The Traitor

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

On Sunday morning Callie took Jake to the hospital where the casualties from the shootout at Rodet’s estates had been taken. After much talking, they were admitted to post-op. The policeman outside the ward refused to let them in, so Jake demanded that he call Inspector Papin, which he finally did. After a few sentences in French, he handed his cell phone to Jake.

“Bonjour, Inspector. This is Admiral Grafton.”

“Good morning, Admiral. I spent a few minutes with Mademoiselle Petrou earlier this morning, immediately after she awoke. Her statement was exactly as you and I discussed yesterday. Such a tragedy!”

“Yes, isn’t it? I understand she is very ill, but I need to ask her a few questions myself. I, too, have superiors I must please.”

“Of course. Let me talk to the policeman again.”

Jake passed the telephone back. He and Callie were admitted to the ward and shown to the bed where Marisa Petrou lay. She was covered in bandages, but she was conscious.

Callie did the talking, in French. “I’m Callie Grafton, and this is my husband, Admiral Jake Grafton. Do you know who he is?”

“Yes.”

“Can you tell us what happened yesterday? Everything you can remember.”

“We were having breakfast, and Jean-Paul Arnaud came. He went into the study and talked to Henri. I heard them arguing, but I could not hear what they were saying. They were in there a few minutes—“

“Did Henri make any telephone calls?”

“He might have. I don’t know.”

“Did Arnaud leave the study?”

“No. I heard a vehicle drive up and glanced out the window. I saw these men getting out, an old man and some others. Four or five, I think. They had weapons. I ran into the study and told Henri and Jean-Paul, but before they could do anything the men rushed into the house — the outside door must have been unlocked. Henri had a pistol, and they took it from him. They gagged me and Jean-Paul and took us to the apartment over the garage. They tied us up, began beating Henri and Jean-Paul, demanding to know what Henri had told… your husband. ‘Tell us what you told Grafton. Where is Abu Qasim? Who is he now? We want that traitor!’”

“What did Henri say?”

“He told them the truth, that he knew nothing. He knew Qasim years ago, but not now. He couldn’t tell them what he doesn’t know, and they refused to believe. One of them began cutting on me, trying to force Henri to talk.”

She paused here, swallowing, perspiring as it all came flooding back.

“I could feel the knife. Amazingly, it didn’t hurt so much, but I knew what he was doing, butchering me. I tried to scream— couldn’t breathe, fought the gag—” She paused again, swallowed, collected herself. “The old one, the one that did the talking, said Jean-Paul had been paid. He had betrayed them. Failed. Then the old man shot him. I heard the shot, a pop. I knew then that they intended to kill us, Henri and me, so it didn’t matter … didn’t matter… what they did — did to me.”

She lay there immobile, rigid, staring at the ceiling, as her IVs dripped and the squiggly lines danced across the screen of the heart monitor beside the bed.

“I passed out. I don’t remember any more.”

Callie translated all this for Jake, whispering so her voice wouldn’t carry. He listened, looking at Marisa or watching the heart monitor. Once he reached out and touched an IV bottle.

Callie asked Jake, “Why didn’t the bugs pick up Rodet and Arnaud in the study?”

“Rodet found the bugs and moved them, I suspect.” He made a gesture of dismissal. “That’s enough. She’s told us all she can.” He reached down and found Marisa’s hand and squeezed it gently. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Truly sorry.” Then he led the way from the room.

Callie lingered a moment, then bent over the bed, whispered that she would be back in a day or two, and followed her husband.

When the doctors came around that Sunday morning, I talked to them about leaving the hospital, and of course they hemmed and hawed. French is a good language to do that in, I discovered. I whispered a few old Anglo-Saxon words I happened to know and resigned myself to my fate.

About midmorning, Willie Varner came sailing in.

“Carmellini, you idiot, I told you to be careful.”

“It’s Shannon. Terry Shannon.”

“You know I can’t remember stuff like that. How smart do you think I am, anyway?”

We discussed that at some length, then he said, “Lucky for you that bullet hit that damn night vision thing. If it had hit your hard little head, it would have cracked it like an egg. Maybe even punched a hole in it. I tell you, Tommy, you’re wearin’ out your luck.”

“Don’t I know it.”

