The Ambler Warning

  “In France? Doesn’t that mean you have to take a lover?”

  Ambler smiled. “Sometimes, even in France, your wife is your lover.”

  As the two walked down the block toward a taxi stand at the corner, Ambler had a distinct sense that they were being followed. Abruptly he turned around the corner and up an adjoining street; Laurel kept pace with him, unquestioning. The presence of a patrol was not itself a cause for alarm. No doubt Fenton’s people wanted to make sure that he didn’t disappear again. In the next five minutes, Ambler and Laurel turned down several streets, at random, only to find the same broad-shouldered man traipsing behind them, across the street, lagging by approximately a third of a block.

  Increasingly, something bothered Ambler about the tail, and now he realized what it was: the man was making it too easy. He was failing to keep an appropriate distance between himself and his putative subject; moreover, he was dressed like an American, in what looked like a dark Brooks Brothers suit and a candy-striped tie, like a local assemblyman from Cos Cobb. The man wanted to be seen. That meant that he was a decoy—meant to provide spurious reassurance when he was eluded—and that Ambler had not yet identified the real tail. Doing so took several minutes longer. It was a stylish brunette in a dark midlength coat. There was no point in losing either of them. If the tail wanted to be seen, Ambler himself wanted Fenton’s people to know where he was going; he had even gone so far as to call the Hotel Debord at the SSG branch office, ostensibly confirming his reservation.

  Finally, he and Laurel grabbed a taxi, collected their cases from the left-luggage office at the Gare du Nord, and checked into a room on the third floor of the Hotel Debord.

  The hotel was a little dank; a slight mildewy smell emanated from the carpets. But Laurel voiced no misgivings. Ambler had to stop her before she set about unpacking.

  He opened the hard-sided briefcase that the balding factotum had provided him. The pieces of the TL 7 rifle he’d asked for—a collapsible CIA sniper weapon—were securely lodged in compartments slotted into stiff black foam. The Glock 26—a subcom-pact pistol that fired 9mm rounds—was secured in place as well. The documents he had asked for were in a side compartment.

  What Ambler was looking for was exactly what wasn’t visible. It would take him a while to find it. First he examined the exterior of the case carefully, making sure that there was no nonfunctioning appliqué. Then he removed the black packing foam, and with his fingertips, he felt along every square inch of the case’s lining. He detected nothing out of the ordinary. He tapped the handle with his fingernails and examined every inch of the stitching along the top, for any sign of tampering. Finally, he turned to the black foam itself, squeezing it with his fingertips until he detected a small lump. Using a pocketknife, he prized the two layers apart until he finally uncovered what he had been searching for. The object was shiny and oval, like a vitamin pill wrapped in foil. In fact, it was a miniature GPS transponder. The tiny device was designed to signal its location, pulsing radio signals on a special frequency.

  As Laurel Holland stared at him in perplexity, Ambler studied the hotel room. There was a small green-floral patterned sof a beneath the window, with a seat cushion above its curved ball-and-claw legs. He lifted the cushion and secreted the transponder beneath it. He was probably the first person to lift the cushion in a year, to judge from the scattering of coins and dust; he doubted it would be lifted for another year.

  Now he took the hard-sided briefcase along with his garment bag and gestured to Laurel to take her own luggage. Wordlessly they walked out of the room. Laurel followed him as he walked past the bank of passenger elevators and around a corner, to a cavernous service elevator, where the flooring was grip-textured steel instead of carpeting. At the ground floor, they found themselves near a rear loading dock. It was vacant at this hour. He led the way through a wide steel push-bar door and onto a ramp that brought them to an alley.

  A few minutes later, they settled into another taxicab for a short ride to the Hotel Beaubourg, on the rue Simon Lefranc, a stone’s throw from the Pompidou Center. It was the perfect place for American visitors interested in modern art, and just around the corner from Deschesnes’ apartment. Once again, there was no problem getting a room—it was January—and, once again, Ambler paid with cash, hard currency taken from the operative in the Sourlands; to use the Mulvaney credit cards would be to send up a flare. The hotel was not grand. It had no restaurant, only a small breakfast area in the basement. But the bedroom had exposed oak beams on the ceiling and a comfortable bathroom with a large claw-footed tub. He felt a measure of safety, the safety that came with anonymity. He could tell that Laurel felt it, too.

