Someone was coming. Either they’d heard them or had come to check on the police officer. Not that it mattered.
Jody was about twenty yards off and still moving away. He couldn’t call to her lest he give himself away. There was only one thing to do.
It was charcoal-gray dark beneath the leaves. Slowly, quietly, Herbert rolled behind one of the trees. He listened.
There were two sets of footsteps. They stopped moving just about where the body would be. The question was, would they continue or retreat?
After a moment the footsteps continued in their direction. Herbert slid his stick from beneath the armrest and waited. Jody’s footsteps. retreated to the right. He was frustrated at not being able to call to her and tell her to stop.
He let his breathing fall to his abdomen to relax him.
“Buddah Belly” they had called it when he was in rehabilitation. When he was taught that a man wasn’t measured by whether he could walk but whether he could act.
Two men walked past. He thought he recognized them from the van. Herbert waited until they had walked by. Then he quickly wheeled behind the second man, swung his stick sideways, and clubbed him hard in the thigh. The man doubled over. When his friend turned around, his submachine gun at his side, Herbert brought the stick swinging back into his left kneecap. The man dropped faceforward, toward Herbert. Herbert struck him hard on the head. As the first man groaned and struggled to get back to his feet, Herbert hit him on the back of the neck. He flopped down, unconscious. Herbert sneered as he looked down at the two men.
I ought to kill them, he thought, his hand reaching for the Urban Skinner. But that would make him as vile as they were, and he knew it. Instead, he returned his stick to the armrest. Picking up the compact submachine gun, a Czech Skorpion, he set it in his lap and wheeled after Jody.
Even though he rolled as quickly as possible through the blue-black darkness of the woods, he knew that she had probably gone too far to catch. He thought about calling Hausen for help, but who could Hausen trust? According to Paul, the politician didn’t even know that his own personal assistant was a neo-Nazi. Herbert couldn’t call the police.
He’d killed a man and would probably be hauled off before Jody could be extricated. And even if they were working on the side of the law, what understaffed group of peacekeepers would march into a remote camp of militant radicals at the height of Chaos Days? Especially radicals who had calmly decimated the crew of a movie set.
As he had been trained from his earliest days in intelligence work, Herbert took stock of the things he knew for certain. First, in this situation he could only rely on himself. Second, if Jody reached the camp before him she would be killed. And third, she was probably going to reach the camp before him.
Gritting his teeth against the pain of his bruises, he gripped, his wheels and hurried after her.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR Thursday, 6:53 P.M., Toulouse, France
As Colonel Ballon sat watching the video monitor he thought, like most Frenchmen, how little he cared for Americans. Ballon had two younger sisters who lived in Quebec, both of whom were full of stories about how Americans were imperious and cocky and crude and just too damn near. His own experiences with tourists in Paris, where he was based, indicated to him quite clearly what the problem was. Americans wanted to be French. They drank, they smoked, and they dressed like the French did. They affected artistry and insouciance like the French did. Only they refused to speak like the French did. Even in France, they expected everyone to speak English.
Then there was the military. Because of Napoleon’s disastrous Russian campaign and World War II, they assumed that members of the French armed forces were vastly inferior to American soldiers and deserved only the bones they signed to throw them.
But Bonaparte and the Maginot Line were aberrations in an otherwise proud military history, he told himself. Indeed, without the French military helping George Washington there would not be a United States. Not that the Americans would ever acknowledge that. Any more than they would allow that the Lumiere brothers, not Edison, invented motion pictures. Or that the Montgolfier brothers, not the Wright brothers, were the ones who enabled people to fly. The only good thing about Americans was that they gave him someone other than Germans to hate.
His phone beeped and he regarded it for a moment.
That would be him. Paul Hood. Ballon didn’t really want to talk to this Mr. Hood, but he didn’t want to let Dominique get away even more. Thus resolved— quickly, as with all things— he snatched up the phone.
“Oui?” “Colonel Ballon?” “Oui.” The caller said without missing a beat, “Je suis Paul Hood. Vous avez besoin d’assistance?” Ballon was caught off guard by that. “Oui,” he replied.
“Eh… vous parlez la langue?” he asked.
“Je parle un peu,” Hood said.
He spoke a little French. “Then we’ll speak English,” replied Ballon. “I don’t want to hear you murder my tongue.
I’m particular about that.” “I understand,” said Hood. “Six years of French in high school and college didn’t exactly make me a linguist.” “School does not make us anything,” Ballon said. “Life makes us what we are. But talk is not life, and sitting in this room is not life. Mr. Hood, I want Dominique. I’ve been told you have equipment which will help me get him.” “I do,” Hood said.
“Where are you?” “Hamburg,” said Hood.
“Very good You can fly here on one of the airbuses which made Dominique’s father a fortune. If you hurry, you can be here in about two hours.” “We’ll be there,” said Hood.
“We?” Ballon felt his passion leak away. “Who else is there?” Hood said, “Deputy Foreign Minister Richard Hausen and the two other persons in my party.” Ballon had been glowering. Now he was sulking. It had to be a German, he thought. And that German in particular.
God does not love me as He promised He would.
“Colonel Ballon,” Hood said, “are you there?” “Yes,” he said glumly. “So now I don’t have to just sit here for two hours. I can fight with my government to get an attention-hungry German government official into France on an unofficial visit.” I take a different view of him,” Hood said. “Attention can be selfless if it’s for a worthy cause.” “Don’t lecture me about selflessness. He’s a general. I fight in the trenches. But,” Ballon added quickly, “this is pointless. I need you, you want him, so that is that. I’ll make a few calls and I will meet you at the Aerodrome de Lasbordes at eight o’clock.” “Hold on,” Hood said. “You’ve asked your questions now I want to ask mine.” “Go ahead.” “We think Dominique’s preparing to launch an online campaign designed to spread hate, inspire riots, and destabilize governments.” “Your associate General Rodgers told me all about this chaos project.” “Good,” said Hood. “Did he also tell you we want him stopped, not threatened.” “Not in so many words,” Ballon said. “But I believe that Dominique is a terrorist. If you can help me prove that, I will go into his factory and stop him.” “I’m told he’s avoided arrest in the past.” “He has,” Ballon said. “But I intend to do more than arrest him. Let me give you an overview which I hope will answer all of your questions. We French are very solidly behind our entrepreneurs. They’ve prospered in the winter of our economy. They’ve thrived despite government manacles. And I admit, with some shame, that a great many Frenchmen approve of the work of the New Jacobins. No one likes immigrants here, and the New Jacobins attack them like pack dogs. If people knew that Dominique was behind those attacks, he would be an even greater hero.” Ballon’s eyes burned through the image on the TV. He saw, in his mind, Dominique sitting smug and comfortable in his office.
“But while we French are an emotional people, most of us also believe in concord. In healing wounds. In harmony.
You Americans see that as waving a white flag, but I see it as civilized. Dominique is not civilized. He violates the laws of France and God. Like his father, he has a conscience made of diamond. Nothing scratches it. It is my intention to make him answer for his crimes.” Hood said, “I believe in moral crusades and I’ll back yours with the full resources of my organization. But you still haven’t told me where this crusade is headed.” Ballon replied, “To Paris.” “I’m listening,” said Hood.
“I intend to arrest Dominique, confiscate his papers and software, and then resign from the Gendarmarie.