“You gonna eat that crossaint-thing there on your tray? Well, I guess not or you’da already done it, huh? You ain’t got nothin’ contagious, I don’t reckon, ‘cept stupidity, and that’s been goin’ around forever. Fought it off a few times my own self. Mind if I scarf that thing down?”

“Be my guest.”

“I hope Grafton’s got this mess all figured out,” Willie said with his mouth full. “Man, I don’t know what the game is! Truth is, I don’t even know who’s playin’. Of course, nobody tells me nothin’.”

“You don’t have a need to know, Willie,” I said. “Got that problem myself.”

He was running his mouth, talking trash, when Jake Grafton came by. The admiral shook hands with both of us and asked me how I was doing.

“Okay. Ready to go, but the doctors said I have to stay another day.”

“Are you dizzy?”

“No.”

“Double vision?”

“No. Honestly, I’m fine. Just had a whack on the noodle. Got some bruises and I’m mighty sore. They took eight stitches in my leg, bandaged it up and gave me some shots.” I tried to flip back the sheet to show him my bandage.

“I don’t want to see it,” Willie declared. “You keep that thing under the covers.” He said to the admiral, “He’ll be okay. His head’s pretty hard.”

I asked Grafton about ol’ Henri. He had a few dozen stitches and a broken rib, Grafton said. He and Callie had checked on Rodet and Marisa before he stopped by to see me. Marisa was conscious and talking, and the doctors said her prognosis was good.

“None of this has hit the papers yet,” Grafton said. “The French government is keeping the lid on. They want the G-8 summit to go as planned.”

“I figured,” I admitted. “The first priority is to look good. But I want to know which of these bastards iced Elizabeth Conner.”

“What would you do if you knew?” Grafton asked.

There must have been an edge in my voice, because as I was mulling an answer, Willie put his two cents in. “Don’t tell ‘im! Don’t tell ‘im. He don’t need no more shit to tote through life.”

“I just want to know, that’s all,” I insisted.

What Grafton might have said I don’t know, because just then Callie came in. Turns out she had been talking to the doctors in French. She shook her head from side to side at Jake, who obviously had something on his mind.

“Well, you’ve laid around here long enough,” he said to me. “Get dressed. Doctors or no doctors, we have work to do. You can check yourself out.”

Uh-oh. Saddle and ride. “Where are we going?”

“I need some help. You can come, too, Willie.”

“Sure. I got nothing to do until tonight,” Willie replied, a comment Grafton ignored. With Willie the Wire, you have to ignore things.

I wasn’t as enthused as Willie. Sarah was going to stop by later. I was sorta looking forward to holding her hand and soaking up some sympathy. There isn’t much sympathy in the world these days— you’ve got to get it where you can, when you can.

Willie and Grafton wandered off to the lobby. I got out of bed and put on my ripped pants and dirty shirt and stinky socks while Callie stood in the hallway having an earnest discussion with the staff. I was so damned stiff and sore that getting dressed took several minutes.

There was some difficulty about the bill; Grafton whipped out a credit card. After a while, I scribbled my name a few times and they gave me some pills to take four times a day. Then we were escorted to the street.

“If you’ve got anything important in mind, I’d like to take a bath and change clothes,” I told the admiral. He was downwind of me, so he knew how it was.

He didn’t care.

“Later,” he said, and led the way to his car.

“So what’s the gig?” Willie asked when we were rolling along with Grafton at the wheel.

“We’re going back out to Rodet’s estate on the Marne,” Grafton told us. “Yesterday afternoon Callie and Sarah Houston searched the apartment on the Place des Vosges and found a onetime pad written with invisible ink that had been sitting in plain sight on Rodet’s desk.”

“It was lying in the trash beside the desk,” Callie said. “And we found a curling iron in one of the desk drawers.”

“What’s a onetime pad?” Willie asked.

Callie told him, even passed him the one she had found. He looked it over and passed it back.

“So why are we searching today?” Willie asked.

Grafton tilted the rearview mirror so he could see my face, then asked, looking at me, “Doesn’t it strike you as strange that someone searched Rodet’s apartment from top to bottom — ransacked it — and didn’t find that pad? With the curling iron right there in the desk drawer?”

“Well…”

“If you had found that iron in an office drawer, what would you have thought, Tommy?”

“Heat. Ink. But maybe they just missed it.”

“Maybe,” Grafton agreed.

