“Yeah, that’s me,” Karr said. “LaFoote talked to you?”
The priest turned and began walking to the front. Karr got up and followed past the altar, entering the sacristy through a side door. Two altar boys were laughing about something as they came in; the boys immediately stiffened, standing at military attention as the priest cast a stern look in their direction. Karr smiled at them, but the boys remained stone-faced.
The priest continued to a narrow hallway and turned into a small, unlit room. He went to a file cabinet in the otherwise empty room and took out a brown envelope.
“Monsieur LaFoote gave me this a month ago,” said the priest in English. “He left a message the other evening that they were to go to you, not the police. His funeral is tomorrow.”
“He was a good man,” said Karr as the priest handed him an envelope.
“He was a sinner.”
“We all are, right?”
The priest didn’t smile. He walked stiffly back out into the sacristy, no longer paying attention to Karr. He scolded the boys in French, telling them their souls had just gained more black marks for whispering in a holy place.
There were a few people in the church now, a dozen or so, scattered around. Karr took a seat; as the service began, a woman slid in at the far end — he turned and realized it was the baker, who made no sign that she recognized him.
There were three photocopies in the envelope. The top two were bank account statements for Vefoures from, as LaFoote had said, a small Austrian bank. There were regular wire deposits of two thousand euros a week, along with irregular withdrawals. The statements were several months old.
The third sheet was a copy of what looked like a signature card for another account at a different Austrian bank; rather than a full name the signature was a single letter: P. Instead of a name and address as contact information, there was a phone number. The account number matched the account the wired deposits had been made from.
Karr pulled out his PDA. He went online to the World Wide Web and tapped into a commercial Web site that had a reverse address lookup. The number wasn’t listed. He tapped the screen lightly and got into the NSA’s comprehensive address search engine.
It took nearly sixty seconds for the database to come back with an ID on the phone number: Jacques Ponclare.
63
Donohue turned right when he reached the top landing and walked down the hall to the second apartment. He paused, pulling on a set of latex gloves, then slipped the owner’s key out of his pocket and placed it into the lock. The mechanism was old and the key worn; he had to jiggle it and lean forward to get it to work.
The apartment smelled musty, as if its owner had never once opened the windows in the fifty years she had lived there. The smell made Donohue gag slightly as he came in; he associated it with his own childhood in Londonderry, a place where every memory evoked disgust. He was soon over it, moving quickly to the closet where he had placed his weapon the day before.
The
Ponclare had only just arrived at work and typically would not leave his office for at least two hours — perhaps not for three or four — but the assassin had to be ready. His escape had already been complicated by the American President’s plans to visit Paris later that day.
From what Donohue knew of Mussa Duoar, it was likely that the visit had been somehow factored into the assassination of the French official. Donohue believed that Mussa primarily acted as a conduit for orders from an organization outside of France, though he was enough of a snake that one could never be too sure. So long as his fee was paid, Donohue would not bother to inquire too deeply.
He began assembling the Barrett sniper rifle, a fifty-caliber American-made gun that fired a round capable of penetrating an engine block. The weapon was not his favorite, but it was necessary because of the distance and the fact that Ponclare might choose to drive one of the armored Peugeots available to him.
When Donohue finished setting up his rifle, he went to the bathroom. He avoided the shower where he had placed the body of the woman who had lived here after killing her yesterday. Despite the fact that he had wrapped her in plastic bags, there was already a distinct odor of decay; this, too, reminded him of the slums where he had grown up, and he flushed the toilet with disgust.
An hour and a half to go. He would wait.
64
As demanding as they were, his responsibilities as head of Desk Three were only part of William Rubens’ job at the National Security Agency, and there was always a stack of paperwork waiting for him in his office. So when Marie Telach told him she wanted to update him in person on what Tommy Karr had found, he asked her to come up to his office. The few minutes he saved meant he could finish reviewing a half-dozen briefs, and by staying here he could initial a small stack of papers. Telach always looked a bit out of sorts when she came upstairs, blinking her eyes like a gopher pulled from her hole.
“Circumstantially at least, it looks bad for Ponclare,” she told him when she arrived, detailing the money trail they had fleshed out from Karr’s information. The chemist Vefoures had been paid from a bank account in Austria that seemed to belong to the French DST Paris security head, Ponclare. That fit with the story that Karr had been told by Vefoures’ friend LaFoote, that Vefoures had been brought back by the government for a secret project. The source of the money wasn’t clear — it came from an Algerian bank whose owner could not, for the time being at least, be traced.
But was it really Ponclare’s? The account had been set up only a few days before the first payment to Vefoures and had only been used to pay him. A preliminary search of the phone records showed that Ponclare had not called the bank from his office or the home number listed on the account. And there were no large transfers from any of Ponclare’s accounts, nor any sudden transfer in for that matter.
“Perhaps he is extremely prudent,” said Rubens.
“Or maybe it was set up to make it seem like a legitimate project to the chemist, and point suspicion at Ponclare if discovered,” said Telach.
Rubens turned to the computer at the side of his desk and punched the keyboard, bringing Ponclare’s resume up in front of him. The man had worked for the French security service for three decades and had, at least according to his superiors, done a decent job. But he had no flashy results; he was clearly more bureaucrat than artist.
Ponclare had served briefly in Africa, where his service overlapped with LaFoote’s. His job there seemed primarily to facilitate budget cutting; besides LaFoote, several dozen officers and foreign agents were let go during Ponclare’s short tenure and no one replaced.
“Is there any connection with the car thief?” Rubens asked.
“Mussa Duoar? Not that we can see.”
“Do they have accounts at the same banks?”
“No,” replied Telach.
