Glass House (46 page)

The stores were at the back. They were
connected to the museum through a columned passage that had a
checkpoint in it, separating the shoppers from the art with all the
appropriate security personnel and metal detectors and searches of
handbags. But that wasn’t the only way into the little mall. That
portion of the Louvre complex could also be reached through a
parking garage and a Metro subway access and, even more
surreptitiously, by stairs that led down from the street level
above. Stairs that were hard to spot and that most people therefore
never really paid attention to at all.

At ground level above those stairs, the Arc
de Triomphe du Caroussel stood exactly as it had for two centuries,
its sculpted surfaces and the warrior figures on it worn smoother
by the years of weather and its surroundings cut by streets and
paths never contemplated when it was completed to commemorate
Napoleon’s victories. The arch was a symbol of pride no more. It
was a landmark instead, for all intents and purposes no better than
a gas station or billboard or restaurant that people used more as a
guide in the city than as a reminder of anything great and
memorable.

Near each of the arch’s sides, barely
visible from the park at its back and the street at its front,
staircases led down underground like cellar steps, their tops flush
with the crushed-rock walking areas of the Tuileries gardens and
grounds above. They were marked only with a simple light post and a
small sign barely noting the access to the shops and museum
below.

Alexander Bay knew the stairs were there,
though. He knew everything about Paris. Knew everything about most
of Western Europe, for that matter, if for no other reason than
that it was his business – his
task
 – to know
those things and places and the people in them, inside and out.

He knew those stairs and the mall near their
end and the museum beyond that, just as he knew a hundred other
particular spots for meetings in the metropolitan area. The notable
places like the crypts at Sacré Coeur and Dôme Church and the
Panthéon. The red-velveted, balcony level of the Opera House.
Montparnasse Cemetery.

And the less notable, too. The bar in the
Concorde La Fayette, in the Chaillot Quarter. The corner booth on
the upper level of the McDonald’s a couple doors down from the
Moulin Rouge. The small artist’s apartment in Montmartre. The patch
of grass to the south, across the path from the Medici Fountain in
Luxembourg Garden.

He knew them all, he knew how and when to
get to each of them, and more importantly, he knew how to get away
from each of them. He knew the hiding places and quiet places and
public places in and around them. He knew the vantage points where
he could tuck himself away, to watch and see what developed at the
appointed times.

Because Alexander Bay was, in American
intelligence parlance, a collection agent for the CIA. Which meant
he was a spy.

It was far and away from what he ever
thought he would be at one time, but he was a spy even so. And
Paris was what he had to know.

When the Central Intelligence Agency had
come to Georgetown University a dozen years before, Bay had skipped
out of his History of Revolutions class and attended the
informational meeting for the same reason that virtually everyone
else attended – as a lark. But he went and listened, politely
and diligently, and at the end, he found out that intelligence work
was far more than being James Bond and that he was far more
interested in it than he ever thought he would be.

He signed up for an interview and sat with
an impossibly nice and well-dressed man for twenty minutes, talking
about himself and learning a sliver of the intricacies of what was
available to anyone working as a public servant in the CIA. At the
end of the meeting, the man asked him to come down to Agency
headquarters in Langley to meet some more people, and Bay did.

Five times.

Five trips to Langley. Five sets of meetings
with the insignificant and the not-so-insignificant, though still
not too significant. There were more applications and
questionnaires than he possibly could remember, along with
interviews that picked apart his past and searched out what he
wanted in his future. One of the interviewers told him more about
his grandfather on his mother’s side than Alexander Bay ever had
heard before.

At the end of that – and it all was so
complicated and furiously fast that it really was no more than a
blur now – he’d signed up, as excited about making it
successfully through the process as he was about the prospects of
working with his new employer. Months of class work and field
training followed, with Bay aiming for a position in foreign
intelligence analysis.

He wanted to be a bookworm. He wanted the
information to drift in to him so he could sit and sift through it
and pore over it and digest it. He wanted to eat up everything he
could learn about all the bad guys out in the world and then report
back on what it was that the United States of America should go and
do about them.

