Vandal walked to the end of Rue des Deux Ponts in the darkness. She crossed the quai to the river and leaned against the stone wall over the Seine. With a vape pen, she inhaled and blew steam into the air. It was late and quiet on the island, and there was almost no traffic, just a handful of shadows on the sidewalks. She spotted a couple kissing in a doorway, hands all over each other. A man walked a terrier. Two children passed on bicycles. There was no one who smelled like a threat. And yet this whole mission felt wrong.
She’d said to Cain: Are we running the show here, or are we dancing to someone else’s tune? More and more, she felt like a puppet, at the mercy of an invisible hand pulling the strings.
She thought about calling Nash. Give him an update. Confess her sins. She could tell him about Bourne and Monika and the search that seemed to be nearing a climax. But then what? If Cain found out what she’d done, he’d disappear and continue his hunt for Monika alone, and Nash would have no idea where he was. By keeping the secret, Vandal could stay close to Bourne. But sooner or later, she would have to pick sides.
She was Treadstone. There was only one side.
Vandal pocketed her vape pen and pushed off the wall. The street ahead of her was empty. She crossed the cobblestones into Rue des Deux Ponts and passed a closed brasserie on her left. Four doors down, she stopped outside an old building with a blue door. Bars secured the windows. She slid a leather pouch from her pocket and selected two slim metal tools that she used to disengage the lock. When she pushed on it, the heavy door swung inward, leading to a dusty hallway that had a sweet smell of garlic. She closed the outer door behind her and found another door halfway down the wall on her right.
An etched metal sign above the door knocker read chouat.
When she nudged her weight against the door, it inched open. A burnt smell drifted from the shut-up space, and she immediately backed away and retrieved her Glock from the holster at the small of her back. She heard no movement from the other side of the door. No lights lit up the darkness of the interior. The office was empty.
But a gun had been fired there, and it smelled recent.
Vandal shoved the door open with her boot. She had her Glock aimed and ready. When she came inside, the smell of the discharged weapon grew sharper in her nose. Her hand searched the nearest wall for a light switch. She clicked it on and found herself in a small, windowless anteroom decorated with dark, heavy wallpaper. There was a sofa and armchair, a small desk, and then another door leading to a second room that faced the street.
That door was partially open, blocked by a body whose bare legs jutted through the doorway.
“Shit.”
Vandal approached the inner office, not lowering her Glock. At her feet, a woman lay on her back, brown eyes huge and wide as she stared at the ceiling, her curly red hair soaking into the pool of blood behind her head. Her mouth hung open in surprise. A single bullet had burrowed between her eyes, killing her instantly.
It was Chouat’s pretty young secretary. She’d left the bistro barely half an hour ago, and she’d come back to the office to find herself face-to-face with an assassin. A block away, in the silence of the night, Vandal was sure she would have heard the shot. So she assumed the killer had used a suppressor.
This was a pro, not a burglar surprised in the act of ransacking the office.
Had the assassin been waiting for Chouat?
Vandal stepped over the body and swung the pistol around the space, but the office was empty. Three tall windows looked out on Rue des Deux Ponts, the blinds closed and dark. The light behind her threw her tall shadow across the hardwood floor.
The office had been searched thoroughly, the kind of search she’d intended to do herself. But she was too late. She saw a charging cord on Chouat’s desk that had once been connected to a laptop, but the laptop was gone. The lawyer had a metal file cabinet in the corner, and dozens of file folders had been yanked out of the drawers and strewn around the floor.
She checked to see if anything had been left behind. The killer couldn’t have expected Chouat’s secretary to return so quickly and wouldn’t have wanted to linger in the office after the shooting. She examined the lawyer’s desk. He had mail in his inbox, and she quickly went through the envelopes, looking for names she recognized. She did the same with the file folders on the desk, but the killer had obviously been through them, too, and left them in a disorganized pile. There was also a bottle of Lindisfarne Mead on the desk, open, with an empty glass next to it. She checked for a note or card and found nothing.
Vandal checked the desk drawers, looking for thumb drives or other electronic records, but if Chouat had kept any, they were gone now. Then she turned her attention to the sea of client files on the floor. It would take her more time than she had to go through them all, but she knew the name Chouat had used at the hotel on Rue Castex.
Patricia Tuile.
She hunted through the folders on her hands and knees and found a stack that had obviously come from the drawer labeled P–Z. In a couple of minutes, she located what she was looking for—a folder identified with a printed label for p. tuile.
The folder was empty.
“Shit,” she said again.
Then she sprang to her feet.
In the anteroom, she heard a low click, just loud enough to disturb the silence. She led with her Glock back into the outer office and saw that something was different. She’d left the door to the hallway wide open.
Now it was fully closed.
Her mind made the leap: The assassin was still here!
He hadn’t had time to make his escape before Vandal arrived, so instead of returning to the street, he’d gone up the stairs and waited to get out of the building.
Vandal charged to the hallway door, but as she turned the knob, the door suddenly crashed open from the other side, slamming into her face and knocking her backward off her feet. Her body flew. She hit the ground hard, dizzy, and she was vaguely aware of the pound of footsteps outside.
As her mind cleared, she got to her feet and staggered into the hallway. The outer door to Rue des Deux Ponts was ajar. She steadied herself on the wall, then limped out to the street and pointed her gun both ways. On the bridge, she saw a shadow passing in and out of the glow of the streetlights. The killer wore black, but at that distance, she couldn’t even be sure whether it was a man or a woman. Vandal took a few steps to give chase, then stopped. She had no hope of catching whoever it was. All she could do was watch the killer disappear toward the maze of streets beyond the bridge.
