I can’t drag you into this any further. This quest is a personal matter and it might end your career, if not your life. You’ll have to let your inner badger loose to see me, which I hope will be soon.
Love,
Nick, your favorite squirrel
There were about fifty countries that met the extradition criteria, but only a couple where Kate could see Quentin Fox hiding out for the rest of his life. The Maldives, maybe Indonesia. Yeah, that felt right, she thought, a nice little place on the beach, on the island of Bali.
She wondered if Nick would dare to come back to Los Angeles after helping his father to hide away forever. His assignment with the FBI would obviously be over, which meant he would probably be looking at a prison cell again, but with no last-minute deal to save him this time. Unless of course she killed him first, then she’d be the one going to prison. At that moment, it felt like a toss-up. She threw the rest of her things into her travel bag and went downstairs to get a taxi to the airport.
* * *
Nick stood on the other side of the street and watched Kate get into the taxi. He waited half a minute, then turned toward the Champs de Mars. His father was waiting for him there.
A thin leather messenger bag was slung over Quentin’s shoulder. He ended a call on his cell phone, put the phone in his bag, and watched Nick approach.
“How’s Professor Lewis?” Nick asked.
“Finally calmed down,” Quentin said.
“He’s never been chased by a bunch of assassins before?”
“Professor of Germanic literature, you’d think he’d get that all the time.”
Nick looked up at the Eiffel Tower. It had just opened for tourists again. The first lifts had gone up and people were already getting in line for the next.
“Does your professor have any more ideas on where we’re going?” Nick asked.
“He’s had a chance to do a little more research since we talked at the safe house. Apparently, there’s this other Nazi map, called the ‘Lue Map,’ brought to America just before the war by a Nazi or at least a Nazi sympathizer. The history is kind of hazy, but Professor Lewis thinks we’re working with something based on the same idea as the Lue Map. It’s actually different pieces of one master map that need to be collected and put together. Even when you do that, you end up with a complex code that has to be deciphered before you can follow the directions.”
“So what does this mean for us?”
“It means that the banner on the right side was probably a pointer to the next section of the map. The key ‘locator’ symbol, he said, was over that Nazi slogan. I had to describe it to him to help him remember what it looked like. I forgot the name he had for it, but it represents the sun.”
Nick looked back up at the tower, shielding his eyes from the bright morning sunlight. “Still not getting it.”
“It means up, Nick. The highest point on the tower. That’s where we have to go.”
Nick blinked away the glare, looked at his father.
“At least, that’s where I’m going to go,” Quentin said.
“Not going to happen, Dad. This time, it’s my turn.”
* * *
Kate placed her unloaded Glock, a box of 9mm shells, and her Ontario MK 3 knife into her hard travel case and locked it. As she waited in the baggage check line at Charles de Gaulle Airport, she knew she would have twelve uninterrupted hours in the air. Twelve hours to consider the end of her career and just how badly Nick had betrayed her.
It had always been a complex relationship between the two of them. As much as she tried to keep it professional, there was always something more. There had been moments when she had let him get close to her, in spite of her best judgment. There was that one time when she had come home to find that he had broken into her apartment and had left a trail of Toblerones leading to him. He definitely knew the quickest way to her heart.
To add insult to injury, she would be flying on the FBI dime, which meant “Economy Comfort” instead of the automatic first-class upgrade whenever she traveled with Nick. So maybe six inches of extra leg room. No fully reclinable seat that felt like a La-Z-Boy chair, no gourmet food, no free cocktails. Even though it was morning here in Paris, it was whatever-the-hell time it was back in Los Angeles and she really wanted something to drink.
When she reached the front of the line, she put the travel case on the scale and told the ticket agent about the weapons that were inside it, as required by law. As the agent printed her luggage tag, Kate found herself picturing two squirrels sitting on another airplane, surely already off the ground by now, flying toward the South Pacific. In first class, of course, toasting Quentin Squirrel’s new life. Next, she pictured herself as a badger, sitting in Economy, eating a bag of broken, stale pretzels. A badger, she thought, who should be out chasing squirrels. And one of those squirrels just told her he hopes to see her soon.
“You lousy son of a bitch!” she said out loud. Way too loud. The agent looked at her like he’d been slapped across the face.
“I’m so sorry,” Kate said. “I was talking about someone else. Can I get that bag back?”
The agent had just put the tag on it and was about to drop it onto the belt.
“I need it back,” Kate said. “Please.”
He hesitated again, then gave it back to her. “Is there a problem, ma’am?”
“Yes, I’m a total idiot! Badgers don’t get on airplanes, they chase squirrels!”
She turned and pushed her way through the people in line behind her. The agent called after her, but she didn’t break stride.
“Idiot, idiot, idiot!” she said, all the way out the door. A few minutes later, she was in a taxi, heading back to the Eiffel Tower.
* * *
Quentin Fox opened up his messenger bag. The security guard took a quick look through it and pulled out the largest medical inhaler he’d ever seen.
“That’s for my asthma,” Quentin said. “Just in case. It’s very high up there.”
The guard put the inhaler back into the bag and let him through. Quentin and Nick took one of the first lifts to the intermediate level.
“Do you know what I’m going to be looking for?” Nick asked.
“I told you, you’re not doing this.”
“I’m not letting you climb the Eiffel Tower, Dad. Watching you jump off that dome was bad enough.”
Quentin thought about it. “Have to admit, that was pretty terrifying.”
“So it’s settled, my turn today. Just tell me what I’m looking for.”
“I was hoping to figure that out when I got up there. Something that could hold an old piece of paper inside it. For seventy-five years.”
“No problem,” Nick said. “Piece of gâteau.”
When they got to the first deck, they went directly to the next set of lifts.
“That was quite a highlight reel they showed us in the Interpol briefing,” Nick said. “Cairo, Barcelona, Cyprus.”
“Cairo was my first. They had just recruited me. I sold a rug to an arms dealer. God, was I nervous.”
“So how do you go from selling a rug to a bad guy to a part-time secret career as a spy?”