He snorted. “A sweatshop girl? But convenient for me. Who’d care about an illegal immigrant like her but Pascal? The bleeding-heart Communist.”
Anger filled her. The pompous ass. Meizi had been an unknowing pawn in his game. It made her sick. He’d planned it to the last detail.
“With your technical know-how, you worked the plastic wrap machine like a snap,” she said, her high heel working the dirt. “Yet you made a mistake. You were surprised when Clodo appeared. You dropped your cell phone.”
“Who?”
“Don’t tell me you forgot the homeless man you pushed onto the Metro tracks?”
“Vermin,” Jean-Luc spat. “He stank.”
“But Clodo sold your phone. Now the
He didn’t have to know Clodo replaced the SIM card.
Close humid air mixed with the wet fur smells from Hippolyte’s coat. She heard the patter of crumbling dirt.
“Now you’ll put down the laptop,” he said.
She crouched with the laptop bag. One hand behind it, fingers scrabbling for clumps of dirt. The dense air in this narrow tunnel and the ragged, stinking fur nauseated her.
“Closer,” he said.
Still blinded by the beam, she pushed the laptop bag forward.
“Unzip the case.”
Shaking, she took the laptop out. Prayed Saj had received the file she sent.
The flashlight beam focused on the laptop, revealing Jean-Luc’s leaning silhouette. She flung the handful of dirt in his face. Catching him off guard, she lunged and shoved him against the wall.
“Bitch!” His arm lashed out, whacking her ribs and throwing her off balance. Struggling, she shook him off, stumbled and ran, pushing herself off the wall. Her adrenalin kicking in.
Darkness except for her thin penlight beam. Perspiration, the hot fur coat, the thick air. She saw the ramp. Ran up it, pushed the door open. Back in the refectory, a few candles sputtering, the odor of melted wax.
She slipped behind the first thing she saw, a bookcase, eyed the stone steps leading to the pulpit. Her adrenalin ebbing, she grabbed her side. This pain.
“We’re playing
She couldn’t see him in the shadows. Her mouth felt like cotton, bile rose in her stomach. Her legs wobbled.
“Don’t you understand?” Jean-Luc said. “Pascal lied. That’s how he repaid me. No gratitude after I helped him learn to weld, mold, machine-design, to calculate, to construct machines.”
Keep focused. Keep him talking. Find his inner geek. “You mean like the guilds?”
“Our heritage comes from the guilds,” he said, his voice impassioned. “Even the classic freshman problem of how to drill a hole at a ninety-degree angle in a piece of metal. An old guild secret.” A short bark of laughter echoed. “But I tried to guide him, be a
“So you caged him?”
Weakness sapped her. Pain knifed through her side.
“Pascal wanted to give this formula away free!” Jean-Luc shouted. “To the world! Can you imagine?”
The glass globe and a leather scientific tome the size of Miles Davis lay within reach on the table. Either one could …
Jean-Luc shoved the bookcase back and smiled. He wore glasses now. Thick lenses. For the first time, she saw his face up close, saw the violent anger contorting his eyes. His dilated pupils. Why had she ever considered him handsome, vulnerable? She’d even felt sorry for him.
“Scream as loud as you like,” he said. “No power. We shorted the power grid.”
Smart ass. She maneuvered the lock pick from her sleeve. “You brainwashed your disciples. Pitiful. You attacked me.”
His knife blade glinted in the candlelight. “Too bad things didn’t work out more smoothly. I wish I had taken care of you then.”
Pascal, Meizi, now her. She felt blood rush to her face. She tried again to stall him. “You ran over Meizi …”
He snorted. “Like she matters. Or you, for that matter. All you did was complicate the means to the end. But nothing I can’t handle.”
He rushed at her with his knife. She threw up her arms to ward off the blow. His glasses went flying.
But his knife blade pinned Hippolyte’s ragged coat sleeve to the bookcase. An odd look spread on his shadowed face. His mouth twitched, contorted. “What did … you do?” he gasped.
She twisted and turned, but she couldn’t move. Stuck.
And she realized the lock pick in her other hand had gone into his eye. All fifteen centimeters of it, up to the handle. His eye was a mashed purple globe.
“Call it luck,” she said. “Auspicious.”
Horror sticken, she shoved his body away. Jean-Luc sagged in a little pirouette, then crumpled against the bookcase, lifeless. A thin line of vitreous and blood trailed onto the stone.
The red light shone on her laptop’s reserve battery, one bar of power remaining. She grabbed her cell phone. Shook it, and lifted it as high as she could for reception. Pecked Saj’s number. Fuzz. Her vision fading, she hit Rene’s speed dial. It rang and rang. Finally, she heard a buzzing. “Refectory,” was all she could manage.
Light-headedness filled her, the bookcases spun. Her fingers came back sticky, and she saw the keyboard was smeared red with blood. Her blood. Jean-Luc had sliced his knife through the coat into her side. And her dress. Her vintage Chanel.
How would she get the blood out? Her thoughts drifted, swirled with bits of code, Latin, the picture of the woman on the Pont Marie. Then the rushing cold, such bone-chilling cold in her legs, her arms. The howling wind in the nave filled her ears until blackness took over.
“YOU LIKE US, do you? Second time tonight,” the white-uniformed nurse consulted her chart. “As if we needed another emergency intake, with the ward this full.”
The gold glow of dawn crept in from under the hospital window shade. “Technically, it’s morning, nurse.” Aimee groaned at the smarting stitches. “But you should have seen the other
“I’d call you trouble, Mademoiselle.” The nurse gave her a little smile. “And that’s the morphine talking.”
“That’s what I like to hear,” said Saj, “after all our meditation work. Drugs.”
“Mademoiselle, you’re lucky no vital organs were punctured.”
Aimee felt like she’d been run over by a truck.
“The X-rays indicate the knife hit your vertebra,” the nurse continued, reading her chart. “Bone and muscle tissue protected your spinal column. A nice
She became aware of Sacault, all in brown, standing next to Saj. “As long as you’re talking, let’s continue the conversation. We’re ambulancing you to Val de Grace.”
“The military hospital?” she said, wincing in pain. “No way.”
Rene was holding her hand, his green eyes wide. “You called me?”
“Sorry for the bad reception, Rene,” she said. “But I took care of him. Sorry it was too late.”
Rene looked down. “Morbier’s out in the waiting room.”
Hurt pinched her heart. She couldn’t deal with Morbier now. If ever.
“Mademoiselle Leduc, you’ll debrief with our team,” Sacault said. “Go over the files recovered from Jean-Luc Narzac’s office at Bouygues. Furnish us with Samour’s work.”
She shook her head, and everything swam.
“Tell him, Rene,” she said. “Fill it in for the DST. Then consider me done. All done.”
Saj nodded, pulled his madras scarf around his shoulders. “First I suggest we center …”
Sacault blinked.
“Pascal Samour applied lost medieval stained-glassmaking principles to fiber optics,” Rene said. “But you know that.” Rene handed Sacault a disc. “It’s all here. But he wanted to give the fiber-optic formula away free. A
