His neck stung from where his carotid artery had been pinched until he passed out. With all the jerks and starts, he figured they were still in Paris traffic, not all that far from the city center.
He tried to ignore the sharp pain and keep sawing away. The rope finally loosened and gave way. With bloody hands he reached for the rope around his legs, tied in a double knot. Now the phone! He pulled it out of his pocket, sticky and mute. He punched the numbers. Nothing.
And then the car stopped. Panic gripped him. Footsteps crunched on gravel. His hands . . . what should he do with his hands?
Don’t freeze. Yell, he told himself. But he hadn’t yet worked the tape off his mouth.
The trunk opened. Dim light and the sway of branches overhead in the wind. Dark figures huddled; he couldn’t see their faces.
“Don’t his kind work in carnivals?” asked someone with a gravelly voice. “Freak shows? With two hundred kilo women and two-headed snakes.”
A blanket whipped over him, smothering him, blocking out the light. Arms gripped and carried him, bumping him over the back of the trunk.
“Over here,” a voice said.
A blow struck his jaw and he moaned.
“Quick!” Cold air and footsteps echoing on stone. Down, they were going down. A cellar . . . a basement? He was thrown down on something hard. Pain shot up his hip socket. The blanket was removed and a bag slipped over his head. Rough, with the texture of burlap.
“He’s been a quick worker,” the gravel voice said. “Tape those hands.”
“Water every four hours,” said a higher pitched voice. “Let him pee. Here’s his phone. Anyone got a battery charger?”
René shivered as hands taped up his bloody wrists.
“Does this cord fit?”
“Bon,” the voice said with a chuckle. “We’ll wait and use his own phone for the phone call. Have fun.”
“Don’t worry, I will,” the gravel-voice said.
Wednesday Early Evening
THE RINGING OF THE phone woke Aimée. She must have nodded off at her desk at Leduc Detective while finishing the stats. On the green computer screen her eyes focused on the bright cursor blinking by her face. Familiar and reassuring. She’d promised herself never to take her eyesight for granted again but of course she had, more and more, as she recovered and tried to forget.
“Oui . . . allô?”
“We’ll give you forty-eight hours,” said a hoarse voice.
She rubbed her eyes and sat up. Yellow rays from rue de Louvre’s streetlights slanted across her legs. The old station clock above her desk read 6 P.M.
“What? Who’s this?”
“Then we start sending you the dwarf. In little pieces.”
She froze.
René.
“What do you want?”
“Thadée’s backpack.”
Aimée stared at the flickering cursor, trying to think fast. They hadn’t mentioned jade. Did they know what was inside?
“Who are you?” She glanced at René’s untouched desk. “How do I know you have my partner?”
A sound like the muffling of a receiver came over the line. Choking.
“Aimée, don’t. I’m OK—” said René.
The line went dead.
She panicked. Stupid, stupid, stupid! Let them have all her money, the jade . . . anything to get René back.
How could this be happening? Thadée shot to death, then the jade stolen, the RG tracking her, and now René, kidnapped! She hit the call back number. It was René’s own cell phone. No answer. Smart.
Her head whirling, she had to figure something out and rescue René. She thought of his hip and . . . didn’t want to think of what they could do to him.
Calm down. She had to calm down.
They’d call back. And she’d arrange to meet them. Try and convince them to accept the fifty thousand franc check and call it quits.
They’d let her stew before calling to give her the “drop.” But what if they never handed René over? Terror clutched her.
Never rely on criminals to do the expected.
She thought of Louis; “Nut,” as she and René had nicknamed him since he kept bags of nuts in his pockets at all times, saying he was determined to eat healthily in the radar infested world he worked in. They’d met him at an electronics seminar when they’d skipped out of Sorbonne classes.
He worked at France Télécom. He’d know a way to trace the kidnappers, if anyone did. She dialed.
“CPMS division.”
“Bonsoir, Nut?” she said, pulling on jeans and a worn cashmere sweater from the office armoire.
“Aimée . . . hold on,” Nut said. She heard beeping in the background. Clicks. “Ça va? I’m the night network supervisor, so I need to monitor transmissions and take calls.”
“I’ll make it quick,” she told him, keeping her voice steady with effort. “Triangulation, can you do it?”
“To a land line or cell phone?”
“René’s cell phone. He’s been . . . kidnapped.”
“You’re joking.”
“I wish,” she said. ”Listen, no time to explain but. . . .”
She heard him take a deep breath.
“Only in Paris within the service antenna’s or tower’s range,” Nut said. “No suburbs or outlying districts. Paris maintains multi-antennas. Even so we’ve had only limited success. Montmartre and the Butte Chaumont hill give us trouble.”
“Will you try?” she asked, turning off her computer, switching off the lights.
“Picking through voluminous CDR records and verifying the data from the base stations which pick up calls to reconstruct and pinpoint the whereabouts of phone users, that’s worse than dental extraction. And more time-consuming.”
“I can give you the number to trace,” she said.
“That lessens it a bit but not enough,” Nut said.
She heard beeps and clicks in the background.
“Talk to a ham radio operator,” he advised. “They monitor cell phone transmissions all the time.”
“René needs help, right away. There’s no time to lose.”
“Go to Club Radio, 11 rue Biot,” he said. “Tell Léo I sent you. That’s the best I can do, Léo helped another friend last week. And don’t forget, Aimée.”
“That I owe you?”
“René’s a black belt. Give him some credit.”
Nut clicked off.
Fear rippled through her as she stepped into her boots and grabbed her knee-length suede shearling coat in the hallway. She ran down the stairs, onto rue du Louvre and found a taxi letting out passengers.
“Eleven rue Biot,” she said to the taxi driver.
“Clichy’s out of my way.” The driver shook his head. “They were my last fare. Sorry, I’ve been working since six a.m.”
Lights glittered on the Seine below. A passing barge churned the black, sluggish water. No other taxis in sight.
She reached for her wallet. “Fifty francs extra for your trouble.”
“Must have a hot date.”
Little did he know.
The taxi driver hit the meter switch. “Get in.”
NUMBER 11 RUE Biot, between the old Café-concert L’Européen, where Charles Trenet had sung in the thirties, and an Indian restaurant, was a cobblestone’s throw from Place de Clichy. She pressed the buzzer, the door was buzzed open, and she stepped into a small courtyard. Against the night sky, a row of antennas poked from the rooftop like twigs: a good sign. She passed the old stables, now garages, and mounted the back stairs to the second floor.
The door stood ajar. She walked inside to what she figured had once been two rooms that had been opened up into a large space. Bare putty-colored walls, a wooden farm table, a bag of potting soil on the floor. Instead of the buzzing and static she expected, she saw a plump woman in her forties wearing an apron, sitting at a scanner by several radios. She wore headphones.