When he reached the copper-topped bar, he leaned toward the bartender and spoke in broken French: “I’m supposed to meet a boat captain named Marius.”
The bartender scowled at the bad French. He looked the stranger up and down and finally announced, “Englishman?”
“Oui,
yes.” “Off that container ship come in yesterday from Japan?”
“Yes.”
“You should learn better French, you come in here.”
“I’ll take that under consideration,” the Englishman said, undisturbed. “What about Marius?”
A typical Marseille feisty character, the bartender glared for a moment, then jerked his head toward a beaded curtain that separated the boisterous main room from a backroom. The English “sailor,” whose name was Carsten Le Saux and who actually spoke excellent French and was not a sailor at all, thanked the bartender in even worse French and ambled back through the curtain to sit across a scarred table from the only occupant of the room.
As if by a miracle, Le Saux’s French improved. “Captain Marius?”
The man at the table was whiplike, of medium height, with the usual thick, dark, Gallic hair worn down to his shoulders and hacked off with a knife. His sleeveless shirt revealed a body that seemed to consist of nothing but bone and muscle. He tossed back a marc, a very cheap brandy, pushed the empty glass away, and sat back is if waiting for something momentous to occur.
Le Saux smiled with his mouth, not his eyes, as he waved to a waiter in a white apron, who was swabbing dirt around on an empty table. “Deux marcs, s’il vous plat.”
Captain Marius said, “You’re the one who called?”
“That’s right.”
“You said there were dollars? One hundred of them?”
Carsten Le Saux reached into his trouser pocket and produced a hundred-dollar bill. As he laid it on the table, the captain nodded but did not pick it up. Their marcs arrived. The captain reached for his.
The two men sipped slowly. At last Le Saux said, “I’ve heard you and your boat had a close call at sea a few nights ago.”
“Where did you hear? From who?”
“From a source. He was convincing. He said you were almost run down by some large vessel. A rather unpleasant experience, I expect.”
Captain Marius studied the hundred-dollar bill. He picked it up and folded it into an ancient leather pocket purse he produced from somewhere. “It was two nights ago. Fishing had been bad, so I sailed out to a bank I know and most others don’t. It was where my father would go when there was no catch closer in.” He took a half-crushed packet of cigarettes printed in Arabic from his shirt pocket and extracted a pair of bent, foul-smelling, Algerian cigarettes.
Le Saux took one. Marius lit both, blew a toxic cloud into the air of the curtained room, and leaned closer. His voice was intense, as if he were still shaken by the event. “It came out of nowhere. Like a skyscraper or a mountain. More like a mountain, because it was a behemoth. Only moving. A moving, mountainous behemoth, bearing down on my little boat. No lights inside or outside, so it was darker than the night itself. Later I saw it did have its running lights on, but who could see them so far above, eh?” He sat back and shrugged, as if it no longer mattered. “It missed us to port. We were nearly swamped, but here I am.”
“The Charles de Gaulle?”
“Or the Flying Dutchman, hein?”
Carsten Le Saux also sat back, thoughtful. “Why would she be running dark? Were there destroyers? Other ships?”
“I saw none.”
“What was her course?”
“From her wake, I’d say south-southwest.”
Le Saux nodded. He waved to the waiter again and ordered another pair of marcs. He pushed back his chair, rose, and smiled down at the fishing boat captain. “Merci. Be careful out there.” He paid the waiter as he left.
Twilight had turned into indigo night. On the crowded waterfront, the pungent odors of fish and alcohol filled the air. Le Saux paused to gaze at the rows of masts and listen to the lulling sound of ropes slapping against wood hulls. The ancient harbor had supported one city or another here since the days of the Greeks in the seventh century B.C. He turned and gazed around as if he were a tourist, then he walked quickly along above the quays. To his left, on a hill high above Marseille, stood the ornate basilica of Notre-Dame-de-la-Garde, the modern city’s guardian, aglow with light.
