Nick and Kate walked back across avenue du Maine and along rue Brézin. Kate didn’t speak until they were heading up toward the Mouton-Duvernet metro station.
“What possessed you to tell Dragan that you knew about the smallpox?” Kate asked.
“I wanted to hurry things along.”
“You could have hurried us into graves.”
“It worked, didn’t it? He told us his whole, twisted plan.”
“I wanted to shoot him in the head.”
“Has anyone ever talked with you about anger management?”
“Yes,” she said. “That’s why I didn’t shoot him. But he still has to be stopped.”
“He will be,” Nick said.
“I could alert Jessup right now so he can organize a multi-agency raid on Dragan’s place in Sorrento.”
“Wouldn’t do us any good,” Nick said. “We don’t know where he’s going from here. Even if he does go back to Sorrento, you don’t know if his lab is there, and his sources in Italian law enforcement will tip him off about the raid. He’ll escape, you’ll confiscate a bunch of lemons, and lose your best chance to stop his scheme.”
“So what do you suggest we do?”
“We steal the smallpox for him,” Nick said. “Or at least make him believe that we have.”
“I get it,” she said. “You’re going to switch the real smallpox with a harmless vial of something else.”
“I don’t know what I am going to do. But you’ve heard the phrase Follow the money, right?”
“It’s a tried-and-true method of investigation. It almost always leads to the heart of any criminal conspiracy.”
“We’re going to use the same approach. Only we’re going to ‘Follow the pox’ to find his lab and the virus that he’s already got.”
They walked past the Mouton-Duvernet station and up to place Denfert-Rochereau. Here seven streets converged in a plaza around a bronze sculpture of a proud lion the size of a bus.
“That’s the Lion of Belfort, a bronze replica by Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi of his monumental sandstone sculpture in the hills above Belfort, a village near the German border,” Nick said. “Bartholdi is perhaps best known for the Statue of Liberty. The lion honors French Colonel Denfert-Rochereau, who defended Belfort ‘like a lion’ against a Prussian siege for a hundred days in 1870 even though he was vastly outnumbered.”
“Why do you know so much about some random sculpture?”
“I’ve thought about stealing it,” Nick said.
“Why would you want to do that?” Kate said. “It’s huge, it weighs tons, and it’s right in the middle of a busy intersection. It’s impossible to steal.”
“That’s why I want to,” Nick said. “Maybe we can do it at the same time that we steal the smallpox.”
“Steal the lion another day,” Kate said. “Let’s keep this simple. Relatively speaking.”
Nick’s cellphone chirped. He took it out of his pocket and glanced at it. “Our millions have arrived. Dragan may be a homicidal lunatic, but he pays his bills promptly.”
“That’s his one virtue,” Kate said.
“He also produces an excellent limoncello.”
They crossed the plaza, where avenue du Général Leclerc became the tree-lined place Denfert-Rochereau, and continued walking up the west side of the street.
There was a florist on the corner, and then a nail salon, a furniture store, and an empty storefront, boarded up and available for rent. Beyond that was a block of beautifully renovated four-story buildings. It took a moment for Kate to realize they weren’t individual buildings nor were they old. It was actually a recently constructed, single structure more than a half block long with multiple old-style façades that gave the impression of being several different buildings. But even that view was deceptive. It was actually a long wall with offices on top. The windows on the ground floor were barred and there were no doors to the street, just a guard-gated archway midway down the block leading to a motor court and more buildings beyond. There was a plaque written in French on the wall. Nick read it and gave Kate a translated summary.
“This was the site of the Saint Vincent de Paul Hospital for Children, the Home for Young Blind Girls, and other medical institutions. The original chapel is still here, but the rest has become the National Research Institute for Infectious Diseases.” Nick stepped back from the wall and gave it, and the gate, a quick once-over. “It can’t be any harder to break into than the Antwerp diamond vault.”
“Perhaps,” Kate said. “But diamonds can’t kill you.”
Nick and Kate took the metro from the place Denfert-Rochereau to Gare de Lyon train station, and from there they took a commuter train for the half-hour journey to Bois-le-Roi. They walked the two miles from the train station to Nick’s house in silence, lost in their own thoughts.
Kate trudged through the door, slumped against the wall, and closed her eyes. “Stick a fork in me.”
Nick leaned into her. His hands were at her hips and his lips skimmed across hers. “I’m feeling romantic.”
“Ommigod,” Kate said, more groan than spoken word. “What are you, Superman? How can you possibly be feeling romantic? I’m so tired I can’t feel my fingertips.”
“No problem. I’ll help you get to the bedroom, and then all you have to do is lay there.”
“Fine,” Kate said. “Don’t wake me when it’s over.”
“Okay, but you’ll be sorry if you sleep through this. I have some new moves.”
“Maybe I just need coffee.”
“Good idea,” Nick said. “You get comfortable and I’ll whip up a double espresso.”
Kate opened her eyes and stretched. She was alone. A shaft of light peeked from between the drapes and spotlighted the pillow where Nick should have been. She touched his side of the bed. It was cold. He hadn’t been in bed for hours…if at all. She checked her iPhone on the nightstand for the time. It was a little after 6 A.M. Kate slipped out from under the heavy comforter and padded barefoot into the living room.
Nick was working at his laptop and making notes by hand on a yellow legal pad. There was an open Paris map, a half-empty pot of coffee, and a crinkled-up Toblerone wrapper beside the laptop.
