3

FISHERwas awoken by the cricket chirp of his iPhone. Having set the ringtone to match only one incoming number, he knew the alert meant visitors had arrived. He checked the time: 11:15 P.M. He sat up in bed and looked around, momentarily confused by his surroundings--the by-product of moving around so much. The decor and layout of chain hotel rooms tended to blur together.

The good news was that the visitors weren't his but rather Boutin's. The night before, Fisher had planted a homemade motion detector around Boutin's apartment door: the tremble sensor from a vehicle's antitheft GPS tracker wired to a prepaid cell phone. The tremble sensor was buried beneath Boutin's doormat, and the cell phone buried against the wall a few feet away, its antenna jutting up among some weeds. Lacking the technological edge that working for 3E had provided, Fisher had, during the last year, become a fair inventor.

Having adopted the habit of sleeping in his clothes, he had only to grab his rucksack and head for the door.

HIShotel, the Monopole, was a couple hundred yards north of Boutin's apartment, on place Drouet d'Erlon. The proximity was a risk, he knew, but having disposed of the Francois Dayreis alias and checked into the Monopole with one of Emmanuel's superbly altered passports, he felt relatively secure.

Outside, the streets were deserted and dark, save the yellow glow of the streetlamps reflecting on the damp cobblestones. He walked north, turned right onto rue de l'Etape, then immediately left into passage Sube, which took him south along an alley lined with boutiques and side entrances to restaurants until he was within sight of rue Condorcet. He stopped a hundred feet short and found a darkened doorway. Across the street lay a kebab restaurant, and to the left of it the tree-lined northern entrance to the courtyard outside Boutin's apartment.

From his rucksack he withdrew his EOS 1D Mark III. He affixed the AstroScope Night Vision, powered up the Canon, and brought the viewfinder up to his eye. In the greenish glow of the NV, he scanned the courtyard. Standing so still was the figure that he passed it twice before he realized what he was seeing. Japanese, medium build, shaved head--in his mid-twenties, too young to be bald. An aesthetic choice. Fisher zoomed in, switched the selector to burst mode, and pressed the shutter button. He stayed focused on the man, waiting to see if he was smoking or waiting for someone, but for a full two minutes the man stayed stock-still. Disciplined. The man had "operator" written all over him.

Fisher moved on, scanning deeper into the courtyard. There were too many trees. If he was right about the Japanese guy, there would be others. This one was covering the northern entrance to the courtyard. . . . Would he have partners at the west and south entrances? Time to move.

Moving with exaggerated slowness, Fisher backed out of his doorway and retraced his steps until he reached the intersection of passage Sube and passage Talleyrand, where he turned west. He emerged back on Drouet d'Erlon, just south of his hotel, turned left through the square, around the fountain at its center, then onto Marx Dormoy. Ten feet from the west entrance to the courtyard, Fisher stopped short. He scanned his flanks with the Canon, then moved up and peeked with the AstroScope around the corner.

Like the Japanese man, this one was hidden in the trees directly across from Boutin's apartment door. She, too, was as still as a statue, save her eyes, which kept up a constant scan. Fisher shot a burst of her, then zoomed in and panned left. He stopped, panned back. In the NV, there was no way to be sure of the hair color, but the face looked familiar. . . . He zoomed in again. Kimberly Gillespie. Fisher lowered the camera from his face, took a deep breath, and squeezed his eyes shut. His situation had just gotten exponentially more complicated. Damn.

Fisher retraced his steps again: north to the square, then left and left again down rue Theodore Dubois to where it intersected rue de Vesles, then east for a hundred yards to the ATM just outside the courtyard's southern entrance.

He ducked down, crab-walked up the alley gate, and peeked around the corner and into the alley.

He froze.

The third watcher was standing thirty feet away, just inside the archway. Fisher kept still, barely breathing, until his eyes readjusted to the darkness and he could see a silhouette of the figure's face: thin and wiry with a hawk nose. Another familiar face? Fisher waited until the face rotated left, toward the interior of the courtyard; then he raised the AstroScope and zoomed in. The face turned again, back toward Fisher and into three-quarter profile. Fisher took a quick burst, then lowered the camera and froze. The man's eyes seemed to fix on Fisher's position. Five seconds passed. Ten. Thirty seconds. The face rotated again. Fisher ducked back and let out his breath.

He brought the Canon up to his face and switched on the LCD screen. He clicked through the last series of pictures. No mistake. He knew this one, too: Allen Ames. As it invariably did, the name caused Fisher's subconscious to start whispering. Something about Ames didn't sit right.

Fisher brought his mind back on track. So, three on overwatch, which meant at least one person inside talking to Boutin--no, there'd be two inside with Boutin, so five in all. One team leader and two pairs. A standard field team. There was no doubt about the opposition now.

Next: transportation. They wouldn't rely on taxis or mass transit, which meant rental cars, at least two of them. Using the AstroScope, Fisher scanned up and down rue de Vesles; the street was under partial construction with temporary NO PARKING signs every thirty feet. The cars would be close, but not too close. A quarter mile or less.

Fisher started walking.

It took fifteen minutes. On rue de Thillois, a few hundred yards southeast of Boutin's apartment, he found a blue Opel and a green Renault parked nose to tail. Both bore Europcar CDG stickers--Paris's Charles de Gaulle airport. This told him something. Someone had been lazy with tradecraft.

Fisher walked to the park across and down the street and found his spot: a bench sheltered by the low-hanging boughs of a tree with a clear sight line to the cars. He did a quick circuit of the park, checking approaches, exits, and angles; then he returned to the bench, pulled a rolled-up newspaper from his pocket, lay down, and covered himself with a hobo blanket. He completed the disguise with a half-consumed bottle of wine, which he placed on the ground beside the bench's leg.

Twenty minutes later the Japanese man and Kimberly appeared to the east on rue de Thillois. They were a quarter mile away and heading toward the cars. Fisher looked around. Where are you? . . . There.Fifty yards to the west, at the corner of rue des Poissonniers, stood a wiry figure. Ames. Good tradecraft. Kimberly and her partner--Fisher had started thinking of him as a Japanese Vin Diesel--would do a walk by of the cars, looking for signs of tampering or surveillance while Ames did the same from his static position.

At the next intersection, Kimberly and Vin split up: Kimberly going straight ahead, Vin crossing over. As she passed the Opel and the Renault, she reached up with her left hand and adjusted her beret: an "all okay" signal to Vin, who replied by taking his right hand out of his pocket. Vin reached Ames's corner and turned left. Kimberly kept walking, crossed the intersection, then took up position in a sunken doorway before a pharmacy. She muttered something--into her SVT (subvocal transceiver), he assumed--then went still, watching. This, Fisher knew, would be the final check-in with Vin and Ames before everyone rallied back at the cars. A nice bit of discipline. It was all too easy to dismiss such precautions as excessive--which they often are--but overcautiousness was an operator's best friend, one of those habits that would, if you stayed in the business long enough, save your life one day. Fisher had seen the lack of it kill plenty of otherwise good spooks.