The Traitor

CHAPTER FIVE

Jean-Paul Arnaud cooled his heels in the director’s outer office while he enjoyed the presence of the secretary, a tall, stately woman who owed her position more to the boss’s appreciation of beautiful women than to her professional accomplishments. She smiled wanly, as if apologizing for Rodet’s uncharacteristic tardiness. Arnaud tried to swallow his churlish mood. He didn’t appreciate being kept waiting.

Twenty minutes after the hour, he was ready to stomp off with orders to call him if and when Rodet arrived. He managed to stifle himself — a good decision, he concluded when Rodet came marching in five minutes later. The director ignored the secretary, who stood for The Arrival, and motioned to Arnaud with a jerk of his head. Inside the director’s office with the door closed, Rodet said, “Sorry I’m late. Traffic becomes more and more impossible.” The director is of medium height, a fit, trim, vain man who spent an hour a day in a tennis court and a half hour a week in a tanning bed. He was smart, a shrewd judge of character and an even shrewder politician, psychotically ambitious and absolutely ruthless. Arnaud suspected that in his heart of hearts Henri Rodet wanted to become the first president of the European Union. Of course, if this were true, Rodet was wise enough to have never mentioned it to a living soul.

Arnaud made a sympathetic noise. “How was Bonn?” he asked.

“They are not sure the politicians will go along with secret data mining of bank records,” Rodet said as he plopped himself into his chair behind his huge custom desk. He held out his hand for the weekly report, which Arnaud passed to him. Rodet had been talking to his counterpart at the BND, the Bundesnachrichtendienst, or German Federal Intelligence Service. “They are worried about scandals. They got burned years ago when they went after the Red Brigades.”

“Scandals are the nature of the business,” Arnaud said reasonably. “It’s the world we live in.”

“Indeed,” Rodet said, and took a deep breath. He exhaled with a sigh as he surveyed his corner office. It was tastefully decorated in understated elegance, with a few simple pieces of art. The people who visited Rodet’s office who weren’t with his agency were exclusively government officials. Only the initiated realized that the art was horribly expensive, and those few were precisely those whom Rodet wished to impress.

Rodet opened the classified morning briefing sheet and scanned it. He read for a few seconds. “This American — Admiral Grafton.

Who is he?”

“The CIA is reshuffling again. Grafton is their new head of European Ops. He’s an amateur, a dilettante.”

“And this illegal Yankee Doodle? Carmellini?”

“A professional. Strictly technical. He was in Iraq this past summer. We are not sure — you know how hard it is to build dossiers on foreign agents — but we believe he and Grafton worked together on several occasions when Grafton was still on active duty in the American navy. Cuba and Hong Kong.”

“Now I remember. This is that Grafton?”

“Yes, sir.”

“There are no aircraft carriers in Paris, no jet airplanes, no revolutionaries,” Rodet said, not bothering to hide his sarcasm. “Ah, these Americans! What are we doing to keep track of these two?”

“We monitor reports from agents. I have the reports sent directly to me.”

“No surveillance?”

“No sir. I didn’t think that wise at this point.” This was a lie, and Arnaud told it readily. He had learned long ago that the key to survival in the DGSE was to know more than the boss. What the boss didn’t know wouldn’t hurt Arnaud; what Arnaud knew was capital in the bank. Professional survival was high on his priority list.

Rodet paused, thinking of his conversations with the Germans. Unfortunately they, like all other Western intelligence services, talked with their counterparts in foreign services, including the Americans. Especially the Americans, who were sharing information on suspected terrorists and their activities and demanding reciprocity. In today’s world it was politically impossible not to cooperate. Correction: impossible to appear to be not cooperating.

The hard reality was that America was an attractive lightning rod for Islamic extremism. America’s arrogance, pride and worldwide commercial interests made Americans easy to dislike; they made wonderful villains. As any student of realpolitik intuitively understood, every holy warrior crusading against an American target was one less aimed somewhere else. Also, although it could never be said aloud, the difficulties American companies experienced doing business in the Middle East created opportunities for European concerns. After all, in the final analysis, the misfortunes of others were profit opportunities.