That expectation, which he amazingly once
labeled a
dream
but looked back on with dread more recently,
ended surprisingly abruptly and with surprisingly less for Bay to
say about it than he would have thought. His supervisors in the
classes and exercises saw something in him, and they dutifully
reported that to the appropriate people.

Those people took him aside. They had a word
or two with him. Words like “honor” and “prestige” and “challenge.”
And in the end, Alexander Bay, fresh out of college at the time,
found himself in the intelligence agent training program of the
CIA.

Under the dim yellow light that seeped from
the poles marking the stairs by the Caroussel arch, Bay walked
carefully but confidently down the steps, following their turns
with an attentive eye for movement and an ear tuned for sounds. It
was late. Not so horribly late that the complex would be closed,
but that was coming soon. He saw only two people as he made his way
down and in. Both of them were leaving, heading up and out. It was
the end of the day, and people were heading to homes and apartments
and hotels.

He reached one hand over, casually dragging
his fingers along the soft and smooth facing of the walls. The
stone that was cut and laid and stacked to form the walls and floor
was so smooth and creamy pale and uniform that it looked as though
you could carve a piece out of it with a knife and use it as
soap.

Reaching the bottom level, Alexander had the
same thought that always came to him – it was like stepping
down into Egyptian tombs, with their stark finishing and
decoration. Their earthen, tanned hues and desert-tinted
colonnades.

Their silence.

That absence of meaningful sound both
comforted Bay and made him nervous. It was soothing in the way it
allowed him to hear everything, and hearing was sometimes far more
important than seeing in his line of work. But the stillness crept
eerily over him at the same time. Despite the training and the
decade-plus of service since he was first at Langley, stepping into
a silent room for a meeting with someone probably already in
it – someone unknown, no less – still made him
anxious.

That was part of the excitement, he
supposed. Even today, after years filled with harrowing moments
that nearly killed him and an even greater number of drearily
boring experiences that he imagined someday
would
kill him,
Bay’s heart beat pleasantly faster in anticipation of what he was
doing.

It had been that way since the start. Each
new country and city and face. Each new thing. Every day was some
kind of challenge. Every meeting and drop, even the nerve-wracking,
high security, coded ones like this one, was exciting.

Bay moved away from the end of the stairs.
They didn’t open immediately into the area where the stores were,
instead stopping in a cavernous antechamber that led, in turn, into
a closed-off meeting room, the parking garage, and, straight on,
the shops and museum. He turned north, toward the doors leading to
the garage, and he faced five massive columns that, stretching away
from him, marked out a line where the wall of a palace had once
been.

He moved quietly up to the second column. He
stepped around it slowly, to the left, until he saw the outline of
the woman who was standing in the darkness of its shadow.

Even in the poor light he could tell she was
beautiful. She seemed slight, of average height but thin in the
neck and arms and legs. Her black hair shone with a single hint of
color that barely caught the light and tossed it back with a
red-purple tint. In that single swatch, her hair was washed with
henna.

Other than that muted taste of color, the
dark ebony of her hair matched the woman’s jeans. Her knee boots.
Her leather gloves, hiding hands at her sides in the shadows.

She stepped up when Bay appeared, but she
only came a pace nearer, moving until the light graced her face
enough for him to make out her features.

Her eyes were moss green, in a softly
tan-tinted face that was rounded but still small and that was put
together exactly like the woman herself seemed to be – soft
and hard at the same time. Common but trained. Determined but …
what
, he wondered. Refined? It was a face that Bay couldn’t
help thinking he’d like to wake up next to, even though the woman’s
dichotomies made it seem as if she might break into either tears or
a maniacal laugh, depending on the turn of the next few
seconds.

“You’re late,” she said. Her words were a
clinical observation and no more. The deadness of her voice was a
marked contrast to the baby doll pitch and lolling accent in
it.

