Christopher Reich - Rules of Vengeance

He still didn’t dare to show his face on the dock.

Instead, he slipped out of the buoy and lowered himself into the sea.

The water was warm and filthy.

He took a breath and went under.

Kate Ford stood on the quai , hands on her hips, arms akimbo. Thirty minutes had passed since Ransom had made his mad dash across the highway and onto the embarcadero. Despite the efforts of over fifty policemen, no trace of him had been found. Even now searches of all the moored cruise ships were taking place. Patrol boats crisscrossed the harbor. She didn’t have much hope.

“He’s gone,” she said.

The lieutenant colonel from the carabinieri shook his head. “It’s not possible,” he said. “We have him penned in.”

“He swam,” said Kate.

“But the ships,” said the policeman, gazing up at the four-story superstructures to either side of him. “It is too dangerous.”

Not when you don’t have any other choice , thought Kate.

She turned and headed back to the main street. “Come,” she said. “Ransom was here before us. He was looking for his wife. Someone must have seen him. Maybe someone spoke with him.”

“Where do we start?”

Kate unfolded the hospital admittance sheet, running her finger to the entry that listed where the ambulance had picked up the injured woman who had given her name only as Lara.

“The Hotel Rondo,” she said.

The offices of the International Nuclear Security Corporation were located on the twenty-seventh floor of a skyscraper in La Défense, Paris’s bustling business district bordering the Seine. The company billed itself as a one-stop shop, capable of providing private businesses, government installations, and military bases with the “entire spectrum of security solutions.” But as its name suggested, the company specialized in one area: the safeguarding and protection of nuclear installations.

With regard to a nuclear power plant, the company worked from concept through final construction, designing and implementing security measures governing everything from physical entry to and exit from a plant (alarms, cameras, biometric checkpoints), cybersecurity, in-plant employee location, force protection, and, last, the monitoring of all critical operations systems, including the storage of spent fuel. It was no exaggeration to say that nearly every major producer of power in the Western world relied on INSC to guarantee the safe and accident-free operation of its nuclear installations. To date, their trust was justified. No INSC-certified plant had ever experienced an outage, shutdown, or accident of any kind.

Emma Ransom was mulling this over as she crossed the broad plaza in front of the building. Nearing the entrance, she straightened her jacket and smoothed her skirt. The black suit was cut high on the leg and low in the chest, and the label graded it a cheap knockoff of Dior. It was Papi’s taste. He had never favored the subtle approach; then again, he didn’t come from a subtle country.

Her hair had been straightened, cut bluntly at the shoulder, and dyed a raven’s black. She wore brown contact lenses and four-inch heels, because Anna Scholl had brown eyes and stood five foot ten in her stockings. As Emma opened the glass doors and walked into the air-conditioned mezzanine, she wasn’t afraid of being spotted as a fraud. Rather, she was terrified of tripping on her stratospheric heels and falling on her inexpensively dressed ass.

“Anna Scholl,” she said, slipping out the forged identification card that showed her to be a member of the safeguards and inspections staff of the International Atomic Energy Agency. “To see Pierre Bertels.”

The guard examined her breasts long enough to see if they matched her identification, then noted her name on his register and called upstairs. “One minute. He’ll be right down. In the meantime, wear this badge.”

Emma slipped the lanyard and attached badge over her head, then stepped aside. The specified minute passed, and then another, until ten minutes had gone by. Finally a tall, barrel-chested man passed through the turnstile. “Fräulein Scholl, I’m Pierre Bertels. How are you?”

Emma sized him up in a glance. Expensive navy suit. Contrasting brown shoes, polished to a mirrorlike sheen. Gold bracelet hanging from a French cuff. A little too much gel for the fashionably short hair. Carrying an extra twenty pounds on a once-formidable frame, but God forbid you tell him. A slight limp he was trying to camouflage, probably from falling on the squash court, but which he’d try to pass off as an old war wound. And then there was the fresh indentation around the base of his left-hand ring finger, from which she was sure he’d removed his wedding band after admiring the photograph of Anna Scholl forwarded as part of her file. It all added up to a horny bull ten years past his prime and looking to prove that he still had the goods. All this she saw in the time it takes to blink.

“In a hurry,” she answered, pouring ice water over his calculated warmth. “I’m due at Charles de Gaulle in two hours. May we?”

Bertels’s smile vanished. “If you’ll follow me.”

Inside the elevator, he made a second attempt at conversation. “I understand you’ll be spending some time in France. Any part of the country in particular?”

“That’s confidential, as I’m sure you know. We don’t advertise our snap inspections. Especially after the incident in London two days ago.”

“In London?”

Emma coughed and looked away. She had her confirmation that word about the stolen codes had not yet spread. As expected, the theft was treated as an internal matter to be settled between the IAEA and the power providers themselves-in France’s case, Électricité de France. No outside firms were to be made privy. It was too big a secret.

“What happened in London?” Bertels persisted. “Was it the car bomb aimed at Ivanov? I had calls all day about it.”

“I can’t comment on that. Should they concern you, you’ll be made aware of any developments sooner rather than later.”

The elevator opened. Smoked-glass doors governed entry to the offices. Bertels placed his palm on a biometric scanner. The pinlight flashed from red to green. He stated his name. A second pinlight glowed green. There was an audible click as the lock disengaged. Bertels opened the door. “This way.”

Emma took note of the enhanced security measures. A palm scanner coupled with voice-print analysis was new, and anything new was problematic. She followed Bertels down a busy hallway. The executive’s office was large and neatly furnished, with a view of the Eiffel Tower and, beyond it, the Champ de Mars, Les Invalides, and Notre Dame.

“I’ve received your vitals from Vienna,” said Bertels, taking a seat behind his chrome-and-glass desk. “I took the liberty of filling out the paperwork in advance. If you’d just read it over and double-check everything to make sure I haven’t made any errors.”

Emma slipped on a pair of reading glasses and brought the folder onto her lap. The form carried the logo of Électricité de France, the corporation that managed France’s nuclear plants, and was labeled “Application for General Worker Identification Card.” Within the industry, the card was known as a nuclear passport. With it, one was able to enter any facility without prior notification or escort. The nuclear industry was highly specialized. Engineers often traveled between facilities to practice their particular specialties. An engineer trained to power up and power down a plant could expect to visit ten plants in one year. A software engineer in charge of IT, more than that. It was too costly in terms of time and money for each individual facility to conduct its own background checks on each of its workers. Hence, anyone desiring to work in the French nuclear industry was vetted by INSC and issued a blanket clearance that allowed him or her admittance into any of the country’s nuclear plants. Hence the term “passport.”