The door swung open. He and the nurse turned to watch Agent Doe, leaning on a cane, enter the room, followed by the two uniformed officers. The three of them sent him baleful glares.
“Well.” The nurse shot Gregor a meaningful glance. “My name is Lily. I’m on until nine o’clock. If you need anything, just push that red button on the remote beside the bed and I’ll be in momentarily.” She brushed past the men and let herself out, closing the door behind her.
Gregor said into the following silence, “Agent Doe. We meet again.” He glanced at the two unsmiling gendarmes. “Where’s my good friend Édoard? Our little reunion won’t be the same without him.”
Agent Doe’s knuckles were white around the curved handle of the cane. His jaw worked, but his cold, cold eye revealed nothing. “He’s at your building as we speak.”
There was a lump in the mattress the size of a cat that was pinching a nerve in his lower back, but Gregor refused to shift his weight to relieve the discomfort. “Oh?”
Doe grew a smile that would have looked at home on Hannibal Lecter. “Do you have any idea how long the prison term is for operating a bordello?”
So they’d found it. Gregor said flatly, “Five years to life. Or so I’m told.”
“Ah, but you are correct! Your lawyer must be very intelligent. Though not intelligent enough to dissuade you from engaging in such a reprehensible activity. Pity.”
Gregor did have an intelligent lawyer. A genius lawyer, in fact, who charged fifteen hundred dollars an hour and had drilled into his brain never,
never
to admit anything, even if caught standing over a decapitated body with a bloody machete in one hand and a severed head in the other. Which in Gregor’s case was not entirely outside the realm of possibility.
“Actually, I only know that from television. It’s amazing what you can learn from those—”
“—crime shows,” Doe finished for him. “Yes, you said so before.” His ugly smile grew mocking. “You certainly do watch a lot of television.”
The two officers snickered. Gregor and Doe stared at one another, deadlocked in silent animosity, until Gregor made a motion with his hand.
“What happened to your eye?”
Doe stiffened. The smile leached from his face, and he shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “I am not after you, MacGregor, you should know that up front so you can make your decisions going forward accordingly.” In answer to Gregor’s plain expression of disbelief, he said, “I am after far bigger fish, and if you assist me in that regard, all charges against you will be dropped.”
“I thought you weren’t with the police. How can you have the authority to do that?”
Ominously, he said, “My organization is above the police.”
Gregor’s interest was piqued. “Is it now? And here I thought no one was above the law.”
“Enough money can put you above anything, even God Himself.”
Without explaining further and apparently tired of standing, Doe snapped his fingers and one of the officers brought him a chair from the corner of the room. He settled himself into it—lips pinched, legs stiff—and then waved a hand, dismissing them. They looked at one another for a moment before leaving the way they’d come. Gregor saw them take up position outside his door, noticed they both wore sidearms.
The police were acting as his very own armed guards. Even more interesting.
“Speaking of God, are you a religious man, MacGregor?”
Gregor blinked over at him and watched as Doe withdrew a cigarette from his inner coat pocket, lit it, and drew the tip into flame. His deep, satisfied exhalation sent out a cloud of smoke.
“I assume there’s a point you’re trying to make, Doe. Make it.”
Doe chuckled. “Neither am I, as it happens. But there are things we don’t understand in this world, wouldn’t you agree? Things beyond our comprehension? Things…you may have even seen yourself. In the very flesh.”
Gregor stared at him, giving nothing away.
“Have you seen the video of your quite spectacular arrival at the hospital? No? Hmm. Well, it’s actually not that interesting”—his one good eye, icy blue, peering at him from behind round spectacles, grew positively arctic—“when you
compare it to the video we retrieved from the security cameras at your building. Amazing system you have there. State of the art, I’m told.”
“Doe—”
He leaned forward in the chair, suddenly intent, all humor vanished. “Did you know what she was all along? Did you have any idea what you were really dealing with?”
Gregor leaned back into the pillow, silent, and Doe struggled to his feet. From another pocket he removed a cell phone and held it up between two fingers. “A copy of the feed. It’s been edited. I thought you might enjoy the highlights.”