“What are you doing?” Kate asked.
“Plotting a crime.”
“You never came to bed.”
“No. You instantly fell asleep so I drank the coffee and came in here to work. I couldn’t stop thinking about stealing the smallpox. There was too much I didn’t know. So I started doing some research. The institute comprises half a dozen buildings. They are patrolled 24/7 by armed security guards and covered by hundreds of cameras, inside and out. Every door is locked, and they require a card key to open, even the broom closets and bathrooms.”
“That’s not surprising.” Kate went into the kitchen to make fresh coffee. The kitchen had a cast-iron stove, a farmhouse sink, butcher-block countertops, and a coffee maker so elaborate that Kate thought it might be capable of cold fusion. It was too daunting to even think about using it. What was the point of having a rustic old kitchen if he was going to put that appliance on the counter?
“There’s more,” Nick said. “To get to the biocontainment labs, you not only need a card key, but you have to pass a fingerprint scan and retina scan at every stage. There are at least eight doors to pass through before you finally get to a seat in front of a microscope.”
“Do you have any instant coffee?” Kate asked.
“I have rat poison,” he said. “It’s probably tastier. I’ll make you an espresso in a minute.”
Kate opened the refrigerator and surveyed the contents while Nick continued his briefing.
“The labs are also under constant video surveillance and are protected by an array of high-tech gizmos, including motion detectors and infrared sensors,” Nick said. “I was wrong. A biocontainment lab is even better protected than a diamond vault.”
“You like a challenge,” Kate said.
The refrigerator was filled with various cheeses, several paper-wrapped packages of butcher-sliced meat, a packet of smoked salmon, and some eggs. There were grapes, mushrooms, carrots, asparagus, and green peppers in the drawers. It all looked like too much work for breakfast. She’d have traded it all for Folgers crystals and Cocoa Krispies.
“But I’ve got some good news,” Nick said.
She closed the refrigerator and looked back at him. “You have Cap’n Crunch?”
“The labs have independent air flow and exhaust systems separate from the rest of the building to keep any viruses from escaping. As an extra precaution, the labs are all underground and practically encased in concrete.”
She gave up on food and drink, took a seat in a chair beside him. “Why is that good news?”
“Because the metro, the sewer, the city aqueduct, and the catacombs all run under the place Denfert-Rochereau.”
“The ‘catacombs’?”
“Abandoned limestone quarries under the city that are filled with the bones of millions of dead Parisians that were unearthed from cemeteries over the centuries,” Nick said. “Part of it is a popular tourist attraction.”
“My God.”
“They used to give boat tours of the sewers, too.”
“Makes me wonder what Paris Disneyland is like.”
“The point is, the ground underneath the institute is a maze of tunnels. We can dig our way into the lab.”
“Do you know where to find the lab and the smallpox?”
“Nope, that’s top secret. The institute isn’t supposed to have smallpox. We’ll never find out where it is.”
“I’m sure you’ll come up with a way to find it,” Kate said. “In the meantime, I’ll run into town and get us some Pop-Tarts.”
“They don’t have Pop-Tarts here,” Nick said. “They have fresh croissants and baguettes.”
“You really are out in the boonies. It’s a good thing Paris is only a thirty-minute train ride away.”
“I thought you were giving up the microwave for me.”
“I never said that and, besides, you don’t microwave Pop-Tarts,” Kate said. “How can you be a criminal mastermind and not know that? They are a tasty toaster treat.”
“Forget about Pop-Tarts,” Nick said. “I’ve got the plot all worked out. It doesn’t matter where the lab is, or where they keep the smallpox, because we don’t need to know any of that to pull off this heist.”
“Maybe I’m tired, and in desperate need of caffeine and sugar, but I think I’m missing something,” Kate said. “How can we break into a lab and steal the smallpox if we don’t know where the lab or the smallpox are?”
“Because we’re not tunneling into the lab.” Nick pulled over his Paris map and circled a building next door to the institute on avenue Denfert-Rochereau. “We’re going to tunnel in here.”
Kate looked at the map. The building wasn’t labeled. “What’s in there?”
“It was a terrible Indian restaurant for a while,” Nick said. “Before that it was a travel agency. Now it’s vacant and available for rent. But soon there’s going to be a world-class level-four biocontainment lab in the basement.”
Now it was all becoming clear to Kate, and she couldn’t help smiling at the beauty of the con. “We’re going to break into a fake lab and steal fake smallpox.”
“That’s the idea,” he said.
“It’s so wonderfully simple.” How did he come up with that so fast? It was one of the things about him that used to aggravate the hell out of her when she was trying to arrest him.
“It’s not quite as simple as it sounds,” he said. “To succeed, we have to pull off a dangerous balancing act that could go wrong in a thousand different ways.”
“Creating the fake lab is the kind of thing we’ve done before,” Kate said. “We’ve got a crew we know can do it.”
“The trick isn’t building the set, it’s making the Road Runners, a group of very smart professional thieves, believe that they’re tunneling into the real lab and that the smallpox is genuine,” Nick said. “The heist needs to feel completely authentic in every way. Not just the work itself, but the palpable risk, the ever-present sense of danger. We have to create a totally immersive physical and emotional experience. One false note and it’s over.”
“So where do we start?”
“With omelets and espresso.”