When he bolted awake he was shaking, adrenaline flooding through his system, and he cried out, for a moment still in with the sick, sentenced to impossible-to-imagine death. His bearings returned after a few panicked gasps, and his racing heart began to slow as he blinked and groped on the nightstand for his watch.
Jeffrey groaned and pushed himself to a sitting position, and then forced himself to his feet and stumbled half-asleep to the bathroom, where it took seemingly forever for the water to get warm. Once in the shower he dismissed shampooing his hair and instead scrubbed himself vigorously with the provided lavender soap, as if he could wash away the lingering sense of dread that was now his constant companion. Even as he watched the suds swirl down the drain, the clock was ticking, and vials of global death could be on their way for dispersal. He was trying not to allow the size of the responsibility he’d been unwittingly stuck with to paralyze him, but it was hard, given what he now knew.
He deliberately took slow, deep breaths as he toweled dry, regaining control of himself with a pronounced effort that set his head to throbbing again, the pain now as familiar as a favorite song. He needed to focus. How was he going to get to see the scientific equivalent of a rock star? The question nagged at him as he shaved, and then he realized he needed to do more research before he could come up with a coherent plan. Right now he was operating in the dark, and he needed to change that, quickly.
Jeffrey called down to the front desk and asked for housekeeping to make up his room while he was having breakfast. He locked his valuables in the safe and took his phone with him, so his watchers would see normal movement. A table set for two near the hotel restaurant entrance afforded him a good view of the lobby, but either his newly acquired spy skills were dormant before his first cup of coffee or there was nobody watching him.
Service was slow, and it took him an hour to finish up, which gave him more than enough time to plan his day. To anyone paying attention he would appear to be bed-ridden, but as soon as he confirmed that his room had been serviced he’d be slipping out the service entrance and completing the tasks that had been accumulating in his mind like cords of firewood. He stopped at the front desk and told the clerk that he was not to be disturbed and to hold all calls until further notice.
Back in the room he stashed his wallet and phone in the safe and peeled off a thousand euros, folding the notes into a thin wad and slipping them into his trousers. He’d been having second thoughts about the wallet since being mugged — it was conceivable a tracking device had been slipped inside it, although he hadn’t been able to find one. But he didn’t know everything that was possible, and as with his German trip, he’d decided to err on the side of caution and leave everything that could be compromised in the room while he went about his business on the sly.
The service door was unattended, and Jeffrey had no problem easing it open and stepping out into the alley, heaping garbage containers signaling that it was trash day. Two minutes later he was a block away and making for an internet café, the smell of coffee drawing him as much as the computers. He ordered a cappuccino and bought some time at one of the terminals, and then spent the next hour researching everything he could find on Bertrand, which was plenty. The man seemed to enjoy the reputation he’d built, and there were literally hundreds of articles from the last decade, including a number of YouTube videos of him speaking at scientific gatherings.
Jeffrey watched several as he sipped his brew, and the sense he got was of a charming figure who was somewhat ill at ease with the constant limelight. An academic more at home in the lab than on the stage, but still inexhaustible in his communication with the media.
That made Jeffrey’s approach easier. He would again pose as a journalist, this time a freelance investigative reporter doing a series of articles on retroviruses. But unlike the case at the German nursing home, he was pretty sure he wouldn’t be able to smile his way past the Pasteur Institute’s security, so he would need to get business cards printed up, at minimum, and go in through the front door with his act polished to a mirror gleam.
He jotted down the Frenchman’s contact information and created a blind email account using his middle name — Stanley — and once it was active he emailed a brief introductory message to Bertrand, in the hopes that someone on his end checked his correspondence. He chose his words carefully, requesting some time with the scientist as a featured figure in his new article series.
Jeffrey next turned to the job he’d been dreading — recreating the pages of the spreadsheet. He opened Excel and settled in, closing his eyes for a moment while he sorted through his memory and found page one. After a brief pause he began entering headings and numbers, the data as clear as though he was reading from the pages. He stretched another cup of coffee forever, and after several more hours had recreated the entire document.
The woman who ran the little café was obliging and told him how to print his file, and was more than willing to sell him an eight-gigabyte flash drive. He returned to the computer and saved the data to the drive, and sent the document to the printer. Once it was safely in the queue he closed the spreadsheet and wiped the temp file it had created. He then collected the dozen pages the printer spewed forth, shielding them with his body from the watchful eye of the proprietress, and accidentally tripped over the power cord, jerking it free of the wall and hopefully dumping the printer’s memory in the process.
Money changed hands and he folded the documents and slipped them into the inside pocket of his jacket. He suspected there was some way an interested party could retrieve the data from the printer if they were motivated, but it would have to be an acceptable risk — he’d covered his tracks as best he could, but he couldn’t be a hundred percent on everything.
His next stop was a cell phone store across the street, where he purchased a moderately priced disposable with a hundred minutes of talk time and a local number. Once it had been activated and he confirmed it worked, he moved to a print shop he’d passed the day before that advertised documents created while you waited — at least that’s what he’d thought the banners in the display window said. He shouldered his way into the shop and was greeted by a morose young man sporting a sparse goatee, a beatnik-era haircut, and an olive green T-shirt depicting Che Guevara staring into eternity. Jeffrey picked up a business card and pointed to it, and the clerk began rattling off prices and terms in lightning French. Jeffrey turned the sample business card over and wrote a name with his new number below it, along with a title: James Stanley, Investigative Journalist, 46a rue Saint-Guillaume, 75007 Paris.
Jeffrey pantomimed that he wanted some cards made, and after a few minutes of tortured back and forth, the young man snorted and addressed him in English.
“You want these on good, or the best, stock? And how many?”
Jeffrey was taken aback but didn’t show it. “The best, and make it a hundred. But I need them as soon as possible.”
“Hmm. Yes, I suppose you would.”
The clerk tapped keys on the calculator in front of him, paused, took another look at Jeffrey’s face and entered more, and then turned the calculator to face Jeffrey so he could read the display. As Jeffrey peered at the tiny screen the clerk moved over a few feet and addressed another customer, an older woman, who had entered the shop after him. The two had a heated exchange with much gesticulation, and then the woman left, slamming the door on her way out. The clerk’s long, jaundiced face remained impassive as he returned his attention to Jeffrey.