Endgame

he’s not heading to Luxembourg.”

“So has he stopped dropping bread crumbs?” Valentina asked.

Hansen shrugged. “I’m calling Moreau. We need eyes in the sky to find that car.”

Valentina raised her brows. “Why don’t you let me talk to him?”

“You?”

“Yeah, I’ve been dying to give him a piece of my mind.”

He grinned. “Be my guest.”

She activated her OPSAT and called Moreau on one of the secure tactical channels. He answered after a four-second delay. “What is it, Maya?”

“We’re done here.”

“Excuse me?”

“You heard me. We’re done playing. Fisher shows up at our airport. Now you got us running around. You already know where Fisher is. Maybe you want us to eventually bring him in, but maybe you want us to do that at a certain time or at a certain place, so just tell us; otherwise I’m done.”

“Young lady, you’re not anything until I say so.”

“Adios, Moreau. I just can’t do this anymore. I won’t let myself be used by you people. This operation is a joke. I thought I was being hired and trained as a professional operative. I’m not an actor.”

“The hell you’re not.”

“You know what I mean.”

“You walk away, you’ll regret it.”

“No, I won’t.” She smiled at Hansen. “Nice working with you, Ben. Maybe one day you’ll wise up, too. They’ll probably get you all killed — because of their pathetic little games.” She turned, strutted down the sidewalk.

All right, so she was calling Moreau’s bluff and was waiting for him to chime in. But the bastard kept silent.

Thank God for Hansen, who came running after her and said, “Maya, don’t be like this. You know we’re part of something bigger. If they told us everything, they could compromise whatever else they have planned.”

“I guess I’m more of a straight-up fighter. I’m really sick of this.”

Hansen suddenly looked away, and Valentina realized he was being contacted through his own subdermal. He turned back, eyes wide.

“What?” she asked.

“Car accident at a McDonald’s on rue du Luxembourg in Audun-le-Tiche. Yellow Aveo. It’s just a couple of minutes away!” He went storming back toward the SUVs.

Valentina fell in behind him. She really was getting tired of all the lies. If there was a certain artifice to their chase, then Grim and Moreau should come clean about it. But maybe they couldn’t, and maybe whatever Fisher was up to was so important that, as Hansen has implied, they needed to engage valuable human resources like themselves in order to get the job done. That was an eloquent way of kidding herself and continuing to live in denial about what she really was: a Barbie doll on a fake spy mission.

She could only hope that Fisher didn’t see it that way, and if they stayed close to him, she would definitely see some action. The real stuff, no doubt.

He was, after all, a magnet for mayhem.

* * *

The sun was already on the horizon, the sky fading from light blue to deep saffron as they reached the McDonald’s parking lot. There they found several police cars, along with a few gendarmes talking to witnesses in front of the restaurant.

Fisher’s yellow Aveo was smashed into the rear bumper of another subcompact. The Aveo’s door was still hanging open. The vehicles’ positions made it difficult to see who had been at fault. Fisher could have been in some sort of frenzy, perhaps pursued by someone else — and had hit this other car. Or this could be another bread crumb, Valentina thought. He slammed his car into the other to bring the team here.

She spun around, studied the area, saw a train station in the distance and some kind of commotion up there. The side streets were blocked off by a few barricades. Some kind of party?

Hansen approached after having questioned one of the witnesses. “They say a guy in a red shirt. They weren’t sure which way he ran.”

“Nathan and I will go up there, toward the train station,” Valentina said.

“Good. We’ll spread out south toward that greenbelt. Everybody open a channel and put on your SVTs.”

Valentina applied the flesh-colored transmitter to her throat and took off running, with Noboru at her side.

They headed up rue du Luxembourg, then turned northwest toward what her map called the Audun-le-Tiche station, where a train had just come in from its run to Esch-sur-Alzette on the other side of the border in Luxembourg. Valentina did a double take because the train was a nineteenth-century locomotive pulling three carriage cars and seemingly transported right out of Disney’s Magic Kingdom.

If Fisher’s plan was to cross the border, then he had picked an excellent avenue of approach. There was so much traffic moving between France and Luxembourg, so many connections between the inhabitants of each country and the sister cities of Russange and Esch-sur-Alzette, that it was quite routine for a French family to spend as much time in Luxembourg as it did in its own country, crossing the border dozens of times each week. As a result, border standards were loose and fast, and Fisher could very well exploit them.

As they neared the station, Valentina spotted a large billboard that announced the decommissioning celebration and carnival of the Audun-le-Tiche rail line. Ah, there was the explanation for the old train; it was part of the festivities and making hourly runs across the border. She and Noboru were running smack-dab into a crowd of weekend revelers — yet another perfect situation for Fisher to exploit. Hundreds of colorful balloons had been tied to the platform, and rows of equally festive flags billowed above rows of vendors’ portable stalls with awnings striped red, blue, and white. Valentina could smell the coffee and the pastries, and her stomach growled as she ran past the stalls. There were, she estimated, at least five hundred people at the station, perhaps more, and she and Noboru began cutting through them, trying their best not to shove people and draw attention.

A cry of “All aboard!” in French lifted above the din of the crowd, and with a clank, groan, and sudden hiss, the train broke forward, and those still standing on the platform raised their arms and waved to their friends seated in the carriages.

As Valentina neared the station doorway, she and Noboru strained to see past all those arms and spot a man with a red shirt on board the train. By the time they reached the edge of the platform, the train had already pulled away.

“He might be on the train,” said Valentina. “We’re just not sure. Moreau? Do you see it?”

“I’m on it. I’ll let you know if I spot anything.”

* * *

The automatic streetlights were beginning to switch on as Hansen called back Ames and Gillespie from the greenbelt area. They hadn’t spotted anything, and Moreau had done a thorough scan of the area with the help of his satellite feeds. They rallied back at the SUVs, where Valentina and Noboru were already waiting for them.

“We searched the entire station,” said Noboru. “Very crowded. But no red shirt.”

“Did you know that on Star Trek the guys who wear red shirts always die?” asked Ames. “I wonder if Fisher knows that. I wonder if, maybe, he’s suicidal. But subconsciously, you know? That’s why he picked a red shirt.”

Nearly in unison Gillespie and Hansen told Ames to shut up; then Valentina said, “If I were him, I’d be on that train.”

“Then let’s go up there and have a look.”

Hansen cocked his thumb back in the direction of his SUV, and Gillespie and Ames jumped in while Valentina and Noboru rushed back to theirs. They took off, heading up rue Napoleon 1er and veering off along a side street running parallel to a large, triangular-shaped reservoir in the distance.

Suddenly Hansen slowed to stop. Gillespie hopped out the back door.

“What’s going on?” asked Valentina.

“I see something down there. Looks like a bike,” said Hansen. “Moreau, can you get a fix on it for us?”