“Charlie, where are you going?” asked Rockman. “Lia will take the train. You stay in the station.”
Dean walked through the door and across to what looked like an escalator down to the train. It turned out to be a moving ramp and it took a moment for him to get his bearings.
“Mr. Dean, where are you going?” said Telach.
“I’m not letting Lia go alone. He’s not here.”
“She’ll be all right.”
Lia sat in car eleven, a first-class car near the middle of the eighteen-coach train. The Eurostar seemed less than half-full, if that. There were only three other passengers in the car — an elderly woman two seats away and a pair of twenty-something lovers who’d been whispering in German when Lia came in.
She hadn’t seen anyone with a gray jacket on the platform, and she’d made sure she was one of the first passengers down and one of the last in. Probably he’d taken off his coat; the Art Room had downloaded a blurry picture of the suspect that she could use to check out the passengers more thoroughly once the train started. She would also put the camera attachment on the satellite phone to beam images back to the Art Room, so the computers could go over the faces as well.
They had two tentative names — Patrick McCormack and Horace Clark. The name was bound to be an alias, assuming the Art Room had matched it to the right passenger. But they were checking the names against various watch lists anyway.
The doors closed; the train began to lurch forward — and Dean appeared around the corner of the car.
“This isn’t your car,” Lia said as he sat down across from her. The first-class seats faced each other across a table, two spots on the right side of the coach and singles on the other.
“Why? Somebody sitting here?” Dean pushed back in the seat, spreading his arms across the back and taking it over. He had that sort of air about him, as if he owned everything he touched.
“Telach wanted you to stay in the station,” Lia told him.
“That would have been dumb. If he got out, they would have seen him. He must have put on a disguise somewhere. Besides, I couldn’t have gotten out of the waiting area without blowing my cover. Which I’m not supposed to do. Right?”
“Maybe there’s an exit from the waiting area the Art Room doesn’t know about,” said Lia. “Rockman thinks every schematic he looks at is accurate just because he got it off a computer. I can’t tell you how many doors I’ve gone through that the Art Room said didn’t exist.”
“If our John Doe got out, then he’s long gone,” said Dean.
A pair of French border policemen walked through the car toward the back.
“Do they always put policemen on the train?” Dean asked.
“Are you talking to me or the Art Room?”
“You. Marie said they’re busy back there.”
“They’re always busy,” Lia said. “Especially when you need them.”
Lia realized how bitter her words sounded — and that the Art Room would inevitably have heard them, since her communications system was on. But the words were out and she couldn’t take them back.
She had every right to be bitter — they’d let her down when she needed them the most.
No, they hadn’t let her down. They hadn’t been able to help, not immediately. They hadn’t abandoned her — they’d sent the Russians, made phone calls, got Fashona in place. Rubens would have sent the Marines if he needed to.
It wasn’t the Art Room’s fault or Rubens’, or hers or anyone’s. It was the nature of the job. All this high-tech garbage didn’t save you from being alone, truly alone, when the volcano erupted.
You were always alone. Always.
Dean reached his hand across the small table toward hers. Lia pulled back.
“You going to be angry for the rest of your life?” asked Dean.
She pulled out the phone and put the camera attachment on it. “I’m going to take a walk. Rockman, stand by to download live video of our companions on the train.”
79
Rubens found it more difficult than normal to wait patiently for Johnny Bib to get to the point. He knew from experience that it would do absolutely no good to tell Johnny Bib to get to the point — if anything, it might make him take twice as long — but Rubens needed to get back to Hadash and the President as soon as possible.
“Six units of thirty-two-point-seventy-three pounds apiece,” Johnny was saying on the phone line. “Of course the original formulas were configured in kilograms and I’ve converted.”
Telach, standing over Rockman at the computer console a few feet away, waved at him.
“Johnny, what exactly are the units?” said Rubens, holding up his finger to tell Telach to wait.
Johnny was several stories above the bunkered Art Room, but Rubens could almost see him standing back from his desk in surprise at the question. He found it baffling that anyone couldn’t follow his convoluted logic through its myriad twists and turns.
“Explosive value similar to the yield of the original equation,” said the team leader. “But in small bits — in the formula they look like variables, but I asked myself, Why would the variables be just of certain sizes? And of course, if they were packages or packets that you had to carry a certain way, say if you sewed up vests full of explosive, OK? Vests a man could wear, then remove and set at the proper position. That’s the way this formula is constructed, to figure out how many packets you need and where to put it. Now, if we substitute—”
“Johnny, tell me clearly: Are you saying that this formula is related to another attack on the Eiffel Tower or not?”
“The formula includes calculations for the tensile value of steel similar to the characteristics of the girder structure between the second and third
“I remember my French, thank you very much,” said Rubens, snapping his underling on hold. He pressed the button on the communications selector on his belt, connecting himself with Hadash in Air Force One. “George, there’s a new development.”
80
The stairwell that extended upward from the second floor of the Eiffel Tower was far more exposed than the ones below, and Karr could feel the wind whipping at him as he trotted up the steps. There were five or six men above him, across the opposite pier. A pair of elevator shafts ran through the center of the structure to the top, but only one was being operated. Its car rose slowly past the cluster of painters.
Or supposed painters. Karr still hadn’t seen any paint cans or brushes or other equipment. Just coveralls that could hide quite a bit.
“Stand by for Mr. Rubens,” said Rockman.
“You sound out of breath,” Karr told him as he climbed. “If I didn’t know any better, I’d think you were the one climbing the stairs.”
“Tommy, I’m on the line with the national security adviser.”
“Hello,” said Karr. He quickened his pace as he turned the corner, trying to keep the painters in sight. There were roughly a thousand steps to the top; Karr had gone up about a third of them. The men were two-thirds of the way to the third
