The Day After Tomorrow_ A Novel - Allan Folsom [65]
Living every day without going crazy at a stranger’s glance, a footfall behind him, a knock at the door had been more difficult than he could have imagined. The pain, too, in what he’d had to keep from Michele had kept him nearly at wit’s end. He still had the touch, though, as he’d proven with Jean Packard. But this was the end and he knew it. Michele was gone. So was his life. Dying would be easy.
“Do it,” he said in a whisper. “Do it now!”
“I don’t have to.” Osborn lowered the gun and put it in his pocket. By now nearly a full minute had passed since he’d injected the succinylcholine. Kanarack hadn’t gotten a full dose, but he’d gotten enough and Osborn could see him beginning to wonder what was wrong. Why it was such a struggle just to breathe or even keep his balance.
“What’s the matter with me?” A look of bewilderment settled over his face.
“You’ll find out,” Osborn said.
35
* * *
THE PARIS police had lost Osborn at the Louvre.
Lebrun had gone out on a limb as it was, and by two o’clock had either to create a story justifying new surveillance or pull his men off. As much as he wanted to help McVey, muddy shoes alone did not make a certified felon, especially if that person was an American physician who was leaving Paris the following afternoon and who, politely and forthrightly, had requested the return of his passport from one of his detectives so that he could do so.
Unable to justify the cost of Osborn’s further surveillance to his superiors, Lebrun put his men onto some of the other things McVey had suggested, such as going back over Jean Packard’s personal history from scratch. In the meantime, he’d had a police sketch artist work with the mug shot of Albert Merriman they received from Interpol, Washington, and now she was standing behind his desk, looking over his shoulder, as he studied her work.
“This is what you think he would look like twenty-six years later,” Lebrun said rhetorically in French. Then looked up at her. She was twenty-five and had a chubby, twinkling smile.
“Yes.”
Lebrun wasn’t sure. “You should run this by the forensic anthropologist. He might give you a little clearer sense of how this man would age.”
“I did, Inspector.”
“And this is him?”
“Yes.”
“Thanks,” Lebrun said. The artist nodded and left. Lebrun looked at the sketch. Thinking a moment, he reached for the phone and called the police press liaison. If this was as close as they were going to get to what Merriman would look like now, why not run the sketch in the first editions of tomorrow’s newspapers as McVey had run the sketch of the beheaded man’s face in the British papers? There were almost nine million people in Paris, it would ‘ only take one of them to recognize Merriman and call the police.
At that same moment Albert Merriman was lying face up on the backseat of Agnes Demblon’s Citroën, fighting with everything he had just to breathe.
Behind the wheel, Paul Osborn downshifted, braked hard, then accelerated past a silver Range Rover, clearing the traffic circling the Arc de Triomphe and turning down the avenue de Wagram. A short time later he made a right on the boulevard de Courcelles and headed for avenue de Clichy and the river road that would lead to the secluded park along the Seine.
It had taken him nearly three minutes to get the faltering, frightened Kanarack into the Citroën’s backseat, find the keys and then start the car. Three minutes had been too much time. Osborn knew he would barely be under way when the effects of the succinylcholine would begin to wear off. Once they did, he’d have to deal with a fully aroused Kanarack who would have the