HE HURDLED THE LAST barrier and sprinted across the half-lit esplanade to the northwest pillar and scrambled up it.
I was fifty yards behind closing in fast as he reached the lower horizontal steel brace a hundred feet up.
I climbed fast, my shoulder dislocating. The pain was bad. Each new wrenching of the arm from the socket made it worse; I couldn’t pull up on it, had to hang swinging wildly over the abyss till the other hand found a grip. The slippery cold steel stank of rain, mildew and rust, numbed my fingers and stung my jaw when it pressed against it.
Thierry and the police and soldiers down below looked tiny as they yelled and gestured up. Above me the Tower gleamed balefully in the dark shadows cast by the city lights, Mustafa’s dark form escalading up it.
As I climbed looking for handholds, almost biting the steel to hang on, gritting my teeth against awful pain in my shoulder, I realized he would have to put the transponder beneath the first floor because the cops were already up there and he wouldn’t get past them. Already I could see the flashing black of uniforms scaling down to meet us.
A searchlight caught him, white on black; he gleamed, almost incandescent. “Mustafa al-Boudienne,” a megaphone intoned from below. “Descend at once. Or you will be shot.”
He swung inside the near-vertical steel and kept scrambling upward. Despite the shoulder pain I’d gained on him, or was he slowing to turn on the transponder? Might the GIGN snipers below mistake me for him? I had no radio contact; did they think I was a second terrorist?
He stopped. I was ten feet below him. We were nearly vertical now, the steel like ice, slippery as wet glass. The ground so far below swum dizzily when I looked down, the people tiny. “You, the second climber!” a megaphone intoned. “Descend at once!”
“Mustafa!” I called. “Mack is safe. His wife too.”
“No matter,” he yelled. “We have poisoned their hearts.” He tugged a pistol from his shirt. “They will die of it.”
“You thought you’d kill Mack and me, but you won’t.”
“The plane is coming. You will die. All of you.”
I ducked inside the girder as the bullet smashed off it; he swung inside to get another shot and I ducked outside, lost footing and fell, dangling on the dislocated shoulder and swinging my feet crazily back and forth for a hold as his bullets wailed past me.
My toe caught a grip, then my other foot and I swung toward the girder intending to jump and hoping to catch it. Each time the gun roared I flinched expecting to be hit, and flinching made me almost fall; one bullet seared my cheek and another knocked a piece off the girder by my foot.
“The second climber!” the megaphone snapped again. “Descendez!”
Mustafa slid outside to angle down a shot at me; I was already moving and couldn’t stop and there was no way he’d miss. He took another shot and hugged the Tower to reload his gun. As I climbed toward him I could hear his harsh breathing and the clink of metal on steel.
With a huge whack a bullet caromed off the steel by my hand; another sparked above Mustafa’s head. I swung out over the abyss to yell down, “Don’t shoot, I’m DGSE” – a lie, but understandable in the circumstances.
With one arm gripped around a girder I aimed the Glock at his chest and fired. The bullet knocked him loose but he grabbed hold again and shot back; the bullet sucked past my ear. I fired again, his body jerked and he leaped down the Tower straight at me.
In the millisecond before he hit I considered my alternatives – there wasn’t time to duck inside the girder – so I held on with all the power of numb hands and fingers, my body and face pressed to steel. When he hit me with the backpack first it was like a truck that knocked me off the Tower but for the injured arm dangling again by its ruined shoulder as for the third time the megaphone snarled, “You, the second climber! Descend at once or you will be shot!”
Expecting to die, I swung inward on the damaged arm and found footing, then dove for the pillar below, grabbed it and started down its intricate latticework as best I could, terrified of the height or that they’d shoot me before I got down, or that the backpack would activate before they could stop it.
I’d killed Mustafa and his body and the backpack were down there somewhere. Mack and Gisèle were alive. But all I could feel was sick and relieved and afraid of falling off this slippery cold steel.
