Cold War - Jerome Preisler [21]
They’d foreseen this, talked about it, planned for it, and yet here she was, nearly falling to pieces.
Inside, the place was a maze. Left or right at the tunnel intersection? There were different lines traveling in cross directions.
Jairdain would take one, but which?
“Go right,” he said in her ear.
“Oui. Thank you.” Nessa turned and trotted onward, craning her neck upward, ducking around a small pack of Korean tourists. A man with a suit was walking about twenty meters ahead. Music filtered in from the platform beyond the access, then the soft rush of the rubber-wheeled train arriving.
“Damn,” she said, throwing herself into a run.
Too late. The rush had been of the train leaving, not arriving.
Nessa was so busy cursing herself she almost bumped into the tall, thin American standing in front of the advertisement for the Louvre at the end of the platform. He held his elbows in his palms like an X across his chest, and frowned at her severely as she recovered her balance.
Crisscrossing aimlessly on the subway lines, Elata arrived finally at Sully-Morland with only a half hour more to kill. He came up from the Metro and walked down the Rue de Birague, turning toward the Maison de Victor Hugo, the home of the famous author, which had been turned into a museum.
He glanced at his watch. Though less than five minutes had passed since he had emerged from the subway, fear paralyzed him—he was going to be late. He turned and began running, streaking across the Place des Vosges, dodging the strollers like a madman. He ran up Rue de Turenne, bolting through traffic. Elata ran every day at home, but rarely this hard; he reached the Musée Picasso with fifteen minutes to spare.
He was at the far end of the ground floor, studying the greens of Woman Reading when the fire alarm sounded. By then he had caught his breath. He walked down the steps deliberately, went straight as directed by the guards, down another flight, moved back, turned left, and found the steps.
A woman in her thirties pushed into him. Her strong perfume caressed his nose. He felt her push the envelope into his pocket; he slipped it into his breast pocket and continued to walk, once more following the guards’ directions.
There were sirens outside, police and fire trucks arriving, someone yelling that they had seen smoke in the basement, someone else swearing there was smoke in the back gallery of the first floor—both were correct, as it happened, though in neither case would the small devices emit enough agent to damage the museum or its treasures.
Elata ignored the rushing firemen and the crowd gathering on the sidewalk. A taxi was just reaching the curb. He pushed past two tourists who had queued for it, ignoring their protests as he threw open the door and jumped in. The taxi lurched away without pause; its driver knew already where he was to take his passenger.
Jairdain slammed his hands on the trunk of the car as Nessa reached the curb.
“J’suis dans la merde,” said the French Interpol agent.
Pierre ran up to him, immediately joining in the coarse denouncing of their fate.
“Calm down,” Nessa told them when she arrived.
“To have lost him here,” said Jairdain before cursing again.
“Easy now, lads,” she said. “Someone in the museum passed him something when the alarm sounded. We’ve just got to track it down.”
“Oui?” said Pierre. “Who?”
“There was a woman on the steps, two guards, and someone who looked like a tourist,” she told them. “We’ll hunt down the tourist first. She’s the only one likely to get away.”
Zurich, Switzerland
Gabriel Morgan had seen both great opportunities and great trials in his life, but the torture he faced presently must surely rank among the most acute. For here he was, in one of Zurich’s newest and finest restaurants—A, which might stand for America, or the beginning of the alphabet, or anything else one wished—and he could not, or should not, choose from any of the excellent entrees. Not American wild duck in a blueberry-tarragon sauce, which carried with it unadvertised hints of mustard