She was trying feebly to get up from the floor. I went to her, got her in a fireman’s sling, and got her outside. Her face was a mess. Blood soaked her right leg and I could see the bulge of bone sticking from her thigh.
I ripped off my belt and cinched it tight around her upper thigh. If I was right, the blast had broken her femur and probably nicked her femoral artery. Had the bone fully cut the blood vessel, she would have been dead where I had found her.
I was acting on autopilot at that point, focused on saving the officer and nothing else. Surging with adrenaline, I scooped her up again and moved back toward the roundabout, where red and blue lights were flashing.
Reaching the sidewalk, I saw cops, firemen, and paramedics racing to the scene. I set her down amid the rubble in front of the station.
A team was working on her in seconds. I stood there and watched numbly. One of the new officers on the scene began talking to me, but I still couldn’t hear for the ringing.
I said, “J’ai vu les saboteurs.”
I saw the bombers.
Chapter 87
THAT STATEMENT GOT me a lot of attention in the next couple of hours. The cop went and returned with a captain. The ringing in my ears began to fade and I repeated what I’d said, showed them my Private identification, and told him to contact Louis Langlois at Private Paris, or Investigateur Sharen Hoskins from La Crim, or even Juge Fromme. They would all vouch for me.
Klieg lights shone from the park across the street, where a gathering horde of media was encamping. The police captain was caught in the glare of indecision, looking at my identification card and then at me. Finally he dug in his pocket for his phone, and hurried off.
He returned about an hour later, but not with Hoskins or Fromme or Louis. A French Army officer in full battle gear and helmet trailed him, his eyes going everywhere until they settled on me.
“I am Major Émile Sauvage,” he said in flawless English. “French Army. I am in charge of this area under martial law.”
“Lucky you,” I said.
“What can you tell us?” he asked, studying me from under his helmet brim.
Sauvage listened attentively and wordlessly during my summary of events. I gave it to him, all of it, from following Epée to a condemned linen factory in Pantin to the moment when I lost sight of the two robed women after they’d parked the Suzuki in front of the church.
“I think they changed out of the robes,” I said. “And left on a bus that pulled away shortly before the bomb went off.”
“What bus?” he demanded tersely. “What route?”
“I don’t know.”
“What makes you think they were aboard?”
“Because I think I recognized one of them.”
That seemed to dumbfound the major. “You knew one of the women?”
“No, not like that,” I said. “It was just a feeling. The redhead. Her face. Like I’d seen it before somewhere.”
“Where?”
Shaking my head slowly, I said, “I don’t know. As I said, it was a feeling. The shape of her face. Her eyes. The way it all came together.”
“But nothing more specific, sir?” Major Sauvage asked.
“No,” I said. “At least right now. My bell got rung in the explosion.”
“Take care of that,” the major advised. “I speak from experience. Concussions can make you feel stupid or nuts.”
Another French Army officer, a big dark-skinned captain, hurried up and signaled the major for his attention.
“You are not to leave France without notifying me, Monsieur Morgan,” the major said. “I’m sure there will be others who make the same demands on you.”
“I’ll help any way I can, Major,” I said.
With a stiff nod and a limp handshake, he pivoted and went to the captain. They spoke and moved off.
Louis hobbled up with Sharen Hoskins and Juge Fromme, and I had to repeat my story all over again.
“You don’t know where you saw that woman before?” Fromme asked.
“Only that she reminded me of someone.”
“Could she be the same redhead the opera director was seen with the night he was murdered?” Louis asked.
“Again,” I said, “I’m clueless. Maybe it will come to me.”
Hoskins said, “We can’t do a thing here. Military intelligence and anti-terror will be all over it. Think you can find that linen factory again?”
Knitting my eyebrows, I thought back, still fuzzy, but said, “I think so.”
Chapter 88
10:20 p.m.
HOSKINS DROVE. SHE and Fromme got us past the blockades near the blast site. Louis and I sat in the back and studied Google Maps on an iPad that the magistrate had produced from his briefcase.
Gesturing at the screen and the roof of a building close to a narrow bridge over a canal, I said, “That’s it, I think.”
“You have an address?” Hoskins asked.
Louis tapped on the satellite image and an address popped up. He gave it to her and she called it in while driving toward Pantin.
I said, “You’ll want to take a look from the other side of the canal before you go kicking down the door.”
Hoskins looked ready to argue, but the magistrate said, “He’s right. We must consider them heavily armed.”
The investigateur sighed, nodded, and altered her route. Someone called Hoskins a few minutes later to inform her that the address she’d called in was a condemned property that had been seized for taxes and was due to be razed to make way for a vacant lot sale in the coming weeks.
“Perfect safe house,” Louis said.
“Again I agree with you,” Hoskins said. “These are miraculous days.”
She pulled over fifteen minutes later on a deserted industrial street and said, “We’re two blocks off the canal here, close to the north side of that bridge.”
We set off in that direction slowly, having to wait for the magistrate and Louis to limp along behind us. A block closer to the canal, headlights appeared. A news van shot by and skidded to a halt by a construction site beside two other news vans.
“What the hell is going on?” Hoskins cried, and ran toward the canal.
I did my best to stay with her, but she reached a small crowd gathered just east of the pedestrian bridge before I did. The reporters had their backs to the canal and the condemned factory, and were barking at the cameras.
When I caught up, Hoskins looked at her watch and said, “AB-16 sent out a message calling the media to be here at ten thirty p.m. In less than a minute they’re supposedly going to deliver a message to France.”
Juge Fromme and Louis hobbled up to us, gasping.
A series of thumping booms like mortar fire echoed across the canal. Fire fountained high inside the condemned factory. Plumes of it billowed out the broken windows and set the whole structure ablaze.
In minutes it was a runaway, throwing shimmering heat and fire that blew through the roof and licked at the Paris skyline like so many snake tongues. Hoskins was calling for fire and police backup, but the rest of us were transfixed by the growing inferno.
Was this the message AB-16 wanted to send in the wake of the bombing? That Paris was burning?
I got my answer a second later, when many of the reporters gasped.
Deep inside the factory something else had ignited, blue and then white and silver hot, almost blinding in its intensity. That brilliant new fire within a fire expanded and took shape at a blistering pace, two bent columns rising from the floor of the factory to a massive curve that soon became the powerful haunches of a giant prehistoric-looking horse reared up on its back legs, pawing at the flames and the sky.
As the roof fell in, there was a third ignition. The horse had wings that burned so hot it was as if the creature actually had molten silver feathers that fluttered in the greater inferno, as if the beast was poised to take flight.