Back in America, life went on, tensely. The morning after the attacks and the President’s announcement, the Dow Jones average fell five hundred points before the board suspended trading. But days passed and nothing else happened. Habit has the force of tides; people stayed in their natural courses as rivers do. They went to work, bought groceries, took kids to school. Except in the communities most immediately affected, it was hard to tell that anything had happened.
Except in conversations. People talked of little else. At first the national response was to want to strike back, but as no immediate target of revenge became apparent, a large majority of Americans began to support the President’s view. Enough of this. Let the rest of the world destroy itself. Let’s stay out of it. Leave us alone.
Corporate leaders had larger views. Microsoft couldn’t withdraw from the world stage, nor would Wal-Mart, nor Disney. And they didn’t want to be alone out there. Executives of such companies talked of patriotism and commitment, and paid millions to public relations firms for ads extolling those virtues. But Americans, already tired of wars that lasted too long and had too little point, of screaming foreigners hating us, of being criticized even where we tried to help, switched channels.
The American Century was coming to a decisive end.
Within a very few minutes it became clear that Paul Desquat didn’t know what to do with Jack, even though his partner Alexis had lured him here. Desquat was a handsome, dissipated-looking man, growing a little belly on a thin torso, the beginnings of pouches under his dark eyes. But still with a strong chin and sharp features, though now they looked puzzled.
“Why here?” he said. “Why to me? Have you been paying calls on everyone you met while you were with—?”
Alexis cleared her throat sharply, cutting him off. She was standing close to Desquat, who sat on a low black sofa matching the chair that held Jack. Alexis was fully dressed now, in black slacks and a black filmy blouse, giving dramatic effect to her pale skin and black hair.
“He knows,” Desquat said to her dismissively. “Everything he’s been doing is about Madeline. As if she left him directions.”
“It certainly took him a long time to decipher those directions,” Alexis said, still staring at Jack. In Jack’s peripheral vision he saw, off to the side, Yvette glaring at the two of them, neither of whom seemed to notice.
“He doesn’t know all that—” Yvette said, and Desquat interrupted her, which was perfect.
“Maybe he didn’t need to do anything about it until now.”
Yvette scowled. Jack pretended to ignore her, as the other two were doing. “Maybe I didn’t want in until now.” He leaned forward, noticing how that move heightened Yvette’s interest in him, and her gun’s interest. The chair in which he sat was too low to spring out of suddenly. Jack said, “I believe I’ve learned everything I can from my—early tutors. Madeline was going to introduce me to others.”
Alexis and Desquat studied him. Alexis had her arms folded. “I don’t think so,” she finally said.
Jack studied her in turn, with frank curiosity. “I don’t know you. Haven’t even heard your name. Are you—” He turned to direct the unfinished question at Desquat. To Jack’s hidden delight, the architect looked guilty. “So you’ve been recruiting outside the—” Jack deliberately cut himself off, as if he’d said too much.
Alexis strode forward. “I know all about your precious Circle,” she sneered.
“Do you? What’s the password? Show me the secret handshake.” Jack held out his hand at an odd angle. Alexis kicked at it. Jack’s hand twisted, caught her ankle, pulled, and dumped her on her ass on the hard parquet floor.
Yvette smiled, and didn’t raise the gun in his direction. Jack jumped to his feet, but Paul Desquat didn’t move. “Where will you go?” he said quietly. “You came here to learn, didn’t you?”
That stopped Jack. Alexis regained her feet, with as much dignity as she could muster. Her face was even whiter, all the blood having drained southward. She looked like a vampire with her blazing blue eyes. Without any other warning she slapped Jack hard across the cheek.
He could have grabbed her then, used her as a shield and a hostage, maybe escaped. Instead Jack just pursed his lips at her in a simper. “Bitch.”
Yvette had to stifle a laugh.
Jack sat down slowly, looked up at Alexis, waited for her to walk away. Then he returned his attention to Desquat. “Tell me why I should want in,” Jack said slowly.
“No one’s invited you.” When Jack didn’t respond, Desquat shrugged. He repeated Jack’s question, with an eloquent French gesture that took in the beautiful room, the house, Nice, his life.
