Helen hunched low in the taxi. The hood was making her nose itch as she tried to follow their progress by sound and by feel. For the first few minutes they bumped along cobbled lanes and swerved violently, the driver cursing under his breath. Then, sudden smoothness and a climbing sensation that ended on a level slab where they were moving at high speed with the noise of traffic all around them. The grinding of gears of large trucks—the blast of streaking motorcycles. She guessed that they must either be on the Périphérique, the city’s ring road, or the A-3, the motorway that stretched out toward the banlieue of Bondy, Marina’s home territory.
She tried to get comfortable, which wasn’t easy when her minder kept shoving her lower whenever she straightened her spine. They continued on smooth roads for another fifteen minutes, slowing at times in congestion marked by car horns and with more cursing by the driver. Finally, they exited onto a smaller street with potholes. There was a mumbled consultation, and someone opened a window. She heard people on the sidewalk, a blast of bouncy Arabic music. Cool air poured into the car. They passed in and out of the glare of street lamps.
A few moments later, her minder yanked her into an upright position and pulled off the hood, snagging her hair enough to bring tears to her eyes, which she blinked back lest they see it as weakness. The car stopped in an alley. Massive concrete high-rises rose to the front and left.
“Go there,” her minder said, pointing to a battered steel door dimly visible across a sidewalk to their left. “Up three stairs.” She nodded, assuming that he meant she should climb three flights of stairs. “Then, number eight. Yes?”
“Yes.”
“After, you will come back here. If not?” He shook his head and drew a finger across his neck. “Yes?”
“If you say so.”
He didn’t seem to like that answer, or maybe he didn’t understand it, so he took her by the shoulders and again said, “Yes?”
“Yes. I understand.”
He released her, and she climbed out. The steel door was unlocked but jammed shut, and she had to pull with all her strength to wrench it free. The stairwell was dark and stank of urine, although it brightened a bit as she climbed, and by the end of the second flight of stairs she could hear voices and smell cooking—peppers, caraway seed, and cumin, the spices of Algeria. But as she made the final climb the noises disappeared, and she emerged into an empty hallway that had either been gutted or was being prepped for renovation. She found number eight on a wooden door with a peephole, and knocked.
“Entrez,” a woman called out.
Helen entered a large room with a scuffed linoleum floor and bare walls. A dim ceiling light offered the only illumination. Heavy curtains were pulled shut across the only window. There were two chairs. One, a blue wing armchair by the door, was empty. Facing it from about twenty feet away was a wooden folding chair, occupied by a younger, smaller woman with olive skin and drawn features, and black hair cut in a choppy bob. She wore a white, baggy peasant blouse, canvas painter’s pants, and sandals. She was smoking. Next to her was a small table with a smudged glass of water. The woman’s pose somehow communicated that she was not to be approached without permission. Helen spoke first.
“Marina?”
“You are Elizabeth Hart?”
“Yes.”
“You will sit, please.”
Helen pulled the Japanese cassette recorder out of her handbag and showed it to Marina.
“Bring it here. I will operate.”
Helen crossed the room as carefully as if she were auditioning for the ballet. Marina took it without a word, switched it on, and placed it on the table.
“Where would you like to begin?” Helen asked after returning to the wing chair.
“With Robert,” Marina said, her voice a monotone. “There will be no questions. I know what is needed, and I have no fault of memory.”
She began her story in Marseille, where her case officer had come to her a year ago and said she would be participating in a special operation that would be directed by another operative, Robert, who she would soon meet. The first two meetings were businesslike. Marina, still being the careful employee, did not tell Helen what the operation’s objective was.
The third time she met Robert, at a safe house of his choosing, he offered her a drink, backed her into a corner of the kitchen, and then overpowered her and raped her. The description was similar to what Helen and Claire had witnessed. The main difference was that Marina fought back more fiercely than the other two victims, although Robert eventually subdued her with several blows to the head.
Three days later she complained to her case officer in a written report, which the case officer forwarded to the chief of station in Paris. Three weeks after that she was shoved in front of a tram in Marseille near the Rue Grignan, saved only when her momentum in falling left her at an angle that caused the tram to bump her aside. She broke two ribs and badly bruised her hip, but the act had been so artfully carried out that eyewitnesses later recalled that she seemed to have tripped on her own.
With the help of her case officer, who was acting without authorization, she secretly obtained a new identity and an off-books posting to San Sebastián, although he agreed to help only on the condition that she no longer pursue her claim against Robert. Since arriving there she had twice had brushes with ETA operatives, yet she still believed it was safer to remain there than return to France. She had come here at great risk, she said.
“And now you are at great risk,” she said. “So I must ask, why have you come for my story?”
“Turn that off first,” Helen answered. Marina nodded and did so.
