For twenty-nine years, Louis served with distinction at La Crim. The day before his retirement, I offered him a job at three times his old pay. He now ran the Paris office of Private, a global security and investigative agency I founded and own.
You’ll hear people refer to Private as “the Pinkertons of the twenty-first century.” I don’t know if we warrant that high praise, but it’s flattering, and the reputation has helped us grow by leaps and bounds over the last few years, especially overseas, which causes me to travel more than I’d like.
I’d been visiting the Berlin office for a few days and arrived in Paris the evening before. After a series of meetings with the local staff during the day, Louis suggested we go out for a few drinks and then a fine meal. That brilliant idea had brought us to one of his favorite cafés and led him to begin to explain to me the intricate mysteries of Paris, its citizens, and their way of thinking.
Before Louis could move on to another subject, his cell phone rang. He frowned and said, “I asked them not to call me unless it was important.”
“No worries,” I said, and took another sip of wine.
Even if the Parisians weren’t happy, I was. Louis Langlois was a funny guy and Paris was still one of the most beautiful cities on earth, filled with interesting and sometimes shocking people, art, and food. In an hour or two, I’d no doubt be eating an incredible meal, and probably laughing a whole lot more. Life, for the foreseeable future, looked very good.
And then it didn’t.
Louis listened to his phone, nodded, and said, “Of course I remember you, Monsieur Wilkerson. How can Private Paris be of help?”
Wilkerson? The only Wilkerson I knew was a client who lived in Malibu.
I mouthed, “Sherman Wilkerson?”
Louis nodded and said into the phone, “Would you rather talk with Jack Morgan? He’s right here.”
He handed me the phone. Now, the last time I’d heard from Sherman Wilkerson like this, out of the blue, there were four dead bodies on the beach below his house. I admit that there were nerves in my voice when I said, “Sherman?”
“What are you doing in Paris, Jack?” Wilkerson demanded.
“Visiting one of my fastest-growing offices.”
Sherman Wilkerson was a no-nonsense engineer who’d built a wildly successful industrial design company. By nature he dealt with facts and often understated his opinion of things. So I was surprised when he said in a shaky voice, “Maybe there is a God after all.”
“You’ve got a problem in Paris?” I asked.
“My only granddaughter, Kimberly. Kimberly Kopchinski,” Wilkerson replied. “I just got off the phone with her-first call in more than two years. She’s in an apartment outside Paris and says there are drug dealers hunting for her, trying to kill her. She sounded petrified, and begged me to send someone to save her. Then the line went dead and now I can’t reach her. Can you go make sure she’s safe? I’ve got the address.”
“Of course,” I said, signaling to Louis to pay the bill. “How do we find her?”
Wilkerson read me out an address.
I wrote it down and said, “Can you text me a photograph? And tell me about her? College student? Businesswoman?”
Louis laid down cash on the table and gave me the thumbs-up during a long pause.
“Sherman?” I said, standing. “Are you there?”
“I honestly don’t know what Kim’s been doing the past two years, and I know little of her life over the past five,” Wilkerson admitted as we left the café and Louis called for a car. “Her parents-my daughter, Pam, and her husband, Tim-they died in a boating accident six years ago.”
“I remember you telling me that,” I said. “Sad.”
“Very. Kim was in her senior year at USC, and back from a junior year in France, when it happened. She was as devastated as we were. Long story short, she inherited a bit of money along with a trust, and she turned wild child. She barely graduated. When she did, she went straight back to France. For a time I know she was working for the Cannes Film Festival organizers. We tried to stay in touch, but we heard from her less and less. Before today, there was a Christmas card from Monaco, and before that, a condolence card when my wife died.”
The car pulled up. Louis opened the door, and I climbed in, saying, “Don’t worry, Sherman. We’re on our way.”
“Thank you, Jack. You’ll call when you have her?”
“I will.”
“Protect her, Jack. I beg you,” Wilkerson said. “She’s my only grandchild-my only living relative, really.”
“You’ve got nothing to worry about,” I said, and hung up.
After filling Louis in on the conversation, I pushed the address I’d written on a napkin over to him. “Know it?”
Louis put his reading glasses on and studied it, and his nostrils flared as if he’d scented something foul. Then he looked up at me and with a definite edge in his voice said, “Look up trouble and danger in a French dictionary, and you get a picture of this place.”
Chapter 2
Pantin, northeastern suburbs of Paris
3:45 p.m.
HOW CAN I make you burn?
How do I make you come alive like a creature from hell’s fire?
In what used to be a linen factory along the Canal de l’Ourcq, these questions consumed the woman standing on scaffolding, absently stroking her long braid of mahogany hair, and studying the giant’s skeleton.
She was in her midthirties, with dusky skin and haunting pewter eyes, and she wore clothes that were completely at odds with her exotic beauty: black steel-toe work boots, double-faced and riveted canvas pants, and a flame-resistant cape and apron over a heavy denim shirt.
She turned from the skeleton, still unsure how it was all going to work, and looked for answers among the various materials she’d bought or salvaged and transported to the building. In the last month she’d amassed two tons of number 9 rebar in twenty-foot lengths. She had sections of battered steel conduit torn from culverts during a big highway job out toward Reims. And she had stacks of scrap sheet metal, angle iron, and galvanized pipe gathered from junkyards and metal recycling plants across northern France.
The massive steel posts came from an old engine repair shop in Orléans. They were already standing, four of them anchor-bolted into the cement floor. I beams had been hoisted and pinned in place as well, forming an open-sided rectangular box forty-five feet long, twenty-five feet wide, and thirty feet high. From a structural point of view, the heavy work was over. The superstructure of the skeleton was standing. And already she could see the vague dimensions of what was to come forming in her-
“Haja!” a man’s voice called.
Haja startled and looked around to see a rugged man in his late thirties emerge from a door in the corner. Thick neck, bronze skin, short black hair. He carried a gym bag and was dressed in a sweat suit. Cleats hung around his neck.
“Up here, Émile,” she called.
Émile Sauvage spotted her and said, “Shouldn’t you be getting ready for your date?”
“Henri won’t be ready until nine,” she said. “I have plenty of time.”
“You’ll text when you’re inside?”
“I remember the plan,” she said.
“I’ll see you there.”
“I look forward to it, chéri,” she said. “AB-16 at last.”
Sauvage smiled. “AB-16 at long last.”
Haja blew him a kiss and watched him go out the main door. She heard the bolt thrown before she turned again to look at the skeleton.