Murder on the Ile Saint-Louis

Tuesday Morning

PENETRATING THE FOG of sleep, Krzysztof heard a long, piercing whistle. He blinked awake, panicking, grabbing at what enfolded him. The stinging welts on his back flamed. He realized he was lying inside a sleeping bag on the floor. The memory of last night’s surprise attack came back: the CRS truncheons, sirens, revolving blue lights, Gaelle’s blood, their group scattering. The peaceful organized march shattered. Running, escaping through the wet bushes. The ransacked MondeFocus office and Brigitte’s anger and accusations.

Something clanged and sputtered. He inhaled the aroma of fresh-ground coffee and just-baked bread. His eyes cleared and he saw a red-haired woman sipping a soup bowl–sized café crème at a worn farm table. Despite the frigid air, she wore a lace halter top and torn jeans, and her feet were bare.

Now he remembered finding this safe place, a squat the others had told him about. No one would bother him here. He checked his cell phone for voice mail. Nothing. Why hadn’t Orla returned his call? He’d left three messages on her phone last night.

“Coffee, Prince Charming?” The woman grinned. La rouquine, the redhead, they’d called her. A steam kettle boiled on the stove in the squat’s industrial-sized kitchen.

He saw her blowtorch leaning against the battered Indian-style sandalwood screen. Gaelle had told him last week about this artiste who was sympathetic to their cause. She welded metal sculptures and could hold her wine. Last night’s empty bottles filled a corner. He had seen how much she could drink before he’d passed out.

The files were gone, Gaelle was in the hospital, MondeFocus was against him. Very well, he would act on his own.

He winced as he got to his feet, still in his Levi’s and half-buttoned shirt, and joined her by the stove, from which heat slowly emanated. She kissed him on both cheeks and handed him a bowl. Her hands, he saw, were rough with blackened fingernails. From the blowtorch, no doubt. The squat was on the site of what used to be an old farm, now scheduled for demolition. The last farm remaining in Paris, it was the abode of artists, political types, and immigrants without papers who hid there. Like him. No one would trace him here.

“I’m late, ma rouquine,” he said, glancing at the salvaged train-station clock hung on the peeling plastered wall.

“Come back, Krzysztof,” she said. “We’ll have a long lunch.”

He saw the dancing look in her gray-speckled eyes. But he had no time for that.

KRZYSZTOF GOT OFF the Number 38 bus by the Sorbonne. The headline of Le Parisien read RIOT BY MONDEFOCUS AT L’INSTITUT DU MONDE ARABE OIL CONFERENCE: TWENTY JAILED. He took a deep breath; if hadn’t known what to do before, he knew now.

His student ID folded in his back pants pocket, he walked between the pillars of the entry gate and hurried up the wide stone staircase to the library. The wood-vaulted reading room smelled of age—antique mahogany had warped with time and the walnut oil that had been rubbed into it for years had given the wood a rich patina. Krzysztof eyed the room, which was covered floor to ceiling with books but vacant except for a few older scholarly types bent over their work. Most of his fellow students were attending lectures.

He had to find proof. The proof that had been stolen from the MondeFocus office.

The librarian took his ID and he sat down at a computer terminal. He logged on using “Sophocles,” the user ID and password of a philosophy professor that he’d found taped under the desktop in a deserted office last week at noontime. It was so easy to steal passwords and IDs. Krzystof imagined that professor abhorred computers and preferred contemplating his navel, as did most of the tenured staff.

Last week he’d accessed Alstrom’s Web site. Alstrom was the oil conference’s major sponsor. Their external site displayed nothing but blatant propaganda about how their oil exploration enriched the world. Enriched their pockets, more likely.

Now he was going to try the site of Regnault, Alstrom’s PR firm. Operational files might contain telltale documents under a code or project name. He’d seen parts of environmental reports that had been withheld from the media, suppressed. And they’d made him sick.

He logged into a privileged user account and told the system to add a new user, Sophocles. So far, so good.

Ready for the plunge, he logged into Regnault with Sophocles. If Alstrom had bribed ministers to overlook discrepancies in its environmental reports and he could find evidence of this, he could salvage their protest and stop the execution of the proposed agreement.

His fingers tensed on the keyboard, feeling that particular rush, the crackle of expectation. In seven keystrokes he’d be inside Regnault’s network, scanning their operational documents. They’d never know their system had been infiltrated. Nine out of ten times they didn’t recheck privileged user accounts or monitor their firewall.

But a message flashed on the screen: If you read this, you’re dead.

Krzysztof froze. Someone was on to him.

Or . . . ?

He logged off and grabbed his hooded sweatshirt. He kept his head down, grabbed his ID, and passed through the turnstile before the librarian turned her head.