“Why not go back there and see what else we can find?”

“I’d thought we’d do the country place first. You may have to get us in.”

“Oh, man!” Willie said dramatically. “Breakin and enterin’. The last time I got out of the joint I promised my ol’ mama that I’d never do that again.”

He was lying, of course. His mother died when he was a teenager. I laid my head back against the headrest and tried to sleep as Willie entertained the Graftons.

Rancho Rodet looked properly somnolent that warm, sunny Monday morning. It should, since the old man and his thugs had killed a maid and the gardener, who doubled as the outside security guy and fed the dogs. They didn’t have any dogs left, either, which almost brought a tear to my eye, but not quite. And no cops in sight.

Grafton handed me my backpack; he had rescued it yesterday from the police after I passed out. I went to work on the back-door lock while he and Callie and Willie stood by the car looking around like tourists. Innocent tourists.

Opening it took a while. My headache had subsided to a buzz, yet I was a little shaky and, truthfully, a bit dizzy. I kept trying one pick after another. Finally I paused, wiped my head and took a deep breath, then started all over again with the pick I had first started with. Got it that time.

After Callie and Willie went in, Grafton told me to sit down for a minute. I plopped down right on the step. He sat down beside me.

“How you doing?” he asked.

“Okay. Want to tell me what you hope to find?”

“I’ve got a theory,” he said. “I want to prove it or disprove it.”

“Uh-huh.”

But he didn’t explain, merely got up and went inside. I wiped my face and levered myself erect.

Each of us took a room. We took that house apart. Looked everywhere, in everything, examined everything. One of the first things I found was an electromagnetic sweep set in an aluminum case; no doubt Rodet used it to check the house for bugs. Terrific.

We found a lot of dry pens, receipts from years ago, old photos, dust balls in places the maids obviously hadn’t visited in years. It was hard, dismal work and got us exactly nowhere. We took pictures off the wall and cut the backing off. We rolled up carpets, examined the baseboards, disassembled radios and televisions, flipped through every book on the shelves — and ol’ Henri had a lot of books. I wondered if he had read them all.

In midafternoon Callie fixed us something to eat. We only had three rooms left to do at that point, two bedrooms and a kitchen.

“Tommy, why don’t you tackle the barns?” Jake said.

He didn’t have to say it twice. I gobbled the rest of my sandwich and went outside.

The big barn smelled of horses, yet it was empty. A few flies buzzed on that warm, late autumn day, and a couple of cats slunk around.

There weren’t a lot of places to hide anything in that barn. I looked under the walkway. Cobwebs and dirt, a pathway for the cats. No human had ever crawled under there.

I went over the ground floor inch by inch. I probed the cans that held the horse feed with a shovel handle. Obviously it would have helped if Grafton had told us what he was looking for, but I sort of figured he didn’t know. My impression was that he was feeling his way along, which bothered me. I confess, I didn’t understand what Arnaud or Rodet had been up to, nor why Rodet didn’t share what he knew about Qasim. I had a few theories of my own. I thought Arnaud killed Al and Rich so the old man and his Islamic gang could sack Rodet’s apartment in peace. But if that was true, why did the old man kill Arnaud? Did he think he double-crossed him and the cause?

A ladder led up to the loft. I climbed it and inspected the loft as carefully as I could in the poor light. There were no electric lights up here, merely daylight coming through air vents overhead. Bird droppings were splattered everywhere.

There was hay in square bales, a lot of it. Moving all those bales didn’t appeal to me. Not by myself, anyway. Some old saddles and tack, really old. Horse-drawn equipment that ought to be worth some money at an antique store. A couple of wood-burning stoves that I looked in. One of them was filled with rusty wire. I pulled it all out.

This barn reminded me of the one my uncle owned back when I was growing up. It was a cool barn; I liked it because my uncle had a stash of girlie mags in an old trunk in the loft, which he liked to study for inspiration. I know because I liked to follow and spy on him. He never found out that I was watching.

Finally I had searched everything in the loft. I stood looking up at the joists, which were also filthy with bird droppings. There was a platform way up there on one end of the barn, right under the roof, but there was no way up.

I looked around on the floor — and saw two scrapped places where the feet of a ladder might have stood.

The ladder! It was lying against one wall, wedged in behind the hay bales.

