Michael Walsh Bundle (21 page)

P
ARIS—SEVEN YEARS EARLIER

He was in the city on a RAND clean-up operation. He was dressed as a Frenchman, loitering around the stage entrance of the Olympia waiting for his mark—a British SAS officer, who'd come over to Santa Monica with an MI-6 vet stamp in his dossier, but who was now suspected of running his own sideline business in sensitive SIGINT cables, hawking them to the Israelis, the Palestinians, the Egyptians, the Georgians, whoever came firstest with the mostest. Even a “22” couldn't be allowed to get away with that. He was about to become, what they called in the trade, an exemplar. An object lesson. A warning.

Normally on a job like this, Devlin blended into the scenery and, whenever possible, the furniture. But only an idiot who was trying to attract attention would try not to attract attention in Paris. Every Frenchman considered himself the second coming of Yves Montand, and peacockery was de rigueur, and among the
beures
, the immigrants from north Africa and the Middle East, it was practically religious doctrine. So he was dressed well, in the current mode, and smoking a cigarette as he loitered and cast admiring glances at the young ladies passing by—who, after all, both expected and deserved nothing less.

She blindsided him. His French was excellent; hers was perfect. So when she somehow snuck up on him as he was checking out the derriere on a particularly good-looking Anamese
salope
and asked him for a light, he fumbled a vowel and she busted him on the spot.

“American, huh?” she said. She must have come out of the club, while his eyes were on Little Miss Saigon's bum. Why she'd approached him, he had no idea. She spoke softly, so as not to embarrass him. “You can always tell. Match me.”

She produced an unlighted cigarette, leaned forward, and lit hers from his. The tips glowed as they met.

Now he looked at her, really looked at her. Middle Eastern, short, slender, very fashionably dressed. She filled it out nicely too without any hint of the future rotundity that almost invariably accompanied girls of her tribe. But it was the big, liquid brown eyes, the hint of olive in the skin, that really blew her cover.

“Persian, huh?” he retorted. “You can always tell. Especially when you're trying to pass for French.”

“Touché, monsieur.”

“Frank.”

“Maryam.”

“Assalmu'Alayki Maryam.”

She crinkled her nose and laughed. “Your Arabic is even worse than your French…although they're both okay.” He caught her eyes and held them until she looked away. “But I'm Iranian, remember?”

“Wanna go for Farsi too?” he said. “With three, you get egg roll.”

Now she laughed heartily, and he knew he had her, if he wanted her. And want her he did. Too bad he was on duty.

“Seriously,” she said. “What are you doing here?”

He glanced across the street. So far, nothing. “Waiting for a friend.”

“Dressed like a Marseilles pimp?”

“He's a whore, so it's okay.”

“Can I watch?”

“No, but you can have a rain check.”

“What's a rain check?”

“I thought you said you spoke English.”

She made a
moue
. “I don't think I like you any more.”

“Who said you ever did?” Movement in the doorway across the street. “I gotta go now, baby.”

“Don't call me baby. I hate when men call me baby.”

He was moving now and so was she, tagging along. He either had to ditch her, kill her, or let her come. He didn't like either of the first two choices, so he might as well make use of the cover. He took her by the hand. “Where are we going?” she asked.

“I don't know,” he said, “but you seem like a fun girl, so you're getting your rain check right now.”

She had to hurry to keep up, her feet clattering her impossibly high heels on the Paris sidewalks.

The man he was trailing stopped, his keen ears tuned to the slightest discrepancy in his environment, visual or aural. In a flash, Devlin had pulled Maryam into the shadows of a nearby doorway and kissed her as hard as he could. He caught sight of the man turning and he knew he was, for the moment, safe. He kept kissing Maryam long after the man had started back along his way. She tasted that good.

At last, he let her up for air. “What was that for?”

“For saving my ass.”

“It's a nice ass,” she said.

He waltzed her out onto the sidewalk. He stepped in some dog shit but he didn't care. Dog shit was as much a part of the romance of Paris as the Seine, as the shellfish spilling out from their ice beds on the sidewalks, as the whiffs of perfume and body odor coming off the ugly but sexy women, as the sight of Notre Dame by night, as the Pont des Arts in late afternoon, and the Sacre-Coeuer against the morning sun.

The man ahead had stopped again. Did he sense something?

“Slap me,” he whispered. “Really, do it. Now.”

She learned fast. She slapped him hard. Harder, in fact, than he expected. Good. That meant she liked him.

“Encule de son père!”
he shouted.

She came right back at him:

“Sale fils de pute enculée par un gros connard de pede!”

That hurt. So would this:
“J'aurais te donner un coup de pied dans la choune, mais ça degueulasserais trop mon go-dasse!”
He couldn't believe the vile things that were coming from his mouth. Neither could she:

“Boro gomsho pedear soukteh, jakesh!”
It was the choicest Tehran invective he had heard in years.

As he'd hoped, a crowd gathered around them, hoping for some action and blocking them from the sight of his quarry. Silently, he started counting down to ten, which was exactly how long he was going to let this little piece of street theater last.

“Goh bokhor!”
he cried and pulled her close again.

“That was pretty good,” she said. “For an American.”

“Let's go.”

They pushed their way through the crowd. The man Devlin was following was still in sight, but moving faster now, his wind up a bit, but not so much that he would disappear. To vanish would be to admit guilt to any pursuer. And then it would be war.

“Who is he?” she said.

“Somebody I want to talk to.”

