I Kill (57 page)

He had been to visit his friend many times. Jean-Loup had told him that he kept an extra key to the house in a secret place and from then on, only the two of them would know about it. He had
told him that the key was stuck with
silicone
underneath the mailbox inside the gate. Pierrot didn’t understand the word silicone, but he knew what a mailbox was. He and his mother had
one at their house in Menton, and their house wasn’t as nice as Jean-Loup’s. He would recognize it when he saw it.

Downstairs, in the
room,
he had his Invicta backpack that Jean-Loup had given him. Inside it was some bread and ajar of Nutella that he had taken that morning from the kitchen shelf. He
didn’t have any Moscato at home, but he had taken a can of Coke and a can of Schweppes and thought that would be okay. If his friend was hiding somewhere at home, he would certainly hear him
call and would come out. Where else could he be? They were the only ones who knew about the secret key.

They could sit together and eat chocolate and drink Coke and this time
he
would say things to make Jean-Loup laugh.

And if Jean-Loup wasn’t there, he would take care of his records, the black vinyl ones. He would clean them, make sure that the covers didn’t get damp and line them up in the right
direction to keep them from getting warped. If he didn’t, they would all be ruined when Jean-Loup came home. He had to take care of his friend’s things. Otherwise what kind of friend
was he?

When the lift reached the bottom floor, Pierrot was smiling.

Libaud, a mechanic for the motorboat showroom on the floor below the radio station, was waiting for the lift and opened the door. He saw Pierrot inside, his tousled hair sticking up over the
pile of CDs. Seeing his smile, he smiled too.

‘Hi there, Pierrot. You look like the busiest person in Monte Carlo. I’d ask for a pay rise if I were you.’

The boy did not have the slightest idea of how to ask for a pay rise. And anyway, that was the last thing that interested him right now.

‘Yes, I will tomorrow,’ he answered evasively.

Before stepping into the lift, Libaud opened the door on the left that led down to the archives. ‘Watch your step,’ he said, as he turned on the light.

Pierrot gave one of his standard nods and started going down. When he reached the archive, he leaned the CDs on the table near the wall, in front of rows of shelves full of records and CDs. For
the first time since he had started working for Radio Monte Carlo, he didn’t put away the CDs he had brought down. Instead, he took his backpack and put it on his shoulders, like his friend
Jean-Loup had taught him, then turned off the light and locked the door as he did every evening before he went home. Except that now he was not going home. He climbed back up the stairs and found
himself in the lobby, the large hallway that ended at the glass doors. Beyond those doors lay the harbour, the city and the world. And hidden there somewhere was the friend who needed him.

Pierrot did something he had never done before in all his life. He pushed open the door, took a step and went out to face the world all by himself.

Frank waited for Morelli in his Mégane at the construction site outside Jean-Loup Verdier’s house. It was a hot day and he kept the engine running so that he could
retain the benefit of the air-conditioning. He kept glancing at his watch as he waited for Morelli and Roncaille’s men.

His head was full of images of Nathan Parker and his group at Nice airport. The general was probably sitting impatiently with Helena and Stuart next to him while Ryan Mosse checked them in. He
could see the massive figure of Froben, or someone like him, telling the old general that there was some bureaucratic difficulty and for the moment he would not be able to leave. Frank
couldn’t imagine what Froben would invent, but he could easily guess the old man’s reaction. He wouldn’t want to be in the inspector’s shoes.

The absurdity of the cliché made him smile.
Actually, that was exactly what he wanted.
Just then,
he
wanted to be at the airport, doing in person what he had asked of
Froben. He wanted to take Nathan Parker aside and finally tell him what he had always wanted to say.
He was dying to.
No inventing, just clearing a few things up.

Instead, he was sitting there, tasting each passing moment like salt on his tongue, checking his watch every thirty seconds as if thirty minutes had passed.

