“A nice view,” the man said.
“It gets no direct light,” Therese contradicted him scoldingly. “For
most of the day, it is dark. You could develop film in here.”
“For some pursuits, that can be an advantage.”
Something was wrong. His accent was slipping, his French losing the
straightened cadences of the social-services bureaucracy, sounding more
casual, somehow less French.
Therese took a few steps away from the man. Her pulse quickened as she
suddenly remembered the reports of a rapist who had been brutalizing
women in the vicinity of the Place de la Reunion. Some of the women had
been older, too. This man was an impostor, she decided. Her instincts
told her so. Something about the way the man moved, with coiled,
reptilian strength, confirmed her growing suspicion that he was, in
fact, the Reunion rapist. Man dieu! He’d gained the trust of his
victims, she had heard victims who had invited the assailant into their
very homes!
All her life, people had told her that she suffered from une mala die
nerve use She knew better: she saw things, felt things, that others did
not. Yet now, crucially, her antennae had failed her. How could she
have been so foolish! Her eyes darted wildly around her apartment,
looking for something she could use to protect herself. She picked up a
heavy clay pot that contained a slightly shriveled rubber plant.
“I demand that you leave at once!” she said in a trembling voice.
“Madame, your demands are meaningless to me,” the smooth-faced man said
quietly. He looked at her with quiet menace, a confident predator who
knew that his prey was hopelessly out matched.
She saw a flash of silver as he unsheathed a long, curved blade, and
then she threw the heavy pot at him with all her might. But its weight
worked against her: it arced quickly downward, striking the man in the
legs, knocking him a few steps back but leaving him unharmed. Jesus
Christ! What else could she use to defend herself? Her little
broken-down TV! She yanked it from the countertop, hoisted it with
great effort above her head, and tossed it at him as if aiming for the
ceiling. The man, smiling, sidestepped the crude projectile. It
thudded against the wall, then dropped to the floor, its plastic casing
shattered along with the picture tube.
Dear God, no! There had to be something else. Yes the iron on the
ironing board! Had she even turned it off? Therese dashed toward the
iron, but as she grabbed it the intruder saw what she was attempting.
“Stop where you are, you revolting old cow,” called the man, a look of
disgust crossing his face. “Putain de merde!” With a lightning-fast
motion, he grabbed another, smaller knife and flung it across the room.
The deeply beveled steel came to a razor-sharp edge along the entire,
arrow-shaped blade; the hollowed tang provided a streamlined
counterweight.
Therese never saw it coming, but she felt its impact as the blade buried
itself deep into her right breast. At first she thought whatever it was
had struck her and bounced off. Then she looked down and saw the steel
handle protruding from her blouse. It was odd, she thought, that she
felt nothing; but then a sensation–cold, like an icicle–began to grow,
and an area of red blossomed around the steel. Fear drained from her,
replaced with sheer rage. This man thought she was just another victim,
but he had misjudged her. She remembered the nighttime visits from her
drunken father, which started when she was fourteen, his breath smelling
like sour milk as he worked his stubby fingers into her, hurting her
with his ragged nails. She remembered Laurent, and his last words to
her. Indignation flooded her like water from an underground cistern,
from every time she’d ever been taunted, cheated, bullied, abused.
Bellowing, she charged the evil intruder, all two hundred and fifty
pounds of her.
And she tackled him, too, slammed him to the ground by sheer momentum.
She would have been proud of what she’d accomplished, trme gras se or
no, if the man hadn’t shot her dead a split-second before her body
crashed into his.
Trevor shuddered with revulsion as he pushed the obese, lifeless body
off him. The woman was only slightly less off-putting in death that
she’d been in life, he reflected as he returned his silenced pistol to
its holster, feeling the cylinder’s heat against his thigh. The twin
bullet holes in her forehead were like a second pair of eyes. He
dragged her away from the window. In retrospect, he should have shot
her immediately upon gaining entry, but who knew she would turn out to
be such a maniac? Anyway, there was always something unexpected. That
was why he liked his vocation. It was never entirely routine; there was
always the possibility of surprise, new challenges. Nothing, of course,
he couldn’t handle. Nothing had ever turned up that the Architect
couldn’t handle.
“Christ,” Anna whispered. She had avoided the shotgun spray by a couple
of feet at most. “Not exactly the welcome wagon.” But where was the
shooter?
A steady succession of blasts was coming from the open apartment door,
from somewhere within its darkened interior. Apparently the gunman was
firing through the gap between the heavy steel door and the doorjamb.
Ben’s heart was thudding. “Georges Chardin,” he called out, “we haven’t
come to harm you. We want to help you and we need your help as well!
Please, listen to us! Hear us out!”
From the dark recesses of the apartment emanated a bizarre rasping, a
shuddering moan of terror, seemingly involuntary, like the night cry of
a wounded animal. Still the man remained invisible, cloaked in
darkness. They heard the click of a cartridge sliding into the chamber
of a shotgun, and each of them raced to opposite ends of the long
hallway.
Another explosion! A fusillade of pellets came through the open door,
splintering the woodwork in the hall, gouging jagged crevices in the
plaster walls. The air was heavy with the pungent odor of cordite. The
entire hall now looked like a war zone.
“Listen!” Ben called out to their unseen adversary. “We’re not firing
back, can’t you see that? We’re not here to harm you in any way!” There
was a pause: was the man hiding inside the apartment actually listening
now? “We’re here to protect you against Sigma!”
Silence.
The man was listening! It was the invocation of the name of Sigma, the
shibboleth of a long-buried conspiracy thundering in its impact.
At that same instant, Ben could see Anna hand-signaling to him. She
wanted him to stay where he was while she made her own way into
Chardin’s apartment. But how? With a glance, he saw the large double
hung window, saw her silently nudging open its heavy sash, felt a gust
of cold air from outside. She was going to climb out the window, he
realized with horror, walk along the narrow exterior ledge until she
came to a window that opened directly into the Frenchman’s apartment. It
was madness\ He was seized with dread. A stray gust of wind, and she
would fall to her death. But it was too late for him to say anything to
her; she already had the window open and had stepped onto the ledge.
Christ Almighty! he wanted to shout. Don’t do it!
Finally a strange, deep baritone voice emerged from the apartment: “So
this time they send an American.”
“There’s no ‘they,” Chardin,” replied Ben. “It’s just us.”
“And who are you?” the voice came back, heavy with skepticism.
“We’re Americans, yes, who have… personal reasons why we need your
help. You see, Sigma killed my brother.”
Another long silence ensued. Then: “I am not an idiot. You wish me to
come out, and then you will trap me, take me alive. Well, you will not
take me alive!”
“There are far easier ways, if that’s what we wanted to do. Please, let
us in let us speak with you, if only for a minute. You can keep your
weapon trained on us.”
“For what purpose do you want to speak with me?”
“We need your help in defeating them.”
A pause. Then a short, sharp bark of derisive laughter. “In defeating
Sigma? You cannot! Until just now I thought one could only hide. How
did you find me?”
“Through some damned clever investigative work. But you have my utmost
admiration: You did a good job covering your tracks, I must say. A
damned good job. It’s hard to relinquish control of family property. I
understand that. So you used a fictio juris. Remote agency. Well
designed. But then you’ve always been a brilliant strategic thinker. It
wasn’t for nothing that you got to be Trianon’s Directeur General du
Departement des Finance.”
Another long silence, followed by the scrape of a chair from inside the
apartment. Was Chardin preparing to show his face after all? Ben