A shell-pocked road. Rock-strewn fields stretched out in every direction as far as the eye could see. I was standing in the middle of it, wearing a fluorescent orange shirt bright as any school crossing guard, but the strange thing was that I seemed to be invisible. A pair of Russian Mig-27's came toward me full blowers, maybe twenty yards off the ground. As they got closer, I saw I was wrong. They were F-15's, ours. The roar was deafening; their exhaust, like showering in a hot mist of gasoline. They were looking for me. What else would they be doing out there? But even though I couldn't be missed-I stood out like a nun in a slaughterhouse-they hadn't seen me.
A dust storm started up on the horizon straight in front of me, grew larger, came closer until I realized it was a column of Bradleys-fifty or them, a hundred, two hundred, I had no perspective, no angle, no way to judge where the end of the line might be. Even if I couldn't be seen, I needed to move, had to get out of their path, realized now they were bearing down on me at Grand Prix speed. But my feet wouldn't budge. I couldn't tell what it was: My shoes were somehow magnetized to the roadbed. The lead Bradley was a football field from me, then twenty yards. Then someone grabbed me by the arm. I looked over at him. He had flaming red hair. Sapphire blue eyes. He was pulling me, yelling at me in French-accented American English to run, save myself.
"Welcome to Charles de Gaulle Airport," someone squawked from an overhead speaker in three languages, none of them clear. Outside the window, Paris looked to be underwater, but maybe that was just me.
Patricia Hoag-Carrington's temperament remained sour. She rose while the plane was still taxiing, stared hard at me, then snapped open the overhead bin, carefully shook her coat out, took down her Louis Vuitton carry-I on, and without ever looking at me again started up the aisle.
"Madame!" the stewardess called out. "Madame! Non!" But to no ¦ avail.
Relieved to be free of her scorn, I waited my turn. Herodotus's injunc-; tion about great misfortune still sat heavily on me.
The immigration line was moving at a snail's pace. I pulled out the Irish passport, boned up on who I was and where and when I'd been born. Thanks to the miracle of modern document doctoring, Eamon Mooney and I couldn't have looked more alike if we had been hatched from the same sperm cell and ovum. Sleep deprivation must have taken its toll because I remembered my yellow entry form just in time to scribble in the blanks and hand it to the blue-shirted cop along with my passport.
"Ah," he said after a quick glance. "Ireland. Land of Joyce." And waved I me through.
After I grabbed my garment bag from the baggage carousel and cleared customs, I took an elevator down to a sub-basement where I'd once met an Algerian baggage handler who claimed to have proof that a Saudi prince Was a transvestite turning tricks in that famous Parisian open-air whore-| house, the Bois de Bologne. He wasn't, but I remembered the out-of-the-Way cafe for airport employees where I'd met him. I needed a caffeine fix.
I was sitting by myself, nursing an espresso and reading he Figaro,
when I heard the whir of an electric baggage cart coming down the hall in the direction of the cafe. An African in a blue jumpsuit, airport badges dangling from his pocket, sat behind the wheel. The cart itself was stacked high with magazines, newspapers, and paperbacks all bound up with plastic straps. I was turning back to my own reading when I saw a man lunge at the baggage cart and grab the steering wheel. Drunk, I said to myself, just as the cart swerved and came barreling toward the cafe, and that's when I knew that what I was seeing wasn't what was happening at all.
Early on in my career with the CIA, I'd taken a monthlong course in a "shoot house." The first day we learned to kick down a door, roll into a room with a mixture of dummy hostages and their captors, and take out the bad guys with a Heckler amp; Koch MP5 on single shot. It was a walk in the park. I double-tapped all three terrorists, point blank in the forehead, and with the suppressor there was barely a pop. The next day, they turned out the lights and gave me a pair of night-vision goggles. My pickups weren't as fast, but still I didn't hit a hostage. A week later, after they'd ratcheted up the pace, they took my silencer away. Next they set off deafening flash-bang grenades. After that, they made us exercise until our heartbeat hit 145. Each day the pressure went up. The last day, I kicked open the door and was met by a wall of deafening and blinding flash-bang grenades, thundering music, targets moving all over the place. I was dead before I got off a single round.
In shoot-house speak, what they were trying to teach us was "target discrimination." When things go to shit, you have to decide in a split second what the immediate danger is. Then the next. What do the bad guys want you to do. And what's going to save the hostages' lives, and yours. All this raced through my mind in an instant, the way great training always does, as the cart driver bore down on me. I waited until the last second, until there was no space left to correct course, before I rolled to the side and watched him careen into the wall behind me and go flying face first into its mirror panels.
Blood, shouting-I feigned interest until the drunk, suddenly sober, grabbed my carry-on and garment bag, and took off at a half-trot that all but begged me to race after him. Ahab could have run faster, peg leg and
all, but that in fact was the point. As he was taking off, I did a lightning inventory of the two bags' contents. My clothes. Toiletries. All replaceable. If I followed, a scene would ensue, one of the parties to which-me-had entered France on a stolen passport. The next thing I knew, the police would be calling the Irish embassy.
I still had what mattered-the photo, two passports, and my money. I'd stick with the plan: Go into Paris, see if I dragged anything with me, catch my breath, and take an afternoon train to Zurich.
I went out the arrivals door and stood in the taxi queue. Two dozen people in front of me, Patricia Hoag-Carrington was just getting into a cab. I half expected something dramatic-a last-minute wave, a flip of that improbable sable collar against what was already a warm Parisian sun-but there was nothing of the sort. Instead, I got to wonder what she had possibly been doing in the airport all that time, especially since she had raced off the plane like a woman on a mission.
Maybe twenty-five yards in front of Patricia, a minibus sat parked at the curb with a sign in the back window: first hershey bible club. I couldn't be certain from my distance-and my track record of late was no comfort-but I thought I recognized a pair of porcine hips and a feral profile clambering onto the minibus. I was about to write if off when Muhlenberg popped up at the back window next to the sign, waved frantically to catch my attention, and blew me a kiss while Hofstra shot me the bird.
Knowing they were together changed everything.