Jack acknowledged what he wasn’t saying. “You have a villa in Nice. How nice. All the money you could spend in more than a lifetime. Comfortable furniture. Lovely friends. Why would you want more than this? You do have Internet, right?”
Desquat smiled. “I have a wine cellar. A lovely beach, where the most beautiful women in the world come to play nearly naked. More comforts than the most powerful Caesar could have had. Why isn’t this enough, Jack?”
“I don’t know.”
“Yes you do.” Desquat waited, but when Jack didn’t take the bait he answered, “Because nothing is ever enough. We are the monkeys who climbed to the top of the highest tree, Jack. But from there we can see the mountains.”
Jack nodded slowly, as if convinced. “All right. You’ve got me.”
Desquat smiled sadly. “I’m sorry, Jack.”
“Madeline trusted me.”
“Really? What did she tell you?”
“Your name. She was ready to bring me in.”
“If she gave you my name, why has it taken you all these years to come to me?”
“Not to find you. Just to decide I wanted in.”
“I’m sorry, Jack. You need a sponsor to come in. You don’t have a sponsor.”
Jack noticed that Alexis had disappeared. He had shamed her out of the room. Desquat probably wasn’t going to buy his turncoat act, and Alexis clearly wouldn’t. So he turned serious. His voice turning hard, he said, “Did you kill her?”
Desquat merely sighed. “I’m sorry. I really am. Maybe Madeline would have brought you in. But not now. You’re too wild a card, my friend. I think you don’t want this. You want to stop us.”
Jack lifted his arms from the uncomfortable chair arms. “I don’t have a gun. And I’m sure my knowledge of martial arts is less than yours. I’m not a threat to you.”
“You have your mind. It is one of the twistiest we have ever known. No one can trust you.” Desquat gazed off into the distance, considering. “But… I don’t think—” He almost said a name. Jack listened tensely. But Desquat stopped himself. “What are we to do with—?” He looked around and saw for the first time that Alexis was gone. As he realized it, she came striding back into the room. “That’s simple,” she said. “He’s a burglar, isn’t he?” A doorbell chimed. “That will be the police.”
The others went more tense than Jack did. At least Alexis and Desquat looked tense. Yvette seemed to enjoy their sudden and quick quarrel. She glanced at Jack with a conspiratorial smile. He didn’t try to send her any message.
Desquat’s and Alexis’s argument was quick and only half-spoken. “We can’t turn him over—” “What’s he going to say? That he’s discovered some worldwide—” Alexis turned and laughed at Jack. “Go ahead. They’ll bury you in the crazy ward.”
Jack smiled back at her ever so politely, like a guest at a cocktail party who knows no one.
Then came the sound of the front door crashing inward.
One would expect that an elegant resort city in the south of France might occasionally need to incarcerate celebrities, or at least rich people. One could hope that their jails, therefore, would be several cuts above the American equivalent. But if that was the case, these gendarmes obviously didn’t think Jack worthy of the presidential suite. The small cell into which they threw him unceremoniously had a rough cement floor—he could attest to the roughness—a small cot, and a constant stench. Its only luxury was solitude. Maybe they thought he would infect the other prisoners with his craziness. Or maybe this was solitary confinement.
It could have been, in fact, that those were no police who had taken him from Paul Desquat’s house and that this was no jail. At least no official one. It could be that that barred door would never open again, and there would be no official record of this discarded American.
Jack curled up on the cot, which immediately sank so that his side was touching the floor. He was wearier than he had ever been. The only useful thing he could do in here was sleep, but he didn’t. He thought.
For the first time since this crisis began, Jack had time to think. He was alone, he had no one else to worry about. And he didn’t have to think about evading pursuit, because he had already been caught. Lying on that cot, his mind roved back over the days, and he realized that since the night the planes had crossed America, obstacles and puzzles had been thrown in his way that had kept him from concentrating on the big picture. He had been separated from his group; he couldn’t contribute to their discussions nor get their insights. Was it accidental that Jack alone had been cut off from the Circle?
