Russian Roulette (26 page)

But the men saw nothing. They had arrived at an empty clearing with a tree lying on its side, nobody in front of it, nobody behind, termites crawling over the bark. Our empty hammocks were in front of them. Perhaps their flashlights picked up the empty whiskey bottle on the ground.

“Vamos a hacerlo!”
One of them gave the order in Spanish, his voice deep and guttural.

As one, the men opened fire, spraying the clearing with bullets, shooting into the surrounding jungle. After the peace of the night, the noise was deafening. For at least thirty seconds the clearing blazed white and the surrounding leaves and branches were chopped to smithereens. None of the men knew what they were doing. They didn’t care that they had no target.

We waited until their clips had run out and then we stood up, dead wood cascading off our shoulders. We had been right next to the soldiers, lying facedown inside the fallen tree. We were covered with termites, which were crawling over our backs and into our clothes. But termites do not bite you. They do not sting. We had disturbed their habitat and they were all over us, but we didn’t care.

We opened fire. The soldiers saw us too late. I was not sure what happened next, whether I actually killed any of them. There was a blaze of gunfire, again incredibly loud, and I saw the ragged figures being blown off their feet. One of them managed to fire again but the bullets went nowhere, into the air. I was firing wildly but Hunter was utterly precise and mechanical, choosing his targets and then squeezing the trigger again and again. It was all over very quickly. The six men were dead. There didn’t seem to be any more on the way.

I brushed termites off my shoulders and out of my hair. “Are there any more of them?” I whispered.

“I don’t think so,” Hunter said. “But we’d better get moving.”

We collected our things.

“I shot them,” I said. “What you were saying to me . . . you were wrong. I was with you. I killed some of them.” I wasn’t even sure it was true. Hunter could have taken out all six himself. But we weren’t going to argue about it now.

He shook his head. “
If
you killed . . .” He put the emphasis on the first word. “You did it in the dark, in self-defense. That doesn’t make you a murderer. It’s not the same.”

“Why not?” I couldn’t understand him. What was he trying to achieve?

He turned and suddenly there was a real darkness in his eyes. “You want to know what the difference is, Yassen?” He had used my real name for the first time. “We have another job in Paris, very different from this one. You want to know what it’s really like to kill? You’re about to find out.”

O
UR TARGET IN PARIS
was a man named Christophe Vosque, a senior officer in the Police Nationale. He was, as it happens, totally corrupt. He had received many payments from Scorpia in return for which he had turned a blind eye to many of their operations in France. But recently he had gotten greedy. He had demanded more payments, and worse still, he had been in secret talks with the DGSE, the French secret service. He was planning a double cross and Scorpia had decided to make an example of him by taking him out. This was to be a punishment killing. It had to make headlines.

However, for once Scorpia had gotten their intelligence wrong. No sooner had we arrived at Charles de Gaulle airport than we were informed that Vosque was not in the city after all. He had gone on a five-day training course, meaning that we had the entire week to ourselves. Hunter wasn’t at all put out.

“We need a rest,” he said. “And since Scorpia’s paying, we might as well check ourselves in somewhere decent. I can show you around Paris. I’m sure you’ll like it.”

He booked us into the luxurious Hotel George V, close to the Champs-Élysées. It was far more than decent. In fact, I had never stayed anywhere like this. The hotel was all velvet curtains, chandeliers, thick carpets, tinkling pianos, and massive flower displays. My bathroom was marble. The bath had gold taps. Everyone who stayed here was rich and they weren’t afraid to show it. I wondered if Hunter had brought me here for a reason. Normally we would have stayed somewhere more discreet and out of the way, but I suspected that he was testing me, throwing me into this gorgeous, alien environment to see how I would cope. He spoke excellent French. Mine was rudimentary. He was in his late twenties and already well traveled. I was nineteen. I think it amused him to see me dealing with the receptionists, the managers, and the waiters in their stiff collars and black ties, trying to convince them that I had as much right to be there as anyone . . . trying to convince myself.

It was certainly true that we both deserved a rest. The journey into the rain forest and out again, the death of the Commander, the shoot-out that had followed, our time in Iquitos, even the long flight back to Europe had exhausted us and we both had to be in first-rate condition when we came up against Vosque. And if that meant eating the best food and waking up in five-star luxury, I certainly wasn’t going to argue.

We had adjoining rooms on the third floor and both spent the first twenty-four hours asleep. When I woke up, I ordered room service . . . the biggest breakfast I have ever eaten, even though it was the middle of the afternoon. I had a hot bath with the foam spilling over the edges. I sprawled on the bed and watched TV. They had English and Russian channels, but I forced myself to listen in French, trying to attune myself to the language.

