Nikki’s contact at the Marseille police department was named Frank Mazot, a grizzled fifty-year-old detective who headed up the city’s major crimes division, the same team to which she was attached in Paris. Over the years, they’d worked a dozen cases together, ranging from tracking down the Pink Panthers, the Balkan crew that specialized in spectacular heists from haute joaillerie boutiques in Paris and Cannes, to the “Dream Team,” four Marseille-based gangsters best known for robbing a passenger jet of twenty million euros before it took off from the Provence airport.
Mazot was strictly old school. He wore a white shirt and dark suit. He carried his gun in a shoulder holster—a .38 snub-nosed revolver, no less. (“If you need more than five shots to put a man down, you need to learn to shoot better.”) And he always had an unfiltered Gitanes cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth.
Nikki bounded upstairs to the third floor, stopping at a break room for two coffees before continuing to his office.
“Surprise,” she said as she elbowed his door open. “Look who’s here.”
“Nikki, what in the world?” Mazot jumped to his feet from behind a desk piled high with unruly folders.
“The place is messier than last time I was here.” She set down the coffees as Mazot came around the desk and greeted her with a kiss on each cheek. “Hello, Frank. How are you?”
“You know how it goes. Clear one case, two more pop up.” He picked up a coffee, viewing her from over the top of a pair of smudged bifocals. “Four sugars?”
“How could I forget? I’m surprised you have any teeth left.”
“Good genes,” said Mazot, smiling to reveal shoddy dental work stained a grubby yellow by decades of nicotine and coffee. “What are you doing here, kiddo?”
“Last-minute deal. I’m working the big robbery in town. The Saudi thing. I need your help.”
Mazot lit a cigarette. “So you came all the way down here?”
“You want something done right you have to do it yourself.”
“I do have a phone.”
Nikki smiled. “Maybe I wanted to see you.”
“Bullshit,” said Mazot, harshly enough to make them both laugh. He sat and offered Nikki a seat. The time for pleasantries had ended. “Any leads?”
“I need to poke my nose into your archives.”
“Who’s the lucky fellow?”
“Tino Coluzzi.”
“That’s a name I haven’t heard in a while. Word was he’d skipped town. Some kind of dispute about a job.” Mazot put two and two together. “Coluzzi’s behind this?”
Nikki shrugged. “Call it a hunch.”
“Or a wild hair?”
“Maybe a little of both.”
“Which is why I haven’t heard from the lieutenant.”
Nikki leaned forward, her arms resting on the desk. She met Mazot’s gaze head-on. “You do what you gotta do.”
Mazot sucked down half the cigarette, stubbing out the butt in an ashtray filled to overflowing. Pushing his bifocals into place, he hunt-and-pecked Coluzzi’s name into the computer. “Write this down.”
Nikki scrambled for a pen and paper, jotting down the file reference. “So you’re not digitized?” she asked, forgetting to hide her frustration. Digging through the archives could take hours.
“We don’t have enough money to pay our detectives on time,” said Mazot. “You think we’re going to waste it scanning old files? You know what we say around here: ‘If you really need to find something, get off your ass and go look for it.’”
“Sounds about right,” said Nikki.
Mazot stood. A favor had been called in, the ledgers evened out. “That it?”
“One more thing,” said Nikki. “It’s personal.”
“Oh?”
Nikki gave Mazot a second name, one that he claimed never to have heard before. He found it easily enough. She wrote down the file reference before following Mazot to the archives in the basement beneath police headquarters.
They found Coluzzi’s files high on a shelf in the far corner of the basement. Mazot stood on his tiptoes to retrieve the storage box and handed it to Nikki. “You’re stronger than I am. You carry it.”
He led the way to a small reading room near the elevator. “All yours,” he said. “Give me a ring when you’re done. I’m at extension forty-nine.”
“Sure thing.”
“And Nikki? If Coluzzi is the one behind the Paris job, don’t forget me. I could use a raise before I retire.”
After Frank Mazot left, Nikki opened the box and began sorting through the files inside. Alphabetizing was not the archivist’s strong suit. It took her fifteen minutes to locate Coluzzi’s file, tucked between “Cranmont” and “Czell.” The file was thick as a phonebook, a compendious mess of arrest sheets, interviews, court records, and sentencing documents, all mixed up haphazardly. She required a further thirty minutes to put them in something resembling chronological order before she could begin her research.
Coluzzi’s first arrest was at the age of sixteen for burglary with a sentence of six months’ probation. The second arrest was three months later, for which he served a year at a reform school near the Spanish border. A note from the school director called Coluzzi “willing to cooperate and a model student.” Nikki wrinkled her nose. A handwritten note to Coluzzi’s parole officer stated that the young man had come to the director with the name of a student who had been pilfering from the kitchen and selling canned goods to a local vendor.
The die was cast at an early age.
From there, Coluzzi’s record grew at a blistering pace. Extortion. Assault. Grand theft. And then at the age of twenty-one, attempted murder. The trial lasted one day. Coluzzi was convicted and sentenced to five years at Les Baumettes.