What had brought him here? Those sightings of him in Europe. Some genuine, several false. He had seen the fake Jacks himself. They weren’t close enough to fool anyone who really knew him. Someone could have used plastic surgery to create near-perfect Jack clones if they had wanted, but what could they do with such replicas? Even if they looked exactly like Jack, they couldn’t fool anyone who mattered for long. Not the Chair, not his friends. His face mattered to so few people. Even if his name was fairly well-known in the gaming world, his face wasn’t. What had those fake Jacks accomplished?
No, that wasn’t question. The question was the one Arden had asked: Why you? Jack suddenly sat up in the darkness. Those Jack-sightings had separated him from the Circle and brought him here, that’s what they had accomplished. They had kept him on the move and on the dodge, unable to think until now.
Someone wanted him out of the picture and coping with lesser puzzles. Why? What did he know? And oddly, the Jack sightings had brought him to Europe, which seemed to be the heart of the conspiracy, if he could believe what he had heard Desquat say. Salzburg. Where the peace summit was going to take place. It could have been a lie, Desquat might have already known Jack was listening. But Rachel had had a feeling about the same thing, and he trusted Rachel’s feelings.
Whoever had plotted this wasn’t a gamer. This was a bad game. In a good game one clue leads to another. Conquering one level admits you to the next level. What was happening now was circular instead, each revelation leading back around. No way out.
Jack paced as far as he could pace in the small cell, reached the wall and paced back. No one knew the National Security Advisor, except that Jack had a way to get to him. The NSA seemed to have been plucked out of anonymity and installed in the White House just for this reason: to isolate further an isolationist president. And someone had created a figure of enormous influence who was completely unknown to Circle members. A near impossibility.
What had those planes accomplished? A huge fortune had been spent on that one night of terror. It had made a president decide to draw back from the world. Who could profit from that? Some terrorists, perhaps, though most would rather have the Great Satan blundering about in the world, giving them recruitment material.
Think. What else had been accomplished? And how would it be furthered by some event at a meeting of world leaders in Salzburg? It seemed that Jack was the one who could figure this out, because he was the sole target of the invisible enemy’s scheming.
But Arden had also been cut off from the group. Sent to babysit Jack. Had that been intended?
Jack lay back down on the cot, which weariness made comfortable. There was a way out of this puzzle. Stop thinking two-dimensionally. Rise above the board. He began to drift off, his thoughts growing wilder and longer, the figures in his life flitting like distorted masks. Madeline. Arden. Rachel. Stevie. The Chair. Mrs. Stein. Jack smiled in his grogginess as he pictured her at the front of the class, telling them about Robert E. Lee’s young adjutant, a name lost to history, but who had set the general’s glasses down in such a way that when he reached for them they focused on a town called Gettysburg. It was such a crazy concept it had made Jack laugh even then. And glancing out the classroom windows he saw someone peeking in. A boy who wasn’t in the class, who had been excluded.
Bruno Benjamin had been the smartest boy not only at Bruton Academy but in the memory of his teachers. No one since Craig Mortenson had tested so high in IQ, in the Circle’s own tests, the ones that mattered. But there was something they didn’t trust about Bruno. He was smart, yes, but he was also lacking in that empathy for other people that was the essential weapon of the Circle. They had brought him to Bruton for observation, but had shied away from bringing him fully inside. He was not, for example, placed in Mrs. Stein’s history class.
But the Circle, those self-styled masters of the American destiny, hadn’t counted on Bruno’s ingenuity, his deviousness. He began to learn about the special classes even though he wasn’t in them. Jack’s first mission for the Circle, one too big for a schoolboy but that could only be done by a classmate, had been to steer Bruno away from his suspicions– an assignment Jack had bungled so badly he had almost given them all away. That was the first time he came to the attention of the Chair, and not in a good way.
Bruno was eventually transferred to another prep school, a much better known one. Jack had asked about him years later and been told that the Circle had seen that he got admitted to Yale, and even inducted into Skull and Bones, which should assuage his hunger for secret societies. The Circle had once again congratulated itself on its managerial genius. But Jack wondered now if anyone had kept up with Bruno’s subsequent career.
Did anyone keep track of those Circle rejects who had been shuttled aside? Because there on the edge of sleep Jack realized what those planes had accomplished, what a disaster at Salzburg would seal for good. Those events had undone everything the Circle had been designed to achieve.
