The Paris Vendetta Read Free

slid down the slick brass rail to the next landing. No sense announcing his presence with more creaks from other wooden risers.
    Carefully, he glanced down into the void.
    Dark and quiet.
    He slid to the next landing and worked his way around to where he could spy the third floor. Amber lights from Højbro Plads leaked in through the building’s front windows and lit the space beyond the doorway with an orange halo. He kept his inventory there—books bought from people who, every day, lugged them in by the boxload. “Buy for cents, sell for euros.” That was the used-book business. Do it enough and you made money. Even better, every once in a while a real treasure arrived inside one of the boxes. Those he kept on the second floor, in a locked room. So unless someone had forced that door, whoever was here had fled into the open third floor.
    He slid down the last railing and assumed a position outside the third-floor doorway. The room beyond, maybe forty by twenty feet, was littered with boxes stacked several feet high.
    “What do you want?” he asked, his back pressed to the outer wall.
    He wondered if it had only been the dream that had sparked his alert. Twelve years as a Justice Department agent had certainly stamped paranoia on his personality, and the last two weeks had taken a toll—one he hadn’t bargained for but had accepted as the price of truth.
    “Tell you what,” he said. “I’m going back upstairs. Whoever you are, if you want something, come on up. If not, get the hell out of my shop.”
    More silence.
    He started for the stairs.
    “I came to see you,” a male said from inside the storage room.
    He stopped and noted the voice’s nuances. Young. Late twenties, early thirties. American, with a trace of an accent. And calm. Just matter-of-fact.
    “So you break into my shop?”
    “I had to.”
    The voice was close now, just on the other side of the doorway. He retreated from the wall and aimed the gun, waiting for the speaker to show himself.
    A shadowy form appeared in the doorway.
    Medium height, thin, wearing a waist-length coat. Short hair. Hands at his sides, both empty. The face blocked by the night.
    He kept the gun aimed and said, “I need a name.”
    “Sam Collins.”
    “What do you want?”
    “Henrik Thorvaldsen is in trouble.”
    “What else is new?”
    “People are coming to kill him.”
    “What people?”
    “We have to get to Thorvaldsen.”
    He kept the gun aimed, finger on the trigger. If Sam Collins so much as shuddered he’d cut him down. But he had a feeling, the sort agents acquired through hard-fought experience, one that told him this young man was not lying.
    “What people?” he asked again.
    “We need to go to him.”
    He heard glass break from below.
    “Another thing,” Sam Collins said. “Those people. They’re coming after me, too.”

TWO
    BASTIA, CORSICA
1:05 AM
    G RAHAM A SHBY STOOD ATOP THE P LACE DU D UJON AND ADMIRED the tranquil harbor. Around him, crumbly pastel houses were stacked like crates among churches, the olden structures overshadowed by the plain stone tower that had become his perch. His yacht, Archimedes , lay at anchor half a kilometer away in the Vieux Port. He admired its sleek, illuminated silhouette against the silvery water. Winter’s second night had spawned a cool dry wind from the north that swept across Bastia. A holiday stillness hung heavy, Christmas was only two days away, but he could not care less.
    The Terra Nova, once Bastia’s center of military and administrative activity, had now become a quarter of affluence with lofty apartments and trendy shops lining a maze of cobbled streets. A few years ago, he’d almost invested in the boom, but decided against it. Real estate, especially along the Mediterranean shoreline, no longer brought the return it once had.
    He gazed northeast at the Jetée du Dragon, an artificial quay that had not existed just a few decades ago. To build it, engineers had destroyed a giant