The Traitor

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Elizabeth Conner was very dead and had been for hours. How many I don’t know, but her body was cool to the touch. Of course. That was why her body was just a ghostly shadow on the infrared.

Ah, me. She was wearing her bra and panties, nothing else. A towel lay under her.

She had been strangled. Her neck was a mass of bruises. I tried not to look at her face.

The contents of the room had not been touched, as far as I could tell. Whoever murdered her had apparently come for that purpose. Someone knocked, she wrapped a towel around herself, then opened the door. Whoever was standing there advanced, seized her by the neck and began to squeeze violently. Maybe she took a couple of steps backward. When his victim was dead, the strangler left, pulling the door closed behind him.

You’ve probably read the mysteries and seen the CSI shows where the victim has big gobs of the killer’s DNA under her fingernails. I have, too, so I looked. Well, I didn’t see any obvious wads of skin and hair, although she did have two broken fingernails. The broken nails looked jagged, as if they were fresh breaks.

I forced myself to look at her face. Whoever did that…

Suddenly I felt embarrassed, as if I were shaming the dead. I was in the presence of sudden, unexpected violent death, and I was wearing only shorts and a T-shirt.

I pulled the door shut and smeared my palms around over the back of the knob. The killer wouldn’t have left any prints, and I certainly didn’t want to decorate the knob with mine. Nor did I want it wiped clean, just covered with useless smeared prints.

Back upstairs I sat down for a think.

After a few minutes, I called Jake Grafton on his cell phone. “Elizabeth Conner’s dead. Strangled in her flat. I just found the body.”

He groaned. “Damnation.”

After a moment of silence, he said, “Go get her cell phone. Bring it with you tomorrow.”

I was losing my patience with Jake Grafton and this whole spy gig. “You know whose number is on it, don’t you?” I said roughly.

“I think I know who killed her, if that’s what you mean. Please, go get the cell phone before the police find the body.” He hung up on me.

Jake Grafton stared at the computer screen, trying to concentrate. He had two pages of text in front of him. He scrolled through it, reading it again, word for word. Then he hit the print button. When he had the pages he folded them carefully, put them in a shirt pocket, and turned off the computer.

I stopped to put my pants on before I went back downstairs. I picked the lock again and went into Conner’s room, leaving the door open so I could hear anyone coming up the stairs.

I tried not to look at her. Even in her underwear, she looked obscenely naked.

I began frantically looking for her cell phone. Alone in a bedroom with a strangled woman, listening for the heavy tread of policemen, I could feel the tension ratchet up with every passing second. Of course, as the tension tightened, I developed an urge to pee, which got steadily worse. I tried to put all the extraneous stuff out of my mind and concentrate on thinking logically about my task. It was difficult.

Three minutes of searching did it for me. I convinced myself that her cell phone wasn’t in the room. It was possible, I suppose, that it was under her, but not very probable. In any event, I wasn’t going to move the corpse to look.

I locked the door behind me, smeared the knob one more time, and went upstairs. Safely back in my hole, I made a beeline for the bathroom. When I had relieved the pressure, I called Grafton and gave him the bad news.

Jake Grafton was walking toward the embassy’s main entrance when the phone rang. He signed out at the security desk as he listened to Tommy.

“Do you know what’s going on?” Tommy demanded.

“Well, I have made some guesses. Based on evidence, I suppose, or lack thereof. But it’s thin. We’re not there yet.”

When I heard that comment, I couldn’t restrain myself. “Maybe you should tell somebody what you’re thinking. Don’t think I’m being pushy, but if on the way home tonight you get crushed by a falling piano, it would be nice if some other human on planet Earth had an inkling of what the hell you think is going on in Paris.”

Grafton sure took his time answering. “I suppose you’re right,” he said finally.

I waited expectantly.

He began with random comments, then finally got into the groove. He told me about Abu Qasim and Henri Rodet, and he told me what he could prove, what he surmised, and what he thought might happen as events played out. The recitation took about twenty minutes.

As I listened I sat at my window and watched the first snowflakes fall into the streetlights.

Finally Grafton ran out of words. I thanked him for taking the time to talk to me and hung up.

A few minutes later I climbed into bed. I lay there listening to the wind sing as it passed my window, which was open about half an inch.

I tried to think about something besides Elizabeth Conner. I thought about Sarah, and about a woman I used to know and had sort of decided to wait for, Anna Modin. But it didn’t work. Their faces faded and I was left with the image of Elizabeth Conner lying dead on her floor, strangled, her eyes bulging, every muscle in her face taut, frozen in death. The image was ugly, and I began thinking evil thoughts.

It was a few minutes past midnight when Jake Grafton put his cell phone into his pocket. As he talked he had taken shelter behind a pillar on the portico of the embassy. Now he stood looking at the Place de la Concorde, and at the two police vans parked in a side street to his right. On the sidewalk beside one of them, a small knot of policemen stood smoking and drinking something hot. Grafton could just see the steam rising from their cups.

There wasn’t much traffic in the huge square. No taxis in front of the Hotel de Crillon, which was next door, and none zooming along the Rue de Rivoli, ready to careen through the plaza and across the Seine on the Pont de la Concorde. He fastened the neck buttons on his coat, jammed his hands in his pockets, and set off for the Metro stop. A few snowflakes were falling, melting when they hit the pavement. The wind had a nasty bite, so he hurried the last few paces toward the stairs leading underground.