He sat up again. Think about it from a different angle. What if all this business had been aimed not at America but at the Circle itself? If so, it had been a smashing success. The Circle isolated, some of them arrested, others scattered, their mission of maintaining American supremacy in the world in tatters. It would take generations for the Circle to undo this, if they continued to exist at all.
If this was right, the person behind it would, first of all, have to know about the Circle, and hate all its members. He or she would have to have enormous resources and an amazing intellect. Jack could only think of one candidate: that boy he’d seen peeking through the classroom window fifteen years ago.
And Bruno would have known that only one person might be able to figure out who was behind this scheme: Jack. For this to work, he would have to isolate Jack from the rest of the group, set him apart and on the run, so he couldn’t think straight.
Exactly what had been accomplished in the last week.
It was scary to have thoughts ranging this widely across time and space while trapped in a small cell. Jack was getting too cosmic for his own good. If Rachel had been here she would have told him he was suffering from rest-deprivation. But once his mind started clicking along these paths, he couldn’t turn it off. There was nothing he could do right now with the idea that his old pal Bruno was behind the cataclysm going on in the world. But he could trace back and see if it made other things fit.
Did Bruno have other Circle members on his team? That would be almost essential. Sleeper agents in their midst. People Jack knew and loved. And good old Bruno would be sure to plant someone right next to Jack, if he could, both to guide him astray and to keep a leash on him.
Arden.
Why had she been assigned to him? Had that been an idle thought of the Chair’s, or had it been planted in her mind in some subtle, sinister way? As Jack began to think, he realized how little he knew about Arden Spindler, how little any of them knew. She had been raised here in Europe. That was the most dangerous thing the Circle ever undertook, to try to bring up a member loyal to the good old U.S. of A. without being raised there. Sometimes it failed, as Paul Desquat demonstrated. Maybe it had failed with Arden as well. At the very least, being raised in Europe had put her closer to the influence of someone planning a disaster at Salzburg.
But he liked her so much.
What? Where had that come from? Jack’s mind was playing him weird. As he lay there in the tiny, smelly cell, the darkness was peopled with Arden: watching him as he talked on the phone to his mother; standing silently aside at his reunion with Rachel; coming around the corner in a car to rescue him; spotting him across a crowded room; her laughing face as she turned and caught sight of him.
But just before sleep finally took him down, Jack realized something else. If the construct he’d created in the last few minutes was true, then Bruno wouldn’t be content to leave Jack here in this cell while he pulled off his most spectacular scheme. He would want Jack as a witness. Which meant he had to free Jack. And that didn’t seem possible.
Arden had rescued him several times already. She had been there when it was barely possible for a human to know about his peril. But now she was gone. There was no way she could learn about his imprisonment here, and nothing she could do about it if she did.
Unless Bruno Benjamin was behind his current incarceration, and Arden was on his team.
His last thought: If Arden showed up to rescue him again, she was on the other side.
Sunlight woke him. The little cell did have one small window, a little higher than a man’s head, so the sun must have been high already to hit Jack’s face. Now he could see his surroundings, which were more disgusting even than his nose had told him the night before. He was at the end of a row of three cells; the other two were unoccupied. Outside the door a short hallway led to a simple wooden door. Down beyond the third cell was some kind of storage area where apparently manure and straw were stored until needed. A paradise for flies and probably worse vermin.
He had to get out of here. He had to get his PlayStation. He had to contact the Circle. He had to call home. But it looked as if no one intended to let him do anything he needed to do. No one, for example, had brought him breakfast, or let him out for a bathroom break. There was a bucket in the corner. Jack stayed as far from it as he could.
Half an hour later that wooden door opened. Arden walked through.
Jack stared at her expressionlessly. He thought he was hallucinating, especially since she showed no reaction to seeing him. Her face was as blank as his. Blanker. She looked like a mannequin of herself. Jack thought, she’s given up the pretense. She knows I’m on to her.
