The Traitor

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

I Vespaed back to the embassy and asked around for Grafton. He was in a meeting with the Secret Service top banana, but he motioned for me to join them. After the introductions, I told them about my car.

“You weren’t hurt?” Grafton asked, scrutinizing me carefully.

“I’m all right. I think the local jihadists are out to get me.”

He didn’t comment on that, so I continued, “The police are going to snag me sooner or later. Seeing as how I’m running around town without diplomatic immunity, you had better be thinking about what you want me to tell them.” I regretted that remark five minutes later, but it felt good when I said it.

Grafton just nodded. He was calm. Too calm. His manner offended me somewhat. It wasn’t his fault that someone wanted me dead, but still, I was a little peeved, and, I guess, surly.

I stomped off to the cafeteria and had some dinner and real coffee while one of George Goldberg’s flunkies hunted up equipment to replace the stuff that had been in the trunk of the deceased rental car. I wondered what the Paris police would say if they found enough of that equipment to figure out what it was.

Pinckney Maillard didn’t say a word until he and Grafton were alone, then he said, “I have heard that Carmellini is a thief. Do you really trust him?”

Jake Grafton smiled. “With my life. And I have done just that.”

Maillard zigged away in another direction. “A car bomb, the murder of a DGSE agent in the streets, Muslim thugs attacking one of our people in a museum — I have to include all this in my report to Washington.”

“So do I,” Jake said without inflection.

“I also have to brief Ambassador Lancaster,” Maillard said. “All these incidents will go into the assessment of whether or not it is safe for the president to attend the G-8 conference.”

“Which will be presented to the president,” Grafton said, “who will decide if he will attend.”

“That’s right. In the interim Lancaster will be discussing these incidents with the French government. He’ll be making his own recommendation to the State Department. I expect he’ll want to talk to you before he talks to the French.”

“I expect you’re right,” Jake said, and sighed.

After dinner, feeling somewhat better and wearing my new backpack, I rode over to Willie’s hotel and called him from the lobby. Woke him up. Resting up for a night on the town, I suppose.

“Hey, dude. We’re going out among them tonight. Get up and get dressed. I’m down in the lobby.”

“You don’t really mean that, do you?”

“We have to work.”

He said a dirty word and hung up on me. I picked up a newspaper and settled into a soft chair. My hands were still shaking from the adrenaline overdose, so the paper was hard to read. Still, I couldn’t miss the big story about the guy who went through the museum clock. A reporter had been to see the family, who were Palestinians. They didn’t speak French, although they said their late son was learning. They denied he was a terrorist or criminal: He was a victim, they said. The authorities were lying to protect someone. The paper had a photo of the family and a photo of the recently deceased from happier times.

I flipped over to the sports, which were soccer and tennis and what the bicycle racers were doing in the off-season. I was trying to get interested when I realized the bellboy was eyeing me from the door. Another dark, Middle Eastern type.

Maybe I was getting paranoid. Every Arab I met wasn’t planning on doing the martyr trick or looking for a throat to slit. Still, I felt like a cowboy in Comanche country. Was it racial bias? Was I a bigot, in this day and age? I felt guilty. On the other hand, someone had put a bomb in the rental and I was the fish they hoped to fry.

Of all the wonderful folks I had met in Paris, who might the guilty party be? The French Muslims? Marisa Petrou? Elizabeth Conner? Henri Rodet? The person or persons unknown who killed Claude Bruguiere? I was trying to decide when the elevator door opened and Willie Varner stepped into the lobby.

He looked around, saw me, and headed for a chair. I hopped up and headed him off. He looked tired and worn out, and it seemed as if he had lost a little weight. Not that he had a lot to lose.

“Maybe you’re hitting it too hard,” I told him.

“I can rest up when I get home.”

When he saw the Vespa and realized that it was our ride, he groaned. “Oh, Tommy, plee-ease!”

I laughed, and he started cussing me.

Okay, the Wire still had it. He wasn’t over the hill yet.

Maybe I should have told him about the car, but I didn’t. No use prematurely elevating his adrenaline level. The way things were going, he might need all the juice he had before this mess was over.