He touched a button and then edged nearer to Gregor, holding the phone out. He took it, gazed down at the small square screen, and found he could not look away.
In all his life, he’d never seen anything move like they did. They’d crawled up the building’s exterior glass walls—literally crawled, like lizards—and entered from the roof. From a dozen different perspectives he saw the assassins running, jumping, bounding, all so quickly their movements were just an on-screen blur. He saw himself and Eliana in the stairwells, the chase in the parking garage, the horrifying impact with the metal door. He saw the Ferrari vanish into the distance out of camera range, but not before he saw, edited from a dozen different angles, five grown men morph into snarling animals and give chase.
Panthers. They turned into panthers, impossibly huge and black.
His skin crawled.
Doe removed the camera from his cold fingers and smiled at the look on Gregor’s face. “Exactly my reaction. I think we’re going to have to build a lot more zoos.”
He returned to his chair and finished his cigarette in silence while Gregor lay back against the pillow, suddenly exhausted. He stared at the ceiling, his brain on an endless replay loop. Men with guns; panthers. Men with guns;
panthers
.
“As I said before,” Doe murmured, stubbing out the cigarette on the plastic arm of the chair, “it’s not you we want. We want her. We want
them
. Tell us everything you know, and all charges against you will be dropped. And you won’t receive any more visits from the police, I can guarantee it.”
She’d been right about having many enemies, Gregor thought as he watched a fly march across the ceiling tiles above. Her own kind wanted to see her dead, this crazy German bastard wanted to stick her in a zoo…she was going to need more guns.
Gregor turned his attention back to Agent Doe. He smiled, humorless. “I think I just realized I have a terrible case of amnesia. Who are you again?”
Doe shook his head, disappointed. “Why would you protect them? Why would you risk imprisonment? They’re only animals, MacGregor.” He said the word
animals
with a sneer and a delicate shudder that wiped the smile right off Gregor’s face.
“So are we,” he said, his voice hard. “So are we, Doe, but some of us are better animals than others. She told me what you did to her. She told me about the tests, about the torture. So what does that make
you
?”
Doe stared at him for a long, long, moment, scrutinizing Gregor’s face from his one visible eye. “I am a patriot,” he finally said. “A protector of our way of life and of our race.”
“Hitler thought the same thing.”
There was another silence, long and cavernous, broken only by the beeping of Gregor’s heart monitor, now wildly erratic.
“Lay down with dogs and you get up with fleas, MacGregor,” Doe said softly, one hand wrapped in a death grip around his cane. He stood slowly, in obvious pain, favoring one leg and leaning heavily on the cane. “This is not over. This is only the beginning. Do you think these creatures will be content to live forever in the shadows? Our information indicates there are hundreds of them, possibly thousands. Maybe more; there’s no way to be sure. But consider what will happen if they one day decide humans have been at the top of the food chain too long. You’ve seen what they can do.” He patted the pocket of his suit jacket where he’d stashed the phone. “And that is only the tip of the iceberg, as they say. They’re killers, MacGregor. They’re monsters. Their potential to cause harm to the human race is unlimited. Consider that carefully when you think of the reasons you are protecting your lady friend.”
He moved slowly to the door. One of the gendarmes saw his approach through the glass and swung the door open for him, holding it as he drew near. He paused in the doorway and looked back at Gregor over his shoulder. His gaze was ghostly pale and eerie as it rested on him.
“You will have plenty of time to ponder all that in prison, I’m sure.”
The hospital door was the kind that had a magnet on it, so when pushed against a wall with another magnet, it stuck and held. Agent Doe passed through the door, but because the gendarme had pushed it all the way open it stayed that way, and Gregor was able to overhear a few words as he made
a phone call from his cell phone, walking slowly away from his room and down the hall.
“Thirteen here. Section Thirty. Put me through to the chairman. Yes, I’ll hold.”
He rounded a corner and limped out of sight.
Crouched in the same spot she’d been hunkered down in for the past six hours, Eliana’s legs were numb.
The tall, turreted red brick structure long ago used as a furnace and chimney to burn waste during construction of the Eiffel Tower was dwarfed by the tower itself, but on its little grassy hill directly beside it, provided a perfect, unobstructed view of the surrounding area. She’d be able to see D’s approach from any direction.
