Kill Shot

Chapter 6
COMMANDANT Francine Neville of the French Judicial Police stood amidst the carnage holding a cup of coffee in one hand and desperately wishing she had a cigarette in the other. Her people were picking through the slaughter with gloved hands and various tools. A photographer stood in the doorway clicking away. Neville was momentarily conscious of the fact that she wasn't wearing any makeup and her hair, which she wore in a swooping bob midway between her ears and shoulders, was probably sticking out in a way that made her look slightly deranged. She'd been to enough crime scenes over the years, though, to know it was a waste of time to worry. If this crime was ever solved, and brought to court, she would have to endure the less-than-flattering photos with the rest of her team, who had all been yanked from their beds before sunrise.

Neville was good at her job. She had risen quickly through the ranks of the National Police, both in spite of the fact that she was a woman and because she was a woman. Political pressures had ushered in the brave new age of women in positions of command and Neville knew there were still plenty of misogynists around who thought the only reason she'd made commandant at the relatively young age of thirty-seven was that the bosses had to reach their quota. She ignored all of the whispers, focused on her job, and took comfort in the fact that the men she worked with knew she was qualified and had earned her position. On nights like this, however, she questioned why she had chosen police work.

Neville's face was a pinched scowl as she surveyed the chaos. This one would be a real circus. She had a fat naked man in the bed with a skinny woman half his age lying next to him. Both were dead - riddled with bullets. Four more men, paramilitary types by the look of them, were also strewn about the floor. These bodies were relatively intact, with only one or two slugs in them. Down the hall, two more bodies were sprawled out in separate doorways. Neville figured they were hotel guests who had heard the commotion, and when they'd gone to investigate, had been killed by the crazy bastards who had done all of this. Also, an unfortunate young employee of the hotel who did the overnight laundry was now prostrate in the alley with five bullet holes in his chest. Neville tallied the carnage - nine bodies in total. In her sixteen years on the force, the biggest investigation she'd been involved in was a triple homicide. It was of course a love triangle, murder-suicide. While sensational, the case was not hard for the press and public to figure out. Wife cheats on husband, husband kills wife and her boyfriend, and then kills himself. It wasn't the first such murder, and it wouldn't be the last.

This was an entirely different scenario. The number of victims pushed her mind in two separate but linked directions. They'd had a real problem with the Slav gangs that had flooded into the slums after Yugoslavia fell apart and spiraled into civil war, and now the Russian gangs with their newfound independence were beginning to assert themselves. As always, she would need to keep her mind open, but those two groups were at the top of her list.

Gnawing at the back of her mind were two other entities - her superiors at the National Police headquarters and the press. Submachine-gun fire at a five-star hotel in the heart of Paris was sensational enough; throw in the nine dead bodies and she was guaranteed a media circus the likes of which the city hadn't seen since the Dreyfus Affair. Her superiors would find it nearly impossible not to interfere and she already knew how they would do it. A few would try to micromanage her investigation and the bulk would spend their lunches leaking to the press.

Anxiety crept up on Neville as she realized this entire mess could end her career. Her attention turned to the dead man lying on the bed. It was something out of one of those American mobster movies. Feathers and tufts of fabric were everywhere, and a good amount of it was clinging to puddles of blood. She looked to the four paramilitary types on the floor. They could easily be Serbs or Croats. They had that swarthy look. Neville had sent one of her officers down to the front desk to find out whose name the room was registered under. She heard a cackle of grating laughter from the hallway, and a moment later a man appeared in the doorway, stopped, and looked down at one of the dead bodies.

If Neville needed any confirmation that she was in the middle of a shit storm, it was now standing in the doorway. She had hoped to get through the rest of her life without ever seeing Paul Fournier again, and she had made it nearly four years, but tonight her luck had run out. Fournier was DGSE - France's General Directorate for External Security. It was the organization tasked with the external security of the country - the key word being external. Neville had a sinking feeling that Fournier was here because of the man in the bed. As her gaze shifted between the two men, one dead and the other alive, she knew that this case had just become infinitely more complicated.

"Francine," Fournier called far too loudly from across the room. "A pleasure to see you. It's been far too long."

Neville sighed and said, "Paul, what are you doing here?"

"You know how things work at the Directorate," he said with a broad grin under a salt-and-pepper mustache. "We go wherever the Republic needs us."

"I thought you specialized in subverting the unstable governments to our south."

Fournier laughed heartily and stepped carefully around the dead bodies. When he was a step away from Neville, he held out his arms as if he was ready to embrace an old friend.

Neville shuddered at the thought of touching him. With a frown on her oval face she put out her right hand, signaling him to keep his distance. His audacity had certainly not diminished over the years. "Why are you here?"

Fournier let the wounded look fall from his face and began patting the pockets of his gray trench coat in search of something. A moment later, he fished out a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. He lit one and then extended the cigarette to Neville.

The gall of this man, she thought to herself. When she had first met Fournier, nine years ago, she had been drawn to his confidence, but in the end, she realized that what looked like confidence was actually the facade of a cold, calculating, manipulative, selfish prick. Straining to keep her cool, she shook her head at the offer and said, "Why is everything so difficult with you?"

"I'm sorry?" he asked, pretending to not understand.

She shrugged. "I ask you a simple question, but you refuse to answer."

Fournier suddenly looked offended. "Come now, my dear Francine. I know things did not end well between us, and I am sorry for that, but it was what . . . ten years ago? Surely we can be professional about this."