Jake Grafton ate dinner with Callie in their Paris apartment. Due to the possibility that the apartment was bugged, they never discussed anything of any import there. Sometimes that habit made for quiet dinners, like this evening. He had a lot to think about.

Had Tommy ticked off the local Muslim fanatics by tossing one of their flock through the museum clock? Were they out to even the score with Tommy, or had they decided to declare war on every CIA officer in France? Or were the locals following orders from Al Qaeda? How probable was it that events were building toward an attempt on the life of the American president? Or another of the G-8 leaders? Or all of them? Should the president come to France or stay in the United States?

“Come on,” he told Callie as she finished the last of her dinner. “Let’s you and I go for a stroll.”

Callie asked no questions, merely began cleaning up. Seven minutes later, they locked the door behind them.

There was still plenty of light in the evening sky when we rode away from the hotel on the Vespa, which was working hard to carry two men. Although Willie doesn’t weigh 120 pounds dressed, I’m not small. Willie wore the backpack, and he had a devil of a time staying on the seat behind me. The problem was that he didn’t want to hold on to me and there wasn’t much else to grab on to. In Italy the girls sit sideways behind their guy and hold on to him lightly with one hand, if they hold on at all; they just sort of perch there.

Willie wasn’t perching. He finally latched on to my belt with both hands in a death grip. If he went, I was going, too. Of course, we were only going about ten miles per hour at the time.

At the second stoplight two motorcycles turned and fell in behind me, one in the right rear and one in the left. The riders were wearing full-face visors on their helmets, so I couldn’t see any facial features. They didn’t look like big men, though. Medium size, maybe 140 or 150 pounds, lean and wiry, dressed in jeans, motorcycle jackets and leather gloves. They were mounted on Japanese bikes, apparently ones with decent engines. They could ride circles around our scooter with those things.

They stayed behind us, just following along as we rode through heavy traffic and stopped at each light.

When I putted away from the third light, dragging those two along in formation, I said to Willie, “At the next light, bail off. I’ll pick you up right here in an hour.”

“What’s wrong?”

“We have company,” I replied, and for the first time I felt him turn to look back.

He didn’t say anything, and the scooter was coming to a halt, he vaulted off the end. Willie Varner dishes out a lot of bullshit, yet when the chips are down, he’s a guy you want in your corner. I watched him walk over to the sidewalk and turn, cross his arms, and look at the two dudes. The motorcyclists shot each other a look and stayed on their bikes. Willie’s move had been unexpected, yet it was me they were after.

The light changed and I fed gas to the scooter. Without Willie’s weight on the back, it fairly leaped ahead. Away we went, still in formation.

My mind was racing a mile a minute, even if my steed wasn’t. If these clowns had guns, they could shoot me out of this saddle, race away and abandon the motorcycles somewhere, and they would be nearly impossible to find and convict. If they had guns. If the motorcycles weren’t registered to them.

These thoughts were running through my mind as we rolled through traffic.

Darn, why didn’t I get a motorcycle instead of this darn scooter? It had a puny engine and handled differently than a cycle. I spent a lot of my youth in California with a motorcycle between my legs and knew how to ride one of those. But a scooter?

Well, let’s show ‘em how we do traffic in L.A.

As we approached a light, I aimed the scooter between two rows of cars and kept going. In the mirrors I saw my riding buddies hesitate, then fall into trail.

I rode right up to the red light, dodged through the pedestrians without slowing, hung a hard right, and gave ‘er the gun. Nearly got flattened by a delivery truck — managed to pass it on the right with two inches to spare and get in front of the thing.

I didn’t wait to see how my friends were progressing but kept the hammer down, got in the crease and wound up that little engine.

We were flying down a boulevard — I don’t know which one— toward the river. Traffic thinned and I caught a glimpse in my mirrors of the two bikes behind me, closing the gap.

A yellow light ahead! It turned red and the traffic on my left began to move. I beat the flow by a few feet.

Over the blatting of the engine I heard horns blaring and brakes squealing, then whap! A glance in the mirror … One of the motorcycles was down. With a little luck, the rider was on his way to frolic with the virgins. The other was right behind me, though.

I shot across the Seine with the remaining motorcycle inches from my fender.

