The stairs zigzagged their way up the center of the tower in tight little patterns. At each switchback, Carter stopped to search the gridwork above and to listen for any further chance sounds, but all was quiet.
As he climbed, all of Paris began to spread out beneath him. In the far distance across the river he could see the Sacré Coeur, lit up on its hill, looking lovely and peaceful.
Another silenced shot whined off the iron rail near where Carter stood, this time so close it sent paint chips flying into his face.
Moments later Carter could hear the distinctive ring of shoe leather on the metal treads, moving upward.
He was less than a hundred feet from the top. He raced up the next few flights relying on his speed of motion, rather than the darkness and his stealth, for safety.
Two more shots ricocheted off the metalwork, until within thirty or forty feet of the top he spotted a figure moving on the cat walk.
Carter snapped off a shot, his unsilenced Luger extremely loud in the night air, and the figure disappeared.
The stairs were covered from above. There was no way he would be able to make it the rest of the way...
Again Carter holstered Wilhelmina, then he climbed up onto the rail and swung out over to the gridwork of the tower, the sheer drop more than eight hundred feet to the deck of the first level.
The metal was slippery with night dew, the corners rounded and at odd, oblique angles, making any kind of grip or foothold extremely difficult.
Carter worked his way around to the outside of the tower, the place Ganin would least expect him to be, and started up, the wind at that height moaning through the gridwork, threatening to dislodge his grip and send him plunging far below to the pavement.
He concentrated on each handhold, on each step upward, a few inches at a time, his world reduced for the moment to hanging on.
Within ten feet of the top, Carter stopped a moment to rest, to gather his strength. His wounded leg was starting to give him some trouble again. He had put too much strain on it during the past few days, but there was no going back now, so he put it out of his mind.
A few feet farther up he heard the clinking of what sounded like thin metal tubing hitting the tower’s metalwork, and then a soft slapping sound... almost like a sail.
Suddenly it was clear to him. Ganin had not made a mistake after all.
Redoubling his efforts, Carter scrambled recklessly the last few feet to the base of the observation room, then climbed through the gridwork to the stairs.
He pulled out his Luger, thumbed the safety off, and cautiously came up through the doorway.
Arkadi Ganin, a large hang glider, its nylon wing black, strapped to his back, stood perched in precarious balance above on the observation room’s roof.
Carter fired a shot through the open trapdoor just as the Russian launched himself and was gone.
A large satchel stood in the middle of the observation room. Carter started up to the roof, when he noticed it out of the corner of his eye. His stomach flopped over, and he scrambled back down.
The satchel was locked, but from within Carter was certain he could smell the distinctive odor of vinegar. It was an acid fuse. Activated. There was a bomb inside!
He whipped out his stiletto and, working with extreme care, slit open the leather side of the squat briefcase. It was possible the lock was tied to an override switch.
Easing open the flap he had cut, he looked inside. Through a tubular fuse the size of a pencil, wires connected two batteries to a thick lump of pastique. Enough to blow the entire tower.
Sweat pouring down his chest beneath his shirt, Carter reached inside the case with his right hand, grabbed the slender fuse between his thumb and forefinger, took a deep breath, and yanked the device out of the plastique. A split second later the fuse sputtered, and a long, deadly-looking spark emerged from the business end.
Carter fell back on his haunches and breathed a deep sigh of relief. Ganin had cut it very close. To within a few seconds. Had Carter gone up on the roof for another shot, he would not have survived.
Yet he didn’t think the Russian really wanted him dead. Not yet. This had been just another test to see how good he was.
Carter was certain now of one crucial fact: Ganin was very good. A hell of a lot better than any of them had given him credit for being.
A minute or so later Carter got to his feet and climbed up to the roof of the observation room. He looked out over the city. There was no sign of Ganin with the hang glider, of course, but he found what he was looking for on the roof. Blood. Not much of it, but he didn’t need much to know. He had hit Ganin. It would make the Russian think twice about playing his little games.
Apparently because of the height above the ground, no one below had heard either of Carter’s two shots. It was already a few minutes after two by the time he made it painfully back down to the gate in the southwest leg, unlocked it, and stepped away from the tower.
The strolling couples were gone, as were the lovers on the bench. Carter hurried up the Quai Branly, past where the tour boats landed and departed, to the Quai d’Orsay where he hoped Lydia would be making her second swing in the next few minutes.
As he walked he continued to scan possible places of ambush. While Ganin had him occupied, he suspected that someone had gone to the hotel in an effort to get Lydia. When they found her gone, they’d have to figure she was somewhere near Carter.
A lot depended, of course, on whether or not they knew about the Jaguar yet, and whether or not Lydia had kept her head during the past two hours. If she had been spotted, they might have managed to stop her.
Carter got to the Quai Branly where it intersected with the Avenue Bosquet at the Pont de l’Alma just before two-thirty, and he sat down on one of the benches that faced the Seine.
An occasional car passed, then a truck, before the Jaguar came roaring across the bridge, its headlights flashing on Carter.
He jumped up as the car screeched around the corner and pulled up to the curb.
Lydia slid over to the passenger side as Carter jumped in behind the wheel, slammed the car in gear, and took off, the tires squealing on the dry pavement.
Lydia was frightened out of her mind. Even in the dark interior of the car, Carter could see that she was pale, her eyes wide and moist.
As he drove he kept glancing up into the rearview mirror to make sure they weren’t being followed.
“They’re after you, Nick,” Lydia sputtered as they crossed the river near the French Naitonal Assembly Building.
“Yes, Ganin and Kobelev,” Carter snapped.
“No, listen to me!” she cried. “The French police are after you. It was on the radio.”
They had picked up a tail, the headlights coming around the corner from the bridge, following them up to the Place de la Concorde.
“What are you talking about?” Carter asked, concentrating more on his driving. He hauled the car around a tight corner, and a block later swung left, nearly running up on the curb.
Lydia looked back. “They’re following us?”
“Hang on tight,” Carter said as they squealed around still another corner.
For the next few minutes Carter put the powerful Jag through its paces, running an intricate random pattern through the early-morning streets until, way out on the Rue de Flandre heading for the E2 highway east to Reims, he was satisfied they had lost their tail.
He turned back to Lydia. “Now, what did you say about the French police?”
“Listen to me — they have your description. They say you murdered a French maintenance man in Borodin’s building, as well as Borodin himself, whom they’re describing as an important Soviet journalist.”