He forced himself to put those thoughts out of his mind. He focused on Roncaille instead. And that was another problem. The chief of police had put his men in motion with reasonable doubts.
Frank had been categorical on the phone, but he had expressed a certainty that he didn’t really possess. He couldn’t admit to himself that he was bluffing, but he knew that he had
placed a risky bet. Any bookie would have given him thirty to one without thinking twice. When he had claimed to know No One’s hiding place, it wasn’t a certainty but a reasonable
supposition. No more than that. If his theory was off, there would be no serious consequences, just another dead end.

Nothing could change the position he was already in. No One was on the lam and that’s how things would stay. Except that Frank Ottobre’s prestige would plummet in disgrace. Roncaille
and Durand would have a weapon against him that he himself had loaded, and they could tell any representative of the US government how unreliable their FBI agent was, despite his undeniable success
at identifying the serial killer. And his public defence of Inspector Nicolas Hulot might even backfire. He could already hear Durand’s suave, nonchalant voice telling the American consul
Dwight Bolton that, although Frank Ottobre had revealed the identity of the killer, it wasn’t really he who had made the discovery.

If his guess was right, however, if his bet paid off, it would all end in glory. He could rush to the airport and take care of his personal business in the glow of victory. Not that he was
particularly interested in glory, but he would welcome anything at all that would help him settle his personal accounts with Nathan Parker.

Finally, he saw the first police car round the curve. This time, as Frank had instructed Morelli, there were no sirens. He noticed that the crisis unit was much larger than the first time they
had tried to catch Jean-Loup. There were six cars full of men as well as the usual blue vans with dark windows. When the rear doors opened, sixteen men got out instead of twelve. There were surely
others waiting at the end of the road to prevent any possible escape through the garden at the front of the house.

A car stopped, two policemen got out, and then it raced to the roadblock at the top of the road, near the highway. The set-up at the bottom was probably similar. Frank smiled in spite of
himself. Roncaille didn’t want to take any chances. Jean-Loup’s easy disposal of the three policemen on guard had finally opened his eyes to the real danger at stake.

Two Menton police cars drove up one after the other, each holding seven heavily armed agents, under the command of Inspector Roberts. The reason they were there was obvious: to ensure that there
was a constant collaboration of the Sûreté Publique of Monte Carlo with the French police.

Frank got out of his car. As the men awaited orders, Roberts and Morelli walked over to him.

‘What’s this all about, Frank? I hope you’ll let me know sooner or later. Roncaille told us to rush out here in combat gear but he didn’t give us any details. He was
pretty pissed off—’

Frank interrupted with a wave of his hand. He pointed to the roof of the house, half hidden by the vegetation and cypress trees rising above the mass of bushes. He skipped the preliminaries.

‘He’s here, Claude. Unless I’ve made a huge mistake, there’s a 99 per cent chance that Jean-Loup Verdier has been hiding in his own house all along.’ Frank realized
that he had just given Morelli and the men the same odds that he had waved under Roncaille’s nose. He decided not to correct himself.

Morelli scratched his chin with the forefinger of his left hand, as he often did when he was puzzled. And this time he was definitely confused.

‘But where in hell could he be? We turned the house upside down. There isn’t a crevice we didn’t examine.’

‘Tell the men to come closer.’

If Morelli was surprised, he said nothing. Roberts, with his natural slouch, waited, unflustered, for something to happen. When all the men were gathered in a semicircle around him, Frank
enunciated each word carefully. He spoke French fluently, with almost no foreign accent, but he didn’t trust himself to explain things in a language that was not his own. He looked like a
basketball coach instructing his players during a time-out.

‘Okay everyone, listen carefully. I had a conversation with the owner of the other house over there, the twin to this one. They were built by two brothers, a few yards from each other at
the same time, in the mid-sixties. The brother who lived here’ – and he pointed towards the roof behind him – ‘in the house that would later belong to Jean-Loup Verdier, was
married to a woman who was difficult, to put it mildly. A total pain in the ass, in other words. The Cold War and the threat of nuclear destruction completely terrified her, so she forced her
husband to build a bomb shelter under the house. Right here, beneath us.’

Frank pointed to the cement where they were standing. Morelli instinctively followed Frank’s gesture and stared at the ground. He raised his head immediately when he realized what he was
doing.

