The Musée. Aimée nodded. “He followed the diagram. So will I.” She stuck her laptop in her bag. Noticed his brown wool Tibetan cap with earflaps. “Mind if I borrow this?”
“As long as both of you come back in one piece.”
OUT IN THE courtyard, she pulled the cap’s earflaps low, turned her metallic coat inside out to show the black lining, lit up a cigarette from the pack of filtered Gauloises that the blonde had given her. Felt the jolt of nicotine.
Now or never.
Head down, she stepped out of the doorway and kept to the right. A church bell chimed in the distance. A moment later she’d joined the homeless man under the sleeping bag, trying to ignore his pungent aroma. Impossible. She’d make this quick.
“Any action?”
“Only they used their cell phones after you went inside.”
Just as she’d thought. Watchers.
But chances were they hadn’t keyed in on her location. Otherwise they’d have a crew waiting.
“What’s your name, Monsieur?”
“Hippolyte,” he said. “Would you be interested in exchanging coats, ma chère?”
“You read my mind, Hippolyte. But only if you take this too,” she said, handing him the last of Tso’s francs.
SHE LEFT THE warm vent, confident no one would follow her.
She kept to the narrow side streets below Place de la République. She felt invisible. No one looked twice at a clochard shuffling along in a Tibetan hat and moth-eaten raccoon coat—more fragrant now after a spritz of Chanel No. 5.
She hit Martine’s number on her cell phone. Martine answered on the first ring.
“About time, Aimée,” she said. “When can I meet Meizi?”
“Bad news, I’m afraid,” she said, her chest tightening. That awful taste of guilt clutched the back of her throat.
“What now, Aimée?”
She took a breath and filled Martine in as she walked.
“Dead? Meizi’s dead? Poor René.” Martine exhaled. A cough. “Not to sound mercenary, but it shoots down my exposé,” she said. “Libération’s interested in a three-part series documenting conditions, Aimée. But for that I need a connection in the sweatshops. People who will talk to me. Open doors. Proof.”
Aimée’s heart fell. Martine couldn’t pull out now.
“She’s not the only one, Martine.”
“Get real, Aimée. It’s a closed world. They live in fear, held hostage by their families in China. Who’d talk to me?”
Aimée had to make her understand. And she didn’t have time. “I found Meizi chained, Martine,” she said. “Treated worse than a dog. The flics snared a few snakeheads to ante up on their taxes.”
Pause.
“No one cares about the women or the men living ten to a room, sleeping under the machines,” Aimée said. “Who’s fighting for them? Or for the unnamed dead in paupers’ graves at Ivry. I sent Prévost proof, he just doesn’t know it yet.”
Another pause.
“But Prévost has connections at Libération,” Aimée continued.
Martine let out a phfft. “Proving what?”
She had no idea. “I met him there on the roof, stunning view,” she said. “You figure it out.”
A longer pause.
“I doubt he was renewing his subscription, Martine,” she said.
“So you’d like me to take on the Ministry of Labor with a possible ally at the newspaper—some flic you met on a rooftop?”
Aimée gripped the phone in her gloved hand. “Prizes for investigative journalism don’t come from fluff pieces,” she said. “Got a pencil?”
Pause. “Why do I feel I’ll regret this?”
“You won’t.” She gave Martine the addresses, the refuge at the Chinese evangelical church, Nina’s name. “Now anything stopping you, Martine?”
A longer pause. “Just my car. I totalled it yesterday. Gilles threw a fit.”
Aimeé sucked in her breath. “You okay?”
“Shaken up.” Aimée heard the jingle of keys. “But I’ll take Gilles’s Range Rover. Safer.”
Sunday, 11:30 P.M.
AIMÉE USED HER security access to gain entry to the Musée des Arts et Métiers. Vardet, the security guard, nodded from his guardroom.
“Ah, Mademoiselle, un express? Fresh, too. Join me before I do rounds.”
Just what she needed. “You’re a lifesaver, Monsieur.”
He poured her a steaming demitasse. Added a trickle of eau-de-vie. “Let me add un fortifiant, as we say in Lyon.”
A Lyonnais, of course.
“Gorgeous country.” Vardet’s eyes misted. “I miss it. The Rhône gurgling past.”
Perhaps he’d had a little too much eau-de-vie already.
She popped another Doliprane and sipped the espresso laced with pear liquor. Heaven. Vardet pointed out his grandchildren in photos. His old-fashioned alarm clock rang. “Time for my rounds.”
UNDER THE GOTHIC nave, Aimée connected her laptop to the museum’s desktop and logged on. Thank God for the space heater. She scrolled the museum’s archaic database. It was hidden here somewhere.
Impatient, she raced over the keys, scrolling through the documents she’d digitized. Nothing. She, René, and Saj had gone over all of these.
Stymied, she stared at her screen. Think, think like Samour would.
Go back to the source. The file Saj had enhanced.
She hit Saj’s number on her phone. “Saj, tell me this, if I were Samour, where would I hide something in the museum files? Somewhere in plain sight, like on Coulade’s screen saver?”
“I downloaded Stenwiz onto your laptop,” Saj said. His voice crackled. Static buzzed on the line. “Use that. It’s the program I used to crack the trebuchet on …”
The rest ended in fuzz. Then a sharp crack of thunder overhead. She jumped, almost knocking her laptop over. A rain of shots. Ducking, she held her breath until she realized it was hail pebbling the plastic sheeting.
Before the power went out again, she opened Stenwiz. Then she realized what she was missing. She’d gone in chronological order, digitizing and searching from the oldest documents. This time, she scrolled the museum’s database from the most recent item, and after twenty minutes found a nineteenth-century doc, the largest taking up one gigabyte of memory. She searched in earnest. Scrolling, opening, reading, and closing a good fifty years. Then she found it.
The trebuchet matching Coulade’s screen saver. Of course!
Aimée ran the Stenwiz program, used the key Saj sent and followed his attached instructions. Five long minutes later, her screen filled with black-and-gold Latin script, sinuous and slanted. A complete version of the alchemical formula in all its medieval glory. Attached was a page of algorithms in tight script, with Pascal Samour’s signature at the bottom.
She gasped. Pascal had rehidden it where it had lain for centuries. And then added his fiber-optic adaption.
She compressed the file, entered Saj’s address, punched send, and prayed the Ethernet cooperated.
The sounds of creaking and shifting in the building mounted. What sounded like whispers came from the adjoining chapel. The wind again? She stifled her unease and focused on her screen. Like before, she heard a high-pitched whine from a distant fuse box. And again, the building plunged into darkness.
Her desktop computer screen went black. The only light came from her green laptop screen and the chapel’s stained-glass window’s rose-and-blue glow. Ethereal and unnerving. The warmth faded from the heater. Not a good sign. Neither was the fact that her laptop blinked “On Reserve Battery” again. Had Saj received the file? In a hurry, she loaded her laptop into her bag, buttoned Hippolyte’s coat over her Chanel dress, and ran across the old chapel for the exit.