Then Arden came farther along the hallway and Jack saw the man behind her, the man in uniform holding a gun on her. He marched her forward, pushed her aside, opened the door of the cell next to Jack’s, and shoved her inside. Arden turned and gave the guard a look that Jack took for complicity. Arden and the guard were in something together. But the uniformed man just stared back at her, then locked the cell and marched out without a word.
“Jack!” Arden flung herself against the bars, reaching through them, so he had no choice but to go and give her an extremely awkward hug. Jack kept his emotions tightly contained. He knew now she was waiting to betray him. He could give nothing away.
Nevertheless, her arms felt surprisingly good.
He asked her how she’d found him, but barely listened to her explanation: decided he would need her, followed him to Nice, heard about an American arrested for invading a home, blah blah blah. Jack waited out the story, then asked, “How are we getting out of here?”
Arden looked longingly at that wooden door. “Hell if I know.”
“You don’t have a plan?”
“I don’t even know exactly where we are.”
Which put a tiny hole in his suspicions. If she didn’t have a way out, maybe she wasn’t on the other side. But just give her time, Jack thought. She’d come up with something ingenious. “You sort of made friends with that guard, didn’t you?”
“I thought we made a little connection,” Arden answered, worry putting lines in her forehead. “But I sure couldn’t tell it by the way he shoved me in here.” Her nose wrinkled. She looked around the accommodations, and her expression was horrified. “My God, Jack, I only left you alone for like a day. What did you do to get put in this hellhole?”
Jack was still watching her. She seemed genuinely to be as trapped as he was. “We have to get out of here,” she said, sounding a little desperate.
“Yes, and very soon.”
“Why?” She looked at him with real curiosity. “What’s happening?”
“I’m starting to think real seriously about that bucket in the corner.”
Two hours convinced him that Arden had no idea how to get out of here. Lunchtime passed as had breakfast time, with no intrusion from the outside world. By climbing the bars between their cells, then leaning far back and to the side, Jack could grab the bars of the only window and hold himself up long enough to see out. There was little to see. The window seemed to be facing an alley. He couldn’t see all the way to the ground from his angle, but he could see another wall a short distance away, and could hear no human voices nearby, although there were the sounds of cars and foot traffic from off to his left. No one close by, though. No one whose sympathies he could enlist.
When he dropped down he said angrily to Arden, “You know what to do in this situation, don’t you? Find an ally before you get captured. Or create one. Didn’t you?” Because Jack was getting very anxious and more than a little paranoid. He wanted this to be over. She should go ahead and reveal herself and drop the pretense.
“I didn’t have time. I was worried about you.”
She spoke very quietly. Jack turned to look at her and found Arden looking down at the floor. He waited, but she didn’t look up. She’d sounded sincere. Which meant they were truly trapped here. Jack wondered if he’d be taken before a magistrate. Certainly no one had offered him a phone call.
An hour later they were slumped against the bars of their cells, back to back. The slight human contact was nevertheless warming. Jack thought he could hear her thinking. But everything they did was about manipulating others. In this solitude, they had nothing to work with. Instead they found themselves reminiscing, as if this might be the last time. Arden spoke of her parents again. Jack told her about school. “Really?” she’d say, as if everything ordinary sounded like an adventure. “One time Rachel and I sneaked into the library late one night, looking for a book that was kept locked away. We didn’t know what was in it, we just knew it must be great if they wouldn’t let us see it. And four teachers were having a meeting in the library, all huddled around one little lamp.” He could hear Arden picturing it, not the same scene he’d seen, but a scene, one transposed into her own school library, probably. He could feel her back against his as he told the story. It had been an adventure. He and Rachel had graduated thinking they’d prepared themselves for the grandest adventures of all, world-guiding. They hadn’t had a clue. World-saving was smelly, uncomfortable work, not grand at all.
When he finished talking Arden said one word: “Wow.” And he found she was holding his hand.
Some time about midafternoon that wooden door opened. The young man in uniform who had brought Arden in stepped into the passageway. Jack smiled inwardly. Here it came. Arden’s plan beginning. When she got them out she would also reveal herself.
“You have a visitor,” the guard said. Jack waited for Arden to stand up. She didn’t move. Jack turned his head in exasperation and saw the guard looking at him. The man gestured impatiently.
