Chapter 53
Paris
Mac ran to the end of the hallway and opened a pair of double doors. “Ava?”
He entered without waiting for an answer.
It was TNT’s bedroom. He recognized it from a photo essay in one magazine or another.
He crossed the room and poked his head into the bathroom.
More gold and marble than a Roman mausoleum.
Who lived here? The Emperor Nero? Not by a long shot.
The Roman Empire had nothing on the Gulf states.
Mac retraced his steps and hurried down the hall to the opposite side of the house.
There was an elevator and, next to it, stairs leading to the floor below.
He took the stairs two at a time, stopping on the intermediate landing.
He peered over the balustrade, from which one could see to the ground floor.
A flurry of voices drifted up from far below.
The pounding of boots on the stairs. Men coming or going.
He didn’t know which. The police would not take kindly to finding an armed intruder.
Mac had searched too many homes, buildings, and hideouts to count.
The rule was “shoot first, ask questions later.” He had, in effect, called the cops on himself.
Mac continued down to the fifth floor. “Ava,” he called out again. He moved briskly along the corridor and pulled up next to a door with a biometric lock. Not something one usually saw in a private residence. He banged once. “Ava.”
He tried the door. It opened at once. He entered a cavernous guest room that might have belonged to Madame de Pompadour.
In the center of the room was a trolley set with a white tablecloth and offering a bountiful breakfast. The coffee was cold, the croissants already hardening.
Cloth napkins remained folded and were embroidered with the name of the hotel next door, the Plaza Athénée.
Tucked beneath one was a card with a number to call for pick up.
Pick up? Evidently, there was a passage between the two buildings, either TNT’s doing or a remnant from the past.
A sound from the hall. Mac spun. No one was there.
Just his imagination playing tricks on him.
He moved toward the bed. The sheets were unbothered, but it was apparent that someone had lain atop the duvet.
The pillow was out of place and terribly wrinkled.
He put his nose to the sheets. His heart soared. It was Ava’s perfume.
The sweet, floral scent stopped Mac cold.
It was strong, unmistakable, and most important, fresh.
Ava was here. He touched the duvet and imagined he could feel her lingering warmth.
He spotted a long dark hair. He knew then that she was alive.
He’d never assumed otherwise, at least not aloud.
All the same, somewhere deep inside of him—a place hollowed by repeated disappointments, roughened by the deaths of too many close friends—he’d made the first preparations for the unthinkable.
Those awful and cowardly doubts vanished in a heartbeat.
Ava was alive.
Mac stepped away from the bed. Experience tempered his ebullience. If anything, he needed to move faster, more purposefully, and, now more than ever, without mercy. Kidnapping merited punishment. Shoot first, ask questions later.
He ducked a head into the bathroom. “Ava,” he whispered to the wilderness of marble and mirror. His mute, wide-eyed reflection ordered him to find her and quickly.
Mac hurried across the guest room, the toe of his shoe kicking a length of black plastic across the parquet floor.
Not plastic. Something else. Something strangely familiar.
He stooped to pick it up. A flex-cuff. A second cuff lay partially hidden beneath the curtains.
He noted that the plastic had been neatly severed.
Ava’s jailer had not freed her. For that, one needed a key, not a razor.
Ava, or someone else, had cut off the cuffs.
Cyrille de Montcalm watched the line of men exit the front door of 27 Avenue Montaigne and file past Luc Chardin onto the sidewalk, where they were escorted a safe distance away.
A few wore traditional Arab dress; others were in jeans and T-shirts.
Every last one had a beard of some type. The prince’s posse.
And the prince, the handsome one they called TNT? Cyrille didn’t see him.
Luc Chardin raised an arm, then lowered it.
Signal to go. A squad of soldiers entered the residence, machine guns at the ready.
Another squad jogged into the courtyard to enter through the side door.
Two stragglers brought up the rear. Cyrille hung her badge around her neck and ran across the street to join them, drawing her weapon.
“Go,” she said to the last man in line. “Keep moving.”
The man looked at her badge, her gun, mostly her face. He saw what he needed to convince him. “Stay close,” he said.
And just like that, she was in.