“There are others besides me who want to get out the word about Robert. Three of us. We’re working together. That’s all I can tell you.”
“It is official, then? This action you are taking?”
Helen considered lying, then decided there was nothing to gain by doing so.
“No. I’m sorry. It’s not official.”
Marina nodded.
“I never thought it would be.” She stubbed out her cigarette on the table and tossed aside the butt. She stood, walked the recorder over to Helen, and said, “When he finds you, you must tell him nothing of how you came here.”
“He will not find me.”
Marina smiled ruefully and shook her head.
“All right. But what you must know is that you cannot tell him anything about these arrangements.”
“There’s nothing to tell. They hooded me, I saw nothing. I don’t even know where I am.”
“But you know many small things, and he is skilled at adding small things into something larger. So you must say nothing for one day. One day, at least, to give me time to return.”
“A day?”
“No matter what he or his people do to you.”
Helen swallowed hard and gripped the recorder as if it were a lifeline back to safety.
“They’re waiting for you downstairs,” Marina said. “You will go now.”
“They?” Had she already been betrayed? Was this a setup?
“The taxi that brings you here. They are waiting.”
“Right. Of course.” Helen was letting fear get the best of her. She exhaled slowly, wanting to show Marina that she was up to the task at hand. Marina lit another cigarette as Helen stood. They did not speak again.
Half an hour later Helen was back within the environs of Paris, dropped off in the middle of a traffic circle only a few blocks inside the Périphérique. Checking the road signs and then unfolding her map as cars whizzed by, she saw that she was on the eastern rim of the 20th arrondissement, at the intersection of Rue Belgrand and Boulevard Mortier. She ran the gauntlet of the circle and crossed to a quiet block of Rue Belgrand, where she ducked into a bar. It was a fairly prosperous neighborhood, with a clientele to match, and for the first time in several hours she was able to relax.
She ordered a whiskey and checked her watch. Nearly 9 p.m., meaning she would be at loose ends for nineteen hours until her next designated contact with Claire. It felt like far too long to wait. From here it would be easy to take cabs and buses back into the outer suburbs, where she might board a train toward Germany at a station less likely to be manned by Gilley’s people. Or maybe instead she should find a room for the night, to give her a safe place to think.
A room. It made her remember Claire’s report, one of the last copies, and maybe the only one that could be easily obtained. It was still hidden at the other hotel, a place that was now off-limits. She sipped her whiskey, and then cursed herself. It seemed foolish in the extreme to take all of these risks only to leave behind a third of the evidence that all of them had worked so hard to compile in the case against Gilley. Claire’s message had been emphatically clear: Do not return to your hotel! But they needed all the ammunition they could get if they were going to stop Gilley. And if she could escape undetected across a rooftop in Berlin, then why couldn’t she enter via a rooftop in Paris?
She paid her bill, found a store that was open, bought a few clothes, a small backpack, and a few other supplies, and then spent the next hour wandering before stopping in a cozy place for a light dinner, plus a glass of wine to bolster her resolve. Toward eleven she hopped a Metro to a discotheque that the guidebook had said “stayed open until the sun came up,” where she kept herself awake with coffee and club soda while watching Parisian couples dance until 3 a.m. Two men asked her to dance, and she politely declined.
Just before leaving she changed clothes in the washroom, emerging in black jeans and a black pullover. She stuffed her remaining belongings, including the tape but not the recorder, into the backpack, which she secured snugly to her shoulders. She jammed a penlight into her pants pocket. Half an hour later, after vaulting onto the fire stairs in the back of a building near the end of the Passage de Flandre—unnoticed by anyone in the street below, as far as she could tell—she climbed five stories to the roof and began making her way down the block.
The going was more difficult than in Berlin. The roofs of two of the buildings were sloped, and the footing was tricky. She slid once all the way to the gutter, barely catching herself and making a terrible clatter. Worse, there were recessed windows along the edge, and she had to climb around them. She did so with her heart beating crazily, not daring to glance downward. She worried about all the noise she must be making in the rooms below, and at one point froze as she heard a window rattle open, followed by a quavering voice that called out, “Hallo? Hallo?”
She waited for the window to shut, and then practically crawled to the next rooftop.
Her hotel, fortunately, had a flat roof, and she easily found the ladder down to the fire stairs. If Gilley’s people were posted below, then she needed to remain as quiet as possible. She reached the steel landing by the window at the end of the fifth-floor hallway. Locked. Shit. The fourth-floor window was locked as well.
She crept down toward the third floor, alarmed by the creaking of the stairway. Straining her eyes in the darkness, she tried to detect any sign of movement from the alley below. All was quiet. As she reached the landing she saw with immense relief that the window was ajar. She slid it open and hopped quickly inside, the cat burglar in black. Her room was up front, so she had to walk the length of the hallway, fearing all the while that someone would open the door and call out in alarm. No one did.