She sounded fifteen, and Bay would have
thought she was fifteen, if he could have believed that
fifteen-year-olds were in a position to send Gold Protocol, coded
messages that accurately asked American CIA agents to meet them at
designated drop spots.

“I’m on time, actually. You’re early. Your
message decoded as Rivoli Metro, Museum Entry, Twenty-One Plus Two.
That’s two after nine at night, and it’s –”

He checked his watch, leaning back into the
light and studying its face. “Two after nine on the nose.”

The woman was glancing around him and past
him when he looked at her once more, and he turned nonchalantly, as
though he were chatting casually in a quiet corner with a woman
he’d met and finally gotten alone.

“Nervous?” he asked.

Her eyes narrowed, the soft green color in
them darkening to black in the squint. “I always watch.”

“Watch?” he repeated doubtfully.

“The things around me. I always watch the
things around me.”

“Usually wise.” Bay wondered about a woman
who was cautious enough to always keep an eye out on things around
her and still apparently careless or unconcerned enough to color
her hair in a way that couldn’t help but be noticed, but he pushed
the momentary thought away.

She had the code, after all. It was in
correct form and had been properly delivered. And here she was.

“You’re anxious to leave.” He was watching
her step back into the shadows. “The message indicated a package
for me. It came with a declaration of Gold Protocol. Face to face
meeting. So I’m here. Where’s this package?”

At no point had Bay gotten himself closer
than a half dozen feet. Just close enough to see the woman’s face
and to like it, to trust it too much, even after it dipped back
into concealment.

Before his words were done, the woman who
looked like a fifteen-year old lifted a 22-caliber semiautomatic
pistol, a sound suppressor stretching from the tip of its barrel.
She stepped forward and brought the pistol flush up to his head.
She tightened her finger on the trigger, twice in quick succession.
The gun bucked lightly, punching out two small coughs of noise that
were swallowed up almost entirely by the suppressor and by the
muzzle’s contact with the agent’s skull.

Alexander Bay, shot two times in the
forehead, dropped dead, straight to the floor.

_______________

The woman with the hennaed hair wasn’t
concerned about the noise. With the small caliber, close range, and
the suppressor, the extent of it wasn’t much more than the echo of
a couple heavy footfalls. But she scanned the immediate area around
her and out into the rooms as far as she could see.

She hadn’t been lying. She did always watch,
precisely as she’d told the dead man.

So she knew no one had noticed. She was
confident of that.

No one was there to notice, in fact. The
museum visitors loved the see-through glass pyramid at the main
entrance, and they flocked that direction, day and night. But back
by the unnoticed rear stairs, aboveground at the arch and
belowground near the access to the shopping areas, no one moved at
this time of night.

She wasn’t worried, anyway. There was a
huge, spreading park above her and a parking garage and subway
station nearby. And no security points that she’d have to pass
through to get to any of those places. To any of a thousand,
ten
thousand
, places she could go.

It was Paris, after all.

She headed for the Metro station and the
trains.

May 8

2:58:12 p.m., Eastern Daylight Time

New York, New York, The United States of America

The old man on the bench beside the moored,
four-masted bark
Peking
moved no more than was necessary to
lift a double-scoop, pistachio over vanilla chip ice cream cone to
his mouth. The motion was careful and constrained, the way the
movements of the old can be, with each millimeter of it seemingly
thought out and struggled at before it was achieved.

He was dressed warmly, more warmly than a
Manhattan May normally would require, with a charcoal gray cardigan
sweater and white turtleneck shirt, heavy cotton slacks, and
cumbersome, thick-soled shoes that were scuffed bare at the toes
and worn to rounded edges at the heels. But the East River and New
York Harbor were at his back, and a choppy breeze was funneling
toward the water from the Financial District buildings at his
front. The soft, puffing wind caught at any loose corner of the
buttoned-up sweater he was wearing, threatening to tug it open at
the neck or bottom. The old man was ignoring it, concentrating only
on the cone, which he tipped left and right with deliberation,
turning the various drips to his mouth so he could lick them away
before they fell.