Tommy Carmellini 02 - The Traitor (42 page)

Grafton handed me my backpack; he had rescued it yesterday from the police after I passed out. I went to work on the back-door lock while he and Callie and Willie stood by the car looking around like tourists. Innocent tourists.

Opening it took a while. My headache had subsided to a buzz, yet I was a little shaky and, truthfully, a bit dizzy. I kept trying one pick after another. Finally I paused, wiped my head and took a deep breath, then started all over again with the pick I had first started with. Got it that time.

After Callie and Willie went in, Grafton told me to sit down for a minute. I plopped down right on the step. He sat down beside me.

"How you doing?" he asked.

"Okay. Want to tell me what you hope to find?"

"I've got a theory," he said. "I want to prove it or disprove it."

"Uh-huh."

But he didn't explain, merely got up and went inside. I wiped my face and levered myself erect.

Each of us took a room. We took that house apart. Looked everywhere, in everything, examined everything. One of the first things I found was an electromagnetic sweep set in an aluminum case; no doubt Rodet used it to check the house for bugs. Terrific.

We found a lot of dry pens, receipts from years ago, old photos, dust balls in places the maids obviously hadn't visited in years. It was hard, dismal work and got us exactly nowhere. We took pictures off the wall and cut the backing off. We rolled up carpets, examined the baseboards, disassembled radios and televisions, flipped through every book on the shelves—and ol' Henri had a lot of books. I wondered if he had read them all.

In midafternoon Callie fixed us something to eat. We only had three rooms left to do at that point, two bedrooms and a kitchen.

"Tommy, why don't you tackle the barns?" Jake said.

He didn't have to say it twice. I gobbled the rest of my sandwich and went outside.

The big barn smelled of horses, yet it was empty. A few flies buzzed on that warm, late autumn day, and a couple of cats slunk around.

There weren't a lot of places to hide anything in that barn. I looked under the walkway. Cobwebs and dirt, a pathway for the cats. No human had ever crawled under there.

I went over the ground floor inch by inch. I probed the cans that held the horse feed with a shovel handle. Obviously it would have helped if Grafton had told us what he was looking for, but I sort of figured he didn't know. My impression was that he was feeling his way along, which bothered me. I confess, I didn't understand what Arnaud or Rodet had been up to, nor why Rodet didn't share what he knew about Qasim. I had a few theories of my own. I thought Arnaud killed Al and Rich so the old man and his Islamic gang could sack Rodet's apartment in peace. But if that was true, why did the old man kill Arnaud? Did he think he double-crossed him and the cause?

A ladder led up to the loft. I climbed it and inspected the loft as carefully as I could in the poor light. There were no electric lights up here, merely daylight coming through air vents overhead. Bird droppings were splattered everywhere.

There was hay in square bales, a lot of it. Moving all those bales didn't appeal to me. Not by myself, anyway. Some old saddles and tack, really old. Horse-drawn equipment that ought to be worth some money at an antique store. A couple of wood-burning stoves that I looked in. One of them was filled with rusty wire. I pulled it all out.

This barn reminded me of the one my uncle owned back when I

was growing up. It was a cool barn; I liked it because my uncle had a stash of girlie mags in an old trunk in the loft, which he liked to study for inspiration. I know because I liked to follow and spy on him. He never found out that I was watching.

Finally I had searched everything in the loft. I stood looking up at the joists, which were also filthy with bird droppings. There was a platform way up there on one end of the barn, right under the roof, but there was no way up.

I looked around on the floor—and saw two scrapped places where the feet of a ladder might have stood.

The ladder! It was lying against one wall, wedged in behind the hay bales.

I moved four bales and worked the ladder free.

It was an extension ladder. I managed to extend it and put it up against the platform. The feet fit the scraped places perfectly.

I wasn't feeling myself, so I went up very carefully.

There was a suitcase up there. Nothing else. It had something in it—I could tell by the weight.

I almost dropped it getting it down to the floor of the loft—had to hold it in one hand and get myself down with the other without falling.

I put it on the floor and opened it.

There was a pistol, a silencer, a box of ammo, a police uniform complete with badge, and the piece de resistance, a small computer and a onetime pad with about a dozen sheets left on it.

I was inspecting this treasure when I heard someone call, "Hey, lommy.

"Up here."

In a moment Grafton's head appeared at the top of the ladder. "Got something?"

"Yeah. Come on up."

He looked at everything. "Where was it?"

I pointed.

He glanced up, then sat down beside me and examined the computer carefully.

"Is this what you were looking for?"

"Looks like the jackpot. Did you touch that pistol?"

"Huh-uh."

"Remember Al and Rich? Talking about the cop outside the van, just before they were shot?"

"I remember. Who wore this outfit, Arnaud or Rodet? Who was trying to frame who?"

"You can make a case either way, but it was Rodet. Qasim and his local soldiers were going to trash Rodet's apartment, pretending to look for a computer. He didn't want us listening."

"So the old man was Qasim?"

"Yes. Wearing makeup."

I couldn't believe it. The old man was Qasim? "Rodet must have recognized him!"

"Oh, yes."

"But... Qasim shot Rodet! Cut up Marisa!"

"Uh-huh."

"That means Marisa's in this up to her eyes. She
let
them cut her up."

"Yep."

"So Rodet and Qasim are both terrorists?"

"I don't know what they are. Let's forget labels for a moment. Marisa was the link between Qasim and Rodet. The proof is right here, in my hand." He meant the computer. "Rodet told me that fancy telephone was the way he wrote and encrypted his messages to Qasim, and he gave us four sheets of a onetime pad that had been lying on his desk in his Paris apartment. He said NSA will eventually sort out the zeros and ones, make these two devices give up their secrets. I suspect this is the computer that was used to program the telephone computer Rodet gave us. Qasim never had one."