The next day, Hunter showed me the city. I had done more traveling in the past few weeks—Venice, New York, Peru—than I had in my entire life, but I loved every minute of my time in Paris. A few of the things we did were obvious. We went up the Eiffel Tower. We visited Notre-Dame. But he also took me to lots of unexpected places: the sewers, the flea markets, Père-Lachaise cemetery with its bizarre mausoleums and famous residents.

Spring had still not arrived, but the sun was shining and although the days were cold, there was a sparkle in the air. We drifted in and out of coffeehouses. We browsed in antique shops and bought clothes on the Avenue Montaigne. We ate fantastic ice cream at the Maison Berthillon on the Île St-Louis. Curiously, this was where the founding members of Scorpia had first come together—but perhaps wisely there was no blue plaque to commemorate the event.

We ate extremely well in restaurants that were empty of tourists. Hunter didn’t like to spend a fortune on food and never ordered alcohol. He preferred grenadine, the red syrup he had introduced me to in Venice. I drink it to this day.

We never once discussed the business that had brought us here, but we were quietly preparing for it. At six o’clock that very morning we went on a two-hour run together; it was a spectacular circuit down the Champs-Élysées, through the Jardins des Tuileries, and across the Seine. There was a pool and a gym at the hotel, and we swam and worked out for two hours more. I sometimes wondered what people made of us. We could have been friends on vacation or perhaps, given our age difference, an older and a younger brother. That was how it felt sometimes. Nor did Hunter ever refer back to our conversation in the jungle, although some of the things he had said remained in my mind.

We had arrived on a Monday. On the Thursday, Hunter received a note from the concierge as we were leaving the hotel and read it quickly without showing it to me. After that, I sensed that something had changed. We took the metro to Montmartre that day and walked around the narrow streets with all the artists’ studios and drank coffee in one of the squares. It was just warm enough to sit outside. By now we were relaxed in each other’s company, but I sensed that Hunter was still agitated. It was only when we reached the great white church of Sacré-Coeur with its astonishing views of Paris that he turned to me.

“I need to have some time on my own,” he said. “Do you mind?”

“Of course not.” I was surprised that he even needed to ask.

“There’s someone I have to meet,” he went on. He was more uneasy than I had ever seen him. “But I’m breaking the rules. We’re both undercover. We’re working. Do you understand what I’m saying? If Julia Rothman found out about this, she wouldn’t be pleased.”

“I won’t tell her anything,” I said. And I meant it. I would never have betrayed Hunter.

“Thank you,” he said. “We can meet back at the hotel.”

I walked away but I was still curious. The more I knew about Hunter, the more I wanted to know. I always got the feeling that there was so much more that he wasn’t telling me. So when I reached the street corner, I turned back. I wanted to know what he was going to do.

And that was when I saw her.

She was standing on the terrace in front of the main entrance of the church. There were quite a few tourists around, but she stood out because she was alone and she was pregnant. She was quite small—the French would say
petite
—with long fair hair and pale skin. She was wearing a loose, baggy jacket with her hands tucked into her pockets. She was pretty.

Hunter was walking toward her. She saw him and turned. I saw her face light up with joy. She hurried over to him. And then the two of them were in each other’s arms. Her head was pressed against his chest. He was stroking her hair. Two lovers on the steps of Sacré-Coeur . . . what could be more Parisian? I turned the corner and walked away.

• • •

The next day, Vosque returned.

He lived in the fifth arrondissement, in a quiet street of apartments and houses not far from the Panthéon, the elaborate church that had been modeled on a similar building in Rome and where many of the great and good of France were buried. Hunter had received a full briefing in an envelope sealed with a scorpion. I guessed it had been delivered to his hotel room by someone like Marcus, who had done the same for me in New York. The two of us went to a café on the Champs-Élysées. It might have seemed odd to discuss this sort of business in a public place, but in fact it was safer to choose somewhere completely random. We could make sure we weren’t being followed. And we knew it couldn’t be bugged.

Vosque provided a very different challenge from that of the Commander. He might be easier to reach, but he probably knew we were coming, so there was a good chance he had taken precautions. He would carry a gun. He could expect protection from the French police. As far as they were concerned, he was one of them, a senior officer and a man to be respected. If he was gunned down in the street, there would be an immediate outcry. Ports and airports would be closed. We would find ourselves at the center of an international manhunt.

