“Where are we going?” Gage asked Batkoun Benaroun as he gunned the six cylinders of his Citroën around the rising curves of the Marseilles hills. He sped through the oncoming flow of commuter traffic like a salmon swimming upstream, and with the same driven instinct.
“I’m not allowed to say until we get there,” Benaroun said.
“Isn’t this a little silly?”
“Of course, it’s like dancing the rumba without music or watching The Man in the Iron Mask without sound.” Benaroun glanced over and smiled. “In any case, we’ve come to the point in the program where we’ll have to supply our own lyrics.” He pointed ahead to where the road rose between banks of apartment buildings. “All they found up here was the car Hennessy had rented. Nothing else.”
Benaroun reached into his glove compartment and handed Gage a map. Looking at it, it wasn’t difficult for Gage to guess their location. The port was to the north behind them. The Mediterranean to the west. And the Basilique Notre Dame de la Garde, overlooking the city, was high in front of them and now coming into view atop a limestone cliff.
They worked their way through the winding streets west of the church until the road forked, one prong heading toward the entrance, the other around the back. They then made a final ascent, and Benaroun drove to the base of the hill on the west side of the church, where it bordered a residential area composed of one-story bungalows and multistory apartments.
Just after he turned onto a narrow dead end street, Benaroun gestured toward the backs of the wall-to-wall hillside homes whose balconies on their far sides faced the sea a mile away.
“He parked just by that yellow one with the green shutters,” Benaroun said. “In front of the door.”
“You mean his car was discovered there,” Gage said.
Benaroun’s face reddened. “Sorry. I went a little beyond the evidence.”
He then made a three-point U-turn and pulled to the curb across from a spreading stand of aloe cactus and olive trees and bushes growing from patches of earth and from cracks in the hillside rock.
The sun that met them as they stepped from the car seemed to Gage to cast pure white light, hard and stark, that made the pastels of the houses and reds and blacks and blues of the cars on the street seem less like overlaid coloring and more like the things themselves.
Gage walked twenty-five yards to the end of the street. He stopped and looked west through a gap between the houses toward the Frioul archipelago a mile offshore. He could just make out the Chateau d’If, France’s Alcatraz, on the smallest of the four islands. It was where the French government once imprisoned political and religious dissenters. Despite the actual suffering inflicted there that Gage had read about in school, the castle-shaped structure now existed in the public imagination only as the setting for the fictional Count of Monte Cristo. He wondered whether Hennessy, too, had hesitated at this spot and saw Ibrahim and himself in the fictional mirror of a wrongful prosecution and a struggle for justice and redemption.
Gage continued a little farther, past the end of the pavement and onto a dirt trail. He walked another thirty yards to where he could overlook the port—and realized that Benaroun had not at all gone beyond the evidence.
Standing in this place with the city glowing gemlike below, even without binoculars Hennessy could’ve made out the north end of the grass meridian at the head of the port and the backdrop of buildings that framed it. With binoculars, the limousine procession would have passed before him like a line of ants under a magnifying glass.
Gage heard Benaroun’s footsteps come to a stop next to him.
“Is this where he was watching from?” Benaroun asked.
“No,” Gage said, staring down at the city.
Benaroun turned toward Gage and squinted up at him. “I don’t understand.”
Gage directed his thumb over his shoulder. “Hennessy wouldn’t have parked back there and then walked all this way. There was no reason to. He’d have parked where the pavement ended.” He thought of Hennessy’s wife and her smile when she mentioned her husband’s investigative techniques. “His FBI training would’ve insisted on it. He would’ve parked as close as he could to where he was headed and then faced the car in the direction he wanted to go when he left.” He smiled at Benaroun. “Just like you did.”
Gage turned and pointed up at the basilica, then drew a line with his finger from the gleaming golden statue of the Madonna and Child at the top and down to where Hennessy’s car had been parked and then back up again.
“He must’ve been a mountain goat,” Benaroun said. “Even if he wanted to park down here for some reason, there are stairs close by.” Benaroun made a curving motion to the right with his hand, indicating the far side of the hill. “Those would’ve been easier. Or he could’ve walked back down the main road until he reached the fork and then back up again to the front of the church.”
“It’s likely that he did just that,” Gage said, enacting in his mind what Hennessy might have been thinking. “I suspect that he was concerned about surveillance. He’d do some evasive driving through town to get here, then pretend to be a tourist. Take the stairs and mix in with the crowd. And if he became convinced that they’d caught up with him, he could slip into the shadows and work his way down the hillside.”
Gage pointed up at the church. “How about drive me up to the top and I’ll make my way back down. You come back here and search a strip along the bottom of the hill, maybe ten meters wide. See if you can find anything.”
Gage’s cell phone rang as they walked back to the car.
“I need the snakehead after all,” Faith said.
Gage didn’t express the relief he felt.
“You ready to come out?”
“I need to stay a little longer. It’s for the students and Ayi Zhao’s son and daughter-in-law.”
Benaroun cast him a puzzled look, and Gage mouthed Faith’s name.
“How soon?”
“Two days. Assuming Wo-li agrees to it.” “You mean the rebels are trading exile for information?”
“And Wo-li is deciding how much to give them. For him it looks like a long-term solution to what may be a short-term problem. If he spills everything and the rebellion fails, he’ll have torpedoed his future. The government will have to arrest him and will probably have to execute him as an example.”
“At least this way,” Gage said, “he saves his life, and once he’s out of the country he can find a way to catch up with wherever his offshore cash is hidden.”
“As much as she hates to do it, that’s the pitch his mother is giving him.”
“I’ll call Mark Fong and give him your number.”
“Won’t he want some money?”
“I’ll take care of it,” Gage said, then thought for a moment. “Make sure you gather up whatever identity documents Wo-li and his wife have and any extra passport pictures. Mark may need to fudge up some papers to get them across the borders.”
Gage called Fong after he and Benaroun had gotten back into the car.
“We’ll settle up afterward,” Fong said.
“How soon—”
“My cousin in Chongqing will rent a big van and arrive there tomorrow, me the day after. We’ll collect the students first”—Fong laughed—“and then the criminals.”
Gage then understood why Fong wasn’t worried about payment. Either Wo-li and his wife would direct their offshore banker to wire the fee into Fong’s account, or he’d make sure that they’d never make it out of China.
“If you have to leave them somewhere along the road,” Gage said, “then leave them, but make sure the kids get out.”
“Of course.”
Gage disconnected and slipped his phone back into his pocket.
Benaroun grinned at Gage as he turned the ignition.
“Exile?” Benaroun said. “Like the Dalai Lama?”
“Not exactly.”
“And you trust this snakehead? The name certainly doesn’t inspire it.” Benaroun smiled. “I think I’d have more confidence in something a little more marsupial.”
“The situation calls for someone cold-blooded,” Gage said, “and I know of no one colder.”