The Paris Option

  The first voice, rising now, returned: “…I can’t get a lock. I can’t…”

  Château la Rouge

  Abu Auda cocked his head, listening. The electric wall lamps had been shot out, and the corridor was in smoky twilight. Slowly he arose behind the barricade, and his desert-trained eyes studied the opposing wall of furniture.

  “They’re gone, Khalid,” he told Mauritania. “Inshallah!” he celebrated.

  The men of the Crescent Shield, weary and wounded, shouted a cheer and clambered over the barricade.

  Mauritania raised a hand for silence. “Do you hear it?”

  They listened. For the moment, there was no gunfire anywhere in the castle. But there was the noise of running feet. Boots. It had to be the Legionnaires of the French general, running not toward them, but the other way—toward the keep.

  Mauritania’s cold blue eyes flashed. “Come, Abu Auda, we must collect the rest of our men.”

  “Good. We’ll leave this accursed castle to fight another day against the enemies of Islam.”

  Mauritania, still wearing the tattered bedouin robes he’d had on since Algeria, shook his head. “No, my warrior friend. We don’t leave this castle without what you came for.”

  “We came for you, Mauritania.”

  “Then you’re a fool. For our cause, we need Chambord and his miraculous machine. I won’t go without it. We’ll find the rest of our men, and then the French general. The pig, La Porte. Where he is, the computer will be.”

  In the dimly lit armory with its musty weapons and chilly air, Marty let out another raging monologue as he struggled to abort the nuclear missile as it closed in on its target.

  On the carpet near his feet, Thérèse Chambord stirred. Ever since Jon had pronounced her father dead, she had sat motionless beside him, weeping quietly, holding his hand, almost in a trance.

  Now as Marty suddenly resumed ranting, she lifted her head, listening….

  “…You cannot win, you unenlightened beast! I don’t care how difficult that diabolical Émile’s codes are. I will flay you alive and hang your scaly skin on my walls with all the other fire-breathing dragons I’ve bested in mortal combat. There, you feeble creature, take that! Yes, there goes another defense…take this…Aha!”

  Meanwhile, outside on the tower landing, Peter and Randi crouched in long shadows, guarding the armory. The air smelled of dust and cordite floating up from below, stinging their noses.

  “Hear that, Peter?” Randi asked in her low, throaty voice.

  Her weapon was trained on the enclosed stairwell, which descended from here all the way to the castle’s first level as well as rising into the east tower above them. There was an opening the size of a large door at each level.

  “Indeed I do hear it. Buggers just won’t quit. Annoying.” Peter’s gun was trained on the opening to the stairwell, too.

  They listened to boots climbing up toward them, trying to be quiet on the stone steps. As soon as the first of the Legionnaires appeared, Randi and Peter fired. There was a spray of blood as a bullet shattered the fellow’s temple. He fell back. There was a sudden scramble as the rest of the Legionnaires retreated.

  Peter turned and called an urgent warning into the armory: “Heads up. La Porte’s men have arrived!”

  “Hurry it up in there!” Randi shouted. “It sounds as if there are a lot more than we expected!”

  Thérèse, still seated on the floor beside her father’s corpse, seemed to rally. “I’ll help.” She squeezed her father’s hand and rested it on his chest. She laid his other hand on top of the first. She sighed, picked up the FAMAS rifle Jon had given her, and stood. She looked frail and distraught in the armory’s musky light.

  Jon said, “Are you all right?”

  “No. But I will be.” It was almost as if a wave of energy coursed through her, and she seemed to gather herself. She gazed down at her father, a sad smile on her face. “He lived a good life and did important work. At the end, he was betrayed by a delusion. I’ll always remember him as a great man.”

  “I understand. Be careful out there.”

  She nodded. With her free hand, she collected the ammunition Jon had given her and moved off toward the landing. She broke into a trot as she disappeared out the door.

  Almost immediately Jon heard her FAMAS open fire to help repel another attack up the stairs. The responding fire was blistering. La Porte’s renegade soldiers were fighting back this time. The noise echoed through the armory, sending chills up Jon’s spine. He wanted to be out there, helping them.

