The Eden Prophecy

CHAPTER 12

Danielle sat in handcuffs, waiting in the private office of the commandant of the Police Nationale in central Paris. Hawker sat next to her, cuffed as she was, and seemed to be favoring his right shoulder.

For the moment they were alone.

“You all right?” she asked.

“Landed on my shoulder when the house blew up,” he said. “Hitting the water didn’t help it much.”

To be honest, she was surprised he’d even survived. “Why’d you go after them on that bike anyway?”

He looked at her. “Why did you run to the river?”

“I thought they were getting away.”

“There you go.”

She exhaled in exasperation. “Yes, but all I wanted to do was spot the boat and contact the police, not risk life and limb five times over on some insane stunt. That may have been the dumbest thing you’ve ever done.”

“Don’t be so sure,” he said. “There’s a lot of competition for that title.”

He made it a point to be funny, but the situation was not all that humorous. They’d been here for three hours, allowed no outside contact, not even with the embassy. Their papers had been confiscated and they hadn’t even been questioned yet. The situation could go either way: They could be released, or if a pissing match developed, they might not see the outside world for months.

To be honest, she wondered why they were being held in this office and not some dark cell. It made even less sense that they were being held together. Perhaps the commandant did not want the world to know they were there. Perhaps he was watching or listening, hoping they would give something away.

At that moment the door swung open. In walked Commandant Lavril, chief of the Paris police. He eyed them with some disdain and closed the door gently before walking to the chair behind his desk.

It was a massive, incredibly impressive desk, the kind that told anyone sitting across from it where the power resided in this particular room, the kind that might protect one from a bomb blast or a tornado or a meteor strike if one hid underneath it.

Danielle wondered how the hell they’d even fit the giant desk into this small room. Maybe the walls had been built around the monstrosity.

“Your papers check out,” the commandant said, flipping through the pages of their passports. “Your consulate confirms that you are here as part of your embassy’s security detail.”

He dropped the passports and glared at them.

She and Hawker had been given covers. No one at the embassy would recognize them on sight, but they’d been told what to say if something happened — as it quickly had.

“So that gives you the right to carry guns in my country,” Lavril said. “But not the right to use them on French citizens or to blow up our buildings.”

“You seem awfully concerned with the people who tried to kill us,” she said.

He shrugged. “They are French, you are not.”

“I promise you if a Frenchman was mugged on the streets of Washington, we wouldn’t be asking him what he did to provoke the attack.”

“You might,” Lavril said, “if he blew up half a block in Georgetown.”

The brawl was coming; she could feel it. She would go for the high ground and the commandant would stand and defend it. But begging was not her way.

“I don’t know how long you intend to hold us,” she said, “but you and I both know what’s going to happen. Sooner rather than later, a call is going to come in. From the right person in my government to the right person in yours. And after long conversations, which you will never know about, someone else is going to call down here and you’re going to be forced to release us whether you like it or not.”

Lavril simmered and she wondered if she’d hit close to the mark. Maybe that call had already come in.

“So are we free to go?” she asked.

Hawker smiled and held up his hands as if Lavril might just unlock them right then and there.

“No,” Lavril said drily, “you are anything but free.”

Hawker’s false smile faded and he dropped his hands with a noticeable wince from the shoulder pain.

Lavril continued. “At best, I will allow you to contact someone. But not until I find out what you were doing here. And what exactly is going on.”

“What’s going on,” she began, “is that two American citizens were almost killed at the hands of the terrorists on French soil. It can’t look good for the Sûreté that we had to save ourselves.”

Lavril laughed confidently. “We are no longer called the Sûreté, madam.”

Strike one.

“But since we are freely offering opinions, I will share one of mine: I have had two terrorist incidents in three days. Both involving Americans. It would take much to make me believe they are unrelated.”

“What you believe is irrelevant to me,” Danielle said.

“What I believe will prove to be incredibly relevant to you,” Lavril corrected. “I assure you of that.”