Jack scrambled to his feet. No one would come visiting him. Unless the Circle had somehow managed to—
He looked through the now-open door and saw Yvette. The young woman from the night before. She stepped through the door, and her nose wrinkled at the stench from his cell.
Jack glanced at Arden, who was staring at Yvette. He had to admit she was worth a stare. Yvette had changed into tight silvery pants that ended about mid-calf. It was hard to tell where slacks stopped and skin began, they were so tight. Good legs. On top she wore a cowl-neck royal blue sweater that brought out her eyes.
“Jack, darling!” she said, and threw her arms around his neck. There she whispered, “You were right. And you’re the only man who can make Paul jealous. I have to have you out.”
Drawing back, she said more loudly, “I wanted to bring you something, darling, but they searched me. Quite thoroughly.” She looked accusingly at the guard, who smirked. He was a young man, swarthy, with a very small moustache and a very large sidearm. He turned to look in the remaining cell at Arden and Jack saw, hanging from the guard’s wide belt, a dagger. It looked ceremonial, something stolen from a museum, or a costume shop. But Jack didn’t stop to criticize. He jumped forward and grabbed the dagger’s hilt.
The guard turned quickly. The thing to do then was to run the blade across his throat, silencing him and killing him. But Jack had no experience of killing, and he had nothing against this young man. It takes a very rare kind of person to make and act on the decision to kill a stranger, and Jack was not one of those people.
But he jabbed the dagger hilt first into the guard’s stomach, making him grab there. Jack snatched the keys off his belt. He tossed them through the bars to Arden, who quickly began working on the lock.
“Who’s she?” Yvette said. Then several things happened in about a second. The barred door swung open and Arden stepped out. The guard straightened and grabbed his pistol. And Jack jumped behind Yvette, putting the dagger to her throat. Then they all froze.
“Are you insane?” the guard asked in accented English. “Who is that woman to me? I’ll kill both of you.”
“Waste this?” Jack asked unbelievingly. “Look at her.” The young guard did, still frowning. Yvette turned toward Jack with a protest. And Arden gave a long sigh and swooned.
She did it in a very dramatic, silent-movie fashion, putting the back of her hand to her forehead and swaying like a kite string before falling sideways. Atop the guard’s gun. He tried to break her fall—she had gotten to him, at least a little—and Arden grabbed the gun. Jack stepped forward and punched the guard in the face. With the weight of the dagger still in his fist, it was a strong blow, and nearly broke his own fingers. The guard fell, but managed to hang onto his gun.
Arden grabbed Yvette, tripped her, and threw her down on the guard. Then she had Jack’s arm, pulling him out the door. Jack looked back and saw Yvette giving him an outraged look. He didn’t even have time to shrug in response.
Arden slammed the door closed, locked it, and threw the keys across the alley. “Come on!”
Instantly, the world seemed alive with the sounds of pursuit. “This way!” they both shouted, and Jack let Arden tug him her direction, thinking she’d had more time to check out the area before getting herself arrested. She ran in the direction of crowds, thinking they could lose themselves. To Jack they looked like everyone else in town, in jeans and tennis shoes, but the gendarme coming out the front door of the police station looked straight at Jack and Arden and yelled for them to stop. They didn’t. No longer hand in hand, they ran, turned the corner, jumped through people. They were in a shopping district, but not in the touristy part of town. Produce was being offered from wooden stands, and small shops sold essentials.
Arden darted into one, pulling his hand. This was a cafe, with only five small tables. Sleepy-eyed men barely glanced at them. Arden began arguing with Jack in French too rapid for him to follow, moving her arms and shoulders expressively. One man at a table smiled, but no one else seemed to pay attention. Jack slumped his shoulders, looking hangdog, but his act was wasted. No one was looking at him. The French didn’t seem embarrassed by a public quarrel the way Americans would be, nor did they seem interested in it.
Arden kept moving, through a swinging door into a small kitchen crowded already with a middle-aged couple. The man began shouting, adding to the general clamor, but the woman just leaned her cheek on her hand and frankly listened to Arden’s tirade, with a faint reminiscent smile.
