The Paris Betrayal Read online

  The Dutchman lowered his gaze. “Cold.”

  “Not as cold as the morgue I’ll stick you in if you come up empty-handed again. I sent you to extract the woman. Instead, you brought me this”—Jupiter looked the courier up and down—“loose end.”

  The courier turned a shade whiter.

  Jupiter polished off his coffee and poured a tumbler of seltzer water to clear his palette. “Relax. I’m joking.” He walked behind the two men. “Mostly.”

  Neither turned, and both kept their eyes level. Like all his employees, Jupiter had taught Hagen never to look down at him, despite his less-than-average stature. The courier wisely followed Hagen’s lead.

  “Oh, cheer up, children. The operation went as smooth as I expected. The Company, and thus the rest of the world’s key intelligence forces, will remain distracted, looking for bomb makers.”

  This seemed to strike a nerve. Hagen had run point in Tokyo and Munich. “The CRTX explosives did well for us.” He pronounced the acronym as cortex. “The markets moved as we predicted. Your investments—”

  “How many times must I tell you?” Jupiter smashed his tumbler on the pavement, making the courier yelp in surprise. “This is not about money!” He kept walking, returning to the front of the two men. Inhale. Exhale. Pulse rate descending. He unclenched his fists one finger at a time. How could he make them understand?

  Jupiter glanced through his home’s open wall at a picture of a young couple in Hong Kong. The antique frame was the only wood in the grand interior veranda of marble, aluminum, and glass. The couple looked out of place, a Greek American and his pregnant wife among a throng of Chinese protestors, as if the crowd might envelop them at any time. Pure chaos. No control.

  Stepping carefully around the broken glass, Jupiter raised a hand. “Who likes hunting?” He pointed at Hagen and the courier one at a time. “You? You?”

  They both just stared at him.

  “Terrance, get the cart.”

  The assistant pulled up with his cart moments later. The courier moved to get in, but Hagen caught his arm.

  Jupiter chuckled. “The cart is not for us. It’s for Terrance. The three of us will walk.” He reached into the small cargo box at the back and drew out a short-barrel rifle with a four-round magazine. “Here, have a gun.”

  They strolled along a flagstone path winding its way through lush grass, while Terrance rolled silently behind. Jupiter shouldered his rifle and glanced at the courier. “Forgive my outburst earlier. But all of this.” He waved his hand over the green expanse. “Our work. It is personal. What I’m trying to accomplish for the world is a mammoth task, made harder by rejection from those who should have embraced me. Many years ago, I was one of them—part of their club. But when I brought my mentor an ultimate solution to all his labors, he turned his back. He has no stomach for true sacrifice.”

  By the pallor of the courier’s skin, Jupiter could tell the man dared not ask the identity of his mentor. And Jupiter did not offer it.

  The green lawn faded into the sage of a natural range. The path became gravel, sloping upward toward a rocky outcropping. Jupiter paused to track a Spanish partridge and fired. The gun made no more noise than a sharp click. The bird dropped from the sky. Terrance set off overland in the cart.

  “Silent rifles,” Jupiter said, answering the question in the courier’s eyes. “Piston-launched subsonic rounds. Two technologies, each more than a decade old, finally combined into one ideal package. A subsidiary of ours is close to a conversion for pistols.” He shifted his gaze to Hagen. “Where was I?”

  “True sacrifice, sir.”

  “Right. No stomach at all. I showed him the route to a prosperous, unified world. Complete control over every outcome. And he fired me—had me followed, hounded, wire-tapped.” Jupiter fired again. Another bird fell. Terrance chased after it, disappearing behind a knoll.

  “To escape my oppressor, I had to die. I had to fall into darkness and reemerge an entirely new creature. We keep in touch, now and again. But I am safe from him here. Safe to follow the route he should have taken. Understand?”

  The courier nodded.

  He didn’t understand. Jupiter could tell. Too bad. He brought the rifle up once more. A small antelope buckled. Terrance reappeared with the cart, but Jupiter waved him off. “Leave that one for my beauties. Just dig out the round. We wouldn’t want them to ingest it.”