I moved four bales and worked the ladder free.

It was an extension ladder. I managed to extend it and put it up against the platform. The feet fit the scraped places perfectly.

I wasn’t feeling myself, so I went up very carefully.

There was a suitcase up there. Nothing else. It had something in it — I could tell by the weight.

I almost dropped it getting it down to the floor of the loft — had to hold it in one hand and get myself down with the other without falling.

I put it on the floor and opened it.

There was a pistol, a silencer, a box of ammo, a police uniform complete with badge, and the piece de resistance, a small computer and a onetime pad with about a dozen sheets left on it.

I was inspecting this treasure when I heard someone call, “Hey, Tommy.

“Up here.”

In a moment Grafton’s head appeared at the top of the ladder. “Got something?”

“Yeah. Come on up.”

He looked at everything. “Where was it?”

I pointed.

He glanced up, then sat down beside me and examined the computer carefully.

“Is this what you were looking for?”

“Looks like the jackpot. Did you touch that pistol?”

“Huh-uh.”

“Remember Al and Rich? Talking about the cop outside the van, just before they were shot?”

“I remember. Who wore this outfit, Arnaud or Rodet? Who was trying to frame who?”

“You can make a case either way, but it was Rodet. Qasim and his local soldiers were going to trash Rodet’s apartment, pretending to look for a computer. He didn’t want us listening.”

“So the old man was Qasim?”

“Yes. Wearing makeup.”

I couldn’t believe it. The old man was Qasim? “Rodet must have recognized him!”

“Oh, yes.”

“But… Qasim shot Rodet! Cut up Marisa!”

“Uh-huh.”

“That means Marisa’s in this up to her eyes. She let them cut her up.”

“Yep.”

“So Rodet and Qasim are both terrorists?”

“I don’t know what they are. Let’s forget labels for a moment. Marisa was the link between Qasim and Rodet. The proof is right here, in my hand.” He meant the computer. “Rodet told me that fancy telephone was the way he wrote and encrypted his messages to Qasim, and he gave us four sheets of a onetime pad that had been lying on his desk in his Paris apartment. He said NSA will eventually sort out the zeros and ones, make these two devices give up their secrets. I suspect this is the computer that was used to program the telephone computer Rodet gave us. Qasim never had one.”

“How’d you figure it out?”

“Rodet telling Callie about the pad on the desk. And in the desk the women found a curling iron to apply heat to the pages of the pad. There it was, right in the drawer. You saw that place after it had been trashed. They broke the lamps, ripped pillows apart, tore up the carpets, even broke the lightbulbs. Don’t you remember? I thought at the time that it looked as if everything in the place had been put through a blender. Rodet’s mistake was to go back and put the pad beside the desk for Callie and Sarah to find. To clue them that it was there, he left a curling iron in the desk drawer, a place where the iron wouldn’t normally ever be used for its designed purpose. He was worried that I wasn’t buying the story he wanted to tell — or the French police wouldn’t — so he tried to tidy up with one too many touches.”

“But what about that scene yesterday?”

“The whole thing was an act. Let’s go through it: Arnaud sees my short story on the Intelink and rushes right over to tell his boss, the man in charge of the security for the G-8 summit. Rodet goes to the bathroom, or a bedroom, and makes a call to Qasim, who jumps in the van, picks up his soldiers and motors right over. Marisa said the bad guys arrived immediately, but she was lying. They arrived later, much later, maybe two hours or so later. Remember, Cliff Icahn saw the van arrive, but he didn’t notice Arnaud in his car, which had passed hours earlier.

“They rolled in, shot the gardener and maid, and took Arnaud and Rodet and Marisa out to the apartment over the garage. They tied them to chairs and set the scene for us. They knew we would be along in a little while. They hoped to be gone by then. We would have found Arnaud dead, Rodet wounded, and Marisa sliced up. Rodet would have probably worked his way out of his bonds and called the police. That timetable went out the window when you showed up. They knew we would be right behind you. A quick shift in plan. The holy warriors would fight, perhaps escape, but even if they didn’t, they were going to kill some of us and go down fighting. Didn’t matter either way, because they would earn a spot in paradise.”

