“Others would take its place.”
The little man nodded sagely. “Not quickly. Not efficiently. And certainly not in France.”
“For France,” Riemé had said softly.
During the next five days, the plan, at once simple and yet stunning in its savagery, emerged. The LPN in Paris had made the arrangements, and Riemé was on his way.
It was just before midnight when Riemé rose from his chair and took off his shirt, laying it aside. Across the cabin, he opened one of his suitcases and extracted a thin, rubber life vest with a carbon-dioxide cartridge, which he donned. Then he put his shirt back on, making sure it totally hid the vest. If he was seen on deck, he wanted no one to notice it.
Next he unpacked a few of his clothes and scattered them around the room, leaving his wallet and passport lying conspicuously on the small writing table, as if he meant to return to his cabin. He would no longer need them, however.
At the door he listened, and when he heard nothing except the ever-present throb of the ship’s diesels, he opened the door and slipped out.
He hurried down the corridor and out the hatch onto the main deck, where he waited for several moments.
There was no one about. Most of the passengers were already asleep in their cabins; only a few of them were in the bar forward.
Riemé moved aft, keeping in the shadows close to the bulkheads so that the officers on duty above on the bridge would have no chance of spotting him. The sound of the ship’s engines was much louder at the stern, and he could hear the prop churning the water twenty feet below the rail.
Checking one last time to make sure no one was on deck to see him, he quickly climbed over the rail and jumped.
The boiling sea came up at him incredibly fast, and he hit badly, plunging fifteen feet beneath the water. He grappled with the carbon-dioxide cartridge beneath his shirt, finally found it, and gave a sharp tug on the lanyard. For a moment nothing seemed to happen, but then the vest tightened against his chest, ripping his shirt, and he shot up to the surface.
The ship was already a couple of hundred yards away. He cocked his head to listen for any sounds of an alarm, but there was nothing. It would be morning before it was discovered he was missing. They would find the empty wine and liquor bottles, and would come to the easy conclusion that poor Monsieur Riemé had gotten perhaps a bit too drunk, taken a stroll on the deck, and simply fallen overboard. An unfortunate but not uncommon occurrence.
Within twenty minutes, the ship was gone from sight, even its highest lights lost over the horizon. Riemé opened the large side pocket on his vest, removed the radio in its waterproof container, activated it, and held the antenna as high out of the water as he could.
For twenty minutes he bobbed up and down on the empty sea like that, utterly alone, even the stars overhead somewhat obscured by a thin haze. At last he heard the faint buzz-saw noise of an approaching boat.
He twisted around until he was able to pick out the lights, which flashed on and off at ten-second intervals, almost as if something were wrong with the electrical circuits. Then he took out his small but powerful strobe light, flipped it on, and held it out of the water.
Immediately the boat turned directly toward him, slowing down as it approached.
“Like clockwork,” the little man had told him. “This job will go so smoothly that you will be in and out of France before the authorities have any idea what hit them.”
The pickup had come at 12:43 A.M. Less than twenty-three hours later, at 22:28 P.M., Riemé was climbing into a legally registered, two-door Peugeot in Marseille, and heading north toward Paris five hundred miles away.
Near dawn he stopped at a small inn near the town of Briare on the Loire River, registering as Bennette Roget, a salesman from Le Havre. At this point he was less than one hundred miles from his target, on the Avenue de la Grande Armée, near the Arc de Triomphe.
He slept a few hours and had a moderately large breakfast. He took his time the rest of the way into Paris, arriving there shortly before noon. He went directly to an address on the Left Bank, which turned out to be a parking garage in a rundown section of similar structures.
With the car parked safely inside, next to a dark-blue, nondescript van he had been assured would be there, Rieme laid his head back on the car seat, closed his eyes, and mentally readied himself for his task.
The weapon he would use was already in the van. After killing the afternoon at a movie, he would drive across the river to the office building, where he would park at exactly 6:00 P.M. Within five minutes, Gérard Louis Dreyfus would come out to his waiting limousine. Riemé would kill him and drive immediately back here. He’d take the car back to Marseille. A boat would be waiting there to take him to Barcelona and his plane to Moscow. There he would be given a new identity, and in due time another assignment.
André Blenault, chief comptroller for Louis Dreyfus operations in Paris, stepped out of his office on the third floor and hurried down to the receptionist near the elevator, hugging a fat briefcase to his chest. He was in a foul mood this afternoon, as he had been since one week ago last Sunday, when the cable from New York had arrived.
First there had been the trouble with the damned Vance-Ehrhardts, who had somehow managed to sign the France-Océanique shipping agreement. Next had come the Cargill coup, which gave the Minneapolis-based firm a solid foothold with the Canadian Wheat Board for the next five years. And finally, the cable: Newman, the filthy Marauder, was on the move again.
From what Blenault and others on the staff had pieced together, Newman had begun to set up a complex arrangement of subsidiaries within the world shipping community. Left to his own devices, he would, within a month, tie up damned near every scrap of tonnage currently available. And there was little or nothing they could do to block him.
The most damning aspect, the one that the New York cable had spelled out, or failed to spell out, depending upon the point of view, was that no one — simply no one — had an inkling of what the Marauder was up to. And that worried the staff, which in turn disturbed Blenault, which finally upset Gerard.
“Heads will roll. Mon dieu, heads will surely roll,” Blenault muttered as he came to the reception area.
The young woman at the desk looked up, startled. “Monsieur Blenault?”
“His car, have you called it up yet?”
The woman looked up at the wall clock, which showed it was a couple of minutes before six, and without a word grabbed the telephone and dialed while the comptroller waited impatiently.
“Bring his car around now, please,” the woman said. “Merci.” And she hung up the telephone.
“If it’s late… oh, heavens, if it’s late. He simply does not need that kind of aggravation at this moment, don’t you understand, you dolt?”
“Oui, monsieur,” the poor woman said.
Blenault stared pointedly at her for another long moment as she fidgeted nervously, then turned as Gérard Louis Dreyfus approached.
He was a short man, with a thick, rich voice, and he was dressed, as usual, in a pin-striped suit. He smiled as he saw Blenault.
“Ah, André, are we ready for the weekend?”
“Oui, monsieur, I have the files you requested right here.”
“Then let us be on our way.”
As they rode down in the elevator, Gérard studied his comptroller’s face for a long moment. “Any further word from New York?”
“None as of the late-afternoon telexes.”
“Then we will call them on the way home. I have told no one as yet, but I will be flying to New York tomorrow, and if need be to Moscow on Monday.”