She found the laptop where she’d been told it would be: dead center in front of TNT’s chair. Ava sat and opened the computer. One thing Dahlia hadn’t provided was the six-digit passcode.
She inserted the thumb drive she’d smuggled in. The malware was two years old, practically obsolete, but it was all she had. Odds were that TNT had hardened the laptop the same as he had his phone. There was no more relying on Zvi Gelber or Unit 8200. No phishing or other clever ploys involved. It was a blunt-force attack. A head-on assault on the laptop’s operating system.
A folder labeled “Tools” appeared on the screen. She double-clicked it, and it asked if she wanted to install a program labeledBreak-in.exe. It sounded like a good idea. She checkedYes, I agreeand double-clicked again. A rectangular box appeared, to measure the installation progress. It took ten minutes to advance from 2 percent to 6 percent. And there it stalled. A minute passed. Then another.
The malware had two functions. First, it mirrored the laptop’s hard drive, making a copy of every program and the program’s contents. Every email, text, photograph, document, spreadsheet, and file. All of it. At the same time, once installed, the malware allowed Ava herself to operate the laptop as if it were her own. She didn’t need a password to access any of the programs. The malware would have retrieved them for her from the operating system. All she had to do was say “Open Sesame” and hit the Return key. If that wasn’t magic, she didn’t know what was.
Ava shifted impatiently in the chair. She slipped the pistol from her waistband and set it on the table. Nice and close in case of surprises. Her gaze wandered the office, admiring the artwork, the furniture. How, she asked herself, had it come to this? From the Golan Heights to the Avenue Montaigne? She held out her hand, palm up, turning it so that the scar tissue shimmered beneath the light. Boiling water, she’d told Mac. A kitchen accident before they’d met. She rubbed her thumb across the hard pink skin. A memory of her grasping the superheated metal door provoked a stab of pain. She flinched. If only she’d held onto the handle a little longer, if only she’d pulled a little harder.
Nothing would bring back Jonny or Benny. She couldn’t blame herself for their deaths. It was an operation in enemy territory. These things happened. Men and women died. Ava was a professional. She knew that. But not a night passed when she didn’t for a moment, however fleeting, see their faces and ask herself what she might have done differently—what she should have done differently.
But Samson . . .
Samson was on her. You didn’t let the bad guys get their hands on something like Samson. You didn’t cut and run and let a bunch of Islamic fundamentalist hotheads take possession of a nuclear device. It didn’t matter if there were fifty of them or a hundred. You stood your ground and killed as many as you could with your thirty-year-old Uzi submachine gun that jammed every tenth bullet and your two magazines of nine-millimeter bullets.
At least, that’s what Ava had done in her dreams. She’d stood defiantly before the burning pickup truck and guarded Samson with her life. In her dreams, the Uzi never jammed and her magazines were endless and not one bullet from one jihadist gun struck her. In her dreams, she’d won; she’d beaten them back, all of them; she’d sent them home to their squalid camps with their tails between their legs.
Waking, her bedclothes drenched in sweat, eyes wide with terror and victory, she’d known that her dreams were a lie. A vainglorious deception. In fact, she’d done none of those things. And as the days and months and years passed, her decision to run, to abandon Samson, tormented her that much more.
The day that Dr. Gerhard Lutz had pulled her into his office and urgently relayed the details of the conversation he’d overheard, she’d known her years of running were over. The bill for her failure had come due. The day of reckoning had arrived. Time to pay.
At length, the rectangular box began to fill. Twenty percent. Now thirty. In her mind, she had an image of a high-powered drill penetrating a vault. She had nothing to do but wait.
“Come on, Dahlia. Report in. You’re messing up my operational security. Where are you? Do you have Samson? When are you coming back?”
Seventy percent.
And then, as if she’d snapped her fingers to order it to finish up, the progress bar read 100 percent and glowed a cheerful bright green.
Ava was in.
Chapter 45
Hôtel Plaza Athénée
Paris
At two o’clock on this autumn Saturday afternoon, the lobby of the Hôtel Plaza Athénée, one of the oldest and most revered hotels in all Paris, was a symphony of elegant chaos. A party of a dozen Saudis—a sheikh, his wives, their children—milled around the reception desk as keys were handed out and the children morosely argued about who would sleep in what room. Elsewhere, two older European women dressed in matching black dresses walked their matching white poodles across the marble floor and toward the gallery. A look between them made clear they did not care for the Saudi contingent. In a far corner, the concierge was going over the evening’s offerings at the opera. Mac caught the words “misanthrope” and “Molière.” A bellman dressed in the same uniform one might have seen a hundred years earlier guided a trolley piled high with Louis Vuitton steamer trunks toward the elevators. The strains from a string quartet playing Vivaldi’sFour Seasonsdrifted from the Gallerie.
In the splendid, perfumed confusion, no one paid Mac Dekker and Harry Crooks the least attention as they crossed the marble floor. A hotelier waved Mac and Crooks to the reception desk. “Welcome,” he said. “Will you be checking in?”
Mac wheeled Harry closer. Crooks gave his name. “I believe it’s a suite.”
“Just the one night?”
“Just the one,” said Crooks.
“Passports and credit card,” said the hotelier.
“My assistant won’t be staying,” said Crooks.
Mac looked on stone faced as the hotelier took Crooks’s passport and credit card. Mac had ditched his suit and borrowed from Crook’s closet. The black cable-knit sweater fit perfectly. The trousers, also black, were two inches short, but who was looking? For his part, Crooks was dressed in a blazer and slacks with a silver silk ascot to make sure everyone knew he was the boss.
The hotelier gave them a suite on the fifth floor, with a view onto the rear courtyard. There were better rooms, and one from which Mac might have climbed onto the roof, but they were too expensive, and besides, Mac couldn’t risk being seen from the street.
Once in the room, Mac opened his travel bag. Inside was a coil of climbing rope and Harry’s Browning pistol. Mac threw the rope over a shoulder, then palmed the pistol. He chambered a round and slid it into his waistband.
“If it misfires,” he said, “you’re in trouble.”
