Kessler looked at Jones, who had his eyes closed and his head leaning against the side window glass. The Air Force captain continued to maintain an ice-cold attitude about the entire ordeal — something that Kessler could not understand. Especially with the launch less than forty-eight hours away.
The driver turned left on NASA Causeway East, and made another left on C Avenue. The Astrovan came to a stop on the side of building M6-339, the KSC’s Headquarters.
“Wake up, CJ.”
Jones abruptly opened his eyes and took a deep breath. Kessler reached for the side door and slid it back.
They walked into the briefing room a few minutes later.
The light late afternoon breeze blew gently, giving motion to the branches of a nearby tree layered with a colorful assortment of flowers that seemed to bring life to the mellow tunes of the young saxophone player performing beneath it. A hat lying by his feet displayed the generosity of the day’s crowd. To his right, a street vendor held up short sticks of French bread to pedestrians, who appeared more interested in watching a child learn to ride a bicycle on a patch of grass to the left of the saxophone player.
“Francois! Francois! Faites attention, Francois!” Cameron Stone heard the child’s mother scream at her accelerating youngster, who was apparently making a last-ditch effort to get the basics down before the day ended. The nervous woman finally caught up with him on the other side of the small park, and shouted something Cameron could not understand. Cameron smiled as he inhaled the cool, invigorating air. It felt good to be in Paris again.
He had left the American Embassy and stepped into one of the most relaxed cities in the world. Definitely a change of scenery from the depressing streets of Mexico City, where he’d spent most of the past five years.
He checked his watch and proceeded to the Metro station by the Place de la Concorde, the east end of the long avenue next to the gardens behind the Louvre. Cameron quickened his pace; he only had thirty minutes to make it to the Left Bank before seven o’clock that evening. He crossed the rue Royale and reached the steps leading down to the Metro hall.
After purchasing a ticket from one of the automatic ticket machines, Cameron followed the signs down an oval-shaped concourse layered with white brick.
He made his way across the crowded platform, and managed to squeeze his slim but muscular body into an already packed second-class car, leaving barely an inch between his face and the closing doors. He grabbed the overhead railing with his left hand and kept his right hand under his coat, firmly holding his holstered Beretta 92F, more to prevent a pickpocket from snatching it than out of fear of needing it. Cameron didn’t feel like having to explain to his new CIA case officer that he had had his weapon stolen, especially during his first day under the man’s jurisdiction.
As the crowd pressed against him, Cameron could feel the three small manila envelopes inside a waterproof pouch in his coat liner. One contained three fake passports and matching driver’s licenses, the other two his emergency money. Cameron never went anywhere without them… and his Beretta.
The rocky ride lasted two minutes. Then Cameron switched to a southbound train, which turned out to be just as crowded.
Cameron’s current assignment, given to him by his case officer that morning, was to meet the widow of a French rocket scientist killed in an auto accident the day before. The widow had contacted the Agency and requested the meeting. Ordinarily, such a seemingly unimportant request would have been dismissed by the CIA or, at most, passed on to the French authorities. But the widow had used a CIA emergency code — albeit an outdated one — when contacting the embassy, and that fact alone had had a few CIA officials concerned enough to activate a field operative.
Cameron got out at the Saint Michel exit, went up to the street, and turned left at rue de Cujas.
An unusual street, he reflected as he stared at the two- and three-story stone buildings, some probably dating back to the seventeenth century. The widow had asked for the meeting at an out-of-the-way location.
Cameron walked up the narrow street on the left side. The sun was setting, and the street was already dark. He eyed the vertical sign of the Grand Hotel Saint Michel opposite him. The hotel could not have been any wider than thirty feet, but someone had thought it large enough to have “Grand” preceding the name. An odd place to meet, he thought, considering that her late husband, the famed French rocket scientist Claude Guilloux, had been among the most respected and wealthiest men in Paris. Claude Guilloux had also been one of the leading scientists of the European space agency Athena, the pride of the European Economic Community.
Athena. Now, there’s a big corporation, Cameron thought. Athena had been around for years, he recalled from the file his case officer had given him that morning, but the agency hadn’t become the corporate giant of today until after the Challenger explosion several years back. Within days of the NASA disaster, communications companies and weather agencies from large and small countries alike had flooded the European space agency with satellite-deployment requests because of NASA’s inability to perform. Backed by the EEC, Athena had grown from less than five hundred employees to over fifteen thousand, and from a few launches every year to a tight weekly schedule engineered to cope with the world’s increasing demand for its services. Athena, now a very powerful and wealthy agency, had a brand-new state-of-the-art launching facility operating in the coastal city of Kourou, French Guiana, and had recently announced plans for a European space shuttle and permanent space station. With Guilloux’s death, Marie Guilloux, also a noted scientist, a main contributor to the development of the guidance system in the reliable Athena V rocket, would inherit most of her late husband’s fortune.
Cameron exhaled. The secrecy and strange meeting place didn’t make sense. Nevertheless, he crossed the street and pushed open the single glass door of the hotel.
Right away, the strong cigar smell sickened him. It came from the other end of the long and narrow entrance hall. He noticed a sitting room to his right, through a pair of double glass doors. He walked in and spotted a couple of sofas and chairs scattered around the small square room. Cameron slipped back to the narrow entrance hall, and walked along the hardwood floors to the other end, where he saw a small elevator to his left and what had to be the hotel’s front counter off to the right.
He approached the counter and saw an old woman lying on a small bed behind it. A cigar burned on a metallic ashtray next to the bed.
“Pardon, madame.”
The old lady opened her eyes, grunted, and slowly got up. She snatched the cigar and let it hang off the edge of her mouth. Cameron detected a foul body odor; at first hidden by the cigar smoke, it became much more noticeable as she got closer.
“Oui?” she responded in a voice as coarse and unfriendly as her appearance. Her sunken eyes studied Cameron through the smoke.
“Bon soir, madame. Quelle est la chamber de Madame Guilloux?”
“Un moment.” The woman put on a pair of glasses and flipped through the hotel’s registry.
“Madame Guilloux n’est pas ici.” The woman turned away.
“Ah… pardon, madame…”
The woman ignored him and walked back to her bed.
“Madame?”