A Long Night in Paris^The must-read thriller from the new master of spy fiction by Dov Alfon

Author:Dov Alfon [Alfon, Dov]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780857058829
Publisher: Quercus
Published: 2019-01-09T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 59

Georges Lucas arrived at Le Grand Hôtel two minutes before his evening shift, as he had done every working day for the past twenty years. He shook the hand of his colleague from the morning shift, who as usual was in a hurry to make it to the R.E.R. before rush hour. They had been working together for more than a decade, and had never exchanged more than brisk pleasantries during shift rotation.

The security room was a presidential suite that had been converted into a surveillance centre. On all four walls hung the screens of the dozens of cameras scattered around the hotel, though no-one actually monitored them in the hotel itself anymore; that was the job of global headquarters, which hired employees for that purpose from less expensive countries than France. Lucas set his rucksack down on the bed, which would be used by the employee who would replace him at midnight. He took out his reading glasses and a bottle of mineral water before turning to the main computer.

He went through the list of messages. A warning had been sent from the chain’s American headquarters regarding a con artist posing as an Italian duke who had already managed to pull one over on three of the chain’s hotels in Brussels, Hong Kong and Buenos Aires. There was also a query from another of the chain’s Paris hotels about an English guest who had stayed at Le Grand Hôtel in the past and was arousing suspicion by having, among other things, ordered since yesterday twenty-four bottles of champagne from room service.

In the hotel itself quite a few incidents had been registered in the course of the morning shift, which was generally the most troubled: a couple from Australia forgot their baby at reception when they checked into their room after a 24-hour flight, then squabbled over who would go back down to get him; a guest from Spain was injured in a car accident while photographing the Arc de Triomphe; and a guest from Germany insisted that an expensive ring had been stolen from her nightstand, even though the sensor logs clearly showed that the door to her room had not been opened since she entered it the previous evening.

Three messages awaited from Paris police headquarters. The first reported the early release from jail of a burglar who specialised in hotel room thefts, targeting the large chains; the second warned of road blocks in the Opéra district next week due to a movie shoot; the third was about the abduction of an Israeli passenger from Charles de Gaulle airport that morning, who had booked a room in a business hotel near the CeBit Fair in south Paris.

Lucas checked the reservations from Israel. A hundred and fourteen new guests had checked into the hotel today, and three of those rooms had been booked from Israel. An additional Israeli guest showed up at reception without a reservation, standard behaviour when Lucas had first started working in the hotel industry, but which nowadays was regarded as suspicious.

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