Police sirens could now be heard coming from every direction. Rapp tossed the syringe out into the current and leaned back. He had to get moving. He fished out the last syringe. It contained a broad-spectrum antibiotic. He sat up straight and found a patch of skin under his bulletproof vest. He jabbed the needle through the fabric of his dress shirt and didn’t so much as feel a pinch. Not knowing how he would secure the med kit and thinking that he had pretty much done all he could, he dropped the entire thing into the murky river. He stared down at his gun for a second and was about to dump it as well, but decided against it. Where he was going he would have plenty of opportunities to dispose of it. Rapp grabbed the weapon with his good hand, reversed it, and nudged the tip of the suppressor into the holster. As he snapped it into place, he heard voices off to his right. He knew the temperature of the water, the speed of the current, and roughly how long he would last until hypothermia took his life.
As the voices grew louder, Rapp scooted his butt to the edge, gripped the stone with his right hand, and slid himself quietly off the ledge and into the water. He sank beneath the surface smoothly, the suction of his clothes pulling him down. He knew not to panic. As soon as his clothes were soaked, they would be neutral. Rapp bobbed to the surface five seconds later, the current already pushing him to the west. He took in an easy breath and ignored the chill of the dark water, telling himself it would help slow his blood flow. He was going to take a casual swim through the heart of Paris, and in a few hours, he would find the right place to make ground.
Rapp rolled onto his back and gently scissor-kicked his legs under the surface. As he cleared the relative darkness of the bridge he looked up at the night sky and for the briefest of moments wondered how many people had died in this river—if his would be just another body to add to the count. The thought made him smile. Always up for a challenge, Rapp felt his survival mode kick in, and he told himself that he would live through this night as surely as the sun would rise in the east in the morning. And then he would go searching for answers. Something had gone horribly wrong tonight, and Rapp needed to know how the enemy was on to him. No matter what Kennedy and the others ordered, he would not be going back to the states for some time on the couch with Langley’s resident shrink.
CHAPTER 6
COMMANDANT Francine Neville of the French Judicial Police stood amidst the carnage holding a cup of coffee in one hand and desperately wishing she had a cigarette in the other. Her people were picking through the slaughter with gloved hands and various tools. A photographer stood in the doorway clicking away. Neville was momentarily conscious of the fact that she wasn’t wearing any makeup and her hair, which she wore in a swooping bob midway between her ears and shoulders, was probably sticking out in a way that made her look slightly deranged. She’d been to enough crime scenes over the years, though, to know it was a waste of time to worry. If this crime was ever solved, and brought to court, she would have to endure the less-than-flattering photos with the rest of her team, who had all been yanked from their beds before sunrise.
Neville was good at her job. She had risen quickly through the ranks of the National Police, both in spite of the fact that she was a woman and because she was a woman. Political pressures had ushered in the brave new age of women in positions of command and Neville knew there were still plenty of misogynists around who thought the only reason she’d made commandant at the relatively young age of thirty-seven was that the bosses had to reach their quota. She ignored all of the whispers, focused on her job, and took comfort in the fact that the men she worked with knew she was qualified and had earned her position. On nights like this, however, she questioned why she had chosen police work.
Neville’s face was a pinched scowl as she surveyed the chaos. This one would be a real circus. She had a fat naked man in the bed with a skinny woman half his age lying next to him. Both were dead—riddled with bullets. Four more men, paramilitary types by the look of them, were also strewn about the floor. These bodies were relatively intact, with only one or two slugs in them. Down the hall, two more bodies were sprawled out in separate doorways. Neville figured they were hotel guests who had heard the commotion, and when they’d gone to investigate, had been killed by the crazy bastards who had done all of this. Also, an unfortunate young employee of the hotel who did the overnight laundry was now prostrate in the alley with five bullet holes in his chest. Neville tallied the carnage—nine bodies in total. In her sixteen years on the force, the biggest investigation she’d been involved in was a triple homicide. It was of course a love triangle, murder-suicide. While sensational, the case was not hard for the press and public to figure out. Wife cheats on husband, husband kills wife and her boyfriend, and then kills himself. It wasn’t the first such murder, and it wouldn’t be the last.
This was an entirely different scenario. The number of victims pushed her mind in two separate but linked directions. They’d had a real problem with the Slav gangs that had flooded into the slums after Yugoslavia fell apart and spiraled into civil war, and now the Russian gangs with their newfound independence were beginning to assert themselves. As always, she would need to keep her mind open, but those two groups were at the top of her list.
Gnawing at the back of her mind were two other entities—her superiors at the National Police headquarters and the press. Submachine-gun fire at a five-star hotel in the heart of Paris was sensational enough; throw in the nine dead bodies and she was guaranteed a media circus the likes of which the city hadn’t seen since the Dreyfus Affair. Her superiors would find it nearly impossible not to interfere and she already knew how they would do it. A few would try to micromanage her investigation and the bulk would spend their lunches leaking to the press.
Anxiety crept up on Neville as she realized this entire mess could end her career. Her attention turned to the dead man lying on the bed. It was something out of one of those American mobster movies. Feathers and tufts of fabric were everywhere, and a good amount of it was clinging to puddles of blood. She looked to the four paramilitary types on the floor. They could easily be Serbs or Croats. They had that swarthy look. Neville had sent one of her officers down to the front desk to find out whose name the room was registered under. She heard a cackle of grating laughter from the hallway, and a moment later a man appeared in the doorway, stopped, and looked down at one of the dead bodies.
If Neville needed any confirmation that she was in the middle of a shit storm, it was now standing in the doorway. She had hoped to get through the rest of her life without ever seeing Paul Fournier again, and she had made it nearly four years, but tonight her luck had run out. Fournier was DGSE—France’s General Directorate for External Security. It was the organization tasked with the external security of the country—the key word being external. Neville had a sinking feeling that Fournier was here because of the man in the bed. As her gaze shifted between the two men, one dead and the other alive, she knew that this case had just become infinitely more complicated.
“Francine,” Fournier called far too loudly from across the room. “A pleasure to see you. It’s been far too long.”
Neville sighed and said, “Paul, what are you doing here?”
“You know how things work at the Directorate,” he said with a broad grin under a salt-and-pepper mustache. “We go wherever the Republic needs us.”
“I thought you specialized in subverting the unstable governments to our south.”
Fournier laughed heartily and stepped carefully around the dead bodies. When he was a step away from Neville, he held out his arms as if he was ready to embrace an old friend.
Neville shuddered at the thought of touching him. With a frown on her oval face she put out her right hand, signaling him to keep his distance. His audacity had certainly not diminished over the years. “Why are you here?”
