“I’ll take that as a stroke of good luck and something we shouldn’t count on continuing,” he said. “But I want you to study it. Let the CDC work on the main virus, and by all means keep up with them, but I want you to look at that inert DNA coding and figure out if it means anything, anything at all.”
Walter Yang stood. “What about the quarantine?”
Arnold was already reviewing his notes, head down.
“What do you mean?” he said without looking up.
“CDC wants to send the ambassador home.”
Moore stopped and looked up. “No,” he said. “Hell no. Anybody tries to bust that quarantine you stop them. Shoot them if you have to. Understand?”
“I’m not issued a weapon, Mr. Moore.”
“Then get one,” Moore said.
Yang seemed unsure, so Moore decided to be clear. “Listen to me,” he said. “We’re involved in this for a number of reasons, most of which I can’t explain to you or the CDC. But one thing that you should know is Claudia Gonzales once worked for the NRI. Ten years ago she was one of us. That may be an odd coincidence or it might mean something. The bottom line is, we’ve been put in charge through a presidential order and until I say so, until we know for sure that this bug isn’t a Greek bearing some mysterious gift, nobody leaves quarantine. Nobody. Got me?”
Yang nodded firmly, seeming far more subdued than when he’d come in. Getting growled at by the boss when you figured you’d done well could do that to a person.
“Good work,” Moore said. “I’m sorry the crusty old bastard you work for didn’t say it earlier.”
Yang hesitated.
“Yeah,” Moore said. “I’m talking about me. Now get out there and dig. A lot may depend on what you find.”
Yang nodded, then left the office with some juice in his step. Moore’s intercom buzzed. The voice of Stephanie Williams, the NRI’s director of communications, came through loud and clear.
“Arnold, you got a second?”
“All yours,” he said. “What do you have for me?”
Because of Hawker’s unique cover, Williams had set up special channels of communication with Hawker that no one else in the organization aside from Danielle and Arnold Moore knew about.
She also kept track of the two agents when they were on assignment.
“I have information on Hawker and Danielle,” she said.
“What’s the word?” he asked.
“I’m afraid you’re going to be busy.”
That did not sound good. “I’m already busy, Ms. Williams.”
“We’re getting radio chatter from France on the police bands. Something about a house exploding, a shoot-out, and a high-speed chase in central Paris. Suspects are Americans. One male and one female.”
Moore cringed. “Good God,” he said. It never rained but it poured.
CHAPTER 12
Danielle sat in handcuffs, waiting in the private office of the commandant of the Police Nationale in central Paris. Hawker sat next to her, cuffed as she was, and seemed to be favoring his right shoulder.
For the moment they were alone.
“You all right?” she asked.
“Landed on my shoulder when the house blew up,” he said. “Hitting the water didn’t help it much.”
To be honest, she was surprised he’d even survived. “Why’d you go after them on that bike anyway?”
He looked at her. “Why did you run to the river?”
“I thought they were getting away.”
“There you go.”
She exhaled in exasperation. “Yes, but all I wanted to do was spot the boat and contact the police, not risk life and limb five times over on some insane stunt. That may have been the dumbest thing you’ve ever done.”
“Don’t be so sure,” he said. “There’s a lot of competition for that title.”
He made it a point to be funny, but the situation was not all that humorous. They’d been here for three hours, allowed no outside contact, not even with the embassy. Their papers had been confiscated and they hadn’t even been questioned yet. The situation could go either way: They could be released, or if a pissing match developed, they might not see the outside world for months.
To be honest, she wondered why they were being held in this office and not some dark cell. It made even less sense that they were being held together. Perhaps the commandant did not want the world to know they were there. Perhaps he was watching or listening, hoping they would give something away.
At that moment the door swung open. In walked Commandant Lavril, chief of the Paris police. He eyed them with some disdain and closed the door gently before walking to the chair behind his desk.
It was a massive, incredibly impressive desk, the kind that told anyone sitting across from it where the power resided in this particular room, the kind that might protect one from a bomb blast or a tornado or a meteor strike if one hid underneath it.
Danielle wondered how the hell they’d even fit the giant desk into this small room. Maybe the walls had been built around the monstrosity.
“Your papers check out,” the commandant said, flipping through the pages of their passports. “Your consulate confirms that you are here as part of your embassy’s security detail.”
He dropped the passports and glared at them.
She and Hawker had been given covers. No one at the embassy would recognize them on sight, but they’d been told what to say if something happened — as it quickly had.
“So that gives you the right to carry guns in my country,” Lavril said. “But not the right to use them on French citizens or to blow up our buildings.”
“You seem awfully concerned with the people who tried to kill us,” she said.
He shrugged. “They are French, you are not.”
“I promise you if a Frenchman was mugged on the streets of Washington, we wouldn’t be asking him what he did to provoke the attack.”
“You might,” Lavril said, “if he blew up half a block in Georgetown.”
The brawl was coming; she could feel it. She would go for the high ground and the commandant would stand and defend it. But begging was not her way.
“I don’t know how long you intend to hold us,” she said, “but you and I both know what’s going to happen. Sooner rather than later, a call is going to come in. From the right person in my government to the right person in yours. And after long conversations, which you will never know about, someone else is going to call down here and you’re going to be forced to release us whether you like it or not.”
Lavril simmered and she wondered if she’d hit close to the mark. Maybe that call had already come in.
“So are we free to go?” she asked.
Hawker smiled and held up his hands as if Lavril might just unlock them right then and there.
“No,” Lavril said drily, “you are anything but free.”
Hawker’s false smile faded and he dropped his hands with a noticeable wince from the shoulder pain.
Lavril continued. “At best, I will allow you to contact someone. But not until I find out what you were doing here. And what exactly is going on.”
“What’s going on,” she began, “is that two American citizens were almost killed at the hands of the terrorists on French soil. It can’t look good for the Sûreté that we had to save ourselves.”
Lavril laughed confidently. “We are no longer called the Sûreté, madam.”
Strike one.
“But since we are freely offering opinions, I will share one of mine: I have had two terrorist incidents in three days. Both involving Americans. It would take much to make me believe they are unrelated.”
“What you believe is irrelevant to me,” Danielle said.