is that behind our leaders are other leaders. And behind them, others still. Who do you suppose they paint at the very center?”
“I don’t know,” Middleton said.
The other trouble with stolen laptop computers was that people generally wanted them back. The student from the Sorbonne sure did. Not really because of the euro value of the hardware. But because of the value of the files it stored. His poems were on there. His play. The start of his novel. The stuff that would win him the Prix Goncourt one day. Plus some term papers. Like everyone else in the world, his back-up routine was haphazard.
He went to the cops. He took witnesses. No one had seen the actual snatch. But three friends recalled two American women. The cops weren’t very interested. Paris was full of bigger stuff-Muslim unrest, terrorism, heists, dope. But then one of the three friends said that one of the two American women had been pale and moving awkwardly, like she was in pain, and she had a dark stain all over her shirt, like blood.
A possible gunshot wound, in a city where guns were still rare, and in a city where two victims had just turned up shot to death.
The cops weren’t dumb. They knew the chances were that the laptop would be trashed when the battery ran out. On the other hand, the MacBook Air was an attractive thing. Very desirable. So maybe the thieves would try to buy a charger. Which gave them a limited number of destinations in Paris. Easy enough to stake them all out. No shortage of young officers willing to hang around such places. When they were bored with the shiny toys, they could look at the tourist girls.
Archer looked again at the picture of Charley Middleton, dead. He revered it, because he liked dead people, and because it came from Jana. It was like a love letter. It showed the girl down and crumpled, in a bloody shirt. The resolution wasn’t great. But it was good enough to be interesting.
And good enough to be a little unsettling.
There were two things Archer wasn’t quite sure about. The first was the dead girl’s posture. Archer had seen plenty of dead people, some quite recently. There was nothing like the slackness and the emptiness of a corpse. And he wasn’t sure those characteristics were there, in Charley Middleton’s body. And the bloodstained shirt didn’t look… organic. It didn’t look like she had been wearing it at the time of death. It looked… thrown on, maybe afterward.
Which made no sense.
And there was a scrap of paper that had apparently spilled out of a trash-can. Scribbled green handwriting that seemed to make no sense either. A code, perhaps, or a foreign alphabet. Maybe Cyrillic. Or a combination of foreign letters and numbers. He stared at it for a long moment.
Then he turned his phone upside down.
GREEN LANTERN. EVAC.
He thought of Harris, immediately. For a moment he wished it had not been necessary to eliminate him. Harris had loved comic books. Which was a part of what had made him a useless wastrel. But he would have understood the reference, maybe.
Archer texted Jana: CALL ME NOW.
Jana’s phone made a sound in Nora’s pocket just as she and Charley stepped into an Apple reseller on the Boulevard Saint Germain. There had been no Apple store under the Louvre pyramid. Planned, but not yet built. Mired in bureaucracy. Old Europe. The Saint Germain place had been recommended by a clerk in an Orange cell phone store. Orange was the old France Telecom and was the exclusive carrier for the new iPhone in France. An iPhone charger was OK for an iPod, but it wouldn’t fit the MacBook Air doohickey. Hence a taxi ride and a short search along a row of chic boutiques.
There were two guys loitering in the corner of the store. Tesla noticed them immediately. She thought:
She said, “Charley?”
“Yes?”
“Run.”
“What?”
“Now.”
The big Boeing flew on, straight and level, thirty-eight thousand feet. Middleton finished his soda and said, “Dams are big things.”
Chernayev said, “Tell me about it. I paid for most of the concrete.”
“Too big to destroy with explosives. The problem has been studied many times, both defensively and offensively.”
“I know. So whatever wild card is in play here is not only wild but also quite possibly stupid.”
“So why worry?”
“The dam will survive. No doubt about that. But we can’t issue the same guarantee about your secretary of state.”
“She dies, there’ll be a world war.”
Chernayev said, “I don’t want that.”
“Just a regional war?”
“First things first, Harry.”
Tesla was hampered by the raging pain in her shoulder, so Charley got out to the street first. Nora turned at the door and flung the first thing that came to hand, which was Jana’s cell phone from her pocket. It caught the leading cop hard under the eye and he spun away and crashed into a glass display case and sent small technical items skittering across the floor. The second cop stumbled and sidestepped and Tesla had a two-yard lead by the time she hit the sidewalk.
Charley had bolted straight through the traffic. Panic, probably, but smart too. Tesla plunged after her through yelping tires and blasting horns. Together they made it across.
They ran.
They had no idea where they were going. They turned randomly left and right in alleys and entrances and barged through knots of people. Every step sent bolts of agony through Nora’s body and every accidental contact with passersby nearly killed her. But adrenaline kept her moving.
Moving, but not fast enough.
The cops were in their own city and they had radios. To Tesla and Charley, the streets were a maze. To the cops, the streets were a map they knew by heart. Alleys had exits and exits could be blocked. Sirens were howling everywhere, feet were pounding, whistles were blowing, radio chatter was loud in the air. Twice Tesla and Charley had to jam to a halt and spin around and take off again in the direction they had come. Twice the streets behind them were blocked, so they ducked into stores and barged through and came out through rear entrances to start all over again. Once a cop got his hand on Charley’s sleeve, and she whirled and ducked and pulled loose and fled.
In the end, Tesla’s pain saved them. They stopped running. Counterintuitive, but the right move in a mobile game. Fugitives run. Pursuers look for rapid movement. People sitting still pass unnoticed.
They dragged themselves through a shirt maker’s door and collapsed breathless on a sofa. Two seconds later a squad of police ran past the entrance to the store without a second glance. The shirt maker approached, tape measure around his neck.
Charley said, “We’re waiting for my father.”
The shirt maker withdrew.
Charley whispered, “What now?”
