Frustrated, he sat down, sighed, and let his head fall forward into his hands. That was when he heard light steps behind him. Soft, evasive footsteps, and he had not even heard the door open.
“Randi?” As he started to turn, he reached for the Browning Hi-Power 9mm in his belt. That tread was not Randi’shellip;. And he was too late. Before the weapon was in his hand, the cold metal of the intruder’s gun muzzle pressed firmly into the back of his head. He froze. Whoever it was, was skilled. Frighteningly adept, and not alone.
Chapter Twenty-one
Brussels, Belgium
Smith closed the cover of the last file folder, ordered a second Chimay ale, and sat back. He had dropped a note at the Cafeacute; Egmont, telling Randi to meet him at the cafeacute; Le Cerf Agile, where he was seated at a sidewalk table. It was his favorite cafeacute; in the rue St-Catherine area of the lower city, not far from the bourse and what had once been the banks of the river Senne when this part of Brussels was a port to hundreds of fishing vessels. As this was still a fish-market area, seafood remained the order of the day in bistros here, even though the river had long ago been boxed inside a manmade channel and bricked over to become the boulevard Anspach.
But the fish, the hidden river, and the food were far from Smith’s mind as he took a long draft of his dark ale and looked around. No other patrons were sitting outside, since dark clouds still rolled occasionally across the sky. But the rain had stopped an hour ago, and when Smith had asked, the matre d’ had wiped off this table and the two accompanying chairs. The other patrons had decided to take no chances that the heavens would open again in another deluge, which was fine with Jon.
He liked being out here alone, out of range of prying eyes and ears. He had changed out of his uniform after he left SHAPE and now looked like any tourist in his tan cotton slacks, open-necked tartan shirt, dark-blue sports jacket, and athletic shoes. The shoes were important, in case he had to run. The jacket was important, to hide his pistol. And the black trench coat he had slung over the back of his chair was important, because it helped him to blend with the night.
But now, as the sun fought the clouds for dominance of the afternoon sky, Jon was thinking about what he had learned at NATO. The file on Captain Darius Bonnard was revealing. Either La Porte did not know or he was protecting Bonnard by withholding the fact that Bonnard’s current wifethe Frenchwoman that La Porte had so admiredwas not Bonnard’s first: While serving in the legion, he had married an Algerian woman. Whether he had converted to Islam was unknown. However, even after being commissioned, he took all his leave time in Algiers, where the wife and her family lived. There was no information about why Bonnard had divorced her. Since there were no divorce documents in the file either, Jon was suspicious. Like sleeper spies or moles, terrorists often established new identities in target countries while maintaining entirely different lives elsewhere.
So Darius Bonnard, favored aide to NATO’s Deputy Supreme Allied Commander, was a German serving in the French army, once married to an Algerian woman, now away somewhere in the South of Francenot all that far from Toledo.
Still pondering, Jon reached for his ale and gazed up just in time to see Randi paying off a taxi a half block away from the cafeacute;. He sat back, smiling, holding his glass and admiring the view. She was dressed conservatively in dark slacks and a fitted jacket, her hair pulled back casually in a ponytail. With her easy movements and slender figure, for a moment she looked like a teenager. She hurried toward him, vigorous and beautiful, and he realized he no longer thought of Sophia every time he saw her. It gave him an odd feeling.
She reached the table. “You look as if you’ve seen a ghost. Worried about me? Sweet, but completely unnecessary.”
“Where the hell were you?” he managed to growl through his smile.
She sat and peered around for a waiter. “I’ll give you a full report in a minute. I’ve just come from Paris. I thought you’d like to know that I stopped to see Marty”
He sat up straighter. “How is he?”
“He was asleep again and still hadn’t told Peter a thing.” As she filled him in about the relapses, she watched worry pinch his high-planed face and darken his navy-blue eyes. Jon could look like a predatory monster when things were going badly, especially if it was in the middle of action, but right now he was a man whose main concern was his friend. With his tousled dark hair and worry-wrinkled brow and the scratches on his face from when they were chased in Madrid, she found him almost endearing.
“It’s all so much harder now that we can’t use our cell phones,” Jon grumbled. “Otherwise, Peter would’ve called to tell me all this himself.”
“Everything’s a lot harder without our cell phones and modems.” She shot him a look of warning. The waiter was coming to their table. They stopped their conversation as she ordered a Chimay, too, but the Grand Reserve. As soon as the waiter was out of earshot, she asked, “Have you learned anything?”
“A few things.” Jon described the file information about Darius Bonnard and his meeting with General La Porte. “La Porte might not know about the Algerian connection, or he could be covering for Bonnard out of loyalty. What did you get?”
“Maybe what we need.” She was excited as she told him what she had learned from Aaron Isaacs, finishing with Dr. Akbar Suleiman’s illness.
“You’re right. This is promising. Where is the guy?”
“He’s postdoc and lives in Paris. Mossad says he’s still in the city. I have his address.”
“What are we waiting for?”
Randi smiled grimly. “For me to finish my ale.”
Somewhere on the Coast of North Africa
From time to time, a cool breeze blew through the large, whitewashed room of the sprawling Mediterranean villa, making the gauzy curtains billow. The villa had been designed to take advantage of even the lightest wind. Currents of air drifted continuously through the open arches that separated the rooms from the hallway at the isolated coastal estate.
Deep inside an alcove, Dr. Emile Chambord worked over the ultrathin tubing and connections between his keyboard and the conglomeration of gel packs in their tray, feeder machine, flexible metal plate, monitor, and electronic printer that Mauritania and his men had carefully transported all the way here from his lab at the Pasteur. Chambord liked the alcove because it was sheltered from the constant breeze. Both temperature control and a complete lack of vibration were vital to the operation of his delicate prototype DNA computer.
Chambord was concentrating. At his fingertips was his life’s workhis secret molecular computer. While he made adjustments, he thought about the future, both electronic and political. He believed that this rudimentary DNA computer was the beginning of changes most people were not educated enough to imagine, much less appreciate. Controlling molecules with the deftness and precision that physicists used to control electrons would revolutionize the world, ultimately leading to the subatomic realm, where matter behaved very differently from what people saw with their eyes or heard with their ears or touched with their skin.
Electrons and atoms did not act with the straightforwardness of the billiard balls in Newton’s classic physics. Instead, they showed characteristics closer to fuzzy wavelike entities. At the atomic level, waves could behave like particles, while particles had waves associated with them. An electron could travel many different routes simultaneously, as if it were really a spread-out phenomenon like a wave. Similarly, an atomic computer would be able to calculate along many different paths simultaneously, too. Perhaps even among different dimensions. The fundamental assumptions of our world would be forever proved wrong.
At its most basic, today’s computer was simply a set of wires arranged in one direction, a layer of switches, and a second set of wires aligned in the opposite direction. The wires and switches were configured to fabricate logic gateshellip;but the kinds of wires and switches made all the difference. Chambord had succeeded in using DNA molecules to function as AND and OR logic gates, the basic computational language of electronic computers. In earlier experimental DNA machines created by other scientists, one of the insurmountable problems had been that the rotaxane molecules, which was what they used for gates, could be set only once, making them suitable for read-only memory, not random-access memory, which required constant switching.
That had been the so-called impossible niche that Chambord had filled: He had created a different molecule with the properties that would make a DNA computer work. The molecule was synthetic, and he called it Francane, in honor of France.