  Jon said, “Mart? How are you doing? Are you making any progress? Is there anything I can do to help?” If they had little time to escape, America had less.

  Marty was leaning intently over his keyboard. There was an air of expectation about him, perhaps even hope. His portly body was almost doubled over, coiled tight as a spring. “Die! Die! Die! You monstrous monster of…” He sprang up.

  “What is it?” Jon asked. “What’s happened!”

  Marty pirouetted, raised his arms above his head, and pumped his fists up and down with excitement.

  “Dammit, Marty. Tell me what’s happened!”

  “Look! Look!” Marty pointed at the monitor.

  As the gunfire lessened again out on the landing, Jon stared. Instead of the monotonous lines of numbers and letters, the black monitor sparkled with silver-white stars, a rendition of the night sky. On the right side was an outline of the French coast, while on the left were landmarks indicating the United States as far west as Omaha, Nebraska. A dotted red line was moving in an arced path toward Omaha. At the end of the line, seemingly pulling it along, was a tiny red arrow.

  “Does this show the progress of the missile Chambord launched?” Jon asked. “The one with the nuclear warhead?”

  “Yes. Keep your eyes on the screen.” Marty looked at his watch and counted, “Five…four…three…two…one!”

  The red arrow exploded in a small white burst, like a puff of whipped cream.

  Jon stared, hoping he understood correctly. “Is that the missile?”

  “Was the missile!” Marty did a wobbly dance on the stone floor. “It’s gone!”

  “That’s it? You’re sure, Mart?” Jon stared, allowing himself the first tendrils of excitement. “Absolutely sure?”

  “I made it blow itself up! While it was still over the ocean. It never even reached our coast!” He twirled and listed over to kiss the monitor, nearly losing his balance. “Wonderful machine! I love you, machine!” A tear appeared at the corner of his eye. “America’s safe, Jon.”

  Chapter Forty-One

  In the old armory, Marty skipped in a circle, celebrating his triumphant destruction of the nuclear missile that would have killed millions of Americans. Jon watched his joy for a few seconds, still absorbing the great news himself, while outside on the landing, occasional bursts of gunfire told him that Peter, Randi, and Thérèse were holding on, defending the tower from being overrun by the Legionnaires.

  But they could not stop them forever. They were badly outnumbered. Now that the missile threat was over, they needed to escape.

  Marty stopped to face Jon. His voice was breathy and filled with relief, as if he could hardly believe it himself. “America’s safe, Jon. America’s safe!”

  “But we’re not, Marty.” Jon ran to the door to check on the activity on the landing. “Can you restore all the satellite communications?”

  “Of course.”

  “Do it.”

  Marty swung back to the computer and resumed work.

  Jon leaned out to where Peter, Randi, and Thérèse guarded the stairs. They were kneeling and lying flat, finding cover where they could in the large, shadowy space.

  “Can you hold them a few more minutes?” he asked.

  “Make it damned few,” Randi warned, her face worried.

  He nodded and rushed back to Marty. “How much longer?”

  “Wait…wait…there!” Marty grinned up at him. “Compare
d to stopping the missile, this was a stroll on the beach. The communications are clear.”

  “Good. Send this.” Jon rattled off a series of numbers, a code that guaranteed his message would reach Fred Klein. “Then add: La Porte, Normandy, Château la Rouge, now.”

  Marty’s fingers flew. He was bouncing in his chair, still excited, radiating optimism. “Done. What next?”

  “Next we run.”

  Marty looked shocked. He frowned and shook his head. “No, Jon. We can’t just leave the computer. We’ll dismantle it. That way we can take it with us.”

  “Wrong,” Jon snapped. He had tried that already, and the firing outside the armory was growing louder. “We don’t have time.”

  Marty wailed, “But, Jon, we have to take the prototype. What if General La Porte’s people recapture it?”

  “They won’t.” Jon grabbed the protesting genius and dragged him toward the door.

  “Let go, Jon,” Marty said huffily. “I can walk by myself.”

