trim, and she spoke French with an American accent. She had two large suitcases.
We ended up climbing the stairs together. I carried the larger suitcase.
“You’re just moving in, apparently.”
“Yes. My name is Elizabeth Conner. I have the fifth-floor apartment.”
“Terry Shannon.” I almost said Tommy Carmellini, but caught myself just in time. “From California.”
“I’m from Boston.”
“I’m your neighbor on the top floor, the one above you.”
“And what do you do?”
“I’m a travel writer. Update guidebooks.”
“Sounds interesting.”
“I eat too much rich food, that’s for sure. And you?”
“Art student.”
“Welcome to Paris.”
“Thank you.”
She stopped in front of her door and used the key. She opened the apartment and I put her suitcase inside the door. “Thanks for your help,” she said, and smiled. She had a nice smile.
I wished her good night and hiked up to my little corner of the world. I took a bath and fell into bed.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Jake and Callie Grafton found a small apartment to rent by the month four Metro stops from the embassy. The other tenants in the building seemed to be middle managers — at least they left for work every morning wearing nice clothes. The neighborhood had its share of children, who gathered every afternoon on a playground that the Graftons could see from their windows.
“So what do you think of Paris this time?” Jake asked his wife as she unpacked the last suitcase. She had been here on two occasions before she finished college and once with their daughter, Amy.
‘The first time I came was with my parents,” she told her husband. “I was still in high school. Dad hated de Gaulle and on that trip denounced him at every opportunity, which created some tense moments. He was so thrilled when the socialists took over.”
Jake merely smiled. His father-in-law had been a political science professor at the University of Chicago; his politics bumped the far left edge of the spectrum. He had been profoundly disappointed when his only daughter married a career naval officer, although he had tried to be civil to Jake — Callie’s mother made sure of that. The professor had been dead for twenty years. Still, when Callie mentioned him, once again Jake heard that sonorous baritone preaching against the evils of capitalism, nationalism, democracy, and all the rest. The professor had been, Jake thought, the most predictable, obstinate, narrow-minded bore he ever had the misfortune to meet, but he had never stated that opinion aloud, nor did he ever intend to.
Callie continued as she folded clothes. “I had read Hemingway and Fitzgerald and loved the Impressionists and the cinema. The summer I was sixteen, walking the streets of Paris, I decided I wanted to learn languages. Paris was so wonderful, exotic and full of life … so marvelous… ” She ran out of words, turned to face her husband, and smiled. “Don’t you think?”
“Oh, absolutely.”
“You’re going to enjoy Paris,” his wife told him definitely. “Isn’t this better than flying around the United States in that little airplane?”
“Well…”
“You were getting bored. I could tell. God knows I was.”
He couldn’t help smiling. “I suppose.”
“Thanks for taking this job.” She turned to the window and opened her arms. “Believe me, we are going to love this city.”
The Secret Service’s man in Paris was Pinckney Maillard. He was tall and willowy with jug ears. He came straight from the airport to the embassy. He hadn’t been in the embassy ten minutes when he huddled with Jake Grafton in the SCIF. He skipped the social pleasantries and got right to it. “Where are you on this Al Qaeda spy?”
“Just getting started.”
“Okay. This Rodet, the DGSE man. Is he going to cooperate?”
“I haven’t talked to him yet. I have no reason to think he’ll tell me anything he hasn’t already told George Goldberg or his minister in the French government. ‘There is no spy.’”
“The Veghel tip—“
Jake held up his hand to stop Maillard. “I know all that. The official French position is that there is no spy. Consequently Rodet has nothing to share.”
Maillard took a deep breath and looked Jake Grafton in the eyes. “Admiral, I know the agency insisted on dragging you out of retirement to take this post. I know you don’t give a rat’s ass if you get promoted or fired or forced to quit. Here’s the deal: In twelve days the president of the United States, the president of France, the prime minister of Great Britain, the prime minister of Japan, the chancellor of Germany — you know the list — are going to be at Versailles with the cameras rolling, talking serious, important political shit, shaking hands, making promises, all of that. You get the picture?”
Grafton nodded.
“They told me in Washington you were the toughest, slickest, meanest, trickiest bastard still wearing shoe leather. They said—“
“They lied,” Jake said flatly.
Maillard lowered his eyes for a moment, then again met Grafton’s gaze. “Democracy won’t work if elected officials can be assassinated by crackpots, half-wits, anarchists, people who want to be famous or suicidal holy warriors on a mission for God. I need all the help you can give me, Admiral.”
“You’ll get it. And call me Jake.”
“I’m Pink.” Maillard held out his hand to shake.
“Has there been a specific threat against the G-8 leaders?” Jake asked.
“There’s all the usual bar talk, cell phone chatter, that kind of stuff. If anyone in Washington heard about a credible threat, they’d tell me. The question is, If Rodet does indeed have a spy in Al Qaeda and he hears about a murder plot, will he pass it on to us?”
“There’s no reason to believe he won’t,” Grafton said. “Except for the fact he says there is no spy.”
Jake met Sarah Houston in a tiny room of the SCIF twenty minutes later. She was reading the special Intelink net. “So how does it look?” he asked.
“They’ve done a nice job,” she admitted.
“Can you sell it?”
“It looks good at first blush. There’s some Al Qaeda intel, some juicy inside stuff on the Saudis, a French op against an American software company, some pretty good Russian intel… Yet if an intelligence specialist studies the information, I am afraid that they will eventually conclude that there is little here of great import. In other words, they’ll smell a rat.”
“That’s the best seed material we could get permission to post,” the admiral explained, and drew up a chair. The first law of disinformation is that most of the stuff must be real and verifiable. The lies must be fashioned so well that they, too, look real, so real that a knowledgeable reader cannot distinguish verifiable truth from fiction.
She scrolled along for a while longer, then logged off.
“Can you sell it?”
“For how long?”
“A couple of days.”
“Before or after you insert your essay?”
“Before.”