The director of the DGSE toyed with the report in his hands, neatly folding and unfolding a corner. “I concur,” he said. “Now is not the time to beard the Americans, not a few days before the G-8 summit, at any rate. Let this sailor, Grafton, have his honeymoon.”

Rodet went on to the next item on the weekly report, the murder of DGSE officer Claude Bruguiere.

“The police are investigating it as a routine murder,” Arnaud said. He had, of course, already talked several times with the police officer in charge of the investigation, the last time just this morning. That fact was in the report in front of Rodet.

“Bruguiere was shot in front of a bar he regularly frequents,” Arnaud continued as Rodet scanned the report. “A married woman friend worked there. Two bullets in the brain. No one heard the shots. The weapon was nine-millimeter, yet the cases probably had a reduced powder charge, one barely sufficient to activate the mechanism.” Arnaud and Rodet both knew that such weapons were the choice of professionals using a pistol with a silencer, so Arnaud didn’t bother to point out this fact. “He was not robbed.”

“The woman’s husband?”

“At work. The police believe he knew nothing of his wife’s affair. The news was quite a shock.”

“Indeed,” Rodet said dryly. “What was Bruguiere working on?”

Arnaud passed the files across.

Rodet flipped through them. “Nothing leaps out. Perhaps something from the past.”

“Perhaps.”

“Look into it, please, and keep me briefed.”

“Yes, sir.”

Rodet went on to the next item on the list, a prominent minister’s secret affair with a woman believed to be a BND agent. “The Germans never mentioned this.”

“Perhaps she isn’t really a BND agent.”

“Without sex to complicate human affairs, newspapers would be much thinner and you and I wouldn’t be nearly as busy,” Rodet said as he studied Arnaud’s notes.

“One wishes politicians would get too old for this sort of thing,” was the good-natured riposte, “but age seems to make them more susceptible.”

“So it seems,” Rodet murmured, and wished he had kept his comment to himself.

They spent the next twenty minutes discussing security for the summit, with a heavy emphasis on surveillance of Islamic militants residing in France.

After Arnaud left the office, Rodet made a call to his minister. They chatted briefly about Rodet’s trip and talked extensively about security for the upcoming G-8 summit. “The president insists on ironclad security,” the minister said. “We are relying on you. The security apparatus of the nation is yours to command.”

“I understand,” Rodet said politely. Indeed he did; if there were a terrorist incident in Paris while the summit was occurring, he would be the scapegoat. The politicians would publicly blame him and, of course, sack him. That outcome was inevitable, perhaps, but the minister wanted to be able to say that he told Rodet he was responsible and accountable. Actually the minister had said it four or five times — Rodet had lost count.

The two men agreed to talk again later that afternoon and terminated their conversation.

Alone at last, Rodet stood at the window looking at his view of Paris. Beyond the double-pane, electronically protected windows the autumn wind swirled fallen leaves in clouds through the streets, but he was thinking about the desert.

He had been young then, only twenty-four.

The heat and cold, the wind, the hard-packed, scoured dirt that stretched away to the horizon in all directions, and the occasional small stone outcrops… that was the desert. There wasn’t a grain of sand for a hundred miles, just endless vistas of naked dirt under a cloudless sky — and the oil pipeline, which ran from horizon to horizon. The company that built it hadn’t bothered to bury it, of course. They had laid the pipe on top of the dirt and rock, here and there putting it up on posts to keep it level where it crossed a wash or low place, and burying it only when necessary to provide a crossing place for vehicles — or the occasional Bedouin. The pipeline ran from the wells in the south across the desert, across the mountains, to the sea.

Algeria! Not the Algeria of the coastal plain, but the Algeria of the desert, the Sahara.

