But the living room was empty. He stood there for a moment, straining to hear any anomalous sounds. There were none. The pipes gurgled. He could hear the muffled traffic noise from the street. He gnawed on his lower lip for a few seconds, steeled himself, then started for the bedroom.
Halfway across the big Sarouk, he stepped on a loose floorboard that sounded-at least to Tom-as loud as an air horn. He cursed his clumsiness and gripped the knife tighter.
And then, from the bedroom, came MJ’s voice. “Tom? Tom, is that you?”
“MJ?” He exhaled a huge, noisy sigh of relief. “My God, what a wonderful surprise,” he called out, quickly looking for some place to put the knife down. He set it on the coffee table then went to the bedroom. “What on earth are you doing here?”
She sat up in the bed. She was wearing one of his shirts. Her long hair was all askew. She’d taken off her makeup. She looked absolutely, sleepily, sexily magnificent. “I guess I conked out. Didn’t you get my message?”
He took her into his arms. “No-I mean, what are youdoing here?”
“They suspended me. So I decided-”
“They? Who? What?”
She smiled at him indulgently. “Don’t worry. It’s the best thing that ever happened.” She caressed his cheek. “Mrs. ST. JOHN went ballistic when I told her I’d been in Israel. She thought it had something to do with the photographs. She threatened to revoke my clearance, Tom.”
“Can she do that?”
“Who cares.”
“I do.”
MJ looked at him. “Why?”
“Because you’ll need your clearance to work for 4627.” He embraced her. “Suspended, huh? Good. You’re right. Best thing that ever happened.” He stroked her hair. “We’ll celebrate.” He kissed her gently on the lips. “But we’ll celebrate tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow?” She pulled him closer. “What about tonight?”
“Tonight I’ve got a date with a bald Israeli.”
27
7 NOVEMBER 2003
1:04A.M.
30 BOULEVARD BARBÈS, PARIS
REUVEN HAD BEEN BUSY.He’d isolated Ben Said’s safe house through the process of deduction and through experience-field smarts. Terrorists already understood that safe houses could be identified through the utilities. If you had ten apartments in a building, all of them allegedly occupied full-time, and one had an electric bill that was only 10 percent of the others, it was logical to deduce that either the occupant spent a lot of time on the road or that you’d located a safe house. So the bad guys compensated these days by leaving their lights on.
Reuven also knew that in Paris, no terrorist worth his WMD would ever use the local phone system. Parisian phones both public and private were too damn easy to bug. DST had the capability of eavesdropping on any line in the city within minutes, and unlike the FBI, they didn’t need to beg for search warrants or have their FISA paperwork approved by some ACLU-loving judge to get the go-ahead.
So in Paris, terrorists tended to communicate either in person or by e-mail. Or, to make calls these days, the bad guys often used prepaid cell phones, which they’d change on a daily or even twice-daily basis. The phones themselves were cheap, and the prepaid SIM cards, available anywhere in Europe, made it easy to switch numbers and carriers.
Bottom line: the safe house would be the only apartment in the building that either didn’t have phone service at all or didn’t bill any outgoing calls. So Reuven had used his contacts and checked the building’s utility records. As he suspected, the electric bills were all pretty much the same. But the phone bill for the rearmost apartment on thedeuxième étage was less than half of all the others. Plus, according to a gossipy neighbor, there was seldom anybody home.
Reuven suggested an early-morning insertion because rue Lambert would be deserted after midnight. The construction site adjacent to L’Étrier was locked up tight at 5P.M. and opened at eight in the morning. The bistro closed down by ten, the café half an hour later. Normally, Reuven said, the street was all tucked in and bedded down by 11P.M. And the early risers didn’t start moving until 6:30 or so. That gave Tom and him a roughly two-hour window to do what they had to do.
Even so, the approach would have to be on foot. Vehicles stick out like sore thumbs on streets like rue Lambert no matter what the hour, and the last thing Tom wanted was to give some bored gendarme pause for concern. So just after one in the morning, they cruised the neighborhood in one of the dinged-up 4627 vans until they finally found a parking spot on the boulevard Barbès, about a block and a half south of the Château Rouge metro stop. It was a bit farther from the target than they wanted to be, but given the parking situation in Paris-which is tight no matter what the hour-it could have been worse.
They sat, lights out, for twenty minutes and noticed nothing untoward. Traffic was light. There were no repeaters cruising. So they climbed out into the damp chill, locked the van, and walked north. They were both in disguise. Reuven wore a chef’s baggy checked trousers and carried a leather-wrapped roll of knives inside of which were concealed the silent drill and video cameras. Tom, also in chef’s clothes, carried a large cloth shopping bag that bore the logo of the Charles de Gaulle duty-free shops. The bag contained what appeared to be food and wine. Actually, the bottles and packages held dye and plaster, as well as an assortment of other supplies in case of contingencies.
Reuven had spent the past few days walking the neighborhood and he knew it as well as any native. His insertion route took them north along the store-lined boulevard to rue Custine, a two-way street that had light nighttime traffic. They’d veer onto rue Custine, make their way to rue Nicolet, then approach the target from the south side of rue Lambert. Once there, they’d head straight for the door and make entry.
Indeed, getting inside was going to be the easiest part of the evening’s work. Reuven had managed to make a copy of the outside door key. It hadn’t been hard. It took him less than two days of surveillance to get a sense of the street’s rhythms. He’d targeted an elderly woman resident of the house-watched as she’d gone shopping, then bumped her as she struggled, her arms filled with groceries, to pull keys out. Of course she’d dropped them and Reuven, hugely apologetic for his clumsiness, had retrieved them for her, found the door key, opened the door, then handed them back.
She’d never noticed him palm her house key and press it into the small tin of modeling clay he held in his hand. He didn’t even have to make impressions of both sides. The door lock was a cheap one-he’d be able to fabricate a duplicate out of a blank in a matter of minutes.
1:35A.M. They’d just passed a shuttered KFC chicken joint and crossed onto rue Custine when a vehicle passed them, moving slowly. Light-colored Citroën. Parisian tags. A single silhouette inside. Neither Tom nor Reuven reacted. They stayed on the eastern side of rue Custine, two slightly intoxicated guys weaving slightly as they walked, after a long night.
They’d just crossed rue Doudeauville when they heard a car approaching from the rear. As it passed, Reuven gave Tom an imperceptible nudge. Same Citroën. Not good. Cops? Maybe. DST? Possible. Bad guys? Not out of the question, either. Whichever one didn’t matter. What mattered was they’d been noticed. Not only noticed, but whoever it was had wanted them to know they’d been noticed.
They continued on another block, moving past the insertion point. On the corner of rue Labat they saw a van parked close enough to the intersection so that it almost protruded into the right-of-way. Tom almost didn’t give it a second glance-until the vehicle rocked ever so slightly as they crossed the street. There were people inside. More sentinels.