The Paris Betrayal by James Hannibal (the dot read aloud .txt) 📗

this bioweapon? For that matter, did they suspect a trap and send us in there unprepared?”

The centrifuge whirred to a stop, and Tess lifted the card. She slid it into an electron microscope with a little more force than seemed necessary and studied the screen. “Do you know how the Company began, Calix?”

He’d heard the story—never written down, always passed from the senior class to the incoming class at the schoolhouse. “Thirty years ago. Conceived by an aide to the president. Formed by an ad hoc intelligence subcommittee under a charter with an ‘any means necessary’ clause.”

“And to run it, they chose that same presidential aide, incredibly young for such an important position—the Director.” Tess turned a couple of dials next to the keyboard, then inclined her head as if looking at the result sideways. “Faith like that speaks of a man of unimpeachable character.”

“And you think the Director is still unimpeachable? After all this time?”

“If not, the Company would be notorious or gone, or both. He’d be living on an island somewhere, counting his money.” Tess turned and rested her hips against the counter, pulling down her mask. “Good news, honey. You’re going to live.”

Relief washed over Ben. “No plague in my system?”

“Oh, it’s there.”

“What?”

She held up a don’t worry hand. “The fluid sample I took shows inviable spores. Dead. Your body never activated its defenses.” She walked to a refrigerated cabinet at the counter’s end and drew out a vial of liquid and a new syringe. “The plague’s saving grace is its combination of quick symptoms and slow progression, but this version moves fast. Super-fast. And dies fast too. Whoever engineered it—”

“Created a weapon for assassination, not mass murder.”

“Looks that way.” She dribbled alcohol onto a patch of gauze and dabbed at his right arm above the bicep. “Even so, I’m going to give you a shot of antibiotics, just in case.”

Ben looked away. He’d always hated needles, even needles hidden in a rapid-injection CO2 syringe. “Tess, how do you know the Director isn’t . . .” He hesitated.

“Rich? Corrupt? Hoarding the ill-gotten spoils of a thousand covert campaigns or sending us into the field without necessary purpose?” She jabbed him with the injector, causing a pinch and an ice-cold hiss. “Faith.”

8

HOME

PARIS

Ben climbed the stairs from the metro station at Saint Germain and turned north on Rue Bonaparte under the late morning sun. Its rays did nothing to ease the winter cold, and he altered his route to his flat in the 16th arrondissement to take him past a favorite café.

In the ten months of Ben’s posting there, Paris had stolen his heart. He loved his country, certainly, but his American roots had thinned. His parents had him late in life and passed while he was still muddling around in his six years at Rice University, deciding what he wanted to be when he grew up. He knew he didn’t want to be a cabinetmaker, so he’d sold the family business, the last tie binding him to his hometown, and moved on. No siblings. No connections. The Company sought out people like him. They’d recruited him—rescued him—during his first year as a commodities trader.

Life at the schoolhouse ended nine months later with his death. Drug overdose. Tragic. His professors at Rice would have never guessed. The Company resurrected him in London as Ben Calix, and he’d never looked back.

With a fresh cup of tea to warm his hands, Ben crossed the river at Pont Neuf—New Bridge, the city’s oldest—and made a casual glance at the street vendor stalls at the north end. A bad sketch of Elvis Presley hung prominently in the third stall from the east. The drop signal.

Already?

Ben wanted his bed, nothing more. No new missions or assignments. He hadn’t slept well on the cot at the back of Tess’s medical station, and he’d used the sleepless hours and her encryption equipment to file his after-action report. Maybe the signal meant the Company had more questions. The mission hadn’t exactly gone as planned. He’d fill out some digital forms, leave the file at the drop point an hour later, and pass out for a couple of days.

A couple of loops around the Louvre served as a hasty check for tails and a chance to finish his tea. After tossing the cup in a bin, he pressed west into the Tuileries Garden parks and reached into his inside pocket for his phone.

The old-school HUMINT signal methods never went away—a potted plant in a window or an Elvis picture hanging in a street market. But the drops themselves have all gone digital. Near-field communication, the same technology that enables consumers to tap-and-pay with a smartphone, enables spies to download large encrypted files simply by walking past a lamppost.

The Tuileries Garden had such a lamppost, planted with several others in a miniature forest like fixtures in a fairy tale. The fifth lamppost from the east had a digital dropbox hidden in its rusty iron base.

Children in mittens and stocking caps played hide-and-seek among the trees, their laughter visible as mists in the cold. As Ben palmed his phone and drew it from his pocket, a boy charged his way. “Faites attention,” he said to the child, spinning and lifting his arm to keep clear.

“Désolé!” the boy replied without looking back.

Their mini ballet had brought him too close to the lamppost. He hadn’t made the phone ready to receive. Ben slowed his steps to an awkward gait, punched the phone’s power button to activate the receiver and ping the digital drop box, and felt a haptic kick.

File received. But not with the subtlest choreography.

Ben would have to modify his route home to make sure no one had been watching.

Spies live every day as if their contacts have been compromised, because one day they will be, even when that contact is a lamppost half a klick from the Louvre. The best defense is a surveillance detection route or SDR—walking in pointless, meandering circles for blocks on end or randomly swapping