Blood Pact (McGarvey) by Hagberg David

Author:Hagberg, David [Hagberg, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates
Published: 2014-03-25T00:00:00+00:00

THIRTY-NINE

The CyberCafe du Monde, a few blocks from the Jardin du Luxembourg, was one of the very few Internet cafés in all of Paris that was open 24/7. Seedy with a dozen old and slow computers, it was the sort of place whose clerks didn’t give a damn why you wanted to go online. They only wanted their 2.80 euros per hour.

When al-Rashid, who’d found the place listed on his iPhone, showed up a few minutes after three in the morning only four of the machines were in use, three of them displaying kiddy porn.

He paid for two hours, took a machine near the back door, and when it was connected brought up the website for Agence France-Presse and entered Robert Chatelet, histoire. Every man had a vulnerable spot, an Achilles’ heel, and al-Rashid figured that the vice mayor of Paris and the leading candidate for president of France was no exception.

For thirty minutes he plowed through two dozen speeches and position papers published on behalf of the Parti socialiste, the PS, when Chatelet had switched from the center-right Union for Popular Movement because of what was being called the growing Muslim problem, which had come to the fore when a law had been passed banning the burqa—the facial covering for women.

Chatelet’s position had not been unique: France for the French, purity of the language and customs, individuals on the world stage. Second to no people, to no nation.

Switching to the AFP’s photo archive, he scanned shots of Chatelet as early as December 2004 in one of a group dedicating the opening of the stunning Millau Bridge over the River Tarn in the Massif Central mountains of Southern France, and as late as groundbreaking for the Lavallette Dam in Saint-Etienne in 2012, and La Tour Bois-le-Pretre, which was a public housing project at the edge of Paris later the same year.

Al-Rashid brought up France 24, the global television news channel owned mostly by TF1—which was akin to CBS in the United States—but its archives yielded little more than what he’d picked up from AFP, except that he saw and heard the man. Chatelet was typically French, more or less undistinguished in stature and looks, but with a lovely wife who’d been a minor movie actress and model. His voice was rough, that of a smoker, and his French, to al-Rashid’s ear, was southern country, not at all refined.

But neither the politician nor the husband had made even the smallest of missteps, which after more than an hour of searching the Internet was the most interesting conclusion al-Rashid had come to. The man was lily-white. Too pure, too clean. It was as if he was either exceedingly careful, or extraordinarily lucky. No politician was that without sin.

He scanned the archives of France Diplomatie, which was a site hosted by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Le Monde Diplomatique, which was a left-wing monthly magazine, and even some of the English, ex-pat-oriented news outlets such as Paris Voice, Radio France Inernationale, Expatica.com-France, and the International Herald Tribune.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.