Page 43 of The Nameless Ones
Louis took out the Bluetooth earpiece and replaced it with a wired earpiece and microphone connected to his own phone. He removed the SIM card and battery from the Android device that had been delivered earlier that morning, and debated breaking the SIM card in two. Instead he put it in his pocket, but dumped the phone and battery in a trash can. He wouldn’t have put it past Harris to embed a tracker in the phone, one that operated independently of the battery.
Louis walked away as more police vehicles pulled up outside the station, along with a pair of ambulances. His taxi was waiting on the street; the driver had come highly recommended, as selectively blind and deaf as the evolution of his breed would allow. As Louis got in, the voice in his ear told him that Markovic had been making for the Reuilly-Diderot Métro station, but now looked as though he might be reconsidering. Moments later, Markovic had hailed a cab, and his trackers were now following, all the time keeping up a constant flow of information from their cell phones to Louis’s earpiece.
‘North at present,’ Louis heard. ‘Do you think he’s going back to his hotel?’
‘Only if he’s dumb,’ said Louis, ‘and Markovic doesn’t strike me as that.’
Louis was frustrated. Harris’s operation had gone south fast, but at least Markovic wasn’t in the wind, not yet.
Markovic’s cab held the straightest route north, only veering east as it approached Gare de l’Est. For a moment it seemed possible that Markovic might just be foolish enough to return to his Stalingrad base, but the cab passed Stalingrad and continued over the Bassin de la Villette and on to Pantin, where it stopped outside a budget hotel near the quai de l’Aisne that was only marginally more appealing than Markovic’s original lodgings. There was no other hotel in the vicinity. Markovic did not enter immediately but instead took a seat in a nearby coffee shop, from which he could watch the hotel while making a series of calls.
He was still there when Louis’s taxi arrived. By then one of the men tracking Markovic had already paid cash for a room at the hotel, and he slipped the card keys to Louis as they passed each other on the street: one for the door that separated the lobby from the interior of the hotel, including the elevator, and another for the room itself. If, as seemed likely, Markovic was keeping a second base at the hotel, Louis now had the means to follow him inside. Louis bought a newspaper, found a bakery, and took a space by the window that gave him a clear view of Markovic.
Markovic was patient, but only up to a point. He waited forty-five minutes before leaving the coffee shop and walking toward, then entering, the hotel. Louis was behind him, tapping the copy of Le Monde against his right leg as he went, although he hoped that no one tried to test him on his knowledge of its contents, his command of the French language not extending to the intricacies of the newspaper’s political commentary. From his pocket he removed a baseball cap and placed it on his head. Louis hated baseball caps, but sometimes indignity was the better part of valor.
Markovic glanced back as he reached the security door in the lobby, aware of the presence at his back, but relaxed a little when he saw Louis flipping a card key between his fingers. They waited for the elevator together, each man giving the impression of studiously ignoring the other. When the elevator arrived, Markovic went in first and took up a position in the corner farthest from the panel of buttons. Louis noted the camera above Markovic’s head, protected from vandalism by a wire cage.
‘Votre étage, monsieur?’ said Louis.
‘Trois,’ said Markovic, then he added, ‘S’il vous plaît.’
Louis pressed the buttons for the third and fifth floors. No one else entered and the doors slid closed. The elevator rattled upward and did not stop until it reached the third floor. The doors opened again, and Markovic exited. Louis nodded at him as he passed, but Markovic did not respond. Just as the doors were about to close for the second time, Louis halted their progress with a foot, stepped out, and called to Markovic.
‘Monsieur, vous avez oublié quelque chose!’
Louis was holding up a key card. Markovic turned back, saw the key card, and displayed his own, which was when Louis shot him twice with the Rohrbaugh concealed in the folded newspaper. The first bullet took Markovic in the belly, the second in the chest. Markovic stumbled backward, landing hard against the wall, and slid to the floor, leaving a smear of blood on the paintwork. Louis advanced and fired one more time as Markovic raised his right hand as though to shield himself. The third bullet passed through the palm of Markovic’s hand and entered his brain through his right eye. The hand dropped, and Markovic was still.
The shots had sounded loud in the low hallway, even with the suppressor, but no one emerged from a doorway to investigate the source of the disturbance. Maybe, Louis reflected, the hotel was under-occupied; that, or its residents were endowed with enough sense not to display obvious interest in what might have been gunfire. Either way, Louis wasn’t going to wait around long enough to find out. He took the stairs to the lobby and left through the front entrance. There was no point trying to hide his face as his presence had already been recorded by the cameras in the lobby and the elevator, but the baseball cap would help, along with the inability of ignorant men to distinguish one Black face from another. What mattered now was getting out of Paris. Harris and his people could sort out the mess, which would be easier for them if the police hadn’t yet laid hands on a suspect.
Louis turned right at the corner and climbed in the back of the rental Peugeot idling by the curb. It pulled away quickly but not recklessly, and attracted no attention. The two Japanese men in the front did not look back at him, although the driver raised an inquisitive eyebrow in the rearview mirror.
‘One down,’ said Louis. ‘Four to go. You have my stuff?’
‘It’s in the trunk,’ said the driver.
‘Then take me to the airport.’
The two Japanese did not return immediately to New York after dropping Louis at Charles de Gaulle. They took a room at Le Bristol, and dined that evening at Dersou on rue Saint-Nicolas, because Paris was always pleasant for a few days. Admittedly, they had not been required to dispose of anyone in a new and interesting way, but into every life a little rain must fall, and they remained hopeful that Louis might need them again before his work was done.
They were, in their way, optimists.
Chapter XXXVIII
Pia Lackner, the estranged daughter of the lawyer Anton Frend, operated from an old brownstone near Blackfriars Bridge, within easy reach of the Inns of Court. Her firm shared the premises with three others, although Lackner’s was the only one specializing in environmental law and human rights. Angel felt more virtuous just by standing in its general vicinity.
He had decided against tackling Lackner on her home ground, opting instead for more neutral territory. He had selected the Black Friar, a nineteenth-century pub that occupied a wedge-shaped building on Queen Victoria Street. A phone call to Lackner’s office informing her that he might have information of interest was enough to draw her out, any concerns that she might have had about meeting a stranger being allayed by the choice of venue and an envelope that Angel had placed in the company mailbox earlier that morning.
The envelope contained a series of documents – provided by the enigmatic Harris – relating to the mining practices of multinational conglomerates in four African countries. A recent judgment by the Supreme Court in London had ruled that a mining company based in the United Kingdom could be held to account for the actions of one of its subsidiaries in Zambia, enabling the case to be held in England, where the claimants believed they had a better chance of achieving a measure of justice. The ruling opened the way for similar suits to proceed against a series of corporations. Lackner’s firm was representing litigants in West Africa who were taking an action against a big oil company for the pollution of their farmland. The firm’s resources were more limited than those of its larger rivals, so any help was likely to be gratefully received.
Angel was already seated at a corner table when Lackner arrived, a cup of coffee and a copy of the Guardian in front of him. Lackner was a small, heavyset woman with very bright blue eyes, and an expression set somewhere between bemused and skeptical, although Angel accepted that he might be the cause of both in this instance, with bemusement appearing to be winning out. Lackner had probably been anticipating an encounter with someone wearing a suit, or at the very least an individual who didn’t look as though he was more familiar with being the client of lawyers rather than their abetter.
‘Mr Angel?’ said Lackner.
He stood to shake her hand.
‘Just Angel.’
‘Is that your real name?’