No less incredulous, she shrugged in resignation. “What do you need?”
Kismet took a deep breath before answering. He knew she was right. It was a crazy, desperate plan, and there was no way to know if it would be enough to disarm Chiron. But even a bad plan was better than simply waiting for the blade to fall.
The Panther flared above the vast greenspace, two hundred meters from the base of the Tower. On a normal night, the area would be thick with tourists wandering through the Champ de Mars and lovers picnicking on blankets, but tonight those crowds had been pushed back another three hundred meters beyond the helicopters landing zone. The gendarmes controlling the scene knew only that a madman had ascended to the summit possibly with some kind of bomb, and believed five hundred meters to be an adequate margin of safety. Ghoulish spectators could rarely be persuaded to leave such a drama completely. No one on the ground could have imagined that the minimum safe distance that night would be not five hundred meters, but fifty thousand.
Rebecca and Kismet hit the ground before the Panther’s wheels touched down and hastened toward a line of waiting vehicles just inside the perimeter. A dozen men stood nervously in front of the four utility trucks, each wearing workman’s coveralls and molded plastic hard hats. One of the men — his hat was white instead of yellow — moved forward to greet them.
Kismet cut short the introductions and launched into a repeat of his earlier monologue. The chief engineer’s eyes grew wide as he spoke, but he waited until Kismet had finished to voice his concerns. “Monsieur, what you suggest — making the tower into an enormous solenoid — even if it could be done, it might tear the tower apart.”
Kismet glanced at the brightly lit grid work towering above them. It was difficult to believe anything short of an atomic bomb could bring down the ten-thousand-ton structure. But the engineer continued. “You must understand. The tower, like any steel building, is aligned with the earth’s magnetic field. If you try to reverse the polarity, the tower will want to repel… It will try to flip over.”
“We’ll have to take that chance,” Kismet declared. “It may not be the best idea, but I need to know if you can do it?”
The man frowned, then glanced back at his team. “Oui. It can be done. We need perhaps… two hours?”
“Try to do it in one. That’s about how long it will take for me to climb those stairs.”
The engineer shook his head as he turned away, but immediately began shouting orders to his men. Kismet started moving in the opposite direction.
“The lift is still operational,” Rebecca pointed out, racing to match his brisk pace.
“Then disable it. We need to buy some time. Once Pierre knows I’m coming up, he’ll hold off taking any action.”
“Nick, there is something else that I need to tell you.” She waited until she had his full attention, then took a deep breath. “That matter you asked me to investigate when we were back at Chiron's apartment. Your suspicions were correct.”
For a moment, Kismet struggled to grasp what she was talking about. Then he remembered and swore under his breath. “I need to call her.”
Buttrick almost jumped out of his skin when the telephone rang. The brief conversation with his friend at the Pentagon had not gone well and now he was… Damn it, I’m actually afraid. What kind of hornet’s nest had he stirred up?
Nick Kismet, former 2LT in the Army Reserves, had an open file at the Defense Department, flagged for immediate action. Anyone who even attempted to look at the file came away with a big bull’s eye on their back. Who is this guy? Buttrick wondered, not for the first time.
He allowed Marie to answer and held his breath as she spoke in French. The telephone call was not the “black spot” he had been expecting.
“Nick?” A pause. “Mon dieu… oui…oui… Très bien. We will meet you there.”
Buttrick could barely contain himself. As soon as she returned the handset to the cradle, he asked, “Well?”
“That was Nick. We must go now.”
Chiron had just finished connecting the timer mechanism to the primary when the public address speakers crackled to life. They had made several attempts to communicate with him. They used his name now, which was, he supposed, a good thing. They would know that he was no amateur, and would therefore make no hasty attempt to storm the tower and disarm him. He had been a little anxious about the helicopter that had set down to the southeast a few minutes before, but nothing had happened subsequent to its arrival.
He ignored the hum of amplified sound and began keying in the time delay sequence. No sense in prolonging the inevitable, he thought. Acting on a perverse impulse, he punched in one digit three times: 6:66.
“Pierre, this is Nick.”
Chiron’s finger hovered above the ‘start’ button, motionless, but every cell in his body seemed to be quivering. Nick is alive! But that’s not possible.
He was in that instant both overjoyed and filled with despair, torn between the love of a father for a son who has been rescued from the lion’s jaws and the guilt for having been the instrument of that peril.
“Pierre, I need to talk to you. I know what you are doing, and what you think… what you have to do. I’m not going to do anything but talk, but there is something you need to know before you do this.”
And then, something new was added to the stir. Chiron ignored the amplified voice issuing from the speakers and directed his gaze out over the night. “You did this,” he rasped, his joy turning to bile. “It’s just your self-defense mechanism. You’re no better than an animal.”
Kismet, unaware of the imprecations, continued speaking. “The police have turned off the elevators so I’m going to have to climb the stairs. It’s going to take me a while, Pierre, maybe an hour. Please let me come up. Give me an hour, Pierre. I’m on my way up now.”
“You saved him, just so he could stop me.” Chiron’s voice was taut. The thread holding his rage in check vibrated in his throat like a piano wire tuned too tightly and ready to snap. “You could do that, but you couldn’t give her what she asked for? What she begged for?”
He lowered his gaze to the number pad for the timer. His finger was still poised above the start button. He moved it back to the six and pressed the numeral once more, then without hesitation, started the countdown. “Save yourself now. If you can.”
Kismet had heard Parisian tour guides tell visitors that there were 1,792 steps to the summit of the Eiffel Tower, a number that commemorated the year of the birth of the French Republic. The tower engineer he had spoken with before beginning his ascent gave the official number, starting at ground level, as 1,665. The real number was probably somewhere in-between, but by any reckoning, the task of climbing more than eighty stories worth of stairs was not for the faint — or weak — of heart.
Kismet was already weary as he topped the first flight, nearly four hundred steps, and was beginning to wonder if he had not erred in deciding not to make use of the elevators. At the time, it had seemed to best way to delay Chiron from executing his mad scheme, but now he was wondering if he had the stamina to make the three hundred meter vertical journey. Fifteen minutes had passed since he had made his plea to Chiron for one hour, and while he had not immediately commenced the climb, he now would be hard pressed to meet that deadline.
But as he left the first level, he caught his second wind and began making steady-if-plodding progress. His conscious effort at breath control had the added benefit of helping focus his thoughts, and the enormity of what he was now marching toward no longer filled him with dread. His entire world consisted of nothing more than putting one foot ahead of the other, and before he knew it, he reached the second level, where the Jules Verne restaurant was located. Like almost every foreign visitor to Europe, Kismet had visited the Tower, but he had never seen it like this, completely deserted. If was as if the world had ended, and he was the sole survivor. Shaking off the dark image, he proceeded to the locked gate that secured the stairway to the uppermost level, and opened it using a key provided by the chief engineer.