“Thirty, maybe forty minutes,” Luna replied. “She took the metro.”
He swore again, that tight feeling turned into a knot at his gut.
The Anthonys' apartments in the Marais were safe. There'd been no indication that they'd been followed there—he'd checked. But out on the street was different. And she'd taken a borrowed phone. It could be traced if she left it on.
He pushed past Innis and went to that bank of computers at the table. Legal or not, whatever it took to find it, he needed an address and he needed it now.
“Number sixty-five, Rue du Chambord in the Montparnasse,” Anthony announced a few minutes later as he hit the print function for after hacking into the university records that had provided Aronson's home address.
James grabbed the printout. She had a forty-minute start, and according to Anthony she needed to make two changes on the metro to make the connection in the Montparnasse. He was already out the door. His only chance was to beat her to that address.
The streets were a nightmare; congested with midday traffic and roadblocks that weren't shown on the map display on the phone Innis had given him. After the third roadblock, he tossed the phone into the passenger seat and followed last-minute directions Anthony had given him.
He crossed the river, dodging through traffic, saw the street marker he was looking for and cut off another driver as he shot around the corner. He pulled to the curb and cut the motor.
According to the street directions he was only a couple of blocks from that address on the Rue du Chambord. He pulled the phone from his jacket pocket. Anthony came on at the first ring. There'd been no call from her. He shoved the phone back into his jacket pocket and hit the street.
According to the information Anthony provided, the first metro train from the Marais District had been delayed, long enough that she had probably missed her first connection, and possibly the next one after that. With any luck she might only just be arriving for that meeting with Aronson, and the route she would most likely have taken would put her on the same street as he cut across traffic and turned down the Rue du Chambord.
He had a description of the jacket, and ball cap she was wearing with the logo of Innis's favorite football team on the front of the cap, and looked for it among tourists and day travelers bundled up in jackets and ball caps, and sidewalk artists who braved the early winter cold, their easels set up in a perimeter around open-air Cafés and coffeehouses.
He darted through ambling tourists and pedestrians who stopped to admire an artist's work or join the line outside one of the cafés amid the aroma of coffee and food.
It was just a glimpse—a flash of blue among hooded sweatshirts and a variety of other head coverings—crossing the street ahead, but it was enough to have him pushing through the crowd at the sidewalk with a new urgency. Then he saw her.
That athletic, long-legged stride, the way she stopped for cross traffic with the confidence of someone who navigated the streets of New York, and the way she checked the sidewalk ahead, glanced back in his direction briefly, then scanned the street before stepping off the sidewalk.
He followed her from down the street, instinctively scanned the sidewalk, then crossed over after her. Aronson's apartment was in the building at the end of the block.
Among the street noises, automobiles, motorbikes, and delivery trucks, a distant rumble that rolled under his feet. It was the sort of sound that was felt rather than heard, a long rumble, once experienced never forgotten.
He had felt it before, and knew it in that way that something imprinted itself in the brain...if one lived through it.
Eight years before. Falluja. People in the streets, at the market, and that deadly sound. He pushed through people on the sidewalk and shouted a warning at her on the run.
Kris stopped, certain she heard her name over the street noise in the street. She heard it again, surprise followed by anger, as she saw him dodging through people on the sidewalk.
He saw the expression on her face—surprise, then the anger that was still there from the night before. He had no time for either as he shouted and made an arm motion for her to get down.
There was something in the way he came at her—urgent, his expression something she'd seen before, not the anger of the night before, but glimpsed that night in London just before the van hurtled across the patio of the Blue Oyster, then the chaos that had followed, the crash of tables and chairs, the screams, bodies thrown around like dolls.
“Get down!” he shouted again, that deep rumble rolling beneath the pavement at the street, beneath his feet, then the explosion that tore through the apartment building at Number sixty-five Rue du Chambord.
She heard it but like others around her had no idea what it was. It was as if movement was suddenly suspended, time slowing, everything around her seen in slow motion, the expressions on the faces of people on the street, a young woman with a child, an old man smoking a cigarette, traffic on the street.
Then she felt it, like a large truck rumbling through the street, rolling toward her. Then it exploded at the apartment building only yards away and she was slammed down onto the sidewalk.
The blast threw him to the ground. Fragments of plaster, wood, and rock showered down on the street and sidewalk. Hepushed back to his feet as a thick cloud of smoke and dust rolled out of the front of the building.
She had been only a dozen yards away when she had turned, surprised, then the anger that gave way to something in those last seconds before the explosion.
He found the old man and helped him up. The young woman seemed to be all right. She was stunned, but reached for the child who seemed to have escaped unharmed. The bodies of others lay about like scattered dolls.
He found her beneath the plaster half-wall of the flower shop where she had been standing when the apartment building exploded.
He shifted pieces of the crumbled wall off of her, tossing other pieces of brick and plaster until he felt the fabric of the jacket.
Kris fought her way up out of the dust and debris. When his hand closed around hers, she held on. She'd lost the baseball cap, and dust from the broken plaster was in her hair and on her face.
