Read The History Thief: Ten Days Lost (The Sterling Novels) Online
Authors: Joseph Nagle
The History Thief: Ten Days Lost (The Sterling Novels) (12 page)
The explosion sent the caltrops hurtling through the air. The sous-lieutenant’s life ended just as the flash from the explosion dissipated. His rotund body had absorbed most of the blast and the flying caltrops.
One of the seemingly innocuous caltrops made it past the sous-lieutenant’s sizable frame and skimmed the right cheek of the young deputy. It was the only other injury.
There wasn’t much time to contemplate the next series of steps; overhead a slight rumble was growing in intensity, and the ground started to shake.
The death of the sous-lieutenant was inconsequential relative to what was happening just above the Pont Neuf.
A FEW MINUTES AGO
INSIDE THE SOUTH
TOWER
T
he ringing of the bell had stopped, and the priest had made it nearly one-half of the way down the steep staircase. As he slid down each stair, he held the detonator out in front of him as if it were itself an explosive device. No longer able to shed tears, his sobs came in the form of small, childish convulsions and whimpers. As each stair passed underneath him, he felt himself getting weaker. But his breathing seemed easier, less labored. In his head, a voice, pure in tone, repeated:
let go, let go.
He wasn’t sure if it meant the detonator or life.
On the ground floor, and at the base of the south tower, Senator Elizabeth Beckett Door, Esquire, was smiling widely and nodding politely as the president of France personally guided her through Notre Dame. Their first stop was scheduled to be the south tower.
Behind them, the diligent horde of paparazzi snapped excitedly away, while the security forces of each powerful political official panned the chapel for glimpses of danger.
Lining the voluminous interior of Notre Dame were over six thousand important and semi-important people, as well as a large number of spectators eager to catch a glimpse of the senator on her visit.
No ordinary senator, she was the highest-ranking member of the Intelligence Oversight Committee and, having won the primaries, was loudly spoken of in the press as the next president of the United States. Senator Door was already being treated by heads of state as if the election was over, and she had won.
It was politics as usual.
If the priest had made it farther down the stairs, or, perhaps, if the wound to his liver hadn’t penetrated quite so deeply, the senator and anyone within fifty feet of the church’s exterior may have had a chance.
But it wasn’t to be.
As she stared up the tower, Senator Door caught a glimpse of the priest’s movements. Wholly unaware of what she was seeing and, pointing upward, she curiously asked the president of France, “What is that?”
Gazing into the tower, both the president and the senator focused their eyes on what was above. It was too surreal to be believed. One of the senator’s entourage, a member of the United States Secret Service, comprehended it before any of the rest.
With a shout, he dove for the senator.
From behind the duct tape affixed across his mouth, the priest was smiling.
He felt as if he was floating.
He felt the wind in his hair.
He felt unburdened by his pain.
He no longer cared about the detonator in his hand; he no longer cared about anything.
He felt at peace.
The same moment that the Secret Service man grabbed the senator, the priest landed on them both. A split second later, the detonator landed at their sides. The green light turned red. Throughout the grand Gothic chapel, a wireless signal instantly activated the charges. The explosives attached to the buttresses detonated simultaneously, as did the gas in the floor and walls.
From a distance and across the river, witnesses would later tell of an explosion that appeared nuclear. The walls violently exploded in all directions, and the buttresses gave way. The ceiling crashed instantly to the ground as rubble.
Not one soul in its interior survived, and many more on the outside met the same fate.
The senator was dead; the president of France, too.
T
he platform for the Réseau Express Régional—the RER—was empty.
This was good
, Charney thought.
Everyone had been above, waiting for a glimpse of the American senator and a wave from the French president. He heard the rumble; it started slowly. He closed his eyes and waited. He knew it would end soon.
Charney stood underneath the blue Sortie sign that pointed to Place Saint-Michel. A small trickle of sweat beaded at the base of his left sideburn. As the sweat rolled down the side of his cheek, it tickled him slightly and he slapped at it.
In the distance, coming from the darkened tunnel, the metallic screeching of the MI-84’s brakes along the train track interrupted his concentration. The fast-approaching train brought with it a growing breeze that did very little to cool the tension flowing through him. At the very moment the train had pulled up before him and stopped, he heard the muffled sounds of the explosions turn into a loud roar. The lights on the platform flickered wildly, and the place where he stood shook forcibly. Cascades of dirt and dust streamed downward from the ceiling. For a moment, he worried about the ceiling caving in on him.
It didn’t.
Charney let out a slow breath laced with relief.
He opened his eyes and saw that the train’s doors were open, inviting him on board. With a smile, he obliged.
For a moment, he thought that the train wouldn’t move, given the destruction that occurred above. That moment of worry ended as quickly as it began when the train’s doors closed and carried him from the platform.
Notre Dame was no more.
R
ER Line B would take him to the Aulnay-sous-Bois, a commune northeast of Paris. It was a rough part of town: full of clochards, thugs, and those humans that the rest of society often spit at and cast aside. Although Charney could easily drift among the upper class, he carried himself depending on his surroundings. There was an edge in him, told through the sharpness in his glare and heard in the low, gravelly tone of his voice, which instantly emerged in the Aulnay-sous-Bois. It had been his home his entire life; it was a part of him that he could not shed.
Much of the destruction to the Aulnay-sous-Bois from the riots four years ago was still evident in the pockmarked walls, condemned buildings, and the burns stained into the streets from the many cars set alight. It pained him deeply to see his home in such a way.