In the summer there was the pitiless dry heat that sucked the moisture from living bodies, literally beginning the mummification process while one was alive. In winter, the desiccating wind was bone-chilling cold. Was hell hot or cold? Summer and winter there was the wind-borne dirt, getting into everything, clothes, food, water, every nook and cranny, accumulating in ears, eyes, hair, every fold of skin, sandblasting metal, windshields, exposed skin, ruining engines, contaminating oil, turning grease into an abrasive…

He had hated the desert. Hated the circumstances that brought him to it. Hated the people who lived in it, the dirty, smelly Arabs in their filthy robes, with their dogs and goats and camels. Most Westerners, Rodet included, discovered that the Arabs did not understand the concept of truth, used an incomprehensible logic, and were reliably unreliable. The world’s worst thieves, they would steal anything they could carry, actually anything they could disassemble to pieces small enough to carry, even if the object was useless, even if they didn’t know what it was. They were illiterate and ignorant, knowing nothing of the outside world, nothing of germs or bacteria or sanitation, nothing about anything except the desert and the animals— and, of course, the Koran, which they committed to memory in the ancient tradition of oral literature. They were religious in the way that illiterate nomads have always been religious, in tune with nature, convinced that the eternal, immortal spirit surrounded them in this grand desolation in which they lived.

Rodet’s job, back when he was young, had been to prevent theft and keep the pipeline intact and operating. So he drove the road beside the pipe and checked on the toolsheds and supply depots located at convenient intervals. The job was mind-numbing.

Standing in Paris all these years later, he could still remember that hot summer day, the brassy sky, the choking dirt raised by the truck that blew in through the windows, coating the dashboard and windshield and seat and every square inch of every single thing, clogging his nostrils, burning his eyes. Oh, yes, he could still see it in his mind’s eye: see the figure in the great distance running from the toolshed, leaping up on a camel, and trotting directly away from the pipeline.

He gave chase, of course. Caught up with the trotting camel and the barefoot man aboard it. Motioned for the rider to stop his mount.

He didn’t. Kept whacking at the camel with his bare heels.

Rodet waved the revolver. The rider urged the animal to greater speed.

Rodet lost it then — shot the camel from a distance of a dozen feet and watched the thing trot on for a few more strides, then slow, stumble, and go down. The rider went flying and landed all in a heap.

Rodet boiled out of the truck with the pistol in his hand.

The rider was a boy with only scraggly facial hair. He was dressed in rags.

They were a hundred miles south of the nearest collection of mud huts, in the midst of a great plain of mud and rock, broken only by an occasional thorn bush. To the east lay the low hills that the boy had been running toward. Once in the hills, he could have found a place to get out of sight until the infidel in the truck tired of waiting and drove on. Now, of course, Rodet had him.

As he stood with the pistol covering the boy, who was sitting, not trying to stand, he looked back at the pipeline and the tool depot. The door of the storage shed was standing open; no doubt the boy had broken the lock and entered to see what he could steal.

The camel flopped around a few times, groaning, then lay still.

Staring at the young man, Rodet realized that he could kill him and no one would know. Or care. For the first time in his life he felt the power of life and death, felt the power of the blued steel he held m his right hand.

The Arab stared at him, watching every move, expressionless. He made no attempt to stand, or even move. Not that anything he could nave done would have done him any good. Only fifteen feet separated them, and Rodet held the revolver, which still had five cartridges in it. Five was probably four more than enough.

Damned dirty Arab thief!

He stood there, tempted, acutely conscious of the heft of the revolver.

Not a trace of emotion crossed the brown face before him. It was only when Rodet glanced away from the dark eyes that he realized the young man was holding one arm with the other. The arm being cradled had a sliver of white bone protruding through it.

The kid was extraordinarily tough. Rodet had never seen anyone with this kind of physical courage.

He stuck the pistol in his hip pocket and went back to the truck for the first aid kit. When he returned the youth hadn’t moved. As he inspected the broken arm, he realized that if he didn’t set it, it would never be set. This boy was from one of these ubiquitous collections of mud huts that surrounded the “towns”; the arm would either heal or fester, and if the latter, be taken off by some self-taught surgeon to prevent the infection from killing the patient. People with missing limbs were a common sight in the third world.

