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.
She wore a black skirt, cut well above the knee, comfortable and flexible in case she needed to run for her life later. A light rain fell outside and added a gloss to the Boulevard Montparnasse. Against the rain she wore a pair of chic leather boots, which she had bought late that afternoon in a shop across the street from her lodgings. The boots were supple and flexible while still looking sharp.
They spoke Italian. “LaDuca” meant “the duchess” in Italian, Rizzo noted, a quirk he liked. He asked about the origin of her name. She explained about her father. She shied away from other personal information, however, and he did too; one never knew when a listening device had been dropped. But he did speak of his boyhood, growing up in the slums of Rome, learning English from his father who had been in a POW camp and how he had done his own stint in the Italian army. He amused her with a tale of blowing up a bridge in Spain in the 1970s, part of a prearranged NATO training exercise, but no one had warned the Spanish police.
“It all got blamed on the Basques,” he said with a snort, following an account of how his brigade of Italians had to hightail it to France in their socks.
In return, she told him about Venezuela and the slaughter in Barranco Lajoya. He listened seriously and offered condolences. They did not discuss Kiev. He knew the details of her loss and stayed away from the subject.
Things were playing out in her mind in three dimensions now. The first was the present, in a nostalgia-laden restaurant on Paris’s Left Bank where the relics of eighty years ago-in addition to the painting on the pillars, portraits of Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Kiki of Montparnasse, Man Ray, and Foujita-haunted the walls. Amidst this, Jean sat near the door, poised and intent, his eyes fixed on comings and goings.
The second dimension was one step beyond the immediate present, the notion that at any given moment a bullet could find her, putting her into the same earthly blackness that had consumed Robert. For the first time, she really considered what death would be like. It occurred to her that she might have just days, hours, or minutes to live.
But beyond that, even as she conversed with Rizzo in the forefront of her mind, her mind played out its own recent memories. This evening had taken on its own madness and it gripped her. She thought of Robert and his funeral, of the chaos in Kiev, and the massacre in Barranco Lajoya, and she thought of the six slain missionaries, Father Martin, and her friends back in Washington who would probably be playing basketball that night.
Then dinner was finished. She was conscious of the Glock she wore on her hip, concealed carefully under a light jacket.
She reminded herself that she had loaded the weapon and even chambered the first round. The Glock had a concealed hammer, but it was there, back and ready to fall and fire the round. All that prevented it doing so was the safety catch, which she could snap to “fire” with her thumb as she drew the weapon. This practice was dangerous, but the second or two needed for the operation of the slide to chamber the first round might make all the difference between-it was best not to think about what came after “between.” In her mind she went through the reflexive motions of using it.