The Traitor

CHAPTER THREE

I called Willie Varner from a phone in the SCIF. Due to the time differential, I got him at home before he went to work. Way before. “Jesus Christ, Carmellini! You know what time it is?”

“Early.”

“It’s five thirty in the fuckin’ mornin’, man. You in jail or dead or what?”

“I need some help, Willie.”

“You need a new watch, that’s for sure.”

“I want you to come over to Paris and help me for a few weeks.”

“You mean, like, in France?”

“Yeah.”

A long silence. “France,” he said. I could tell he was warming to the idea.

“We’ll pay you for your time, of course,” I said casually. “All expenses covered. Nice hotel, some time off. Sort of a working vacation.”

“Doin’ what?”

“Helping me. I need some backup.”

“Backup for what?”

“I really can’t get into it on the phone. Nothing dangerous.”

“No shooters, man. Nothin’ that goes bang. No knives, neither.”

“Oh, no. Nothing like that.”

“I done my time and I done my bleedin’. Don’t want to do no more of neither one.”

“I know where you’re at. This will be cool.”

“Well…” He was seriously tempted, I could tell. “Hell, I ain’t got a passport.”

“We’ll get you one. Be a fellow around to the shop later today to take your picture and get your information. In a couple of days someone will bring you a passport and give you some tickets.”

“Goddamn! France! Okay, I’ll come. I can always boogie if things get too iffy. I’m no spring chicken, you know.” Sure.

“More like a jackrabbit. I like to screw and I can really run.”

“The airport’s open seven days a week.”

“The Folies … I heard about that! That’s what I want to see.”

“Works for me. Man will be in to see you later today.” I hung up.

Grafton was looking at me with raised eyebrows.

“He’s never been out of the country before,” I explained, “so he’s hot to trot. He’ll cool off when he gets to thinking about it, but he’ll come. I’ll keep him busy and out of trouble while he’s here.”

When he was seated at his desk in DGSE headquarters in the Conciergerie, Jean-Paul Arnaud could see the Eiffel Tower. From his large, padded swivel chair he could also see the stately walls of the Louvre and bridges all the way downriver to the Pont de la Concorde. If he were so inclined, he could watch the tourist barges, the bateaux, cruising up and down the river with their loads of sightseers, or cloud formations soaring across the skyline of Paris, clouds that had enchanted armies of artists. Jean-Paul Arnaud never looked. He sat at his desk day in and day out as the seasons changed and the sun and rain came and went, chain-smoking cigarettes as he worked. Occasionally he wrote orders, case summaries and the like; once a quarter he devoted a day to the budget battles; one afternoon a week he turned his attention to personnel matters; on Monday and Wednesday mornings he sat down with the agency head, Henri Rodet, to discuss business; and when asked, he accompanied his boss to meetings with the minister. Otherwise, Jean-Paul Arnaud sat at his desk smoking and reading reports.

So it was at his desk, while sunlight and shadow played on the great city beyond his window, that Jean-Paul Arnaud learned that Jake Grafton, now believed to be associated with the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, was temporarily attached to the American embassy as a State Department employee and would soon be arriving in Paris.

And it was here, this morning, that he learned that Tommy Carmellini, CIA officer assigned to the SCS, was coming to Paris under a false passport that gave his name as Terry G. Shannon. The report noted that he would arrive in France tomorrow and rent an apartment on Rue Paradis, then speculated a bit on why he might be in Europe.

Using his pen that wrote in green ink, Arnaud made a note on the margin of the report. Keep me informed.

He tossed the form into the out basket and picked up the next one from the in basket.

After my interview with Jake Grafton, Gator Zantz gave me a ride to a hotel, the Royal Garden. I was his only passenger. “Where’s Houston?” I asked.

“She’ll be along.”

I grunted. I didn’t want to be in the same country with Sarah Houston, let alone the same hotel, not after that stunt she pulled on the airplane. Oh, well.

My hotel room was on the eighth floor. I pulled the curtains, got undressed and climbed into bed — had a devil of a time getting to sleep but eventually drifted off. Not long after that the maid began pounding on the door. I ran her off, watched television for a while, then finally went back to sleep.

A nightmare woke me up at 9:00 p.m. local time, and I lay in bed tossing and turning, unable to get comfortable. I had been trying to catch a plane, and the security people kept finding something else to check as the minutes ticked away. Then I left my watch at the checkpoint and had to run back for it… An anxiety dream. What do they mean?

Jet lag is always worse traveling east. On top of that, I was hungry.

When I realized that I was wide-awake, I showered, shaved and got dressed. Went downstairs and looked in the bar. Naw. Went outside and saw a pub just down the street. Perfect.

I don’t know about you, but I like London. It’s a great town, and the Brits are terrific. They even speak an obsolete form of English that some folks find amusing. Sitting in the pub, I ordered fish and chips and my favorite cider and submerged myself in the delightful atmosphere, surrounded by conversation and laughter as a tennis match played on the telly over the bar.

In a few minutes the world began to look better. Yeah, I had another Jake Grafton adventure ahead of me, but it was the last one. Yeah, I had woman troubles, but who doesn’t? I was munching chips and sipping cider and meditating about what I was going to do after I got out of the Christians In Action when Guess Who came into the joint.