He touched the limb, explained in French what had to be done. The boy’s expression never wavered. “Do you understand?” Rodet asked.

“Oui.”

So he seized the arm and braced his foot against the elbow and pulled until the bone came back inside the skin. The boy groaned once, a moan that escaped from deep inside. Rodet felt the arm to make sure the bone was where it should be, more or less, and then splinted the limb. He left an opening in the splint for the wound, which he sprinkled with a disinfectant powder and dressed.

When he was finished, he half-carried the boy to the truck.

His name was Abu Qasim. His arm healed, and as it did, he taught Henri Rodet to speak Arabic. Not shooting Abu Qasim was the turning point in Rodet’s life, the most important thing that ever happened to him.

Abu Qasim …

Henri Rodet turned away from his palatial window and tackled the paperwork piled in his in basket.

I spent the evening riding the subways and walking into and out of department stores. Those exercises, I have learned through the years, give me an excellent opportunity to see if I am under surveillance. I was well aware of the fact that if the DGSE wished, they could devote so many agents, cars, and helicopters to the task that the subject would be under continual surveillance and, unless he was very astute, be unaware of it. During the cold war the Soviets took this kind of roving surveillance to a whole new level in Moscow. Fortunately this was France. A government bureaucracy, the DGSE had no more extra people than any other agency of a democratic government; God willing, they had no reason yet to pull out all the stops to learn what that American wart Terry G. Shannon was up to. All I was doing was checking to see if, for any reason, I had aroused enough suspicion somewhere to warrant a little checking up on by one or two officers. I didn’t see anyone paying any attention to me, and after two hours of strolling, I was certain I was clean.

I needed to be, because I was going to a meet with two agency types. This meet was set up by the call Grafton told me to expect. These men had diplomatic cover, which was a mixed blessing; as personnel assigned to the embassy, the counterintelligence section of the DGSE would automatically be interested in them and would routinely, from time to time, devote people and assets to checking on their movements and activities. They had to be loose when they met me or I would come under suspicion and my future activities would ecome more difficult. I hoped those two were pros and knew what the heck they were doing.

When trying to spot surveillance, the secret is not to appear to be looking for it. A surveillance subject who stops to look for reflections in windows, pauses to tie his shoes, darts across traffic or jumps on or off a subway at the last moment red-flags himself, telling the watcher that, indeed, he is worth watching.

I checked my watch and, exactly at twenty-one minutes past eight in the evening, stepped out of a Left Bank bar onto the sidewalk. I turned right and was walking along when a blue Citroen pulled over to the curb. A man was in the right seat with his window rolled down, and he was smoking a cigarette. I recognized him; his name was Rich Thurlow, and he was originally from Brooklyn. “Need a ride?” he said, just loud enough for me to hear.

“Yeah,” I said. I opened the rear passenger door and climbed in. The car was in motion again as I slammed the door. I lay down in the rear seat.

Rich turned around and looked at me. He nodded toward the driver. “You know Al.”

“Hey there,” I said, and tried to make myself comfortable. The back seats of Citroens are not designed for guys over six feet to lie down in.

“Hey,” the driver said, and concentrated on driving.

“Long time no see,” Rich said. He tossed his weed out the window and fished another from a pack in his shirt pocket.

“So how’s everything?” I asked.

“The frogs had two cars on us tonight. We led them around for about an hour before we put some moves on them.” They laughed.

Well, if you couldn’t brag a little about your exploits, why be a spy?

“Think you’re clean?”

“Yeah, but hell, you never know. Fucking frogs…”

I sat up, putting my head into one corner so I would be difficult to see from a trailing car. “Won’t getting ditched make them suspicious?

“Would if this was the first time we did it,” Al Salazar said with a laugh. “We do it every time we go anyplace. They expect us to. They play the game awhile and let us go.”

