drug should wear off in about an hour, and with luck she should sleep soundly for the rest of the night. “Au revoir, baby,” I whispered, and gave her a kiss.
I sidled along the dark hallway, pausing at the head of the stairs. No one in sight. Down the stairs I went, trying desperately to be quiet.
The lights in the library were off. Three small night-lights were the only illumination, and they certainly didn’t give enough light for photographs. I looked at the entrance from the hallway. There were two large oak doors, but closing them would probably wake the dead. No curtains on the windows. I looked out. The lawn was there, quite spacious for Washington, with a few trees and shrubs, bounded by a high masonry fence topped with barbed wire. Beyond the fence was another building. I could see windows.
If Lamoureux encoded his messages in here, anyone in the yard could look in the window and watch him do it. If he did it in the chair he was sitting in when Marisa introduced me, anyone in the window of that building across the way could see him with binoculars.
No, he didn’t encrypt messages in here. He did it at the embassy or upstairs in his bedroom or office.
I glanced at my watch. I had been in the building for sixty-seven minutes — far too long — and I was going to have to turn on every light in this library if I were going to photograph all the book spines. I scanned the shelves. A good many American and British authors, even a few German, but the works were in French.
The Sum of All Fears. That might be it.
As I walked out of the library I almost bumped into a guard. My heart nearly leaped from my chest. At least, I assumed he was a guard; he was a fit man wearing a suit and he looked quite capable.
“Ah, I wonder if you could show me the way out,” I said thickly, as if I had had a bit too much to drink. “I seem to be a little lost.”
“Of course, sir,” the guard said in good English. “Right this way.”
Four minutes later I unlocked the Mercedes and climbed in. The sky was getting light to the east.
On Monday at headquarters I gave the digital camera to the wizards and told them about the Clancy paperback. They thanked me and that was that.
The person who said “Silence is golden” must have worked in the intelligence business. If you pull off a difficult assignment you never hear another word about it. I must have done okay on this one because no one ragged me about what I should have done. They wouldn’t even tell me if one of the books I photographed was the key they were searching for to Lamoureux’s codes.
So Marisa Petrou faded into my past. A few weeks later, just as the baseball season got interesting, the trolls in the inner sanctum sent me to Iraq, which is one of the world’s hellholes, let me tell you. It was truly a long hot summer; I couldn’t wait to get back to the land of the beer and home of the hot dogs.
CHAPTER ONE
Maurice Marton died of a heart attack thirty-seven thousand feet above the Mediterranean. He did it quietly, the same way he had lived his life. He felt a sudden, severe chest pain, couldn’t breathe, and reached for the call light above his seat. As he looked up, gasping, groping for the button, his heart quit beating altogether. Maurice Marton slumped in his first-class airline seat. By chance, he was in a window seat and his head sagged toward the window. Also by chance, the aisle seat beside him was empty.
It was several minutes before the flight attendant noticed Marton. The man was slumped down, facing the window, and although his eyes were open, the attendant couldn’t see them and thought he was asleep. As is customary in first class, he let him sleep.
A half hour later as the aircraft began its descent into Amman, the seat-belt light came on. It was then that the flight attendant tried to wake his sleeping passenger. As soon as he saw the open, unfocused, frozen eyes, he knew the man was dead.
An old hand at the business, the attendant felt for Marton’s pulse. Finding none, he covered the man with a blanket and turned his head back toward the window.
The plane made a normal landing in Amman, and after the other passengers were off the plane, a doctor and two policemen came aboard. As the senior cabin attendant watched, they loaded the corpse onto a stretcher and carried it off.
With the airplane empty of people, the senior attendant removed Marton’s attache case from the storage compartment over his head and opened it. The case was crammed full, mostly letters and spreadsheets and a few printed statements. Roughly half were in French and half in Arabic. The attendant sat down and began rapidly scanning the documents.
Three weeks after the death of Maurice Marton, a man from the American embassy entered a nondescript building in Tel Aviv and was ushered to a basement room. The walls, floor and ceiling were poured concrete. A naked bulb on a wire hung from the ceiling over the only desk, a small, scarred steel one that at some time in the historic past had been painted a robin’s egg blue. Behind the desk was a tanned man with close-cropped brown hair wearing a white short-sleeved shirt. He had a comfortable tummy, and a firm grip when he shook hands.
“Good to see you, Harris. How was Washington?”
“A steam bath,” the American said. “With a whole continent to play with, they managed to put the capital in a place that’s cold, damp and miserable in the winter, and hot, humid and miserable in the summer.”
“I’ve never been there. Should I make the trip someday?”
“Only if the airfare is free.”
The men were seated now. The host said, “I have a story that I thought would interest your colleagues.”
“Anything that interests the Mossad will interest my crowd,” Harris replied candidly.
“On the twenty-seventh of last month, a French intelligence agent named Maurice Marton died on an Air France flight between Paris and Amman. Had a heart attack, apparently, and quietly expired. In his attache case were some interesting documents that I would like to share with you.” The host picked up a small stack of paper and handed it to his guest.
The American examined the sheets carefully. They were obviously copies. After a few minutes, he remarked, “I understand most of the French, I think — it’s been a few years since college — but my Arabic is a little rusty. It appears someone named Henri Rodet is buying stock in the Bank of Palestine, two million euros’ worth.”
“I think so, yes,” murmured the Israeli. “Do you recognize the name?”
“No.”
“Henri Rodet is the head of the DGSE.” The Direction Generate de la Securite Exterieure was the French intelligence agency.
Harris lowered the sheets and stared at his host. He blinked several times. “Really!”
“Indeed.”
Harris spent another minute scanning the documents, then raised his head and said, “They’ll want to know how you got these.”
“As I said, Marton, a career clerk in DGSE headquarters, was on his way to Amman, presumably to do this deal for his boss, Rodet. He died en route. One of our men got his hands on Marton’s attache case, saw that these documents were of interest, and managed to run the originals through a copier and return them to the case.”
“Luck,” muttered Harris.
“On rare occasions that sprite does indeed smile,” the Israeli said casually. He said that to be polite; the only kind of luck he believed in was the kind you made for yourself. The men and women of the Mossad used every morsel of wit and guile they could muster, and every penny of their budget, to keep agents in place in key positions in Cairo, Amman, Damascus, Beirut, Riyadh and two dozen other places around the globe. Because agents were there, in place, good things could happen. Good things had to happen for Israel. Without timely, accurate, reliable intelligence for its decision makers, the nation would cease to exist.
The American settled himself to study the documents in detail. When he finished he put the sheets back on the desk.
“You may have those,” the Israeli said.
Harris folded the sheets carefully. “You are convinced these are genuine?”
