be using an alternate route to the border, the more familiar he was with the countryside, the better. Chances were, his dash from Reims would take him straight to Villerupt and Russange, but he was also aware of the old adage “No battle plan survives contact with the enemy,” and unless he was wrong about Boutin, the enemy would soon be here.
Only two questions remained: How good would they be? And what would be their orders?
He was back at Boutin’s apartment shortly after five. The forger had the altered licenses ready. Fisher checked them, then handed over the money. “Nice work.”
“I am aware. So, where will you go from here?”
“Who said I’m going anywhere?”
“I just assumed… ” Boutin gestured to the forged licenses.
Fisher shrugged. “Switzerland… Italy. I’ve got a friend who has a villa in Tuscany.”
“A lovely place, Tuscany. When will you be leaving?”
“Tomorrow or the day after.”
“Well, safe travels.”
Fisher left Boutin’s apartment and walked down the block to Jules, a clothing store on the corner of de Vesles and Marx Dormoy, and spent fifteen minutes perusing the racks by the window overlooking both entrances to passage Saint-Jacques until Boutin emerged from the courtyard. Being the devout indoorsman he was, the forger took the shortest route to the nearest
Like Emmanuel Chenevier, Boutin the Gnome would have little trouble with arithmetic. The man he knows as Francois Dayreis arrives at his apartment with five driver’s licenses, and within hours those same names appear in the news: a brutal assault on the outskirts of Reims. A lone perpetrator. Francois Dayreis was more trouble than he was worth — a customer whose continuing business was more a liability than an asset to Boutin. By the time he’d placed his anonymous call to the authorities, Boutin had probably suspended his business and secreted his tools and materials. If Dayreis was captured and tried to implicate him, all the police would find was an old man running a fly-tying business in his basement apartment. As is the nature of their trade, forgers know how to hide things.
Now came the waiting. Boutin would be visited; of that Fisher was certain. His cutout had been clear about that much. The timelines and scope of the response would be telling. Who? How many? And, most important, what were their rules of engagement?
Fisher checked his watch: almost 7:00 P.M. Boutin was savvy; he wouldn’t have said anything to the authorities about forged documents, but rather that he knew of the man described on the news. Francois Dayreis was his name. The report would go to the local police, the Police municipale, who would pass on the tip to the Police nationale. As Doucet and his cohorts would have reported the theft of their driver’s licenses (but not the loss of their satchel full of stolen IDs, passports, and SIM cards), the Police nationale would assume the attacker planned to use the stolen licenses, which would necessitate the involvement of Interpol and the Direction centrale du renseignement interieur (Central directorate of interior intelligence), or DCRI, France’s version of the FBI. From there, electronic ears would take note of the name Francois Dayreis and alarms would be raised. In all, Fisher estimated he had six hours before someone in the United States pushed the panic button.
3
Fisher was awoken by the cricket chirp of his iPhone. Having set the ringtone to match only one incoming number, he knew the alert meant visitors had arrived. He checked the time: 11:15 P.M. He sat up in bed and looked around, momentarily confused by his surroundings — the by-product of moving around so much. The decor and layout of chain hotel rooms tended to blur together.
The good news was that the visitors weren’t his but rather Boutin’s. The night before, Fisher had planted a homemade motion detector around Boutin’s apartment door: the tremble sensor from a vehicle’s antitheft GPS tracker wired to a prepaid cell phone. The tremble sensor was buried beneath Boutin’s doormat, and the cell phone buried against the wall a few feet away, its antenna jutting up among some weeds. Lacking the technological edge that working for 3E had provided, Fisher had, during the last year, become a fair inventor.
Having adopted the habit of sleeping in his clothes, he had only to grab his rucksack and head for the door.
His hotel, the Monopole, was a couple hundred yards north of Boutin’s apartment, on place Drouet d’Erlon. The proximity was a risk, he knew, but having disposed of the Francois Dayreis alias and checked into the Monopole with one of Emmanuel’s superbly altered passports, he felt relatively secure.
Outside, the streets were deserted and dark, save the yellow glow of the streetlamps reflecting on the damp cobblestones. He walked north, turned right onto rue de l’Etape, then immediately left into passage Sube, which took him south along an alley lined with boutiques and side entrances to restaurants until he was within sight of rue Condorcet. He stopped a hundred feet short and found a darkened doorway. Across the street lay a kebab restaurant, and to the left of it the tree-lined northern entrance to the courtyard outside Boutin’s apartment.
From his rucksack he withdrew his EOS 1D Mark III. He affixed the AstroScope Night Vision, powered up the Canon, and brought the viewfinder up to his eye. In the greenish glow of the NV, he scanned the courtyard. Standing so still was the figure that he passed it twice before he realized what he was seeing. Japanese, medium build, shaved head — in his mid-twenties, too young to be bald. An aesthetic choice. Fisher zoomed in, switched the selector to burst mode, and pressed the shutter button. He stayed focused on the man, waiting to see if he was smoking or waiting for someone, but for a full two minutes the man stayed stock-still.
Fisher moved on, scanning deeper into the courtyard. There were too many trees. If he was right about the Japanese guy, there would be others. This one was covering the northern entrance to the courtyard… Would he have partners at the west and south entrances?
Moving with exaggerated slowness, Fisher backed out of his doorway and retraced his steps until he reached the intersection of passage Sube and passage Talleyrand, where he turned west. He emerged back on Drouet d’Erlon, just south of his hotel, turned left through the square, around the fountain at its center, then onto Marx Dormoy. Ten feet from the west entrance to the courtyard, Fisher stopped short. He scanned his flanks with the Canon, then moved up and peeked with the AstroScope around the corner.
Like the Japanese man, this one was hidden in the trees directly across from Boutin’s apartment door. She, too, was as still as a statue, save her eyes, which kept up a constant scan. Fisher shot a burst of her, then zoomed in and panned left. He stopped, panned back. In the NV, there was no way to be sure of the hair color, but the face looked familiar… He zoomed in again. Kimberly Gillespie. Fisher lowered the camera from his face, took a deep breath, and squeezed his eyes shut. His situation had just gotten exponentially more complicated.
Fisher retraced his steps again: north to the square, then left and left again down rue Theodore Dubois to where it intersected rue de Vesles, then east for a hundred yards to the ATM just outside the courtyard’s southern entrance.
He ducked down, crab-walked up the alley gate, and peeked around the corner and into the alley.
He froze.
The third watcher was standing thirty feet away, just inside the archway. Fisher kept still, barely breathing, until his eyes readjusted to the darkness and he could see a silhouette of the figure’s face: thin and wiry with a hawk nose. Another familiar face? Fisher waited until the face rotated left, toward the interior of the courtyard; then he raised the AstroScope and zoomed in. The face turned again, back toward Fisher and into three-quarter profile. Fisher took a quick burst, then lowered the camera and froze. The man’s eyes seemed to fix on Fisher’s position. Five seconds passed. Ten. Thirty seconds. The face rotated again. Fisher ducked back and let out his