For thirty years, the inhabitants of the Aulnay-sous-Bois had been treated as less than equal, as nothing more than the servants for the rest of Paris. For thirty years, rage against the machinations and shameful tactics of the police had morphed into anger, into an indescribable resentment of Parisian authorities by the residents of the Aulnay-sous-Bois. The pent-up rage had reached a choking point one hot summer evening when the shakedown of a local teen by the police had led to the teen’s death; he had been cuffed to a fence and beaten repeatedly. Two men had happened upon the brutal scene and tried to interfere. Their attempts led to their deaths, too.
Both men had been found shot in the back.
That’s when the riots began.
For nearly three weeks, the rioting continued unabated and grew in its intensity. The rioting started to spill into other, more respectable neighborhoods of Paris. President Jacques Morabend, then the Minister of the Interior, had ordered the riot police to use the Karcher Treatment: to wash the streets of the thugs.
The police were relentless in their attacks; many of the neighborhood’s inhabitants were made their victims. Men, women, and children: it didn’t matter. The police didn’t discriminate when choosing their targets. When the violence was over, seventeen more had perished.
Some were Charney’s friends; one was his lover.
The police had marched cowardly upon the neighborhoods behind a column of armored vehicles. They were outfitted in full riot gear and firing tear gas and anti-riot munitions at both the thugs and the unarmed civilians.
The bullets were supposed to be rubber, but many of the more unscrupulous of the police had replaced some of their rubber bullets with real ones.
Annette—his lover, his beloved—had just left work and was heading home: to their home. She had no idea that the riots had spilled onto their block. All she had wanted to do was get into their building and away from the danger. A policeman had fired as she ran to their front door. The bullet tore through her back, perforating her lung from behind. To make it worse—if it could have been any worse—they had left her there, stepping over her body as they continued down the block. The key to the front door was still in her hand.
Her death had been slow and painful.
Cerebral hypoxia induced myocardial infarction due to asphyxiation.
That’s what the doctor had said. She had drowned in her own blood.
Charney lowered his head when he thought of Annette. She was so beautiful. He missed her tremendously. Never would he touch her smooth skin again nor feel her breath fall on his. Never would he hear her voice, kiss her lips, or hold her hand. Instead, she lay rotting, interred six feet under the earth. Clenching his fists tightly and biting down so hard that he could hear the grating of his teeth, he whispered quietly, “Finally—that pig!—Morabend is dead! Rest well, my love.” His lower eyelids were lined with tears readying to fall. It was as close to feeling an emotion—any emotion—that he could.
The train approached his stop, and Charney stood and wiped his eyes. Outside, the streets were silent. By now, everyone knew of Notre Dame’s destruction, of the deaths of the president and the senator. The country and the world would be in shock. It was a fitting tribute to his Annette. Hammurabi had written “an eye for an eye,” and Notre Dame was just the start.
The walk to his home was uneventful; the line of prostitutes that normally adorned his entryway was missing. The only person there was the man Charney paid to keep an eye on his front door. The man was dressed in worn-out, dirty clothing, not unlike the rags that Charney wore when impersonating the sleeping clochard under the Pont Neuf. He was dirty and beyond unkempt. He seemed oblivious to his master’s approach.
Charney was standing over the man, but said nothing.
Without as much as opening his eyes, the dirty man’s voice cracked when he said, “Interesting night, monsieur.”
It wasn’t a question that hissed through his cracked, dirty lips. It was a statement made matter-of-factly.
A slight smile was evident in the upturned corner on the left side of Charney’s mouth. But the clochard didn’t see it. Charney replied, “What makes you say that, old man?”
“The last time the whores were gone longer than ten minutes, the Bois was on fire. I don’t see a fire and the whores ain’t here.” He reached around, scratched his backside, and repeated, “Must have been an interesting night.”
Charney looked around; the streets were missing the evidence of any sign of life. He looked down at the old man and asked, “How’s my home?”
“No different than when you left.”
Stepping over the man, Charney didn’t say a word and climbed the short stone staircase to his front door.
Under his breath, when Charney was out of earshot, the old man said, “Except for the visitor that waits for you.” He let out a raspy chuckle and then rolled over onto his other side. In his hand was the twenty-euro note Charney’s visitor had given to him to keep quiet.
Charney opened a small steel door that covered an electronic keypad. Punching in a sequence of numbers, a green light flashed. Charney then inserted a key into his front door: a heavy, steel-backed door that weighed more than a large man.
His building was four stories tall and took up half of the city block. He owned the entire building; its insides had been renovated to a standard fit for royalty. From the outside, the building was unassuming and looked no different than any of the other rundown buildings in the neighborhood. However, the walls had been reinforced to withstand the blasts from any handheld, and some mounted, rocket launchers; the windows were made of double-paned bullet-resistant Lexan, and the communications systems were closed-circuited and scrambled. His home was designed for his protection.
The entire first floor served as a garage for his many vehicles. All were armor-plated and outfitted with the same bullet-resistant windows as those on his home.
The second floor was for his training. It was complete with a climbing wall, fully stocked gym, and firing range: he didn’t need to leave his home to perfect his body and craft. The third floor was his living quarters. It was nearly ten thousand square feet and adorned with impeccable furniture, appointments, and fixtures. However, the grandest part of the building was on the fourth floor; it was here that Charney housed the majority of the relics and artwork that he had stolen or acquired. It was his personal Louvre: catalogued on the fourth floor were priceless works worth a small fortune.