Several men wearing FEZ jackets appeared, shouting angrily in French.
“I’m not getting what they’re saying,” I said.
Louis replied, “They say that the imam is a man of peace, and that this is a travesty of justice and a mockery of France’s tolerance. They say Massi was targeted because he’s a Muslim immigrant who has built a big business during the economic crisis, and the old French hate him for it. They don’t agree with the AB-16 killings, but they understand the reasons.”
On-screen, a bottle sailed through the air. It struck one of the men on the side of the head, and he staggered, bleeding. A piece of brick followed. Within moments the street all around the reporter erupted into chaos and fighting before the feed cut and the screen went to black for several seconds. Then it jumped to a pair of rattled French news announcers apologizing for the break in coverage.
Louis looked over at me gravely.
“I fear we are entering a dark and dangerous time in Paris,” Louis said. “We may be seeing the end of Private in France, and perhaps Europe.”
My stomach plummeted. This sort of thing could easily snowball, destroy the reputation of an investigative firm I had nurtured over years.
“Unless Farad and the imam are telling the truth,” I said.
“But if they’re not?”
Before I could answer, the television feed cut to, of all people, Laurent Alexandre, who was on the sidewalk across from Millie Fleurs’s shop, fighting back tears as he publicly mourned her death and denounced AB-16.
“French culture is not going anywhere,” Alexandre vowed. “Paris is the number one tourist destination in the world because we are so fierce about our culture. Millie was fiercely passionate about Paris and France, and I know she would want us to fight for it, to show her killers that her spirit and our culture go on. I have spoken with several of Millie’s friends, and instead of a funeral or memorial, we are going to put on a celebration of her life, a runway show in her honor. We’re hoping it will be televised to the nation.”
Before I could begin to wrap my fatigued brain around that, the Dog orbited back into the room.
“Louis,” he said before someone knocked sharply at the apartment door.
The hacker moved straight down the short hallway and looked through the peephole. Still cradling the iPad and the memory stick, he started to unlock the dead bolts.
“Who is it?” Louis asked.
“Maria,” he said.
“The concierge,” Louis told me.
Our attention shot back to the television screen, where the feed had cut from Laurent to Barbès. Tear gas was being fired at the rioters.
The Dog made a weird noise. I turned to see the hacker crouched and moving backward, and the old concierge shaking from head to toe.
Whitey was behind her. He had a gun to her head.
Chapter 64
“WEAPONS ON THE ground and back away, or she dies, and the retard’s next,” Whitey said, leering at us with yellow teeth.
Louis grimaced but unholstered his pistol and set it down. I did the same.
Whitey pushed the old woman inside, and his buddy, the Nose, appeared, also armed. He followed Whitey, shutting the door.
Still pressing his gun to the concierge’s head, Whitey said, “Where’s the lighter? Start talking or she dies.”
“You’re out of luck,” Louis said. “Government took it along with everything else when they raided our offices last night. It’s true-you can check.”
“Is that what you’ve been after all this time?” I asked. “A lighter?”
Whitey ignored me, but he was looking conflicted.
His partner said, “What do we do, Le Blanc? Call-”
“Shut up,” Whitey said, and I thought for a moment that he was going to cut his losses and bolt.
But then the Dog said, “I’m not retarded.”
“Yeah, whatever,” Whitey said, and then did a double take at the hacker.
He threw the old woman aside. In two bounds, he was in front of the Dog, who shrank in terror. Whitey snatched the iPad from him, held it up so his partner could see the memory stick jutting out the bottom, and said in triumph, “Bonus coming! We got it!”
The Nose grinned, then sobered and said, “They get in?”
Whitey slid his finger across the screen, studied it, and said, “Negative. We’re good.”
He pulled the memory stick and stuck it in his pocket. He tucked the iPad under one arm and said, “Just in case.”
“Whatever’s on that stick, you’ve got what you were after,” I said. “Let Kim Kopchinski go.”
The Nose snorted, “That’s not exactly up to us.”
“Zip ’em up, and we’re gone,” Whitey said.
They used zip ties to bind our ankles and wrists behind our backs. They shoved rags in our mouths and forced the four of us onto the floor.
“The shit you’ve caused us, we should shoot the both of you,” Whitey said, waving his pistol at me and Louis. “But we’re not sore winners.”
Then he kicked me hard, in the stomach. And the Nose did the same to Louis, low in the back. It took several painful minutes after they’d left for the two of us to recover enough to try to free ourselves.
The Dog was way ahead of us. He’d gotten to his feet somehow, hopped into his kitchen, and soon returned holding a pair of scissors behind him. Several contortions and a careful snip later, Louis’s hands were free. Louis took the scissors and cut off Maria’s bindings first and made sure she was okay before removing the Dog’s restraints and then mine.
I was feeling exhausted and low. We’d lost the memory stick, and whatever leverage we might have had to get Kim Kopchinski back. What was I going to say to Sherman? What could I say?
The hacker, meanwhile, went over to the concierge, and said something to her in Portuguese. She nodded, rubbed her wrists.
The Dog looked at us and said, “I am not retarded.”
“Absolutely not,” Louis said.
The hacker took several steps away with that vacant expression, and I thought he was going off into orbit again. He stopped, however, and said, “I’m smarter than they are, Louis.”
“I have no doubt, my-”
“No,” the Dog insisted. “I am smarter, Louis. Before I went to the door, I quit out. But I’d already cracked the security and copied most of the stick wirelessly to my iCloud account.”
Part Four
Is Paris Burning?
Chapter 65
Pantin, northeastern suburbs of Paris
4:48 p.m.
SERGE MFUNE DROVE a stolen delivery van out of the condemned linen factory on the Canal de l’Ourcq. The sliding doors quickly slammed behind them, blocking any view of the sculpture inside.
In the passenger seat, Émile Sauvage looked over his shoulder at the thick, rolled Oriental rug on top of a painter’s tarp that covered the heavy load of two large wooden crates.
The major turned his attention to the side-view mirror and appraised his disguise: thick black eyebrows, a dense black beard, and a wig. With a healthy dose of instant tan to turn his already bronze skin darker, a worn and faded gray workman’s jumpsuit, and a black-and-white checked scarf, he looked infinitely more North African than French.
Mfune was similarly dressed. Satisfied that they would pass muster, Sauvage turned his attention to the portable police scanner in his lap. It crackled with reports of building protests over the arrests. They mentioned disturbances in Sevran, like Pantin a suburb of Paris with a high concentration of immigrants.
“Building protests,” the captain said. “That’s good.”
“Predictable,” Sauvage said, nodding. “Sevran is always up for a riot.”
He got out a piece of paper with three phone numbers on it, and entered them into the burn phone’s memory.