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

troop carrier through the gate and carrying enough supplies to last until spring? He found nothing. She’d left the SIG in the truck with Otto. Getting detained by zoo guards and arrested by the polizei wouldn’t do her or Ben any good.

The army, with its stroller troop carrier, marched south from the hub inside the gate. Clara chose east, if only to escape the whining and bickering. She needed to concentrate.

Find Ben.

She doubted Sensen could get a sniper rifle past the gate, even a zoo gate. A rifle is a rifle. But now that she had a confined area to search, she didn’t need to track down Sensen or bash him over the head with a potted plant—the only viable weapons in sight. If she found Ben, she could get him safely out of there.

“Ben?” Clara shouted up the path.

A young couple, barely out of their teens, watched her with worried looks. The girl caught her elbow. “Hast du dein Kind verloren?”

Clara didn’t speak German.

The young man held his hand waist high. “Dein Kind.”

They thought she’d lost a child. What was she supposed to say? No, I lost my spy.

“Uh . . . Yes. Mein . . . kind. Ben. He’s always wandering off and getting into trouble.” She waved away their worried looks. “No problem. I’ll find him.” She reinforced the declaration with a nod.

The girl nodded back, adding an unconvinced smile. Her husband pulled her onward, mumbling to her in German.

Maybe she shouldn’t shout Ben’s name—for many reasons. She hurried on.

“Where are you?”

Why were all zoos laid out like a maze on a child’s cereal box? Clara began to think she’d have to search every path and every building. She came to a broad plaza-slash-junction with camels, paired together in little thatch-roofed hothouses all around the space. A camel spa. She half expected to see them wearing towels and lounging on teak benches. Ten camels in all. No Ben.

She plopped down on a circular bench to think. Some spy she’d turned out to be. The nearest camel stopped roving his tiny space and stared at her. Clara stared back. “Do you think Ben expected a sniper to interrupt his meeting?” The camel absently chewed something she hadn’t seen him pick up. “You’re right.” She slapped the bench. “Ben let his opponents choose the meeting point. How desperate is that?”

The camel wandered off. Clara looked to her right to see a little boy gazing at her, mouth slightly open. His mother pulled him away.

The Company chose the location, one meant to favor their sniper. And with security checking bags at the entrance, a sniper would need to shoot from beyond the zoo walls.

Clara’s eyes drifted uphill to a glass geodesic dome rising from the trees. Turning her head, she saw the FIFA headquarters building, the highest structure on the Zürichberg hilltop. The rooftop offered a clear view of the dome—a clear shot for a sniper. A sign on the junction’s north side pointed the way, identifying the place as the Masoala Indoor Rainforest.

Clara left the bench at a run.

42

Ben watched a bright red macaw wheel past the platform to land atop a mushroom-shaped baobab tree, the enclosure’s centerpiece. Beyond the treetops and the glass panels, snow-covered slopes rose from Lake Geneva to a dozen or more rocky peaks. “Quite the sanctuary you found.”

“You wanna talk about the scenery or business?” Hale sat heavily beside him, resting his hands on the worn knees of his jeans and glaring out at the mountains. “I cut a trip to Venice short for this.” He lolled his head over to fix his glare on Ben. “I’m retired, kid. Remember? I left the game a week before you graduated from the schoolhouse. We had a party and everything.”

No matter what security measures the zoo had in place, Ben knew a Glock was hiding under Hale’s gray canvas jacket. He grabbed for it.

The colonel trapped his wrist in an iron grip before his fingers got halfway to the target.

“Your reflexes are pretty sharp for an old retired guy.” Ben gave him a thin smile. “You and I have seen each other plenty since then. We both know Company agents never leave the game.”

Hale released him, pushing his arm away. “They do when they’re told to leave.”

“You mean me, right? Are you confirming this is a severance, a campfire horror story come to life?”

“I’m not the Director’s buddy, kid. He doesn’t tell me anything. But from where I’m sitting, this can’t be anything else.” Hale let out a breath and eased himself back next to Ben. “I received a briefing on my way here. I know about Rome, Brussels, Paris. I know about Leviathan and the man you call Massir. And Sensen told me you paid him a visit at his place in Luxembourg.” He chuckled. “You should take it as a compliment that he let you live.”

“He won’t do it again.”

“So I’ve been told.”

Ben could swear Hale made a slight tilt of his head—a minuscule movement, perhaps a shift of his gaze. Disturbing, but the need for answers kept him locked in his seat. “Tell me this. Did the Company analyze the case contents? Rome might have been a setup, but Dylan told me the case contents were genuine—the chemical foundations for CRTX explosives.”

“I might say Dylan knows his business, if I were privy to such information. Where are you going with this?”

“If the chemicals are real, we should still be able to backtrack the order, follow the money.”

Hale crossed his arms. “We does not include you anymore. Nor me, officially. But I have it on good authority the money trail led to a dead end. Those chemicals appeared from nowhere—a rabbit out of a hat.”

“Impossible. That only works if . . .” Ben fell silent, trying to let his thoughts catch up with his conclusions.

The flat line of Hale’s mouth threatened to turn upward into a teacher’s grin. “Go on.”

“Leviathan is synthesizing the compounds for CRTX in-house. But if they can do that, they can make tons of