The man behind the ticket counter eyed him tentatively when Jason presented the credit card in payment. He held out both hands together like the opening and closing of a book. It took Jason a second to comprehend. The man wanted papers, identification. He seemed satisfied when Jason handed him the Simmons passport.
Required procedure, or had identity theft reached the Balkans?
Jason returned to sit on the bench just as his iPhone vibrated. He took it out of his pocket and read the message, a single line of an address in Paris in the 20th Arrondissement. He knew it well, well enough that he didn’t have to memorize it before deleting it.
When he looked up, the elderly couple, unfamiliar with current technology, was staring at him as if he had sprouted horns. Perhaps he had; the woman was definitely making signs to counter the evil eye.
28
The train to Zagreb and the three-hour Air France flight into a foggy, rainy Orly merged into one miserable journey. First, Jason had been faced with the choice: abandon his weapons or check them. As much as standing around a baggage carousel flew in the face of his training and experience, being unarmed for whatever period was required to either ship the weapons or replace them was worse. He would be relatively safe in the air, at risk once on the ground. Paris, after all, had around 155,000 Moslems, almost 7½ percent of the city’s population.
It would be a good bet some of them wanted Jason dead.
That was the reason he retreated to the nearest men’s room after retrieving his bag. In a stall, he strapped the killing knife to his leg and the Glock in its holster at the small of his back.
He took a cab, which was soon cruising Paris’s 20th Arrondissement through a section of single houses. The soggy day made the stone walls of Père Lachaise Cemetery weep as though mourning the passing of such diverse talents as Oscar Wilde, Chopin, Pissarro, and the Doors’ Jim Morrison. Past the cemetery, they turned left and stopped.
Jason gritted his teeth as he climbed from the cab onto the drizzle-moistened sidewalk. After hours of enforced idleness, the wound in his calf resented the sudden action. He paid the driver with euros he had gotten at the airport’s exchange booth, looked both ways, and crossed the street to an unremarkable wall. Behind the bricks adorned with razor wire, Jason could see the top story of the rather ordinary-looking two-story, freestanding house that was home to France’s Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure, the DGSE, France’s CIA. Because of its proximity to the Piscine des Tourelles, its habitués referred to it as the swimming pool. As he stood before the massive wooden gate, he pulled his jacket collar flat to give a better view to the concealed cameras he knew were transmitting his image to the facial recognition technology.
He couldn’t resist. Putting down his bag, he used both hands to pull his jaws back and stick out his tongue as he gave the invisible speakers the raspberry.
The mechanical voice that followed was not amused. It requested he identify himself and state his business here.
“Jason Peters. René de Terre is expecting me.”
The gates swung open. Picking up his bag, Jason followed paving stones glistening with winter moisture oozing from lead skies, as typical of Paris’s winters as the chestnut blossoms are of spring. He entered a marble foyer. In the center of the floor was a blue mosaic disk, crisscrossed by white lines with a red hexagon in the center, a symbol as enigmatic as the French words for “In every place where necessity makes law” that surrounded the disk.
Jason had long ago abandoned hope of understanding either women or the French.
The room was bare of furnishings or people. There was no need for a receptionist. No one got this far without identifying both self and purpose.
From an entrance Jason hadn’t seen, a dark-skinned, white-haired man in a stylish pinstripe suit appeared. “Jason! Good to see you again, lad!”
Jason submitted to a one-armed embrace and air kissing in the vicinity of each cheek before shaking René’s right hand. René had lost his left arm to a FLN bomb as the eight-year Algerian War wound down in the early sixties and the Fourth Republic was collapsing along with the last vestige of French imperialism. With the advent of de Gaulle and the Fifth Republic, France’s reforming intelligence agencies recognized the Ouled Aissim tribesman’s usefulness. He spoke Arabic, Farsi, and several Berber dialects in addition to impeccable French and Oxford-accented English. Not only had much of North Africa been in turmoil when René had joined the organization, but France had had a long policy of treating its colonials as full citizens of France, thereby causing a migration of poor Moslems whose culture would never be assimilated into that of France no matter how much French liberals had hoped. Instead, the culture and laws of Islam would threaten the nation’s very existence as the pall of Islamic extremism spread across Europe in the following half century.
René’s talents had been useful in the sixties and were even more so as time passed, so useful that France’s mandatory retirement age of sixty-two had been waived, ignored, or simply swept under the rug of bureaucracy.
René shepherded Jason to a section of wall that silently slid open, revealing an elevator. It hummed upward, opening onto an anteroom with a steel door. René leaned toward the door and stood still for a second before it swung open.
He confirmed what Jason had guessed, “Iris recognition. Bloody ingenious!”
After a few steps down a hall lit to operating room standards, they stopped in front of what appeared to be a normal wooden door. Jason knew case-hardened steel was sandwiched between the oak panels. Inside was an office remarkable only for its economy. Two nondescript club chairs faced a desk that had seen long and hard service. On it, sat a computer monitor, a key pad, telephone, a file folder, and a hand-tooled leather desk blotter. A Kerman rug in pale pinks and blues and a well-done reproduction of Renoir’s Luncheon of the Boating Party in a golden frame softened the austerity of the room. Men in straw hats, women in summer frocks. An unidentified but recognizable bottle of wine dark against a tablecloth.
Jason was examining the painting as René slid behind the desk. “I’m rather fond of that picture. The depiction of frivolity lessens the burden of the more serious matters that pass through this office.”
René always talked like that, a professor standing behind a lectern.
This was no art-store print, but an actual painting. The artist had even mimicked the original by using a palette knife to apply a coat of white over the empty canvass before he had begun, giving a translucence to his subjects. Jason was noting the strokes that arranged color rather than applied it, sculpted rather than brushed.
“As delighted as I am to see you, Jason, I was informed you are here for specific information this organization is willing to share, not to admire my art.”
Reluctantly, Jason turned from the painting and sank into one of the chairs, not conscious he was massaging the throbbing calf. “You have already been briefed on what I’m looking for?”
René opened the file folder and handed over several typed sheets. “Here is the official BEA report. Attached are some pages that are anything but official. I’ve taken the liberty of having both translated into English.”
“Thanks, but I’ll try the original French. Don’t want risk the translator missing something.”