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Dubois waited for an hour after Marie left and then he made his move. He hadn’t expected her to contact him, so he wasn’t surprised not to hear how her efforts to warn Renault and Noir had fared, though it did leave him worrying.
He wasn’t idle while he waited, he had plenty to do to keep him occupied. Most of his arrangements had been made shortly after he began selling information to Renault, but he still had last minute things to take care of.
The first thing he did was pull the curtains to keep the watching surveillance team from seeing anything of what he did. He then sat at the powerful desktop computer system he had built, where he used a back door he had built into the system when he worked there to access the Interpol Records Department. Once he was in, he uploaded a program he had prepared, a program which altered his and Marie’s personnel files; the program made minor alterations to the photos, fingerprints, DNA, and other identification records contained within both their files, which would make it more difficult for his colleagues to catch or identify them.
While the program did its job, he retrieved a memory stick he had taped to the underside of his desk. The memory stick held a virus, which he had paid someone else to write since it was beyond his programming skills, and it went to work the moment he plugged it in.
He left the virus to do its deadly work, destroying every file and scrap of information it encountered, both on his system and on the Interpol database, and made his way into the bathroom, where he got on his knees so he could reach under the tub to remove one of the floor tiles. From the cavity he revealed he took out a wrapped package.
After replacing the tile, not that he needed to, he carried the package into the living room, where he pulled off the waterproof wrapping. Inside was a pair of pistols, with extra ammunition clips, two passports, with matching drivers’ licences and credit cards, and a large bundle of Euros.
The small collection of items was only a fraction of what he would need to successfully evade Interpol and the efforts they would inevitably make to find both him and Marie long term. The rest of what he needed was kept in a locker at the airport, with similar bundles, differing only in the names used, in other places. Arranging everything had been costly and time-consuming, but he hadn’t wanted to take a chance on having only one escape package in case it was compromised.
Dubois emptied his wallet of the cards it currently contained, all in his real name, and replaced them with the ones in his false identity, Helmut Kroeger. He then stuffed the Euros, spare ammunition, and Marie’s false identification into his pocket. The guns, which were unregistered and untraceable, went into the waistband of his trousers, one at the front and the other at the back. He didn’t anticipate needing to use either weapon, let alone both, and he hoped he wouldn’t have to resort to them, but he wanted them available, just in case.