Montmartre, eighteenth arrondissement
Paris
The rain began to fall at two in the morning.
Cyrille de Montcalm sat at her kitchen table, on the third floor of a sixteenth-centurymaisonon the Rue St.-Rustique, window open to free the smoke from her cigarette, listening to the ebb and flow of police communication across the Parisian cityscape.
A transmitter squawked. A cop radioed in about a drunk who’d driven his car through a hedge in Passy. Tow truck needed. No backup required.
Not her man.
Cyrille adjusted the volume on the transmitter. Police communication in Paris was conducted over the Mototrbo system, encrypted end to end. Each of the city’s twenty arrondissements, or districts, was assigned its own frequency, with all calls relayed simultaneously to the Prefecture of Police.
Another squelch. Burglary in Clichy. Suspect took a necklace and a cat. Yes, she’d heard correctly. A cat.
Cyrille was forty last month, five feet two inches tall in her stockings, and slight as a dancer for the Ballet Nationale. Dancing, however, wasn’t her thing. As a child, she’d studied judo. Her father was an instructor. She grew up wearing ajudogimore than her favoritejeans. She was a black belt at twelve and a national champion at sixteen. A year later, she came out. Her father wanted none of it. No “queers” in the Montcalm family. She left, joined the army, and loved it, deploying to Africa on several occasions as part of a small counterterrorism force.
Then came the incident that derailed her career. Cyrille was pretty enough. Dark hair, blue eyes, nice ass. A few guys in her company wouldn’t take no for an answer. Same old story. Cyrille didn’t know what she was missing. It got nasty. She killed one of them. Crushed larynx and fractured spine. A standard Ippon throw. Her father would have been proud. Unfortunately, the dead man was an officer. There was no trial, just immediate separation from the service and forfeit of all benefits. Who said life was fair?
Cyrille had been a cop for twelve years, first with the Paris gendarmerie, and now the DGSI, the General Directorate for Internal Security. The job was great; the salary wasn’t, so she did a little moonlighting. Five years now, she’d been a hitter. It didn’t matter who hired her; she didn’t ask, and they wouldn’t have told her if she had. All anyone cared about was that Cyrille de Montcalm got the job done. Quickly, cleanly, and without any blowback. If she liked her work a little too much, she kept that part to herself. As far as she was concerned, it was all about the money. Cyrille had a wife and two kids, the younger one a boy with special needs, which was the polite way of saying he would require care his entire life. An extra €20,000 now and then made a big difference.
The American would be number twenty-one.Lucky twenty-one.
Her target could be anywhere, she thought, gazing out the window at the sea of lights. If she were the one wanted for murder, she would distance herself from the crime as quickly as possible. His name was Mackenzie “Mac” Dekker, a.k.a. Robert Steinhardt, and he was wanted in connection with two murders—diplomats, no less. Patagonia wouldn’t be far enough. But they assured her he would be in Paris, so Paris it was.
Cyrille took a drag from her cigarette—Disque Bleu, no filter—and replaced it in the ashtray. She had no business smoking. She was a mother. She knew better. She had no business doing a lot of things. That was her excuse. She figured she’d be dead long before the cigarettes killed her.
A call from St.-Denis. A murder. The cop sounded shaken. Cyrille leaned closer.Maybe... Victim: Female. Eighteen years old. Suspect in custody. Her boyfriend.
Cyrille relaxed.
She needed six multiband transmitters to keep up. For now, it was the only means of locating Mac Dekker. A long shot to be sure. In the morning, she’d make herself pretty and stop by the hotel to sniff around. She’d been given his cell number, but it was dead. Dekker was in the business, too, or had been. He knew better.
She had a picture of him, but it was fifteen years old. Hopelessly out of date. She studied the photograph anyway. Not bad looking, but too American for her taste. The thick hair, the square jaw, the broad shoulders. She could imagine him planting a flag on a foreign shore.
Her brief stated that Mackenzie “Mac” Dekker was ex-CIA, a retired field operative, last seen at the Hotel Bristol. He was visiting Paris in the company of Ava Attal, former Mossad, his girlfriend/partner. Her location was also unknown.
Quite the couple, thought Cyrille. Sadly, there was no picture of the woman. She sounded like her type.
A last line stated that every precaution was to be taken when approaching the subject. The warning—if it was one—pissed her off. Cyrille de Montcalm always took every precaution.
She stood and stretched her legs. If Dekker was staying in the city, it was for a reason. It wasn’t Cyrille’s business to know why. Still, she was a cop and she was smart, so she wondered. Why risk your freedom, and possibly your life, hanging around a foreign city when you know the entire police department—and maybe someone just like her—is after you?
A squawk from the seventh arrondissement captured her attention. A cop at the Eiffel Tower radioed in about a worker assaulted by a tourist, possibly American, at the restaurant Jules Verne. The victim’s name was Francis Matthieu. Matthieu stated that a tall man, aged fifty or older, pretended to have lost a bracelet there earlier that day but once inside demanded to see the security cameras. Something about his wife being missing, said the cop. Details unclear. A fight ensued. The foreigner got away. The watch commander advised the victim to file a report online.
Cyrille double-checked her brief. Foreigner? Check. Jules Verne? Check. Looking for wife? Check.
There it was.
Cyrille radioed in. She stated her name and rank and informed the police on scene that the suspect was a person of interest.
“Hold Matthieu for me,” she said. “I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”
Cyrille took a last look at the brief. Once more she read the words,Red Flag.
She pulled on her jacket, making sure to take her pistol, knife, and stun gun. She kept the heavier stuff in the trunk of her car. She peeked into the bedroom. Her wife lay with their daughter, sound asleep. She blew them a kiss and left the apartment.
“Red flag” meant neutralize. Do not attempt to capture. Do not attempt to question.