  “Run.”

  On the landing, Peter, Randi, and Thérèse had beaten the renegade Legionnaires back down the steps once more. Thérèse had ripped up her last remaining sleeve and used it to bind a bloody flesh wound on Peter’s thigh. Randi had been hit in the upper arm, the bullet going clean through without any major damage. A tight bandage stemmed the bleeding.

  “What happened?” Randi asked. “Did you stop the strike?”

  “You bet,” Jon assured them. “Marty did it again.”

  “Took you bloody long enough,” Peter grumbled, but his leathery face was spread in a large smile as he continued to watch the stairwell.

  Jon crouched beside Peter. “Give me a grenade.”

  Peter, old soldier that he was, asked no questions. He removed a hand grenade from his backpack and passed it over to Jon without a word.

  “I’ll be right back.”

  Jon ran back into the armory, laid the grenade on top of the tray of gel packs, and pulled the pin. He hurtled away as if all the hounds of Hades were on his heels.

  As he burst back out onto the landing, he shouted, “Everyone down!”

  They fell flat onto the stone floor. The grenade exploded behind them, sending steel fragments and wood splinters flying past in a deadly hail. At the top of the stairs, a Legionnaire cried out, blood spurting from his face where shards cut him. He fell back down out of sight.

  “What in hell did you do that for, Jon?” Randi demanded.

  “The gel packs,” Jon explained. “They’re the key to the molecular computer. They contain the DNA sequence that Chambord created. Any scientist near his level of expertise could’ve used just one of them to reproduce Chambord’s work.”

  Marty nodded, his expression miserable. “They wouldn’t have needed even a full gel pack. All anyone had to do was scrape up some residue to get a sample.”

  Jon said, “The gel packs had to be completely destroyed in case they fell into the wrong hands.”

  They stopped talking as the sound of booted feet making another charge up the stairs echoed toward them. Peter, Randi, and Jon ran to the stairwell and fired down. No Legionnaires were in sight. The bullets ricocheted below, and they heard angry curses and the noises of a retreating scramble.

  Marty had been looking around the tower landing, beginning to grasp the desperate struggle out here, while he had been at work inside the armory on the DNA computer. He gazed at them and swallowed hard. He tried to make his voice cheerful.

  “Is…is this a ‘grand’ battle, Peter?”

  “Grand,” Peter said, “but probably short. Those stairs down, I fear, are the only way out of the tower. And the Legionnaires don’t seem willing to give us safe passage.”

  “We’re trapped?” Marty’s face stretched in terror.

  “Unless we figure something else out,” Randi agreed.

  As if to echo the dire pronouncements, General La Porte’s booming voice shouted up in French, “You must surrender, Colonel Smith! We outnumber you three to one, and more of my men arrive every minute. You can’t escape past us.”

  Randi said, “The general isn’t going to be in a forgiving mood when he learns we blew his scheme.”

  “Not to mention that he can’t leave any of us alive if he plans to get away clean,” Peter pointed out.

  Randi said, “That’s probably why he shot Dr. Chambord, and I don’t hear Captain Bonnard’s voice down there. Do any of you?”

  Heavy gunfire interrupted her. It sounded as if it were coming from the floor below. They readied themselves, but this time there was no charge up the stairwell. Instead, the firing moved farther away, growing louder and more intense. They heard shouts in Arabic, Pashto, and other languages.

  “The Crescent Shield’s very near,” Thérèse realized.

  “They’re attacking La Porte’s group from the rear,” Peter decided. “And while dying for one’s country may have its points, let’s hope our Islamic friends have made that option less necessary for us.”

  Marty had been watching Jon, who had been studying the stairwell, his weapon grasped at the ready. “You have a plan, Jon, I hope?”

  “No reason to go down,” he decided. “We’ll go up into the tower. With Randy’s climbing gear, Peter’s plastique, and a few more grenades, it’s our best chance.”

  “And there’s that pleasant little chopper sitting out there on the barbican we spotted when we arrived,” Peter reminded them.