  Terrance offered a thumbs-up.

  The path spiraled into an aluminum and concrete platform built into the rock outcropping. A valley spread out below, with the remnants of its former roads and half-built homes still visible in the fading sunlight. Jupiter had bulldozed the few houses left standing after the developer went bankrupt. But he’d kept a small playground near the center. Call it art. Call it a trophy. A forlorn playground in the wild represented the failure of a world system with far too many uncontrolled variables.

  At the platform, he kneeled on a cushioned bench and positioned his rifle barrel on a sandbag draped over the rail. He waved the other two over to kneel beside him. “I’ve built an empire, all without his help or his resources—much to the contrary. And look at the results.” Jupiter tapped the courier’s scope, indicating he should use it, and looked through his own to show him where to aim.

  Down on the playground, a tiger walked free, softly padding through the gravel between the swing set and the merry-go-round.

  “Do you see him?”

  For the first time, the courier spoke. “Y-yes, sir.”

  “You are looking at a myth, a legend—a Maltese Tiger.” The big cat stretched, and portions of its slate-gray flank glinted blue. “The name refers to its color, not its origin. They’re native to Southern China, hunted near to extinction for use in worthless medicines. But my people found two, and I’ve built a new family—a streak, as they’re called. Something like a pride.” He took his eye away from the scope and bent closer to the young man. “I have enough now that I could release some into the wild, but the world would only squander my gift. So, I maintain control. Occasionally, I must trim our population.”

  The courier bit his lip, tracking the animal but not firing.

  Jupiter touched his shoulder. “Go ahead, son. Pull the trigger. Every man should experience the thrill of taking down a majestic creature before his death.”

  Click.

  The tiger fell. A growing blotch of red stained his blue-gray coat.

  “Well done, young man. How’d that feel?”

  The kid backed away from the bench, letting his rifle hang from his right hand. “Amazing.”

  “I’m glad.” Jupiter lifted his rifle and fired one round straight into the young man’s chest. The courier dropped, stammering, to the aluminum grate platform.

  Hagen’s features remained placid.

  Jupiter appreciated his calm. “They’ll be looking for him, wasting time and resources. No sense in leaving him running around to be captured.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Did Jupiter detect a touch of exasperation in his operative’s tone? “You think my former employer treats his people any different? I gave this man a fair chance.”

  No answer.

  Jupiter nudged the body with his toe. An arm jerked. Probably a postmortem response. “I told him I planned to kill him. Twice. And I placed a weapon in his hands.” He racked back the bolt of his rifle and showed Hagen the empty chamber. “And I left myself only one round. The Director is never so just with his victims. He never plays on a level field.” He went quiet and looked out at the tiger, at the red stain on the beautiful blue. A necessary sacrifice. Many more were coming.

  “You have another mission for me, sir? The woman?”

  “No. She’s taken care of. Right now, the Director is learning that one of his agents has not checked in—disappeared—another failure from the Rome fiasco. Forget the woman. I want the man who shot you. His name is Ben Calix. We already have a city. Paris. Find him there and bring him to me.”

  “So,
this is a retrieval-only job.”

  “Don’t sound so disappointed.” Jupiter turned to go, but sensed a question forming on Hagen’s lips and tried to head it off. “I know the task seems daunting. How do you find a ghost like Calix in a city as large as Paris? But trust me, within hours, he’ll be forced from hiding. Be ready to move in and take him.”

  “Why not just kill Calix? Let me drop another of the Director’s soldiers and be done with it.”

  Jupiter pursed his lips and let out a sharp breath through his nose. “Because I don’t want to kill him. What do I always say about death?”

  The Dutchman had to think far too long before he managed to regurgitate the answer—or part of it. “Death is a tool.”

  “Not a goal. ‘Death is a tool, not a goal.’ That is the complete saying. Why do I impart my wisdom to you if you can only remember half a phrase?”

  Hagen kept silent.