Or follow unobtrusively. Well, this was Thurlow and Salazar’s station — all I could do was hope they knew what they were doing.

I knew them both, so I had reason to believe they did. Rich Thurlow and I had broken into a bank in Zurich, among other things. I had known him for about three years. He had a wife who cheated on him if left alone too long and a teenaged son who experimented with marijuana. He lived to fish and carried a telescoping rod with him everywhere. He even fished in the Seine during his lunch hour.

Alberto Salazar and I had worked together during my four months in Iraq. We ran on-the-job experiments with new technology to detect explosives through walls and in vehicles. He was about five and a half feet tall, very athletic, and single. Al was from Texas and spoke machine-gun-quick Spanish. His English was lightly accented, his Arabic pretty good, and his French tolerable; he could cuss a blue streak in any of those languages. He had an innate grasp of how a thing should work, so he was easy on the equipment and got results.

In short, Thurlow and Salazar were competent career professionals. When I told Grafton that I didn’t trust my colleagues, that statement might have conveyed a false impression. I had no specific complaints against anyone. And yet… sometimes it seemed that the harder we worked, the fewer results we had to show for it. Now and then a subject found out we were doing surveillance, or the other side transferred the guy we wanted somewhere else, making him unavailable, or people stopped talking in rooms we had bugged. Things are going to go wrong occasionally — that’s life — yet it seemed to me that in Europe, especially in Europe, things went wrong a little too much. Occasionally. Nothing I could put my finger on. Or maybe I’ve been in this game too long.

Hell, maybe we all had. “So Goldberg says you want a brief.”

“That’s right. Need to know everything you know about Henri Rodet.”

Both men turned to look at me. Salazar got his eyes back on the road two seconds later as Rich whistled. “Rodet, huh? Gonna start right at the top and work down.”

“Yeah. I want to see DGSE headquarters and Rodet’s residences. I hear he has a flat in Paris and a chateau somewhere outside the city.”

“Well, yeah, we can do that,” Salazar said, glancing at me again in the rearview mirror.

“Gonna get to know him better, are you?” Rich muttered. “I know him on sight, but that’s it. Never met the man and don’t want to. Real asshole, from what I hear — one hard, ruthless, tough son of a bitch. Made a lot of money somehow or other and runs a tight ship. Used to be the DGSE was a bunch of Inspector Clouseaus with attitudes, strictly amateur hour. Every naughty little thing they did got leaked to the press. You opened the morning paper to see what the spooks had been up to last night. Murders, kidnappings, smears of political enemies — they did it all. Rodet stopped the leaks. Hasn’t been a leak in years. They may be doing the same stuff, but you won’t read about it in Le Monde.”

Salazar was wending his way through the streets as Rich talked. I could see his right eye in the rearview mirror. His eyes never stopped moving — checking the mirrors, looking at traffic to the right and left, oncoming, checking pedestrians …

Rich finally tired of talking about the French spooks and got started on Paris station gossip. He and Salazar gave me the latest on the boss, George Goldberg, who was trying to eat his way through every restaurant in Paris during his tour. He had eaten in 237, by his count, according to Salazar. They discussed the possibility that George might be lying about that number. They condemned George’s practice of eating dinner in one establishment and dessert in another and adding both to his list.

Rolling through the streets and listening to my colleagues gab, I thought about how nice it was to once again be in a place that had toilet paper in the restrooms. I have a theory about toilet paper: Social organization is required to get it into the restrooms, public education tells the average Joe what it is and how to use it, and public order prevents the first guy who sees the stuff from stealing it. Paris had all three; Baghdad none of them.

Salazar rolled into a square and found a spot at the curb where we could sit for a moment. He pointed. “Over there, the second building from the left, second floor above the arcade. That’s Henri Rodet’s apartment.”

I thought I knew the square. “Isn’t this the Place des Vosges?”

“Yeah. These houses date from the Renaissance. They’re about four hundred years old.”