We got a green light and the guy decided to see if he could dump me. He hit my rear fender with his front tire and I almost lost it. Fishtailed and goosed it while he backed off a trifle to stay up.

I shot right and tapped the brake and he was beside me. He looked my way, and for the first time, through his clear visor, I got a glimpse of his face, a mask of concentration. When you’re out to kill a man you’d better work at it.

I aimed for the crease in traffic ahead — their brake lights were on — and goosed it just as the other rider glanced ahead.

He was too late! He was going to pile into the rear of that truck— but no! At the last split second the bastard saved it and fell in immediately behind me, three feet behind my taillight.

We shot down the boulevard between the cars, which were rolling right along. The quarters were too tight for him to use his speed and handling advantage, which was the only thing keeping me alive. I figured if I went down, I’d be dead before he rode away.

But maybe not. Maybe I should stop and break the bastard’s neck with my bare hands. That would probably darken Jake Grafton’s day and earn me a trip to a French penitentiary, but if it was that or the graveyard, I was willing.

Not yet. That was my hole card.

With my luck the dude would have a gun in his pocket and drill my silly self while I was trying to kung fu him.

These thoughts zipped through my mind while we shot down the traffic canyon between the rows of speeding cars and trucks. Once some Frenchie in a little van decided to change lanes and almost made a grease spot out of me. I saved it by the thickness of the skin on the knuckles of my right hand.

The guy behind me bumped my fender with his tire on three occasions, but he was trying to stay up and didn’t put enough oomph on it.

As we came to an intersection where the traffic was stopped and cars were crossing, I knew I’d never make it. I darted to my right between two cars, slammed on the brake, then squeezed the scooter between two parked cars and got up on the sidewalk, hooked a U-ie and started back the way I’d come.

My maneuver had been unexpected enough that I put a serious amount of distance between us. The only problems were the human obstacles on the sidewalk… and the fact that my riding partner had a faster machine. I swerved violently a time or two to avoid pedestrians, yet they parted like the Red Sea for the guy roaring up behind me.

He looked like a runaway Freightliner in my rearview mirrors.

I was running out of sidewalk. I slammed on the brakes and swerved to avoid a light pole. Skidded out into the street and almost got flattened by a big Mercedes. Looked back just in time to see my pal hit the light pole dead center. He went over the handlebars and tried to drive his head through the thing.

At a glance, it appeared that the impact broke his fool neck. My engine stalled. As I stood there pushing on the button and goosing the throttle, I could distinctly hear the ooh-aah, ooh-aah of a police siren.

Thankfully the tiny engine of my faithful steed fired before I flooded it. I putted off with traffic and took the first corner in order to quicken my disappearance. As my heartbeat began to slow, I noticed that I had broken the front brake hand lever — ripped it from the bracket that held it. It was dangling by its cable.

Willie was waiting for me where I left him. I pulled up to the curb, and he walked over to the Vespa.

“It took you long enough.”

“Sorry,” I said.

“They get tired of chasing you?”

“I think so. Hop on.”

He climbed aboard. “What’s going on, anyway, Tommy?”

“As if I knew,” I told him. Man, I didn’t have a clue. I just hoped Jake Grafton did.

As we rode through Paris I looked for holy warriors on Hondas but didn’t see any. Now, however, I saw cops. Several of them glanced at the Vespa, but they didn’t wave me over. I thought they might have heard about the Vespa that had run from the motorcyclists, yet if so, they were probably watching for a scooter with one man aboard.

We rode into the Place des Vosges and I parked the scooter in a motorcycle farm. I left it unlocked on the off chance that some idiot would steal it. Lost my enthusiasm for motor scooters, I guess. I wasn’t having much luck with cars, either.

The van was parked in the usual place. “Wait here,” I told Willie. I approached it from an angle that would shield me from any watchers sitting on benches in the park.

As I reached to rap on the side of the van, I saw that the door was slightly ajar. The fire alarm went off in my head.

Frozen, I stood with hand outstretched, listening. I leaned forward and put my ear up to the side of the thing.

Quiet as a tomb in there. Plenty of street noise, but nothing from inside.

Call it a premonition; I grabbed the door handle and jerked it open. The first thing I saw was a shod foot. Then another. I peered into the crowded interior. Al and Rich were there, and they were dead.