Rules of Vengeance

Sooner was better.

Jonathan faltered and the officer was at his shoulder, an arm stretched to grab his collar. Jonathan leaned forward as if to get away, but the next instant he arched his back and threw an elbow behind him. The elbow caught the Italian squarely in the throat. The policeman flailed to a halt, clutching his neck before falling headlong to the asphalt.

Far ahead, two police cars mounted the curb and drove directly onto the embarcadero. The cars stopped, effectively barring his passage. Officers stood at the doors, guns drawn. Jonathan dodged left, legs and arms pumping, threading his way through the busy walkway and onto the broad quai that separated two cruise ships. As if in the eye of a storm, he’d reached a barren patch of dock, meaning that there were few people. Behind him was a mass of a hundred or so. Ahead were even more. But for once there were no blue uniforms anywhere.

Walk and no one looks twice at you, Emma had told him. Run and you’re a target.

Against every instinct, Jonathan slowed to a walk. To his left, a gangway descended from a boat, and men and women were streaming onto the landing. To his right, stevedores pulled bags from the hold and arranged them in a neat row. A forklift honked and trundled past, carrying a large crate.

Jonathan headed to the edge of the quai. As he’d expected, a second landing about two meters down ran its length, accessed at intervals by ladders. This landing, he knew, was used by longshoremen and dock-workers to service the boats. Putting a hand to the dock, he hopped onto the landing and ducked his head beneath the foundations. A latticework of wood supported the quai. Water lapped at the barnacle-encrusted beams. Somewhere in the darkness, a rat stared at him. He started to run again, constantly checking behind him.

Then he saw it, and he knew it was what he needed.

Acting as cushions to protect the ocean liners’ hulls when they docked were great man-sized buoys made from the same heavy black rubber as automobile tires. The buoys were 6 meters long, 3 meters tall, perfectly round, and hollow in the center. Jonathan grabbed hold of one end of the nearest buoy and swung inside it. Step by awkward step, he advanced until he had reached the middle. And there he sat for the next hour, listening as the sirens came and went and the voices of frustrated policemen echoed into his hiding place, until all of a sudden it grew quiet.

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 pe

“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, ru

“The Hotel Rondo,” she said.

54

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 A

“A

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 A

“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?”