“So which apartment does Rodet have?”

“Man, he’s got a whole floor. Not that the flats are all that big, but they’re cool, y’know?”

“Who does he keep here? Wife or mistress?”

“Top secret stuff like that is way above my pay grade,” Salazar said solemnly.

“You see him, you ask him,” Rich chimed in. “Then tell us.”

“Okay,” I said. “Let me out. Come back and get me in thirty minutes.” sure. I got out of the car, and Salazar got it under way.

Nine symmetrical houses lined the east, west and south sides of the square, with seven on the north. Whoever designed it four hundred years ago was probably very uptight. If you really like symmetry, this is the sort of thing you will like. A people place, complete with sidewalks, trees and wrought-iron benches, formed the interior of the square. The ground floors of all the houses formed an arcade that stuck out over the sidewalk. When the houses were built back in the good old days, pedestrians were probably grateful for the arcade since the folks in the top floors of the houses emptied their chamber pots out the windows into the streets, symmetry or no symmetry. France had its pre-toilet-paper era, too. The wonder is that the people lived long enough to reproduce.

I walked across the park toward Rodet’s building as I looked it over. Streetlights lit the fronts of the buildings, so every feature was visible. Some of the windows had drapes, others did not. Some buildings, especially those on the west side of the square, looked as if they were being renovated. That meant contractors and craftsmen and their vehicles.

I could see lights in Rodet’s windows. He had four windows, two with drapes and two without. The main entrance to the building was off the arcade. I looked for security cameras and didn’t see any. Still, the head of the DGSE probably rated a bodyguard or two, and no doubt they were upstairs or somewhere out here on the square, keeping watch.

There was a walkway under the center building in the block, so I passed through. Sure enough, a narrow alley led behind all the buildings. Metal fire escapes were arranged on the exterior walls. There should be a rear staircase, too, I reasoned, because even before fire escapes, people in buildings didn’t want to be trapped.

I walked along the alley and found doors into each building, although whether the doors were original or later alterations was impossible to say. The locks were old large-key door locks, the kind that were popular in Europe between the world wars. They probably dated from a renovation during that period, which I thought must have been the last major one. I glanced at Rodet’s back door. It was not alarmed, at least on the exterior, but high above, pointed down at a fairly steep angle, I saw a security camera. The thing seemed to be aimed straight at the doorway. If the video feed was not monitored inside the building, then it must be monitored off-site, which meant there was a dedicated telephone line or an Internet connection. I continued strolling along the alley, craning my neck left and right like your average tourist.

If you think it would be easy to go in through Rodet’s back door, think again. I would have bet serious money that the old door was there because local ordinances prevented exterior modifications on historical buildings. Immediately inside, I suspected, was another door, a steel one with terrific locks, festooned with alarms. Yet the exterior walls, with old metal drainpipes coming down off the roofs, could be climbed.

When I got back in the square I looked again at the roofs. Above Rodet’s apartment was an attic with dormer windows. I wondered if that attic was part of his apartment. A careful man could go over the roof and enter through one of those windows. It was something to think about.

I was also thinking about Marisa Petrou, Rodet’s mistress. Could I use the fact that I knew her to gain entrance to this apartment?

I spent the rest of my half hour just looking, trying to make the scene and details stick in the gray matter. Alberto Salazar and Rich Thurlow arrived right on time to pick me up.

“I thought we’d look at DGSE headquarters tonight and save the chateau for tomorrow,” Rich said after I was in and the car was rolling again.

“Sure. Drive on.”

We hadn’t gone two blocks before Salazar said, “Sure is different from Iraq, isn’t it?” He directed that comment at me. “There’s a place I don’t miss, let me tell you. Squalor, dirt, heat, fanatics, car bombs, blood on the street, body parts strewn around… It’s the contrast, y’know? I have nightmares about the place. How about you, Tommy?”

“Hard to forget a resort spa like that,” I agreed.

