I was hauled to my feet and tossed on my back on the bed. Two men wearing jeans, black jackets, and panty hose over their heads to smear their features stood there. The dark-haired guy had a big nose. He also had a suppressed SIG Sauer pistol aimed at me.
The other, a blond guy with pale skin, held a ball-peen hammer in his right hand. In a thick accent, he said, “Here’s how it works, Monsieur Morgan. I take the gag out and you tell me where to find Kim. If you try to yell or if you lie, I will break your kneecap. Understand?”
My breath had come back, and already my senses were searching for a possible counterattack. I found it in attitude. Relaxing my face and softening my eyes, I acted as if I somehow had the upper hand in this negotiation.
“Vous comprenez?” the pale guy demanded.
I bobbed my head. The one with the gun reached over and yanked the gag from my mouth.
“Where is she?”
“Don’t know,” I croaked.
He raised the hammer.
“No, really,” I said. “Last time I saw her, she was running from your terrible shooting skills.”
“Fuck you.”
“If I’d been behind the gun, she would have hit the ground, not some waiter,” I said. “What do I call you, anyway? Since the first time I saw you, I kept thinking of you as ‘Pale Guy.’ So what name do you want? Pale Guy or Whitey?”
Pale Guy stiffened. But the one with the gun snorted, and under his breath he murmured something I barely caught before Whitey said in a reasonable voice, “My name is of no consequence to you, Monsieur Morgan. However, the things I can do, my expertise, in fact, is of total consequence to you.”
He slapped the hammer into his gloved palm. “Do you enjoy walking?”
“One of my favorite pastimes, but as I said, Whitey, I don’t know where Kim Kopchinski is. In case you hadn’t noticed, she’s been trying to avoid me as much as get the fuck away from you. Other than that, go ahead and turn my legs into oatmeal. It’s not going to change my tune. What did she do to you, by the way, that’s got you shooting up Paris?”
Whitey said to the one with the gun, “I believe him.”
“Yeah?”
“Oui,” he said, and then lowered the hammer and came closer to me. “Did you hear? I believe you, Monsieur Morgan.”
“Great. Just a little misunderstanding.”
“Exactly,” Whitey said, again in that reasonable tone. “Tell me. In the time when you were with Kim, was she still smoking and using that lighter she has on a chain around her neck?”
What did that have to do with the price of a croissant?
“She smoked like a chimney,” I said. “The pack of Gauloises was never far from her hand, and she still had the lighter.”
Before Whitey could respond to that, someone began banging loudly on the outer door to the suite.
Chapter 39
“JACK!” I HEARD Louis yell. “Jack, open up!”
Big Nose pivoted and moved out fast. Before following him into the outer room, however, Whitey threw his hammer from close range, hitting me hard and high on the flank of my left leg.
The effect was electric and painful, but I gritted my teeth and rolled off the bed and to my feet, barely able to feel my left butt cheek and thigh. No more than ten seconds had elapsed since Whitey and Big Nose had left the bedroom, but already the suite’s living area was empty. The doors to the balcony were open. Even in the dim light I could tell that it, too, was empty.
What the hell had they done? Jumped seventy feet to the sidewalk?
I limped fast to the door, where Louis was still pounding. Turning my back to the latch arm, I hooked the zip tie on it and pressed down.
Louis almost knocked me over, shoving his way inward.
“Justine was right!” he cried, pulling me back to my feet. “Who did this?”
“Our friend Whitey, and his pal, a guy with a big nose and dark hair,” I said. “You spooked them.”
“Where’d they go?” Louis asked, and I felt a blade slip between my wrists and sever the tie.
“They either jumped or they climbed to the roof,” I said, rubbing my wrists.
“The roof! Come, Jack. With luck we can cut them off!”
“They’ll be long gone,” I said, limping after him.
“Maybe not,” he said. “The footing up there is treacherous when it’s wet.”
Several months before, the Plaza Athénée hired Private Paris to do a complete rethinking of its security system as part of a remodeling of the current hotel and an expansion into three adjoining buildings. Louis had inspected the four structures, cataloging all ways in and out of the future hotel, and in the process developed the new system.
My leg was no longer numb but threatened to charley horse now. But I managed to keep several steps back from Louis as he wound his way through the hallways to a stairwell. He stopped on the landing and looked up at a hatch in the ceiling. It was locked. There was a red plastic tag on the lock hasp.
“That’s my seal,” Louis said. “They didn’t get in this way.”
“How many other ways to the roof are there?”
“One other in the hotel. But six others among the three buildings the hotel bought for the expansion. They’re all empty, ready for interior demolition.”
He started up the ladder, got out his knife, cut the seal, and then dialed in the combination he said was the same on all eight hatches. When he pushed the hatch door open, I heard a whoosh. Wind and light rain blasted down on us.
By the time I got out on the roof, Louis was ahead of me in the low light, moving gingerly across the roof, which was copper, ghostly green, slick, and steeply pitched. To the left, it was an eighty-foot fall to the hotel’s power plant, and to the right, a drop of the same distance into the hotel’s famous courtyard. The windows of the rooms overlooking the courtyard were glowing, giving enough light that when I happened to glance back toward the Avenue Montaigne, I spotted two figures moving around air-conditioning compressors.
“Louis. There they are,” I hissed.
“I know where they’re going,” he said, scrambling over to me. “Back into the hotel through that second hatch.”
We scuttled back to the near hatch, climbed back down the steep ladder, and started to run through the hallways again.
“Call hotel security,” I grunted. The pain in my leg had died to a throb.
“And risk a shoot-out in here?” Louis said. “Excusez-moi, but that’s a bad idea that would probably cost us our lucrative contract with the Plaza. Best thing we can do is let them think they’re home free, and follow them wherever they go.”
It made sense, so I didn’t argue. But by the time we’d reached the second hatch, it was open, and the rain was blowing hard into the stairway. We heard the slap of footsteps several floors below us.
We ran to the elevator. It came up from two floors below. We climbed in and hit the lobby button.
“There are only a few exits and all are on the first floor,” Louis gasped.
The elevator dropped, and then opened, and we spilled out into the loggia, which was even more packed than it had been thirty-five minutes before. I spotted Randall Peaks still at his post. Beyond the Saudi entourage some people moved, revealing Whitey and his companion strolling with their backs to us as if they had not a care in the world.
“They’re going to the crystal bar,” Louis said.
He’d no sooner said that than the two men took a right toward open doors. Just before they disappeared into the bar, Whitey happened to look back and saw us staring right at him from fifty yards away.
Chapter 40
THE NEXT FEW seconds seemed to unfold in slow motion.
Even as Louis and I started to move toward them, Whitey reached under his leather jacket and said something to his comrade, and they both twisted our way, pistols rising amid the happy cocktail hour din.