Chapter 24
St.-Germain-des-Prés
Paris
“Dad, you have to leave.”
Mac pressed the phone to his ear. “Jaycee, that you?”
“Who else has the number?”
“I’m sorry,” said Mac, a little hazy. “Hold on a sec. I must have dozed off.”
He sat up and threw his feet onto the floor. He checked his watch. It was nine o’clock. He’d slept two hours. He looked around the flat, remembering where he was, his flight from Gerard Rosenfeld’s apartment, one step ahead of the police.
“Jaycee, I’m here,” he said, rousing himself. “Listen, I need your help.”
“Dad, stop,” said Jane. “You need to leave the safe flat immediately. Hear me? Get the hell out.”
“Leave?” said Mac. “I haven’t had my coffee yet.”
“I’m not joking,” Jane continued. “The DDO is flying to Paris. She might already be there. She’s canvassing all the safe houses in Paris to see if any are in use.”
“But no one knows I’m here,” said Mac. “Right?”
“No one knows you—Mac Dekker—are there. But safe houses are equipped with security systems that let station chiefs know when they’re in use. If anyone checks, they’ll find a record of someone entering the premises. For all I know, there are cameras there too.”
“Who is she?” asked Mac. “The new DDO. Anyone I’d know?”
“She came over from State,” said Jane. “Consular Affairs.”
Consular Affairs. There was a shady outfit. A bunch of glorified scalp hunters. “She’s coming to Paris to look for me?” asked Mac.
“No one is saying as much, but yeah.”
“How do you know? Friends tipping you off?”
“I just know,” said Jane. “I’ve got ten years on the job. Give me some credit.”
“Thanks for the heads-up,” said Mac. “Last thing I want to do is get you into trouble.”
“I’ll only get in hot water if they find you there,” said Jane.
Mac stood, grabbing the pistol off the night table and tucking it into his waistband. He could be dressed and gone in ninety seconds. “I’m up and moving,” he said. “Can we talk later?”
“I’m not finished,” said Jane. “Word is that you’ve been red-flagged.”
The news hit Mac like a sock in the gut.
“Red flag” was agency lingo for a termination notice.
A contract issued for an individual’s murder.
He’d been red-flagged once before. He’d escaped, but at the cost of his name and nine years’ exile.
“Shoot first, ask questions later,” he said.
“That’s extreme. Who the hell is the new DDO, anyway? ”
“Eliza Porter Elkins. She likes to use all three names.”
Mac thought he was hearing things. “Eliza Porter Elkins? For real?”
“Yeah. What about her?”
“Nothing, sweetheart,” said Mac. “The name rings a bell, that’s all. Think she’s someone I escorted in Baghdad back in the day. Congressional delegation.”
“Her father’s a senator,” said Jane. “He’s the longest-serving member of Congress. She’s got some juice.”
“Yeah,” said Mac, unexpectedly coming face to face with another of his past sins. “I know who he is . . . they are, um, whatever.”
He remembered Eliza Porter Elkins vividly.
To him, she was and always would be “Lizzie.” It was a crazy time.
The surge going full force, thousands of new troops pouring into the country.
Missions carried out 24/7. Kill, kill, kill.
IEDs on every street. So many of his brothers cut down. In a word, “hell.”
And then there she was. A blond beauty asking smart questions.
What happened, happened. He didn’t regret it.
But she’d seen things a different way. A way Mac had no business seeing things when he was counting his life in days, maybe hours.
But try explaining that to a woman like her.
A woman who got what she wanted. A woman with some juice, even then.
“What’s going on down there?” asked Jane. “You’ve got a lot of very important people very scared.”
“I found out who abducted Ava,” said Mac. “Prince Tariq bin Nayan bin Tariq al-Sabah.”
“TNT?” Jane’s surprise was evident. “He’s a dilettante, a showboat.”
“You know him?” asked Mac.
“Not in any professional sense,” said Jane. “I’ve seen some of the pictures he posts. He’s like the Kardashians on steroids. He’s the world’s biggest car nut. His father made him Minister of the Interior last year to get him to spend more time at home. So far, it hasn’t worked.”
