memories of a long, close professional relationship, of triumph and mourning, and of sexual tension were suddenly very vivid.
“Can I ask you something?” Ann said.
“Sure.”
Her eyes lowered. So did her voice. “How long will you give it?”
“How long?” Hood said under his breath. He shook his head. “I don’t know, Ann. I really don’t.” He looked at her for a long moment. “Now let me ask you something.”
“Sure,” she said. “Anything.” Her eyes were even softer than before. He didn’t understand why he was doing this to himself.
“Why me?” he asked.
She seemed surprised. “Why do I care about you?”
“Is that what this is? Care?”
“No,” she admitted quietly.
“Then tell me why,” he pressed.
“It isn’t obvious?”
“No,” he said. “Governor Vegas. Senator Kaufmann. The president of the United States. You’ve been close to some of the most dynamic men in the nation. I’m not like them. I
“No. You left it,” she said. “There’s a difference. You left because you were tired of the smears, of the political correctness, of having to watch every word. Honesty is very appealing, Paul. So is intelligence. So is keeping cool when all those charismatic politicians and generals and foreign leaders are running around swinging their sabres.”
“Steady Paul Hood,” he said.
“What’s wrong with that?” Ann asked.
“I don’t know,” Hood said. He stood and picked up the carton. “What I do know is that something’s wrong somewhere in my life, and I need to find out what it is.”
Ann also rose. “Well, if you need any help looking for it, I’m available. If you want to talk, have coffee, dinner — just call.”
“I will,” Hood smiled. “And thanks for stopping by.”>
“Sure,” she said.
He motioned with the carton for Ann to go first. She left the office briskly, without looking back. If there was sadness or temptation in her eyes, Hood was spared both.
He shut the office door behind him. It closed gently but with a solid, final click.
As he walked past the cubicles to the elevator, Hood accepted good wishes from the night team. He rarely saw them, since Bill Abram and Curt Hardaway ran things after seven. There were so many young faces. So many go-getters. Steady Paul Hood was definitely feeling like an antique.
Hopefully, the trip to New York would give him time to think, time to try and fix his relationship with Sharon. He reached the elevator, stepped in, and took a last look at the complex that had taken so much of his time and spirit — but had also given him those adrenaline jolts. There was no point lying to himself: He was going to miss it. All of it.
As the door shut, Hood found himself getting angry again. Whether he was angry at what he was leaving or what he was going to, he just didn’t know. Op-Center psychologist Liz Gordon once told him that confusion was a term we’d invented to describe an order of things that was not yet understood.
He hoped so. He truly did.
THREE
Every section of Paris is rich with something, be it history, hotels, museums, monuments, cafes, shops, markets, or even sunshine. Just northeast of the Seine, beyond the half-kilometer-long Le Port de Plaisance de Paris de l’Arsenal — a canal for recreational boating — is a region rich with something a little different: post offices. There are two of them a few blocks apart on the Boulevard Diderot and a third building between them, just to the north. Other post offices are scattered throughout the district. Most of them derive the bulk of their business from the tourists who come to Paris year round.
Each morning at five-thirty, an armored truck operated by the Banque de Commerce begins its rounds of these post offices. It carries an armed driver and one armed guard up front and another armed guard in back, along with postage stamps, money orders, and postal cards to deliver to the five post offices. When it completes its rounds, the armored truck is carrying canvas sacks loaded with the counted, banded cash collected by each post office the day before. Typically, the cash is international currency equivalent to three-quarters of a million to one million U.S. dollars.
The truck follows the same route every day, making its way northwest and then turning up the heavily traveled Boulevard de la Bastille. Once the armored car is past the Place de la Bastille, it deposits its cargo at a bank building on the Boulevard Richard Lenoir. The policy of the Banque de Commerce, like many armored car companies, is to adhere to the same path every day. That way, the drivers will know the route and its character and recognize any changes. If there’s an electrical team working on a streetlight or a road crew working on a pothole, the driver is informed ahead of time. A two-way radio is always turned on in the cab and is monitored by a dispatcher at the Banque de Commerce office across the river on the Rue Cuvier near the Jardin des Plantes.
The one constant — paradoxically, the one constant that always changes — is traffic. The men watch from behind bulletproof windshields as faster-moving cars and trucks weave around the heavily armored four-ton vehicle. Along Le Port de l’Arsenal, boat traffic is also constant, mostly motorboats from fourteen to forty feet in length. They come here from the river so that crews can dine, rest, take on fuel, or undergo repairs at the docks.
The men in the armored truck did not notice anything unusual on this sunlit morning except for the heat, which was even worse than it had been the day before. And it wasn’t even eight A.M. yet. Though their dark gray caps were hot and snug, the men wore them to keep the sweat from dripping into their eyes. The driver wore an MR F1 revolver; the guard in the passenger’s seat and the man in the back both carried FAMA assault rifles.
Traffic was heavy at this hour, as trucks made deliveries and small cars maneuvered to get around them. None of the men in the armored car thought anything was out of the ordinary when a truck in front of them slowed to let a Citroen pass. The truck was an old rig with battered, dirty-white metal siding and a green canvas curtain in the back.
The driver’s eyes drifted to the left, toward the canal. “I tell you,” he said. “I would like to be out there today on my little Whaler. The sun, the rocking of the waves, the quiet.”
The other man’s eyes snapped over as the masts and trees rushed by. “I’d be bored.”
“That’s because you like to hunt. Me? I’d be content to sit in the breeze with my cassette player and fishing —”
The driver swallowed the rest of the sentence and frowned. Neither the caps nor the weapons nor the open radio nor the familiarity of the route mattered when the old truck in front stopped suddenly, and the curtain in back was pulled aside. A man stood in the back. Another man walked around from the passenger’s side. Both wore camouflage uniforms, bulletproof vests, gas masks, equipment belts, and thick rubber gloves. Each man held a shoulder-mounted rocket-propelled grenade launcher. The man in the truck leaned to the passenger’s side slightly, angling himself so that the back of the RPG was facing away from the cab of their truck. The other man stood on the street, the RPG angled upward slightly.
The guard in the truck reacted immediately. “Emergency!” he said into the open microphone. “Two masked men in truck, license 101763, have stopped in front of us. They are armed with rocket launchers.”
A heartbeat later, the men fired.
There was a faint