She looked around, saw me, thought she would leave, then changed her mind and came over. I stood as she approached the table.

“May I join you?” she asked coolly, formal as hell.

“Please do.”

I enjoy the company of women — being around them, watching how they move, how they carry themselves, their gestures, listening to what they have to say, all of it — and I had really enjoyed being around this one. I wasn’t so sure I was going to like it this time.

Sarah Houston was seriously brilliant, with a quick, darting mind and a feminine presence that seemed to radiate heat. In addition, she had an erect, athletic carriage and was pretty darn good-looking. Tonight, as usual, people at other tables and at the bar had turned to watch as she walked across the room. They kept their eyes on her as she seated herself, and only reluctantly turned away.

“Couldn’t sleep?” I asked.

“No.”

Umm.

The waitress came over and Sarah ordered white wine. “I’m not hungry,” she told the young woman in jeans when she asked if Sarah wanted something to eat. The other patrons accepted us as members of the pub community and ceased to pay attention. Sarah helped herself to a small piece of fish off my plate and nibbled on it.

“Ever been to London before?” I asked, just to make conversation.

“Back in my dark days.” She meant back when she was known as Zelda Hudson and was on a holy quest to get filthy rich. I had known that and forgotten. Since we weren’t supposed to talk about Zelda, her former identity, I changed the subject.

“How about Paris?”

“No.”

“Great town.”

She didn’t respond to that inanity.

“After this assignment, are you going to stay with the company you work for?” I meant the National Security Agency.

“I’m still in the process of rehabilitation, I guess.” She grimaced. “Not that I have a choice. You sprung me from prison, remember?”

For some reason the subject wasn’t changing. I thought about telling Sarah about my own checkered past, and Grafton’s promise, but refrained. Sharing personal secrets with ex-girlfriends is always a bad idea.

“I’m sorry about the scene on the plane,” she said, when the silence had gone on too long.

I muttered something.

She took her time on my fish, thoroughly chewing each tiny bite. She didn’t look at me.

When she had finished the last morsel, she cleared her throat. “It was the first time for me.” Then she decided that comment could be taken several ways. “The first I fell in love,” she said as an addendum.

I knew I was also the first man she had welcomed into her bed, but she didn’t want to discuss that. Nor did I. The silence got wider and deeper.

“A man once loved me,” Sarah said softly. “But I didn’t love him.” She sat immobile, her eyes focused on infinity.

“These things happen,” I said as gently as I could.

When the silence was threatening to strangle us both, she said, “Now I know how it feels.”

She got up and walked out. The waitress bringing the wine stopped and watched her go.

The wind off the Atlantic carried in low clouds that evening, and rain fell across most of northern France. About ten o’clock a man came walking slowly and unsteadily along a street in a working-class district of suburban Paris, a street lined with cars and small trucks, with scooters and motorcycles parked sideways between them. The man wore an ankle-length coat and a hat that shed the rain. Under the coat, he had a muffler wrapped around his neck. Sticking from the pocket of his coat was the neck of a bottle.

He took shelter in the doorway of a closed business. There he extracted the bottle from his pocket, sipped on it and lit a cigarette. Working carefully, keeping one hand on the locked door of the building and the other firmly around the neck of the bottle, he lowered himself to the concrete. Once in position, he took the cigarette from his mouth and exhaled slowly, savoring the smoke. Then he took another nip from the bottle.

Pedestrians, and there weren’t many, ignored the man. The people were going into and out of a bar across the street. Even those men and women who glanced his way couldn’t see him very well, with the hat obscuring his eyes and his coat collar turned up against the invigorating night breeze, which occasionally whipped a small shower of raindrops into the doorway.

An hour passed as the rain made puddles in the street and on the cracked, broken sidewalk. Half of another hour had slipped by when a dark blue motorcycle came down the street at a good rate of speed and stopped in front of the motorcycle parking area near the bar. In the rain the motorcycle looked black, except when a streetlight shone directly on it.

Unfortunately the motorcycle parking area was full. The rider eased his steel horse into motion, rode to the end of the block, then turned around. Coming back toward the bar, he saw a place on the sidewalk near a pole that he could squeeze the motorcycle into. No sooner thought than attempted.

The man in the doorway was standing now. The motorcyclist ignored him and set about securing the vehicle with a chain lock, which he threaded around the drive shaft and and through the spokes in the rear tire.

The light was bad, and the lock on the chain quickly became wet and slippery. The motorcyclist put his helmet on the seat of the bike and bent down, trying to see where he needed to put the chain.

He realized that the man in the doorway had left it and was behind him, and glanced around. As he did so, the man in the coat fired a pistol into the motorcyclist’s head. The bullet entered it above his left ear. The shot was muffled, a wet pop that was lost in the sound of an oncoming truck. The victim slumped to the pavement, his legs splaying out.

The man in the coat quickly bent down and fired another bullet into the motorcyclist’s head, then put his pistol back into his coat pocket.

The shooter walked away along the sidewalk with his hands in his pockets as the truck passed. In the dim light and rain, the driver of the truck didn’t notice the man lying on the sidewalk.

The falling rain diluted the blood that had leaked from the holes in the victim’s head and washed his open, unseeing eyes.