Dark Zone (32 page)

Despite the extra security, the tower was open for business. A long line snaked out from the chute in front of the north pillar as tourists waited to buy their tickets and then take the double-decker elevator up to the first or second observation deck. Once they reached the second level, or
etage,
as the French called it, they could board a smaller elevator and ride to the top.

“How do you think these guys manage to sell miniature towers for one euro when they’re three in the souvenir shop over there?” asked Lia.

“They don’t have the same overhead,” Dean told her.

Lia frowned and turned to look across the road. “Big bus could jump this barrier pretty easily,” she said, putting her hand on the metal rail that separated the tower platform from the road. “Go right through this pipe.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t stand there then.”

“You won’t save me if something goes wrong?” she said sarcastically.

Dean frowned. He wasn’t sure if her sarcasm was a good or bad sign.

“They have enough gendarmes here,” added Lia, referring to the military policemen, who were dressed in battle gear and carried automatic rifles. “You’d think they’d be able to do something about the souvenir sellers.”

“The guys on the bikes are the ones who look after them,” said Dean. There were two policemen who used mountain bikes to chase after the sellers when they got particularly obnoxious, but their efforts seemed halfhearted at best; the souvenir sellers would retreat, sometimes all the way across the river, only to return a few minutes later.

“Some security,” grumbled Lia.

“You want them to close the tower?”

“If they’re serious, yes.”

“Life just can’t come to a stop.”

“You’re either serious or you’re not,” said Lia.

“Maybe we should go up,” suggested Dean. “Play tourist.”

“Why?”

“I’d like to see what it’s like,” said Dean.

“Be my guest.”

Before he could answer her, Rockman’s voice echoed in his ear. “Charlie, Mr. Rubens has something he needs you to do right away. Find a taxi and we’ll tell you what’s going on while you’re en route.”

66

Mussa tapped his foot on the brake impatiently as the traffic showed no sign of letting up. He had given himself nearly an hour’s extra time, and still he was going to end up being very close.

He would make it. He knew he would make it. He had to relax. He settled his hands on the steering wheel, tapping out an impatient beat. He thought of listening to the radio and reached in that direction—only to be startled by a sharp rap on the window. He pushed upright, angry—then saw that a policeman was standing there.

Slowly Mussa put his left hand on the button to lower the window. He had no weapon; they were liabilities now.

“Yes?” he asked.

“This is your truck?” said the officer.

“My company’s, yes.”

“Where are you going?”

“To Gare du Nord,” Mussa said. “The train station. I have a delivery to the Eurostar and I’m running late. I was just—”

The policeman frowned at him, then took a step back from the window. “Take that road there to the left,” he said, pointing. “We’re blocking off traffic because of the American President’s visit. Go now, before the road is completely closed.”

“Thank you,” managed Mussa, putting the van in gear and cranking the wheel to turn into the opposite lane.

67

Was there any number as perfect as 3?

Indivisible. Prime. Essential. Mystic in its many applications. Mysterious.

Very mysterious. Unfortunately.

Johnny Bib looked at the three blank pieces of paper on the large table in the center of the lab room. The pages represented the blank spots of a larger file that his team was trying to extract from the hard drive that Dean and Lia had taken from the French library. The drive had been corrupted by a power spike. It seemed to have happened as the drive was being overwritten, which was a bit of a break for the analysts, making it much easier to recover data. However, the scrubber program had succeeded in laying down its pattern more than three times over several areas—probably during an earlier session—and at least some of the files they wanted had been erased.

The recovery process in those areas was excruciatingly slow. The team used a device that looked at the magnetic recordings on the drive that were left by the very slight misalignment of the heads. These fluxes—Johnny saw them as tiny yes or no checks written on pieces of sand on a vast beach—were run through a series of programs that attempted to tease logic from them, looking for patterns that corresponded to computer language. This part wasn’t necessarily as difficult as it sounded; it was another way of thinking about encryption, after all. But the way that the computer stored files added another level of complexity, and in any event the flux reading was painfully slow.

Three large blank spots, unlikely to yield their secrets.

Three. The ultimate prime, the ultimate number.

Was that a sign that they would succeed or fail?

“Johnny, look at this,” said Blondie Jones, one of the computer geeks working on the project.

Blondie had earned her nickname a year before, when she’d come to work with her black hair dyed yellow. Her hair had since returned to its natural color, but her nickname had become permanent.

“This other set of calculations mimics the simulation we found earlier, but on a slightly smaller scale. The tower blowup. Some of the values are similar, but the impact area is closer and smaller. It wasn’t completely overwritten.”

Johnny Bib walked over to the console where Blondie was working.

“You’re sure it’s not just a small-scale model they tried first, to control the variables and get the concept down?” he suggested.

“Look at the dates. And there’s an access correlation here, when the library computer was taken over. See? We traced everything back and we found the computer used to initiate the connection. It’s part of a network, like a commercial thing or something. I think the queries originated there, but we may not know until we download everything off those drives. Right now we’re looking around. There’s a hidden file structure similar to what we’ve seen on the others. It’ll take a few minutes. Three or four.”

“Better three than four,” he said automatically. “Three is a much better number.”

He looked at the data. A smaller explosion, a smaller effect, but the result was—

Oh.

Oh!

The upper stage of the tower—an easier target.

“Excuse me. I have to talk to Mr. Rubens. Find out what else is on that computer.”

68

Donohue watched as the door to the building opened. The first man out was a plainclothes officer, a bodyguard of some type. He walked to the end of the block and got into a car. As soon as he pulled away from the curb, two more men emerged from the building, followed by a third dressed in a brown suit—Ponclare, his target.

Donohue bent slightly. His joints tightened. His eyes narrowed their focus.

Now
.

