‘Yes. I have the file with the account information.’
‘I have the encryption key.’
‘Two halves of the puzzle. Held by the queen and the pawn.’
‘I despise chess,’ she said, frowning. ‘Give me the account numbers, Luke. Now.’
The martyr watched the target building. He was nervous; he had not expected to go to paradise for weeks, and now he had no time to comport his mind toward calm. People strolled past it; no one came in or out. On the other side was a Christian bookstore, with apartments above it; on the opposite side was an art supply store. Selling the tools to make godless images, he told himself. He tried not to think about the two pretty young women standing outside in the dank air, finishing their Gitanes, laughing. He smoked Gitanes, too. He tried not to look at them but their lovely faces drew his gaze like a magnet. He was weak and temptation was strong. They laughed and the smoke wreathed their faces, and he reminded himself they were devils, nothing more. Paris was a city full of devils. The virgins given in heaven would be far more desirable, flashing eyes, water-pearled thighs and smiles of rapture.
He drove past twice, looking the part of the man seeking that simplest of urban pleasures, a parking spot. When he completed his orbit back in front of the target building he was glad the two girls had either left the street or gone back inside the art shop. He didn’t want to look at them again.
‘You can put the gun down, Jane.’
‘Can I?’
‘Let’s discuss terms,’ Luke said.
The softening of her smile was an acknowledgment that they were moving toward the truth. ‘Terms. You give me the fifty million and you walk away, and you hope the Night Road never finds you. Mouser might flay you alive if he gets his hands on you, and he might not be the worst of it.’ She gestured at the photos of Mouser, Snow and Sweet Bird. ‘They’re insane but functional. I’m sure they could take a very memorable vengeance against you.’
‘Two of the three are dead,’ he said. ‘I’m not exactly scared of them the way I was.’
‘I’d kill Mouser if I were you. He won’t give up.’
‘So I give you the money and I get nothing.’ No way she would let him live. She had nothing to gain from it.
‘I’ll offer the same deal I gave Eric. I promised I could buy a new life for him and Aubrey. You keep a quarter-million. You vanish. I’ll help you set up in a nice backwater.’
‘You’re just as bad as the Night Road. You completely screwed up my life, you bitch. For what? So you can have what you want, and everyone else be damned, and you don’t give a shit about innocent people.’
‘You make me sound so bad, Luke. Honestly. It’s a day’s work. We’re keeping cash away from terrorists, after all. I’m much less nasty than the Night Road. Now. The file, please. I have the encryption key on the computer in the other room.’
He stepped into the corridor. He would only get this one chance. She stepped away from the window, the pistol focused on him.
Finally a parking spot directly in front of the building opened up. An elderly man eased his Peugeot out of a slot and, talking to himself, drove down the rue de l’Abbe-Gregoire.
The martyr parked with care; one had to be a good parallel parker to survive in Paris, and he was. He did not weep but he thought of his father, dead two years from a cancer, his mother, who would not understand. The sky was milky with rain. He wondered if there would be cool rain in paradise; he could not remember if weather was mentioned. It felt like someone else was operating his muscles, as though they moved of a different accord than his own brain and heart. He wished for his mother’s touch, he wished he had not seen the girls in the art shop, he wished he had finished school, but none of that would matter. He was being weak. The glory that awaited would surpass all. Wouldn’t it?
The martyr lifted a device that had once been a game controller. Wires led to the gateway to paradise. He was afraid. A tiny voice inside him screamed do not do this.
He silenced the voice with a heaving sigh and pressed the button to the game controller.
52
Jane had followed him into the room with the computer. It sat on a desk, in front of the window. She went behind the desk, gestured with the gun at him to make him stay put.
‘Toss me the key ring.’
He obeyed. She opened the toy, slid the thumb drive into the USB port.
With one hand she ran her fingers along the keyboard, typing. She kept the gun aimed at him with the other hand.
She would have to glance down if the account information appeared. He could rush her then. She would shoot him, he was sure, but if he didn’t do something he was dead anyway.
She kept flicking her glance between the computer screen – which he couldn’t see, but which gave off a dim glow in the darkened room that lit her face with an otherworldly blue – and him. She wouldn’t kill him until she was sure she had what she wanted.
He tensed to jump at her.
‘There it is.’ But Jane’s voice – so confident and snarky – suddenly sounded shaken. ‘Hidden in plain sight, that little b-’
The window – and the world – where Jane stood vanished. A flash, like God opening an eye, blinded Luke. There and gone, only light and dust remaining. He tumbled up and down and sideways through the air and grit where the walls had been and landed against a fist of stone, rubble rained past him where Jane had stood with her rotten gun and her smug smile. Junk hammered a hundred blows into him. Everything seemed pulverized. His scream got lost in his throat and then it was done, the sound and fury gone and then an enormous, wrenching silence.
Luke grew aware that he was still breathing since he was coughing and every hack pierced his ribcage with pain. He tried to move and every muscle cried against the bones and flesh. He could see part of a milk-colored sky above him; the roof was gone, half of it in the street, the other half on top of him. The front of the building was a memory; a curtain of dust marked where the walls stood. Smoke filled his nose. Parts of the rooftop had fallen atop him in a wide scattering. The wall had held, shielding him from the heaviest of the rubble. He blinked. Tried again. He could move his feet. His hands. The floor sagged and a fearsome crack in the floor inched toward him. Beyond that, the mist of dust.
He rose on hands and knees now, testing the bones to see what was broken. His face hurt. His eyes were swollen, blinking hard against the onslaught of grit and the bright sun-smashing flash of the blast. He crawled away from the crack, from the edge of the floor – he remembered that he was six stories up.
‘What the hell, what the hell, what the hell,’ he mumbled to himself. He tried to get his bearings. The building could collapse. Would collapse. He had a horror of being trapped, entombed alive with tons of rubble sealing him away, succumbing to a slow, lonely death. The fear cut through the haze. He crawled along hands and knees. The stairs he had come up had to be gone now, in the front of the building, but there had to be back stairs.
The floor groaned, sagged, and he nearly fell. Below him he heard a rumble, walls tumbling away. The floor canted hard; he could not see past the swirling dust. He heard the shrill cry of a police siren. Help was coming.
He tried to remember the layout of the building. Stairs. Reception. Hallway. Offices on both sides.
He realized he was crawling the wrong way through the gritty fog. He turned and hoped he didn’t crawl off the edge. He splayed fingers in front of him, feeling, reaching. He found wall. A door. Blown inward by the blast, at a broken angle, wrenched clean off the hinges. He fumbled forward. Nothing but wall, more wall. A dead end. No back stairs. He crawled back out into the shattered hallway.
The building moaned. He thought it might well have been built before the days of steel beams and might be straining to stay erect, held together only by chance.