When you’re pursued, the biggest mistake you can make is to give in to ancient, atavistic human survival instincts like the fight-or-flight response that saved the lives of our cavemen ancestors. Instinct makes you react predictably, and predictability is the enemy.
Instead, you put yourself into your opponent’s mind, calculate as you think he would, even if it means crediting him with more intelligence than he possesses.
So what would he do?
Just about now, if the door did not yield, he’d search out the nearest alternate entrance. No doubt one would be nearby. He’d enter the station, put himself in my head, decide whether I would choose to leave the station for the street-no, too risky-or whether I would attempt to lose myself in the maze of corridors (a good possibility), or whether I would try to put the greatest distance possible between myself and him, and find the nearest train (an even better possibility).
And then, calculating, he would double back, eliminate the best (and therefore most obvious) escape route… and search for me in the concourses. Anywhere but a train platform.
I scanned the crowds. A stringy-haired teenage girl nearby was singing in French-accented English, in a dreadful twittering imitation of Edith Piaf, “On the Street Where You Live,” against a synthesized background of swelling strings and angelic obbligatos emanating from a Casio machine. People were tossing francs at the coat spread out on the floor before her, more out of pity, I guessed, than appreciation.
Everyone seemed to be moving purposively somewhere. Best I could tell, no one inside the station was coming after me.
So where was he?
The station was a bewildering array of orange correspondences signs and blue sortie signs, with trains headed toward dozens of different destinations: Pont de Neuilly, Créteil-Préfecture. Saint-Rémy-Les-Chevreuse, Porte d’Orléans, Château de Vincennes… And not just the regular Métro trains, but also the RER, the Réseau Express Régional rapid commuter trains to and from the Parisian suburbs. The place was huge, sprawling, bewildering, endless. And that was to my advantage.
For a few more seconds, at least.
I headed in the direction my pursuer would consider most obvious, and therefore-perhaps-least likely: the way the greatest flow of traffic seemed to be heading. Direction Château de Vincennes and Port de Neuilly.
To the right of the long row of turnstiles was an area marked PASSAGE INTERDIT that was cordoned off with a chain. I sprinted toward it, got a running start, and vaulted over it. A long line of people holding copies of Pariscope snaked around a booth selling half-price theater tickets (Ticket Kiosque Theater: “Les places du jour á moitié prix”), beside an odd bronze statue of a man and a woman, both artistically misshapen, reaching forlornly toward each other. I flew past an exit to the Centre Georges Pompidou and the Forum des Halles, past a cluster of three policemen equipped with walkie-talkies, guns, and nightsticks, who looked up at me with suspicion.
Two of them snapped to attention and began to run after me, shouting.
I came to an abrupt halt at a row of tall pneumatic doors, which couldn’t be surmounted.
But that’s why God invented the Sortie de Secours, the security entrance for officials only, toward which I swerved, and then, to the audible alarm of a gaggle of Métro workers, bolted through.
The shouts crescendoed behind me. A shrill traffic whistle trilled.
A clattering of footsteps.
Past a Sock Shop, then a flower stand (“Promotion-10 tulipes 35F”).
Now I came to a very long corridor, through which a set of moving conveyor belts-“people movers,” I believe they’re called-were carrying pedestrians up a gradual incline. The adjacent belt carried people back the other way, down in the direction from which I’d come. Between the two conveyor belts was a waist-high meter-wide band of metal that flowed uphill like an endless steel carpet runner.
I glanced around, and saw that the Métro security officers clambering after me were now joined by a solitary, dark-suited figure vastly outpacing them, approaching me with frightening speed, as I found myself wedged in a crowd of people who were not moving, letting the steel and rubber conveyors do all the work. Stuck.
The man in the dark suit: the exact one I wanted to lose.
And as he came closer, and I once again turned to gauge the distance that separated us, I realized that I had seen the face before.
His heavy, black-framed glasses only partially obscured the yellowish circles under his eyes. His fedora was gone, lost in the chase no doubt, revealing his thin, pale blond hair combed straight back. Gaunt, ghostly pale, thin pale lips.
On Marlborough Street in Boston.
Outside the bank in Zurich.
The same man, no question about it. A man who probably knew a great deal about me.
And a man-the thought was chilling-who took few if any pains to disguise himself.
He didn’t care if I recognized him.
He wanted me to recognize him.
I wriggled past the bottleneck of people, elbowing them out of my way, and leapt up onto the metal runner between the conveyor belts.
Stumbling, I realized that the metal surface was broken every foot or so by jutting blades of steel, put there, I was sure, to make what I was trying to do-run atop it-difficult.
Difficult, but not impossible.
What had the woman in Zurich called him?
Max.
All right, old friend, I thought.
Come after me, “Max.”
Whatever you want, come and get it.
Try.
SIXTY-ONE
Unthinkingly, I ran.
Along the metallic ledge, uphill. Around me, from either side, were gasps and screams and shouts-Who’s the madman? A criminal? What is he escaping? The answer was supplied immediately to anyone who looked a short distance down the commuter beltway and saw the uniformed officers, trilling their whistles like a French version of the Keystone Kops, wriggling through the crowds.
And now, doubtless to the amazement of onlookers, not one but two men were loping along the metal ledge, the one desperately trying to elude the other.
Max. The killer.
Barely thinking about what I was doing, I vaulted across the opposing lane of descending commuters, gaining a tenuous foothold for a second or two before I leapt over the glass siding and down, a good ten feet, to the deep stairwell below, and bounded up the stairs. I couldn’t risk looking back, couldn’t risk breaking my stride for even a second, and so I simply ran as fast as my weakened ankles would take me, all sound around me drowned out by the incessant, rapid staccato of my heartbeat, the wheezing intake and expulsion of breath from my lungs. Way up ahead of me, at the top of the stairs, was a blue sign: DIRECTION PONT DE NEUILLY. A beacon. I was a greyhound chasing a rabbit; I was a prisoner making a jailbreak. I was, in my fevered brain, anything, anything inspirational, anything that would keep me going, through the pain, ignoring my body’s screams to stop, trying to block out the silkily seductive siren calls-Give up, Ben. They won’t hurt you. You can’t win anyway, can’t outrun them, you’re outnumbered, just make it easy on yourself and give it up.
No.
He will not hesitate to “hurt” me, I replied in my manic internal dialogue. He will do what it takes.
A narrow escalator loomed just up ahead, at the top of the stairs.
Where were the… pursuers?
I allowed myself a quick glance around, a snap of the head before I headed up the escalator.