He looked at her oddly and then at Hawker.

“What about you?” he asked. “Do you speak?”

Hawker glared at Lavril. “Better to hold one’s tongue and be thought a fool,” he said finally, “than to speak out and confirm it.”

“So you are a fool,” Lavril said.

“I must be,” Hawker said. “How else would I end up in here?”

“Hmm,” the commandant mumbled. “I don’t think either of you are fools. And the fact that you quote the proverbs is more telling than you know. My nurse tells me you are a man covered in scars. Bullet wounds, knife wounds, even a few broken bones that seemed to have healed a little bit off.”

Because several pieces of shrapnel from the building had cut into Hawker and his shoulder had been injured, the first thing the police had done was remove his shirt, pull out the shrapnel, and stitch him up.

Two stitches here, three stitches there. Some gauze and tape on a third smaller cut.

They had of course relayed Hawker’s physical description to Lavril, partially because it would have seemed noteworthy and also because scars could help identify people. As far as Danielle knew, Hawker wasn’t in anyone’s database, but she couldn’t be sure.

“By their fruits you shall know them,” Lavril said, quoting scripture himself. “You are a killer: an assassin. Sent here to clean up a problem your government has been aware of for years.”

Danielle rolled her eyes. “Oh come on.”

“Monsieur Milan was on Interpol’s list,” Lavril reminded everyone. “No doubt he was on your list as well. One of your most wanted. Admit it, you came here for him.”

The words soaked in as Lavril glared down at them.

“And if you killed him,” Lavril added, “then you are responsible for the deaths of my officers, my men. In which case I will not release you, even if God himself calls on your behalf.”

He leaned back in his chair, tapping his pen on the desk like a drummer, waiting.

Now Danielle understood. In a way, she couldn’t blame Lavril. She’d lost people under her charge before. There was no deeper well of determination than finding a way to right such an act.

“We didn’t kill Ranga Milan and we didn’t kill your officers,” she said. “You know that. We came through customs two days after it happened. Besides, if we’d killed Ranga or your men, do you think we’d still be here?”

“Then you must have a different target,” he said.

Danielle remained still.

Lavril got up and came around to the front of the desk. He folded his arms, leaning back, resting against it.

She guessed it was a deliberate, practiced move. Sitting on the low-slung couch, with Lavril towering over them, they were at a distinct disadvantage.

“Perhaps your target was these terrorists — as you call them,” he said. “Though I must admit they seem a little out of their depth.”

He picked up a rap sheet of sorts.

“Roland Lange,” he said, apparently naming one of the men. “Two counts of purse snatching last year. Three counts of disorderly conduct, and minor assault. He’s gone from swearing at the police from the crowd, to a slab in the morgue, with a hunk of metal where his liver should be.”

Danielle squirmed a bit.

Lavril continued to read. “Dibea Monsigne was once an accomplice in a bungled car theft. Has been charged with two counts of assault for fights he seemed to have lost … public drunkenness … disorderly conduct.”

Lavril put the paper down. “The others are similar. Criminal masterminds one and all. And now they’re dead.”

“Dead?” she asked.

“All of them.”

That didn’t make sense. The men in the house, yes. The poor bastard who’d taken the stick of rebar into his ribs, too, but the others …

“What about the one on the boat?”

“In a medically induced coma, due to a major head injury.”

“What about the other man in the yard?”

“A bullet to the head, small caliber. Perhaps point two five.”

Danielle’s mind reeled. That man had been alive if not well when they’d left him. Certainly she hadn’t shot him, and Hawker had trailed her by only seconds. Even in his anger she couldn’t believe he would do such a thing.

As she went silent, Hawker finally stirred, which seemed to please Lavril. “And the man in the street?”

“Do you even have to ask?” Lavril said.

“I shot him in the leg,”

“And in the head.”

“I shot him once,” Hawker said. “I had no reason to see him die.”

“And if you had such reason?”