  She broke the silence first. “I was going to ask you what that was all about. But I guess I kind of know.”

  “A needless precaution, let’s hope.”

  “I have a feeling that there’s a lot you’re not telling me. And I should probably be grateful for it.”

  In an easy silence, they settled in. It was early evening after a long day, but Laurel wanted to go out for dinner. As she took a quick bath, Ambler heated the small iron that the hotel had provided and carefully laminated her photograph onto the passport. What made U.S. passports difficult to forge was simply the material with which they were made—the paper, the film, the holographic metallic strip, all of which were tightly controlled. Most likely, then, Fenton’s supply was courtesy of his governmental collaborators.

  Laurel came out of the bathroom, covering herself shyly with her towel, and Ambler kissed her lightly on the neck.

  “We’ll have dinner and get an early night. Tomorrow we can have breakfast in one of the cafés round the corner. The man I’m looking for lives a few blocks away.”

  She turned around and looked at him, wondering, Ambler thought, if she could ask him something. Something that was important to her. He gave her a reassuring look. “Come on. You can ask me. Anything to get that worried expression off your face.”

  “You’ve killed people, haven’t you?” Laurel asked. “I mean, when you were working for the government.”

  He nodded gravely, his own face mask-like.

  “Is it . . . hard to do?”

  Was it hard to kill? That was not a question Ambler had asked himself for years. But there were related questions that did haunt him. What did it cost to kill—what did it cost in the currency of the human soul? What had it cost him? “I’m not sure how to answer that,” he said softly.

  Laurel looked abashed. “I’m sorry. It’s just that I’ve dealt with patients who seemed, well, damaged, damaged because of the damage they inflicted on others. They didn’t seem vulnerable—most of these people had to pass extensive psych workups before they were hired in the kind of jobs they had. But it’s like a piece of ceramic with a hairline crack. Nothing could seem tougher, until it suddenly shatters.”

  “Is that what the Parrish Island facility was like—a box filled with shattered ceramic soldiers?”

  She did not answer right away. “Sometimes that’s how it seemed.”

  “Was I one of them?”

  “Shattered? No, not shattered. Bruised, maybe. Like they tried to crush you, but you just wouldn’t crush. It’s hard to put in words.” She looked into his eyes. “But in your career, you’ve had to . . . do things that must have been hard to do.”

  “I had a Cons Ops instructor who used to say that there are really two worlds,” he began slowly, softly. “There’s the world of the operative, and it’s a world of murder and mayhem and all the skulduggery you could imagine. It’s a world of boredom, too—the endless tedium of waiting and planning, of contingencies that never come into play, of traps that never spring. But the brutality is real, too. Not less real for being so casual.”

  “It all seems so heartless. So cold.” There was a catch in her voice.

  “And there’s another world, Laurel. It’s the normal world, the everyday world. It’s the place where people get up in the morning to do an honest da
y’s work, and angle for their promotions, or go shopping for a son’s birthday present, and change long-distance plans so they can call their daughter at college for less. That’s the world where you sniff the fruits in the supermarket to see whether they’re ripe, and look up a recipe for orange roughy, because they had that on special, and worry about arriving late for a grandchild’s Communion.” He paused. “And the thing is that sometimes these worlds intersect. Suppose a man is prepared to sell technology that can be used to kill hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of people. The safety of the normal world, the world of everyday people, depends on making sure the bad guys don’t succeed. Sometimes, that means taking extraordinary measures.”

  “Extraordinary measures,” she said. “You make it sound like medicine.”

