the Tower, and now here was a man asking for glasses and hat for an instant disguise, with a gun tucked in the side of his pants, under his jacket.
The fear in her eyes churned his heart. She could scream. She could go to the first policeman in the next station.
‘Please,’ he said. ‘I’m not the bad guy. I’m not.’ He didn’t know what else to say.
She seemed unsure of what step to take next, and the boyfriend looked at her, aware of a strained communication passing between her and Luke, and misreading it. Suddenly not happy about it. He eased the girlfriend away from Luke, down the steps, toward the door. She looked at Luke with stark terror; her mouth trembled.
‘I’m not the bad guy,’ he mouthed again.
Les Invalides. The train stopped. Much more of the crowd poured out for this station, but Luke tried to hang back until the last second to see if Mouser exited. And this time he did, passing within fifteen feet of Luke, hurrying. He stepped off last, Mouser a good twenty feet ahead of him, the boyfriend and girlfriend between him and Luke.
Luke considered ducking behind the garish orange pillars but decided he had to risk staying close. He kept following the couple. The girlfriend pulled a phone from her purse and started talking into it.
At the top of the stairs, Mouser shot a glance across the crowd behind him. His gaze raked across where Luke walked but he did not notice him, wearing dark glasses, heavy cap and an ugly scarf across his chin and mouth.
Mouser turned back toward the front.
Luke hurried up the stairs, half-expecting to see Mouser waiting for him but he wasn’t. Mouser stood on a long moving sidewalk, feeding past abstract art, and Mouser returned his attention to the phone, texting, eyes close to the screen. An angry expression colored his face.
Luke realized that the girl and her boyfriend were gone. Vanished. Maybe they’d tucked into another line.
Mouser reached the end of the moving sidewalk and stepped off without a backward glance. Then Luke looked back at the end of the conveyor belt, spotted the couple from the train.
Talking to a policeman.
He had to hurry. If the cops stopped him before he stopped Mouser
… the panic tore through his chest. He’d put his father and Aubrey in this danger; he had to save them from it.
He hurried toward the station’s exit and took an escalator up. Ahead of him, across a stretch of parkland, was Les Invalides, the golden-domed complex of museums and monuments to French military history. To his right was the Musee d’Orsay, the more recent jewel of Parisian museums. Around him was a stretch of grass, a playground, people walking in lazy surrender to the brightening day.
Fifty feet ahead of him a black BMW stopped, the back door opened, and Mouser slid into the back seat. Luke pivoted; he couldn’t risk Mouser seeing him and now the car was headed toward him.
He heard the purr of the approaching motor and the air felt sealed in his lungs as he headed back toward the escalator that led down to Les Invalides station.
The policeman came out of the station. Looking straight at him.
Trapped. Between the cop and Mouser in the BMW. He took the risk and stopped. The sedan shot past, not braking. Luke crossed the street in the wake of the BMW’s passage.
In the back seat, he saw the burr of Mouser’s head. Then the driver turned full to speak to Mouser.
Henry Shawcross. His stepfather.
Oh, you bastard, he thought. Finally, to see the betrayal with his own eyes, Mouser and Henry together. No way he could let them escape, no way. Luke’s eyes darted everywhere; no taxi stand in sight. No way to follow them. He ran across the street now, in a full-blown sprint, toward the Musee d’Orsay.
He glanced back. The policeman was running now, too. Chasing him. The girlfriend had sold him out.
He reached the taxi stand at the museum and one of the cabs cut hard to the front of the line, earning a squeal of honks from the other drivers. Luke got in the back seat.
‘Thank you, go. Vite. Fast. Eiffel Tower.’
The driver, a young man about his age, nodded and roared down the street. Past the winded policeman, who had stopped running.
‘The Tower, very hectic, too much traffic,’ the cabbie said. ‘A shooting…’ His English was okay.
‘Okay,’ Luke said. He didn’t care where they went. The black BMW was gone. How was he going to find his dad or Aubrey, now? ‘Then – the police station.’
The cabbie kept watching him in the mirror. ‘You run from a policeman and now you want to go to the police.’
‘He mistook me for someone else.’
The cabbie did not seem to understand.
‘Wait.’ Drummond had said that he and Henry and his dad had all worked for the State Department. If Quicksilver was the replacement for the Book Club, then he should turn to State for help. ‘Take me to the American Embassy, please.’
‘I must call for address.’ He flipped open a phone, spoke a flurry of what sounded like Russian into it.
Luke fell against the back of the seat. The cabbie made turn after turn, speaking into the phone. He reached for a radio and turned it off.
‘How far to the embassy?’
The cabbie clicked off the phone and took a hard turn into a quiet street. He slammed on the brakes and twisted in the seat. He raised a small gun from the seat and aimed it at Luke. A pop sound, and Luke felt a thump hit the crocheted wool of the ugly scarf and a slight weight lodge in the fabric. He grabbed at the gun, his head scraping the ceiling. He turned the little gun back toward the cabbie and it fired again.
The dart pierced the cabbie’s throat and he sagged against the steering wheel. The car lurched forward, crumpling into a parked van. Luke yanked a dart from the scarf; it had gotten stuck in the thick knitting. The girlfriend’s impulsive gift had saved him.
Jesus, Luke thought. He was waiting for me. Cut ahead of the line to make sure I was his fare. He knew I was at that subway station. How?
The cabbie kept breathing in shallow panting gasps. Drugged.
Luke fumbled with the dart at the guy’s throat; his fingertip touched a leather string. He pulled on the cord and a small medal of an armed angel crept out of the cabbie’s shirt.
Saint Michael. Like his, like Drummond’s.
Was the angel a sign of Quicksilver? Drummond had the medal and was clearly a member. But if the cabbie was from Quicksilver, why would he attack him?
Luke picked up the dart gun and the cell phone the guy had used. He grabbed the cabbie’s wallet. He got out of the cab and ran. Three streets over, he opened the cell phone and looked in the call log. The number was one he recognized, one seared in his memory.
Jane. The kidnapping mastermind.
Never mind Quicksilver, never mind the Night Road, never mind the fifty million. Jane was the woman who had orchestrated all the chaos. The woman responsible for the hellish chessboard his life had turned into, she had sent this cabbie after him.
If the cabbie was part of Quicksilver, then he must be a traitor, working with Jane.
That was going to be her mistake, Luke thought. Because she’d just given him a way to track her down.
Pawn takes queen, he thought, as he ran away from the cab.
Luke knew he needed to avoid any place with security cameras – maybe the surveillance in the metro had helped the cabbie find him at Les Invalides, he thought – and so he ran until he found a library. But even the library had a camera near the door. He ducked his head, averted his gaze from its unblinking view.
He opened the cabbie’s wallet. A wad of euros, a driver’s license, a gray blank card. Like an electronic passkey.
Now he just needed to find an address to match the passkey.
He sat at a computer terminal. He entered in the web address he’d seen on Eric’s laptop in the old house: the
