Theacute;regrave;se Chambord protests vehemently, but they force her aboard. The compact helicopter rises, skirts the disaster site, and heads north toward Europe. Abu Auda orders Jon’s hands bound, and the group moves at a brisk clip to the distant highway, where they are met by two covered pickup trucks. A long, jolting ride through the wind-swept inland desert finally ends at the noisy docks of Tunis. There they board a motorboat like the converted PT boat on which Jon stowed the day before. The ragtag group is exhausted, but their sense of urgency remains clear.
On the boat, they blindfold him. He sees none of the long trip across the Mediterranean. He falls asleep again despite the slamming of the boat against the waves, but as soon as the boat lands, he is instantly awake, craning his head to listen. They hustle him out ondeck, still blindfolded, where he hears many voices speaking Italian and guesses they must be in Italy. They board the Sikorsky helicopter to fly to an unnamed location that could be anywhere from Serbia to Francehellip;
Now as Jon sat blindfolded in the helicopter, waiting for them to either run out of gas or land, he wrestled with his tormenting thoughts: Was Randi alive? Where were Peter and Marty? From what Theacute;regrave;se knew, she and her father had been the only prisoners in the villa until Jon arrived. Jon hoped they had not been captured, that Peter had somehow saved Marty, and that they were safe. His only comfort was that the molecular computer had been pulverized in the missile blast.
Now he must stop Emile Chambord before he built another. It had been a shock to learn Chambord had been working with the terrorists all along, apparently the instigator of an elaborateand very successful charade to fool not just national governments but also his daughter. In a perversion of a great scientific achievement, he was scheming to build another molecular computer so he could use it to destroy Israel. Why? Because his mother had been Algerian? Part of Islam? Jon remembered Fred Klein’s report: His mother raised him as a Muslim, but he showed little interest in religion as an adult. There had seemed no reason to consider that bit of information salient, since Chambord had never shown religious tendencies.
As Jon thought about it all, he remembered Chambord’s stint teaching in Cairo just before he returned to the Pasteur, and that Chambord’s wife had died not long ago. A reacquaintance with Islam, plus the life-changing loss of a beloved spouse. Belief shifts in later years had happened to others, and they would happen again. Forgotten faith could reach out and reclaim, especially as one aged and faced personal tragedy.
Then there was Captain Darius Bonnard, who had a similar background: Married to an Algerian woman when he had been in the Foreign Legion. When commissioned, his leaves spent in Algiers with, maybe, a first wife he had never divorced. A double life? It certainly seemed more than possible now. And, too, there was his jobwithin whispering distance of the top echelons of NATO and the French military. He was one of the invisiblesthe quiet, efficient aide to a general. Although he had far more access than most, he was seldom in the limelight, unlike his general.
Chambord’s and Bonnard’s lives made a new kind of sense when looked at with the hindsight of Chambord’s shattering revelation: “I’m not with themhellip; they’re with me!”
The scientist’s prototype was destroyed, but not his knowledge. Unless someone stopped him, he would build another. But that would take time. Smith held on to that morsel of hope. Time to find Chambord and to stop him. But first he had to escape. Behind him, he resumed trying to loosen the ropes that bound him.
Paris, France
Marty was awake, gratefully out of his hospital gown, and dressed in clothes Peter had brought back after making contact with MI6a pair of shapeless dark brown cord pants, a black cashmere turtleneck despite the warmth of the hospital room, athletic shoes with racing stripes along the sides, and his ubiquitous tan windbreaker. He looked himself up and down and pronounced himself appropriately attired for anything short of a formal dinner with the prime minister.
Randi had returned to the room, too, and the three friends wrestled with the issue foremost in their mindshow to find Jon. Without any formal agreement, they had simply decided that Jon was alive. Eyes sparkling, Marty volunteered to go off his meds and devote himself to solving the problem.
Randi agreed. “Good idea.”
“Sure you’re up for it?” Peter questioned.
“Don’t be a dolt, Peter.” Marty looked offended. “Does a mastodon have tusks? Does an algebraic equation require an equals sign? Gee.”
“Guess so,” Peter decided.
The room phone rang. Randi picked it up. It was her boss at Langley, Doug Kennedy, on the secure scrambled surface phone line. He was not encouraging. She listened, asked some pointed questions, and as soon as she hung up, she reported what he had learned: The ground assets in Algeria said there was little unusual activity of any kind, not even smugglers, except perhaps in Tunis, where a known smuggler’s high-speed boat had left some five hours after the strike for an unspecified destination with a dozen or so men on board. One of the men, however, was reported to be a European or American. There had been no women among them, which pretty much ruled out Emile Chambord, who was certainly traveling with Theacute;regrave;se. He would not have left her, or at least Randi and Marty did not think he would. Peter was not so sure.
Marty made a face. “No one like Emile abandons a child, you ridiculous man.”
“She’s pushing forty,” Peter noted dryly. “She’s no child.”
“To Emile she is,” Marty corrected him.
There had been few U.S. ships or aircraft in the eastern Mediterranean at the time, the Saratoga having left its position the instant it launched its missile. It had turned off all surface-to-air radar so as not to allow back-tracing and had run dark, steaming straight north to put as much deniability as possible between it and the Algerian coast before the certain uproar from the Arab countries began.
“That could have been Jon on the smuggler’s boat,” Randi decided. “It was the kind of craft the Crescent Shield used to cross the Mediterranean to Algeria. On the other hand, the terrorists could have had some Americans among them.”
“Of course it was Jon,” Marty declared. “There can be no doubt.”
Peter said, “We’ll wait for what my people tell me, shall we 7 ”
Marty was standing at the window, watching the Paris street below. His mind was in a race against time, soaring through the stratosphere of his imagination as he sought a solution for how to find Jon. He closed his eyes and sighed happily as lights flashed in a variety of vivid colors, and it seemed to him that he was lighter than air. He saw shapes and heard sounds in a kaleidoscope of excitement. His freed self was soaring toward the magical heights where creativity and intelligence joined, and ideas far beyond the scope of ordinary mortals were waiting to be born like infant stars.
When the phone rang, Marty jumped and frowned.
Peter headed for it. “My turn.”
He was right. The information was delivered in a crisp London accent: A British submarine, running deep, had surfaced less than ten miles from the Algerian villa moments after the blast. In fact, it was the blast’s shock wave, transmitted through the water and picked up by the sub’s sonar, that had prompted its rise. With its radar fixed toward the villa, it had identified a small Hughes scout helicopter leaving the vicinity some fifteen minutes after the strike. Five minutes later, the sub dove again, concerned it might be discovered.
Meanwhile, on land, a passing MI6 informant had spotted two pickup trucks exiting the area, driving west toward Tunis. The informant had reported the news to his contact in hopes of being paid, which he had been, and handsomely. It was not cost-efficient to be niggardly in the spy trade. Finally, the captain of a British Airways jet en route from Gibraltar to Rome had observed a small helicopter of the same model flying from the direction of Oran toward the Spanish coast in an area where the captain had never seen a helicopter. Thus, he had entered it in his log. A quick check by MI6 revealed that no scheduled, or even authorized, helicopter flights had been made from Oran or any place near it that night.
“He’s alive,” Marty boomed. “There’s now no doubt.”
“Let’s assume that’s true,” Peter said. “But we still have the problem of contacting him, and which course do we pursue? The unauthorized helicopter flying to Spain, or the smuggler’s boat out of Tunis that carried a possible American?”
“Both,” Randi decided. “Cover all bases.”