He heated up a tajine, lemon chicken with carrots, cooked by the Moroccan woman who took care of the building as well as his laundry and cleaning. Later he watched a gangster film on TV the way you look at the passing landscape from the window of a train, unable to follow the plot, his mind fixated on the murder of Flavien Carvel.
The next morning, after stopping by the offices of the Criminal Investigation Department, Mattéo went to the bank that managed Carvel’s accounts, the Financière des Victoires.
No one seemed to be aware they had lost an important client the day before on rue des Degrés. The dead man’s financial adviser very grudgingly agreed to enter the password to access information in his computer about Carvel’s financial transactions.
“Monsieur Carvel’s net holdings amount to nearly 400,000 euros. We have also approved transactions for double that amount. Real estate projects. I can give you a statement to the last centime.”
“Thank you very much, but what would really help would be to know where Flavien Carvel got his money from... If I understand correctly, he made his fortune rather suddenly. One might wonder... Everything was legal, in your opinion?” The banker tensed up at the mere suggestion of money-laundering. “I don’t see why you would have any doubt...”
“No reason... Experience, maybe... I’m just asking you to reassure me. Where did those 400,000 euros come from?” “From all over... Europe, the United States, Japan, Russia, South Africa. Close to a hundred countries in all... Last month, he received nearly 10,000 transfers via the Internet at an average of three euros per transaction. He sold connection time, access to information...”
Mattéo took out his wallet and unfolded the scrap of paper found on the corpse.
“This kind of information?”
The banker pinched it between his fingertips to read the message:
Tom Cruise was seen last Monday on rue de la Paix in the second arrondissement of Paris in the company of the wife of a candidate in the French presidential election, while rumors of the American star’s separation from Katie Holmes are making headlines in the celebrity magazines.
“Our role is limited to making sure that all transactions are legal and managing the flow of money in the best interest of both the bank and its clients. We would never intervene in our clients’ activities in any way. All I can tell you is that Monsieur Carvel got his income from selling information on the web. Nothing more. I am putting these lists at the disposal of the examining magistrate.”
“We’ll wait.”
When he got outside, a gathering had formed on rue Notre-Dame-des-Victoires. A rainbow-colored banner attached to the iron fence around the stock exchange proclaimed the construction of the Marker of Evil. Mattéo mingled with the onlookers to watch the inauguration of some kind of monument in the form of a coffin with the names of all of today’s dictators and warmongers printed on it. He walked away when he heard the police sirens.
His steps carried him toward the garment district. As he walked up rue Beauregard, he saw the mustached owner of the Mauvoisin polishing his coffee machine in the shadowy light of his café, then he retraced the last path of Flavien Carvel up to the fourteen steps of rue des Degrés. The sanitation workers had erased all traces of the murder. All that remained was a memory of the bloodied body rubbing against the wall under the peeling billboard for Artex. The lieutenant pressed himself up against the wall, into the exact spot where the victim had been found. He raised his eyes and then noticed a few drops of blood a foot or so above his head. He stood on tiptoe and saw that there were some more drops a bit higher, at the edge of the plaque where it said, ARTEX distributes CHAL-DÉE creations, manufacturer. He slipped a fingertip under the inside right corner, which was slightly raised, and wiggled it around. A small object, freed from behind the metal, fell to his feet. He bent down to pick up the small flash drive that Flavien had managed to hide before he died.
Ten minutes later, Mattéo was loading the contents of the drive onto his office computer. Two icons indicating videos popped up in the middle of a dozen other files. The first was titled 09-11-01, the other one Tom-Cécilia. He double-clicked on the second one. The scientologist actor and the flighty wife were walking near the Opéra de Paris and laughing as they stepped into Café de la Paix arm in arm. Insignificant pictures that only a tendentious commentary managed to turn into a secret idyll. The content of the second sequence, also a minute long, was totally different. It was clearly filmed from a surveillance camera with a zoom lens at the top of a building with a roof terrace; Mattéo could make out a corner of the façade when the camera swept around. He began to recognize the massive architecture of the Pentagon, with gardens, parking lots, and entrances sprinkled with sentry boxes at checkpoints. After about fifteen seconds of the webcam’s slow scanning, a white object came into its field of vision, from the right, and smashed into one of the sections of the large concrete wall, sinking into it with a huge burst of flame. A digital clock gave the date and time of the crash: 09-11-01, 9:43 a.m. The slow motion that followed allowed Mattéo to recognize the fuselage of a Boeing 757 with the colors of American Airlines. It was as obvious — and as horrifying — as the newsreels showing the two planes moments before slamming into the Twin Towers. Mattéo could not recall seeing a film as precise as this about the attack on the Pentagon. Everything the Bush administration had made public to refute the conspiracy theories failed to stand up to scrutiny, whereas here, before his eyes, the reality of the explosion of AA Flight 77 was indisputable.
He opened the other files to find several dozen messages similar to the ones he’d already found in his investigation of Flavien Carveclass="underline" testimony from all the disasters that had struck the planet in the course of recent history — tsunamis, earthquakes, environmental disasters, suicide bombings, tornados, volcanic eruptions... Every message corresponded to visual imagery and was labeled with its source — last name, first name, and a telephone number or an e-mail address — followed by a sum in euros. A group of tourists in the Philippines running wildly from an incandescent cloud was 300 euros; the confession of a Hezbollah martyr child wearing an explosive belt was valued at 200 euros; while the pictures of an old man swept away by a gigantic wave in Thailand was worth 1,000. Just one paragraph had no price tag on it:
the one relating exactly how the Pentagon’s outer rings had been destroyed. Yet the alleged source of this document was listed: Fidel Hernandez. The lieutenant figured this might be the elegant guy with the Spanish accent who had been with Flavien Carvel in the Mauvoisin café shortly before his death. It took his assistant less than two hours to locate the address Hernandez had given for his cell phone bilclass="underline" a hotel near the stock exchange.
“It doesn’t seem fake. I was able to check calls from his cell over the last three days; a number of them were traced to that neighborhood.”
“Thanks, Mélanie.”
Mattéo walked around the Opéra building and headed toward the old library, the Bibliothêque Nationale. The Royal Richelieu, wedged between two banks, displayed its gilded, intertwined initials under the windows of all six stories of this Haussmannian building. The police officer set his forearms on the reception desk.
“Good morning. I would like to talk to Monsieur Fidel Hernandez. I don’t have his room number...”
The receptionist looked at her reservation screen.