The Day After Tomorrow_ A Novel - Allan Folsom [125]
He knew people would give him until seven o’clock, then the calls would start. Lebrun, reporting he was on his way back from Lyon and setting a time to meet. Commander Noble and Dr. Richman calling from London.
Then there were two calls due from L.A. One from Detective Hernandez, whom he’d called when he got back to his room at two in the morning because there had been no fax waiting of the Osborn file he’d requested. Hernandez had not been in and no one else knew anything about it.
The other L.A. call would be from the plumber the neighbors had called when McVey’s automatic sprinklers Started going on and off at four-minute intervals around the clock. The plumber was calling back with an estimate of the cost to install an entirely new system to replace the old one McVey had put in himself twenty years earlier With a kit from Sears, the parts to which no longer existed.
Then there was one more call he was waiting for—rather hoping for, the one that had kept him tossing most of the night—the call from Osborn. Again he thought back to the basement. It was bigger than it looked and packed with a zillion cubbyholes. But maybe he’d been wrong, maybe he’d been talking in the dark.
6:52. Eight more minutes, McVey. Just close your eyes, try not to think about anything, let all the muscles and nerves and everything else relax.
And that’s when the phone rang. Grunting, he rolled over and picked up.
“McVey.”
“This is Inspector Barras. Sorry to bother you.”
“It’s all right. What is it?”
“Inspector Lebrun has been shot.”
64
* * *
IT HAD happened in Lyon, at the Gare la Part Dieu shortly after six. Lebrun had just gotten out of a taxi and was entering the train station when a gunman on a motorcycle opened fire with an automatic weapon and then immediately fled the scene. Three others had been shot as well. Two were dead, the third seriously injured.
Lebrun had been hit in the throat and chest and had been taken to the Hospital la Part Dieu. Initial reports were that he was in critical condition but expected to live.
McVey had listened to the details, asked to be kept abreast of the situation and then gotten quickly off the phone. Immediately afterward he’d dialed Ian Noble in London.
Noble had just come in to the office and was having his first tea of the day when he found McVey on the line. Immediately he sensed McVey was being careful with what he said.
At this stage McVey had no idea whom he could trust and whom he couldn’t. Unless the tall man had gone directly from Paris to Lyon after his escape from Vera Monneray’s—which was very unlikely, because he’d know the police would throw an immediate dragnet out for him—it meant that whoever was behind what was going on not only had capable gunmen elsewhere, they were somehow monitoring everything the police did. With the exception of himself, no one knew Lebrun had gone to Lyon, yet he had been tracked there just the same, to the point that they knew precisely what train he was taking back to Paris.
Completely baffled, he had no idea who they were, what they were doing or why. But he had to suppose that if they’d taken out Lebrun when he got too close to their setup at Lyon, they would know he and the Paris detective had been working together on the Merriman situation and since he had not, as yet, been molested, the very least he could expect was a tap on his hotel phone. Accepting that, what he conveyed to Noble was what anyone listening would expect to hear. That Lebrun had been shot and was in Lyon at the Hospital la Part Dieu in grave condition. McVey was going to shower and shave, grab a quick breakfast roll and get to police headquarters as quickly as he could. When he had more news, he’d call back.
In London, Ian Noble had gently set the phone back in its cradle and pressed his fingertips together. McVey had just told him the situation, where Lebrun was, and that he was afraid his phone was tapped and would call him back from a public phone.
Ten minutes later, he picked up his private line.
“There’s a mole of some kind in Interpol, Lyon,” McVey said