Keep moving, that was the secret. They never stopped. Arden acted as if other people were mannequins in a stage set backing her performance. They went out the back door of the kitchen into another alley, where they turned left. Arden kept up whatever she was saying as they ran across the alley, tried two doors, and went through a third. They found themselves in a small storage room where they stopped to catch their breath. They were chest to chest, breathing hard.
“Which way is the—?” Jack panted.
“The what?”
“I don’t know, don’t you have a car or a way out?”
“I’m pretty sure they impounded my car when they arrested me.” She glanced at him. “Don’t give me that look. I got us out, didn’t I?”
“No, I think I did.”
They started out through another small shop, and saw a half-open door. Arden moaned. “Oh, look, a bathroom. I’m sorry, I’ve got to—”
“Go.”
“You first. You were inside longer, I can—”
“Go!”
She went inside. Jack was almost jumping from foot to foot now. He looked around the cluttered room. There was a small plant in a two-foot copper stand. The soil inside looked deep, and dry. Jack stared out the windows. They were alone.
Two minutes later Arden came out. “Okay, your turn. I’ll keep watch.”
“It’s okay. Come on.”
“Don’t you—?”
“No! Come on.”
“Macho man. God, James Bond. I can—”
“Come on!”
“Okay, okay. Wait a minute. What’s that smell?”
“Out, out, we’ve got to get out of here.” He grabbed her hand, hurried her toward the front door. This shop seemed to be closed, or at least empty of people, with the clerk taking a break. Arden looked out the small window beside the front door. A police car pulled up, with that whah-whah-whah European cop car thing. Without another word they ran back inside. They ran toward the back door, heard that same sound.
They looked at each other. No way out. One of them would have to sacrifice himself. Jack saw a small door down a narrow hall. “Quick!” She followed him as he ran. The small door gave, as he knew it would, onto a narrow staircase, going up.
“Come on!”
“Why?” She tugged at his hand. “There’s no way out up there. Why?”
“I don’t know. I always go up.”
As they pounded up the stairs, she asked, “Has this worked out for you in the past?”
Well, no. It was just an instinct. Monkey to the top of the tree. They were probably trapping themselves. But he couldn’t stop. At the top of the stairs they burst out into a hallway, ran down it. Doors left and right. Jack went left, Arden right. A few seconds later they ran into each other back in the hall. “No way—!” they both shouted.
At the end of the hall was a window. They were at it in a second. Down below, there were crashing sounds. Jack raised the window. There was a narrow alley below. Cobblestone street. The promise of broken legs.
They turned back the other way, heard the sounds of people filling the floor below. They stared at each other, the same thoughts crossing both their minds. Too many cops, no way to make a personal connection. “I’ll—” But no plan emerged.
They turned back to the window. Now there was a sound from below. Something filling the alleyway. A small truck that seemed to be filled with straw. Perfect. Jack looked behind them. Arden looked at him. He shook his head. Her eyes met his. They took each other’s hands, each put a foot up on the windowsill, and they stepped out the window. Arden screamed as they stepped.
The scream brought a French police officer, then another, up the stairs and down that hall to the window. The gendarme looked out and saw the truck going by. He screamed, the loudest sound on a noisy street, and everyone looked up at him. Some of his men appeared at the mouth of the alley and halted the truck. The policeman in the window made hand signals. Then he turned and gave explicit instructions to his subordinate, indicating the open doors along the wall. “Make sure they’re not hiding in the rooms, trying to fool us.” The young recruit nodded wisely, eyes narrowing. He stalked into the first bedroom as his captain turned and ran out down the hall.
When the captain reached the ground floor his men had the truck surrounded, the driver out on the sidewalk waving his arms and shouting while everyone ignored him. Another officer explained quickly that all the doors along this alley had been locked. “And we had men at both ends of the alley. There is no way they could have gotten past us.”
The captain nodded intently. He dropped to the ground and peered under the truck. He was a man who didn’t mind getting his uniform dirty in the performance of his duty. No one was clinging to the underside of the truck, but there was some kind of structure there, an extra appendage hanging down.
Plus all that straw in the back. And the cab of the truck itself. “Take it apart,” the captain said brusquely.
