Critical Mass Read Free Page B

Help!”
    Capretz turned around.
    â€œHelp me!” Leon shouted.
    Capretz came to the door, a puzzled look on his face that turned to concern when he didn’t see Gallimard.
    â€œIt’s your partner. He’s down. I think he’s had a heart attack.”
    Â 
    The Orly terminal was a madhouse. July and August were the traditional months when Parisians took their vacations, and they streamed out of the city in hordes.
    No one paid any particular attention to the three men who entered the main departures hall and went up to the offices on the mezzanine level. Two of them, Bob Roningen and Dor Cladstrup, were field officers from the CIA’s Paris Station. Beyond the fact they were both bulky, well-built men in their mid-forties, there was very little to distinguish them from the average businessmen. Nor, apparently, was anything bothering them at the moment. They were doing something totally routine.
    The third man, however, was extremely nervous, glancing over his shoulder from time to time as if he suspected someone was following them. He was Jean-Luc DuVerlie, an electro-mechanical engineer for the Swiss firm of ModTec, GmbH, and he was frightened that the information he’d come to Paris to give the CIA would cost him his life. He was having second thoughts about it.
    They went down a short corridor, and at the far end Cladstrup knocked at the unmarked door.
    DuVerlie looked back the way they had come, and Roningen shook his head.
    â€œThere’s no one back there. We came in clean.”
    â€œBut it is not your life at risk,” the Swiss engineer said, his English good, but heavily accented. He was barrel-chested with a square face and extremely deep-set eyes beneath thick, bushy eyebrows. He looked like a criminal, or an ex-boxer who’d been beaten too many times in the ring.
    â€œYou came to us, remember?” Cladstrup said evenly.
    DuVerlie nodded. “Maybe this was a mistake.”
    â€œFine,” Roningen said, holding out his hands. “Why don’t we just call it quits here and now? You go your way and we go ours.”
    â€œThey would kill me. Within twenty-four hours I would be a dead man. I have explained this. You don’t know these people.”
    â€œNeither do you.”
    â€œI know what they are capable of doing. I told you, I saw it with my own eyes.”
    â€œWhen you show us, we’ll go from there,” Cladstrup said, as the door was buzzed open. They went inside where they turned over their plane tickets and passports to the French passport control officer behind a desk. A second policeman, armed, stood to one side.
    â€œYou’re booked on flight 145 for Geneva, is that correct?” the passport officer asked stamping the exit visas.

    â€œThat’s right,” Roningen said.
    The cop looked up at DuVerlie with mild interest, then handed back their documents. “It leaves in thirty minutes. There is coffee and tea in the waiting area. Maurice will show you the way and he will stay with you until it is time to board. You will be the last on the aircraft. And please do not try to leave the waiting area until you are told. Comprenez-vous? Do you understand?”
    â€œYes, thank you,” Roningen said, and they followed the second officer out where they took another corridor nearly the length of the terminal building to a small but pleasantly furnished VIP lounge. The windows overlooked the flight line where the plane they would board would be pulling up momentarily. No one else was using the lounge this morning.
    A telephone on the wall buzzed, and the cop answered it.
    â€œAfter you have seen their weapons cache, as I have, then you will have to believe me,” DuVerlie said.
    â€œIt’ll be a start,” Roningen said. “And the body.”
    â€œIt’s there unless the police have discovered it. Leitner was an important engineer. Perhaps the best at ModTec.”
    â€œWhat was he giving those