Parisian street.

There was a bigger crowd standing around the farthest screen, which was showing an aerial view of that same street. We walked up to the back of the crowd, where a woman in her fifties turned, smiled, and shook my hand.

“Inspector Simone Marché with French counterterrorism, Dr. Cross,” she whispered. “We know your work and welcome you.”

I was about to say, Can you please tell me if my wife’s alive? when I heard a weary but familiar voice speaking in French.

“Bree!” I shouted.

My wife stood in front of the screen next to a tall, willowy woman with steel-gray hair. Bree looked like she’d been through hell, but when she saw me, she grinned with relief. Agents moved aside as we walked to each other, both with tears in our eyes. We threw our arms around each other and people began to clap.

“Oh, Alex, you don’t know how much I needed you here.”

“And you don’t know what it took me to get here.”

She drew back from the embrace. “Thank you. For loving me enough to...” Bree couldn’t go on and buried her head in my chest, weeping.

Inspector Marché came up and said, “She’s been through a lot, and we haven’t been easy on her.”

The willowy woman walked up and introduced herself as Marianne Le Tour of Bluestone Group’s Paris office.

“Can she leave now?” Le Tour asked Marché. “So she can get some sleep?”

“We should hold her,” Marché said. “There is still the matter of the gun.”

“She had a legitimate permit,” Le Tour said. “And thank God she had the gun, Inspector, or who knows if Valentina Ponce would still be alive.”

“Allowing her to walk after she participated in a firefight in the streets of Paris is going to be a difficult thing for me to sell to my superiors.”

“Can you tell me what happened?” I asked.

Marché hesitated and then said, “We believe one person, maybe more, got access to the basement of a building nearly two blocks from the shooting. All the buildings in the seventeenth are connected in one way or another. These people somehow knew the route. They got to the top of an apartment building near the restaurant Canard de Flaque and shot Philippe Abelmar’s chief of security with a silenced weapon.”

Bree nodded and said, “After that, they shifted to an automatic weapon to draw out Abelmar and kill him.”

“Your wife is a very brave woman, Dr. Cross,” Inspector Marché said. “She rescued Abelmar’s young personal assistant while the bullets were still raining down.”

Bree shook her head. “I thought for sure they were going to cut us in half, but they stopped shooting when the bullets were less than a foot away. Valentina and I weren’t targets, I guess.”

“They were professionals, no doubt,” Marché said. “Which is why I suspect this is not terrorism but an assassination.”

“Motive?” I said.

Marianne Le Tour said, “I’ve got one. Desmond Slattery, our financial expert, has been looking into the books of the Pegasus Group, especially the Paris operation. There appear to be ties to accounts in banks in Mexico that have been known to do business with the Alejandro cartel.”

“Wait, what?” I said. “From here?”

“It fits, Alex,” Bree said. “Abelmar was talking to me about setting up shell companies to move money to the Caribbean.”

“This also fits,” I said, reaching into my pocket for my cell phone. “Before I flew here, I was able to interview Marco Alejandro in prison in Colorado. He told me that the cartel itself has been under attack for years from a group of people known as Maestro or M.”

I showed them the text I’d received when I landed. “I’ve been getting texts from this M for years and always assumed it was a single person. But Alejandro convinced me that Maestro is actually a group of people acting in concert under the command of a leader they call M.”

“You think this Maestro group is behind the shooting in the seventeenth?” Marché said.

“I do. I also believe M or someone in Maestro stopped the shooter from cutting down Bree and Abelmar’s personal assistant.”