At last, he turned into an old brick building on a narrow side street and climbed the stairs to a two-room apartment on the fourth floor. Once inside, he sat on the bed, picked up the phone, and dialed.
“Howell.”
Le Saux grumbled, “How about a pleasant ‘good evening’? I retract that. Considering your generally surly nature, I would accept a simple ‘hello.'”
A distant snort at the far end of the line. “Where the devil are you, Carsten?”
“Marseille.”
“And?”
“And the De Gaulle was at sea southwest of Marseille a few hours before General Moore reappeared at Gibraltar. I checked before I talked to the captain of the fishing boat and also discovered there were no NATO or French naval exercises scheduled at the time. Actually, none this week at all. The De Gaulle was heading farther south and west toward the Spanish coast. And get this, she was running dark.”
“Dark, was she? Interesting. Good job, Carsten. Thanks.”
“It cost me two hundred American.”
“More likely one hundred, but I’ll send the hundred in pounds.”
“Generosity is its own reward, Peter.”
“Would it were so, would it were so. Keep your ears open, I need to know why the De Gaulle was out there.”
Chapter Twenty-five
The Mediterranean, Near Algeria
For hours, the fast motorboat slammed through the waves. Trapped like an animal in a cage, Jon kept himself sharp by playing games with himself, seeing how perfectly and with how much detail he could reconstruct the pasthellip;. The too-brief time with Sophiahellip;his work as a virus hunter at USAMRIIDhellip;the long-ago stint in East Berlin undercover. And, too, there was the fatal mistake in Somalia, when he had failed to identify the virus that eventually killed Randi’s fianceacute;, a fine army officer. He still felt guilty, even though he knew that it had been a diagnostic error any doctor could have made, and many had.
The years pressed in on Jon, and as time dragged and the boat continued to batter him, he began to wonder whether this journey would ever end. He fell into an uncomfortable sleep. When the door to the storage room opened, he was instantly alert. He released the safety on his Walther. Someone entered, and he could hear what sounded like a search. The minutes passed slowly, and he felt a trickle of sweat run down his side. The frustrated crewman muttered to himself in Arabic. Jon strained to understand, finally realizing the man was looking for a certain wrench.
Fighting a rising tide of claustrophobia, Jon tried to envision the storage room, wondering whether he had inadvertently hidden the damn wrench. Inwardly he swore, and almost simultaneously he heard the crewman curse, too, aloud. But the crewman’s tone was excited, not frustrated, because he had found the tool. Soon his footsteps retreated across the storage room and out the door.
As the door settled back into its frame, Jon let out a long stream of air. He wiped the back of his arm across his forehead, put the safety back on his gun, and slumped against the bulkhead with relief. Almost instantly, the boat slammed into another wave.
He checked his wristwatch again and again. In the sixth hour, the motorboat’s throbbing engines suddenly racheted down, and the boat slowed. Soon it glided to a floating stop, and there was the metallic creak of the anchor being released. Its chain rattled out, and the hook hit the sea bottom quickly. Which meant they were in shallows. The sharp shrieks of seagulls told him they were near land.
There was quiet activity on deck. A brace of soft splashes, followed by a flurry of padded scrambling sounds over the side. There were no shouted orders. The crew was being as quiet as they could. Jon heard the creak of oars and the controlled splash of paddles, and then the noises faded. Had both the dinghy and the rubber raft been launched? He hoped so.
He waited. The boat rose and fell rhythmically, without the teeth-jarring crashes of heavy waves. As the sea washed against the hull, the vessel seemed to sigh, its wood and metal joists and panels settling in to rest. Silence permeated the craft.
He eased the hatch cover open over his head and stood up slowly, waiting for the feeling to return to his limbs. He stretched, his gaze on the line of light under the door. At last he climbed from his hole. As he advanced through the dark room toward the door, his knee struck some kind of machine part, knocking it to the floor with a clang.