“You will lose the contract. When I am still alive in seven hours, Abubaker will give your natural gas deal to your competitor, and he will use whatever it is he has on LaurentGroup against you. You cannot avoid that. But if you let the girls and their mother go, just get them to a safe place, when I come tomorrow, after the deadline, I will kill Lloyd, do your job for you, but I will spare you.”
“Spare me?”
“You have my word.”
“In my mind’s eye I always pictured you as a two-dimensional predator. A gunman, nothing more. But you are actually a clever fellow, aren’t you? You and I could be friends under other circumstances.”
“Are you flirting with me?”
“You make me smile, Gentry. But you will make me smile even more when I am standing over your body, another trophy for my case.”
“You really should consider my offer.”
“You overestimate your negotiating leverage, sir. We will have you within the hour.”
A pause. “You’d better hope so. Sleep well, Mr. Riegel.”
“I might stay up awhile. I am expecting some good news from my associates in Paris.
“
“Just one more thing, Mr. Gentry. Call it professional curiosity on my part. Kiev . . . Not you, was it?”
The line went dead, and Riegel shook in the cold that seemed to have just blown down from the coast, four kilometers to the north.
TWENTY-EIGHT
The watcher was bored, but he was accustomed to boredom. He’d spent twelve hours on the same street corner, sipped espressos in three different cafes, the first two at tables outside in the bright morning and the graying and chilly afternoon, and then lastly inside at a window table as the air filled with vapor and the last of the day’s warmth left the street and sidewalk.
At nine he’d moved to his car, a small Citroen parked at an hourly meter that he’d been feeding all day like a hungry pet.
But the watcher was good, and his boredom did not affect his tradecraft. He had the engine running for warmth but did not play the radio; he knew his ears were nearly as likely to pick up any hint of his quarry as were his eyes. The radio would rob from his senses the sharpness needed to pick a man he’d never seen out of a passing crowd of thousands.
He did not know the larger picture of this mission, only knew his role. He was static surveillance. Unlike other watchers on this detail, he was not assigned to a known associate location. Instead, his detail was a general choke point overwatch. He had a photograph of a man, and he was to spend the day trying to match the two-dimensional, years-old, five-by-seven picture to a living, breathing, moving target who would likely be trained in surveillance countermeasures and no doubt flow along in a crowd who would obstruct the watcher’s view.
But the watcher stayed optimistic; there was no other way to work. He knew if he doubted he’d see the man, this would detract from the acute senses he needed to bring to bear on his little operation.
The watcher was no killer, just a well-trained pair of eyes. A long time ago he’d been a cop in Nice, then he worked awhile in French counterintelligence as a pavement artist, following Russians or whomever around in leapfrogging details of surveillance, the bottom rung of the espionage ladder. More recently he’d practiced as a private investigator in Leon, but now he was principally an odd-job man for Riegel in Paris. There was always a need for the surveillance of someone on the Continent, and this watcher was usually one of the team. Though he was older than most of the rest, he was no leader. He was better than the rest when he was sharp, but he was a once and future drunk, could not be relied on long-term, though tonight he stayed off the wine and on the mission.
The watcher looked back again, for the thousandth time, to the photo in his hand. It was of no concern to him what the face had done or what fate awaited the face after he’d been spotted.
The face was not a man, just a target.
The face was not alive, did not breathe or think or feel or hurt or need or love.
The face was just a target, not a man.
Identifying a target in the field brought a bonus from Riegel. It did
Just after one thirty, the watcher pissed into a plastic bottle without missing a drop, also without bat-ting an eyelash at the ignobility of his action among the beautiful people passing by unawares within feet of him on the Boulevard Saint Germaine. He screwed the cap on tightly and tossed the warm bottle to the floorboard and just looked up when a man appeared in the half-light of a streetlamp. He walked along with another group of passersby, but he stuck out somehow to the watcher. He was younger than the others, was not coupled as were they, and his suit was slightly incongruous to their less formal attire. The man was twenty-five meters away when first noticed by the man in the Citroen. As he came closer, the eyeglasses and the shaved head and general facial features sharpened.
The watcher did not move a muscle, only glanced down to the photo clenched and moist and wrinkled in his hand, then back up to the three-dimensional figure closing in the evening fog.
Maybe. At fifteen meters, the watcher squinted, thought he detected a slight limp in the stride. Yes, this man was favoring his right leg. The French-speaking Brit who’d been sending out the updates throughout the day had said the target might have an injury to one thigh.
Yes. When the target moved to his closest point to the Citroen, not more than five meters away, the watcher saw two things about the man’s face that clinched his certainty that his choice of choke point and his twelve-hour- long vigil had paid off. There was a wince in the man’s cheeks with each step, just a touch, when his right foot touched down.
That and his eyes. The watcher was good, was well-trained, he saw the darting movement of the younger man’s eyes as he strolled. Where his body language portrayed a man sashaying through the Left Bank without a care in the world, the eyes were a flutter of constant movement. This man was watching out for watchers, and as soon as the pavement artist in the Citroen noticed this, he broke off surveillance, looked down to his hands until the man had fully passed. With a suddenly ferocious heartbeat, he waited several seconds to glance into his rearview, did not turn his head or lift his shoulders or even flex his neck to do so. Just his eyes flitted up and caught the man in the suit as he moved on, west on the Boulevard Saint Germaine.
The watcher put his car into gear as he pressed a single button on his earpiece.
After a beep indicating his call had been put through, he heard, “Tech, go ahead.”
The watcher was trained, was good, but he could not hide the excitement in his voice. This, even more than the money earned from the jobs, was what he lived for.
He said, “Tech, this is Sixty-three.” A very slight pause. “I have him. He’s moving east on foot.” He needn’t say more. The Tech would have his location on the GPS.
Moments like this fueled the watcher, kept him off the drink for long enough to see the mission through. He’d done well, he knew it, and now he would go home and celebrate with a jug of wine. And he would celebrate in the same manner in which he worked.
Alone.
The call was broadcast over a net that ensured all five kill teams in Paris would hear the news simultaneously. This was a mistake on the Tech’s part; it all but assured discord among the competitors, did not allow for fallback teams and coverage of escape routes. But the young Brit could not help himself; they’d been a half day without a positive sighting of the target, and it was only an educated guess that he would go to Paris at all, so when the ID came through, he just sent every man with a gun towards his location.
He would never admit it to Lloyd or Riegel, but since the target had disappeared in Geneva, the Tech had
