Cara Black - Murder in Belleville

Crouched on her knees, Simone peered out of the door. The bad man looked asleep. She’d hurt him. Good—that would teach him not to push people! Rules were rules, but sometimes you had to learn the hard way, like Papa said, give people doses of medicine…. What had he said? Anyway, something like that.

Her stomach growled, and it was too hot in that closet. Time to find her maman and a buttered tartine. She’d won over the bad man. They could go home now.

Just in case no one believed her she lifted the gun. So heavy and ugly. Too bad; it would never fit in her Tintin bookbag. She slung the strap over her shoulder but the gun scraped the floor. Looping it three times around her neck did the trick. She picked up the smooth black cartridge filled with bullets and shoved it in the empty gun slot, like they did on the télé. She sighed. So heavy, and what a lot to carry!

And teddy bear, he didn’t like all this bumping. She stuck him between the gun straps and hoped he wouldn’t mind such tight quarters. After taking the stairs one at a time and holding the rail with her free hand, she remembered the phone and trudged back. Teddy would get cross with all this to-ing and fro-ing. She grabbed the phone from the metal mop pail in the closet and a green light flashed. Maybe it worked now. She hit the button Maman had showed her, the one with the big letter she couldn’t remember.

AIMÉE’s NEW cell phone, connected to her previous number, rang. Even though she’d told Yves to get lost, she hoped it might be him. Get ahold of yourself. No time to be waylaid by visions of Yves’s sideburns.

“Aimée Leduc speaking,” she said, making her tone businesslike.

“A flic’s picking you up!” Sardou barked. “Get over here now!”

She started to speak, but a siren announced a motorcycle policeman outside the café.

When she arrived at the temporary headquarters, Sardou looked ready to spit bullets.

“Simone will only talk with you,” he said thrusting the cell phone at her.

Aimée took a deep breath.

“Simone?” Aimée said, her knuckles white as she clutched the phone.

“Tell everybody I won, Aimie,” the tired child’s voice said.

Something clacked in the background, heavy and metallic sounding. A brief series of clicks, and Aimée realized that Sardou was monitoring the call. What a primitive tracing system these flics had—René’ would laugh, but this wasn’t funny.

“You can talk to me, Simone, I’m a policeman and want to help you,” Sardou said.

“That’s what the bad man told me,” Simone said, sounding more tired. “But I took care of him. So stop talking.”

“Simone, tell me what’s happened, okay?” Aimée coaxed, keeping her voice light. “Just a little. You’ll tell me more over hot chocolate in the café, eh?”

Simone yawned. Sardou kept silent.

“Aha, you must be the Orangina type, eh?” Aimée giggled, hoping her giggle sounded real.

“Do I get a grande Orangina even though Maman says I get a stomachache from cold drinks?”

“How about a double?” Aimée asked.

“I put a bad man to sleep and took his gun,” Simone said.

“Where are you?” Sardou interrupted.

“But Aimée,” Simone sobbed, tears caught in her throat. “Where’s Maman?”

“Look Simone, my name is Sardou. I can help—”

“You’re with the bad man, I know,” Simone said. She hung up with a loud click.

Here was four-year-old Simone wandering around with a gun, and Sardou had pissed her off! And no contact from Anaïs. Aimée shuddered, she pushed possible scenarios from her mind.

Sardou muttered over the buzzing line. Her hands tensed around the phone. She must remain calm and collected. She took a deep breath.

“Sardou, when I hit the Return Call button, let me do the talking. Don’t you agree it’s called for in this situation?”

That sounded diplomatic, she thought. For what seemed a minute all she heard was the buzz and click of the other line. Sardou must be conferring with others.

“Make sure she gets Rachid by the window,” he finally said.

Flustered, Aimée measured her words. “How do you propose a little girl would do that? Rachid isn’t stupid.”

“Sounds like she got rid of one terrorist.”

Sardou could have a point.

“Would a courtyard window suffice?”

“Facing south,” Minister Guittard said, cutting in on the line.

She punched the Return Call button on her cell phone. A recording came on: “The party is unable to answer your call momentarily or has stepped out of range. France Telecom thanks you for your patience and requests you try again momentarily.”

Great.

“She trusted me, Sardou; you blew it,” Aimée said. Sardou and Guittard’s conversation had wasted time and proved useless. Until Simone answered they hovered in a holding pattern.

“Call again. Keep trying, Mademoiselle Leduc,” Guittard said and hung up.

She’d pretty much figured that out.

And then she looked at her new cell phone with the battery … her dead Tintin watch … her mind raced. When she’d dropped the proposal off at the EDF site, the manager had warned her to turn off her cell phone since the electromagnetic rays from the HERF generator interfered with systems. Flattened them, he’d said. The electromagnetic fields were quite high due to all the unshielded equipment and the heavy iron reinforcement in the station walls. No reason it couldn’t do so now.

“Sardou,” she said, her voice certain and calm. “I know how to dismantle the bomb without touching the computer.”

BERNARD AIMED for the staircase, which tilted dizzily as he crawled toward it. His hand throbbed. Where had the little girl gone? Where was the gun?

The terrorist’s overalls clung to him. He shivered. If he could just get downstairs he’d pretend to be the other terrorist, wounded and unable to talk. He’d get Rachid by the window. With that thought, Bernard almost tumbled down the stairs headfirst.

And then the sun blazed for a brief moment as the clouds parted. Bernard smiled. The sun at last. He heard a zinging crack as a fine tinkle of windowglass powdered him. And then Bernard felt warmth on his face. The wonderful warmth, the heat from his childhood. Everything danced before him; his nounou, the slim grinning mother he knew as a child, his papa driving a jeep. Little teething Andre beckoned, and Bernard joined him.

RENÉ WALKED into the command center with a small shopping bag. He set the bag down and started pulling items out.

“Everything’s here,” he said, strapping on the Walkman-size HERF generator in his waist bag. With the power emanating from this he could knock out communications systems in the surrounding buildings.

Aimée helped adjust the antenna up his left sleeve so he could easily slide it out.

“From Simone’s conversation, we know one of the terrorists was knocked out,” Aimée said. “René resembles a child from this distance. If the doors Berge entered are closed, René can go to the window. Aiming the HERF gun at the device controlling the bomb, he shoots high-energy radio frequencies. He interferes with the detonation device, defusing the—”

Aimée never finished.

Sardou and every man wearing headsets rushed to the window.

“Green light,” someone muttered.

She saw a black-suited tactics team pause at the door, simultaneously heard the crack of rifles.

“Don’t do it!” she yelled. “The building will blow up.”

“They’ve got three to five seconds before the reaction time sets in,” Sardou muttered. “They better make it count.”

In stunned disbelief she watched the team enter the building. No explosion. More cracks from the rifles. She could see bullet holes pepper and shatter the glass.