One for One (John Flynn Thrillers Book 3) Page 7

  “You want a phone, my man?” he asked Gorski.

  “I need a phone my wife doesn’t know about.”

  “Don’t we all. Smartphone?”

  “No. Just for calls. No ID.”

  The guy shrugged. “You need ID to get the SIM card.”

  Gorski looked further down the row of stalls. “We’ll keep looking.”

  “Okay, my man. You like this one?” He held up and old flip-style phone.

  “Sure. Two?”

  The guy glanced at Flynn. “Sure. Two. Cash?”

  “Of course.”

  “Go down the end, turn left. There’s a blue van. Be there in ten.”

  Gorski and Flynn slowly made their way to the end of the stalls and turned left. It was a residential street, and parked cars lined one side of the road. People were walking from the train station toward their houses after a long day at work, eyes down, paying no attention to anything but their destination.

  The North African guy appeared from an apartment block. He carried a plastic bag. He walked over to a blue Renault van with flat tires and waited. Gorski approached him.

  “What do you have?”

  “You’re not French,” said the guy.

  “No,” said Gorski.

  “So not a cop.”

  “No.”

  “So I got two phones. They’re used but they work. The SIMs are Czech so the numbers are funny. There’s five hours talk time on each. I wrote the numbers down.”

  He handed Gorski a piece of paper and a phone and Gorski called one of the numbers and it rang the phone in the bag.”

  “Recharge?”

  “I take it you don’t want to use a credit card.”

  Gorski shook his head.

  “Then only in Czech. Or I can sell you another SIM, but the number will be different.”

  “Five hours?” asked Gorski.

  “Oui.”

  “How much?”

  “A hundred. Each.”

  Gorski didn’t negotiate. He pulled four fifty-euro notes from his pocket and handed them over.”

  “Pleasure doing business,” said the guy, and he strode away past Flynn, toward the market lane. Gorski and Flynn walked the other way, along the street to the next corner, where they turned back to the high street, looking for some food.

  Chapter Seven

  Flynn sat hunched on a moped at the end of Rue de Marignan in the upscale 8th arrondissement. A couple of hundred meters to his south was the River Seine, 150 meters to his north the Avenue des Champs-Élysées. Either direction the streets were lined with stores selling handbags worth ten thousand euros, coats worth five times as much, and jewelery that would have bought a home in most parts of the world.

  Flynn had walked the block in the cold, small hours, before the traffic and the pedestrians had arrived. Unfortunately his assessment of Loup’s living situation had been accurate but not complete. There was certainly no underground parking. But Loup didn’t have to come out on the street to get in a car. His home was on the top floor of a building just down the street from the Canadian embassy. From up there Flynn figured he could have seen both the Arc de Triomphe and the Eiffel Tower. The street level on Avenue Montaigne was all retail: Vuitton, Chanel, Harry Winston. There was access to the residential floors via a heavy wooden door that looked like it never opened for the wrong person.

  The vehicle access to the building was via Rue de Marignan. It was a tight, nondescript street. Double wooden doors hid access to a courtyard within which vehicles could collect wealthy residents without having to breath the air of the commoners. Flynn noted down the license plates on a Bugatti, a Rolls-Royce and a Mecedes Benz van entering. Then the Bugatti came out and turned left toward the river. Flynn watched it pass him. He couldn’t see through the tinted rear windows but he let it go. South was no way to get to Loup’s office in La Defense, which was a 6.7 kilometer straight shot down the Avenue des Champs-Élysées.

  The second vehicle turned away from Flynn, toward the Avenue des Champs-Élysées. The Rolls-Royce. That felt like a billionaire industrialist kind of ride. Flynn fired up the stolen moped and headed after the Rolls. It turned onto Avenue des Champs-Élysées and headed west. The traffic was bad even in the predawn, and navigating the traffic circle around the Arc de Triomphe was ranked up there with Flynn’s raids on Al-Qaeda in Pakistan for being death-defying.

