I returned to our hotel and got quietly into bed next to Molly, who was sleeping soundly.
Troubled and sleepless, I got out of bed, fetched the copy of Allen Dulles’s memoirs that Molly’s father had left to me, and began to leaf through it aimlessly. It isn’t even that great a book, but it was all I had in the hotel room, and I needed to run my eyes over something, needed to distract my whirling thoughts. I skimmed a passage about the Jedburghs, who were parachuted into France; and about Sir Francis Walsingham, who was Queen Elizabeth’s spymaster in the sixteenth century.
I looked again over the codes that Hal Sinclair had left for us, for me, to find, and I thought about his cryptic note in the vault in Zurich that told of a safe-deposit box in a bank on the Boulevard Raspail.
And I thought, for the millionth time, about Molly’s father and the secrets he had bequeathed us, the secrets within secrets. I wondered…
It was a hunch more than anything else, certainly nothing well grounded, that inspired me to get out of bed a second time and retrieve a razor blade from my shaving kit.
Publishers in America used to print books of a higher quality in the old days, and by the old days I mean as recently as 1963. Underneath the gray, red, and yellow jacket of The Craft of Intelligence, the heavy pasteboard case was covered with a fine-woven cloth and embossed with the publisher’s insignia. The binding was sewn, not glued, of black and white cloth. I examined the jacketless book, turning it over and over and inspecting it from all angles.
Could it be? How clever was the old spymaster anyway?
Carefully, I sliced open the binding with the razor blade. I lifted back the black cloth of the binding, peeled away the brown kraft paper liner, and there it was, glinting at me like a beacon, a signal from Harrison Sinclair’s grave.
It was a small, oddly shaped brass key stamped with the number 322: the key to what I assumed was the explanation, the answer to the mystery, somewhere in a vault on the Boulevard Raspail in Paris.
FIFTY-FOUR
We strode quickly along the rue de Grenelle the next morning toward the Boulevard Raspail and the Banque de Raspail.
“An assassination is scheduled to occur in two days, Ben,” Molly said. “Two days! We don’t know who the victim will be; all we know is that unless the surprise witness testifies, we’re all as good as dead.”
Two days: I knew it; I thought of the ticking clock virtually all the time. But I didn’t reply.
A neatly dressed older man in a blue overcoat walked toward us, his short white hair slicked back, brown almond eyes behind rectangular glasses. He smiled politely. I glanced in the window of a storefront marked IMPRIMERIE, which featured a display of cartes de visite pinned on a corkboard, samples of their handiwork. In the glass I caught the reflection of a woman, admired her figure, and then realized it was Molly; and then saw the reflection of a small red and white Austin Mini Cooper moving along slowly behind us.
I froze.
I had seen that same car from our hotel window last night. How many other little red Austins were there with white tops?
“Shit,” I exclaimed, slapping my hand against my forehead in a large, theatrical motion.
“What?”
“I forgot something.” I pointed in back of me without turning. “We’ve got to go back to the hotel. Do you mind?”
“What’d you forget?”
I took her arm. “Come on.”
Shaking my head, I pulled her around and walked back up the street toward the hotel. The Austin, which I now saw in a quick, furtive glance was being driven by a young bespectacled man in a dark suit, sped up and disappeared down the street.
“You forget the documents or something?” Molly asked as I turned the key in the room door. I put a finger to my lips.
She gave me a worried glance.
I closed and locked the door, immediately tossing my leather portfolio on the bed. I emptied it of the sets of documents, then held it up to the light, unzipping each compartment, running my fingers along each fold, scrutinizing it closely.
Molly mouthed one word: What?
I said aloud, “We’re being followed.”
She looked at me questioningly.
“It’s okay, Molly. You can talk now.”
“Of course we’re being followed,” she said, exasperated. “We’ve been followed since-”
“Since when?”
She stopped, frowned. “I don’t know.”
“Think. Since when?”
“Jesus, Ben, you’re-”
“-the expert. I know. All right. There was someone waiting for me when I arrived in Rome. I was tailed pretty much constantly in Rome. Lost them in Tuscany, I assume.”
“In Zurich-”
“Right. We were followed in Zurich, to the bank and afterward. Probably in Munich, though it’s hard to tell. But I sure as hell wasn’t followed last night.”
“How do you know?”
“Well, the truth is, I don’t know for absolute certain. But I was pretty damned careful, and I walked around a bit after I met with the documents guy, and if there was any indication, I sure as hell didn’t see it. And I’m trained to look for this sort of thing. That skill doesn’t go away no matter how much patent law you practice.”
“So what are you saying?”
“That you were followed.”
“And that’s supposed to be my fault? We left the airport together, you had the taxi take a pretty circuitous route-you said you were sure we weren’t being followed. And I didn’t leave the hotel.”
“Let me see your purse.”
She handed it to me, and I dumped the contents onto the bed. She watched in dismay. I went through everything carefully, then inspected the purse and its lining. I examined, too, the heels of our shoes; unlikely, though, since they hadn’t been out of our sight. No.
Nothing.
“I guess I’m like your black cat,” she said.
“More like the bell on a sheep,” I said distractedly. “Ah.”
“What?”
I reached over and carefully lifted her locket and chain off her neck, pulling it up and over her head. I popped the round gold case open, and saw inside only the ivory cameo.
“For God’s sake, Ben, what are you looking for? A bug or something?”
“I figured it was worth a look, right?” I handed it back to her, and then a thought occurred to me, and I took it back.
I popped the locket open again, then looked very closely at the inside of the lid. “What’s inscribed on the inside of this?” I asked.
She closed her eyes, trying to recall. “Nothing. The inscription’s on the back.”
“Right,” I said. “Which made it pretty easy.”
“Easy for what?”
I had a small jeweler’s tool attached to my key chain, which was on the bed, and I grabbed it and inserted the tiny beveled screwdriver into the lid. A gold disc, roughly the size of a quarter and about an eighth of an inch thick, popped out. Attached to it was a tiny coil of wire almost as thin as a human hair.
“Not a bug,” I said. “A transmitter. A miniaturized homing device with a range of up to six or seven miles. Emits an RF signal.”
Molly gaped at me.
“When Truslow’s people captured you in Boston, you were wearing this, weren’t you?”
She took a long while to respond. “Yes…”
“And then, when they sent you to Italy, they returned this to you with the rest of your things.”
“Yes…”
“Well, then. Of course. Of course they wanted you with me. For all our precautions, they’ve known our location every second. At least, every second you’ve had the locket with you.”
“Right now, too?”
I answered slowly, wishing not to alarm her any more than necessary. “Yeah,” I said. “I’d say it’s a pretty fair guess they know where we are right now.”