  “Stupendous!” Marty started up the stairs in his awkward gait. “The race is to the swift, O paladins. Let us be very swift.”

  As the others raced after Marty, Peter and Jon sent a final long volley down the stairs.

  “Two stories, I should think,” Peter said as he turned and ran upward.

  But a sudden draft of heat made Jon stop. He stepped back onto the landing. Smoke rolled out from the armory door, and then flames. All that old, oversized wood furniture that La Porte favored must have caught fire from the grenade explosion.

  He hurried up the stone stairs, remembering the crates of ammo he had also seen in the armory, stacked in the back. The boots of La Porte’s men hammered behind him, closing in. Jon caught up with the others, and he and Peter grabbed the wobbling Marty by each arm and propelled him along between them.

  Thérèse had pulled out ahead, running like a gazelle, while Randi dropped back to cover the rear. She turned frequently to slow the pursuit with bursts of her MP5K.

  “Across the tower!” Thérèse was breathing hard, a white streak in the darkness.

  “Randi and I’ll hold off the Legionnaires here,” Jon told them. “Thérèse, you take Marty and run ahead and pick a window. Not one of the archers’ windows. Get something we can crawl through, as close to the barbican as you can get. Peter, fuse some plastique and plant it ten yards or so away.”

  Peter nodded, while Jon and Randi dropped to the stone floor to open fire on the lead pursuers. Their bullets felled the first two quickly, while the third plunged back down the circular stairs. The injured two did not move. For a moment, there was no pursuit, while the gunfire grew heavier from what was now far below. Apparently La Porte and his men were being kept so busy by the Crescent Shield that they could spare only a few for this pursuit, but that could change quickly.

  The faint sound of voices drifted up the stairs, followed by footsteps trying not to be heard. There was also the vague odor of smoke from a wood fire, not only the gun smoke one would expect. Jon debated whether to tell the others about the flames and the boxes of ammo in the armory.

  In the end, he decided against it. There was nothing they could do about it now, except accelerate every action. Escape as quickly as possible. Which was what they were doing already.

  “Done,” Peter called out softly.

  Jon and Randi fired another volley at the first Legionnaire who came into sight, sending him scurrying back.

  Then they ran after Peter. The three had reached a cross corridor at the far side of the tower when Peter’s plastique
exploded in a shattering blast that flung them forward hard, onto their faces. Behind them, the corridor collapsed in a tangle of stone and smoke. Ahead, Thérèse stood in the doorway to one of the tower’s rooms, gesturing them to come ahead.

  Coughing, Peter picked a grenade from his web belt and crouched where he could watch the smoking stone rubble.

  Again, Randi and Jon ran. The room had three narrow windows as well as a good-sized one, which was where Thérèse and Marty were waiting anxiously.

  “We can see the helicopter from here,” Marty told Randi. Then he worried: “It looks very small.”

  “It’ll do, if we can get to it.” Randi hooked her mini-grappling hook into a crevice on the tower wall outside the window, threw the coiled nylon-covered wire down to the ramparts seven levels below, slid into the harness, and dropped.

  As soon as she had landed, Jon said, “You next, Marty.”

  “Oh, very well.” Marty sat on the windowsill and shut his eyes. “I’m inured to danger.”

  The harness was back almost instantly, and Thérèse and Jon strapped him into it and lowered him over the side. Marty landed, the harness sped back up, and Thérèse followed him down just as a grenade exploded out in the passageway.

  Screams and yells followed as Peter sprinted into the room. His face was looking particularly grim. “I’m here, Jon. Let’s bunk.”

  Jon motioned to the window. “You first, Peter. Age before beauty.”

  “For that remark, my boy, you can stay.” Peter tossed the last grenade to Jon and glided over the edge just as the harness returned.

  As Peter buckled himself in and disappeared, Jon waited, his gaze on the door. His heart was pounding.

  When the harness reappeared, he snared it and quickly crawled inside. Just then, two Legionnaires stormed into the room. As he dangled high above the parapet, Jon pulled the pin, lobbed the grenade, and released the lock so he could drop down the castle’s wall.