“Maybe he’s out. It could have been someone else, but it looked like Rodet.”
“What’s he doing here?” This rhetorical question went unanswered. “I’ll check with the French.”
Grafton moved left, elbowing his way around the room as the president of France spoke into a microphone. He scanned the crowd. Rodet had disappeared.
“Papin says Rodet came through the gate twenty minutes ago,” Maillard told Jake over the Secret Service net. “He had a pass. No one told the gate people that it was invalid.”
Jake clicked his mike twice and kept moving, trying to find Rodet among the hundreds of onlookers.
The batteries, Rodet thought. They were always the technological weak link. Ten months they had been in place, through the heat of the summer.
At the top of the staircase to the basement he passed two paras, who nodded at him. He went down the stairs as quickly as he could. He was favoring his left side, but with the tight wrapping, it didn’t hurt too badly.
I’ll climb to the bomb. That is the best way.
As he entered the kitchen he glanced around. A slender black man sat at the table. He had been watching the television. He rose.
“What are you doing here?”
Rodet went to the door that would admit him to the stairs to the servants’ hall. He removed a key from his pocket and inserted it in the lock.
“You can’t go up there! Get away from that door!” The black man came at him. He had a knife in his right hand.
Rodet reached into his coat pocket and grabbed the pistol. But it had no silencer. If he fired a shot here, it would bring an army of paramilitary police and security men. He palmed the pistol, and as the black man stabbed with the knife, he hit him in the side of the head. The man went down and stayed down.
Rodet looked at his side. The knife had gone through his coat, ripping it, but it hadn’t penetrated the vest.
He unlocked the door, went through, and pulled it closed behind him.
Stunned, Willie Varner levered himself from the floor and fought to clear his head. He had recognized Henri Rodet, stabbed him — and the knife hit something hard.
He struggled to his feet and grabbed the door handle. Locked. He had the key Grafton had given him. Swaying on his feet, he fished for it.
Should call Grafton, but no time.
He inserted the key in the lock, opened the door, and started up the stairs.
The commotion in the Hall of Mirrors got my attention. I could hear the sonorous French over the PA system, hear every word.
I was standing there in the hallway nursing my headache when I saw the man come up the stairs from the kitchen.
I turned toward him. Holy…! Henri Rodet!
I walked toward him.
He saw me, pointed his pistol at me and kept coming, closing the distance.
“You fucking bastard!” I screamed. I had the ray gun out, so I raised it and aimed. Rodet’s arm came up, the pistol in his hand.
I squeezed the trigger; the laser leaped across the space and hit Rodet in the chest.
He fired the pistol and something whacked me in the left arm. I released the trigger of the ray gun, steadied myself and pulled it again as I launched myself toward him.
I got the laser on his chest just as his pistol cracked a second time and Willie Varner shouted, ‘Wo, Tommy! He’s wearing a bomb!”
We were only twenty feet apart when the finger of God shot from my fist in a brilliant flash, strobed once…
Henri Rodet disappeared in a blinding explosion.
The expanding fireball raced toward me and smacked me like a giant hammer; I flew backward through the air … That was the last thing I remember. Everything went black.
Jake Grafton heard the muffled shots, barely audible over the PA system, then the dull whump of an explosion. Pieces of plaster flew off the wall behind the French president and several mirrors shattered.
The president paused just long enough to shoot a glance at the falling glass, then continued his speech without missing a word.
The crowd shuffled their feet, restless, but nothing else happened, so they settled down almost immediately.
Jake Grafton forced his way through the onlookers behind the cameras and made for the stairs to the kitchen as Pink Maillard’s voice sounded in his ears, giving orders to his men to enter the servants’ hall and report to him.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
When I awoke I was in a hospital bed. I moved my eyes — an IV bottle hung on a hook, sun streamed in a window. I tried to move, but the effort required was too great.
“He’s awake.” The voice was French, in heavily accented English.
Two women’s faces came into view. One I recognized: Sarah Houston.
“Hey, babe.” My voice came out a whisper.
“Hey babe yourself, Tommy Carmellini. Welcome back to the land of the living.”
I swallowed a time or two and worked my eyes around. My head … I couldn’t turn my head. I tried to lift my right hand; the effort required was huge. Then I got it going and lifted it to my head, which was swathed in bandages.
“You have a fractured skull. Bullet hole in your left arm, some burns, a ton of bruises — that’s about it.” Her face was maybe a foot from mine. God, she looked good!
“How long have I been here?”
“Four days.”
I thought awhile, trying to remember. I recalled Willie shouting, and the explosion. “How’s Willie?”
“Oh, he’s okay. Got singed some, but only his head was sticking up above the stairwell. They kept him for a couple of days, then sent him home. He’s back in Washington.”
“Good. Another week in the whorehouses would have finished him off.”
She sat on a chair beside the bed and grasped my right hand. “The summit is over. The French never told the press about the bomb. They explained that there had been a minor accident in the next room, and that was that.”
“Minor accident…”
“I’m supposed to call Grafton when you wake up.”
“Don’t hurry. I want to look at you awhile.”
She had a good smile. In fact, her smile reminded me of my mother’s, back when I was young. And I really liked her eyes, which were big and brown. Say what you will, brown eyes are the best.
“Hey, babe,” I said. “When we get back to the States, what say you and I move in together?”
The smile widened. “Yes,” she said, and kissed me.
Jake Grafton brought his wife, Callie, when he came. After the three of us visited awhile, Callie excused herself and the admiral pulled the chair over to the bed. They had me cranked up and told me I was going to sit up the next day, but I wasn’t there yet.
“Do you know you’re in the same hospital that Henri Rodet checked himself out of?”
That thought hadn’t occurred to me. I told him so.
“He shouldn’t have gotten onto the chateau grounds, and wouldn’t have if the French had told their security folks that he had been fired. But this being France, they were afraid someone would leak it to the press and questions would be asked that would embarrass the government. So they still haven’t told anyone that he was fired.