She’d be able to see if he brought anyone else with him.
Twilight conspired to paint Paris in a romantic glow perfectly unsuited to her mood. It was cold but lovely; light snowfall tinted the sky all silver and haze and muffled the roar of the cars and buses on the Avenue Gustave Eiffel to the south. The lights from the port on the river Seine snaking by to her north sparkled in long, winking waves off the dark water. The tower itself was awash in gold light from the thousands of lamps that illumed it, a spear of brilliance that rose straight up to the heavens from the heart of the greatest city in the world. Everything was beautiful.
Everything was awful.
She hadn’t been able to string together a single coherent thought all day. After the catacomb police—a separate division of the force tasked with clearing out the cataphiles on a regular basis—had finally left and the dark corridors were once again silent, Eliana had gone aboveground and
wandered the streets for nearly a full day, blank-eyed and hollow. She didn’t see the pedestrians Christmas shopping who thronged the quaint, cobblestone lanes and chic boulevards; she didn’t care when she bumped into them and they skittered away, frightened by whatever look must have been on her face.
She could guess it wasn’t friendly. Or particularly sane.
Curiously, she couldn’t feel it. She wasn’t feeling much of anything at all, except a tightness in her chest that wouldn’t go away and a growing tension in her muscles that felt like a winch, constricting. There was a black cloud over her head, descending, engulfing her in darkness.
A tingle of recognition snapped her head around and pulled her out of the morass she’d been lingering in with an abrupt jolt, as if she’d been plucked from quicksand. Her heart began to pound. Her hands began to shake.
Because there he was. Walking slowly toward the ticket booth at the south foot of the tower marked
pilier sud
, queuing up like a regular person with all the other tourists, there he was, dressed identically to her in boots and black leather, a long coat with the collar turned up against the wind.
He stood out like a lion in a flock of dozing lambs.
A lion that carried, in one large hand, a small parcel wrapped in butcher paper.
Instead of the elevators with most of the tourists who preferred to avoid exposure to the cold, Demetrius took the narrow stairs in the south leg of the tower to the second floor. She watched him as he ascended through the open latticed network of iron until he reached the wide platform. Moving with slow deliberation, shouldering through the thinning crowd who darted aside to let him pass like a school of minnows fleeing from a shark, he went to the
railing and looked out. He closed his eyes and stayed that way for several moments, unmoving, his coat flapping and billowing around his spread legs, while Eliana watched from her hidden perch, feeling as if her heart would claw itself out of her chest.
Then he turned his head, and across the distance his eyes found hers, as if he knew where she’d been hiding all along. As if he’d felt her watching.
She stood. She stared back at him. Even with the distance, everything was between them, palpable as rain, bright as summer sunlight. His gaze was heat across her face, his dark eyes burned, just staring at her, not a muscle moving, searing intensity and the crackle of invisible flame. She felt pinned by that look, the stark longing in it, the hunger, raw and real. She felt powerless against it, and suddenly a wave of anguish rose up in her, a longing to match his own, and she had to look away.
She turned to the stairs of the old chimney and began the winding descent down.
When she finally stood beside him on the second-floor observation deck and looked out over the vast, sparkling majesty of Paris on a winter evening, she had herself a little bit more under control.
D didn’t turn to look at her. He acknowledged her presence with a slight bow of his head, but that was all. They stood silently for a while, shoulder width apart, listening to people chatter in a dozen different languages, feeling the wind on their faces. Up here it was colder, the flakes of snow more biting than below.
“I have this memory of you,” he said in a low, solemn voice, still looking out over the city. She kept her own eyes on the view as well as he continued to speak. “You were sixteen,
maybe seventeen. It was the winter solstice, and everyone had gathered in the great room after the ceremony in the temple for the feast of Horus.”
Eliana closed her eyes, remembering the cavernous great room they used on festival days, the smell of hot beeswax and incense, the glow of a thousand candles in iron braziers and chandeliers, the shouting and laughter, the heat of so many bodies pressed close together at long wooden tables as they feasted on suckling pig and roasted beef and delicacies from all over the world, brought in to celebrate the birthday of their patron god.