‘But we even examined the plans of both houses. Neither of them showed any bomb shelters.’

‘I can’t explain that. Maybe they didn’t have permits and it doesn’t show up in the land register. If they were building two houses at the same time, with bulldozers
digging and trucks coming and going, an underground shelter would be easy to construct without anyone noticing.’

Roberts backed Frank up. ‘If the shelter was built and does in fact exist, it probably happened the way Frank says. There was a construction boom back then and an awful lot of rules were
stretched.’

Frank went on telling them what he knew. ‘Rouget, the owner of the other house, told me that the entrance to the shelter is located in an empty room behind a wall covered with
shelves.’

A commando raised his hand. He was one of the men who had assaulted the house when the bodies of the three policemen had been discovered, and he had searched it from top to bottom.

‘There’s some kind of laundry room in the basement to the right of the garage. It gets light from a window that looks out on the courtyard. I think there are some shelves on one of
the walls.’

‘Good,’ said Frank. ‘I don’t think the problem is finding the shelter as much as opening it and forcing whoever’s inside to come out. Let me ask a crazy question.
Does anyone here know anything about tackling bomb shelters? I mean, more than they show in the movies?’

There was a moment of silence and then Lieutenant Gavin, the crisis unit commander, raised his hand. ‘I know a little, though not that much.’

‘That’s a start. More than I know. Once we’re in, how do we get the guy out of there, if he’s inside?’ As he spoke, Frank mentally crossed his fingers in hope.

Roberts lit another cigarette and took a long draw. ‘He’s got to be able to breathe down there, right? If we find the air holes, we can get him out with tear gas.’

‘I don’t think that’s feasible.’ Gavin shook his head. ‘We can try, but if things are the way Frank said and the guy has done the maintenance, it won’t work.
If he’s kept up with the latest technology, forget it. Modern bomb shelters have an air-purification system that uses filters with normal or activated carbon acting as absorbers. Activated
carbons are used as filtering agents in gas masks and high-risk ventilation systems, like in nuclear power plants. They’re used in tanks and military planes too. They can resist hydrocyanic
acid, chloropicrin, arsine and phosphine. So tear gas wouldn’t do anything.’

Frank looked at Lieutenant Gavin with greater respect. If this was something he knew only a little about, what would he say if he was an expert? Frank raised his arms. ‘Okay, we’re
here to solve a problem. Sometimes you solve problems by making stupid suggestions. Here’s mine. Lieutenant, what’s the chance that we could open the door with explosives?’

‘Well . . . it’s possible,’ Gavin said, shrugging with the apologetic expression of someone forced to keep giving bad news. ‘I’m not an expert, mind you, but
logically a shelter like that is built to resist an atomic bomb. You’d need to make a lot of noise to get it open. But, and here’s the good news, keep in mind that this shelter is more
than thirty years old so it’s not as efficient as the ones they build now. If there’s no alternative, that might be the best idea.’

‘If we opt for explosives, how long would it take?’ This time, the lieutenant’s scowl led to a positive conclusion.

‘Not long. We’ve got an explosives expert, Brigadier Gachot. If he and his team get to work immediately, all we need is the time it takes to get some C4 or something like that over
here.’

‘Call the unit and get Gachot on it. Explain the situation and tell him where we are. I want him here in fifteen minutes max.’

The commando raced off without so much as the ‘Yes, Sir’ that Frank would have expected from him. Frank looked at each of the men standing before him.

‘Any other ideas?’ He waited for an answer that didn’t come and then decided to take the bull by the horns. ‘Okay, here’s how it’s going to be. If our man is
in there, he can’t escape. Once we locate him, we can hypothesize all we want. First, let’s find this damn shelter and then we’ll decide what to do. From here on in, we improvise.
Let’s move.’

The shift from conjecture to action put the crisis unit on much more familiar ground. They removed the seals from the gates and rushed down the ramp leading to the garage. Within seconds they
had occupied the house, using a plan that was part of their training. They were silent, fast and potentially lethal.

At first, Frank had considered their presence there a ridiculous and excessive precaution. But after ten deaths, he was forced to realize that they were an absolute necessity.