to the floor, lying flat, and he did the same.
And then came a second explosion, and another round punched through the
solid exterior wall and then through the plaster interior wall. Ben saw
a circle of daylight in the brick wall, saw now that the shots had come
from outside!
Whatever their assailant was firing, the rounds had penetrated the brick
wall as if it were a bead curtain. The last round had come dangerously
close to Anna.
Nowhere was safe.
“Oh, my God!” Anna shouted. “We’ve got to get out of here!”
Ben whirled and looked out the window. In a glint of reflected
sunlight, he caught the face of a man in a window directly across the
narrow street.
The smooth, unkned skin, the high cheekbones.
The assassin at Lenz’s villa. The assassin at the auberge in
Switzerland
The assassin who had murdered Peter.
Stoked by a towering rage, Ben let out a loud shout, of warning, of
disbelief, of anger. He and Anna simultaneously raced to the
apartment’s exit. Another hole exploded, deafeningly, in the outside
wall; Ben and Anna made a dash to the staircase. These missiles would
not lodge in the flesh, nor sear skin; they would tear through the human
body like a spear through a spider’s web. Clearly they were designed
for use against armored tanks. The devastation they had done to the old
building was incredible.
Ben ran after Anna, leaping and bounding down the dark stairs, as the
volley of explosions continued, plaster and brick crumbling audibly
behind them. Finally they staggered down to the small lobby. “This
way!” whispered Anna, racing to an exit that would take them not to the
rue des Vignoles but to a side street, making it far more difficult for
the assassin to target them. Emerging from the building, they looked
frantically about them.
Faces all around. At the corner of the rue des Orteaux, a blond woman,
in denim and fake fur. At first glance, she looked like a hooker, or a
junkie, but there was something about her that struck Ben as off. Again,
it was a face he’d seen before. But where?
Suddenly he flashed back to the Bahnhofstrasse. An expensively dressed
blonde, holding shopping bags from an upscale boutique. The flirtatious
exchange of glances.
It was the same woman. A sentry for the Corporation? Across the street
from her, a male adolescent in a ripped T-shirt and jeans: he, too,
looked familiar, although Ben couldn’t place him. My God! Another one?
At the opposite end of the street stood a man with ruddy, weathered
cheeks and wheat-field eyebrows.
Another familiar face.
Three Corporation killers placed strategically around them?
Professionals intent on making sure they’d never escape?
“We’re boxed in,” he said to Anna. “At least one of them’s on either
end of the street.” They froze in place, unsure how or where to move
next.
Anna’s eyes searched the street, then she replied. “Listen, Ben. You
said Chardin had chosen this district, this block, for good reason. We
don’t know what contingency plans he had, what escape routes he’d mapped
out in advance, but we know that he must have had something in mind. He
was too smart not to have arranged for path redundancy.”
“Path redundancy?”
“Follow me.”
She ran straight toward the very apartment building where the assassin
had taken up his seventh-floor perch. Ben saw where she was headed.
“That’s insane!” he protested, but he followed nonetheless.
“No,” Anna replied. “The base of the building is one place he can’t
reach.” The alleyway was dark and fetid, the scampering of rats
evidence of the quantities of refuse that had been allowed to accumulate
there. A locked metal gate blocked off its egress to the rue des
Halles.
“Should we climb?” Ben looked doubtfully at the top of the gate whose
sharp-pointed spear like rods loomed twelve feet above them.
“Ybw can,” Anna said, and unholstered a Clock. Three carefully aimed
blasts, and the chain that locked the gate swung free. “The guy was
using a .50 caliber rifle. There was a flood of them after Desert
Storm. They were a hot commodity, because with the right ammunition
they could put a hole right through an Iraqi tank. If you’ve got one of
those monsters, a city like this might as well be made out of
cardboard.”
“Shit. So what do we do?” Ben asked.
“Don’t get hit,” Anna replied tersely, and she began running, Ben close
behind.
Sixty seconds later they found themselves on the rue de Bagnolet in
front of La Fleche d’Or restaurant. Suddenly Ben darted across the
street. “Stay with me.”