“An influencer,” said Mac. “Whatever that is.”
“What does he want with Ava?” asked Jane.
“They know each other,” said Mac, replaying the scene from the security camera.
“When they met, he gave her a kiss on the cheek. They talked for a second, then things went south. Looked heated. Out of nowhere, a woman jabbed a syringe into her neck. Some kind of drug. Ava was down in five seconds. She never saw it coming.”
“That doesn’t sound like Ava,” said Jane.
No, Mac had to admit to himself. It didn’t. Ava saw everything coming.
“All this happened in the restaurant?” said Jane. “I don’t get it.”
“He had help,” said Mac and explained how Gerard Rosenfeld had aided and abetted TNT to steal Ava out of the nearly empty restaurant.
“I’m afraid to ask how you know all this,” said Jane.
“Don’t,” said Mac.
Before conking out, he’d done a search on TNT. It took ten minutes of scouring his social media pages to get a picture of his opulent lifestyle. Clothes, watches, and like Jane said: cars, cars, cars.
Journalists shed a more informative light on him.
Boarding school in England. College in the States.
A bachelor’s degree from USC. No dorms for him.
He took over the top floor of the Four Seasons Beverly Wilshire hotel.
A scandal about a gift of a Rolex to a professor.
Questions about how much coursework he’d in fact completed.
That wasn’t all Mac had discovered. The Al-Sabah royal family maintained an official website showcasing biographies of all its members—a total of some 653 men, women, and children.
TNT wasn’t quite the dilettante Jane claimed.
There was another side to him that he seemed to want to keep hidden—a subject about which he didn’t post pictures on social media.
TNT had completed officer training at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst in England and, afterward, graduated from the rigorous three-month US Army Ranger course.
A Rolex would not buy you a Ranger tab; that you had to earn.
Mac knew this from experience. The course was brutal, bordering on life-endangering.
In ninety days, he had lost thirty-seven pounds, dislocated his shoulder, and, for one grueling three-hour stretch, gone blind from dehydration.
His Ranger tab counted among his proudest possessions.
TNT was also a sharpshooter who’d competed for his country at the Olympic Games. He was not just the good-looking, jet-setting billionaire he wanted the world to believe. There was steel beneath the polished veneer. And more. Ambition.
Which man, Mac wondered, was the real TNT?
“You asked me if we had something running in Paris,” said Jane.
“We don’t, at least nothing anyone is talking about.
I haven’t had time to check with Mossad, not that they’d tell me.
But those guys who came after you in the hotel yesterday .
. . the one whose name you gave me is a member of the Royal Guard, the Saudi king’s bodyguards.
Wherever the king goes, they go with him.
If they’re in Paris, so is the king. His name also came up as being a member of the Tiger Squad.
One of their trained assassins. He was there in Istanbul when they cut up Khashoggi. ”
Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi American dual-national journalist lured into the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, where he was strangled to death before his body was chopped into pieces and placed into trash bags for discreet removal.
His murder was payback for a few scathing articles about the Saudi royal family.
“That explains the knife,” said Mac.
“What? Dad! Those men came to kill you?”
Well, thought Mac, they certainly weren’t the ones who sent the fruit basket. “I don’t get it,” he said. “First TNT, then the Saudis. But, listen, Jaycee, there’s an Israeli involved, too, and he’s not one of the good guys. Yehudi Rosenfeld.”
“A relation of the other one?” asked Jane. “From the restaurant.”
“His brother,” said Mac. “Know him? He’s a member of the Knesset, part of the Kach Party. They’re way to the right. Anti-Arab, pro-settler, as extreme as an Israeli politician can get. Apparently, he co-opted his brother to help TNT.”
“Why would Ava be working with TNT, the Qataris, or the Saudis, for that matter?” asked Jane. “And what are the Qataris doing palling around with the Jewish National Front? They hate each other.”