  They crossed the river and headed into the La Defense precinct. Flynn called Gorski on his burner phone as he rode.

  “Coming into La Defense,” said Flynn.

  “I’m overlooking the garage entrance.”

  “I’m tracking a silver Rolls-Royce.” He gave Gorski the plate number. The flow of the traffic moved Flynn to within one vehicle of the Rolls-Royce as they pulled around toward Loup Tower.

  Then the Rolls cut the other way. Flynn kept on it. He wasn’t sure if he was made or if he was wrong, but the big car rounded another tower and then pulled down into a garage underneath. Flynn pulled up onto the sidewalk and watched the driver use a keycard to open the garage boom gate. Then the Rolls-Royce disappeared from view.

  Flynn called Gorski.

  “The Rolls went into another tower.”

  “Were you made?”

  “I don’t think so. Why go to another building? Loup’s own building has to be secure.”

  “Sure. We’ll try again tomorrow. Let’s rendezvous.”

  “Okay.” Flynn dropped the phone from his ear. “Wait—are you there?”

  “Oui.”

  “There was another vehicle in his building. A van.”

  “A van?”

  “A Mercedes van.”

  “Mercedes makes delivery vans. That’s probably what it was.”

  “Probably. But I read an article a while back about rich people in New York City buying these vans as fitting them out like mobile offices. Like a spacious limo.”

  “You think Loup has one?”

  “No idea. But he might. He’s a busy guy, right? And rich as hell.”

  “He is that.”

  “Keep your eyes open. It’s a black Mercedes. Here’s the plate.”

  Flynn gave the plate number to Gorski and then hung up. He circled around and came back around the Grande Arche. He left the moped on the street. If hadn’t been towed by the end of the day he planned on returning it to the apartment building near their hotel.

  He found Gorski sitting on a stone bench that surrounded a sculpture of what looked like a finger. The sun was breaking and the plaza was busy. Flynn sat and Gorski handed him a coffee. Flynn took a sip.

  “The French really know coffee,” he said.

  “Not as thick as that Turkish stuff you used to drink.”

  “No, but it does the job. I take it you didn’t see the van.”

  “Oh, I saw the van.”

  “Where?”

  “It went down under Loup’s building.”

  “So it might be him.”

  “It’s him,” said Gorski. He drank his coffee, warding off the cold morning. The sky was still heavy and it looked like rain was in the forecast.

  “How do you know it was him?”

  “There was a security guy there. I asked him about the van. Said it didn’t look very business-like unless there was a florist in the building. He told me it was Loup. Fully fitted out with a working office, wifi, everything. Just like you read.”

  “All right, so if we need to follow him we know what to look for. It’s a small step.”

  “It’s tiny,” said Gorski. Then his attention was captured by the sound of a helicopter over head. It was high up, but even over the sounds of the city traffic both men heard it. No one in the plaza paid any attention, but military guys responded differently to some sounds, and the whoop-whoop of a chopper was one of them.

  The helicopter seemed to slow over the top of them, and then ever so slowly it dropped out of sight above Loup Tower.

  “That thing just landed on Loup’s building,” said Gorski.

&n
bsp; “It did.”

  “Do you think it’s him?”

  “How could it be? He can’t land on the Champs-Élysées to get home.”

  “Maybe he wasn’t home at all. Maybe the van came to get him.”

  “Then why bother going to his house?”

  Gorski shrugged. “I’m hungry. Let’s get some breakfast. Then I’ve got an appointment to make.”

  Chapter Eight

  The first four calls couldn’t fit Gorski in that day. The fifth had an opening. It was an advertising agency on the thirtieth floor. He and Flynn ate croissants and baguettes with butter and drank café au lait to kill the time waiting.

  “Do you think you need some different clothes?” Flynn asked. Gorski was in an olive drab coat, blue knit sweater and jeans.

  “What? This is what these advertising types wear.”

