Meeks glanced at Louis before sighing. “There is one who has been giving us-uh, me-many headaches.”
“A name?”
She seemed to struggle inside.
I said, “AB-16 is targeting your members, Madame Meeks. I should think you’d want to protect them.”
That got to her. “Of course I wish to protect them!”
News vehicles pulled up in front of the institute. Cameramen got out and filmed the tag up on the cupola.
“Who is it, Pricilla?” Louis grumbled.
“Jacques Noulan,” she said, and filled us in.
Noulan, a noted Paris fashion designer, was evidently infuriated when he lost an open seat in the academy of fine arts to Millie Fleurs, a more famous member of the fashion world. Meeks said that Noulan, who was more an expert marketer than an innovator, had organized a smear campaign after the election, trying to get Fleurs unseated. He was unsuccessful.
“He made threats to me at a party recently,” Meeks said. “He was quite drunk, and belligerent.”
“He unstable enough to start killing academy members?” I asked.
“I don’t know how to answer that,” she said, playing with an earring.
“You just did,” Louis said.
“Pricilla!” cried a female television news reporter who’d come out onto the bridge to get a better angle on the cupola and the tag. “Have you heard about Lourdes Latrelle?”
Meeks turned toward the reporter, and the klieg lights went on.
Squinting, I took a step back as Meeks replied, “I have heard, and it’s a tragedy. France has lost another of her immortals.”
Investigateur Hoskins and Juge Fromme climbed from a police car and were swarmed by reporters. The tag’s placement and the murders had struck a deep nerve. No doubt about it now.
“I still think we want to talk to Monsieur Noulan, and sooner than later,” I said, backing away from Meeks and the journalists grilling her.
“Why?” Louis said, unconvinced.
“From an L.A. point of view, this is starting to feel like a well-organized marketing campaign with the tag as a brand,” I said as I headed toward the west bank and the Louvre. “Noulan is supposedly strong at this kind of thing, right?”
Louis stopped, looked back over his shoulder at the tag, and said, “With the coordination and the brutal precision of the murders, it feels more militant to me.”
Chapter 49
Pantin, northeastern suburbs of Paris
8:35 a.m.
HAJA LIFTED THE welding mask to study the latest muscle group she’d been working on, deciding that it suggested the beast’s raw power but didn’t overstate it, at least up close. She’d have to climb down and get a different perspective to tell for sure.
But when the sculptor reached the floor of the old linen factory, Émile Sauvage opened the door that led to the war room and called out to her, “Haja, you need to see this.”
She took one more look at her work in progress, sighed, and hurried through the steel door. At twenty-five by fifteen, the room was windowless. The wall to Haja’s left was covered in whiteboards. Across the top it said, “AB-16.”
Underneath there was an appointment calendar of sorts with dates on a long horizontal axis, hours in military time stacked on the vertical axis, and cryptic notations in the boxes.
The wall opposite the door featured fifty black AK-47 7.62mm assault rifles standing upright in an improvised gun rack. Boxes of ammunition stamped “For disposal” were stacked below the rifles, along with empty magazines and a thick, rolled-up Oriental rug.
Captain Mfune sat beside the rug, oiling the action and barrel shroud of one of the rifles. Epée lay on a couch watching a television screen that showed a close-up of the AB-16 tag up on the cupola.
“There it is again!” he cried. “They keep showing it over and over!”
“I knew putting it there would do the trick,” Amé said.
“A brilliant idea, brilliantly executed,” said Mfune, returning the now gleaming rifle to its spot on the rack.
The screen cut away to show the entrance to the Red Rooster, along with an author photo of Lourdes Latrelle.
Epée said, “Your execution was brilliant too, Captain. The great minds are under fire. That’s all they’re talking about besides the tag.”
“And we got out clean,” Amé said. “The mystery of AB-16 intact.”
“Perhaps too intact,” Sauvage said. “They think this is solely about Les Académies.”
“The slow burn is critical to mass awareness,” Amé insisted. “You have to let them chew on the mystery of it, employ their imagination to suggest answers, so that when the true scenario is revealed, it comes as even more of a shock to the population.”
“A call to action,” Mfune said.
“Exactly,” Amé said, snapping her fingers. “If we make the next few moves well, AB-16 will be bigger than the Dreyfus Affair.”
The screen jumped away from coverage of Lourdes Latrelle’s murder to an interview with Pricilla Meeks, the Institut de France’s director, who was out on the bridge with the tagged cupola visible behind her.
Haja spotted two men behind Meeks. They looked familiar.
Did she know them?
The screen cut to an exterior shot of La Crim and a shaken Investigateur Hoskins, who was vowing to track down AB-16 at all costs.
“I have been authorized to bring in as many detectives as is necessary to solve these murders,” Hoskins said. “We have even brought in the world-famous Private agency to work forensics and as consultants on the case.”
That provoked silence in the room until Mfune looked at Sauvage and said, “Private has a strong reputation, Major. A first-class operation.”
Sauvage said nothing, just twisted his head as if adjusting his collar.
“Can you rewind that?” Haja asked. “Back to when Meeks was talking?”
“Sure,” Amé said, and backed the feed up.
“Stop there,” Haja said, and then stepped closer to study the men behind the institute’s director. “I know these two. I saw them outside the mosque the other day.”
“Are you sure?” Sauvage asked, engaged again.
“Positive,” she said. “I never forget a face, Émile. The older one is French, but I think the other one is American.”
“Then we have a problem,” said Epée, who’d lost color. “The old one is Louis Langlois. He used to be a top investigator with La Crim.”
“How do you know that?” Haja demanded.
“He arrested my father for burglary when I was a kid,” the tagger said. “I think he runs Private’s Paris office now.”
“I’ll check,” Amé said, grabbing a laptop. A moment later, she said, “It’s Langlois. And the American is Jack Morgan, the owner of Private and the guy who found the Harlows last year.”
Haja knew exactly what she was talking about. Who didn’t? Thom and Jennifer Harlow, Hollywood’s most famous couple, had been kidnapped along with their three children. Morgan and Private L.A. had found and rescued the family in Mexico.
She felt minor panic ripple through her. Why had Morgan and Langlois been at the mosque that day?
Mfune and Epée were upset as well.
“Those Private guys,” the tagger complained. “I read about them in Paris Match last year. They cut corners, break laws. They’re not like normal cops. They never give up once they get on something, especially Morgan.”
Though his arms were crossed, Sauvage smiled. “No, they’re not like normal cops,” he said. “And Morgan and Langlois would appear to be formidable foes. But with a little creativity, I think Private Paris can be neutralized without much change in our original plans.”
“How?” Mfune demanded.
“We’ll put a pincer move on them, and squash them like bugs.”
Chapter 50
8th Arrondissement