The Day After Tomorrow_ A Novel - Allan Folsom [147]
McVey shrugged. “I didn’t think it was too good an idea to let her go back downstairs right away.”
Handing McVey the paper, Osborn opened the bathroom door. The girl sat stark naked on the toilet, handcuffed to a water pipe on the wall beside it. A washcloth was stuck in her mouth and her eyes looked as if they were ready to pop from her head in fury. Without a word Osborn closed the door.
“She’s a feisty one,” McVey said, with the sliver of a grin. “Whoever finds her, she’s going to make a big stink about her clothes before she lets anyone pick up a telephone. Hopefully that delay will add a few more seconds to our increasingly limited life span.”
74
* * *
TEN SECONDS later, McVey, and then Osborn, stepped cautiously into the hallway and closed the door behind them. Both had guns in their hands but there was no need—the hallway was clear.
As far as they could tell, whoever had sent the girl was Still waiting for her, probably downstairs. That meant whoever had sent her had only suspected who they might be, and wasn’t sure. They were also giving her time. She was a professional and if she’d had to play sex with the suspects, she would. But McVey knew the time they would give her wouldn’t be much.
The interior hallways on the fifth floor of Hotel St.-Jacques were painted gray and had dark red carpeting. Fire stairs were at the end of each corridor, with a second set near the center of the building surrounding the elevator shafts. McVey chose the far stairs, farthest from the elevators. If something happened, he didn’t want them caught in the middle.
It took them four and a half minutes to reach the basement, go through a service door and take a back alley to the street. Turning right, they walked off down the boulevard St.-Jacques through a thickening fog. It was 2:15 A.M., Tuesday, October 11.
At 2:42, Ian Noble’s red bedside phone buzzed twice, then stopped, its signal light flashing. Careful not to disturb his wife, who suffered from painful arthritis and hardly slept, he slipped out of bed and pushed through the black walnut door that separated their bedroom from his private study. A moment later he picked up the extension.
“Yes.”
“McVey.”
“It’s been a damn long ninety minutes. Where the hell are you?”
“On the streets of Paris.”
“Osborn still with you?”
“We’re like Siamese twins.”
Touching a button under the overhang of his desk, Noble’s desktop slid back, revealing an aerial map of Great Britain. A second press of the button brought up a coded menu. A third, and Noble had a detailed map of Paris and its surrounding environs.
“Can you get out of the city?”
“Where?”
Noble looked back to the map. “About twenty-five kilometers east on Autoroute N3 is a town called Meaux. Just before you get there is a small airport. Look for a civil aircraft, a Cessna, with the markings ST95 stenciled on the tail. Should be there, weather permitting, between eight and nine hundred hours. The pilot will wait until ten. If you miss it, look for it again, same time, the next day.”
“Gracias, amigo.” McVey hung up and walked out to meet Osborn. They were in a corridor outside one of the entrances to a railroad station, the Gare de Lyon on the boulevard Diderot, just north of the Seine in the northwest quadrant of the city.
“Well?” Osborn said, expectantly.
“What do you think about sleep?” McVey said.
Fifteen minutes later, Osborn put his head back and surveyed their accommodations, a stone ledge tucked up under the Austerlitz Bridge over the Quai Henri IV, and in full view of the Seine.
“For a few hours we join the homeless.” McVey pulled his collar up in the darkness and rolled over on his shoulder. Osborn should have settled in too, but he didn’t. McVey raised up and saw him sitting against the granite, his legs out in front of him, staring at the water, as if he’d just been plunked down in hell and told to sit there for eternity.
“Doctor,” McVey said quietly, “it beats the morgue.”
Von Holden’s Learjet touched down at a private landing strip some thirty kilometers north of