There was a shout from the open window that the fugitives had leaped through. The young recruit stood in it, waving his arm. “Not up here,” he cried. The captain waved him down, then stood frozen. Beside the young recruit, attached to the wall, was an old wooden fire escape. It went down, but also up, to the roof. It wasn’t vibrating, there was no obvious sign of passage. Nonetheless, the captain screamed in rage, looking up toward that roof.
As he ran that direction, splitting up his men, he thought, The scream. The woman’s scream. That’s what had drawn him into what he’d done, without even looking upward until now: the scream of a woman jumping out a window, even fading as if she were falling.
It had been perfect.
Two blocks away, Jack and Arden, having gone over the roof of the building and down the other side, had escaped capture for the moment, but they were on foot. Within a minute Arden found a Citroen with keys in it. “Two blocks,” Jack said. “We’ll just drive it a couple of blocks. I’m not stealing a car.”
They got in and took off, Arden driving. Jack looked back and saw a police officer emerge from a side street, putting his hands on his hips and staring first the other direction, then this way. Jack ducked his head. “Six blocks, tops,” he said.
“What do you think, Butch?” Arden and Jack huddled in a shop doorway across from a train station. “Hop a freight, or bluff our way on board?”
“The thing is,” Jack answered immediately, “I really don’t know how to ‘hop’ a train. I don’t even think you can any more. I mean, look at them.”
The few trains they could see waiting in the yard were silver cylinders with no apparent handholds. Sleek and slippery and within a few yards of pulling out they would be going eighty miles an hour. Eventually a hundred and twenty. And no cattle cars or open baggage cars. Probably no unlocked doors one could open from the outside. The movies on which Jack and, apparently, Arden had been raised seemed useless here as training films.
“How hot are we?” Jack asked.
“I feel a little feverish.”
“I mean, I’m just a burglar, and you’re just someone who came to see me. Or did you do something else to get thrown in jail?”
Arden shrugged, which made him give her a double take. “I killed DeGaulle,” she confessed.
“So there’s really probably not that big a manhunt for us. Let’s just go in and buy tickets.”
“You got money? Because they took mine when—”
“Excuse me a second.” Jack went into a men’s room and was gone for a while. When he came out his face was very blank. In one hand he clutched some Euros, and in the other he carried a small key ring. Arden stared at him. “How did you do that? How did you keep anything through a police search?”
“Forget it.”
As he walked past, Arden turned and continued to stare. “I mean, the folding money I understand. But the keys?”
She followed him into the train station and past the ticket windows to a row of lockers. “You’re kidding,” she said aloud.
Jack said nothing. He went into the second row of lockers, mostly hidden from view of passersby, and straight to an upper one. He opened it with the small key and pulled out a wallet, a small cell phone and charger, and an overnight case, black leather, the kind a sophisticated traveler would carry. Jack put the phone into the bag and peered into the locker. He seemed to be looking for something, but didn’t find it.
Arden, hands on hips, said, “You keep a stash in the train depot in Nice?”
Jack closed the locker door. “Doesn’t everybody?”
Jack bought them tickets, feeling as if he were glowing radioactively. Security was much tighter than it had been pre-9/11, but not like an airport. As they moved toward the train Jack looked fidgety.
“What’s the matter?”
“I wish I had my PSPII.” Jack’s fingers were moving involuntarily.
“Just as well you’re leaving it behind,” Arden said carelessly. “That’s probably how they were tracing you all over Europe.”
Jack stopped and stared blankly. As they mounted the stairs he turned and looked back at the moderately busy station. No one seemed to look back at him. Nevertheless, Jack gave his head and shoulders a paranoid duck as he went through the door.
Jack had spent the extra money for a very small private carriage. They didn’t say much until the train was moving. Jack looked out the window, musing. Arden didn’t know everything he had been through in the last twenty-four hours, and didn’t know what he planned now. She had to ask what he was thinking.
Jack looked up at her. “You left Yvette locked in the jail.”
“We needed to distract the guard.”
“We could have knocked him unconscious, taken his gun, and brought her with us. She could have been useful.”
Arden stood up and looked back at him over her shoulder. “Oops,” she said, and went out the door of the compartment, heading for the communal bathroom.