The Eiffel Tower lit up, sparkling with twinkling lights, and then colors ran up and down the steel girders.
Dree hopped back. “Oh, my!”
The light show on the Eiffel Tower shone gold, red, and green for Christmas at first, the colors zooming over the structure and rotating around the tower as the lamp on top glowed into the night. The Christmas colors blended into each other, then blue and purple joined the mix.
At one point, the colors paused while the top shone red, the center portion white, and the base was lit with bright blue becauseVive le France,and then the light show resumed.
Dree clapped her hands and made little squeals of delight the whole way through, and Maxence watched her.
He could not drag his eyes away from her rapture at the beauty and wondrousness.
Max was enthralled.
That’s where the problem began.
A man such as Maxence—a man who should have professional bodyguards protecting him at all times but who had ditched them yet again—should never let his guard down, not even to watch a pretty young woman enjoy a beautiful experience for a few minutes in the crisp Parisian night.
Especiallyat night.
As the Eiffel Tower settled back down to a steady golden glow and the show ended, Max took Dree’s hand and led her back toward the hotel. He took a slightly different route than they’d walked on the way there. He knew security measures and applied them as he could when he was in Europe, which was where many problems occurred.
Dree chattered on about how she’d loved the lights and how perfectly choreographed it was. She kind of skipped beside him, doing quick chasses as she talked.
He said to her as they strolled, “You should see Paris in the springtime. These planters and those window boxes,” he pointed to the windows tiling the tall buildings, “overflow with flowers. You can smell the blossoms everywhere, and the whole city smells like flowers.”
“Oh, I’m sorry I missed it,” she said, trotting to keep up with him.
“Maybe you can come back in a few months,” Maxence said and regretted it. He was already forgetting that not everyone lived the same extravagant, limitless lifestyle he did, and he’d been back from the field for less than a month.
That was not good.
“Well, probably not,” she said.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean it that way.”
“I know. Ain’t no big thing.”
Maxence was looking down at Dree, enjoying her happiness and carefree banter as they neared the Pont de l’Alma bridge to cross the Seine River, the nearest bridge to their hotel. The other bridges would be out of their way.
Taking the same route to and from destinations is not good operational security. Any sort of predictability is a liability.
The streetlamps on the bridge were decked with yet more evergreen boughs, red ribbon, and white pinpricks of light. As they neared the slender crossing, four men standing on the wide sidewalk ahead of them caught Maxence’s attention.
Dree had so distracted Max from his usual vigilance that he hadn’t noticed them standing there, not walking, not talking to each other. They all had odd silhouettes that suggested lumpy weapons hidden under their clothes. Their alert, quick movements as they examined people crossing the bridge meant that they had not suffered a lapse of operational security.
None of them had necks.
Maxence recognized one of the men’s profiles as Michael Rossi, who was Pierre’s favorite commando for particularly dirty work.
Max grabbed Dree’s hand and whirled her back to walk the other way. This was not the time to brief her on who his older brother was and why he might want to kill Max this week. Max’s knuckles were still bruised from punching him just a few days before.
He was assuming Pierre had sent them. The list of suspects was short but not singular.
Dree teetered on her heeled boots as he sped up. “Hey, what’s going on?”
“Problem,” Max said. “Keep up.”
As he dodged between people standing still or wandering on the wide sidewalks that lined the sides of the street and towed Dree behind him, Max slid his arms out of Arthur’s long coat that he had been wearing, thus changing his silhouette. He concentrated on dragging the outside of his left foot near his pinky toe to change the way he walked. No one could keep up a gait affectation for long. If Max had wanted to maintain it for any length of time, he’d have needed to put a rock in his shoe or something. However, he could modify the way he walked for a while and thus elude surveillance in the short term.
