hardly knows?”
“That wasn’t how I planned it,” I said, but Gobi wasn’t looking at me anymore.
“We’re not going to lose her this time,” Monash said. It was the first time I’d heard him speak, not counting all the shouting inside the steamer trunk back in Venice. Now that he had a gun in his hand, his voice was refined, British American, the product of private school and board rooms, exactly the way you’d expect the father of someone like Paula to sound.
Tucking the weapon into a shoulder holster, letting Paula keep her gun pointed at Gobi, he started strapping a pair of plastic restraints around Gobi’s wrists. “And there’s going to be quite a lengthy reeducation process, isn’t that right, Zusanne?” And then, to Paula: “We’ve got an empire to rebuild, darling.”
Gobi lowered her head and said something under her breath.
“What’s that, love?”
“My name is Gobija.”
The restraints zipped tighter. At first I thought she was going to do the same thing she’d done in Zermatt, going quietly until she had a chance to assess the situation.
I was wrong.
43. “Icky Thump” — The White Stripes
The noise Gobi’s head made as it smashed into Monash’s nose was kind of a wet, muffled crack, like what you’d get if you pulverized a grapefruit inside a burlap bag. Monash didn’t get a chance to cry out. By then, she was already on him, looping her arms up and wrapping the restraints around his neck, crossing her wrists and jerking them tight. Something popped in Monash’s spine-something deep and fragile and important-sounding-and he let out a sharp glottal croak and started twitching frantically in his five-thousand-dollar suit.
Gobi whirled, still in motion, keeping Monash’s body upright in front of her, ramming him forward like a human shield into Paula, who had backed up, trying to get a shot. Even I saw that wasn’t going to happen. The alley was narrow, with even less space now that the FedEx truck was parked here, and no room to maneuver if Paula wasn’t planning on shooting Gobi through her father, who was arguably still alive and kicking. My parents and Annie had already jumped back up inside the truck.
“Hold it!” a voice shouted down the alley, and when I glanced back, I saw Nolan running toward us from up the alley from rue Oberkampf with two uniformed gendarmes coming up behind him.
I’ve watched the surveillance footage of what happened in the next nineteen seconds, from several different angles-the CIA made me go over it with them, and a bootleg version is also available on YouTube, and I still haven’t wrapped my mind around it.
Things start to get blurry around the one-minute mark. Then around 1:22, you can see Gobi pivot with Monash still held up in front of her like a spastic puppet. At 1:29, there’s a gunshot-it’s Paula’s, and it’s headed nowhere in particular, ricocheting off the alley wall where the cops will later find it embedded in a trash can thirty meters away-and the driver’s-side door of the FedEx truck flings open, knocking Paula over sideways. I’m out of the frame at this point, temporarily blocked out by Nolan and the gendarmes, who are still charging forward until they realize somebody’s shooting.
At 1:33, Paula regains her balance, turns around, and fires a second shot, this one more deliberate, but too late. There’s a flicker of something moving into the truck, the door slamming shut.
If you pause the footage at 1:38, you can see my face pop back up in the foreground, looking straight up. The expression on my face says it all.
The truck is gone.
So is my family.
So is Gobi.
44. “Walking Far from Home” — Iron and Wine
Which brings us here, Gobi.
Not quite, but close enough.
With everything that’s been written and broadcast and blogged about us in those final few hours in Paris, official and otherwise, you would think that the full story had been mapped out. And to the extent that the facts tell the story, that’s true. There were definitely aspects of the investigation that Nolan’s people withheld from the public, especially when the lead was still flying and the blood was still wet, but none of that really affected the outcome in any concrete way.
In the end it boiled down to this:
A woman, only twenty-four years old, died on top of the Eiffel Tower that night.
As far as the record is concerned, those are the facts.
Here is the rest.
The wet metal railing is flaking nine hundred feet up, rusty, worn smooth in places from the millions of eager hands that have gripped it over the years, gazing down over the lights of Paris. It’s so cold up here that I already can’t feel my fingertips, even with my hands stuffed down in the pockets of my parka. I stopped feeling my earlobes and the tip of my nose somewhere on the elevator ride to the top.
Despite the darkness and the temperature, plenty of tourists are still milling around up here posing for pictures, pointing out landmarks far below in a half-dozen different languages. Being here makes them feel glamorous somehow, part of something bigger than themselves. They act like celebrities at a photo shoot. They pose and preen. They air-kiss and vamp. They’ve got bottled water and hot chocolate and sandwiches from the bistro and plastic bags from the souvenir shop one floor below the main observation deck. There have been no additional security checks at ticket windows tonight, and why would there be? The afternoon’s assault off the rue Oberkampf was an isolated incident, the identity of its sole fatality not yet released to the public, but certainly not a cause for panic in the City of Lights. No one has mentioned anything to the authorities about keeping an eye on the Eiffel Tower in particular, because if such a person were to do that, neither one of us could have come up here.
I never would have seen you again.
And I see you now.
You’re standing twenty yards away, waiting for me on the opposite side of the platform with your arms crossed and your back to the railing. We’re a thousand feet above the most beautiful city in the world, and you’re only looking at me.
The wind and rain blow hard in my face, making my eyes water a little, and when I come closer and wipe them clear, I can see you’re bleeding. Not much, not yet. It’s running down your face from your right nostril. From here, I can’t tell whether you recognize me or not.
“Gobi.”
You smile sadly. You say something in Lithuanian. It sounds like a prayer.
“Where did you leave the FedEx van?”
You blink and gaze back at me.
“Where’s my family?”
Your eyes flick down and up to me again, almost tentatively, but without true recognition. It’s as if you’ve spotted someone in an airport, an old acquaintance whose face is familiar but whose name you can’t recall.
“I know you like them,” I say. “I know you’d never do anything to hurt them. Just tell me where they are.”
You smile again, then wince and touch your head, as if it suddenly hurts very badly.