  “How many advertising types do you know?”

  “Everybody know this. Even ripped jeans, that’s a thing. But I’m not ruining a perfectly good pair just for a recognizance mission.”

  “You look like a farmer.”

  “I am a farmer. Well, at least I live in a farmhouse.” Gorski looked out the window of the cafe and said, “Give me a minute.”

  He stood and walked out and Flynn watched him walk away across the plaza. Flynn returned to his croissant. He hadn’t had one so good since he’d last been in France. He wondered why that was. Even in San Francisco he hadn’t found them this good. One of the psychology books Flynn had read might have said that it had something to do with being in Paris tainting his memory, like the way hot dogs were always better in a ballpark. But he wondered if it had something to do with the butter. Pretty much all dairy was pasteurized in the US. He figured that had to do something to the end product. He was thinking about this when Gorski returned wearing what he was before, with the additional of a scarf. It looked silk, and very feminine.

  “Is that a women’s scarf?”

  “This is France. Everything’s unisex.”

  “Pinks and purples. Very pretty.”

  Gorski flicked the scarf out of the way as he sat and took up his coffee. “But do I look like one of those advertising people?”

  “You could pass for almost anything except military, right now.”

  “That’s the point.”

  “It could have been worse. You could have gotten a beret.”

  Flynn stayed watching the plaza while Gorski took his meeting. He wandered into the lobby and spent some time looking over the tenant board. There were a lot of companies in the building, and a lot of people. Many of the companies were offshoots or subsidiaries or just other holdings of Jean Loup. Loup’s main umbrella company was called Loup Holdings, and the public face of it was Loup Industries, otherwise simply known as Loup. Loup Industries held the top three listed floors of the building, with the reception on the lowest of these. Loup Holdings had no listed floor, which told Gorski they were probably on the PH, or penthouse level.

  Gorski’s advertising agency was on the twenty-ninth floor. He noted that some of the elevators served lower floors and some served higher floors, obviously skipping the lower ones for the sake of speed. He got in an elevator for the higher floors and noted that access to the Loup Industries floors—other than the reception level—was via keycard.

  Gorski got off on twenty-nine. The lobby was bright red and featured a television screen that took up an entire wall. It was showing a reel of the agency’s work, television slots for shampoo and computers and running shoes and cell phones.

  The reception desk had two people behind it, a man and a woman, neither of whom seemed interested in talking to him. They appeared to do nothing more than answer phone calls through their headsets. After a couple of minutes one of the woman took a breath long enough for Gorski to ask after Monsieur Pratt.

  “Who is asking?”

  “Jean-Paul,” said Gorski. He had planned on a false name, and thinking about Loup had put the name Jean front and center in his mind.

  The man shrugged as if this meant nothing then spoke into his headset. He didn’t speak again to Gorski. Gorski stood at ease in front of the reception desk. He was comfortable with standing at ease and waiting. He had done a lot of it. He had also been inspected more times than most people ate meals, so he waited right in front of the man. Which got his attention.

  “You may sit,” he said.

  “No,” said Gorski. “Do you have a toilet?”

  The man pointed to the left and gave Gorski a keycard. He took it and walked away. The toilet was just off the reception, behind a marbled glass wall. As with many toilet facilities, it was also near the stairs. Gorski hit the stairs. They were less secure than the toilets, but he figured they had to be. There was probably a law, some kind of fire code. Probably updated after 9/11. He strode up the stairs in quick time.

  The reception level for Loup Industries, was on the 33rd floor. Gorski went to thirty-four. The door out of the stairwell was locked. There was a black box where he was supposed to wave a keycard to gain access. He put the keycard in his hand against it but got nothing. No lights, no buzzers. The door remained locked. Perhaps the fire codes didn’t extend to secure locations. Perhaps they figured people would go down in a fire, and everyone above had a card.

  Gorski returned to the twenty-ninth floor. He stepped around the glass wall and found a man in the lobby. He didn’t look like an ad man. He wore a fine tailored suit and round glasses, and he had a mop of brown hair. He nodded at Gorski.

