Portable barricades lined the south side of the Faubourg, cordoning off both the Palais de l’Élysée and the entrance to the British embassy. The smartly dressed gendarmes in their spiffy caps, red-trimmed tunics, white dress gloves, holstered revolvers, and mirror-polished shoes who normally guarded the French president and the Brit diplomats’ front doors had been augmented by dozens of tactical officers in midnight-blue fatigues tucked into jump boots and body armor. The cops had their war faces on. They carried compact FN submachine guns and long rubber truncheons and wore black leather gloves whose knuckles were filled with lead shot. Packets of flexi-cuffs hung from their duty belts. On the side streets, black vans and minibuses held SWAT teams. At the north end of rue d’Aguessau where it dead-ended at the rue de Surène, a huge windowless bus turned into a mobile command center bristling with VHF antennas, a GPS receiver, and a pair of satellite dishes that straddled the narrow street.
He continued past the Versace boutique, crossed the Faubourg, and walked past a cordon of cops who directed him toward a steel barrier funnel that blocked off the entrance to rue Boissy-d’Anglas. A pair of tactical officers stared at him as he approached the barrier.
Tom nodded at them. “Morning.”
They nodded back but said nothing.
He continued down the street. On the left stood the service entrance to the grand Hotel Crillon, built as a palace for Louis XV. Marie Antoinette had taken singing lessons there. The hotel entrance stood facing the Place de la Concorde, where she’d been guillotined. On the right was the old Pullman Hotel, which had been rechristened in the 1990s as the Sofitel Faubourg St. Honoré. The Sofitel was where the embassy lodged mid- and upper-grade diplomat visitors and TDYs. (Supergrades-minister-counselors and career ambassadors-were customarily put up at the Bristol or the Meurice, because as grand exalted pooh-bahs, they rated cars and drivers.)
The bar on the Sofitel’s ground floor was exactly 158 paces from the embassy gate. At least that’s how many steps it had been when Tom worked at Paris station. Now, where the rear of the embassy looked out on the rue Boissy-d’Anglas, there were barriers and armed cops. Tom was shunted to the Crillon’s sidewalk, where he walked past dark stonework and twenty-foot windows, south to the corner. There, at a guard post, two SWATflics checked his ID then allowed him to pass into a mazelike arrangement of steel barriers that blocked avenue Gabriel.
He slalomed past half a dozen submachine-gun-carrying officers, walking parallel to the Champs-Élysées, scanning the small green park to his left. There were tourists of course-a large clump of what appeared to be Indians or Pakistanis followed a guide carrying a ludicrous fluorescent pink parasol. Their tour had been stopped momentarily at the southeast corner barrier so that at the roadblock across the narrow ribbon of blacktop that led to the embassy gate, a black Mercedes could be checked.
Tom paused to watch as two armed men with mirrors inspected the undercarriage, one working each side of the vehicle. Two others popped the trunk lid and the hood and began poking around inside. The passengers were brought out. Each one was patted down and sniffed-no doubt for explosives-by a Malinois on a short leash while the entire performance was videoed by the Japanese. Tom wondered whether the videographer worked for al-Qa’ida. The AQN was known for its painstaking target assessments and contingency planning.
He resumed walking, scanning the park as he made his way to a second barricade. Even though he perceived nothing out of the ordinary, Tom’s instincts told him there were DST watchers among the trees and on the benches. It had always been the French agency’s practice to surveil the American embassy. And now that the threat level was elevated, they would have increased their vigilance.
Ten yards later, he was stopped by a second pair of tactical officers, who scrutinized his passport, actually holding it up so they could check the picture against his face. He was allowed to pass. But thirty feet on, at the barrier set just yards from the embassy gate itself, he was stopped a third time and his papers checked, this time by one armed police officer and an Inspector Clouseau look-alike in a baggy brown suit.
Tom counted 362 paces from the Sofitel. It was overkill, of course. The entire embassy compound was ringed by Jersey barriers set so that they would keep even the largest of truck bombs a hundred meters-more than a football field’s length-from the structure itself. There was no way any car-even an embassy vehicle-could approach the outer security perimeter without being checked thoroughly.
Tom held his passport in his right hand and proceeded through the gate. To his right were the steps of the old embassy entrance. The first time he’d been in Paris-it was the early 1970s-he and his parents had walked off the Place de la Concorde and straight up the steps into the huge embassy foyer. No guards. No barriers. No ID checks. Not, at least, until they’d come to Post Number One, where a Marine sergeant in a starched tan shirt and razor-creased blue trousers asked to see their passports.
Now the old entrance was out-of-bounds. Tom was shunted along a narrow walkway to a gatehouse whose only door was built of heavy steel and dark-tinted bulletproof glass. A metallic voice with a French accent came through the three-inch speaker on the right side of the doorpost. “May I ’elp you?”
“I’m here to see Adam Margolis.”
“Do you ’ave an appointment?”
“Yes.”
“Your name?”
Tom recited it.
There was a twenty-second pause followed by a dissonant buzzing as the electronic lock on the door disengaged. Tom pulled at it. The damn thing was heavy. He entered a narrow security lock, manned by two French security contractors. They stood inside a bombproof enclosure, behind a chest-high counter and two-inch Plexiglas windows. Six television monitors displayed the area outside the gatehouse.
“Passport, please.”
A tray emerged from the counter. Tom dropped the document into it. The security agent inspected it, then turned and marched six steps to a photocopier. He laid the passport on the bed, closed the cover, and pressed a button. He checked to see that the copy was good, then laid the sheet in the tray of a fax machine. As the photocopy transmitted, he picked up an embassy phone book, ran his finger down a page, then dialed an extension and said, “Mr. Margolis, you ’ave a visitor, a Mr. Stafford.”
There was a pause.“Bien sûr, monsieur.” The guard returned the passport to Tom. “Please ’ave a seat. Mr. Margolis will be with you in a few mi-nute.”
Tom settled himself on one of the three steel chairs lag-bolted to the wall. The gatehouse counter was U-shaped. Behind and above the desk, hermetically sealed from the gatehouse by another layer of bulletproof glass, was Marine Post Number One. Tom could make out a pair of sergeants looking down at him. He gave them a smile and an offhand wave and got one in return.
To the left and right of the counter were two portals-they were, in fact, metal detector-slash-explosives sniffer units-and ramps that led to steel-and-bombproof glass doors. The one on the left opened onto a ramp leading down to a patio. When Tom had worked at Paris station, the patio, which sat in front of the embassy’s west wing housing the USIA library and cultural center, had been a well-kept garden filled with sculptures and stone benches. Now, in their stead, was a makeshift blast walclass="underline" a huge blue steel cargo container-the kind you see on oceangoing cargo ships-probably filled top to bottom with sandbags. Behind the container Tom could see that the glass in the big windows of the USIA cultural center had been replaced with thick plastic. The beautiful glass-and-iron French double doors were chained shut.
Under the watchful eye of the two French security guards, Tom panned over to the opposite side of the gatehouse. To the right of the counter was another steel-and-glass door, which opened onto a ramp that ended in what used to be the embassy’s courtyard and now was used as a small parking lot. Behind the lot were the wide steps that led to the old formal entrance of the embassy. The steps hadn’t been altered. But the entrance itself-which had been in use when Tom had worked there-had been replaced by a pair of utilitarian bombproof doors, in front of which were placed a series of squat, ugly concrete planters-more overkill.