“And that would be me,” she assumed evenly. “The target for Comrade Kaspar.”
“That would be you,” McKinnon said.
“We’d rather get him here in Europe than have him find his way into the US and come after you there,” Cerny said.
Alex looked at the three men at the table, plus the observer, and gave them an ironic shake of the head. “What are you asking me to do now?” she asked.
McKinnon looked to Rizzo.
“We have some informers among the Ukrainians in the local underworld,” he said. “We have the ability to let Kaspar know you’re in Paris. We’ve already done that. The information he received indicated that you’re on a trade mission for the Treasury Department. We have a safe apartment for you to stay in. Near rue Mazarine. Fine neighborhood, about a two-minute walk to the river. We’d set a security ring around you. When he comes looking for you, we hit him.”
“So you’ve made me a target,” she said. “Again.”
Silence around the room. “Not much we can do about it at this point, LaDuca,” McKinnon said. “You’ll be compensated well for this.”
“Well or posthumously?” she asked, her displeasure growing.
“Better to get him on our terms rather than his own,” Cerny said. “We think he’s here for maybe two more days. If he knows you’re here and where you might be found, he’ll come into our view. Then we strike.”
“What about Federov?” she asked.
“We have no idea where he is now. He’s kept a low profile since Kiev. We can’t account for how many passports he might have.”
“Or what names they’re under,” McKinnon added.
In her mind, she was putting it together. “The date of the ‘hit’ in Paris, when someone was killed by our people under a false identity. Wasn’t that January second?”
Cerny answered. “Yes, it was.”
“And the file came to me four days later in Washington,” she said. “So that was the start of your next attempt to get Federov?”
Cerny again. “You could call it that.”
“Then six weeks later, the president is in Kiev, I’m supposed to keep tabs on Federov, and we’re trying to look like we’re negotiating a peace with him. And you guys are looking for new ways to hit him, but he beats you and takes a shot at the president instead. Lucky for you he missed.”
“Well,” Cerny said, “you know what they say. If the shoe fits, wear it.”
Alex considered her part in the near endgame, that of the bait in a trap. “And my alternative is?” Alex asked.
“As we said, wait for months, years. You never know where he’ll turn up.”
Cerny, McKinnon, and Rizzo escorted Alex to her lodging, which was a small two-room apartment on the rue Guénégaud in the sixth arrondissement. The apartment was toward the middle of the block in an old building with two huge blue doors at street level. The River Seine was a hundred yards to the north and the intersection with the rue Mazarine a hundred feet to the south.
They went there in the late afternoon. Alex studied the logistics, not a bad idea since her life depended on them. Two flights to walk up, one key to open the door. The door was reinforced from the inside, steel slabs that would bolt all the way across, a steel frame reinforcing the security from within.
There were shutters that would close on the two windows that overlooked the street. No point to be a target from across the street or a rooftop. When Alex inspected them, she saw that they too were reinforced with metal.
She put her foot to the ragged carpet in the apartment to test the floorboards. The wooden floor and steps in the hallway outside had creaked and sung like a choir with every footfall. The floor under the carpet was stable. She could have jumped on it and it wouldn’t have given a vibration.
“Concrete?” she asked.
“Above and below.”
That didn’t protect her from a bomb, but it definitely made one impractical. She checked the rear window. It was barred, though the bars could be unbolted from inside in case of fire. Cerny also explained that there was no access to the building from the roof. No exit from that direction either.
McKinnon gave her a new cell phone, specially designed. Someone on her surveillance team would be on it twenty-four seven. She didn’t even have to dial. Just open it and talk. It had a camera and a tracking device. She may have been a target, but she was a high-tech one.
“I’ll warn you,” Cerny said. “We’d put you in body armor, but then any shooter who detected it would sense the trap and aim for the head. So what good would that do?”
“We think he’ll come after you right away, LaDuca,” McKinnon said. “Probably tomorrow, maybe even during the day. For whatever reason, there seems to be some urgency in getting you killed.”
“I’m flattered,” she said with irony. “What in God’s name is it they think I know that even I don’t know?”
“We have no idea,” McKinnon said.
“What if he comes after me tonight?”
“We’re ready,” Cerny said. “We have backup teams all over the city. Stay in touch by phone and we’ll lead you to the nearest help if you need it.”
“It doesn’t take more than a second or two to fire a bullet,” she said.
“But it takes a while to set up a shot on a moving target in a city,” McKinnon said. “Kaspar is not on a suicide mission. He wants to hit you and get away. That makes him vulnerable. Even more vulnerable than you since he’s not watching for us.”
She was to go out to dinner with Lt. Rizzo that evening in Montparnasse at La Coupole, the atmospheric old haunt of Hemingway and the expatriate American writers of the 1920s. He would pick her up by car and drop her off after dinner. Rizzo would be her escort and act as her bodyguard also.
In the evening Cerny introduced her to a Frenchman named Maurice, a lanky Parisian cop who did extracurricular stuff the same way Rizzo did. Maurice was unshaven in a leather jacket and jeans. He didn’t seem to be the brightest man she’d ever met.
In any case, Maurice would be posted in the entrance foyer of her building, keeping an eye on whoever went in and out, while another local guy named Jean, whom she met at the same time, would watch the entrance at the restaurant. At the end of their twelve-hour shifts, others would rotate on and off.
“Do I get a weapon to defend myself in case you guys screw up again?” she asked.
Cerny reached to his attaché case. He pulled out a box and handed it to Alex.
She opened it and found a Glock 9 with twenty-one rounds of ammunition, enough for a full clip plus a half dozen for good luck. She hefted it in her hand and looked around the table.
“Looks exactly like mine,” she said suspiciously. “The one I own back in Washington.” She continued to examine it. “Even has the same little nicks as mine. Imagine that.”
“What could make you feel more secure than having your own weapon?”
She looked at them angrily, not surprised. “If I knew you were going to burglarize me, I could have used some clothing changes too.”
They weren’t sure whether she was joking or not.
“You guys better know what you’re doing this time,” she said. “I can only be shot at so many times before I get hit.”
She clipped the holster to her waist of her skirt on the right side. There seemed no end to what had been put in motion in January.
SEVENTY-NINE
At La Coupole, Alex sat across the table from Lt. Rizzo. The restaurant, which dated from the twenties, was pure art deco, with characteristic light fixtures on the many square pillars that held up the ceiling of the large, not-very-intimate room. Above the light fixtures were paintings that had been done by local artists in exchange for food and, more probably, drink all those decades ago. Alex wondered which, if any, of them had lived full, happy lives pursuing their muse.