“DOCTOR DEATH is not on the flight from Teheran anymore,” Thierry said.
“He’s changed flights,” Anne said.
“Or he’s under another name? I’m looking at the manifest now. There’s a Marcus Sulla ... Italian businessman. Traveling from Teheran to Paris.”
Sulla I remembered was a powerful and ruthless Roman general and politician. Marcus could be Marcus Aurelius, two centuries later Rome’s greatest emperor. But lots of Italians use those names. “Keep looking.”
—
AT 20:45 I hit Les Andelys. Alone, in the Beast as promised. No wires, no transmitter, just my Glock and Kabar clipped under the Beast’s back fender, my iPhone, mike and earbud in my pocket so I’d be there for their call. Plus my normal smelly self. Sweating because I was so scared.
So many times I’ve risked death. You have to do it with a certain confidence. But now I wasn’t confident. I truly feared I wasn’t going to survive. Or Gisèle either.
Anne and I had exchanged goodbyes in our usual tough way. We’ve had a few nice fucks, I’d said, and now I’m going to die.
I’ll find you in the next life, she’d answered. We’ll live in peace then.
The pain in her eyes was atrocious. I held her face in my hands – how like the human heart our face is – distilling into this last look all my love for her and for all of life, praying for her to be happy, live deeply, the kids too ...
I felt bad for sneaking out on Thierry, Tomàs and Harris. But they would’ve somehow wired me, tagged me, backed me up. And Mustafa’s people would’ve known, particularly since they were tracking us. And everybody would’ve died.
On my left, the Seine was high and silvery under the nascent moon. The ancient stone houses along its banks glistened in the ancient yellow streetlamps. King Richard’s island loomed huge and dark amid the roiling water. I thought of the couple who’d lived there in that beautiful solitude then died at Auschwitz, their paintings stolen by the Germans.
The world seemed a very dangerous, predatory place.
Highway to Hell on my phone. “It’s me,” Gisèle said.
“Holy shit it’s you.” I could barely speak. “Are you okay? Is Mack?”
“Drive on Avenue de Gaulle toward Grand Andely.”
As I did a set of headlights swung in behind me, and then a motorcycle’s single beam.
My heart was thundering, sweat running down my wrists. You have to manage this fear, I told myself. Or it will kill you.
It’s very hard to manage fear. To stop shaking when you’re terrified. The cold fire in your gut that keeps rising up your throat. Your knees so weak it’s hard to push down the accelerator.
“Take the next road to the right.”
This one I knew, it headed past the fountain blessed in 791 by Queen Clotilde, wife of Charlemagne, the grandson of Charles Martel who had defeated the Islamic invasion at Tours. The road turned up the hill east of the town. There were lots of lonely curves with a long drop on one side.
The headlights stayed behind me. I began to hope what would happen next, and yes, at the top of the hill Gisèle said, “Turn right past the soccer field.”
Ahead there was only one place: King Richard’s castle.
Chateau Gaillard.
Gaillard means tough, robust, often used for large, fearless men. It was Richard’s most advanced castle, based on what he’d seen in the Holy Land and like the one where he’d been imprisoned at Dürnstein in Austria.
And now I was driving toward it with my high beams picking out the white blossoms of the cherry trees on both sides of the narrow road.
We entered the forest, dark and high, my headlights tunneled as if undersea. I feared this was a runaround, and now they’d send me somewhere else. The road turned left down a wide, open hill with Chateau Gaillard on the crest beyond it.
“Park in the lot below the castle,” Gisèle said.
“I’m not walking into that. It’s a trap.”
“No one will bother you there. We have their word.”
Instead I pulled the Beast off the road where a skinny path switchbacks up to the castle. “Where are you?”
“Run!” she screamed. A thump on flesh, hiss of a fallen phone.
“Where are you? Say it quick!”
“Stables!”
I leaped out, grabbed the Glock and Kabar from under the back fender and ran up the hill. It was very steep and open and anyone with a night vision scope could have hit me easily.
They didn’t. For an instant I halted, gasping, to check my back trail then dashed left uphill into the trees and sprinted to the ridge. The castle was now in front of and below me, huge and unassailable on its vertical promontory over the Seine. But a string of trees led down to its left side, the tall wall where over 800 years ago the French attackers had climbed to the privy holes at the top and squirmed through them, and so took this impenetrable castle from within.
The privy holes at the top of the wall hadn’t been used in hundreds of years. The stone blocks of the wall varied between one- and four-foot rectangles, and over time had developed nice creases between them where the medieval mortar had eroded away.
After having downclimbed the wall of Anne’s apartment building, chasing the guy who’d come to kill her, I was less uptight about heights. And here I had good finger grips and toeholds and soon climbed the wall’s 150 feet, wormed through a privy hole and hid in a dark corner of a meurtrière – the slot where you fire arrows down on unruly visitors below.
My phone vibrated: Gisèle. “They still want to do this,” she half-sobbed. “Once you show yourself in the courtyard, they let me go. I can run down the hill and disappear into town. Then you will give yourself up to them.”
“Agreed.”
But I was already above them and they didn’t know it. They’d expect me to come from below up the open hill toward the outside walls. But I’d already be in the stables, hunting them.
I crossed forty feet of open stone blocks to a parapet that circled the inner walls, and cautiously scanned the open land below down to the road. I saw no sign of anyone nor any cars in the lot.
The rough stone under my palm was cold and wet with Seine fog. The few yellow lights of the town below blinked in and out of the mist, the ancient stone façades appearing and vanishing as in a dream. Even at this distance you could hear the Seine rushing madly along its banks, making everything else more dangerously silent.