There were four or five people on the platform; he didn’t pay much attention. He walked out to within four feet or so of the edge and unfastened the top buttons on his coat, looking idly at the billboards advertising haute couture jeans and expensive tennis shoes.

Grafton was thinking about Elizabeth Conner when he realized that the man on his left was walking toward him. He looked. The man was young, Midde Eastern, of medium height and build.

Jake glanced right. Another man, also Middle Eastern, advancing toward him.

He heard a noise. Two behind him — he had walked right by them when he came out onto the platform.

They had been waiting for him!

He was outnumbered four to one. There were no other people on the platform at this time of night. No, there was one other person on the platform, sitting on the bench, a man in a long coat.

Grafton turned to face the young thugs.

They kept coming. One of them pulled a knife from his pocket.

This might be an excellent time to try out the wireless Taser, Grafton thought. He pulled it from his coat pocket and flipped the switch on the side to turn it on. What was it Maillard had said? The thing took ten or fifteen seconds to charge the capacitor?

“You guys stop right there.”

They did stop, momentarily, their eyes on the weapon. Then one of them realized there was no hole in the barrel. He laughed, pointed at it, and made a comment to his friends, who grinned.

The man on Jake’s left pretended to piss, and laughed. They thought the thing was a squirt gun.

The admiral raised the weapon and pointed it right at the man with the knife, who was about eight feet away, still immobile. “I wouldn’t, if I were you.”

The man lunged — and Jake pulled the trigger through the first detent to the last stop, as far as it would go.

Even he was surprised at what happened next. There was a flash as a finger of visible light shot out and illuminated the man’s chest. A second later a streak of lightning reached out with a loud, high-pitched cracking sound, the finger of God, and hit him right where the light had rested. The lightning strobed once, twice, and disappeared.

Half-blinded by the intensity of the glare, Grafton watched as the man he had zapped dropped his knife and toppled to the concrete. Then he groaned.

Jake looked at the weapon. He had the intensity set on the middle setting. “Best to keep it there,” Maillard had said, “halfway between kill and tickle.”

Grafton swung the weapon, pointing it at the others, who had already retreated a few steps. “Anyone else want some?”

The thugs turned their heads toward the figure sitting on a bench against the wall. For the first time, Grafton really looked at him. He was an older man, wearing a ratty coat and brimmed hat — and he had a pistol in his hand, an automatic of some type with a silencer on the end of the barrel. There was no mistake about the silencer, which was as big as a sausage.

He raised the pistol, pointed it at Grafton.

Jake didn’t wait. He leaped from the platform onto the track as the pistol popped and he heard a bullet zing past.

As he ran he could hear bullets pinging off the concrete. Hitting a running man at fifty feet with a pistol without sights would be a challenge for an expert, which the shooter plainly wasn’t. He had a lot of bullets, though. They spanged around Grafton and stimulated his adrenaline mightily. He ran toward the dark tunnel ahead as hard as he could go, still carrying the thunderbolt weapon in his right hand.

He had reached the dubious sanctuary of the darkness when he heard the oncoming train — heard the rumble, heard it decelerate, then heard the squeal of brakes. The train was entering the station from the other direction. In a few moments it would be coming this way.

He glanced back and saw two men running toward him, both looking back.

Grafton felt for the weapon’s intensity knob, cranking it as far as it would go. He aimed at one of the oncoming men and pulled the trigger.

The light reached out and — crack!. The strobing lightning… and the man he had aimed at fell to the tracks.

The other one didn’t pause in his charge. Grafton pointed the weapon and pulled the trigger again. Nothing.

Damn thing needs to recharge the capacitor.

Grafton braced himself to receive the charge — then he saw the gleam of the knife blade!

He turned and ran into the darkness. He stumbled on the ties, recovered, and ran hard.

Slap, slap, slap. His feet pounded on the gravel. Behind him he could hear the panting of his pursuer.

He was running into total darkness. Not a glimmer of light ahead… no, a faint glow. The track turned up there, and he now he could see the reflected glow from the next station.

He would never make it. The man behind was getting closer.

Grafton risked a look and saw only a blur, a few feet behind. He could hear the man’s rasping breath — he wasn’t in shape, but he was thirty or more years younger than the admiral.

Grafton felt a touch on his shoulder. He spun with the weapon leveled in his hand and pulled the trigger as he turned.

The knife went by his face. Then came the flash, the report — and a scream as the man fell onto Grafton, who was falling himself, going down on his back.

The man went on screaming in agony as the lightning pulsed between them.

When the darkness came again, the sound stopped. All sound.

Jake’s attacker was lying across him. And he wasn’t breathing. The admiral felt for the pulse in the man’s neck. There wasn’t one.

Jake Grafton pushed the corpse aside and rose shakily to his feet.

He heard the train get under way, felt the rush of air. He scrambled over the hot rail, carefully avoiding it, and hunkered down against the tunnel wall.

The headlight illuminated the bodies on the track, but the train continued to accelerate. The noise rose to a painful level. The wind became a gale; Jake braced himself against it. Then the train thundered by, its steel wheels singing on the rails. The sides of the cars passed inches from Jake’s shoulder.