Private Paris (Private 10)

“Have you told Sauvage?” Haja asked.

“I don’t have his new burn cell number, or Mfune’s.”

“I’ll call him,” Haja said. She punched in the number, handed the phone to Epée.

He told the story again. Sauvage said nothing until the end.

“You’re positive you were clean after the cemetery wall?”

“Yes.”

“I want you out of Paris immediately,” the major said. “Haja will give you money and the address of a safe house in the south. Let me speak to her.”

Epée handed Haja the phone.

Haja took the phone, listened, and nodded. “I’ll get both taken care of.”

She hung up and said, “We’ll give you ten thousand euros, and the address. Move in disguise. Use burn phones.”

“Okay,” the tagger said.

“It’s out in the factory with the creature,” Haja said, and went through another door into the cavernous space that held her sculpture.

The place was only dimly lit, but the beast loomed above them, looking otherworldly and fantastic. Epée tripped over electric cables on the floor.

“It’s all hitched up?” he asked.

“Yes,” Haja said curtly as she went to the table where she kept her tools.

Epée peered at the creature and thought he saw where the electrical cables attached to the lower legs of the beast. He pivoted to ask her if he was—

Haja’s powerful arms and shoulders were already swinging a piece of rebar. It cracked against the side of the tagger’s head. Fire and pain seized his brain, and he crashed to the ground.

Haja stepped over Epée’s quivering body and hit him again, so hard she heard and felt his skull cave in.

“God. What did you do that for?” Amé whined.

“He became a liability,” Haja replied coldly. “Émile said we had to martyr him for the cause.”

Chapter 83

DARKNESS FELL. THE number of joggers running along the canal dwindled to stragglers, and all of them were on the better-lit south bank, which was a problem.

In the twenty minutes that had passed since Epée went into the old building, I’d wanted to call Louis and tell him roughly where I was. But the two or three runners who came by either laughed at my pitiful efforts at French—one of them said that I spoke the language like a Spanish cow—or shook their heads at my request to use their cell phones, and carried on.

I decided to go back across the bridge and was a quarter of the way across when the door that Epée had used opened, and two Muslim women wearing dark brown robes and head scarves exited and headed west carrying large shopping bags with a logo on them that I couldn’t make out. One of them glanced up at me as I continued to cross toward them. She craned her head around and did it again after they’d walked beneath the south end of the bridge.

I continued on, as if I hadn’t a care in the world. When I started down the stairs, I meant to find a cell and wait for Louis before entering the building in search of Piggott. But when I looked after the retreating figures of the Muslim women, there was something about the way they were walking, as if there was something heavy in their shopping bags.

Blame it on my time in Afghanistan, because there was nothing rational or logical about it, but at the bottom of the stairs I decided to go with my instincts, abandon Piggott, and follow the women. They seemed even warier than Epée. It took all of my skills to stay below their radar. They turned left into that pedestrian mall. I stripped the Windbreaker, leaving the red hoodie exposed, and ran to catch up.

Fewer than half the teens were still hanging out in the area, but there were still enough of them that I didn’t seem to arouse the attention of the two women as they headed toward the main drag.

Instead of turning right toward the Métro station, however, they hung a hard left past a bar called the Pause, which was bustling with a happy hour crowd. I drifted toward a group of men and women chatting merrily, but stayed focused on the two women hurrying down the sidewalk.

I had a moment of doubt, thinking that I should go back and sit on Piggott, but then the women veered toward a small blue Suzuki two-door SUV. They opened the driver’s and passenger doors and popped forward the front seats so they could put the bags in the back.

They climbed in and started the car.