Petitjean was enraged. “Thrown out of my own lab!”
Vans said, “You act like we’re criminals.”
“Maybe you are,” one of the officers said laconically. “That’s what we’re here to find out. If so, you will most definitely be hearing from us.”
“This is slanderous,” the scientist said.
“But legal,” Louis said with a sigh, handing back the warrant. “When can we reenter?”
“Couple of hours?”
“Please lock it when you leave,” he said, and turned to me. “We should go, Jack. The press will get word of this, and it does not help us to be photographed in connection with a terrorism investigation.”
The four of us walked away.
When we were well down the street, Petitjean said, “Given the letter and the initial reports we sent to La Crim yesterday, it didn’t surprise me that we were raided.”
“What reports?” Louis asked.
Vans frowned and said, “We ran DNA on the cigarette butts left at Chez Pincus and the pubic hairs we found at the sex club, and got enough to know that we are dealing with seven different people: five male, two female, and all of Middle Eastern or North African descent.”
“Farad?” I asked. “Is he a match?”
“He’s from the same general gene pool,” Petitjean said. “I could know more definitively in a couple of days, but they took the samples.”
Vans said, “We did get a match on the newsprint used to compose the letter. They were all cut from Algerian and Tunisian newspapers.”
“You can tell something like that?” Louis asked.
“It’s technical,” Petitjean said. “But yes.”
We rounded the corner, and I realized something else and groaned.
“What is it?” Louis asked.
“Kim’s lighter was in the lab. My passport and my money too.”
“No,” Vans said. “I’ve got your passport and cash.”
“And I have the lighter here with my cigarettes,” the scientist said, patting his breast pocket and smiling. “By the way, I know what it really is.”
After making sure we weren’t under surveillance, we found a café, went inside, and ordered double espressos and croissants that were good, but they didn’t splinter like the Plaza’s.
“So, what is it?” Louis said after the waitress had left. “The lighter?”
Private Paris’s head scientist dug in his breast pocket and came up with a blue box of Gitanes cigarettes and the stainless steel lighter that had caused havoc all over the city in the past few days. He held the lighter, admiring it.
“Quite a piece of technology,” Petitjean said. “Must have cost a small fortune to engineer. Very James Bond. Took a bit to figure it out, but I did.”
He turned the lighter upside down. He used a paper clip to press against the bleeder valve at the center of the flame control dial.
“There was actually butane in it the first time I tried,” the scientist said. “And that kind of threw me, until I…”
He used his thumbnail to turn the dial clockwise. Setting the paper clip aside, Petitjean took the lighter by both ends and tugged. It separated into two pieces, and revealed, sticking out of the bottom piece, a USB micro-B connector similar to the one that attaches a charger to my camera.
“It’s a data storage device,” Vans said.
“And heavily encrypted,” said Petitjean, who looked irritated that she’d spilled the beans. “I tried to hack my way in, but it was beyond my skills.”
“And mine,” Vans said.
I looked at Louis. “Le Chien?”
He smiled and said, “Excellent idea. We’ll put the Dog on it.”
Chapter 63
11th Arrondissement
11:35 a.m.
THE BRAIN-INJURED HACKER cradled an iPad connected to the memory stick and went into slow orbit around the perimeter of his apartment, completely ignoring Louis and me as he probed the method of encryption.
Louis shifted gears and put in a call to our French legal team regarding Ali Farad. I got on the phone with a Palo Alto, California, company that provides twenty-four-hour data backup services for Private offices around the globe, and authorized it to move a copy of all of Private Paris’s files to a secure virtual office where we could access them.
I called Justine, too. It was 2:35 in the morning, L.A. time, but she picked right up. The Dog orbited past me while I got her up to date on Kim Kopchinski’s kidnapping, the lighter, and the raiding of Private Paris.
“Private the focus of an anti-terror investigation,” Justine said. “A disaster.”
“Tell me about it,” I said.
“What about Farad?”
“Louis swears by him. And his record is immaculate. Not even a rumor of Islamic radicalism.”
“But you said the police hinted that they had more than a rumor?”
“Yes.”
“What is it?”
“I honestly have no idea,” I said, glancing at Louis, who was in the Dog’s kitchen intently listening to his cell phone.
“Has news of the raid gotten out?” Justine asked.
“Not that I know of,” I said.
“Could be time to hire a publicist who specializes in crisis management,” Justine said. “Have something ready in case it does come out.”
“Maybe,” I said. “How’s Sherman?”
“Slightly better,” she said. Wilkerson had remembered her when she visited the night before. He also remembered that three men wearing masks had assaulted him in his house. They had wanted to know where Kim was.
“Sherman kept asking me if you had her safe,” Justine said. “I told him you were working on it, and that seemed to undo his progress. He got very agitated and angry with me-shouting, even-and the nurses asked me to leave.”
“Great,” I said, watching the Dog leave the cluttered living area and orbit into a back hallway.
Shaking his head, Louis hurried from the kitchen, glanced at me in deep distress, and said, “The lawyers, Jack. They say to watch the news. Life is getting worse for us and for Farad.”
Before I could reply, he snatched the remote off a coffee table.
I told Justine I had to go, and hung up in time to see the flat-screen on the wall blink and then jump to a Parisian street scene I recognized immediately.
“That’s Barbès,” I said. “The mosque. FEZ Couriers.”
“And Al-Jumaa tailors,” Louis said as the camera angle shifted to show officers wearing bulletproof vests and carrying MAT-49s as they led the tailor out of his shop in handcuffs.
Other anti-terrorists stood guard at the doors of the mosque and the courier service. A perimeter had been formed, blocking off a growing crowd of onlookers that burst into angry shouts when the police brought out Firmus Massi in cuffs. The owner of FEZ Couriers looked shaken and bewildered.
“Killers!” some began to chant. “Assassins!”
I recognized one of the protesters as that kid who’d chased the robed woman down the sidewalk, trying to get her picture. He still had the camera hanging around his neck, and shook his fist at the camera, yelling, “These immigrant AB-16 bastards want to destroy France, but France will destroy them!”
The mob’s fury built when the feed cut to the mosque doors, where anti-terrorists were hauling out Imam Ibrahim Al-Moustapha, who held his head high despite the wrist restraints and the hysterical crying of his wife and three children behind him.
Immigrants in the crowd began to shout, protesting the arrest.
“They think Farad’s involved because that’s his mosque,” I said. “And he knows that guy Massi, right?”
Louis nodded, transfixed by the imam, who looked right into the camera as he went past it, saying forcefully, “We are innocent. We have nothing to do with AB-16 or these killings. France is our home. We would never-”
The anti-terrorists pushed the imam into the back of a black van along with the head of the courier service and the tailor. The doors slammed shut and the van drove off.