and battered his skull. He hadn't had a headache like this since the last days in Kabul, drinking away the shame of defeat with homemade potato vodka. He felt nauseous, dizzy, spacedout, concussed. Well, screw that. Kursk had been hurt a lot worse than this and kept fighting. He'd probably smelled as bad too. But it was one thing stinking when you were sitting in a foxhole at the ass end of Afghanistan and everyone else stank just as bad. In the middle of Paris, it wasn't so smart.
Kursk looked around. He was standing on a wide avenue. Up ahead he could see ramps leading up onto a freeway, but there was barely any traffic. Behind him there were some rail yards, half lit in orange and gray. A few railway workers were wandering between the freight trucks. No one seemed to be doing too much work.
Kursk knew what he had to do. He slumped to the ground, leaning back against a lamppost by a bus shelter. Then he waited.
People came by. Three railway workers at the end of their shift, glad to be on their way home, shouted at him, told him to get a job and have a bath. One of them was about to aim a kick in his direction when his pal held him back. 'Hey, Paco, you crazy? You'll never get the smell off your boot!' The men walked off laughing.
Kursk waited.
It took about twenty minutes before he got what he wanted, one guy by himself, about Kursk's size but flabby. He wouldn't know how to defend himself. Kursk could tell just by looking at him.
As the man walked by, Kursk got up and walked toward him, just another drunken bum begging for a few coins. The man's eyes widened in alarm. He tried to act tough. 'Piss off, tramp!' Kursk grinned and came a few steps closer. The man turned and walked away fast, trying to maintain his dignity, not wanting to run. Kursk caught him in a few steps, grabbed the man's head, and twisted it, snapping his neck, then caught him as he fell.
Kursk felt another stab of pain slice through his upper body. It settled into a relentless, grinding ache as he dragged the man's body to the side of the road and dumped it by the rail yard fence.
It hurt Kursk when he pulled off the man's jacket, pants, and shirt. It hurt when he got out of his own sodden, stinking, shredded clothes. It hurt when he got dressed again. Everything he did hurt.
He went through the man's wallet and pockets: thirty- five francs in notes and another nine or ten in small change. That was plenty.
Kursk left the man slumped against the fence in his old, sewer-drenched clothes. It would be a while before anyone realized he was dead. No one was going to go too close to a guy like that.
He set off down the avenue, walking under the freeway. Beyond it the streets narrowed. They all looked the same: endless apartment blocks, four or five stories high, occasional bistros, bars, and shops. There was a public toilet on one corner. Kursk put a couple of francs into the slot, let the metal door slide open, and went in. He washed himself as best he could in the basin, soaping his face and scalp, and rinsing the filth out of the cuts that crisscrossed his shaved head, enjoying the sandpapery abrasion of the stubble against his palm.
When he'd finished, he looked in the mirror. It wasn't too bad. He looked like a tough bastard who'd been in a fight and couldn't give a damn. Kursk grinned at the thought of all the bourgeois Parisians who might see him and feel a prickle of fear. He took his capacity to intimidate for granted, the same way a beautiful woman assumes she will turn men's heads. A walk down the street was a parade of his powers.
Kursk left the toilet and looked around for a phone booth. He shoved every coin he had into the box and dialed an overseas number. It was a while before anyone answered.
He spoke in Russian: 'This is Kursk. Get me Yuri. Yeah, I do know what time it is. Just shut up and get me Yuri.'
19
Can I have one of your filthy cigarettes?'
Papin grinned. 'I thought you did not smoke.'
The operations director grimaced. 'I don't usually. But tonight I think I'll make an exception.'
Papin reached for his Gitanes, then held up his hand for a second before placing it to his own telephone earpiece. He frowned with concentration as he listened, then spoke briefly into the mic that dangled by his throat. Another nod, a quick good-bye, then he turned off his phone.
'I am afraid I have more bad news,' Papin said, handing over a cigarette, then flicking on his lighter. 'There has been a killing in the Marais. One of the finest mansions in Paris has been turned into a slaughterhouse. An exploded car. A body in the gateway. Two more bodies in the hall. Two more again upstairs. And human remains from the explosion scattered like confetti across the courtyard. The dead men were armed with submachine guns. These men were professional killers, who were themselves killed. So I ask myself, why would killers be in Paris tonight?'
'All right, you've made your point.'
'Then follow me.'
They drove to the mansion in the first gray light of the false dawn. Papin flashed a badge at the police officers guarding the gate and keeping back the increasing crowd of rubberneckers attracted by the flashing lights of the vans and squad cars massed in the road outside the gates. Inside, Papin had a brief, angry conversation with a bull-necked man in an ill-fitting suit with sweat patches under the arms.
'That was the detective in charge of the case,' Papin told the operations director, by way of explanation.
'I gathered. What was his problem?'
'He wants to remove the bodies so that they can be examined as soon as possible. I told him he can have them in five minutes. So let's not waste time. Tell me everything.'
They walked up to the first body.
'You know him?' asked Papin.
'Yeah. His name was Whelan, ex-Para. Seems fairly obvious what happened. Someone arrives at the front gate, Whelan goes to take a look, gets shot.'
They walked farther in, saw the burned-out shell of the bombed car. The detective was standing by the shattered remnants of the driver's side door. 'Regardez,' he said, and pointed inside. The two men looked in and saw the charred steering wheel. There was a plastic restraint clipped to the wheel. A fragment of a severed hand was still inside it. The rest of the body was in pieces all around the courtyard. A crime-scene investigator was photographing each piece.
Papin reached for his cigarettes. He offered the pack to the Englishman. 'Another?'
'No, I'm all right, thanks, seen worse.'
They walked into the building and saw the two men sprawled on the floor of the hall, their blood a vivid crimson splash against the black-and-white tiles.
'Nichol, Jarrett, also Paras,' said the operations director. 'They came as a crew with Whelan and two others.'
'Maybe you should think again about your hiring policy,' said Papin.
'Don't worry. We hire the best. That's why these two are dead.'
'You know who did this?'
'I'm pretty certain. I'll know for sure when I see who's upstairs.'
The men went into the dining room. The operations director winced when he saw Max.
'The one in the jeans is the fourth member of the crew, McCall. I imagine you'll find what's left of the fifth man, Harrison, down in the yard.'
'And the other man, the one I suspect you know well?'
'His name is Max. That's what I called him, anyway. I couldn't tell you what his birth certificate says. We weren't on real-name terms.'
'Alors, who is? Have you noticed the interesting variation between the deaths in this room and those downstairs?'
'Of course. Max and McCall were hit by a three-shot burst of automatic fire; the others were killed by separate shots. My guess is your firearms people will find that those came from a SIG-Sauer P226. If they did, the shooter is known to me as Carver. He's the only person that could have done this, except for one minor detail. He's supposed to be dead.'
