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

his agents has not checked in—disappeared—another failure from the Rome fiasco. Forget the woman. I want the man who shot you. His name is Ben Calix. We already have a city. Paris. Find him there and bring him to me.”

“So, this is a retrieval-only job.”

“Don’t sound so disappointed.” Jupiter turned to go, but sensed a question forming on Hagen’s lips and tried to head it off. “I know the task seems daunting. How do you find a ghost like Calix in a city as large as Paris? But trust me, within hours, he’ll be forced from hiding. Be ready to move in and take him.”

“Why not just kill Calix? Let me drop another of the Director’s soldiers and be done with it.”

Jupiter pursed his lips and let out a sharp breath through his nose. “Because I don’t want to kill him. What do I always say about death?”

The Dutchman had to think far too long before he managed to regurgitate the answer—or part of it. “Death is a tool.”

“Not a goal. ‘Death is a tool, not a goal.’ That is the complete saying. Why do I impart my wisdom to you if you can only remember half a phrase?”

Hagen kept silent.

Jupiter frowned. “We do not fight on a conventional battlefield where the side which wreaks the bloodiest havoc on the other wins. Espionage is not a war of attrition but a war of control. Consider chess. The endgame is not to kill the king, but to own him. Control, not death. And in our far more complicated game, controlling a knight or even a pawn moves us toward that goal.”

At the phrase controlling a knight, Hagen’s eyes gained a smidgeon of clarity. “So, you want to turn Calix.”

Jupiter ignored the why didn’t you just say so tone in the operative’s voice. “It’s a little more complicated than that. As in chess, were I to take the whole board—and I will come close, I assure you—I still could not kill the Director. But I don’t have to kill him to gain victory. Our intelligence tells me Calix is special to him. By simply creating the illusion that Calix may be a traitor, I will hurt my old boss. By proving it—by making it so—I will destroy him.”

The smidgeon of clarity in Hagen’s eyes faded.

Jupiter shook his head. Cretin. Why did he bother trying? “You don’t need to understand. Just get it done. I’ll take care of the rest. Right now, I need to be . . . away from you. I’ll walk back to the house alone. Terrance will pick you and the body up when he returns with the tiger. Tell him to have it incinerated.” He took a step and paused, catching himself since he now had grave concerns about the man’s intelligence. “I mean have the body incinerated, Hagen. Not the tiger.”

7

Ben watched the freight barges on the Meuse River as his train crossed into Belgium. He tried to convince himself he’d done the right thing, but a question kept pounding at him—had he taken too many risks?

With the last-minute change to the plan, driven by his need to see Tess and get checked out, he’d been stuck with an aisle seat. As he took his gaze from the river, the elderly woman in the window seat next to him caught his eye and gave him a quick smile. She wanted to chat. He did not. He didn’t want to breathe.

For nine hours—the flight from Rome, the train from Stuttgart—Ben had been afraid to exhale. He’d purchased all new clothes and ditched the old ones by sealing them in a trash bag and depositing them in an unattended janitor cart at the airport. He wore cotton gloves and kept a scarf up around his nose and mouth most of the time. Once, his behavior might have seemed odd, but not now in the post-pandemic world.

Was he doing the right thing? Or had America’s enemies made him a modern-day Typhoid Mary, carrying a destructive disease across Europe and into the Company’s strongholds?

“Pardon, monsieur.” Ben’s elderly seatmate needed the restroom.

He stepped into the aisle to give her space and cringed when she touched his armrest.

So many risks. Ben needed answers. He needed Tess.

The dark of night outside gave way to the deeper dark of a tunnel and then the blue-gray light of Platform 3 at Brussels South Station. Drawing his arms in to avoid brushing any shoulders, Ben merged with the crowd and made for the exit.

The Brussels night crowd had yet to flood the streets—that strange city quiet when the restaurants are closing but the clubs are not yet open. Ben preferred this hour, even when not on the job. He checked a map on his phone and continued straight down Hollandstraat. With any luck, Tess had reached the med station ahead of him.

A thumping drew Ben’s eyes skyward. A chopper lifted off from the pad at the top of South Tower, the city’s tallest building. He wouldn’t find the med station up there. Ben didn’t belong to the caste of spies who merited executive operating suites or the Company’s light and agile FLUTR medevac vertical lift aircraft—so named for their butterfly-like appearance when the four stealthy ducted rotors tilted into position for cruise.

The Company maintained covert medical outposts all over the globe, always in one of two locales—top floor or ground floor. Nothing in between. No one wanted operatives bleeding out while sharing an elevator with a bewildered businesswoman or a soccer dad and his kids. The Company reserved the shiny top floor stations served by FLUTR medevac craft for top brass and high-value assets like Dylan. Run-of-the-mill field operatives like Ben got garage utility closets and abandoned laundromats—and they walked, drove, or crawled to these places on their own.

“Nine six six five . . .” Ben repeated the grid coordinates, checking the map one last time before pocketing the phone and making a right down an empty one-way street. In Rome, while escaping the old city and the burning