Authors: Terry Hayes
missed Christmas and birthday would only have made stronger. He also had easy access to the personnel: crime intelligence reports from any police force in Europe would tell you that half of Albania was involved in the murder-for-hire business.
From Hédiard’s wine department, a door accessed a side street and I went through it without pause,
turning left. It was a one-way street and I walked fast towards the oncoming traffic, the only strategy in the circumstances. At least you can see the shooter coming.
Scanning the road ahead, I realized I was acting to a well-organized plan. I didn’t know it until then but, wherever I went, part of me was always thinking about the best way out, an unseen escape programme constantly running in the background of my mind. My biggest regret was about my gun.
A cup of coffee, a quick meeting with the doctor and a cab home – half an hour maximum, I had
figured. That meant the gun was in a safe back at the apartment. I had grown sloppy, I guess. Even if I saw them coming, there was little I could do now.
Home was exactly where I was heading – first thing, to open the damn safe and get myself weaponed up. I turned right, walked fast for a block, turned left and met the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré exactly where I wanted – just down the road from the Élysée Palace. Whichever Greek or Albanian was in the taxi would know it was the safest street in Paris – snipers on the rooftops, the whole length under constant anti-terrorist surveillance. Only now did I feel comfortable enough to grab a cab.
I got the driver to stop hard against my building’s service entrance. By cracking open the door of
the cab and staying low I could unlock the steel door and get inside without anybody seeing me. The
driver thought I was crazy – but then his religion thinks stoning a woman to death for adultery is reasonable, so I figured we were about even.
Slamming the door behind me, I ran through the underground garages. The limestone building had
once been a magnificent town house, built in the 1840s by the Comte du Crissier, but had fallen into ruin. The previous year it had been restored and turned into apartments, and I had rented one on the first floor. Even though it was small, normally someone in my situation would never have been able
to afford it, but my material circumstances had changed – Bill Murdoch had died three years ago while I was on a brief assignment in Italy.
I wasn’t invited to the funeral, and that hurt – I just got a note from Grace telling me he had died suddenly and had already been buried. That was my adoptive mother for you – jealous to the end. A
few months later I got a letter from a lawyer saying Bill’s matrix of companies – controlled by an offshore trust – had been left to Grace. It wasn’t unexpected – they had been married for forty years.
The letter said that, while there was no provision for me, Grace had decided to set aside enough money to provide me with an income of eighty thousand dollars a year for life. It didn’t spell it out but the tone was clear: she believed it discharged all her responsibilities towards me.
Two years after the arrangement – almost to the day – Grace herself died. I felt her earlier behaviour relieved me of any obligation and I didn’t go back for the huge society funeral at Greenwich’s old Episcopalian church.
Again, and not for the first time, I was alone in the world, but I couldn’t help smiling at what a difference two years can make: had the order of their deaths been reversed, I knew Bill would have
made a substantial bequest to me. As it was, Grace left everything to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to rebuild the Old Masters gallery in her name.
This information was conveyed in a letter from the same lawyer who also mentioned that there was
a small matter concerning Bill’s estate that needed to be finalized. I told him I’d see him at his office in New York when I was home next – and then let it pretty much slip from my mind. The cheques
from Grace’s bequest arrived regularly and it meant I could live a life far more comfortable than anything the government had ever envisaged with their pension.
The most tangible benefit was the apartment in Paris, and I found myself racing through what had
once been the mansion’s kitchen – converted to a plant room – and flying up a set of fire stairs towards my home. I opened a concealed door next to the elevator and burst into the small foyer.
A woman was standing there. It was Mme Danuta Furer, my seventy-year-old neighbour, who lived
in the mansion’s grandest apartment. The perfectly groomed widow of some aristocratic industrialist, she had the uncanny ability to make everyone else feel like a member of the Third World.
She saw my tongue moistening my dry lips, shirt hanging out. ‘Something wrong, Mr Campbell?’
she asked in her inscrutable upper-class French.
She knew me as Peter Campbell, on sabbatical from my job as a hedge-fund manager – the only job I knew of which would enable somebody my age to afford to live in the apartment and not work.
‘Fine, Madame – just worried I left the oven on,’ I lied.
The elevator arrived, she got in and I unlocked the steel-core door into my apartment. Bolting it,
not turning on any lights, I sprinted through the living room with its beautiful bay windows and small but growing collection of contemporary art. Bill would have liked that.
In the gloom I ripped open a closet in the dressing room and keyed a code into a small floor safe.
Inside was a large amount of cash, a pile of papers, eight passports in different names and three handguns. I pulled out a 9mm Glock fitted with an extended barrel – the most accurate of them all –
checked the action and grabbed a spare clip.
As I slipped it into my waistband, I dwelt on something that had been ricocheting round my head all
the way home: if it was the Greeks, how the hell had they found me?
One theory I could come up with was that the Russians had stumbled across something and passed it
on to their former partners, just for old times’ sake, you know – and a bucketload of untraceable cash.
Or had I made some tiny mistake at Richeloud’s that Markus Bucher had passed on to his clients and which had allowed them eventually to discover who I was? But, in either case, what had led the
Greeks to Paris? For God’s sake, I was living under a completely different identity.
The knock on the door was firm and definite.
I didn’t react. I had always known that a hostile would have little difficulty getting into the building
– François, the middle-aged, snivelling concierge, was always leaving the front doors open as he plumbed new depths of servitude. No sooner would he have heard Mme Furer coming down in the elevator than he was probably out in the street alerting the limo driver and fussing around to make sure he was registering ever more clearly on her Christmas gift list.
