converted to Islam was unknown. However, even after being commissioned, he took all his leave time in Algiers, where the wife and her family lived. There was no information about why Bonnard had divorced her. Since there were no divorce documents in the file either, Jon was suspicious. Like sleeper spies or moles, terrorists often established new identities in target countries while maintaining entirely different lives elsewhere.
So Darius Bonnard, favored aide to NATO's Deputy Supreme Allied Commander, was a German serving in the French army, once married to an Algerian woman, now away somewhere in the South of France — not all that far from Toledo.
Still pondering, Jon reached for his ale and gazed up just in time to see Randi paying off a taxi a half block away from the caf. He sat back, smiling, holding his glass and admiring the view. She was dressed conservatively in dark slacks and a fitted jacket, her hair pulled back casually in a ponytail. With her easy movements and slender figure, for a moment she looked like a teenager. She hurried toward him, vigorous and beautiful, and he realized he no longer thought of Sophia every time he saw her. It gave him an odd feeling.
She reached the table. 'You look as if you've seen a ghost. Worried about me? Sweet, but completely unnecessary.'
'Where the hell were you?' he managed to growl through his smile.
She sat and peered around for a waiter. 'I'll give you a full report in a minute. I've just come from Paris. I thought you'd like to know that I stopped to see Marty'
He sat up straighter. 'How is he?'
'He was asleep again and still hadn't told Peter a thing.' As she filled him in about the relapses, she watched worry pinch his high-planed face and darken his navy-blue eyes. Jon could look like a predatory monster when things were going badly, especially if it was in the middle of action, but right now he was a man whose main concern was his friend. With his tousled dark hair and worry-wrinkled brow and the scratches on his face from when they were chased in Madrid, she found him almost endearing.
'It's all so much harder now that we can't use our cell phones,' Jon grumbled. 'Otherwise, Peter would've called to tell me all this himself.'
'Everything's a lot harder without our cell phones and modems.' She shot him a look of warning. The waiter was coming to their table. They stopped their conversation as she ordered a Chimay, too, but the Grand Reserve. As soon as the waiter was out of earshot, she asked, 'Have you learned anything?'
'A few things.' Jon described the file information about Darius Bonnard and his meeting with General La Porte. 'La Porte might not know about the Algerian connection, or he could be covering for Bonnard out of loyalty. What did you get?'
'Maybe what we need.' She was excited as she told him what she had learned from Aaron Isaacs, finishing with Dr. Akbar Suleiman's illness.
'You're right. This is promising. Where is the guy?'
'He's postdoc and lives in Paris. Mossad says he's still in the city. I have his address.'
'What are we waiting for?'
Randi smiled grimly. 'For me to finish my ale.'
From time to time, a cool breeze blew through the large, whitewashed room of the sprawling Mediterranean villa, making the gauzy curtains billow. The villa had been designed to take advantage of even the lightest wind. Currents of air drifted continuously through the open arches that separated the rooms from the hallway at the isolated coastal estate.
Deep inside an alcove, Dr. Emile Chambord worked over the ultrathin tubing and connections between his keyboard and the conglomeration of gel packs in their tray, feeder machine, flexible metal plate, monitor, and electronic printer that Mauritania and his men had carefully transported all the way here from his lab at the Pasteur. Chambord liked the alcove because it was sheltered from the constant breeze. Both temperature control and a complete lack of vibration were vital to the operation of his delicate prototype DNA computer.
Chambord was concentrating. At his fingertips was his life's work his secret molecular computer. While he made adjustments, he thought about the future, both electronic and political. He believed that this rudimentary DNA computer was the beginning of changes most people were not educated enough to imagine, much less appreciate. Controlling molecules with the deftness and precision that physicists used to control electrons would revolutionize the world, ultimately leading to the subatomic realm, where matter behaved very differently from what people saw with their eyes or heard with their ears or touched with their skin.
Electrons and atoms did not act with the straightforwardness of the billiard balls in Newton's classic physics. Instead, they showed characteristics closer to fuzzy wavelike entities. At the atomic level, waves could behave like particles, while particles had waves associated with them. An electron could travel many different routes simultaneously, as if it were really a spread-out phenomenon like a wave. Similarly, an atomic computer would be able to calculate along many different paths simultaneously, too. Perhaps even among different dimensions. The fundamental assumptions of our world would be forever proved wrong.
At its most basic, today's computer was simply a set of wires arranged in one direction, a layer of switches, and a second set of wires aligned in the opposite direction. The wires and switches were configured to fabricate logic gates but the kinds of wires and switches made all the difference. Chambord had succeeded in using DNA molecules to function as AND and OR logic gates, the basic computational language of electronic computers. In earlier experimental DNA machines created by other scientists, one of the insurmountable problems had been that the rotaxane molecules, which was what they used for gates, could be set only once, making them suitable for read-only memory, not random-access memory, which required constant switching.
That had been the so-called impossible niche that Chambord had filled: He had created a different molecule with the properties that would make a DNA computer work. The molecule was synthetic, and he called it Francane, in honor of France.
As Chambord turned from his apparatus to make mathematical calculations in his notebook, Therese appeared in the archway. 'Why do you help them?' Her eyes were angry but she controlled her voice as she studied her father. He looked very tired as he bent over his calculations.
He sighed, looked up, and turned. 'What else can I do?'
Her full lips were pale, all the dynamic red lipstick worn off days ago. Unbrushed and uncombed, her black hair no longer hung in a satin sheet. She still wore the slim white evening suit, but now it was torn and dirty. The high-necked, off-white silk blouse was flecked with blood and what looked like grease, and the high-heeled, ivory pumps were gone. Her shoes were bedouin slippers. They were her one concession; she had refused to accept even a change of clothes from her captors.
'You could say no,' she told him tiredly. 'None of them can operate your molecular computer. They'd be helpless.'
'And I'd be dead. More important, so would you.'
'They'll kill us anyway.'
'No! They've promised.'
Therese heard the desperation, the grasping at straws. 'Promised?' She laughed. 'The promise of terrorists, kidnappers, murderers?'
Chambord closed his mouth, refused to answer. He returned to his work, checking the connections of his computer.
'They're going to do something terrible,' she said. 'People will die. You know that.'
'I don't know that at all.'
She stared at his profile. 'You've made a deal. For me. That's it, isn't it? Your soul in exchange for my life.'
'I've made no deal.' Still her father did not look up again.
She continued to stare, trying to fathom what he must be feeling, thinking. What he was going through. 'But that's what you'll do. You'll make them let me go before you help them accomplish whatever it is they want.'
Chambord was silent. Then he said quietly, 'I won't let them murder you.'
'Isn't that my choice?'
Now her father whirled in his chair. 'No! It's my choice.'
There were soft footsteps behind Therese. She flinched as Mauritania arrived at the archway, gazing from her to her father and back again. Armed and glowering, Abu Auda stood sentry behind.