“Just talk?” She grabbed him and whirled him around. “Enough to kill him?” She patted the gun under his left armpit, the one that was so well concealed that not even a drunken
flic
with a grudge against Americans would have noticed it on a first pat-down. Or even a second…

The sudden rush of emotion he was feeling was something new, unexpected. He'd spent his life after Rome living within a carefully constructed iron box that the world couldn't dent, and now this girl comes along and cracks it right down the middle with one kiss.

He made a snap decision. The first rule of snap decisions was never to make them. The second rule was to make one exception. “You'd better leave now. Things could get ugly.”

Big brown eyes, looking right into his. “I'm from Shiraz. You think I haven't seen ugly things?” She took off her heels, ready to run. Maybe the second rule was right after all.

Third rule: never underestimate a woman. Not her brains, not her heart, not her soul.

The man was heading toward the Seine. Inwardly, Devlin smiled; that's where he would head at this point in the game too—someplace open, with a clear shot in every direction, one with plenty of shadows among the closed kiosks, lovers galore, bridge abutments. Open spaces could be killing fields, but only when the battlefield had already been prepped; otherwise, they were observation posts.

Okay, they could play it either way. “This could get rough,” he said. “And I want to see you again, after this is over.”

“I'll have to think about it.”

“Make it snappy.”

“What's your name?”

“Frank Ross,” he lied.

“Okay, Frank Ross,” she said with a hint of entirely accurate suspicion, “I'll meet you at the Café de la Paix.”

“When?”

“I'll be there all night. I'll be the girl with a broken heart, playing ‘Hearts and Flowers' on my violin, if you don't show up.”

He kissed her again, for absolute real this time. “I'll see you there.”

“Try not to get yourself killed, Frank Ross,” she whispered. Before she could say anything else, he was gone.

He hit the Seine across from Notre Dame. The man ahead of him was jogging now, down the left bank of the river along the Quai Malaquais, heading for the safety of the crowds at St.-Michel.

Devlin trailed him along the various quays. There could be no doubt now that the man was guilty. Or that he was good. Or that he was very dangerous. He had played the pickup just the way Devlin would have, sensing, sorting, then heading for safety, which meant that he had sized up his pursuer and would be ready for him.

It was a cliché, but it was also true: Paris really was for lovers. In the heart of one of the world's greatest cities, his race along the Seine was run nearly alone, the auto-tunnels buried beneath him, the river quiet except for the passing barge or tourist boat, but everywhere, mostly unseen but never unsensed, in the shadows, were the lovers.

He realized with a start that, for the first time in his life, he had just joined their ranks.

The man tossed a glance over his left shoulder. Devlin peeled off near the rue de Seine, heading south, where he could cross the rue Mazarine and then cut back into the warren of streets in the Latin Quarter. He had a pretty good idea where the man was heading: the rue Galande.

Charles Augustus Milverton. At one time, “Milverton” had been one of the finest operatives in Britain's most elite fighting force, a leader of the 22nd Regiment Special Air Service at Credenhill. Later, he moved on to “deep battle-space” assignment.

The best part of an SAS posting was that absolute anonymity prevailed, even when operating at home. SAS officers were not required to identify themselves either to police or civilian agencies; in effect, there was no bothersome review authority over them, which meant that Milverton was pretty much free to operate as he saw fit, even after he left the Two-Two's Mobility Troop and had moved closer to home in the Artists Rifles reserve, in Regent's Park. He had spent the past few years roaming the wreckage of the old Soviet Union as a kind of hired gun, sorting out communists and capitalists alike and burnishing his reputation for sudden, violent lethality. Milverton could kill you in dozens of different ways, but so could a lot of guys. What made him special is that he could kill you and be gone before you even knew you were dead.

Devlin passed south of the Place St.-Michel and turned left on the rue St.-Séverin, across the rue St.-Jacques. There it was, up ahead—the place he was looking for: 42 rue Galande.

Devlin moved slowly now, down the crowded street. This part of the Quarter was always packed with young humanity, pretty girls and phony-tough boys, the Arabs jostling their way in packs over and through the French, who still had not quite grasped the extent to which they were becoming strangers in their own capital city.

The spires of Notre Dame shone brightly just off the west: from the sacred to the profane in five minutes, and all you had to do was cross the Pont St.-Michel. It was as if the great cathedral had deliberately faced west, down the Seine, turning its back on the sin and sacrilege behind it.

He took a spot in a darkened doorway and waited. Mentally, he reviewed the intelligence. It was all NSA stuff, nothing from Langley, which meant that on a scale of one to ten it scored about a six, as opposed to a one. The rue Galande was where Milverton kept a safe house, a flat, in one of the last places in Paris that anyone would ever think to look for such a thing.

Maryam wandered briefly into his thoughts, but he cast her aside. He had her parting promise to meet him at the Café de la Paix, near the Opéra, and if she was true to her word, so would he be. He had no intention of getting killed by Milverton. He was there as judge, jury, and hooded executioner.

“I am the Angel of Death,” he said, under his breath.

There was no chance that Milverton would go through the front entrance. But he didn't want him to. That was the way he was going to go in. And so he bought a ticket and entered the building.

Everybody was dressed for the occasion except him. Men in bustiers, fishnet stockings, and high heels. Women dressed as virginal brides, but wearing no underwear. Mock-hunchbacks. Vampirish whores. All there for
The Rocky Horror Picture Show
.

The cult movie had been playing at the Studio Galande since forever. It had taken the French a few years to catch on to the fact that the Tim Curry movie was not just a movie but an audience-participation extravaganza, but once they got the hang of it, they showed up with the same fervid and flamboyant enthusiasm as their counterparts in Boston, New York, and elsewhere.