  “Maybe it is a kind of medicine. It’s more like medicine than it is like police work, anyway. Because at the shop I worked for, there was a simple creed: if we operated by the policeman’s rules, we would lose ground we can’t afford to lose. We’d lose the war. And there was a war. Beneath the surface of every major city in the world—Moscow, Istanbul, Tehran, Seoul, Paris, London, Beijing—there were battles going on every minute of every day. If things work the way they’re supposed to, people like me spend their lives working for people like you, by keeping that battle from erupting into view.” Ambler stopped.

  So many other questions remained unanswered, perhaps unanswerable. Was Benoit Deschesnes a part of this war? Could he, in fact, kill this man? Should he? If Fenton’s intelligence was correct, Benoit Deschesnes was betraying not just his own country, not just the United Nations, but all the people whose lives would be threatened by nuclear weapons in the hands of tinpot dictators.

  Laurel broke the silence. “And if they don’t? If they don’t work the way they’re supposed to?”

  “Then the great game becomes just that, another game, only a game played with human lives.”

  “You still believe this,” Laurel prodded.

  “I don’t know what I believe anymore,” he said. “At this point, I feel like a cartoon animal who’s run off a cliff, and if he doesn’t keep pumping his legs in midair, he’ll plunge to the bottom.”

  “You feel angry,” she said, “and lost.”

  He nodded.

  “That’s how I feel,” she said, and it was almost as if she were thinking aloud. “Except I feel something else, too. I feel like I’ve got a sense of purpose now. Absolutely nothing makes sense, and, for the first time in my life, it’s like everything makes sense. Because stuff’s broken, and it has to get fixed, and if we don’t do it, nobody will.” She broke off. “Don’t listen to me—I don’t even know what I’m saying.”

  “And I don’t even know who I am. We’re a swell pair.” He sought out her eyes with his, and, together, they shared a small smile.

  “Pump those legs,” Laurel said. “Don’t look down—look forward. You came here for a reason. Don’t forget it.”

  For a reason. The right one, he hoped to God.

  After a while they decided to go out for fresh air and walked into the open plaza of the Pompidou Center. Laurel was delighted by the building, a great glass monster, with its innards on the outside. As they moved toward it, with people bustling by in the winter cold, her mood seemed to lift.

  “It’s like a giant box of light, floating over the square. A huge kid’s toy, with all those brightly colored tubes around it.” She paused. “It’s not like anything I’ve ever seen before. Let’s walk around it.”

  “Sure.” Ambler took pleasure in her delight. But he was grateful, too, for the opportunity to use the endless windows to search for any reflections of the man in the Brooks Brothers suit and the woman in the midlength coat. This time, though, they were nowhere to be seen. There was only one moment when Ambler heard the belling of an internal tocsin: the reflection of a man, fleetingly glimpsed—short-haired, features that were handsome but almost cruel, eyes that searched too hard, too insistently, too desperately.

  It was not entirely reassuring when he realized that the man he had glimpsed was himself.

  At seven-thirty the next morning, the American couple greeted the desk clerk with a cheerful “Bonjour.” The clerk tried to direct them to the breakfast room in the basement, but Ambler begged off, explaining that they were going to have “un vrai petit déjeuner américain.” They set off for the café around the corner on the rue Rambuteau that he had identified the previous evening. Once they had settled in at a table with a view onto the street, Ambler made sure he could see the entrance to the apartment building at 120. Then the watching began.

  They had slept well. Now she looked lively and refreshed, ready for whatever awaited them.

  They ordered a large meal at the Café Saint Jean. Croissants, a couple of poached eggs, orange juice, coffee. Ambler stepped out for a moment to grab a copy of the International Herald Tribune from a news vendor.

  “We may be here awhile,” Ambler said quietly. “No need to rush.”

  Laurel nodded and opened the front section of the Tribune on the wrought-iron table.

  “The news of the world,” she said. “But which world, I wonder. Which of those two worlds you told me about?”

  He glanced at the headlines. Various business and political leaders were addressing the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland, their platforms and entreaties dutifully noted and analyzed. A strike had hit Fiat, crippling production at the automaker’s Turin plants. A bomb had gone off during a religious festival in Kashmir, Hindu extremists blamed. Talks failed in Cypress.

  The more things change, Ambler reflected mordantly.