—
AT A COUPLE hundred feet above the ground I called down and Thierry yelled, “We have you!” I slowed, watching holds and footholds carefully, for in my sad experience the closer you are to safety the more you’re in danger.
“The plane?” I yelled when I hit the ground.
“Twenty minutes. Descended to eight hundred meters, coming straight for the Tower.”
“The backpack?”
“A transponder ... We’re trying to shut it off.” He pointed and I ran to it.
Two RAID guys had yanked the backpack off Mustafa’s body, had broken off the cover and were trying to follow wires by the light of their headlamps.
“Get back!” I yelled.
“Who the fuck are you?”
They jumped aside as I emptied the rest of my Glock into the transponder, hitting what seemed to be a timer, some connections, two round metal canisters. They knocked the Glock from my hand, making my shoulder scream with pain.
Thierry ran up yelling, “He’s DGSE!” His headphone buzzed and he turned away. I bent over, the hand of my good arm gripping my right knee, the other arm dangling as I tried to breathe fast and survive the pain.
I looked down at Mustafa’s lifeless, battered face and tried not to throw up.
It wasn’t Mustafa.
—
THIERRY TURNED back to me. “That was Tomàs. The plane’s still coming. Fifteen minutes.”
I ran to an elevator and punched the button for the top of the Tower, scanning the girders all the way up, knowing I’d reached the end and failed.
At the top I tried to slow my breathing, forget the agony in my shoulder, remind myself we’d saved Mack and Gisèle and killed their captors.
But was the plane still coming. Or would it pull away, now that I’d destroyed the transponder?
Was there a bomb?
Or had all of this just been a farce? A gambit to distract us while they laid a trap elsewhere?
I was so weary I told myself I didn’t care. Just to lie down. Even for a moment. I scanned the wide top floor, seeing nothing but cops and soldiers. Lots of guns. We humans so in love with guns. Can’t live without them.
I wanted to lie down and sleep forever.
We got Mack and Gisèle back, I told myself. And might have killed the guys who killed Bruno.
But if the plane hit, everyone on the Tower would die.
Anne was down below, would probably die too. The domestic life. Love and children. What more is there?
Finding Mustafa.
It felt, irrationally, that he was already here. That he’d been here, watching us enact that comedy on the ground, the attempt to kill me, my shooting his acolyte with the transponder that I’d then shattered with five rounds from my Glock.
I grabbed the elevator for the trip down. A cop in a black face mask was already there, seemed surprised to see me. A yellow Police armband over his black jacket, Sig at the waist, the usual accoutrement of nightstick, radio, whistle, handcuffs and Mace. A big black plastic case at his feet, the kind for carrying battery-powered lights. The doors hissed shut and we started down.
The drop dizzied me. I felt asleep on my feet.
We lurched to a stop. I looked out expecting to see the second floor. But we were still above it, halfway down in a near-vertical chute.
Like in a dream I tried to wake up. The cop in the black mask had his Sig aimed at me.
He pulled down his mask. Mustafa.
“Even if Mack did get away,” he hissed, “instead I have you.”
All our efforts, I realized, had been in vain. Evil, in the long run, will always win. The plane would hit the Tower and Paris would blow. He’d shoot me before I could stop him. It was like being buried alive, six feet under, breathlessly scrabbling at the concrete wall of your casket.
The car’s speaker crackled. “Pono?” Thierry’s voice. “You there?”
“Unfortunately,” I said, watching Mustafa.
“The plane’s four minutes away. Still on a strike path.”
“I’m in this elevator car with Mustafa. He’s got a gun on me and he’s got a transponder.”
“What? Oh Jesus! How?”
“Doesn’t matter. He’s stopped the car. Bring cars from above and below to assault this one. Guys will have to climb outside, blow the doors off.”
“No time.” Mustafa smiled the way he’d always done in my nightmares, before signing off with “Inshallah.”