  Jupiter frowned. “We do not fight on a conventional battlefield where the side which wreaks the bloodiest havoc on the other wins. Espionage is not a war of attrition but a war of control. Consider chess. The endgame is not to kill the king, but to own him. Control, not death. And in our far more complicated game, controlling a knight or even a pawn moves us toward that goal.”

  At the phrase controlling a knight, Hagen’s eyes gained a smidgeon of clarity. “So, you want to turn Calix.”

  Jupiter ignored the why didn’t you just say so tone in the operative’s voice. “It’s a little more complicated than that. As in chess, were I to take the whole board—and I will come close, I assure you—I still could not kill the Director. But I don’t have to kill him to gain victory. Our intelligence tells me Calix is special to him. By simply creating the illusion that Calix may be a traitor, I will hurt my old boss. By proving it—by making it so—I will destroy him.”

  The smidgeon of clarity in Hagen’s eyes faded.

  Jupiter shook his head. Cretin. Why did he bother trying? “You don’t need to understand. Just get it done. I’ll take care of the rest. Right now, I need to be . . . away from you. I’ll walk back to the house alone. Terrance will pick you and the body up when he returns with the tiger. Tell him to have it incinerated.” He took a step and paused, catching himself since he now had grave concerns about the man’s intelligence. “I mean have the body incinerated, Hagen. Not the tiger.”

  7

  Ben watched the freight barges on the Meuse River as his train crossed into Belgium. He tried to convince himself he’d done the right thing, but a question kept pounding at him—had he taken too many risks?

  With the last-minute change to the plan, driven by his need to see Tess and get checked out, he’d been stuck with an aisle seat. As he took his gaze from the river, the elderly woman in the window seat next to him caught his eye and gave him a quick smile. She wanted to chat. He did not. He didn’t want to breathe.

  For nine hours—the flight from Rome, the train from Stuttgart—Ben had been afraid to exhale. He’d purchased all new clothes and ditched the old ones by sealing them in a trash bag and depositing them in an unattended janitor cart at the airport. He wore cotton gloves and kept a scarf up around his nose and mouth most of the time. Once, his behavior might have seemed odd, but not now in the post-pandemic world.

  Was he doing the right thing? Or had America’s enemies made him a modern-day Typhoid Mary, carrying a destructive disease across Europe and into the Company’s strongholds?

  “Pardon, monsieur.” Ben’s elderly seatmate needed the restroom.

  He stepped into the aisle to give her space and cringed when she touched his armrest.

  So many risks. Ben needed answers. He needed Tess.

  The dark of night outside gave way to the deeper dark of a tunnel and then the blue-gray light of Platform 3 at Brussels South Station. Drawing his arms in to avoid brushing any shoulders, Ben merged with the crowd and made for the exit.

  The Brussels night crowd had yet to flood the streets—that strange city quiet when the restaurants are closing but the clubs are not yet open. Ben preferred this hour, even when not on the job. He checked a map on his phone and continued straight down Hollandstraat. With any luck, Tess had reached the med station ahead of him.

  A thumping drew Ben’s eyes skyward. A chopper lifted off from the pad at the top of South Tower, the city’s tallest building. He wouldn’t find the med station up there. Ben didn’t belong to the caste of spies who merited executive operating suites or the Company’s light and agile FLUTR medevac vertical lift aircraft—so named for their butterfly-like appearance when the four stealthy ducted rotors tilted into position for cruise.

  The Company maintained covert medical outposts all over the globe, always in one of two locales—top floor or ground floor. Nothing in between. No one wanted operatives bleeding out while sharing an elevator with a bewildered businesswoman or a soccer dad and his kids. The Company reserved the shiny top floor stations served by FLUTR medevac craft for top brass and high-value assets like Dylan. Run-of-the-mill field operatives like Ben got garage utility closets and abandoned laundromats—and they walked, drove, or crawled to these places on their own.

  “Nine six six five . . .” Ben repeated the grid coordinates, checking the map one last time before pocketing the phone and making a right down an empty one-way street. In Rome, while escaping the old city and the burning body, he’d sent out an encrypted data burst requesting med support, adding a special request for Ambrosia, Tess’s code name. As expected, he received a set of coordinates in the self-deleting response. He hoped he’d got them right.