She got out her key and listened carefully. No noise in the stairwell. No slamming doors or clattering footsteps. She had made it.
She let herself in and switched on the flashlight, taking care to keep the beam from shining toward the window or any mirrors. She slid off the backpack and set it gently on the floor. Easing past the bathroom door toward her bed, she directed the light toward the wall where the poster was, only to see that the poster was gone. She then saw the report itself, folded neatly on the console table by the tourist magazines, which made no sense at all unless—
There was a sudden movement to her rear, a shadow darting out from the bathroom. She pivoted quickly as someone strong and fast knocked the flashlight from her hands. A second person grabbed her arms from behind and, quick as a flash, bound them in plastic while a hand clamped across her mouth just as she attempted to cry out. She tried to kick outward, but someone yanked her legs out from under her and bound her ankles with another band of plastic, and then he dropped her sideways to the floor, which nearly knocked the wind out of her. Someone slipped a gag into her mouth and tightened it, and her cry of pain emerged only as a mumble.
Someone picked her up, a strong and easy lift. Then, with a mighty heave, he tossed her onto the bed like a bundle of laundry. She bounced once and might have rolled off the side if the second man hadn’t caught her and rolled her back toward the middle of the mattress.
The ceiling light went on, bright in her eyes.
Now she saw them. The man by the bed, stouter and shorter, spoke rapidly in French to a taller and more muscular fellow who stood at the foot. The taller man answered by shaking his head and speaking brusquely. A third fellow then emerged from over by the window, where he must have been standing all along. He and the stouter man nodded in reply and they both left the room, the door shutting with a click. Helen heard one set of footsteps receding down the hallway, meaning that the other one must have remained just outside.
The taller man looked down at her with an expression of triumph. He was about forty, she thought, as she tried to memorize his face. Slim but fit, with short dark hair gleaming with either sweat or pomade. He wore a black ribbed turtleneck, black running shoes, and a pair of black jeans. Then he spoke to her in English.
“Welcome, Miss Abell. What a pleasant surprise.”
When he stooped down to reach for her, Helen kicked out at him with her bound legs, but he easily evaded the blow and laughed lightly, as if to say it hadn’t been a very good joke.
“Can we calm down now, Helen?” Perfect English, with a slight British accent. “Oh, yes. I suppose you can’t really answer with that gag in place.” He reached behind himself, toward his belt, and produced a long and slender knife, which he displayed for a second or two as if to give her the best possible chance to gauge its possibilities.
“Here’s what we’ll do, then. I’m going to cut off that gag so we can talk. At the first sign you’re about to scream or start shouting for help, I’ll cut your tongue out as well. Then it won’t matter how loud you scream, because I’ll be out the door with that report and also your backpack, which I am guessing has an item of interest to us. And then, after all of your hard work, you won’t even be able to tell the police what happened. Remain quiet, however, and you get to keep your tongue. At least for now. Do we have a deal?”
She nodded, which wasn’t easy while lying on her side with her hands and ankles bound.
“Very good.”
He leaned closer, and with alarming deftness he sliced free the gag. She coughed and tried to push herself back toward the headboard so she could at least raise up her torso.
“No, no,” he said, again showing the blade. “None of that. All you need to do is speak. Remain still.”
She obliged.
“Good. I want you to tell me all about this afternoon, then. Not a rundown on how you got away from us, but on who you met afterward, and where.”
“I didn’t meet anyone.”
“Is that so?”
“Yes.”
He lunged toward her, and with a flash of his hands he pinned her torso against the bed and landed with his knees on her chest. He placed the point of the knife against her neck, near her artery, and then pierced her skin, just deep enough to sting. She felt a warm trickle of blood dripping toward the duvet.
“This is my lie detector, you see.” He shifted his weight, pressing his knees so hard into her diaphragm that she could barely breathe. “Like the needle on the machine when they flutter you. Except this one jumps a little deeper every time you lie or don’t cooperate. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” she whispered.
“Louder please. A whisper is insufficient.”
“Yes.”
“Yes, what?”
“Yes, I understand.”
“If drawing blood is insufficient, then we’ll begin collecting your digits. First your fingers and then your toes, one by one, and it will get a lot sloppier than either of us would like. So how about if we avoid all that and just get talking, all right?”
“Yes,” she said weakly, and for a moment she thought she might pass out.
Then she remembered Marina, and how broken the young woman had looked. Now she knew why. She also recalled Marina’s final admonition: Hold out for one day, to give her time to make her way back to safety.
Twenty-four hours? Helen doubted she would even last for one.