breath.
He brought the Canon up to his face and switched on the LCD screen. He clicked through the last series of pictures. No mistake. He knew this one, too: Allen Ames. As it invariably did, the name caused Fisher’s subconscious to start whispering. Something about Ames didn’t sit right.
Fisher brought his mind back on track. So, three on overwatch, which meant at least one person inside talking to Boutin — no, there’d be two inside with Boutin, so five in all. One team leader and two pairs. A standard field team. There was no doubt about the opposition now.
Next:
Fisher started walking.
It took fifteen minutes. On rue de Thillois, a few hundred yards southeast of Boutin’s apartment, he found a blue Opel and a green Renault parked nose to tail. Both bore Europcar CDG stickers — Paris’s Charles de Gaulle airport. This told him something. Someone had been lazy with tradecraft.
Fisher walked to the park across and down the street and found his spot: a bench sheltered by the low- hanging boughs of a tree with a clear sight line to the cars. He did a quick circuit of the park, checking approaches, exits, and angles; then he returned to the bench, pulled a rolled-up newspaper from his pocket, lay down, and covered himself with a hobo blanket. He completed the disguise with a half-consumed bottle of wine, which he placed on the ground beside the bench’s leg.
Twenty minutes later the Japanese man and Kimberly appeared to the east on rue de Thillois. They were a quarter mile away and heading toward the cars. Fisher looked around.
At the next intersection, Kimberly and Vin split up: Kimberly going straight ahead, Vin crossing over. As she passed the Opel and the Renault, she reached up with her left hand and adjusted her beret: an “all okay” signal to Vin, who replied by taking his right hand out of his pocket. Vin reached Ames’s corner and turned left. Kimberly kept walking, crossed the intersection, then took up position in a sunken doorway before a pharmacy. She muttered something — into her SVT (subvocal transceiver), he assumed — then went still, watching. This, Fisher knew, would be the final check-in with Vin and Ames before everyone rallied back at the cars. A nice bit of discipline. It was all too easy to dismiss such precautions as excessive — which they often are — but overcautiousness was an operator’s best friend, one of those habits that would, if you stayed in the business long enough, save your life one day. Fisher had seen the lack of it kill plenty of otherwise good spooks.
Who would it be? Fisher wondered. So far he recognized two of the three opposing players. Would he recognize the other two? He’d know soon enough. He tried to look ahead, tried to visualize the surrounding streets as a chessboard, placing Kimberly and Ames on their respective squares. Vin was still moving, probably circling the block; they’d want to triangulate on the cars’ position…
As if on cue, two figures turned the corner opposite Vin and started toward the cars. Fisher remained perfectly still. The team would be at its most alert now, as it reunited.
When the new pair was fifty feet from the cars, Vin, Ames, and Kimberly left their posts, collapsing toward the cars. The newest pair, a man and woman Fisher could now see, reached the Opel. The woman, a blonde, peeled off and walked around to the driver’s side. Vin was right behind her, getting into the rear as the woman unlocked the doors. The man walked around the front of the Renault to the driver’s door. Kimberly walked past Fisher’s position, got in the front passenger seat as Ames got in the rear. Fisher lifted the AstroScope, focused on the Renault’s driver, shot a burst, then lowered the camera.
Within seconds, the cars pulled out and drove down the block. At the intersection the Renault headed north, the Opel south. Once the engines faded, Fisher called up the last batch of shots on the Canon’s LCD. In all but two of the pictures the driver’s face was partially obscured by a patch of reflection on the Renault’s windshield. The last two were enough. Fisher smiled.
Hansen would want to talk to the still-recuperating Doucet and company, but it was after midnight, well past visiting hours at the Centre Hospitalier Universitaire, so the visit would have to wait until morning — assuming they’d gotten into Reims late. If so, that left Hansen two options: settle in for the night or visit Doucet’s warehouse and see what they could see. Fisher guessed the latter; Ben Hansen was proactive, to put it mildly. A “bulldog” was perhaps a better term. Though the police wouldn’t have found anything of use at the warehouse, Team Hansen would be looking for altogether different evidence.
Fisher let five minutes pass, then walked back to Boutin’s block. It was time for another field exam. From the trees beside the kebab restaurant, he watched Boutin’s courtyard for fifteen minutes. Nothing moved. He moved in.
In the glow of his red-hooded penlight, he lifted the doormat. The tremble sensor had been moved, ever so slightly. Fisher checked the cell phone. It, too, showed signs of having been touched.
Fisher drove to Doucet’s warehouse and drove around the industrial park until he spotted the team’s cars; this time they’d parked a quarter mile apart. Hansen was learning.
He found a scrap yard, parked beside the hurricane fence enclosing the lot, then shook the fence a few times until certain no guard dogs were present. He then climbed atop the car, scaled the fence, and dropped down to the other side. On the west side of the dirt lot was a car compactor, next to it a crane with a glassed-in control booth. He climbed the ladder and slipped inside. A quarter mile to the north, over the tops of the stacked cars, he could see Doucet’s warehouse. He lifted the Canon to his eye and zoomed in. For five minutes nothing moved, and then, from the skylight hatch on the roof, a darkened figure appeared. Then a second. They padded across the roof and down the same air-conditioning unit he’d used to gain entry two nights earlier.
In the corner of the AstroScope he saw a glimmer of light. He panned that way but saw nothing, so he returned his focus to the warehouse. Another glimmer. He snapped around in time to catch it.
In a parking lot across the street from Doucet’s warehouse, a lone black Range Rover sat under a tree. Fisher zoomed in and adjusted the NV contrast until two man-shaped silhouettes came into view. He couldn’t make out faces, but there was no mistaking the object the passenger was holding: a spotting scope. Aimed at Doucet’s warehouse.
4
Following the extended arm of the lot attendant, Fisher pulled his rental car into the parking space and got out. He handed the rental agreement to the attendant, waited while she checked the car’s mileage and condition, then took the receipt, grabbed his blue duffel bag, and started walking. The bus station was two blocks away; twenty minutes later he was heading west toward Villerupt.
He was exhausted. It was, in fact, hell getting old, Fisher decided. True enough, he was in far better shape than 90 percent of the people half his age, but the little aches and pains that at one time went unnoticed were harder to ignore now. The same went for sleep deprivation, but that wasn’t anything that couldn’t be cured by a tall
