Echo of War by Grant Blackwood Page A

know.”
    â€œThe question is,” Latham said, “do the kidnappers know that?”
    The discussion continued for a few more minutes before coming around to the media storm the kidnapping was sure to create. Oliver told the group, “We’ve assigned an FBI spokesperson to Mr. Root; she’ll pose as a family attorney. For his part, Mr. Root’s agreed to not speak to the press without checking with us first. Whoever these people are, they’ll be watching the television.”
    The FBI director nodded and looked around. “Any questions?” There were none. “Mr. Barber, Ms. Fitzpatrick, Charlie, thanks for coming. I’ll be sure to keep you updated.”
    Once the room was empty except for McBride and Oliver, the director leaned back in his chair and sighed. “Jesus.”
    â€œYeah,” said Oliver.
    â€œWhat’s this about physical evidence?” asked McBride.
    â€œWe’ve got boot prints,” Oliver replied. “Inside and out. Whether they’ll be enough to point us somewhere, I don’t know. The lab’s working on them.”
    â€œWhat about the bodies?”
    â€œThe coroner should have something for us this afternoon, but his first impression was the bullets used were soft-nosed. We’ll be lucky to recover anything bigger than a sliver.”
    Score another one for the bad guys, McBride thought Oliver was right—these people were professionals, from top to bottom. An image popped into his head: One by one, each of the Roots’ guards ambushed from behind, made to kneel in the dirt, feeling the cold steel of the barrel against the back of his head … Joe suppressed a shiver.
    Oliver’s cell phone trilled. He answered, listened, then hung up. “They’ve found something near the scene,” he explained, then looked at McBride. “You up for a ride?”
    â€œLet’s go.”

5
    Paris, France
    Knowing time was against him, Tanner booked a pair of tickets on the Concorde. Flying at Mach 2 and sixty thousand feet, the supersonic plane would make the Atlantic crossing in half the time of standard commercial flights. Whether an extra five hours would make a difference, Tanner wasn’t sure, but with Susanna’s trail two weeks old he needed every advantage he could get, real or notional.
    Three hours and twenty minutes after leaving New York, the Concorde began a banking descent, circling Paris and heading northeast toward Charles de Gaulle. Tanner glanced out the window, picking out landmarks below: the Arc de Triomphe surrounded by its wagon wheel of radiating streets; Notre Dame cathedral with its Gothic flying buttresses jutting from the middle of the Seine; the Institut de Monde Arabe, its glass wall of sixteen hundred photosenstive irises winking in the sun like a sheet of faceted diamonds; and of course the ubiquitous Eiffel Tower and its gridwork of brown steel rising a thousand feet above the skyline.
    Paris is split roughly in half by the Seine, with the Left and Right Banks—the Rive Gauche and the Rive Droite—serving not only as geographical dividers but also cultural, though such differences have faded into cliché over time. Where the Left Bank was once traditionally home to struggling artists and the poor and the Right Bank was reserved for the well heeled and socially elite, the lines have blurred. Prostitutes are as likely to be seen strolling the steps of the Louvre as they are in a back alley of the Latin Quarter.
    Surrounded by a ring highway called the Peripherique and divided into twenty arrondissements, or municipal wards, which begin at the city’s center and spiral clock-wise outward, Paris is in many ways twenty cities within a city, as each arrondissement has its own mayor, police, and fire department, as well as its own web of customs and traditions.
    For Tanner, of all the European cities he’d visited, none had the same feel of Paris, a finely balanced