“Yes.”
“Before Hutchinson Island?”
Bambridge hesitated for a moment. “I don’t know what he’s been working on. Nobody here does. But he’s been at it for a couple of months now. Just before Hutchinson Island one of his computers showed a lavender background, which I’m told means some sort of trouble is coming our way. But he wouldn’t talk about it.”
It had struck McGarvey as odd at the time that Otto had not confided in him, and again he felt slightly depressed.
THIRTY-SEVEN
DeCamp carried no photographs of Martine in his wallet, relying instead on his almost photographic memory to see her. But pulling on his jacket and getting set to leave his tiny apartment in the working-class Twentieth Arrondissement in the late afternoon, he stopped for a moment to remember her face in his mind’s eye, and he couldn’t. As often was the case when he was on assignment, his concentration was elsewhere.
“It’s not the stray bullet that kills you or your lads,” his sergeant instructor had taught in his officers combat training course. “It’s the stray thought. Keep your heads out of your arses, gentlemen.”
The early afternoon was mellow as he headed downstairs and south through the Menilmontant neighborhood with its nightclubs, strip joints, and occasional whorehouse, not yet alive for the evening, and before he got ten meters he’d already forgotten about his vexation over Martine. Thinking about her would come later, because he’d made the decision that when he went to ground — very soon — he would take her with him.
She would understand the necessity. He would make her understand.
He carried a dark blue ripstop nylon duffle bag over his shoulder, his head up, his step confident; to do otherwise was to invite attack. This was a tough neighborhood where the strong preyed on the weak. Even the Paris metro police presence here was minimal; it had always been a perfect place for DeCamp’s needs.
The streets were heavy with traffic, as were the mostly narrow sidewalks, and although he was noticed he remained anonymous. The trouble was that although he operated best on his own, he never fancied himself a loner — at least not in his heart of hearts. When his father had been killed and his mother had abandoned him he’d felt an almost overwhelming crushing sense not only of loneliness, but of defeat. To this day, this moment, he remembered his feelings very clearly, and they were just about akin to what he was feeling now.
But first things first, he told himself, allowing a slight smile to show at the corners of his mouth. And for a moment he could see Martine clearly in his mind’s eye, before he clamped off that line of thought. Business.
The Pere-Lachaise Cemetery, a couple of blocks down the hill from his apartment, established by Napoleon in 1804, was actually the largest cemetery in all of Paris. Other than the nightclubs and strip joints, it was the most popular tourist attraction in the arrondissement. Chopin was buried here, as were Sarah Bernhardt, Edith Piaf, Bizet, Proust, Balzac, and most curiously, to DeCamp, the American rock star Jim Morrison of The Doors.
DeCamp entered through the gate in the tall white stone wall and made his way slowly up a series of winding paths and lanes to the upper end of the cemetery near Oscar Wilde’s grave. At this hour, just before early cocktails, the place was nowhere near as busy as it was in the early morning openings just after nine on Sundays and holidays. But still it was anonymous; he was just one visitor among many.
He stopped at the grave of some Frenchman and waited a minute or so until a party of middle-aged men passed him. He stepped off the path and made his way to a small mausoleum a few meters away with a centopath of a winged warrior outside an ornate bronze door.
Bowing his head for a second, and looking back to make sure he was not being observed, DeCamp opened the door, slipped inside, and closed it after him.
He had a clear line of sight through the filigreed panel at eye height, and so far as he could tell no one had taken notice.
The chamber was divided into two sections: the first was a small chapel designed for six or eight people to kneel and pray at one time, and the second was a smaller, innerchamber that held niches for the cremated remains of the French-Catholic family, beginning in 1898, with two niches remaining.
Putting his nylon bag down, DeCamp went to the small altar at the front of the chapel and muscled the one-meter-long stone countertop aside to reveal a dusty space a half-meter square by one-and-a-half meters deep. It contained two canvas rucksacks that he pulled out. From the first he removed a plastic-wrapped package that held an Austrian-made 9 mm Steyr GB semiautomatic pistol with two eighteen-round box magazines, a suppressor, and a cleaning kit.
Next he took out a package containing several passports, from which he selected one of Canadian and one of U.S. issue, with matching American Express platinum credit cards and supporting credentials including valid driver’s licenses, social security and national IDs, health insurance cards and photos of wives and families, along with several thousand in euros and Canadian dollars.
He’d decided that importing a long rifle and associated equipment to Norway was not worth the risk. Whichever scenario he selected in the end — a hit in the hotel, a hit while Eve was taking a buggy tour of the old city, or a hit just before or just after the Nobel ceremony — the Steyr, which was a favorite of his, would be adequate.
He loaded his choices into his nylon bag, replaced the two rucksacks into the space beneath the altar top, and slid the stone back into place.
He remained at the door for a full ten minutes before a family of four lingering at one of the graves across the lane finally moved off then slipped outside, and shouldering the nylon duffle bag reached the street and headed back to his apartment.
He would remain in Paris for a few more days before shipping a parcel to himself at the Grand Hotel in Oslo and then flying there to arrive the day before the package arrived. The cargo-sniffing dogs would not detect the odor of gunpowder in the bullets because they would be packed in two containers of mentholated spirits — Vicks VapoRub.
The TGV could get him to Nice in a few hours where he could rent a car and do a drive by on the corniche highway above his house. Just to see if all was well. To reassure himself that because Wolfhardt had found him nothing had happened.
But not yet. There would be time later.
THIRTY-EIGHT
In a cab on the way back into town, McGarvey left a message on Otto’s cell to call him, and then phoned Gail who had been working with Yablonski all morning, but she had no news for him. Everyone was coming up short, and they were all frustrated. It was like knowing the sword of Damocles was about to fall but not when it would happen or from what direction it would be falling, except that the thread holding it above their heads was getting thinner by the minute.
There’d been no arrests yet over the Princeton attack, and one of Eve’s techies who was the only witness hadn’t been of much help except to describe their approximate build and the clothing they wore — including the balaclavas.
“Are you coming into the office?” Gail asked.
“No,” McGarvey told her. “But if something turns up, anything, call me.”
“Okay,” Gail said, and she sounded a little hurt. “I’ll see you back at your apartment this evening. Maybe we’ll go someplace for a bite to eat.”
“Maybe,” McGarvey said, and he broke the connection and telephoned Eve Larsen’s cell, and she answered after three rings.
“Speaking of deja vu all over again,” she said. “I was just thinking about calling you. Are you here in town?”
“If you mean Washington, yes, I am.”