  Ben came to a garage door covered in graffiti—the delivery entrance for a bodega—and chuckled beneath the scarf still covering his mouth. “This looks about right.” He bent and gave the handle a tug. The door rolled up with ease, and the wash of the streetlamps spilled in around him, giving definition to shapes in the dark.

  “Hello?”

  Wireframe shelving. A box of molded fruit. A rusted freezer. Ben used his smartphone light to illuminate the rest. A rat scurried away from the beam.

  “Anyone home?”

  A metal door opened at the back, and a woman stood in the frame, shorter than Giselle despite her spiked heels. “You planning to come inside or stand out there caterwauling all night?”

  Nothing said come hither like a Georgia accent, especially when combined with a crooked smile like hers. “Hey, Tess.”

  “Hey yourself, honey.” She backed up, pulling the door wide. “Get in here. I don’t have all night.”

  She waited for him to pass and then flipped on the halogens overhead. Stainless steel, glistening clean, dominated the room—counters, two sinks, and an exam table. Tess tied on a surgical mask and pointed at the latter. “Sit and strip.”

  “Giselle warned me you’d say that. I’m supposed to remind you I’m spoken for.”

  “Hilarious. Why is your shirt still on?”

  As the halogens warmed up, Ben got a better view of the outfit beneath Tess’s lab coat. Her sleek, emerald-green dress said Studio 54 more than Mayo Clinic. The lack of a bio suit gave him hope. He’d added a high-level hazard code to his request for support. If Tess had bypassed her protection protocols, she knew something Ben didn’t. He removed his jacket and pulled his shirt over his head. “Hot date later?”

  “I have a friend in the city.” She pushed her hand into a latex glove. “And yes, we’re meeting up tonight, so don’t get any blood on my dress.”

  “I’m not bleeding.”

  Tess wiggled a syringe with a needle as thick as a ten-penny nail. “Not yet.”

  A monitor with two handles hung from the ceiling by a combination of joints and telescoping arms. Tess set the syringe beside her patient and pulled the screen in front of his chest, lining up a set of laser crosshairs.

  Ben harbored a closet aversion to crosshairs. “What is that?”

  “Microwave imager.”

  “Is it dangerous?”

  “Yes. Don’t move.”
/>   The machine hummed, building energy. Tess left it in place and pulled up a stool. “Tell me about the victim. Describe the symptoms.”

  He did, emphasizing the speed of the black tendrils creeping through Massir’s veins.

  Tess checked his skin, nose, and eyes, and interrupted with the occasional question. “And he went from healthy to dead in how many minutes?”

  “Five. Seven max, based on the chase between the Pantheon and the alley where I cornered him.” Ben started to relax.

  She threatened him with the syringe. “I said don’t move. So, you’re assuming the female operative your victim met is the one who dosed him?”

  “Should I suspect otherwise?”

  “No. I think that’s valid. And the lack of any other cases cropping up in Rome is encouraging.” The machine’s hum reached a crescendo. Tess grabbed both handles. “Here goes nothing.”

  Ben tried to look down at the crosshairs with just his eyeballs, keeping his head still. “Wait. I think I moved.”

  “Yeah, you did, honey. But it’s probably fine.”

  “Probably?”

  She pulled the trigger, and the hum ended with a snap.

  He could swear he felt a burst of heat pass through his torso.

  Tess studied her screen for a few heartbeats, then nodded. “We’re good. Turn around.”

  Ben raised his legs and spun them to the table’s other side. The humming rose to another crescendo. The machine gave another snap. A second burst of heat passed through his body. He started to ask about it, but the coolness of an alcohol swab at the small of his back refocused his attention.

  “Bend over,” she said, gently pressing him forward until his elbows rested on his knees. “This is going to hurt.” Without further warning, she stabbed him.

  Tess had never had much of a bedside manner—probably the reason she’d wound up in intelligence, pulling a government paycheck, instead of the private medical sector.

  After several moments of excruciating sliding and tugging, she yanked the needle out again.