“Cars on the way,” Thierry said.
“How long till the plane hits?” I answered.
“Three minutes. No, two minutes forty-seven seconds.”
“No time.” Mustafa patted the black plastic case. “This little box will bring that plane right here. It can go nowhere else. It will smash us to atoms, evaporate this tower. See, it is God’s will.”
“You mean the bomb?”
“You are well informed. It’s in the plane’s baggage. Because the passenger is a diplomat it wasn’t security checked.”
“But he’s traveling as Marcus Sulla. Not a diplomat.”
Mustafa gave me a congratulatory wink. “But, you see, due to his prominence in Iran, Marcus Sulla is treated as a diplomat.”
Every second I could delay him, the better my nonexistent chances. “So why Rachid? Is he running you?”
Mustafa snickered, looked at the speaker in the corner of the ceiling, said nothing.
“Wasn’t it Rachid you called ‘Abu’ the other night in Fontainebleau Forest?” I expected this to shock him – how could he imagine I knew? But he stared at me with immobile black eyes, as if really watching somewhere else.
“What were you guys carrying in those backpacks, that night in the forest?”
He turned back to me. “You truly don’t know? You are that stupid? In a few moments it will blow, and then, for the tiniest second, you will know.”
The north wind came up, squeaking the elevator car on its cable. “You are the stupid one,” I said. “I fooled you, in Les Andelys. I saved Gisèle.”
He did nothing. Just watched me.
“We tracked you down,” I went on. “We have your photos, your cell phone calls, know where you were – that bar near La République – Les Quatre Vents – we were ready to tie you up like the fat little pig you are, the useless, stupid pig ...”
It seemed I couldn’t anger him. “Why are you doing this?” I added, trying to think of anything to divert him. “To the country that fed and educated and raised you ...”
He shook his head. “You have no chance.”
“Yeah.” I took a breath, tried not to look at the black plastic case. “I have no chance.”
“None of you do. Not one of you.” He swung the Sig wide, as if to include us all – me, the soldiers and police down below, the sleeping city, the world. “None at all.”
The wind shook the car again as he swung the pistol to the side and I took my only chance and leaped at him as his bullet ripped pain across my left shoulder, numbing my arm so I couldn’t grab his wrist with my left hand but reached across with my right and broke his wrist knocking the Sig away then drove the side of my right hand deep into his throat, his eyes bulging while his fists clawed at my face, his jaw shut and opened then the light went out of his eyes.
I dropped him and ran to the backpack.
Another elevator car bumped into mine from below.
“Got him,” I told Thierry. “It’s a transponder. Trying to disable it.”
“Leave it alone!” he yelled. “For sure it’s armed. Send you to Hell and lock the plane on the location. We have someone coming up beneath. Bomb engineer.”
“They’re here.” I started to pry open the doors as three people in black with climbing gear clambered like spiders across the side of my car. The first commando waved me away from the door and blew it with an entry charge. “This it?” he said, moving toward the backpack. He slipped off his face mask and kneeled down to it, flipped it on its front and scanned its interior with a headlamp.
“No shit,” he said.
I leaned over him, trying to hear after the blast. “No shit what?”
“Not made in Pakistan. From Iran.”
“I don’t give a fuck where from. Kill it!”
He yanked a phone from his vest, pushed in a few buttons and set it beside the main power line in the transponder. “Leave it there twenty seconds,” he said. “Scramble its brain.”
He glanced round the car, the towering darkness outside, the lights of the city far below, then at me. “This isn’t the easiest job.”
I looked down at dead Mustafa, the scrambled transponder. “I’m tired of it.”
He smiled into my eyes. A knowledge shared that no one else has. Most of the time I don’t even know it’s there. But it links us all in ways I can’t deny.
Sometimes I think it’s worth it just for that.
Dizzy, I took a breath, caught myself. “Never again,” he said.
“Yeah,” I said. “Maybe never again.”