America. There was a rising hysterical note in the chorale he hadn’t heard earlier. Well, it was certainly out of his hands now. As he neared his exit, Fate was taking the stage.
With any luck at all, someone would pull a gun and shoot a palace guard. Then President Bocquet’s troops would open fire on the mob. At that point, Luca Bonaparte would step in front of the guns himself. A single raised hand would silence them. Bonaparte would ride to glory on the shoulders of the people, the savior and hope of all France.
A new and glorious beginning.
That was the plan, anyway. Hmm. He crawled around the table to the opposite side of the room and made a fresh hole of the same dimension there. He then withdrew a foil-wrapped block of Roquefort cheese from the tool kit. Unwrapping it, inhaling its fragrant aroma, he placed the cheese on the dusty floorboards inside the wall. He then tacked the baseboard back into place and used a bit of sawdust in a brown shoe-polish base to hide any trace of his alterations. He rocked back on his haunches and admired his work. Perfect.
“Hungry?” he asked the rat. He already knew the answer. He had been starving him for forty-eight hours.
Scurrying over to his original hole, where Chou waited impatiently in his cage, he took out the spool of C4, ran off a foot or two, and tacked the bitter end to the wooden floor just inside the opening. Next, he clipped a detonator to the wire and set it to receive a radio signal rather than one from the default mode, a digital timer.
All that remained was to strap Chou into his little harness.
“Ah, my pretty one,” he said soothingly as he took the rat out of his cage. “Your time to shine at last has come.” The rat was one of several that Hu Xu had mission-trained for just such work in China. His technique of using rats to run explosive lines behind walls, under floors, and over ceilings was in its infancy. Hu Xu was using the assassination of the president of France as an early test bed of the protocol. It was a singular measure of his confidence in his abilities.
General Moon was deeply interested in the success of this mission, naturally. China’s plans and the meeting of its long-term energy needs depended in large measure on the succession of Bonaparte to the office of president of France. Although Hu Xu was supremely confident, he had chosen the rat that had demonstrated the most courage and ability to overcome unseen obstacles once it left his sight. Chou had been first in her class. She had arrived from Hong Kong by diplomatic courier just the night before. Chou could smell the cheese on his fingers and nipped greedily at them, drawing a bit of blood. Tsk-tsk, he said to the rat, soothing her.
He secured the Velcro straps under Chou’s belly. The rat’s tiny claws were snickering on the polished hardwood floor, desperately trying to gain purchase. Chou now had the scent of the Roquefort wafting through the walls from the far side of the room. Nothing would stop her now.
She would literally go through walls to achieve her objective.
Hu Xu placed the squirming rat inside the hole. The animal paused on its haunches, pawing the air, sniffing the dank odors within the ancient walls, her wet black nose held high and twitching feverishly. Then, she rocketed away with a hum of wire, the spool on her back spinning furiously as the C4 unwound. The rodent raced through the dark, compacted rubble of centuries in search of her supper.
“Pauvre petite Chou,” he whispered to himself. Poor thing. The rodent would soon be suffering grievous constriction and spasms in her circulatory system. He had spiked the cheese with just enough rat poison to kill a small dog. Don’t want her retracing her steps now, do we?
No. Covered in soot, dust, and debris, the rat finally reached her target. She ripped the foil aside and began gnawing furiously at the pungent supper, wolfing down the pride of Roquefort. Her spool was empty. A hundred feet of high-velocity explosive wire now encircled the room. There was enough plastique C4 in these walls to bring down a good-sized building.
Chou expired on the spot.
The assassin carefully replaced the last bit of baseboard and meticulously erased any trace of his alterations. Only then did he look at the new Tank watch on his wrist. It had taken him only twelve minutes to set the “rat trap,” as he called his new technique. Hu Xu unzipped and stepped out of his coveralls and doffed his hat. Returning that wardrobe to the tool case, he stood and straightened his tie, inspecting himself in a large gilt mirror.
His blackface needed a little touch-up, which he did, but otherwise this new being he inhabited would serve him well for a day or two in London. He’d booked a suite at the Dorchester, a luxurious hotel he found conveniently located just across Park Lane from Hyde Park. Because General Moon’s daughter had failed yet another assignment, he had an appointment with a certain Lord Alexander Hawke. This British gentleman, codenamed “Pirate.”
And so to England!
When he unlocked the ornate anteroom door and stepped outside into the corridor, it was as if he had boarded a sinking ship loaded to the gunwales with human rats. He wrinkled his nose in disgust. The stink of panic was upon the place. Diplomats and secretaries, staffers and military personnel, all running through the palace halls, whispering into their cradled mobile phones and into each other’s ears in a rising cacophony of fear:
What is the president going to say to the cameras?
Is Bocquet to step down? There are riots in Toulon!
And what of Bonaparte? He says we are weeks away from sending troops into Oman? Are we no better than the fucking Americans?
Hu Xu turned a corner into a wide corridor and swam upstream in the onrushing river of bureaucrats. Here were more shouts than whispers:
Who will stop the carnage in the street?
We’re on the brink, I tell you! A second Revolution!
Can you get me on a plane? How should I know!
Any fucking plane, you idiot!
MON DIEU!
Apres moi, le grand deluge, Hu Xu whispered to himself.
The cowards, chewing pencils and dropping papers, scurrying by with their nervous, frightened eyes, didn’t even notice him.
He made his way down a narrow set of stairs leading to a vestibule and a small side door. This was the very door to the side street used by the late unlamented Honfleur and the sultan of Oman only yesterday. When last seen around midnight, the once-mighty sultan was still alive. But he had been bound and gagged, loaded into the back of a limousine, and was on his way to the airport. A small chartered jet would return him to Oman. There, he would be secreted away, a prisoner in his own palace.
Just as he was being bundled into the car, Madame Li had bent and kissed him on the lips. Poor old dear. He looked so frightened.
Stepping lightly out into the street in his highly polished shoes, the elegant black gentleman motioned to a big black Peugeot idling on the opposite curb. The liveried driver, one of General Moon’s Te-Wu policemen in Paris, smiled his recognition as he swung open the rear door. Hu Xu entered and they slipped into the heavy traffic, honking its panic.
“Vive la Nouvelle Napoleon!” the Chinese driver said over his shoulder as he placed a flashing blue light on the dashboard.
“Screw Napoleon,” Hu Xu replied with a laugh. “Vive les Chinois!”
Hu Xu relaxed back into the leather seat. The assassin had the satisfied and reverent air of one who had successfully completed his mission and learned much from his sojourn. The savior of France was in fact an inspiration. Before this trip, Hu Xu’s god had been Moon. Now, there were two all-powerful deities whirling in his heavens. Two giants would soon be standing astride the world. On their shoulders, a chameleon whispering evil deeds in their ears.
Two hours later, as Hu Xu stood on the tarmac beside the small Citation V that would ferry him to England, his mobile silently vibrated. He flipped it open and said, “Yes?”
“Is there cheese in the trap?” a voice asked in Chinese. It was the general’s PR man, Major Tony Tang. The man in the grey flannel suit.
“Indeed there is.”
“Spring it.”