A heavyset man was just getting off a Vespa, one of those small
motorized velocipedes that had achieved nuisance status among French
drivers.
“Monsieur,” Ben said. “J’ai besoin de votre veto. Pardonnez-moi, s’il
vous plait.”
The bear-like man gave him an incredulous look.
Ben pointed his gun at him and grabbed the keys. The owner stepped
backward, cowering, as Ben leaped onto the small vehicle and revved the
motor. “Get on,” Ben called out to Anna.
“You’re crazy,” she protested. “We’d be vulnerable to anyone in an
automobile, once we get on the Peripherique. These things don’t go any
faster than fifty miles an hour. It’s going to be a turkey shoot!”
“We’re not going on the Peripherique,” Ben said. “Or any other road.
Climb on!”
Bewildered, Anna complied, taking the seat behind Ben on the motorbike.
Ben drove the Vespa around the La Fleche d’Or and then, joltingly, down
a concrete embankment that led to old railroad tracks. The restaurant,
Anna could now see, was actually built directly over the tracks.
Now Ben steered onto the rusted tracks. They drove through a tunnel,
then back into an open stretch. The Vespa kicked up dust, but the
passage of time had flattened the tracks here into the earth, and the
ride became smooth and swifter.
“So what happens when we meet a train?” Anna shouted, grasping onto him
tightly as they rolled over the tracks.
“There hasn’t been a train on these tracks for over half a century.”
“Aren’t we full of surprises.”
“The product of a misspent youth,” Ben shouted back. “I once messed
around here as a teenager. We’re on a ghost railroad line known as the
Petite Cemture, the little belt. It runs all the way around the city.
Phantom tracks. La Fleche d’Or is actually an old railroad station,
built in the nineteenth century. Connected twenty stations in a loop
around Paris
Neuilly, Porte Maillot, Clichy, Villette, Charonne, plenty more. The
automobile killed it off, but nobody ever reclaimed the belt. Now it’s
mostly a long stretch of nothing. I was thinking some more about why
Chardin decided on this particular neighborhood, and then I remembered
the phantom line. A useful piece of the past.”
They passed through another spacious tunnel, then back into the open
air.
“Where are we now?” Anna asked.
“Hard to gauge, since you can’t see any of the landmarks from here,” Ben
said. “But probably Ford d’Obervillier. Maybe Simplon. Way the hell
away. Central Paris isn’t very big, of course. The whole thing is
about forty square miles. If we can make our way into the metro and
join a few hundred thousand Parisians there, we can begin to make our
way to our next appointment.”
The Flann O’Brien–the bar’s name was displayed in coiled neon as well
as painted in curlicued script in the window–was in the first
arrondissement, on the rue Bailleul, near the Louvre-Rivoli stop. It
was a dark, beery establishment, with lots of deeply grooved old wood
and a dark wood floor that had soaked up sloshes of Guinness for years.
“We’re meeting him at an Irish bar?” Anna asked. Her head swiveled
around by something like reflex, as she scanned their surroundings,
alert to any sign of threat.
“Oscar has a sense of humor, what can I say?”
“And remind me why you’re so sure he can be trusted?”
Ben turned serious. “We’ve got to deal with probabilities, not
possibilities, we’re agreed on that. And so far he’s been on the level.
What makes Sigma a menace is the fact that it commands the loyalty of
true believers. Oscar’s too damn greedy to be a believer. Our checks
have always cleared. I think that counts with Oscar.”
“The honor of the cynic.”
Ben shrugged. “I’ve got to go with my gut. I like Oscar, always have.
I think he likes me.”
The din in the Flann O’Brien, even at this hour, was overwhelming, and
it took their eyes a while to adjust to the dim lighting.
Oscar was tucked away at a banquette toward the back, a diminutive
gray-haired man behind an enormous tankard of viscous stout. Beside the
tankard was a neatly folded newspaper, with a half-completed crossword
puzzle. He had an amused expression on his face, as if he were about to
wink Anna soon realized that this was simply his habitual expression and