Air France 9039 pulled up to the gate ten minutes early, and Alex was among the first off. She’d been exhausted, and had slept in the wide first-class seat that converted into a flat bed, not staying awake for the afternoon meal or complimentary champagne.
At this point she was awake if not refreshed, and she took care with her tradecraft after she was passed through immigration and had picked up her overnight bag and attaché case. Making her way through the main concourse, which was busy, she kept within groups of passengers so far as it was possible.
Twice she darted into a ladies’ room, the first time lingering in one of the stalls to see if anyone suspicious came in—but no one did. And the second time, walking in, turning around immediately, and heading back to the gate she had landed at.
A number of the passengers seemed somewhat suspicious to her, but then they either passed by or went to the ticket agent at a gate.
Airport cops were everywhere, mostly traveling in pairs, but in this day and age their presence wasn’t unusual, and not one of them paid her the slightest attention.
As she headed down the escalator to the ground transportation exits, she paused for a moment to wonder if no one paying her any attention was in itself significant. She was still an attractive woman, and just about everywhere she went she turned male heads. But then this was Paris—the city of well-put-together women.
The only things she could not gauge were the overhead cameras, but she kept her head lowered as much as possible.
Outside, she got a cab and asked the driver, in French, to take her to the InterContinental. “The one on Avenue Marceau.”
By the time they left the airport and got on the ring road traffic was heavy and until she got to the hotel, it would be impossible for her to make sure she wasn’t being followed. She’d considered taking the cab to the vicinity of a train station, and from there another cab to a metro entrance, and from there eventually back to the hotel. But she had decided against it. It wasn’t likely she had been followed this far this soon.
She had picked the InterContinental as a sort of a message to McGarvey: Here I am. Do you want to talk on neutral ground?
Of course he would not, and in fact, he would probably try to take her into custody. But she had read enough about him in his Agency files that although he was a dangerous man, he was principled. He was a man of high morals for whom collateral damage of any sort was completely out of the question.
If it came to a stand-up fight in the hotel, or on a crowed street—the Champs-Élysées was just around the corner—he would hesitate. It would be enough for her to escape.
The only dark cloud was the poor bastard she’d killed in Georgetown. She had no idea why she had done it, except that it had been a release for all the tension she had been under since Walt and the others had been murdered on campus. She knew George was coming after all of them, her included, to keep them quiet. It had only been their superinflated egos concerning their abilities that had stopped them from coming forward with what they knew. That, and the likelihood that if they were to blow the whistle, they could very well be signing their own death warrants.
Either George was going to kill them, or someone else would—so it was up to them to go deep.
But it had not worked for Walt and the others on campus. Or for Joseph or even Larry in Athens. Nor for her in the DCI’s office.
All that was left was coming face-to-face one last time with George and hopefully leading McGarvey to him. If George told what he knew, she figured she would have a shot at guaranteeing her own life and maybe her freedom.
Except for the guy in Georgetown.
The cabby dropped her off at the hotel, and a liveried doorman in a blue morning coat came out to help her with her bags.
“Bonjour, Madame,” he said, and followed her to the front desk, where the night manager stood.
“Madame Wheeler?”
“Mademoiselle,” Alex said, graciously smiling. She handed over her credit card and passport.
The manager was a younger man with a short haircut. He was impeccably dressed in a tasteful blue blazer and vest, white shirt, correctly knotted tie. The InterContinental under new management had transformed from the iconic former mansion of the Comte de Breteuil, used as a stuffy hotel, into a hip boutique hotel. She had to wonder if McGarvey had been back since the change.
She signed the card. “Have my things brought up, and in two hours have my bed turned down and draw me a very hot bath. First I’m going to take a walk.”
“Of course.”
Alex smiled again. “Thank you.”
“May I suggest that if you walk, stay away from the Jardin. It is sometimes dangerous at this hour of the morning.”
* * *
Alex walked out of the hotel and headed down to the Jardin des Tuileries, the morning pleasantly cool after Washington’s humidity. She didn’t bother with her tradecraft for the moment. If McGarvey had traced her this far already, she wanted to see if he could be induced to approach her. Away from people, away from any danger of collateral damage.
She was betting, however, that if he had followed her to Paris and had not tried to stop her from leaving the campus or getting on the flight, it was because he figured she was on her way to meet George.
Two possibilities, she thought. Either he would try to arrest her, in which case her best immediate defense was to always surround herself with innocent civilians. Or he wanted her to lead him to George, in which case he might show himself but would leave her alone.
Coming here to the deserted park at this hour of the morning would test the second possibility. That, and she was feeling irascible again, and she wanted someone to try something with her.
The Jardin was one of the more highly structured parks in the city, with rows of flowers and trees and a couple of ponds. From just about anywhere inside the park, Paris was highly visible, unlike much of Central Park, which in many places hid from the city. And yet Alex felt a sense of isolation here, as she had even in times past when the place was busy with old couples resting on benches, or young fathers pushing baby carriages, or children running and playing—almost too quiet, as French children often were.
Maybe if her life had been different as a child, if she’d had a normal upbringing, a normal father, she might have turned out differently. Maybe she would have gotten married—a lot of NOCs did. They had their careers and their partners.
A half dozen kids—two of them girls, all of them in their early teens—suddenly appeared on the path to her left. They had wild haircuts, Mohawks and the like, tattoos, piercings in their ears and noses and lips and eyebrows, and they were either drunk or high.
One of the boys pulled out a knife and, holding it low, swooped in toward her, swinging the blade at her midsection.
At the last moment she stepped aside, took his wrist and, using his momentum, yanked his arm up and sharply backward, dislocating his shoulder and tearing his rotator cuff.
He skipped out of the way, howling in pain.
The others, all of them with knives in hand, circled her. No one except the kid with the screwed-up arm said a word, and he only muttered something dark Alex couldn’t quite catch.
Coming to the Jardin against the advice of the night manager and getting into the middle of something like this was exactly what she had wanted in some perverse way. Maybe to prove that after too many years of sitting behind a desk, she still had some moves left.
One of the girls came in from the right, while at the same moment a tall-drink-of-water boy who might have been sixteen or seventeen ran at her from her left.
Alex turned, grabbed the boy’s wrist and elbow, and spun him around so his knife rammed into the shoulder of the girl, directly above her right breast.
The others moved in at the same time.