“My question exactly,” said Mac, as he finished dressing and headed for the door. “Now you have something to occupy yourself with. Find out, will you? I’m out of here. I’ll call you in an hour.”
“No, Dad. You can’t,” said Jane. “Too many people are watching me. Don’t contact me. I can’t talk to you again.”
“Jane, I need your help.”
“This isn’t just about you anymore. I’ve done all I can. Please, get out of the city. Promise me.”
“Not yet,” said Mac.
“Ava can take care of herself,” said Jane, with mounting frustration. “People want you dead. Think of Katya. She can’t lose both of you.”
“She’s not going to,” said Mac.
“If you stay, they’ll find you,” said Jane.
“Maybe. Maybe not.”
“Get over yourself, dammit,” said Jane. “Be a father first, for once. Ava didn’t want you involved in this.”
“I know what I’m doing,” said Mac, knowing, of course, that he didn’t.
“You can’t save everyone.”
“Just wait—”
“You disappeared once,” said Jane. “Do it again.”
“Jane . . .”
“Just do it. Get out. Hear me? Get out.”
The line went dead. Mac stared at the phone.
Get out. It’s what the card addressed to the “Famille Steinhardt” had said.
Mac removed the SIM card and flushed it down the toilet.
He checked his pistol—round in the chamber, safety on.
Did he have time to take a leak? No, he decided.
That would have to wait. Jane had put herself in jeopardy to find him the bolt-hole and to warn him.
He had to do as she instructed. Get the hell out.
Mac left the flat. He paused inside the foyer to peer through the windows on either side of the door. It was a sunny morning. Pedestrians thronged the sidewalk. He scanned the street for double-parked cars, vans, anything that might signal unwanted attention.
Eliza Porter Elkins was in Paris. Had she come alone? Was Don Baker with her? Who had tipped Jaycee off? A red flag. Again? All these thoughts raced through Mac’s brain as he tried to figure out the best course of action.
“Screw it,” he muttered, shouldering the door and hitting the street. It was too much for a simple field guy. He didn’t do plotting and conniving and scheming. If they were there, they were there.
He headed east on the Boulevard St.-Germain, past the Brasserie Lipp and, across the street, the Café Deux Magots.
The tables out front were taken. No sign of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, or Eliza Porter Elkins.
Against every rule, he looked over his shoulder.
If they were coming, he wanted to see them.
But no . . . for now, he didn’t see anyone stalking him.
No stealthy assets with murder in their eyes.
No little old ladies with poison-tipped umbrellas.
No tall, buxom blonds looking to call in an airstrike on him.
He laughed at himself. You never saw ’em coming. Just like they never saw Mac coming.
He’d forgotten how lousy it felt to be on the run in enemy territory.
Mac turned the corner and entered the first shop he came to. It was a confiserie selling chocolates and pastries. The smell was heavenly. He browsed the displays while keeping watch out the window for a tail.
Jane was right. Sooner or later, they’d find him.
They always did. A red flag. What were they so scared of?
Strangely, the news fired him up. He was on the right path.
Whatever Ava was involved in, whatever trouble she’d gotten into, it was important enough for a deputy director of the CIA to drop everything and fly to Paris.
He only wished Ava had confided in him. He was no longer angry with her.
He loved her, and love, at its root, meant trust. Like it or not, he had to trust Ava’s decision not to bring him into her affairs.
But that was then . . . that was before she’d been abducted.
He had no choice but to help her. There it was.
Sorry, Jaycee, your dad is never going to disappear again.
“Good morning.” The salesgirl smiled at Mac from behind the display. “May I help you?”
Mac jumped, as if shaken from a reverie. Yes, he did need help. He couldn’t do this alone. He’d never locate Ava if he had to constantly check over his shoulder.
“Harry Crooks,” he blurted. Where in the world had the name come from?
“Excuse me?”
“Crooks . . . oh, uh, never mind,” said Mac, once again present. “Nothing for me. I’ve gotta run.”
Mac fled the store, talking to himself. “Harry Crooks. I wonder if the tough bastard’s still alive.”