He squeezed the trigger; in the scope he saw Ponclare’s head burst as if it were a water balloon.

The sniper held the gun ready until the body crumpled. Then he got up and walked calmly to the door, savoring the satisfaction of a job well done.

69

The driver stopped, waiting to turn. Dean had glanced down at the handheld computer to look at the download of the bank statement when he heard the crack of a gunshot a block away. It was a sharp, loud bang, and Dean, a former sniper, realized instantly that they were too late.

“Pay the driver!” he yelled to Lia, jumping for the car.

Ponclare’s office was down the block and around the corner. As Dean started to run, a man came around the corner, walking casually, as if nothing had happened. He wore an American-style baseball cap and had a camera around his neck and seemed oblivious to what was going on around him.

Dean got a glimpse of the man’s face as he went past. Something poked at him in that moment, but he didn’t realize it for a step or two, not until he reached the corner.

Two men with pistols drawn were running down the block toward a man who lay sprawled on the sidewalk. They were yelling for their boss:
“Monsieur Ponclare! Monsieur Ponclare!”

Dean turned around to get another look at the man he’d just passed. Lia, done with the cab, ran up to him, asking what had happened.

Rather than answering, Dean started to cross the street. The taxi driver had picked up another fare—the man in the baseball cap. Dean stopped to let the taxi pass; as it did, he slipped a small tracking device from his shirt pocket and slapped it against the car’s rear fender. Another taxi was coming down from the cross street; Dean ran out halfway into traffic to flag it down.

“What are you doing?” asked Lia, catching up to him.

“We have to follow him,” said Dean.

“Why?”

“Because this is the second time I nearly ran into him. The first was in London when we went to check out the room Kensworth had stayed in.”

70

Tommy Karr stared at the small metro ticket, momentarily unable to remember which way it was supposed to be fed into the machine so the magnetic strip could be read. He finally decided strip-down; the reader grabbed the ticket from him, whisking it through its mechanism and spitting it out at the other side. The green light on the panel flashed as he grabbed the ticket and walked through, wending his way through the tile-lined tunnels down to the platform. A train trundled in just as he arrived; he joined what looked like the smallest triangle queuing for the doors.

The doors began to close as he got in. Two men jumped in behind him, pulling a large black case; in the half second or so it took Karr to grab the pole and turn around they had snapped the top of the case open to reveal an amplifier, CD setup, and microphone. As the train began to move, one of the men produced a small and silvery alto sax. The subway car exploded with a jaunty blare of music that was part rap, part American blues, part rock.

Karr caught the glance of an elderly woman sitting nearby ; she rolled her eyes but then dug into her purse for a few coins to toss into their cup. The two men sang a decent harmony—or at least it might have been decent had it not been distorted by the amplifier. Their words were a French-Croatian-English patois; rather than translate them directly, Karr’s brain began supplying its own version of the song:

She’s a gorgeous girl
Too pretty for you
Gone now.
The bird flew, flew, flew.

Whether the words had really come from the performers or not, Karr couldn’t say.

The tune stayed with him as he changed trains, remaining in his head even when he ascended the steps at Champ de Mars near the Eiffel Tower. A policeman frowned at him as he stepped near the curb at the middle of the block; Karr smiled and then walked over toward the corner, joining a small knot of people as the light turned green.

“So, Rockman, what’s going on?” he asked his runner as he crossed toward the tower. “They have more dump trucks here than a construction site.”

“Marie’s going to update you in a second,” replied Rockman. “We’re in the video system. We can see what’s going on in the elevators and have limited views on each of the floors.”

“
Étage
,” said Karr, letting the French word roll off his tongue. “Where are Dean and Lia?”

“Marie’ll give you the low-down,” said the runner. “It’s complicated.”

A black man with a ring of Eiffel Tower souvenirs came up to Karr as he reached the curb. The man jangled the metal towers as if they were keys and said, “One euro,” indicating the price. Three or four other souvenir sellers came up behind him; when Karr shook his head and walked past the first a second approached and gave him the same pitch, then a third and a fourth. The sellers wouldn’t compete with one another directly, but each felt entitled to try his own selling techniques where another failed.

“Ponclare was assassinated,” said Rubens over the com system.

“Hey, Chief,” said Karr. “Who killed him?”

“We’re not sure yet. Dean saw someone leaving the area who looked like a man he saw in the hotel in England. He and Lia are following him.”

“You want me to help?”

“I don’t believe that will be necessary,” said Rubens. “In any event, we’re still trying to piece together what’s going on. The French don’t know themselves. Continue where you are,” added Rubens. “We’re working on new information and we may need you to communicate it directly to the commander in charge at the tower scene. His name is Georges Cunard.”

“Should I introduce myself now?”

“I’d prefer you didn’t break cover unless necessary,” said Rubens. “Not until we understand what’s going on.”

“Ducky.”

Rubens didn’t get the
pun—cunard
was “duck” in French—a fact Karr found even funnier than the joke itself.

Karr glanced at the massive concrete pillar that anchored the tower. Blow it up? No way. It seemed to him that if you had a bus of explosives, it would be much easier to park near a big department store over by the Opera district. A bus loaded with explosives would demolish Au Printemps, the fancy department store; people would be afraid to shop anywhere, not just in France. But then again, he wasn’t a terrorist—he didn’t quite get the symbolic value involved in hitting a place like the Eiffel Tower. He understood, obviously, that it was important, but he didn’t really think like a madman.

Karr walked across the plaza, studying the line to the tower entrance at the north pier. There were several policemen as well as military gendarmes near the entrance, checking backpacks and handbags. They weren’t what made the line so long, however; the double-decker elevator inside the pier could only hold a few dozen people at a time.

The south pier, however, had no line.

It had no elevator, either. If you went in there you had to climb the stairs.