“Then I’d have killed him with the first bullet,” Hawker replied sharply, no doubt confirming the commandant’s belief that they were some kind of hit squad.

A smile curled across Lavril’s face as he weighed Hawker’s statement. Whether he believed what he’d been told or not, Danielle couldn’t tell, nor did she really care. Her thoughts were now occupied with the dead men who’d been alive when they left.

Someone else had to have shot him, either the French police — which seemed unlikely, since that wasn’t their reputation to begin with and the building had been surrounded by onlookers long before the police arrived — or …

Another member of the group. One who had remained unseen, one who had escaped. A trailer. A control.

“You have our weapons,” she said. “Neither were twenty-five caliber.”

“You drove five miles,” Lavril said. “He went into the water. Easy to lose a weapon doing such things.”

“You don’t believe that,” she said, “so why don’t you just drop all this, tell us what you want, and we can get this game over with.”

“You are very direct,” Lavril said. “I admire that.”

He looked down at her. “You know, much has been made of the rift between your country and mine. We agree as often as an old married couple. It is easy to understand. European soil has been soaked with blood for five hundred years as men from Paris, Berlin, and London tried to control the world. We have finally let it go. But you … Your country is younger, only now feeling the pain that comes from reaching beyond your grasp.”

Lavril smiled, then went on. “You see our reluctance as weakness and you resent it. We see your confidence as arrogance. But in truth, it is only time that divides our perspective.

“In time you will see things as we do now,” he continued. “Perhaps that will be unfortunate. There are times for caution and discretion, and there are times for anger and for … revenge.”

Slowly Lavril’s focus shifted from her to Hawker. And Danielle sensed a moment that she had begun to fear. Hawker’s own anger had remained beneath the surface so far, but she had no doubt that the fires of vengeance were smoldering inside him.

Lavril reached into his desk drawer, grabbed a file, and then fished out a photograph. Leaning forward he pushed it across the desk. She and Hawker stretched to see it.

It was Ranga, naked and bloodied, on his knees with his arms held up, tied in ropes. His head drooped and his body sagged, held only by the rigging that bound his arms. Bruises, welts, and blood covered his face. Slashing cuts covered his chest and torso, and burn marks left his skin peeling and blackened.

“We believe the burns were done with a blowtorch,” Lavril said. “In places, they were down to the bone.”

Danielle felt as if she was about to be sick. She saw Hawker from the corner of her eye, staring unblinking at the image as if looking away might indicate some weakness.

Mercifully, Lavril took the photo back.

“Whoever killed him could have easily dumped his body somewhere, but instead they left him like this. It is for a reason.”

“A message,” Hawker said.

Lavril nodded.

“To who?” Danielle asked.

“To the whole world,” Lavril said.

He glanced at the photo. “There was a strange mark burned into his chest. Very hard to make out.”

He pushed another photo toward them, this time a close-up of Ranga’s chest. It looked like he had been branded.

“Numbers and letters,” Lavril said. “G, E, N, two, one, seven.”

“And what’s that supposed to mean?” Hawker asked.

“Earlier you quoted Proverbs to me. Surely you recognize it? Genesis, chapter two, verse seventeen.”

Hawker looked back to the photo, silent as to whether he knew the meaning of those verses, but thanks to a strict Catholic upbringing the text popped into Danielle’s mind almost immediately.

“And ye shall not eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil,” she said. “For when you eat of it you shall certainly die.”

As she spoke the words, Danielle’s mind reeled. Ranga was a geneticist obsessed with the building blocks of life, the very ability to control it, change it, even create it. Knowledge previously reserved for God alone.

If the brand was a message, was it a warning? Or a punishment from some radical group that did not want him doing such things?

“We believe a cult is responsible,” Lavril insisted. “We believe they murdered both your citizens and mine.”

He looked at Hawker. “You are angry. For reasons you will not say, this is personal to you. And if that’s the case, then I would like to make you a deal.”