old station clock above her desk read 6 P.M.
“What? Who’s this?”
“Then we start sending you the dwarf. In little pieces.”
She froze.
Rene.
“What do you want?”
“Thadee’s backpack.”
Aimee stared at the flickering cursor, trying to think fast. They hadn’t mentioned jade. Did they know what was inside?
“Who are you?” She glanced at Rene’s untouched desk. “How do I know you have my partner?”
A sound like the muffling of a receiver came over the line. Choking.
“Aimee, don’t. I’m OK—” said Rene.
The line went dead.
She panicked. Stupid, stupid, stupid! Let them have all her money, the jade . . . anything to get Rene back.
How could this be happening? Thadee shot to death, then the jade stolen, the RG tracking her, and now Rene, kidnapped! She hit the call back number. It was Rene’s own cell phone. No answer. Smart.
Her head whirling, she had to figure something out and rescue Rene. She thought of his hip and . . . didn’t want to think of what they could do to him.
They’d call back. And she’d arrange to meet them. Try and convince them to accept the fifty thousand franc check and call it quits.
They’d let her stew before calling to give her the “drop.” But what if they never handed Rene over? Terror clutched her.
Never rely on criminals to do the expected.
She thought of Louis; “Nut,” as she and Rene had nicknamed him since he kept bags of nuts in his pockets at all times, saying he was determined to eat healthily in the radar infested world he worked in. They’d met him at an electronics seminar when they’d skipped out of Sorbonne classes.
He worked at France Telecom. He’d know a way to trace the kidnappers, if anyone did. She dialed.
“CPMS division.”
“
“Aimee . . . hold on,” Nut said. She heard beeping in the background. Clicks. “
“I’ll make it quick,” she told him, keeping her voice steady with effort. “Triangulation, can you do it?”
“To a land line or cell phone?”
“Rene’s cell phone. He’s been . . . kidnapped.”
“You’re joking.”
“I wish,” she said. ”Listen, no time to explain but. . . .”
She heard him take a deep breath.
“Only in Paris within the service antenna’s or tower’s range,” Nut said. “No suburbs or outlying districts. Paris maintains multi-antennas. Even so we’ve had only limited success. Montmartre and the Butte Chaumont hill give us trouble.”
“Will you try?” she asked, turning off her computer, switching off the lights.
“Picking through voluminous CDR records and verifying the data from the base stations which pick up calls to reconstruct and pinpoint the whereabouts of phone users, that’s worse than dental extraction. And more time- consuming.”
“I can give you the number to trace,” she said.
“That lessens it a bit but not enough,” Nut said.
She heard beeps and clicks in the background.
“Talk to a ham radio operator,” he advised. “They monitor cell phone transmissions all the time.”
“Rene needs help, right away. There’s no time to lose.”
“Go to Club Radio, 11 rue Biot,” he said. “Tell Leo I sent you. That’s the best I can do, Leo helped another friend last week. And don’t forget, Aimee.”
“That I owe you?”
“Rene’s a black belt. Give him some credit.”
Nut clicked off.
Fear rippled through her as she stepped into her boots and grabbed her knee-length suede shearling coat in the hallway. She ran down the stairs, onto rue du Louvre and found a taxi letting out passengers.
“Eleven rue Biot,” she said to the taxi driver.
“Clichy’s out of my way.” The driver shook his head. “They were my last fare. Sorry, I’ve been working since six a.m.”
Lights glittered on the Seine below. A passing barge churned the black, sluggish water. No other taxis in sight.
She reached for her wallet. “Fifty francs extra for your trouble.”
“Must have a hot date.”
Little did he know.
The taxi driver hit the meter switch. “Get in.”
NUMBER 11 RUE Biot, between the old Cafe-concert L’Europeen, where Charles Trenet had sung in the thirties, and an Indian restaurant, was a cobblestone’s throw from Place de Clichy. She pressed the buzzer, the door was buzzed open, and she stepped into a small courtyard. Against the night sky, a row of antennas poked from the rooftop like twigs: a good sign. She passed the old stables, now garages, and mounted the back stairs to the second floor.
The door stood ajar. She walked inside to what she figured had once been two rooms that had been opened up into a large space. Bare putty-colored walls, a wooden farm table, a bag of potting soil on the floor. Instead of the buzzing and static she expected, she saw a plump woman in her forties wearing an apron, sitting at a scanner by several radios. She wore headphones.
“I’m looking for Leo. . . .”
“Short for Leontyne,” she said, smiling. “My mother loved opera and Leontyne Price.”
“Nut sent me.”
“I know,” she said. “Can you hurry up? Sorry but I’ve got to add forty-five megahertz in about seven minutes.”
She gestured to a large red clock, and pulled off her headphones.
Aimee nodded. “I don’t know if my friend’s in Paris, but he’s in trouble. I’m desperate. Can you help me find him?”
Leo hit several switches and adjusted a black knob that caused a needle to quiver on the volumeter.
Aimee wrote Rene’s name and cell phone number on a pad of paper by Leo’s elbow.
“
Aimee was out of her depth. “How does it work?”
“I set up a system for this phone’s ESN and MIN code, its serial number and identification number. So each time,” she paused, rubbing her neck, “Rene . . . that’s his name, Rene?”
Aimee nodded.
“So when Rene makes a phone call, my scanner picks up his ESN and MIN numbers, my computer, hooked up to my scanner, recognizes his cell phone, and tunes in to his conversation and records it.”
“Sounds easy. But I’m sure it’s not.”
“So far there’s no encryption in the radio spectrum,” she grinned. “When it happens, we’ll figure something
