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“I don’t know. What’s easier?”
She took my computer, gave it a few instructions, and then nodded and returned it to me.
I scrolled down the list, scanning past all Microsoft Excel and Word files, finding more than twenty files in a format—RCP—that neither I nor my computer seemed to recognize.
I dragged the RCP files into a new folder that I intended to e-mail over to Sci, and continued on with my scroll.
Five minutes later, I saw another three of the RCP-type files, but my attention shot below them on the list to two JPEG files. They’d been flagged as examined, but for some reason I highlighted both and double-clicked.
My laptop seemed to grind a moment before two pictures popped up, splitting the screen. I studied them, both offhand shots, and felt confused by the odd sense that the subjects of the photographs were familiar to me, but I didn’t know how. Then it struck me, and I stared at the pictures long enough to consider alternatives before the unarguable meaning of them became clear.
“I’ll be a son-of-a-bitch,” I said.
“What?” Louis said.
“The guy behind all this—the lighter, Kim, everything. He was right under our nose, Louis, and we let him walk away.”
Chapter 68
14th Arrondissement
7:40 p.m.
A COLD DRIZZLE fell over Paris as Louis and I left the taxi and hurried toward a blue gate in the dark stone fortress walls of La Santé prison.
For decades, and through the turn of this century, La Santé regularly made the list of the world’s worst places to be incarcerated.
“A hellhole, Jack,” Louis said angrily. “It’s supposed to be closed now, which makes the fact that they’re keeping Farad and the others in here an absolute outrage as far as I’m concerned.”
At the gate, Louis called someone on his cell phone. Ten minutes later, the gate was unlocked by a uniformed police captain, Alain Grande, a burly guy with pocked skin. He scowled and said, “You owe me on this one, Louis. He’s not supposed to have visitors beyond counsel.”
“We are working on his behalf and his counsel’s behalf,” Louis said.
“Ten minutes,” Grande said begrudgingly, and let us pass through.
Erected in the 1860s, La Santé was built like spokes on a wheel, with a central hub and four multistory wings jutting off it. A modern maximum-security wing was added later, and it was there that Grande led us.
“I can’t believe they have them in here,” Louis said.
The police captain shrugged. “It’s still the highest-security facility in Paris, and intelligence and anti-terror wanted quick and easy access to them.”
We passed construction debris and supplies for the prison’s renovations and at least twenty officers wearing bulletproof vests and carrying submachine guns.
“They think AB-16 is going to attack the prison? Free their leaders?”
“They killed a cabinet minister, didn’t they, Louis?” Grande snapped. “What makes you think they wouldn’t try?”
That shut Louis up, and we walked the rest of the way in silence. Captain Grande brought us into a room with two doors, a steel table bolted to the bare cement floor, and four metal folding chairs.
A few minutes later, the other door opened, and Farad was brought in wearing the same clothes from the other night, and leg-irons and shackles. His eyes were sunken and bloodshot. His hair was greasy, and he had two days’ growth of beard on his face.
He glared at us and at Captain Grande as officers ran a chain from his handcuffs through a steel eyebolt welded to the table. When they were done, Farad said in a hostile tone, “Nice of you to visit, Louis. Jack.”
“They wouldn’t let us see you before,” Louis explained. “It is only this past hour that we even knew where they were holding you.”
“It’s true, Ali,” I said.
Farad set his jaw before looking to Grande. “Can we have some privacy?”