Someone was willing to kill to keep them from finding Monika.
Or was it Monika herself?
Chrétien Pau asked the driver to drop him on a quiet stretch of Rue de Grenelle near the Swiss embassy. He got out of the passenger side of the inconspicuous black Volvo, then leaned through the window.
“Meet me back here in one hour.”
“Oui, d’accord.”
Pau waited on the street until the Volvo disappeared.
He checked in both directions, but no one was around. It was late, and this area of the city was free of the violent protests by La Vraie. He tugged a beret low on his head to cover his brown hair and squinted through his sunglasses in the dark. Despite the heat, he’d slung a white scarf that he could swish over the lower part of his face if necessary. He wore a dark sport coat over a collarless red shirt, plus jeans and old sneakers, not the attire anyone would have expected from a candidate for the presidency of France.
He walked to the corner. The Eiffel Tower gleamed in gold against the dark horizon. Crossing the intersection, he continued in the shelter of the trees until he reached the oxidized-green cannons of the Musée de l’Armée, pointing their barrels toward the esplanade and the river. The shining dome and steeple of Les Invalides, where Napoleon was buried, peeked over the roof.
As he neared the gates that led into the museum grounds, he saw a fiftysomething man seated on the stone wall, a cane nestled between his knees and his chin on top of the cane. The man was small, but built like a sturdy fire hydrant. His wiry gray hair had tufts that didn’t fall into place, and his skin had the leathery look of a comfortable old shoe. His clothes were loose. He whistled loudly, and Pau recognized a snippet from Camille Saint-Saëns’s Carnival of the Animals.
That was the signal; all was well.
The older man’s eyes were dreamy as he stared down the long avenue toward the Grand Palais, but that was a ruse. Pau was sure that Nash Rollins could have described the face of every pedestrian and rattled off the license plate of every car that had passed him in the last half an hour.
“This meeting is ill-advised, Nash,” Pau commented, sitting down on the wall a few feet away from him.
“It couldn’t be helped,” Nash replied in his typical raspy drawl. “But I thought a midnight rendezvous would be more discreet for you.”
“Well, you’re right, I don’t need to be seen talking to an American spy in the middle of the campaign. If anyone from La Vraie spotted us? Berland would build a guillotine for me in the Place de la Bastille.”
“Le Roi Raymond,” Nash murmured. “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.”
“I assumed so.”
“You’ve been very helpful to us over the years, Chrétien. Your information about policy discussions at the EU has been extremely valuable. Treadstone and the American government are grateful.”
“You’re welcome, but I’d rather we keep that fact to ourselves.”
“Yes, of course. Needless to say, we want our relationship to continue after the election. We were among those lobbying behind the scenes for you to be the replacement when your current president decided to bow out. So I’m here to offer our help in making sure the election goes your way.”
“You can help by doing nothing,” Pau said.
Nash pursed his lips. “I understand, but that may not be possible.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning we can’t let Raymond Berland win. An extremist right-winger as president of France? Unthinkable.”
“I share your goal in that regard,” Pau replied.
“Maybe I misspoke. We will not let Berland win. We will do whatever it takes to make sure that doesn’t happen.”
Pau stripped off his sunglasses and eyed Nash in the darkness. “What are you suggesting? Voter fraud? Hacking our machines? Or something worse? France is not one of your play toys in the Americas or the Middle East, Nash. You can’t use the CIA to meddle in our elections.”
“You think we’re alone in doing that?” Nash replied. “You think the Russians aren’t trying to put a thumb on the scale in favor of Berland? Probably the Chinese, too.”
“I think social media manipulation is very different from what you have in mind. Do you think I’m naïve? I’ve known you too long, Nash, and I know the kind of people and tactics you use. In fact, I suppose I should ask you directly. Was Treadstone behind the assassination attempt on Berland?”
Nash shook his head. “No. That wasn’t us. In fact, we have reason to suspect Berland orchestrated the shooting himself. To make himself a martyr and to drive more anti-immigrant sentiment.”
“I suspected the same thing,” Pau admitted.
“We also believe that Le Renouveau is stage-managing the urban riots around the country. Revving up the outrage, turning the protests violent. All in support of Berland.”
Pau exhaled with a loud huff. “Le Renouveau again. You and your conspiracy theories.”
“This is not a conspiracy.”
“No? I remember a Treadstone briefing in Brussels after their so-called leadership summit in Ibiza more than a decade ago. Your spies came away with nothing. I’m not saying Le Renouveau doesn’t exist, but I think you’re greatly exaggerating its influence.”
“Berland was in Ibiza that weekend,” Nash pointed out.
“And so what? Berland and La Vraie are the culmination of some kind of yearslong plot to take over France?”
“Maybe so.”
Pau stood up from the stone wall and replaced his sunglasses on his face. “I appreciate the intelligence you provide, Nash. I always do. But keep Treadstone’s dirty little fingers out of the election. France has flirted with Jean-Marie Le Pen and Marine Le Pen and now Le Roi Raymond, and always the Americans and the media pitch a fit, believing this time the Nazis will win. Hitler is on the march. Well, the right wing always comes up short with the voters, and they will again.”
The American spy’s face was stone. “We’re prepared to make sure they do.”
“Then let me be clear,” Pau told him. “If you interfere, I will expose American involvement in the election, and you’ll lose France as an ally for the next generation. I imagine that would be the end of NATO, too. Think about that, won’t you? Good night, Nash.”