week about this
The files were gone, Gaelle was in the hospital, MondeFocus was against him. Very well, he would act on his own.
He winced as he got to his feet, still in his Levi’s and half-buttoned shirt, and joined her by the stove, from which heat slowly emanated. She kissed him on both cheeks and handed him a bowl. Her hands, he saw, were rough with blackened fingernails. From the blowtorch, no doubt. The squat was on the site of what used to be an old farm, now scheduled for demolition. The last farm remaining in Paris, it was the abode of artists, political types, and immigrants without papers who hid there. Like him. No one would trace him here.
“I’m late,
“Come back, Krzysztof,” she said. “We’ll have a long lunch.”
He saw the dancing look in her gray-speckled eyes. But he had no time for that.
KRZYSZTOF GOT OFF the Number 38 bus by the Sorbonne. The headline of
His student ID folded in his back pants pocket, he walked between the pillars of the entry gate and hurried up the wide stone staircase to the library. The wood-vaulted reading room smelled of age—antique mahogany had warped with time and the walnut oil that had been rubbed into it for years had given the wood a rich patina. Krzysztof eyed the room, which was covered floor to ceiling with books but vacant except for a few older scholarly types bent over their work. Most of his fellow students were attending lectures.
He had to find proof. The proof that had been stolen from the MondeFocus office.
The librarian took his ID and he sat down at a computer terminal. He logged on using “Sophocles,” the user ID and password of a philosophy professor that he’d found taped under the desktop in a deserted office last week at noontime. It was so easy to steal passwords and IDs. Krzystof imagined that professor abhorred computers and preferred contemplating his navel, as did most of the tenured staff.
Last week he’d accessed Alstrom’s Web site. Alstrom was the oil conference’s major sponsor. Their external site displayed nothing but blatant propaganda about how their oil exploration enriched the world. Enriched their pockets, more likely.
Now he was going to try the site of Regnault, Alstrom’s PR firm. Operational files might contain telltale documents under a code or project name. He’d seen parts of environmental reports that had been withheld from the media, suppressed. And they’d made him sick.
He logged into a privileged user account and told the system to add a new user, Sophocles. So far, so good.
Ready for the plunge, he logged into Regnault with Sophocles. If Alstrom had bribed ministers to overlook discrepancies in its environmental reports and he could find evidence of this, he could salvage their protest and stop the execution of the proposed agreement.
His fingers tensed on the keyboard, feeling that particular rush, the crackle of expectation. In seven keystrokes he’d be inside Regnault’s network, scanning their operational documents. They’d never know their system had been infiltrated. Nine out of ten times they didn’t recheck privileged user accounts or monitor their firewall.
But a message flashed on the screen:
Krzysztof froze. Someone was on to him.
Or . . . ?
He logged off and grabbed his hooded sweatshirt. He kept his head down, grabbed his ID, and passed through the turnstile before the librarian turned her head.
AIMEE STARED AT the clock. It was 6:00 A.M. Still no word, no call from the baby’s mother. The dried blood on the baby bag, the figure who had chased her in Place Bayre—these thoughts had kept her up half the night. Yet the responsibility for this small human terrified her most of all.
Streaks of an apricot dawn sky filtered in through the tall window, showing her vintage Chanel, now filthy, hanging from the armoire door. She envisioned the dry cleaner, hand on her hip, rolling her eyes, saying, “Miracles, Mademoiselle, cost more.” Reports were stacked on the desk, talcum powder dusted the duvet. All night she’d listened, alert to the breathing of the sleeping baby beside her, afraid at every hiccup that it would stop.
For a moment she imagined the room strewn with baby-care manuals, plush toys, dirty diapers, and a fine spray of pureed carrots decorating the cream
Next to her on the duvet, a little fist brushed her arm. The phone receiver stared her in the face. She had a business to run: a client meeting to attend, office rent to pay, and the sinking feeling she’d run out of diapers.
The phone rang. She picked it up on the first ring.
“You sorted things out, right?” Rene said. “Had a good sleep?”
“Snatched an hour or two, Rene.”
The sound of a coffee grinder whirred in the background, a kettle hissed.
“You mean . . . the baby’s still there?” Rene asked. “Are you all right?”
She rubbed her eyes, torn between alternatives. She didn’t know what to do.
“I’m fine,” she said.
The coffee grinder sputtered to a halt.
“You know, and I know, that you’re an innocent party, Aimee,” he said. “But you could be accused of kidnapping.”
“Me, Rene?” she asked. “Her mother asked me to keep her for a couple of hours.”
“Don’t wait to read about a missing or kidnapped baby in this morning’s paper. It’s time you called Brigade de Protection des Mineurs
She gazed at the baby’s fingers, so small, curled around hers. She stroked the velvet fuzz on the baby’s head, like the skin of a peach. All night she’d racked her brain, trying to figure out who the mother could be and how she knew Aimee and had gotten her phone number.
Rene made sense. But she couldn’t send the baby away. Not yet. The woman had been in fear for her life and for the baby’s; she hadn’t even diapered her infant. Aimee knew she had to give the woman more time.
“She knows me, Rene, and she’ll be back,” Aimee assured him, wishing she felt as certain as she sounded.
“You’ll have to wing the Regnault meeting on your own, Aimee. Can you manage?”
“What?”
“I’m off to Fontainebleau,” he said. “The client likes the proposal but has questions to be answered before they sign a contract. This morning. You know how skittish they’ve been.”
A big, fat contract, too, if he could seal the deal.
“Don’t worry, I’ll think of something.”
There was a pause.
“Think of the baby. The mother could be in jail, or on the run. Or . . . gone.”
She heard a
“Hasn’t that crossed your mind, Aimee?”
Just all night long.
“Promise me you’ll call child protective services.”
“I’ll take care of it, Rene.” She hung up.
