alley led to a parking garage behind it. I parked the Porsche on the second deck, rescued my junk from the trunk, locked up the car and went inside to see if the computer recognized my credit card.
It did. After I had dumped my stuff in my room, I went to find some dinner. Back in my room I had a nice hot shower and scrubbed my teeth. I was exhausted. In less time than it takes to tell, I was in bed with the light off Then my cell phone rang.
“Yeah.”
“Hey, Tommy.” It was Jake Grafton.
“Yes, sir.”
“The police found Henri Stehle this evening. He was floating facedown in the Seine about ten miles downriver from the center of town.”
“So he’s not the guy we talked about.” That would be Abu Qasim, of course, but I wasn’t going to say it over the air.
“Our luck doesn’t run that way. Or mine doesn’t, anyway.”
“Oh, man! She was looking right at him, I thought. You should have seen the look on her face — recognition, horror, loathing, it was all there.”
“She might have been looking at Stehle, who might have reminded her of someone. Or she might have been looking at someone else, one of the waiters, perhaps, or one of the guests.”
“Or the real Henri Stehle wasn’t there.”
“They’re checking on that. In the meantime, Wolfgang Zetsche’s hovel by the river — you know where it is?”
“Drove by a little while ago.”
“Better get over there and spend the night. I want him to be alive in the morning.”
I must have been tired, because the only thing I could think of to say was, “You want me inside or out?”
“Inside, of course. As close to Zetsche as you can get.”
“Of course.”
“Try to keep Marisa alive, too.”
“Maybe you’d better send the Marines.”
“You’re it, Tommy.”
Oh, man! The news just kept getting worser and worser.
” ‘Bye,” he said and hung up.
I turned the light on and rolled out. Back when I was a callow youth, if I had known how miserable the hours would be while working for the CIA, I would have just told that recruiter to send me to prison instead. How does that old song go? “If I’d shot him when I met him, I’d be out of prison now.”
CHAPTER NINE
I left my car in the garage and walked to the castle. I was dressed in black trousers, a black pullover shirt, dark sneakers and a black sweater, and carried my gear in a navy blue knapsack slung over one shoulder. My hand- cannon was tucked in the small of my back and my cell phone was in my pocket, set to vibrate if anyone called. That “anyone” would, of course, only be Jake Grafton or a duty officer in London or Paris. Swine that I am, I hadn’t even given my mother this number.
As I saw it, my job was relatively straightforward. The admiral said he wanted Wolfgang Zetsche and Marisa Petrou alive in the morning. I had to get into the house and find those two people, then ensure no one with mayhem on his mind got to them during the hours of the night. On the other hand, if they had already ingested poison, there wasn’t much I could do about it except get them to a hospital quickly after they got sick but before they died. I decided I would worry about poison if and when. It wasn’t dark and stormy, but it was dark and gloomy and dripping that winter’s night. I was the only person on the street, which was probably a good thing — people have a nasty habit of calling the police when they see a man dressed all in black sneaking around outside in the middle of the night. Presumably Johnny Cash didn’t sneak.
My entrance to the castle had to be over the wall that separated the grounds from the road. The river was on the other three sides, and I wasn’t about to swim it.
At fifteen feet tall, it was a heck of a wall, constructed of fieldstone and, fortunately, not smooth. I scanned the trees and top of the wall as I walked along on the other side of the road. I didn’t see any security cameras. Which didn’t mean there weren’t any — only that I didn’t see them. Anyone with a lick of sense who planned to burgle the place would case the joint during the daytime; working for Jake Grafton, I didn’t have that luxury.
Two cars went by. I ducked out of view behind a tree one time, and into the entrance to a stairs that led to a house on a hill the other time. I walked the entire length of the wall, looking it over as carefully as I could.
I stood across the road in the entrance to another set of stairs that led up behind me and listened for traffic and voices. Nothing.
With the knapsack firmly in place on my shoulders, I took a deep breath, trotted across the pavement and free-climbed the wall. I learned this skill in high school when two friends and I took up rock climbing, kept it up through college and still liked to take climbing vacations whenever life allowed.
I crouched on top near a large tree limb that barely cleared the wall. Opened my backpack, got the infrared goggles on and scanned the grounds. Nothing in infrared, so I switched to ambient light. There were two cars parked in front of the place and another in front of a garage beside the house. Lots of large trees, a few shrubs and two flower beds. The windows of the building — from this angle it didn’t look as formidable as I first thought — were blank, with only one light showing in one window on the third floor. There were dormers on what appeared to be the fourth floor. Each corner of the building had a round, silo-like structure festooned with windows; presumably these round rooms were bedrooms. No crenelles or merlons. After I had examined the ground and house as well as I could from this angle, I switched to the trees. Security cameras and motion detectors would probably be mounted high. I didn’t see any.
I slithered down the limb until it reached the trunk of the tree, then dropped about two feet to the ground.
Knelt and looked some more. Listened. I could smell smoke. Someone had a fire going.
A vehicle — it sounded like a car — stopped on the other side of the wall and sat there with its engine running for about a minute, then drove on.
A sprint took me to a bush under one of those round turrets that decorated the corner of the building. I got busy with the goggles on the infrared setting, scanning the grounds, then the house. The nifty thing about the goggles was that they could detect heat sources through windows or normally insulated wooden walls. Unfortunately Herr Zetsche’s country home was constructed of stone, and a lot of it. The heat sources were too well masked for the goggles to find. Couldn’t even find the hot water tank or the fire in the fireplace. I did see a plume of heat emanating from one chimney.
I went around behind the building, trying to stay in the deep shadows under and behind the shrubbery. As I made this trip, rain began to fall. Not a night mist, but rain. The walls above me were wet and getting wetter. I had made it up the rough boundary wall, but free-climbing this cut limestone in the rain was a bit more than I thought I could handle. No sense in finding out how deep a crater I would make in Germany if I fell two or three stories.
The servant’s entrance was down five stairs and had a small projecting roof over it. I went to work with the picks I kept in a small folding wallet on my left hip. The door had two locks. After checking the door for alarms and not finding any, I opened the top lock first, then went to work on the bottom one.
The continuous gentle patter of raindrops on the little roof above my head was broken only by the faint, distant moan of a train whistle. Once, twice, three times it called, then fell silent. I fervently wished I were on it.
The telephone rang in Jake Grafton’s Paris apartment. Not the encrypted portable satellite telephone he carried with him everywhere, but the regular unsecure landline.
“Hello.”
“Admiral Grafton? How are you this evening?”
“I don’t know who you are. In five seconds I’m hanging up.” Grafton began counting silently.