  “Monsiuer Jean-Paul,” said the man, extending his hand. “Pratt,” he said. “Michael Pratt.” Although he spoke French he said Michael, not Michel.

  “Jean-Paul,” said Gorski. “Est-ce que vous êtes anglais?”

  “Oui, I am English. But I have lived in Paris many years. Won’t you come through.”

  As they walked Gorski asked Pratt about the building.

  “Built by Monsieur Loup, whom of course you must know.”

  “Only a little.”

  “One of France’s richest men, from a very prominent family. They go back centuries.”

  “He works here?”

  “I believe he does. I’ve only seen him once here though. At a Christmas function. He has his own rooms at the top of the castle here. I see him often at the rugby.”

  They entered an office with a view across the river toward the Eiffel Tower. Clearly there was some money in the ad business.

  “Now, why don’t you tell me about your business.”

  Gorski took off the scarf before he got out of the lobby. Flynn had wandered the area, watching. He seemed to notice the same faces again and again. A man in a blue blazer, a woman in a pantsuit, but he figure a lot of people dressed the same way here, and it was reasonable to see people multiple times since they worked in nearby buildings, took their coffee breaks and lunch in the area, and strode across the plaza to meetings in other nearby buildings. Flynn was back on the stone bench when Gorski came out.

  “What do you know?” Flynn asked.

  “The advertising business isn’t as interesting as it sounds. KPIs and CPCs and LVs. The acronyms are worse than the army.”

  “Not possible.”

  “Well, close. But I’ll tell you this. We’re not getting at Loup in the building.”

  Gorski explained the secure stairs and what Pratt had told him about never seeing Loup in and around the facility.

  “So we keep looking.”

  Both men turned their eye skyward at the sound of the rotor blades. The helicopter that had landed earlier was taking off from Loup’s rooftop. The choppers lifted up slow and away from the building, and then banked and headed away to the north.

  “Maybe that’s him,” said Flynn.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I know where he is going to be tonight.”

  They split up. Gorski marched down to the 16th arrondissement, covering the 6.5 kilometers in a little under the hour. Flynn waited by th
e Loup building with the moped. If Gorski’s information was good they would meet up at the stadium. If not, Flynn would follow the black van wherever it went.

  The van came out of the garage at 8 p.m. Darkness had fallen and a light drizzle had set in. Flynn followed the van back across the river and along the edge of the Bois de Boulogne, the second largest park in Paris. Flynn knew it to be two-and-a-half times the size of Central Park in New York City, but like Central Park, not a place to venture alone at night.

  But they didn’t stop. The Stade Jean-Bouin was a boutique 20,000 seat stadium at the south-east corner of the Bois de Boulogne, used for rugby and football matches. It was dwarfed by its much larger near neighbor, Parc des Princes, which was the home to local football side Paris Saint-Germain.

  The van stopped in front of the smaller stadium and Flynn watched three men get out and check the surrounding. Only then did Flynn see Jean Loup for the first time. He was a poster boy for everything French. He was around Flynn’s 183 centimeters—or six foot even—and despite wearing a heavy cashmere coat he looked trim and healthy. His brown hair swept back across his hair as if it never required tending to, and his smile would win elections.

  Loup shook hands with another man who had come out of the stadium. This man was short and stocky and looked to be made of solid brick. They spoke and then Loup turned to another man who had gotten out of the van. He was a touch shorter than Loup and his coat was black, and he hair was trimmed and conservative and neat. He could have been a senior military guy. But he wasn’t. Flynn recognized him as Pierre Robert, Loup’s in-house counsel, and the link back to the troubles with Gorski’s parents.

  Flynn took out his phone and called Gorski.

  “Loup’s at the stadium.”

  “I’m watching. The gate he is going in is the corporate hospitality entrance. He’s going up to one of those boxes.”