"How'd you figure it out?"

"Rodet telling Callie about the pad on the desk. And in the desk

the women found a curling iron to apply heat to the pages of the pad. There it was, right in the drawer. You saw that place after it had been trashed. They broke the lamps, ripped pillows apart, tore up the carpets, even broke the lightbulbs. Don't you remember? I thought at the time that it looked as if everything in the place had been put through a blender. Rodet's mistake was to go back and put the pad beside the desk for Callie and Sarah to find. To clue them that it was there, he left a curling iron in the desk drawer, a place where the iron wouldn't normally ever be used for its designed purpose. He was worried that I wasn't buying the story he wanted to tell—or the French police wouldn't—so he tried to tidy up with one too many touches."

"But what about that scene yesterday ?"

"The whole thing was an act. Let's go through it: Arnaud sees my short story on the Intelink and rushes right over to tell his boss, the man in charge of the security for the G-8 summit. Rodet goes to the bathroom, or a bedroom, and makes a call to Qasim, who jumps in the van, picks up his soldiers and motors right over. Marisa said the bad guys arrived immediately, but she was lying. They arrived later, much later, maybe two hours or so later. Remember, Cliff Icahn saw the van arrive, but he didn't notice Arnaud in his car, which had passed hours earlier.

"They rolled in, shot the gardener and maid, and took Arnaud and Rodet and Marisa out to the apartment over the garage. They tied them to chairs and set the scene for us. They knew we would be along in a little while. They hoped to be gone by then. We would have found Arnaud dead, Rodet wounded, and Marisa sliced up. Rodet would have probably worked his way out of his bonds and called the police. That timetable went out the window when you showed up. They knew we would be right behind you. A quick shift in plan. The holy warriors would fight, perhaps escape, but even if they didn't, they were going to kill some of us and go down fighting. Didn't matter either way, because they would earn a spot in paradise."

Grafton took a deep breath, then continued. "Arnaud had to die.

He was always the fall guy, the man they were going to blame for everything to keep Rodet in the clear. Arnaud was supposed to have framed Rodet on the Bank of Palestine stock purchase. He was supposed to have shot Claude Bruguiere to permanently close his mouth. He was supposed to have shot the two Americans in the surveillance van in the Place des Vosges."

"But why did they need a scapegoat?" I asked.
"Rodet
was the man in charge of renovations to Versailles in advance of the G-8 summit.
Rodet
was the man in charge of security. So after the assassination of the leaders,
Rodet
will need a villain, someone to blame for betraying the security arrangements. Arnaud is that man. It would look as if he sold out to the terrorists and attempted to implicate his boss."

Grafton paused. "That scene yesterday wasn't as impromptu as one might think. Rodet and Qasim probably planned to kidnap Arnaud sometime before the summit, act out this scene and kill him. His rushing over merely speeded things up."

He laid the computer back in the valise on top of the folded police uniform.

"Shit!" I muttered.

"Marisa is in it as deep as Rodet. Maybe they injected her with a local anesthetic. Qasim could have taken the needle and drug with him when he left."

Grafton stood. He reverently closed the suitcase and smiled at me. "Thanks," he said.

"Jesus Christ, Admiral! I am
so
confused. I thought Rodet had a spy in Al Queda. He gave us the Veghel conspiracy!"

"Oh, no, Tommy. You're looking at cause and effect the wrong way round. You're looking at a mirror image of the truth. The truth is precisely the opposite. Abu Qasim is
not
spying on Al Queda.
Henri Rodet is Al Queda's spy in the West.
The Veghel conspiracy was sacrificed to ensure that no one suspected that Rodet was passing information to Al Queda. He's a double agent." He patted the suitcase. "This computer will tell the tale."

All this was a bit too much for my criminal mind to process quickly. "But no one suspected that," I objected.

"Oh, they will," Grafton said heavily. "They will! When Al Queda assassinates the G-8 leaders—the president of the United States, the prime ministers of Great Britain and Japan, the president of France, the chancellor of Germany, and the others—the investigators are going to turn over every single stone. The fallout from that event will make the Warren Commission look bush league.
Then
Henri Rodet will have the alibi he needs. He selected Arnaud to take the fall months ago. When I arrived in Paris and began nosing around, Rodet began to worry that they didn't have Arnaud wrapped tightly enough. So he improvised."

"And nearly killed his girlfriend."

"If she had died after she told her story, he wouldn't have cared."

"What about those thugs who tried to kill me? You think Rodet ordered them to do that?"

"No. Personal vendettas and vengeance isn't his style. After you threw that guy through the museum clock, the jihadists declared war."

"They tried to kill you, too."

"I think Rodet and Qasim were afraid of me by then. They wanted you dead, too. That car bomb should have done it."

"Elizabeth Conner?"

"You really want to know?"

"Yeah."

"I need your word that you are not going to get personally involved."

Uh-oh. He knew I wasn't going to like this. So it wasn't Rodet or Arnaud or the soldiers of Islam. "Okay."

"Your word?"

"My word."

"Gator Zantz."

"That son of a bitch!"

Grafton hefted the suitcase, lifting it experimentally as if he were weighing it. "We found two more electromagnetic sweep sets after

you came out here. So Rodet actually had three sets in the house. He found the bugs and put them in two bedrooms upstairs, then turned on a radio. That's what Icahn was listening to."

"I figured it was something like that."

Grafton nodded. "In this business we must have good people. Icahn listened to the bugs all night and heard nothing but music. He didn't think a thing about it. You listened for, what—ten or fifteen minutes?—and knew we were being had."