behind the desk from Lanier’s duffel bag. It was a good Louis Vuitton knockoff, decent camo. But the woman might think it odd that someone checking into a seedy hotel for a couple of hours would pack a bag, let alone such a big bag.
It contained a forty-four-inch-long Remington bolt-action M40A1, the M40 variant with the relatively lightweight McMillan HTG fiberglass stock. Lanier would have preferred to use a Mark 14 Mod 0 rifle with a collapsible stock, but the M40 wasn’t bad given that she’d had just over an hour to devise this op. M40s were common enough; she’d rented this one from a hunting and fishing supply store in nearby Lamentin for “target practice.”
She initially set the bag on the floor of the lobby, so that the woman would miss it from her elevated seat in the Plexiglas-encased front desk. The bag would come into view, however, as Lanier climbed the spiral stairs to the rooms.
So after Stanley got the room key, he lingered at the reception desk and smiled his appraisal of the warbled drinking song cascading down the stairwell from one of the upper floors. The woman smiled along with him.
Then he asked, “
While she rifled through a drawer behind her for a map-the staff here probably didn’t get this request often- Lanier and her bag disappeared up the stairs.
The third-floor room was shaped like a wedge of cheese and smelled a bit like one. The furnishing included a pipe-frame twin bed that looked as if it had survived a flood, a dresser missing one drawer and all its handles, and a nightstand that belonged in a child’s room. Bolted to the top of the dresser, evidently in an effort to thwart theft, was a clock radio that emitted a mechanical grunt each time the digits flipped. It read 6:51. According to Stanley’s watch, the time was 22:13.
“All in all, not bad for forty euros a night,” he said.
Lanier flashed a smile and returned to assembling her bipod near the room’s key feature, the mullioned dormer window overlooking the Foret Communale de Montgerald parkland. She had a clear shot, save for a few palm fronds, at the American consulate.
Peering into her scope, Lanier said, “You’re not going to believe this, but I think I can make out Charlie Clark standing right by his window.”
Charlie turned away from the window when his door opened and Arnold entered with a plastic bottle of Coke. Charlie was about to say thank-you when something or someone crashed against a door down the corridor, followed by a heavy flop of a body against tile floor.
Charlie glanced beyond Arnold. Outside of the next room down the corridor stood the young stone-faced marine from the yacht-the name silk-screened onto his uniform was, fittingly, Flint.
Regarding the closed door, Flint asked, “Mr. Clark, are you all right?”
There was no response from Drummond’s room.
“Mr. Clark?” Flint again asked.
Still no answer.
Did Drummond have an escape plan? Charlie should have felt his hope surge, but he sensed something was wrong.
Sergeant King, Flint’s graying superior officer, came bounding around a corner, an assault rifle in hand. He slowed, leveling the weapon at Drummond’s door.
“Go ahead,” he told Flint.
Kneeling to the side of the door, the younger marine inserted a key, twisted the bolt free of the lock, and tried to push the door inward. When it barely moved, Flint peered through the crack between it and the jamb. “He’s just lying there, sir. Doesn’t look like he’s breathing.”
Charlie held his breath. A cold perspiration coated him. Protocol surely dictated that Private Arnold shut the door to his room, but deferring to basic humanity, perhaps, the marine allowed Charlie to remain in the doorway.
They both watched King move closer to Drummond’s room and Flint throw a shoulder at the door, grab an edge with his free hand, and drive Drummond’s body back. An orange Croc rolled from the room and into the corridor, coming to rest upside down.
With King covering him, Flint ducked into the room.
“I don’t feel a pulse,” he called out.
“Roger that,” the sergeant said. He squatted, disappearing into the room. “Let’s get him to the infirmary.”
The two men picked up Drummond then backed into the corridor, King holding him by the shoulders, Flint by legs that were now white to the point of translucence.
Charlie launched himself toward his father until the barrel of Arnold’s gun lowered like a gate arm.
“Sorry,” the marine said, backing Charlie into the small room and jerking the door shut.
Charlie was pummeled by horror and sorrow, and, at a hundred times the intensity, anger that a hero like Drummond Clark could come to such an inglorious end with proof of his innocence just a few computer keystrokes away.
50
Alice reached Geneva by midnight. To get travel documents, she had to pay a visit to Russ Augenblick, the forger, who did a lot of his business out of a nightclub on the rue de la Rotisserie, L’Alhambar, known for jazz.
She parked the Mercedes on a sleepy residential side street three blocks away, then walked. Her route, with the usual strategic left turns, added four blocks.
Tonight L’Alhambar featured a brass quartet with a predilection for volume. Among its throng of early- twentysomethings, she spotted the slight, fair-haired forger, in a Red Sox T-shirt. He stood by the curlicue bar, part of a small crowd vying to order drinks.
“I need one too,” Alice said, sidling up to him. “Big-time.”
At twenty-five, Russ Augenblick could pass for a choirboy, his wispy attempts at a mustache and beard, paradoxically, highlighting his youthfulness. He regarded Alice as if she were insane. “Dude, you’re hotter than Satan.”
“Oh, you like my new jacket?” Frank’s gray overcoat gave her the form of a traffic cone. “Thanks.”
“I mean, showing up here. This place has more cameras than a camera store. What kind of super-crazy- desperate trouble are you in?”
“The usual kind. I need your ‘full suite,’
He looked down at his sneakers. “I can’t. Not now. Sorry, man.”
“By all means, go ahead and have your beer. My treat, in fact-if the bartender can break a hundred-euro bill …”
“I can’t take you to the workshop while you’re listed as shoot-on-sight. Not even you would take that risk.”
“Yes you can, Stew.”
Despite himself, he blanched. Russ Augenblick was an alias.
“I know about California,” she continued. “But there’s no reason to tell tales out of school, is there?”
While at the NSA, Alice had learned the truth about “Russ,” but she allowed him to continue operating in case he might be of use at some point. Like now. She was prepared to tell what she knew of Stewart Fleishman’s freshman year at Berkeley, where making the scene at off-campus bars was mandatory, the drinking age was twenty-one, and his Massachusetts driver’s license showed his true age. The fake California license he’d bought proved useless because the bouncers ran licenses through magnetic strip scanners-a flashing red light resulted in a long and expensive night with Berkeley’s finest. Fleishman chose to replicate a Delaware license because of its simplicity and relative obscurity. A quick trip to San Francisco netted him a sheet of the same PVC the Delaware Department of Motor Vehicles used, plus a magnetic strip that he programmed so the scanners informed the