“Remember that time we located those explosives inside that house, and when the soldiers surrounded the place, that woman walked out? She was wearing one of those chadors, those black robes that cover her head to toe, and she had a baby in her arms, a kid maybe a year old. She walked right toward the lieutenant.”

I knew how this story ended, and I wasn’t in the mood for it. Let’s talk about something else, Al,” I suggested.

He ignored me. He glanced at Rich to ensure he was listening and continued. “She was walking toward the lieutenant and interpreter, who were standing behind an APC, when she blew up. Had explosives around her waist in some kind of belt. Goddamnedest thing I ever saw. One instant she and the kid were there, then they weren’t. Gone in the blink of an eye. When the smoke and shit cleared so we could see, there were little pieces of skin and bone and bloody tissue splattered for blocks. Everybody was watching when the bomb went off, so everybody got hit with this stuff, and six or eight guys got scratched up with shrapnel or something.”

“That’s enough, Al,” I said.

“If they try to send me back, I’m quitting.”

“Okay,” Thurlow said, “but enough’s enough. I don’t want to hear any more, either.”

“Fuck you,” Al shot back. “You too, Carmellini! Fuck both you dickheads.”

Of course, he would be the guy behind the wheel. He was hunched over, gripping the wheel so tightly his knuckles were turning white, staring straight ahead as the car rolled along.

“Hey, man, it’s over,” I said, trying to calm him. “You’re out of the sewer. Lay it down and let it go.”

“If I can’t talk to you guys about it, who the hell can I talk to?”

That, I thought, was the most insightful question I had heard in years. Be that as it may, I still didn’t want to chin about Iraq with Al Salazar or anybody on planet Earth.

If I never again set foot in Iraq, that would be fine by me. Remembering Grafton’s promise, I silently vowed to make this assignment my very last for the agency. After this, you can color me gone. Au revoir, baby.

The French spooks, the DGSE, had their offices in an unlikely building, the Conciergerie. This was an old, old building on the He de la Cite that had been used for a lot of things down through the centuries, including a prison. Here the revolutionaries imprisoned Marie Antoinette and Charlotte Corday, the assassin of Marat, as well as Danton and Robespierre before they each made their oneway trip to the guillotine. The history came from Rich Thurlow, who had apparently spent a few evenings with a guidebook. He said that during the Revolution over four thousand prisoners were held here. We found a place to park and did some walking.

Standing on the right, or north, bank and staring at the building, I thought it looked ominous. It was made of cut stone and stood about six or seven stories high — it was hard to say because I didn’t know how high the ceilings inside were. There were towers where the walls cornered, and the whole thing had one of those Paris roofs broken with dormers. The place had obviously been built as a medieval palace. In those happy days a palace was a fortress, a stronghold, where the king’s men could hold off starving mobs or armies led by unhappy lords and barons. The river had been the moat. No crocodiles, but since the Seine was the city sewer, who needed them?

“When was that thing built?” I asked Thurlow, our walking Baedeker.

“Thirteenth or fourteenth century. It’s roughly contemporary with Sainte-Chapelle, which is immediately on the other side of it.”

I knew about Sainte-Chapelle, a magnificent medieval church that King Louis IX built in the thirteenth century to house Christ’s crown of thorns and fragments of the true cross. He purchased these relics, properly authenticated, of course, from the emperor of Constantinople for an outrageous fortune. No doubt the emperor laughed all the way to the bank. This transaction set the record for the largest swindle ever successfully completed, a record that stood for centuries. If you take inflation into account, it may still be the con to beat. The pope was so impressed that he made Louis a saint; the good folks in Missouri even named a city after him.

Staring at the walls of the Conciergerie, I wasn’t in a laughing mood. I saw my share of old black-and-white movies when I was growing up, so I knew damn well what they had in the dungeons of that rockpile: lots of cells and a torture chamber. Probably had a rack and screw and a wall where they hung people in chains, the way the King of Id tortures the Spook. Just looking at those massive sandstone walls gave me the willies. I turned and looked the other way. Well, heck, half of Paris was to the north, and half to the south.

