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

stern look. Clara ignored it and pulled around her, one tire bumping up onto the sidewalk, listening to angry shouts fading behind.

A hundred meters past the crosswalk, she saw a roundabout. Three roads peeled off from the circle, none running straight ahead and all hidden from view by apartment buildings.

She’d lost him.

Panic followed her through two spins around the circle, squinting up the streets to no avail, until she gathered her wits and focused on the signs. Two bore the names of Zürich subdivisions. Nothing useful. The third sign, pointing south, read ZOO, with the silhouettes of an elephant and a giraffe.

The zoo. Secure gate. No guns.

Otto seemed to decide he’d live longer if he stayed on the floor. Clara glanced down to give him a nod and took the zoo exit. She punched the gas. “Think like a spymaster.”

40

A blast of heat washed through Ben the moment he opened the door to the zoo’s rainforest dome. The temperature inside might not have been higher than twenty-one or twenty-two degrees Celsius, a midsummer day in Paris, but compared to the freezing alpine winter of Zürich, it felt like he’d stepped into the Amazon.

Forced air and hanging strips of black vinyl protected the captive ecosystem from the outside environment. Ben pushed through these into a lush forest of bamboo, ebony, and persimmon. The geodesic ceiling rose to a peak more than thirty meters above, and some of the trees were so tall, they threatened to pierce it with their upper boughs.

“Mr. Roy?” A young man of Indian descent, wearing the royal blue polo and gray khakis of a Zürich Zoo guide, called to him from a wooded walkway guarded by a composite chain. “Mr. Jacob Roy?”

Ben swallowed the shock of hearing his old cover name and offered a pleasant smile. “That’s me.”

“This way please.” The guide unclipped the chain and gestured up the walkway, but he seemed to struggle to hold Ben’s eye. His gaze darted everywhere but Ben’s face. A tell. The inability to look someone in the eye could mean a number of things—deceit, irritation, fear. What was his problem?

Your face, you idiot.

Ben remembered his battered and frostbitten features. He removed a wad of tissue he’d picked up on the train from his back pocket and dabbed his nose. The pressure hurt, and it left spots of pus on the white paper.

Great.

The guide was no spy. He just didn’t enjoy looking straight into the eyes of ugly.

Ben solved the young man’s where-do-I-look problem by nodding for him to lead on, and the two headed for a steep spiral stair enclosed within a wire-net shell. Relief colored the guide’s voice. “Your party is waiting in the north tower.”

“My party?” Ben had resigned himself to the strong possibility he’d walked into a trap, but if the Company still wanted to put him down, he’d rather Hale do it alone. “How many are in this party?”

The guide glanced over his shoulder as they rounded the spiral stair’s first turn, catching himself before his eyes reached Ben’s. “A figure of speech. There is only one. Your friend, yes?”

“More like an old coach.”

“Ah. A coach. Good.” The guide stretched a hand toward the FIFA headquarters building, visible through the dome’s upper panels. “Football?”

“Hunting.”

“Oh.” The man didn’t make another peep for the rest of the climb.

At the top, he drew an umbrella from a mesh pail and used it to point at the other tower, two stories higher and joined to the first by a rope-and-plank bridge that dipped into the forest canopy. “Over there. Your coach is on the upper platform.” He offered Ben the umbrella.

Ben waved it away and shielded his eyes against the sun shining through the glass. “I don’t see him.”

His escort had already started down the stairs.

“Hey,” Ben called after him. “Why would I need an umbrella anyway?”

“The rain.”

Rain? “But we’re inside.”

The guide didn’t answer.

Ben tested his weight on the bridge’s first plank. It seemed sturdy enough. As he crossed, he passed a blue-green chameleon walking the rope railing with slow, rocking steps. A fruit bat hung upside down from an overhanging tree branch and hissed at Ben. He frowned back. “You too, huh?”

The steep angle of the sightline between the bridge and the upper platform prevented Ben from scoping it out. Hale probably planned it that way, leaving him no choice but to trust his former schoolmaster or walk away. Give your enemy no options. Isn’t that what Hale had taught him? He sighed and started up the stairs spiraling around the tree at the platform’s center.

“Couldn’t stay away, could you, kid?” Hale stood from a wooden bench as Ben reached the platform.

“I need answers.”

“I have some. But maybe not the answers you’re looking for.”

Ben thought he sensed concern from the old tyrant. More than concern. Affection. Hale made two long strides and wrapped him in a hug. “You look like death. It hurts me to see you like this.”

Hale had seen Ben suffer before. A lot. In all those cases, in the broad scope of schoolhouse training, there’d been a safety net—well out of Ben’s sight, but present. Hale’s response to his appearance now told him with absolute clarity that all safety nets were gone.

The schoolmaster released him and gestured at the bench, sheltered by a wooden awning. “Have a seat, kid. Let’s talk.”

41

Clara’s foot tapped an erratic beat on the yellow-painted asphalt at the ticket booths. Who in their right mind went to the zoo in winter? The answer was an American family of eight, and they were hogging the only open window. The father wanted to haggle the price of every extra attraction the zoo offered.

“The special white lion exhibit—how much is that again?”

His wife, rolling a double stroller back and forth to rock her twins, offered Clara an apologetic shrug.

Clara answered with a curt smile. Her foot never stopped tapping.

The security guard singled her out for a random check. Of course—because why stop the small army rolling a miniature