Grafton took a deep breath, then continued. “Arnaud had to die. He was always the fall guy, the man they were going to blame for everything to keep Rodet in the clear. Arnaud was supposed to have framed Rodet on the Bank of Palestine stock purchase. He was supposed to have shot Claude Bruguiere to permanently close his mouth. He was supposed to have shot the two Americans in the surveillance van in the Place des Vosges.”

“But why did they need a scapegoat?” I asked. “Rodet was the man in charge of renovations to Versailles in advance of the G-8 summit. Rodet was the man in charge of security. So after the assassination of the leaders, Rodet will need a villain, someone to blame for betraying the security arrangements. Arnaud is that man. It would look as if he sold out to the terrorists and attempted to implicate his boss.”

Grafton paused. “That scene yesterday wasn’t as impromptu as one might think. Rodet and Qasim probably planned to kidnap Arnaud sometime before the summit, act out this scene and kill him. His rushing over merely speeded things up.”

He laid the computer back in the valise on top of the folded police uniform.

“Shit!” I muttered.

“Marisa is in it as deep as Rodet. Maybe they injected her with a local anesthetic. Qasim could have taken the needle and drug with him when he left.”

Grafton stood. He reverently closed the suitcase and smiled at me. “Thanks,” he said.

“Jesus Christ, Admiral! I am so confused. I thought Rodet had a spy in Al Qaeda. He gave us the Veghel conspiracy!”

“Oh, no, Tommy. You’re looking at cause and effect the wrong way round. You’re looking at a mirror image of the truth. The truth is precisely the opposite. Abu Qasim is not spying on Al Qaeda. Henri Rodet is Al Qaeda’s spy in the West. The Veghel conspiracy was sacrificed to ensure that no one suspected that Rodet was passing information to Al Qaeda. He’s a double agent.” He patted the suitcase. “This computer will tell the tale.”

All this was a bit too much for my criminal mind to process quickly. “But no one suspected that,” I objected.

“Oh, they will,” Grafton said heavily. “They will! When Al Qaeda assassinates the G-8 leaders — the president of the United States, the prime ministers of Great Britain and Japan, the president of France, the chancellor of Germany, and the others — the investigators are going to turn over every single stone. The fallout from that event will make the Warren Commission look bush league. Then Henri Rodet will have the alibi he needs. He selected Arnaud to take the fall months ago. When I arrived in Paris and began nosing around, Rodet began to worry that they didn’t have Arnaud wrapped tightly enough. So he improvised.”

“And nearly killed his girlfriend.”

“If she had died after she told her story, he wouldn’t have cared.”

“What about those thugs who tried to kill me? You think Rodet ordered them to do that?”

“No. Personal vendettas and vengeance isn’t his style. After you threw that guy through the museum clock, the jihadists declared war.”

“They tried to kill you, too.”

“I think Rodet and Qasim were afraid of me by then. They wanted you dead, too. That car bomb should have done it.”

“Elizabeth Conner?”

“You really want to know?”

“Yeah.”

“I need your word that you are not going to get personally involved.”

Uh-oh. He knew I wasn’t going to like this. So it wasn’t Rodet or Arnaud or the soldiers of Islam. “Okay.”

“Your word?”

“My word.”

“Gator Zantz.”

“That son of a bitch!”

Grafton hefted the suitcase, lifting it experimentally as if he were weighing it. “We found two more electromagnetic sweep sets after you came out here. So Rodet actually had three sets in the house. He found the bugs and put them in two bedrooms upstairs, then turned on a radio. That’s what Icahn was listening to.”

“I figured it was something like that.”

Grafton nodded. “In this business we must have good people. Icahn listened to the bugs all night and heard nothing but music. He didn’t think a thing about it. You listened for, what — ten or fifteen minutes? — and knew we were being had.”

“Lucky, I guess.”

“Lucky? Maybe lucky for Marisa Petrou. Those people weren’t doctors. That fool with the knife might have killed her. She might have bled to death.”

“Maybe she wishes she had.”

Grafton didn’t say anything to that.

I went down the ladder to the ground floor first and he handed the suitcase down to me. He climbed down carefully.

“Marisa is in love with Rodet,” I said when he was beside me. “I thought the bastard loved her.”

“Maybe he does, in his own twisted way,” Jake Grafton mused. “Yet there’s someone he loves more.” A moment later he muttered, “Qasim may have started out as Rodet’s spy. Somehow that relationship got seriously twisted.”