“You going in there?” Rich said, jerking his head at the building.

“I sure as hell hope not. But I do what Grafton tells me. He says go, I’m off like a racehorse.”

“More like a mouse.”

“That’s probably a better analogy, I suppose.”

“Better you than me.”

We discussed equipment, what they had on hand and what they could get in a reasonable amount of time. “Bugs,” I said. “Audio and video. How many?”

“We got about twenty of each on hand. Most of them are the new ones, so tiny you could swallow them and listen to your lunch digest.”

I grunted. One of my instructors had done just that to demonstrate the capability of the new units. It had been funny … then!

“Take me to a subway station and drop me off,” I said. “Tomorrow, when you’re clean, you come along this street right here, and I’ll be standing over there by that bus stop. About ten in the morning. Will that be enough time?”

“It’s after rush hour. We should be clean by then.”

“Have the guy driving the van meet us somewhere. I want to see him and the stuff in the van.”

“Okay,” Rich said, and flipped a cigarette away.

Al stood looking at the Conciergerie with his hands jammed in his trouser pockets. Finally he pulled one out, turned his jacket collar up to ward off the late-evening chill, then jammed that hand back where it belonged and started walking toward the car, which was two blocks away.

“Assholes,” he muttered.

I wasn’t sure whether he was referring to the French spooks or his present companions. He was going to be fun to be around for the next few weeks.

Jake Grafton had an interview with Sarah Houston at the American embassy.

“So how are you and Carmellini getting along?”

“Fine,” she snapped. She had no intention of discussing her relationship with Tommy Carmellini with anybody alive.

“Do you have any objection to working with him?”

“I have absolutely no desire to go back to Alderson.’ She had served some time in the federal women’s prison in Alderson, West Virginia. “To stay out of the can I’ll work with the devil.”

“I don’t think we have to dig that deep for recruits just yet,” Grafton said with a straight face. “I merely wished to confirm that you had no objection to working with Mr. Carmellini.”

She shook her head. Although her lips were compressed in a thin line, Grafton noticed, she seemed relaxed.

“Or me,” he added.

“I don’t like where this conversation is going. Just what do you have in mind?”

“Fair question,” Grafton admitted. “I was thinking of having you turn traitor.”

Sarah Houston’s mouth fell open and she gawked.

“I was thinking you and Tommy might sell access to Intelink to our French friends.”

She closed her mouth and kept her eyes glued on his.

Grafton kept talking. “Terry Shannon is a CIA traitor who wants to make a big score and live happily ever after. You are his girlfriend, the NSA analyst with the access to Intelink. You were on the software team and Shannon has convinced you to install a trapdoor. You hate your job, your bosses don’t appreciate you, and you’re madly in love with Shannon.”

“They’ll never believe that!”

“We’ll have to make them believe it.”

“Do you really intend to give them Intelink?”

“I’ll give them a peek at a fake Intelink. That’ll be enough.”

She snorted. “You have got to be kidding!”

“I’m not. She pursed her lips and gave a low whistle. Then she rubbed her forehead. “The French will never buy it.”

Grafton waved that away. “Will you give it a try?”

“No. Hell no! I’m supposed to be rotting in a federal prison right this very minute. You ought to know — you put me there. They’re going to check me every way from Sunday and find out I’m hot. And by hot I don’t mean sexy.”

“The last thing in the world they will want is for any information about you or Intelink to get out,” Grafton pointed out.

“Rodet won’t be the only one at the DGSE who knows. One photo in the papers and I’m toast. One nosy reporter bastard and I’ll be in a cell until the day I die. I’m not complaining — I deserve it for what I did — but I am not going to do anything that increases the odds that I’ll go back to that shithole. Nothing. I will do nothing!” Her voice rose until it cracked. Whispering, she added, “Goddamn hell no, Admiral. Get another sucker.”

“Unfortunately, you’re the only one I have,” Jake Grafton said, and sighed.