I had to know how many of them there were. And where were the ones whose headlights had followed me?
In the best of all possible worlds you take each one silently so the others aren’t warned. In a shootout usually everybody loses, and Gisèle would be the first.
If there were three of them it might be possible. Five would be too many. Sure death.
From where I stood a stone staircase dropped to the next level, a broad paved inner courtyard. Below that in a narrow stone trench were the stables. Eight hundred years ago they had been chiseled out of the solid rock beneath the courtyard, ten of them.
The trench of the stables had two staircases back up to the courtyard, one at each end. If I came down either I’d risk being seen. It was a twenty-foot drop from the courtyard to the stable floor, enough to risk an ankle that would screw up the whole deal.
It was another climbdown.
A cascade of ivy snaked up the corner of two walls. I didn’t want that to hold on to; it’s too frail and wouldn’t carry a person’s weight. But by descending the wall next to it I’d be more difficult to see.
Staying in the shadows I circled the courtyard to the wall of ivy. Below, at the far end of the stables, a dark form crossed the white limestone of a stable entrance. Wishing I’d brought night goggles, I slid along the wall to the ivy and climbed down beside it to the floor of the stable trench.
There were ten stable openings cut into the stone. I’d have to check each one, hoping to kill whoever was there one by one. In which was Gisèle?
The moon came from behind a cloud, splashing the trench with light. I ducked back against the wall till the clouds returned. With the Glock in my right hand and the Kabar in my left, I cleared the first three stables, nothing inside but rank stone, old straw and bad memories.
Three dark shapes crossed from the far stable to the stairs up to the courtyard, then up another level to the parapet, where they leaned out over the wall scanning the open slope below.
Within a minute they’d realize I wasn’t coming up the hill and my chance of getting Gisèle would be gone. Ducking low I fast-checked the following two stables then heard a voice from the next, in Arabic, “Kill the dirty apostate,” or something like that. “Yes,” she answered in a bruised voice, “you do that.”
“What, slut, you don’t believe me?”
Then two other voices, from the further stable.
Gisèle was alone in this one with a nasty proselytizer. I slid to the door, dropped to the ground and glanced around the corner.
In the penumbra all I could see was a shape standing before another reclining form.
“It is written,” the voice continued. “And still you don’t believe?”
“Tell me.” Her voice changed. “Come closer, teach me to believe.”
I was across the floor in less than a second and drove my knife deep into his throat and pinned him to the floor till he bled out and stopped twitching and choking.
“I saw you, in the corner,” she whispered. “That’s why I said what I did.”
I held her for an instant, gloriously happy. “How many others?”
“Three in the next room. Plus whoever’s looking for you down below.”
She was pinned spread-legged against the wall by barbed wire tying her wrists to two rusty steel rings in the walls. Two more coils of barbed wire from her ankles to steel pins in the stone floor.
I unwrapped her wrists and she pushed down her skirt and bent over to unwind one ankle while I did the other.
“Where’s Mack?” I whispered.
“They had us together, I think Saint-Denis.”
“How could you tell?”
“Cathedral bells. Maybe a mile. North north-east.”
“Where’s Mustafa?”
“Not here.”
I pulled her up. “Wait!” She tore a strip off the dead man’s shirt, grabbed two empty plastic water bottles off the floor.
“What the fuck?” I snapped.
“DNA.”
We eased up the stairs to the courtyard and out a side gate to the exterior moat, where 800 years ago hundreds of people had starved to death in the French siege. On the open slope below four headlamps were dashing back and forth.
They’d be watching the Beast so we couldn’t chance it. Instead we slipped and slid down through the sumacs and young oaks of the near-vertical slopes below the castle, and reached the main road out of town where I got Anne on the phone.
“You’re alive!” she kept saying, “Oh Christ you’re alive. And Gisèle too ... Mon Dieu ... Where’s Mack?”
“Two days ago they had him in what Gisèle thinks is an industrial building maybe in Seine-St. Denis.”
“Parameters?”
“She could hear cathedral bells. Half a mile maybe. North north-east.”
“Lemme talk to her.”
I handed Gisèle the phone. Anne’s excited voice and Gisèle saying, “God bless you, thank you ... Yes, I think it was an industrial building ... No, nothing else I can think of ... Except ...”
I watched her, intense. Knew this was something.
“A bus went by. During the morning every seventeen minutes. I counted the time with my heartbeat. Then in the middle of the day thirty-five minutes. Late afternoon till maybe seven, every nine minutes ... Don’t know if that helps.”
Anne’s voice was ecstatic. “Of course it helps!”
“Other people lived there too,” Gisèle went on, “like it was a squat?”
“Tomàs’ll find it,” Anne said. “Then we move in.”
“Go in fast and quiet,” Gisèle said. “Don’t let him die now.”
“Remember,” Anne asked me when Gisèle handed me back the phone, “when I said Take tomorrow off?”
“Of course.”
“He’s coming for you. A 2004 green Citroën Xsara. We’ll let you know what we learn. If it’s a takedown we’ll do it fast, before they know what we know.”
Seven minutes later Take tomorrow off arrived and we stepped out of the shadows by the municipal swimming pool. A seedy guy about thirty-five wearing the OGC Nice shirt, who didn’t say a word the whole way. In the back I held Gisèle’s hand but didn’t dare say much in case the guy spoke English, she squeezing my fingers in affection and pain, tears trickling down her bruised cheeks.
Now all I could think about was stopping Mustafa before he killed Mack.