Dressed in civilian clothes, including mock turtleneck shirts to conceal their SVTs, Hansen and the others left the hotel, bound for Boutin’s apartment. Moreau remained at the hotel to monitor the open channel and the satellite feeds. It was 10:46 P.M. on Hansen’s OPSAT as they left the hotel’s parking garage.
They drove both rental cars to rue de Thillois, a street a few hundred yards southeast of Boutin’s apartment. A slight chill hung in the air as they parked, waited a few moments, then exited the vehicles, moving swiftly onto the empty street.
While Noboru and Gillespie approached from the north, gaining access past the fences to take up positions in the trees, Hansen, Valentina, and Ames would enter from the south, through the passage Saint-Jacques.
They reached the gate, and Valentina got to work on the lock while Ames patched into the security network and turned off the motion sensors.
Keeping to the long shadows near the wall, they slipped into the passage, and Ames did a wholly impressive job of silently climbing his way into the old tree just to its north so he could cover the north side of the courtyard and the gate entrance.
Hansen motioned for Valentina to halt. He took several long breaths to calm his nerves, then whispered in his SVT, “Nathan? Kim?”
Noboru was covering the north-south entrance to the courtyard directly opposite Boutin’s apartment. He had already found a particularly large branch on which to set up and was scanning the area with his NV binoculars when Hansen called. He checked in and listened to Kim do likewise. She was in much closer, having glided up like a wraith to the left side of the apartment building’s main entrance and found good purchase in a tree right there. In Noboru’s humble opinion, no one could approach the operational area without being detected.
And while they didn’t have the luxury of thermal scans, Moreau’s satellite feeds could detect anyone approaching from outside their bubble.
Noboru glanced over at the old church, just visible through all the leaf cover, and for a moment, he thought he saw a shadow creeping across the ancient stone wall. In fact, he had. Hansen and Valentina were approaching Boutin’s place and had donned their balaclavas.
Hansen checked his OPSAT once more: 11:14. He put Valentina to work on the main door, and then, on the periphery, he spotted something — a perfectly straight silhouette, unnatural against nature’s curves. He shifted over, leaned down, and there it was: a cell phone, the prepaid type, leaning against the wall, its antenna sprouting up between some weeds. He glanced back at Valentina as she finished with the lock. He motioned for her to step back; then he lifted the doormat and found a tremble sensor, the kind from a vehicle’s antitheft GPS tracker. A tiny, almost invisible wire snaked from the sensor back to the cell phone.
Hansen cursed and stage-whispered, “Let’s move. He already knows we’re out here!”
The old forger was a clever bastard, having jury-rigged his own personal alarm system to back up the building’s standard security. He must’ve assumed someone would be coming to visit, someone who knew how to bypass the gate and door, and that deeply troubled Hansen. He withdrew his SC pistol loaded with anesthetic darts, and Valentina did likewise as he announced to the others that they were moving in.
The sensor at the door had tripped a mental alarm, and Hansen immediately decided to abandon stealth in favor of shock and awe. He gave Valentina the high sign, and they stormed through a short hall illuminated by a lone bulb, hit a stairwell, and thundered down it to reach Boutin’s door.
Hansen’s single kick sent the door smashing inward, and he dropped to his haunches as Valentina came in over him.
Moreau sat at the desk in his hotel room and faced his computer while wearing the Trinity System’s virtual- reality headset and gloves. The gloves were fixed with dozens of wireless sensors, and the headset resembled a narrow pair of sunglasses with attached microphone that could be mistaken for an integrated Bluetooth device. The headset was both comfortable and discreet, so wearing it in public was not entirely out of the question. The gloves were another story. Images were produced by a low-intensity laser projecting them through Moreau’s pupil and onto his retina. The laser scanned vertically and horizontally at high speed using a coherent beam of light, and all data was refreshed every second to continually update him.
The system was the result of a joint venture between the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, DARPA, the army’s Natick Soldier Center, and Third Echelon (whose involvement was kept classified from Kovac and the rest of the NSA through Grim’s careful maneuvering). Trinity allowed Moreau and Grim not only to meet in a virtual environment, but to interact directly with that environment in order to more expeditiously and visually share data with each other. Trinity was protected by a hybrid version of QKD, or quantum key distribution, that enabled participants to produce a shared random-bit string known only to their computers. That string became a key to encrypt and decrypt messages. Should anyone attempt to hack their link, they would be notified immediately while the system attempted to trace the hack to its source.
At the moment they stood improbably in midair, about five hundred feet above Boutin’s apartment and its environs, the backdrop shimmering with a phosphorescent glow. Gravity meant nothing in this place. Moreover, these weren’t wire-frame images but a near-real-time streaming satellite feed enhanced by night vision, so that even the light from traffic well in the distance, gliding down the boulevards and auto-routes, was represented with only a slight delay.
Moreau could look down past his avatar’s boots to see the apartment entrance, the positions of each member of the team denoted by green triangles, and the team’s cars parked on the street. He glanced over at Grim, her avatar remarkably lifelike, right down to the hair color and brand of glasses. Some of the best producers, programmers, and artists from the video game industry had obviously been tapped for this project, and the results were no less than stunning.
Ahead of them, superimposed against a backdrop of stars and narrow rafts of clouds, were stacks of slightly translucent data boards similar to the home pages of websites. The boards floated like tabbed windows and were organized into groups created by Grim. She reached out with her finger, lifted one board from the stack, and drew a small circle with her finger that caused the board to hover before her. This one contained classified information regarding an NSA employee code-named Stingray. She widened the board by extending her thumb and index finger, then lifted her hand to a navigation bar and began to tap deeper into the information, flicking documents aside with her finger, the illuminated pages arcing high and away from the board and vanishing into the night. She wasn’t just surfing information; she was bulleting through it with a vengeance.
“I think our subroutine on Kovac’s network finally picked up something,” said Grim. “This code name was attached to an agent who died three years ago. Why is it that agents who die always come back to life?”
“That’s the zombie factor,” quipped Moreau.
Grim stood back from the data board to reveal the face of an old man, probably in his sixties, with closely cropped white hair and beard. He had penetrating blue eyes and an earring in his left ear.
“So that’s our tail,” Moreau sang darkly. “I know him. William Harvey Deacon. Special Forces. Black ops. Deacon the Beacon. I’ll kill his ass and be done with it.”
“No, let’s see if we can put him on a diet of junk food.”
“I like your style, Grim.”
“The feeling’s mutual — except for the part about, ahem, killing his ass. We’ll just keep him misinformed.”
“All right. But big and noisy is more fun.”
“One other thing troubles me. I told Kovac you went home sick. No one ever followed up on that. I had someone take your car home. No tails, nothing.”
“Maybe he bought it.”
“Or maybe he already knows you’re in Reims.”
“How?”
Grim faced him, the avatar’s eyes narrowing. “I don’t know. But I’m going to find out.”
Hansen and Valentina confronted Abelard Boutin in his sitting/TV/work room. The little forger was seated on his couch and just reaching over to his metal TV stand, where a pistol sat next to a large bag of potato chips. On