She ignored the fact that he was off by six years and instead focused on a thousand things she'd like to say to the jerk. All of them would have felt good, would have been accurate, and they would all have been a mistake. Accuracy and truth had no sanctity to Fournier. For him they were devices to be used to advance his agenda and schemes. He would obfuscate and claim the mantle of victim no matter how egregious his sins. Engaging him was exactly what he wanted. "Paul, I am being completely professional about this. That is why I asked you why you are here. This is my crime scene. Directorate of Security or not, I need to know why you are here."

"Fair enough," Fournier said in an easy tone. He exhaled a cloud of smoke and turned to the bed. "Do you have any idea who that is?"

Neville was suddenly very angry with the officer she had sent down to the front desk to find the answer to this exact question. She straightened a bit and said, "I do not."

The answer brought a smile to Fournier's face. "Well, let's see." He wheeled back toward the dead bodies and said, "Four men with suppressed automatic weapons, all dead." Gesturing to the bed he continued, "An overweight man in his sixties and a skinny young woman less than half his age . . . most likely a prostitute."

Neville acted bored. The conclusions were obvious. She was tempted to say so, but knew the less she said the better. Fournier had his stage, and he needed to play out this little game in order to diminish her in front of her men. "The man's name?" she asked in a dispassionate voice.

"I'm getting there," Fournier said, holding up a cautionary finger. "Six bodies. That's rather a lot."

Neville didn't bother to correct him and tell him about the other three bodies. She would offer as little information as possible in hopes that the spook from Directorate of Security would get what he was looking for and leave.

As Fournier continued to analyze the obvious, his eyes were busy noting the more interesting aspects of the crime scene. There were certain incongruities that Neville and her team would eventually notice, but for now, it was hard to see the proverbial trees through the forest. He placed himself in the room when it all went down. Looked at the shattered glass headboard, the bullet-pocked plaster wall, and the two bodies on the bed, riddled with bullets. Brass shell casings littered the floor. Hundreds of rounds had been fired. That the assassin had escaped was a miracle. Fournier looked at the nearest man on the floor and noted the precise location of the bullet hole in his forehead, and couldn't help but nod in respect for the man whose aim had stayed so steady under a fusillade of bullets.

"The man's name?" Neville asked again.

Fournier approached the bed. He looked down at the heavyset man, noted more than a dozen shallow entry wounds, and then his eyes found the near-perfect dot just above the minister's nose. That would have come from their assassin. Fournier inhaled deeply and waved his cigarette at the bed. "That, my dear, is Tarek al-Magariha."

Neville waited for him to expand. It was a long moment that grew longer, and when she tired of the wait, she asked, "And who is Tarek al-Magariha?"

"He is Libya's oil minister, and these men I presume are, or I should say were, his bodyguards."

Neville closed her eyes for a moment and clenched her fists. Serbian and Russian gangsters killing each other was one thing - it wasn't good, but to a certain extent the good people of Paris didn't care as long as they were killing each other. A foreign diplomat, however, was an entirely different mess. A Libyan diplomat was even worse, and their oil minister the worst of all. Neville didn't know the exact number, but she knew her country received a large portion of its oil imports from the country across the Mediterranean.

"Any idea who killed him?" She found herself asking the question before she could stop herself, and she instantly regretted it, for she knew Fournier was incapable of telling her the truth.

"No idea at the moment, but the usual suspects will be looked at."

"The usual suspects?"

"The Israelis . . . a few others." Fournier knew much more than he was letting on, but he wasn't about to tell someone from the National Police that al-Magariha had spent most of his career working for Libya's brutal intelligence service, the Mukhabarat el-Jamahiriya.

Neville eyed Fournier with suspicion. All of her instincts told her he was holding back information. "How did you find out so quickly?"

"Quickly?"

"That he'd been murdered."

Fournier flashed her a proud smile. "I have my sources."

Neville wondered if the DGSE had had the Libyan under surveillance. She was about to ask the question but thought better of it. He would never give her an honest answer. She would pass her suspicions on to her bosses, and they could lock horns with the higher-ups at DGSE. "I'm still a bit confused as to why you are here."

"We have a dead foreign diplomat, my dear. I would think you would understand the need for the Directorate to be involved."

Neville gave him nothing.

Fournier shrugged. "Well, my superiors want me to keep a very close eye on your investigation, so we will be seeing quite a bit of each other."

Neville's light brown eyes were fixated on the inch-long piece of ash that was precariously dangling from the end of Fournier's cigarette. "This is a crime scene. I don't care how much clout you think you have, if that ash hits the carpet, I will have you handcuffed and removed."

"Sorry," Fournier said, wide-eyed, as if he'd suddenly realized his mistake. He held a hand under the ash as he made his way to the balcony door. With light breaking in the morning sky, he could see the bullet holes in the curtain. He shouldered his way through the curtains and out onto the small balcony. Fournier flipped the ash over the edge and followed it down to the sidewalk. The police barricades were up and a few members of the press and curious onlookers were beginning to gather. Word would continue to spread and this place would be a circus by midmorning. He turned his head toward the roof and took note of the fact that his man had retrieved the rope before the police had figured out it was there. Fournier wasn't sure how much more he could do to help muddy the waters, but he did know he needed to get out of here before too many cameras showed up.

He walked back into the hotel suite and began stepping around bodies. "Francine, I will be in touch. If you need me, you know where to find me."

Neville turned away from the examination of several shell casings on the near side of the bed. She felt a great sense of relief as she watched him leave the room, but then within a few seconds, asked herself why he was leaving so quickly. Something didn't feel right, and in that moment, Neville had final confirmation that Paul Fournier was going to be a major complication in an already complicated case.