  As it turned out, they did not have to stay long. Deschesnes appeared at about eight o’clock, briefcase in hand, and scanned the street for a few moments before he entered a black limousine that had arrived for him.

  Ambler, obscured by the sun’s glare on the café window, stared intently at that face. Yet it had told him little.

  “Sorry, honey,” Ambler said loudly. “I guess I left my guidebook at the hotel. You go ahead and eat your breakfast and I’ll go get it.”

  Laurel, who had not seen the pictures of Deschesnes, looked puzzled for a moment—but just a moment. Then she beamed at him. “Why, thank you, honey, that is so sweet.” She was almost enjoying this, Ambler thought. He handed her a shopping list—items of clothing that would come in handy—and he was off.

  A couple of minutes later, Ambler went into the Rambuteau metro station; Deschesnes had to be headed for the office—nothing in his expression indicated that this day would be out of the ordinary—and Ambler took the metro to the Ecole Militaire station. He got out near the regional office of the IAEA, which was located in a hulking modernist building on the Place de Fontenoy, a demilune of a street off the avenue de Lowendal, at the opposite end of the Parc du Champ de Mars from the Eiffel Tower. The surroundings were scenic; the building itself was not. Largely given over to the office requirements of UNESCO, the building was ringed by a steel fence and had the forbidding aura of midcentury modernism: a configuration of girders, stone, and glass designed not to welcome but to intimidate.

  Ambler turned himself into a bird-watcher at the Square Combronne, gazing about with compact field glasses, occasionally feeding pigeons with the crumbs of a pastry acquired from a street vendor. Despite his idle and distrait air, not one person left 7 Place de Fontenoy without his noticing.

  At one o’clock Deschesnes strode out of the building, a purposeful look on his face. Was he off to have lunch at one of the restaurants nearby? In fact, he entered the Ecole Militaire metro station: a peculiar move for the director-general of a powerful international agency. Deschesnes, Ambler suspected, was someone who was usually accompanied by an entourage—visiting dignitaries, staffers, colleagues in need of a moment of his time—and who usually traveled in style. His UN office made him a personage as well as a person. When someone of that eminence disappeared into the subway system, it carried a suggestion of
subterfuge.

  Ambler thought back to the man’s face across the street that morning; there was no evidence of particular stress, of his being mindful of a hazardous rendezvous.

  Ambler trailed him as the UN administrator made his way south to Boucicaut, trailed him as he emerged at Boucicaut Station, strode to the end of the block, made a left, and, in the middle of a quiet residential street lined with classic Parisien manses, took out his key ring and let himself into one.

  It was, then, a rather early version of that classic form of French liaison, the cinq à sept. What Deschesnes was up to involved both subterfuge and routine. He was conducting an assignation, an affair, doubtless one of long standing. Across the street, Ambler took out his field glasses and peered at the windows of the drab building of weather-stained limestone. A flicker of light at a curtained window on the fourth floor told him that it was the apartment Deschesnes had entered. He glanced at his watch. It was twenty after one. He saw Deschesnes’ figure shadowed against the unlined curtains. He was alone; his mistress was probably a professional woman and had not yet arrived. Maybe she would arrive at half past and Deschesnes would busy himself with his ablutions until then. There were too many maybes. Ambler’s instincts told him to intercept Deschenes now. He felt the small Glock 26, which fit comfortably and invisibly in a waistband holster. He had noticed a florist at the corner; a few minutes later, he buzzed the fourth-floor apartment, a bouquet of elegantly wrapped flowers in hand.

  “Oui?” a voice said a moment or two later. Even through the crackly interference on the loudspeaker Ambler could hear the wariness in Deschesnes’ tone.

  “Livraison.”

  “De quoi?” Deschesnes demanded.

  “Des fleurs.”

  “De qui?”

  Ambler kept his voice bored, impassive. “Monsieur. J’ai des fleurs pour Monsieur Benoit Deschesnes. Si vous n’en voulez pas—”

  “Non, non.” The buzzer sounded. “Troisième étage. A droit.” Ambler was in.