The blood-it was everywhere.
Montbusson sighed. Twenty years on the force and he still wasn’t accustomed to the sights, the smells, the textures of death. Frankly, he hoped he never would be. At mass each Sunday, he thanked God for the love of his wife and his two daughters, asked forgiveness for his sins, and prayed for the strength to make it through another week on the job. Tonight, however, the work was particularly grim, and he knew that if he stayed at it much longer, he risked losing his humanity.
Five men blown up in such a small, contained space. There were no words to describe it. He kept asking himself the same question: Where was God in this place? Though he thought himself a pious man, René Montbusson could find no response.
A flutter of white at his feet caught his attention. A piece of paper, hardly larger than a few postage stamps. Kneeling, he took a pair of tweezers from his pants and bent toward it. The tweezers dropped to the ground and he saw that his gloves were too smeared with blood to hold them. After changing the translucent, polyurethane gloves, he managed to pick up the paper. One side was white, the other, at first glance, multicolored. The edges were charred, but otherwise it was in good shape.
The same couldn’t be said for the apartment. The charge had destroyed every piece of furniture in the living room, blown out the windows and curtains, and blasted a hole in the floor as well as through the drywall separating the living room and bedroom. The first persons allowed on the scene, besides medical technicians, were the structural engineers. An examination of the building proved it to be sound. As a precaution, the engineers installed eight floor-to-ceiling braces in the apartment.
The ordnance experts had come and gone hours ago. A swab of the walls subjected to a handheld ion mobility spectrometer confirmed the presence of RDX and PETN, the two principal ingredients of plastic explosives. The vapor detection device also found the presence of ethylene glycol dinitrate, a chemical marker that identified the explosive as being “Semtex,” a product of the Czech Republic. The ordnance team estimated Taleel had used about a half-kilo of the professionally manufactured, and all too easily available, plastique to blow himself to kingdom come.
Standing, Montbusson raised the paper so that the light from one of four industrial-size paint-drying lamps brought in to illuminate the crime scene caught it squarely on its face. It was a map-that much he could tell right away. He could see the horizontal lines that denoted streets, a comma of green that indicated a park, and a ribbon of red and white that probably meant a section of freeway. He had more of a problem making out the letters. Dropping a hand into his jacket pocket, the forty-five-year-old crime-scene investigator fished out his bifocals and balanced them on his nose. “-nt St. De” Here the paper ended. A narrow expanse of blue curled across the bottom left-hand corner of the paper. Running through its center were larger, well-spaced, letters-“m a.”
Carefully, Montbusson retraced his steps to his collection tray and laid the paper in a plastic folder, pasting a number onto it, and cataloguing the piece in his notebook as “Remnant: city map. America???” On a hand-drawn site map of the apartment, he placed a dot where he had found it, along with its corresponding evidence number.
A check of his watch showed the time to be eleven o’clock. Montbusson sat down. He felt tired, older than his years. Through the window-or rather the gaping maw where the window used to be-he viewed a chain of headlights negotiating the roadblocks and moving rapidly up the street. Strobes atop the cars spun blue and white. Mercifully, the sirens were silent. No doubt it was the American FBI’s own bomb blast specialists come to the rescue. He’d been told to expect them at any moment and to show them the utmost courtesy.
Montbusson stood, brushing the dust from his jacket. To think that the Americans called the French arrogant. The FBI acted as if they were the only competent law enforcement organization in the world. Fired by a sudden, passionate desire to do his job as well as he knew how-call it what you will, pride, patriotism, or a healthy sense of competition-he set about sifting through the rubble landscape with a demon’s eye. He had found little of interest. There were no clothes in the closets, no papers in the desks, no food in the refrigerator. Either the terrorist was planning on leaving soon or he used the apartment as a safe house. The only items of any intelligence value Montbusson had salvaged were a computer whose CPU looked like it had been run over by a Mack truck, a cellular phone crunched to the width of a stick of gum, and a few fragments from a handwritten notebook.
Step by step, he walked through the apartment, carefully lifting bent and mangled pieces of furniture, moving slabs of debris. Outside, a bevy of doors opened and closed. A chorus of loud, optimistic American voices rose toward him. He supposed he’d better go and greet his counterpart. Determinedly, he fixed a welcoming expression to his face, smoothed his mustache, and pulled his shoulders back. The Americans always stood so damned straight.
That was when he glimpsed it. A triangle of silver winking at him from the floor below. Curious, he advanced toward the “seat” of the blast, the exact spot where the terrorist Taleel had been standing when he had detonated the bomb, and looked through the hole into the apartment below. Only a cursory examination had been made of it, and a blanket of white dust coated the furniture. Squinting, he saw the swatch of metal again. It looked like an old transistor radio wedged into the wall. Hurrying from the room, he descended a flight of stairs and entered the lower apartment. Crossing to the sofa, he jumped onto the cushions and lifted himself on his tiptoes. It was a video camera. A very small Sony digital number. The viewfinder was missing, the lens was cracked, and the severe heat of the explosion had warped the casing so that it bent like a banana.
“Jean Paul!” Placing his fingers in his mouth, he whistled for his assistant to join him. In a matter of minutes, the two men had pried the camera from the wall without causing the device any further damage. Montbusson turned the camera around in his hands, seeking the on switch. A toggle controlled the apparatus’s actions. Switching it to VCR, he was surprised to hear the camera power up. He put an eye to the ruined viewfinder and pressed “play.” Immediately, a mélange of colors played across the screen, and though he was unable to make anything of it, he was thrilled nonetheless.
Cradling the camera, he left the apartment, only to walk squarely into the broad chest of Frank Neff, the FBI’s legal attaché to the American Embassy.
“Hello, René. Did you find anything?” Neff asked.
Montbusson displayed the camera. “It still functions. There is a film inside.”
Neff glanced dismissively at the camera. “That’s fine and dandy,” he said. “But what about the money? The five hundred grand?”
René Montbusson looked from Neff to the cluster of pale, expectant faces behind him. He had a terrible sensation that everyone knew something except him. Something very, very important.
“What money?” he asked.
Chapter 8
A faint blue light glowed in the office of General Guy Gadbois, chief of the General Directorate for External Security. Gadbois, a barrel-chested paratrooper, forty-year veteran of Algeria, the Congo, and too many brushfires to mention, lit another cigarette and stared at the blizzard of gray and white snow swirling on the television screen a few feet away. Though the tape had finished fifteen seconds before, he couldn’t shake his eyes from it.