Without hesitation I did exactly what the training says – I moved fast, silently, into the back of the apartment. One strategy experienced assassins use is to attach a couple of ounces of Semtex – a plastic explosive with the consistency of clay – to the frame of a door before ringing the bell.
The perpetrator takes cover – in this case it would be in the elevator car – and detonates it with a call from a cellphone. Eight ounces of Semtex brought down Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, so
you can imagine what half that would do to a steel door and anybody looking through a peephole.
I backed through the dining room, grabbed a jacket to cover the Glock and headed for the spare bedroom. When the building had been the Comte du Crissier ’s mansion his staff had used a hand-cranked elevator to send meals up from the kitchen to the dining room. This dumb waiter had terminated in a butler ’s pantry – which was now my spare bedroom.
During the renovation the shaft had been converted to carry electrical wiring and, under the guise
of installing high-speed computer cable to monitor the activities of my non-existent hedge fund, I got
permission for a contractor who had installed surveillance equipment on The Division’s behalf to access the shaft. Having him fit a ladder inside, giving a route to the basement, I figured made the place almost worth the sky-high rent. Right now it was priceless.
I opened a closet door, pulled off an access panel and in less than a minute was heading into a narrow lane at the back of the building. Any moment I expected to hear the nineteenth-century facade and the heritage-listed bay windows heading towards a messy landing on the Champs-Élysées.
Nothing. What was stopping them? I guessed that, having lost me down at the place de la Madeleine,
they had returned immediately to my apartment. Uncertain if I had arrived back yet, the knock on the door was an attempt to find out.
Just as well I hadn’t answered. I was almost certain there were two of them – that’s how many I would have used – and they were hiding right now near the elevator, waiting for me to return. That
gave me a chance – if I entered by the front doors and took the stairs, I was pretty sure I could surprise them. I was never the best shot in my graduating class, but I was good enough to take them
both out.
I slowed to a walk as I emerged from the lane, and ran a professional eye over the pedestrians, just to be certain that the guys inside didn’t have help on the street. I saw women on their way home from shopping at the luxury stores on avenue Montaigne, couples walking their dogs, a guy in a Mets cap
with his back to me – a tourist by the look of it – window-shopping at the patisserie next to my building, but I didn’t see anyone who fitted the profile I had in mind. I turned to the vehicles and, equally, there was no white cab or shooters sitting in parked cars that I could see.
I moved up close behind a fifty-year-old woman in high heels and her boyfriend, twenty years her
junior. They wouldn’t completely shield me from a sniper on a roof but they would certainly make
the job more difficult. Under cover of them, I steadily closed down the distance to my building: eighty yards, forty, twenty …
As I passed the patisserie, the guy in the Mets cap spoke to my back: ‘Wouldn’t it have been easier
just to open the fucking door, Mr Campbell?’
My heart stopped, every fear I had collapsing into the void that was once my stomach. In the next
moment two distinct and contradictory thoughts fought for primacy. The first was: so this is how it
ends? The retired agent outsmarted on a street in Paris, shot through the head, probably by somebody standing inside the patisserie.
Vyshaya mera
to me, I guess, bleeding out on the sidewalk, a man I don’t even know pocketing the gun as he and the guy in the Mets cap walk away to be picked up by – what
else? – a white taxi.
The other thought was – there’s no way they’re killing me. Even if there was a shooter on a building or in a room at the Plaza Athenée hotel, the guy in the cap would have signalled silently and the marksman would have done his job. They don’t talk to you in the real world: only in movies do
the bad guys have this pathological need to tell you their life story before they pull the trigger. Out here, there’s too much danger and your mind’s way too revved not to just get it over with. Look at
Santorini.
Nevertheless, there was always a first time – so I still wasn’t sure whether to piss myself from fear or from relief. I looked at the man: he was a black guy in his fifties with a lean body and a handsome face, worn around the edges. More Reject China than fine Limoges, I told myself. This assessment was confirmed as he stepped a little closer and I realized he was limping badly on his right leg.
‘I think you called me Mr Campbell. You’re mistaken,’ I said in French, filling every syllable with
my best imitation of Parisian disdain. ‘My name isn’t Campbell.’ I was buying time, trying to work
out what was going on.
‘I guess that’s one thing we agree on,’ he said in English, ‘given that no Peter Campbell holds a Wall Street trading licence, and the hedge fund he manages doesn’t exist.’
How the hell did he know that? I shifted casually, putting him more squarely between me and the
patisserie window.
‘So if you’re not Campbell, who are you?’ he went on. ‘Jude Garrett, FBI agent and author? Well,
that’s difficult too – him being dead. Here’s another weird thing about Garrett,’ he said calmly. ‘I spoke to his cousin down in New Orleans. She was pretty amazed about his literary achievement – she
doubted he ever read a book, let alone wrote one.’
He knew all this stuff about me, but I was still alive! That was the important point and he seemed to be missing it. I scanned the rooftops, trying to see if there was a sniper.
He watched my eyes, knowing what I was doing, but it didn’t affect his swing: ‘This is what I figure, Mr Campbell-or-whoever-you-are, you live under a fake identity but you wrote the book using a dead man’s name, just to be safe.
‘I think you worked for the government and only a handful of people know your real name. Maybe
not even that many.
‘To me, that says it’s probably not wise to ask what kind of work you did but, the truth is, I don’t care. Your book is the best work on investigative technique I have ever read. I just want to talk about it.’
I stared at him. Finally, I got it out, speaking in English: ‘You wanna talk about a book?! I was gonna
kill
you!’