Nikki paused, studying the paper. Something was missing. Normally, there should be a prisoner transfer sheet attached, documenting his remanding to the national prison system. In its place was a pink-hued form she knew all too well. She’d filed a similar one a dozen times, if not more, including one with Aziz François’s name on it when she’d recruited him as a confidential informant.
At once, Nikki took a photo of the form with her phone.
Reports from Coluzzi’s case officer followed, providing a comprehensive list of criminals with whom he regularly worked, as well as crimes they’d committed and crimes they planned to commit. There on the third page was “Simon Ledoux.”
With mounting fury, she read Coluzzi’s detailed, almost joyous recounting of the plan to rob the Garda armored car on September 2, 1999. The following page was a copy of the arrest record, including a brief description of the attempted robbery. Four men killed, names given. Simon Ledoux shot three times, taken to hospital, condition unknown.
Coluzzi stood trial to preserve his anonymity as an informant and received a cursory sentence of six months, of which he was released after two.
And like Aziz François, Coluzzi did not allow his work as a police informant to interfere with his career as a criminal. A few years after the Garda job, he was arrested for robbery and assault, and sentenced to a five-year stretch at Les Baumettes. This time, no amount of snitching could shorten his term. The prisoner transfer sheet showed the date of his arrival as shortly after Simon would have ended his time in solitary.
But nowhere was there mention of an attack on an inmate.
And then, as if a magician had snapped his fingers and said “Abracadabra,” the file ended. No mention of Tino Coluzzi for the past fifteen years. Even if he’d never committed another crime in his life, there ought to be more here—the mandatory reports from his parole officer, to begin with.
Something was wrong.
Nikki put down the last sheet and closed the file.
An administrative request form was stapled to the back of the folder. It was dated January 2003 and came from a Colonel M. Duvivier of the DGSE for an interagency transfer.
The Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure was France’s foreign security service, the equivalent of the CIA.
The request read: “All further information kept at 141 Boulevard Mortier, Paris.”
It was the headquarters of the DGSE.
Nikki closed the file and slid it back in the box.
Now she knew who had given Tino Coluzzi’s name to Mr. Neill.
Nikki returned the box to its place on the shelf, then forwarded pictures of all the pertinent documents regarding Coluzzi’s work as a confidential informant to Simon. Satisfied she’d completed the first request, she consulted the notes she’d made in Mazot’s office and ventured to the opposite corner of the archives. The light was dimmer in this part of the basement, the air mustier, and she felt as if she were walking deeper and deeper into a forgotten grotto. The box holding the information she sought was easy enough to find, located on a shelf she could reach without difficulty. Thankfully, the files were alphabetized correctly and she found the name quickly. The file itself was surprisingly thin, containing a single arrest report and a court declaration noting that the defendant had pleaded guilty and waived his right to a trial.
She leafed through the pages that followed, her eye trained to spot one piece of information. She found it on the last page. An addendum to a prisoner’s death notice written in longhand at the bottom of the sheet, practically an afterthought. One sentence, but it was enough.
She replaced the box, then hurried upstairs. Frank Mazot was waiting in his office. With him were four men, all of them his superiors if dress and age were any indication.
“How did it go?” Mazot asked.
“Fine,” said Nikki, aware that all eyes were on her.
“Get everything you need?”
“I did, actually. Thank you.” She looked from man to man, meeting their gazes, and realizing with a sinking feeling that they were here for her. “Am I interrupting?”
“We received a call from Paris. From your lieutenant. He was curious as to what you were doing here when you’d been posted to desk duty on administrative assignment.”
“I thought I explained.”
“Detective Perez,” interjected one of the men in a no-nonsense voice, “Frank told us why you’re here. While we applaud your eagerness to help bring the investigation in Paris to a successful conclusion, our colleagues are concerned about your methods. They feel you may be assisting someone who isn’t working within the purview of French law enforcement.”
Nikki looked at the man. Sixty, gray hair, fit, with a fighter’s jaw and cold blue eyes. Suit far above a policeman’s pay grade. “You are?”
“Martin Duvivier. Office of Defense Intelligence.”
Colonel M. Duvivier, formerly of the DGSE.
“I see,” said Nikki.
“If you don’t mind, Detective Perez,” said Duvivier, with far too much deference, “we would like you to stay here until you can talk with one of our colleagues.”
“If you don’t mind,” Nikki replied, in an equally unctuous tone, “I can come back as soon as he arrives.”
“But he’s on his way over right now,” said Duvivier.
Nikki looked from face to face, meeting one stone gaze after another. She landed on Mazot. “Are you preventing me from leaving?”
“Please, Nikki,” said Mazot. “Do as they say.”
Nikki looked back at Duvivier. “Who is it that we’re waiting on?”
“A friend of French law enforcement.”
Nikki stared at the floor, concealing a bitter smile. That’s exactly what Dumont had called Simon Riske. “A friend?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“I want a name.”
“Mr. Neill. An American. He’s with the CIA.”