Private Paris (Private 10)
Louis hobbled up with Sharen Hoskins and Juge Fromme, and I had to repeat my story all over again.
“You don’t know where you saw that woman before?” Fromme asked.
“Only that she reminded me of someone.”
“Could she be the same redhead the opera director was seen with the night he was murdered?” Louis asked.
“Again,” I said, “I’m clueless. Maybe it will come to me.”
Hoskins said, “We can’t do a thing here. Military intelligence and anti-terror will be all over it. Think you can find that linen factory again?”
Knitting my eyebrows, I thought back, still fuzzy, but said, “I think so.”
Chapter 88
10:20 p.m.
HOSKINS DROVE. SHE and Fromme got us past the blockades near the blast site. Louis and I sat in the back and studied Google Maps on an iPad that the magistrate had produced from his briefcase.
Gesturing at the screen and the roof of a building close to a narrow bridge over a canal, I said, “That’s it, I think.”
“You have an address?” Hoskins asked.
Louis tapped on the satellite image and an address popped up. He gave it to her and she called it in while driving toward Pantin.
I said, “You’ll want to take a look from the other side of the canal before you go kicking down the door.”
Hoskins looked ready to argue, but the magistrate said, “He’s right. We must consider them heavily armed.”
The investigateur sighed, nodded, and altered her route. Someone called Hoskins a few minutes later to inform her that the address she’d called in was a condemned property that had been seized for taxes and was due to be razed to make way for a vacant lot sale in the coming weeks.
“Perfect safe house,” Louis said.
“Again I agree with you,” Hoskins said. “These are miraculous days.”
She pulled over fifteen minutes later on a deserted industrial street and said, “We’re two blocks off the canal here, close to the north side of that bridge.”
We set off in that direction slowly, having to wait for the magistrate and Louis to limp along behind us. A block closer to the canal, headlights appeared. A news van shot by and skidded to a halt by a construction site beside two other news vans.
“What the hell is going on?” Hoskins cried, and ran toward the canal.
I did my best to stay with her, but she reached a small crowd gathered just east of the pedestrian bridge before I did. The reporters had their backs to the canal and the condemned factory, and were barking at the cameras.
When I caught up, Hoskins looked at her watch and said, “AB-16 sent out a message calling the media to be here at ten thirty p.m. In less than a minute they’re supposedly going to deliver a message to France.”
Juge Fromme and Louis hobbled up to us, gasping.
A series of thumping booms like mortar fire echoed across the canal. Fire fountained high inside the condemned factory. Plumes of it billowed out the broken windows and set the whole structure ablaze.
In minutes it was a runaway, throwing shimmering heat and fire that blew through the roof and licked at the Paris skyline like so many snake tongues. Hoskins was calling for fire and police backup, but the rest of us were transfixed by the growing inferno.
Was this the message AB-16 wanted to send in the wake of the bombing? That Paris was burning?
I got my answer a second later, when many of the reporters gasped.
Deep inside the factory something else had ignited, blue and then white and silver hot, almost blinding in its intensity. That brilliant new fire within a fire expanded and took shape at a blistering pace, two bent columns rising from the floor of the factory to a massive curve that soon became the powerful haunches of a giant prehistoric-looking horse reared up on its back legs, pawing at the flames and the sky.
As the roof fell in, there was a third ignition. The horse had wings that burned so hot it was as if the creature actually had molten silver feathers that fluttered in the greater inferno, as if the beast was poised to take flight.