He lived alone. Hunter produced some photographs of his address. They had been provided by Scorpia and showed a ground-floor apartment with glass doors and double-height windows on the far side of a courtyard shared by two more apartments. Although one of these was empty, the other was occupied by a young artist, a potential witness. An archway opened onto the street. There was no other way in and an armed policeman—a
gendarme
—had been stationed in the little room that had once been the porter’s lodge. To reach Vosque, we had to get past him.

In all our discussions, we called Vosque “the Cop.” As always, it was easier to depersonalize him. On the Saturday, we watched him leave the apartment and walk to his local supermarket, two blocks away. He was a short, bullish man in his late forties. As he walked, he swung his fists and you could imagine him lashing out at anyone who got in his way. He was almost bald with a thick mustache that didn’t quite stretch to the end of his lip. He was wearing an old-fashioned suit but no tie. After he had done his shopping, he stopped at a café for a cigar and a
demi pression
of beer. Nobody had escorted him, and I thought it would be a simple matter to shoot him where he sat. We could do it without being seen.

But Hunter wasn’t having any of it. “That’s not what Scorpia wants,” he said. “He has to be killed in his home.”

“Why?”

“You’ll see.”

I didn’t like the sound of that, but I knew better than to ask anything more.

Our Paris vacation was over. Even the weather had changed. On Sunday morning it rained and the whole city seemed to be sulking, the water spitting off the sidewalks and forming puddles in the roads. This was the day when Vosque was going to die. If we wanted to find him alone in his apartment, it made sense. Monday to Friday he would be in his office, which was situated inside the Interior Ministry. According to his file, most evenings he went out drinking or ate with friends in cheap restaurants around the Gare Saint-Lazare. Sunday for him was dead time—in more than one sense.

That morning, Annabelle Finnan, the artist who lived next door to Vosque, received a telephone call from the town of Orléans, telling her that her elderly mother had been run over by a van and was unlikely to survive. This was untrue, but Annabelle left at once. We were waiting in the street and saw her flag down a taxi. Then we moved forward.

We were both wearing cheap suits, white shirts, and black ties. We were carrying Bibles. The disguise had been Hunter’s idea and it was a brilliant one. We had come as Jehovah’s Witnesses. There had been real ones, apparently, working in the area and nobody would have noticed two more following in their wake. The gendarme in the porter’s lodge saw us and dismissed us in the same instant. We were the last thing he needed on a wet Sunday morning, two Bible-bashers come to preach to him about the end of the world.

“Not here!” the gendarme grunted. “Thank you very much, my friends. We’re not interested.”

“But, monsieur . . . ,” Hunter began.

“Just move along.”

Hunter was holding his Bible at a strange angle and I saw him press down on the spine. There was a soft hissing sound, and the gendarme jerked backward and collapsed. The Bible must have been supplied by Gordon Ross, all the way from Malagosto. It had fired a knockout dart. I could see the little tuft sticking out of the man’s neck.

“And on the seventh day, he rested,” Hunter muttered, and I recognized the quotation from the second chapter of Genesis.

The two of us moved into the office. Hunter had brought rope and tape with him. “Tie him up,” he said. “We’ll be gone long before he wakes up, but it’s best not to take chances.”

I did as I was told, securely fastening his wrists and ankles and using the tape and a balled-up handkerchief to gag his mouth. After everything Hunter had told me, I was a little surprised that he hadn’t simply shot the policeman. Wouldn’t that have been easier? But perhaps, despite everything he had said, he preferred not to take a life unless it was really necessary.

With the gendarme hidden away, we walked across the courtyard, our Bibles in our hands. I thought we would go straight to Vosque’s door, but instead Hunter steered us over to the artist’s apartment and rang the bell there. It was a nice touch. She wasn’t in, of course, but if Vosque happened to be watching out of his window, the fact that we were patiently waiting there would make us look completely innocent. We stood outside for a minute or two, ignoring the thin drizzle that was slanting down onto the cobblestones. Hunter pretended to slip a note through the letter box. Then we went over to Vosque’s place and rang the bell.

He must have seen us coming and he didn’t suspect a thing. He was already in a bad mood as he opened the door, wearing a sleeveless undershirt and boxers with a striped bathrobe falling off his shoulders. He hadn’t shaved yet.

“Get the hell out of here,” he snarled. “I haven’t—”

That was as far as he got. Hunter didn’t use another anesthetic dart. He hit him, very hard, under the chin. It wasn’t a killer blow, although it could have been. He caught the Cop as he fell and dragged him into the house. I closed the door behind us. We were in.