Paris Option by Robert Ludlum

Author:Robert Ludlum [Ludlum, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781409117667
Publisher: Orion Publishing Group
Published: 2010-08-15T04:00:00+00:00

Covert One 3 - The Paris Option

Chapter Twenty-one

Brussels, Belgium

Smith closed the cover of the last file folder, ordered a second Chimay ale, and sat back. He had dropped a note at the Cafeacute; Egmont, telling Randi to meet him at the cafeacute; Le Cerf Agile, where he was seated at a sidewalk table. It was his favorite cafeacute; in the rue St-Catherine area of the lower city, not far from the bourse and what had once been the banks of the river Senne when this part of Brussels was a port to hundreds of fishing vessels. As this was still a fish-market area, seafood remained the order of the day in bistros here, even though the river had long ago been boxed inside a manmade channel and bricked over to become the boulevard Anspach.

But the fish, the hidden river, and the food were far from Smith's mind as he took a long draft of his dark ale and looked around. No other patrons were sitting outside, since dark clouds still rolled occasionally across the sky. But the rain had stopped an hour ago, and when Smith had asked, the matre d' had wiped off this table and the two accompanying chairs. The other patrons had decided to take no chances that the heavens would open again in another deluge, which was fine with Jon.

He liked being out here alone, out of range of prying eyes and ears. He had changed out of his uniform after he left SHAPE and now looked like any tourist in his tan cotton slacks, open-necked tartan shirt, dark-blue sports jacket, and athletic shoes. The shoes were important, in case he had to run. The jacket was important, to hide his pistol. And the black trench coat he had slung over the back of his chair was important, because it helped him to blend with the night.

But now, as the sun fought the clouds for dominance of the afternoon sky, Jon was thinking about what he had learned at NATO. The file on Captain Darius Bonnard was revealing. Either La Porte did not know or he was protecting Bonnard by withholding the fact that Bonnard's current wifethe Frenchwoman that La Porte had so admiredwas not Bonnard's first: While serving in the legion, he had married an Algerian woman. Whether he had converted to Islam was unknown. However, even after being commissioned, he took all his leave time in Algiers, where the wife and her family lived. There was no information about why Bonnard had divorced her. Since there were no divorce documents in the file either, Jon was suspicious. Like sleeper spies or moles, terrorists often established new identities in target countries while maintaining entirely different lives elsewhere.

So Darius Bonnard, favored aide to NATO's Deputy Supreme Allied Commander, was a German serving in the French army, once married to an Algerian woman, now away somewhere in the South of Francenot all that far from Toledo.

Still pondering, Jon reached for his ale and gazed up just in time to see Randi paying off a taxi a half block away from the cafeacute;.

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.