Before she could venture a question, her cell phone rang again. Kismet ignored the distraction and kept talking, not so much to share information with Rebecca as to put his thoughts in coherent form. “It would have to be tall, like a skyscraper… Incorporate metal in the frame…”
Suddenly he knew the answer. It had been staring him in the face earlier in the night. But as he saw a look of aghast horror spreading across Rebecca’s countenance, he knew that she had somehow beat him to the answer. “Chiron,” she rasped, barely able to speak. “He’s—”
“Let me guess.” There was no triumph in his tone, only bitter certainty. “The Eiffel Tower.”
When it was erected as part of the World Exposition in 1889, the Tour Eiffel, stretching more than three hundred meters into the sky, was the tallest man-made structure in existence. That record endured for more than thirty years until technological advancements made possible the construction of skyscrapers like the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building in New York City, USA. And while the Eiffel Tower had ceased to be ranked among the world’s tallest structures, it remained one of the most instantly recognizable monuments on earth.
From the turret-like observatory, just a few meters below the television antenna that completed the steel tower’s extraordinary skyward reach, Pierre Chiron had a spectacular view of the city. Unlike most residents of Paris, for whom it was a destination only for visiting tourists, Chiron was intimately familiar with La Tour Eiffel. He had made the vertical journey to the summit many times in the last six years and had made an exhaustive study of all available reference materials. Yet there was more to the history of the tower than what was reported in books and travel guides. There were perhaps only a handful of people alive who knew the real story, and for a brief moment, Chiron had almost joined their number.
His fleeting glimpse into the shadows that surrounded that group had left him with more questions than answers, but what little he did know drove him deeper into the mystery. He knew that the Eiffel Tower was some kind of observatory, and that it would be a focal point for some experiment connected to atomic testing. Everything else was supposition.
When in 1886 Alexandre Gustave Eiffel had submitted the plans for his entry in a competition to build a tower to celebrate French progress on the occasion of the centennial celebration of the revolution, he could not have imagined it would have anything to do with nuclear physics. Or could he? The architect, who in 1877 had designed the steel skeleton for the magnificent statue Liberty Enlightening the World, a gift from France to the United States of America, known universally as the Statue of Liberty, was without question a genius, but had his namesake tower been designed with an ulterior motive in mind?
Chiron had come to believe that Eiffel too had been a member of the secret society of intellectuals, and that his tower reflected advance knowledge of the coming atomic age. More than that, he believed that Eiffel, and all the others in the inner circle, had known what he now knew: the Divine Entity, worshiped by many, reviled by some, resided in the earth’s magnetic field. An amalgam of charged photons and human psychic energy, God existed because of the faith of his followers and the unalterable constant of global magnetic force.
But global magnetism wasn’t a constant. The charged poles were constantly shifting, changing the location of compass north. Moreover, recent experiments had shown that it was possible to obliterate the Van Allen radiation belts — the electromagnetic shroud which separated heaven from earth, and was, Chiron believed, the abode of the Entity.
They had known it — Eiffel and his co-conspirators. Perhaps knowledge of the secret went back to the dawn of civilization, to the builders of the Tower of Babel itself, who said among themselves: “Let us build a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven.” They had tapped into that inexhaustible source, creating miracles which could only be described as magic. But Eiffel and the others had gone a step further.
Chiron tried to recall what Kismet had said that day as they rolled along the highway toward Baghdad: We are the Chains of God….
The memory was suddenly painful. Unbidden, the image of the cavern and the blank wall of steel with which he — he, Pierre Chiron who had sworn an oath to watch over that young man — had entombed Nick Kismet and left him to die.
“This too, I lay at your feet,” he whispered. “And you will pay.”
He had manhandled the stretcher into the turret and positioned it at the exact center of the structure. Now safely out of the line of sight of any observers, he could work undisturbed. He laid aside the ersatz trigger and began removing pieces from the device itself. A globe of black metal, the plutonium core of a Russian warhead, lay innocuously beside the French-designed Iraqi detonator. The nuclear fuel was relatively safe in this form; unlike the unstable isotopes of uranium that had powered the first atomic weapons, plutonium was not neutron heavy. The greatest threat to safety was a very high risk of lung cancer if particles of the element were inhaled, but Pierre Chiron knew that cancer would not be the cause of his death.
The Eurocopter AS 565UB “Panther” roared above the city of lights like a Valkyrie charging toward an epic battlefield. Its twin Turbomeca Ariel 2C engines screamed like those mythical creatures, hungry for the flesh of dead warriors. The image was oddly appropriate; if the aircraft did not reach its destination in time, the streets of Paris would resemble the aftermath of Ragnarok — the Norse equivalent of Armageddon.
Unlike Rebecca and the other DGSE commandos, Kismet didn’t have a flight helmet or even a headset to both muffle the harsh noise of the engines and keep him informed of their progress. The latter point was of little consequence. Their objective lay centered in the cockpit windscreen, stabbing heavenward and continuously sweeping the night with a blazing searchlight.
It was impossible to know if they would reach the Eiffel Tower before Chiron activated his bomb. Every soul aboard the helicopter knew that at any moment the famed monument might erupt with the brilliance of a thousand suns, erasing them and the City of Light from existence, yet here they were rushing toward ground zero.
Rebecca leaned close and shouted in his ear. “He hasn’t made any demands! The police say that he has a dead-man switch. If we try to kill him, it may trigger the device!”
The words stunned Kismet. Kill Pierre? Despite what the old man had done to him, he had never expected that it would come down to that. He tapped the side of her helmet, indicating that he wished to answer. “You have to let me speak with him! Maybe I can talk him out of it!”
Rebecca’s expression was grim and doubtful. “He tried to kill you! What makes you think he will want to listen now?”
That stopped him. Chiron was no longer a creature of reason. What could Kismet possibly say that would turn him from his meticulously thought out endgame? If he could not convince Pierre to abort his scheme, what other options were there?
He gestured for one of the commandoes to give up a headset, and at a nod from Rebecca, the man surrendered the earmuffs to Kismet. The foam insulation reduced some of the noise, but he still had to shout into the lip mic to be heard. “I’ve got an idea.”
Rebecca stared in disbelief as he sketched out his plan, and when he had finished, shook her head. “Is that even possible?”
“It doesn’t matter. All that matters is that Pierre has to believe we have done it. If we can do this, we’ll take away the only reason he’s up there.”