“The question is,” Latham said, “do the kidnappers know that?”
The discussion continued for a few more minutes before coming around to the media storm the kidnapping was sure to create. Oliver told the group, “We’ve assigned an FBI spokesperson to Mr. Root; she’ll pose as a family attorney. For his part, Mr. Root’s agreed to not speak to the press without checking with us first. Whoever these people are, they’ll be watching the television.”
The FBI director nodded and looked around. “Any questions?” There were none. “Mr. Barber, Ms. Fitzpatrick, Charlie, thanks for coming. I’ll be sure to keep you updated.”
Once the room was empty except for McBride and Oliver, the director leaned back in his chair and sighed. “Jesus.”
“Yeah,” said Oliver.
“What’s this about physical evidence?” asked McBride.
“We’ve got boot prints,” Oliver replied. “Inside and out. Whether they’ll be enough to point us somewhere, I don’t know. The lab’s working on them.”
“What about the bodies?”
“The coroner should have something for us this afternoon, but his first impression was the bullets used were soft-nosed. We’ll be lucky to recover anything bigger than a sliver.”
Score another one for the bad guys, McBride thought Oliver was right — these people were professionals, from top to bottom. An image popped into his head: One by one, each of the Roots’ guards ambushed from behind, made to kneel in the dirt, feeling the cold steel of the barrel against the back of his head … Joe suppressed a shiver.
Oliver’s cell phone trilled. He answered, listened, then hung up. “They’ve found something near the scene,” he explained, then looked at McBride. “You up for a ride?”
“Let’s go.”
5
Knowing time was against him, Tanner booked a pair of tickets on the Concorde. Flying at Mach 2 and sixty thousand feet, the supersonic plane would make the Atlantic crossing in half the time of standard commercial flights. Whether an extra five hours would make a difference, Tanner wasn’t sure, but with Susanna’s trail two weeks old he needed every advantage he could get, real or notional.
Three hours and twenty minutes after leaving New York, the Concorde began a banking descent, circling Paris and heading northeast toward Charles de Gaulle. Tanner glanced out the window, picking out landmarks below: the Arc de Triomphe surrounded by its wagon wheel of radiating streets; Notre Dame cathedral with its Gothic flying buttresses jutting from the middle of the Seine; the Institut de Monde Arabe, its glass wall of sixteen hundred photosenstive irises winking in the sun like a sheet of faceted diamonds; and of course the ubiquitous Eiffel Tower and its gridwork of brown steel rising a thousand feet above the skyline.
Paris is split roughly in half by the Seine, with the Left and Right Banks — the Rive Gauche and the Rive Droite — serving not only as geographical dividers but also cultural, though such differences have faded into cliché over time. Where the Left Bank was once traditionally home to struggling artists and the poor and the Right Bank was reserved for the well heeled and socially elite, the lines have blurred. Prostitutes are as likely to be seen strolling the steps of the Louvre as they are in a back alley of the Latin Quarter.
Surrounded by a ring highway called the Peripherique and divided into twenty arrondissements, or municipal wards, which begin at the city’s center and spiral clock-wise outward, Paris is in many ways twenty cities within a city, as each arrondissement has its own mayor, police, and fire department, as well as its own web of customs and traditions.
For Tanner, of all the European cities he’d visited, none had the same feel of Paris, a finely balanced ambiance that was at once medieval and modem. One minute you can be wandering the dim back alleys of the Marais — literally, the Swamp Quarter — the next emerging into clamorous, bumper-to-bumper traffic on the Rue de Turenne. Turn another corner and you’re eating a lunch of pastrami and borscht at a Jewish-Algerian cafe overlooking the Place des Vosges, a park that centuries ago served as a jousting ground for knights of rival houses.
Somewhere down there, amid the labyrinth of alleys, the glass and chrome skyscrapers, and the thousand-year-old boulevards, Susanna Vetsch was lost. She’d turned herself into a chameleon, slipped into the underworld of Paris, and disappeared.
Once on the ground, they went through customs, picked up their bags, and found a taxi at the curb. “Bonjour,” the driver said. “Où?”
Tanner said to Cahil, “You have a preference?”
Bear looked up from his phrase book. “Huh?”
“Never mind. Hotel Les Ste. Beuve, s’il vous plaît,” Tanner told the driver. “Rue Ste. Beuve.”
“Trois cent.”
“Non,” Tanner said, wagging a finger at him. “Deux.”
“Oh, monsieur, je proteste! Un surcharge spéciale—”
“Non,” Tanner repeated. “Deux!” From hard-won experience Tanner knew Parisians loved to barter and argue, and considered it all nothing more than good-natured sport. Quoting an inflated fare had simply been the driver’s way of engaging them. If he’d gotten the price, all the better; on the other hand, had Tanner pushed the matter — and done so with admirable flare — he might have even finagled a discount. As he’d read in a travelogue once, “There’s no better compliment than to be singled out for an argument by a Parisian.”
The driver gave a Gallic shrug and smiled. “D’accord.”
As they pulled into traffic, Cahil was riffling through his Berlitz phrase book. “What was that, I didn’t catch that.” Of Bear’s many skills, a long-term memory for languages was not one. He picked up phrases well enough to travel discreetly, but he promptly forgot them once back home.
Tanner owed his ear for languages to his parents, Henry and Irene. From the age of seven until he entered high school in Maine, Briggs lived in a dozen different countries and saw a dozen more as his father, a teacher with a cross-cultural outreach program, led them around the globe. Employing some maternal magic Tanner had never quite understood, his mother had always managed to make their house, flat, bungalow, or tent into a home. By the time Tanner became a teenager, he was well rounded, tenaciously curious, and self-assured, having seen and experienced things his peers had only read about in books.
“What was he saying?” Cahil asked.
“He was trying to pad the fare. Have you learned anything useful with that?”
“It’s a fount of knowledge. Here try this: Pouvez-vous traiter mon animal contre les tiques et les vers? There, what do you think of that?”
Before Tanner could answer, the driver barked over his shoulder, “Aucuns animaux ont permis!” No pets allowed!
“What did you say to him?” Tanner asked.
Bear consulted his dictionary and recited, “Can you treat my pet for ticks and worms?”
“Very handy.”
“You never know.”
Tanner had been in Paris in half a dozen times before, but never for more than three days at a time, so his memories of the city were disjointed, bits of recollections and remembered landmarks which he used to reorient himself whenever he returned. He navigated the city like a coastal sailor, taking his bearings from nearby landmarks and adjusting his course accordingly. Once down to the level of alleys and side streets, it became a matter of trusting that his mental compass would return him to the familiar. Each time he came to Paris as a transient, he vowed to return when he had more time, turn off his mental compass, and wander the quarters without worrying about getting somewhere.