computer area by a personnel shortage.
“Look at this,” said Young. “Looky, looky, looky.” He pointed to a solid screen of alpha numerals.
Johnny stared for a few seconds but could not discern a pattern. “Assembler code?” he guessed.
“No, no,” said Tristan. “French and German car registrations. Watch.”
Tristan hit a few keys and the wall of digits transformed itself into a list, punctuated at regular intervals by gibberish.
“Wonderful work,” said Johnny Bib. “And where is the computer?”
“A dentist’s office in a town near Marseilles, France.”
“It accessed the Web site after it was changed?”
“Right before.”
“Before?”
“Then again, like, oops, my clock is a little fast. Heh, heh, heh.”
Johnny Bib straightened and considered this.
“The phone number for that bulletin board that was called from the pay phone in Morocco was in this same town,” added Tristan.
“Very good,” said Johnny Bib. “Very, very good.”
“Looks like the dentist’s computer has been hijacked,” added Tristan. “We think there are other computers, spread out across the country, that are used for various chores. There are several Internet accounts associated with the owner of the phone that was called, which of course turns out to be a name we cannot find in any other record.”
Johnny Bib looked at the registration numbers. Not one on the first page was prime.
Interesting. A coincidence probably, but interesting. A sign, definitely, that they were on the right track.
“We’re checking the registrations and tracing the other computers one by one. The whole nine yards, heh, heh, heh,” added Tristan.
“Why is it nine yards?” asked Johnny.
“Don’t know.”
“A significant mystery,” said Johnny, nodding. “Keep me informed.”
47
They caught the last possible plane to Paris that night, an old Boeing 737 operated by a Spanish airline Dean had not only never heard of but which also apparently operated only one aircraft — this one.
The plane sat at the gate for nearly an hour after they boarded. Dean took out the World War I book he’d “borrowed” from the British and read about a wounded German calling to the Marine for help in the dark. The author wondered whether he should put the German out of his misery or take him prisoner. Doing either involved great risk, since he’d be exposing himself to anyone hiding nearby, as well as to the man himself, who might have a concealed weapon. The writer spoke honestly and simply of his uncertainty.
Something similar had happened to Dean in Vietnam: he’d come across a North Vietnamese soldier lying in the brush, stomach full of blood. The man babbled something in Vietnamese; Dean thought he was begging to be killed.
Dean’s job was to kill the enemy. He wasn’t squeamish about it. He’d taken down a Vietcong officer (or at least someone suspected of being one) just a few hours before. But for some reason he couldn’t bring himself to kill this man.
What had stopped him? To this day he couldn’t say.
Did war stay the same, or did men?
Lia curled her body tight against the comer of the seat, wedging herself next to the window.
All
It didn’t, though. The few hours’ dozing on the plane left her restless and stiff, and every bit as confused and scared and unsure as she’d been before.
Lia had trouble finding the ATM at Charles de Gaulle Airport, even though she’d been at the airport dozens of times just in the past two years. It turned out to be only a few yards from the gate where she exited. Then she couldn’t remember the PIN on the ATM card she was carrying, even though the support team always set the PINs on her cards to the same sequence. It took a monstrous amount of effort not to start kicking the machine, to calm down, to ask the Art Room for help.
She found Dean on the taxi line.
“You look tired,” he told her.
“As if you don’t,” she snapped.
He didn’t say anything else.
“Concorde Lazare,” she told the taxi driver when they got in. The man started telling them in French what a nice place it was.
Dean turned and gave her a dirty look. “Excuse us,” he said in English. “My friend has not had much sleep. I apologize for her.”
Lia thought she, too, should apologize, but it was much easier not to say anything at all.
48
Many people say they would like to die in their sleep, but wasn’t that a bit of unexamined foolishness? To die in one’s sleep meant to have no chance to set one’s affairs straight — to have no chance, really, to rage against the coming of the darkness, to hold out, to gasp a few breaths, to resolve to be brave one final time: to meet the ultimate fate with courage, the only real asset one took into old age.
To die in one’s sleep meant to slip into the next life as a passive victim, and Denis LaFoote had never been in his whole life a passive victim. Something deep inside him rebelled at the whisper of death. He found himself struggling as if under deep water and pushed himself toward the surface. He was dreaming and then he was not dreaming — strong hands pushed against him, weighty arms that belonged to a man of flesh and blood, not some nightmare summoned from the dark places of his past. LaFoote pushed upward, calling on the muscles of his once- athletic shoulders and arms to help. The seventy-one-year-old man pushed and shoved toward the light above. He could feel himself choking, but he did not give in; he wasn’t tempted by the sweet warmth he began to feel around his eyes, the lull of more sleep.
“Non!” he shouted.
He did not give up, to the bitter end.
Patrick Donohue sat at the edge of the bed after it was over. It had been some time since he had chosen to kill a man so personally, and he needed a moment to adjust.
Not to get over it, simply to adjust.
The old man had proven stronger than he would have guessed, but there were many benefits to having killed him with no weapon other than the pillow. For one, it was possible that a country coroner might completely miss the fact that his death was a homicide. The struggle had dimmed that possibility, as he’d had to push down heavily on the man’s arms and chest with his body, which would leave telltale marks. But the chance had been worth taking.
Given that the coroner was likely to see the obvious, Donohue decided to supply a motive. He went to the old man’s dresser, looking for his wallet. There were only thirty euros in the wallet; he took them. Then he rifled through the drawers quickly, finding nothing of any worth. In the living room, there was a strongbox with old franc notes — a considerable sum, well over two hundred thousand, which would translate roughly into forty thousand
