Breakfast was taken from a neighborhood boulangerie, rolls and a tall coffee, and Slaton carried it less than two blocks to reach his destination. He’d scouted the area methodically last night after drawing mental lines between Zavier Baland’s home and his office. There were any number of routes Baland might take on his way to work, but one particular intersection seemed a necessity before the options broadened.
There were never absolutes in predictive surveillance. Baland wouldn’t walk to work every day. Not when it was raining or when he had a breakfast meeting across town. Not when a sick child had to be taken to a doctor’s appointment. A given target’s habits often took weeks, even months to establish. That being the case, Slaton was fully prepared for failure. If Baland did not appear before nine this morning, he would go back to his room and contact Talia for updates. Then he would return tomorrow morning a few minutes earlier.
He scouted out positions along Avenue Pasteur, ending at the intersection of the far busier Boulevard Saint-Denis. By 7:25, with a newspaper and breakfast in hand, he was scanning the busy sidewalks from a bench in the Parc de Bécon, a charming municipal garden that graced the banks of the Seine. He occasionally referenced his phone, even though it was not powered up—it was fast becoming a more typical pastime to stare at a screen than to bury oneself in the terrible truths of Le Monde.
With a good line of sight down the length of Avenue Pasteur, Slaton visualized the face he hoped would appear. Instead of the recent pictures, however, he found himself going back fifteen years. The kills came back often enough in his dreams, so he rarely conjured them at will, but the old sight picture was unshakable in his mind: Samir alone at a table, smiling at a pretty waitress. Reading a newspaper and sitting perfectly still. Slaton could almost feel the tension in his finger, the mechanical action and recoil. Then two seconds of chaos. After taking one glimpse at the aftermath through his optic, he’d broken down his gun and egressed. A hit, yes. But had Samir survived?
8:01.
Slaton canvassed the buildings around him. Across the street was a six-by-ten array of apartments, each with two windows, and rows of trellises and planters filled the roof above. On the opposite corner he saw a different kind of roof, full of ductwork and ventilators, and a pharmacy at street level. A building acutely to his right was under construction, a warren of good hides for a shooter, but also busy work crews who were at this hour beginning their day. Slaton admonished himself for getting ahead of things. One step at a time.
8:06.
He noticed a man approaching on Avenue Pasteur. The timing was right, as was the height and build. The stride suggested a man in decent shape, about the right age, and on his way to work. Purposeful, but not in a rush. He was wearing an overcoat and carried a small attaché.
At seventy yards Slaton was curious.
At sixty he was interested.
He had exceptional eyesight, and as the man paused at the crosswalk, forty yards away, there was no longer any doubt. He was looking at Ali Samir—alias Zavier Baland.
* * *
At that same moment, as Slaton sat watching Baland, a single eye was locked firmly on him through the lens of a small camera. Not seventy yards from where he sat, across Boulevard Saint-Denis, an amorphous figure lay prone on an ill-kept garden rooftop. Soon her method of observation changed: she put down the camera, trading its viewfinder for the magnified scope on a compact rifle.
The watcher had arrived as she had for each of the last three mornings, by way of a fire escape ladder in the back alley. The garden around her was little more than a skeleton of pottery and dirt, a few wistful brown stalks remembering September. It all would be spectacular again in May, but whoever tended it—no doubt one of the tenants in the flats below—had clearly surrendered for the season.
The watcher was virtually invisible as she lay squeezed between rows of wooden planting boxes. She was good at shooting from concealed positions, and had done her share of it. New, however, was the flutter she’d felt in her stomach forty minutes ago. That was when she’d seen the tall man across the street take up a bench with a commanding view of the intersection. There was a second tingle as she’d watched him linger over a newspaper and coffee, yet she told herself it might be nothing at all. The problem was that she’d never set eyes on the man she was looking for—few had, and many of those were no longer of this earth. According to legend, the kidon had been killed … twice, actually … but rumors to the contrary lingered. She had to be sure.
She’d gone to great lengths to flush him out, knowing a better chance might never come. There had still been no word from the men she’d dispatched halfway around the world. Not that she was surprised. The flash drive had been her insurance. If it was the kidon, and if he came to Paris seeking Baland, this was where he would start. She knew because this was where she would have started. Baland, in all his obstinate predictability, had made his own hunter predictable.
But is that who I’m looking at? Or is it only the hope of so many years?
She’d taken one distant photo, but now she studied his face behind the aiming reticle, the thin cross centered on his head. She shifted to his chest and saw no bulkiness to suggest body armor. If it was him, why would he bother? He thinks he is the hunter.
With a glance at her watch, she looked down at a more acute angle. Right on schedule, the soon-to-be chief of DGSI appeared at the corner. Baland paused for traffic, then crossed the street into the park. She watched the man on the bench intently through her Zeiss scope and curled her finger around the trigger. She studied his face intently, but his features gave away little. He might be Israeli, but given his fair hair she would have guessed him to be a Swede or a German. Whatever he was, his food wrappers and newspaper went into the trash as Baland passed no more than twenty feet from where he sat.
The man in her viewfinder stood and began walking toward the park. The flutter became a wave. After so many years, could it really be true? Was this the man she’d been looking for? It wasn’t a certainty, not one hundred percent. In that moment, however, she decided it was enough. If it was the kidon, Baland might never reemerge from the park. And if that came to pass—her best chance would be lost.
Her finger began the subtle pressure on the trigger. The man was moving at a casual walking pace, and so she added a small leading correction. More pressure, her finger on the cool metal. The noise from the street below seemed to disappear. Her breathing paused. Then, in the instant before the expected recoil, her view was obliterated.
She pulled back from the scope and saw an aqua-and-white city bus drawing to a stop, its bulky frame ruining her line of sight to the path. She let loose a venomous string of hushed expletives. There was nothing to do but wait. She tried to predict where her target would reappear. After what seemed an interminable pause, the bus finally pulled away. Seeing no one with her naked eye, she used the scope to scan the path until it disappeared beneath a canopy of trees. She saw no one. Her chance was gone.
Malika muttered in Arabic and began breaking down her weapon. She tried to tell herself it might be for the best. She hadn’t been completely sure. Ninety-five percent, at best. Yet if it was the kidon, might he be reaching for his own weapon at that moment? Perhaps he would be stymied by some similar roadblock. Or he might only be laying the groundwork for tomorrow or the next day. Wasn’t that how a professional would go about it?
So many questions.
At that moment, however, Malika was certain of two things. The man she had just seen was an operator. And he was following Zavier Baland.