The Paris Vendetta (Cotton Malone 5) by Berry Steve

Author:Berry, Steve [Berry, Steve]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Paris (France), Vendetta, Cotton (Fictitious Character), Fiction, Malone, Americans, Thrillers, Suspense, General, Booksellers and Bookselling, Antiquarian Booksellers
ISBN: 9780345525574
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Published: 2009-01-02T05:00:00+00:00

“Let us say that he’s aroused my curiosity. Are you free tomorrow? The club is gathering for an important session.”

“I’m a Jew. Christmas is not a holiday for me.”

“Nor me. We meet in the morning, in La Sal e Gustav Eiffel, on the first platform of the tower, at eleven. They have a lovely banquet room, and we have a lunch planned after we talk.”

“Sounds wonderful.”

“I shal see you then.”

She clicked off the phone.

Tomorrow.

A day she’d been anticipating for a long time. She planned to ful y explain to her cohorts what the parchments had taught her family. Some of which she’d related to Thorvaldsen at lunch, but she’d intentional y not mentioned a caveat. In a peace-based society, with no war, stimulating mass fear through political, sociological, ecological, scientific, or cultural threats could prove nearly impossible. No attempt, so far, had ever carried sufficient credibility or magnitude to work for long. Something like black plague, which had threatened on a global scale, came close, but a threat such as that, conceived from unknown conditions, with little or no control, was impractical.

And any threat would have to be containable.

After al , that was the whole idea. Scare the people into obeying—then extract profit from their fear. The better solution was the simplest. Invent the threat. Such a plan came with a multitude of advantages. Like a dimmer switch on a chandelier that could be adjusted into infinite degrees of intensity. Thankful y, in today’s world, a credible enemy existed and had already galvanized public sentiment.

Terrorism.

As she’d told Thorvaldsen, that precise threat had worked in America, so it should work anywhere.

Tomorrow she’d see if the parchments were correct.

What Napoleon had wanted to do, she would now do.

For two hundred years her family had profited from the political misfortunes of others. Pozzo di Borgo deciphered enough from the parchments to teach his children, as they’d taught theirs, that it truly did not matter who made the laws—control the money and you possess real power.

To do that, she needed to control events.

Tomorrow would be an experiment.

And if it worked?

There’d be more.

FORTY-THREE

LONDON

6:40 PM

ASHBY SEARCHED THE DARKNESS AND THE HUNDRED OR SO faces for a green-and-gold Harrods scarf. Most of the people surrounding him were clearly tourists, their guide yel ing something about the feel of gaslight and fog and August 1888 when Jack the Ripper struck terror into drink-sodden East End prostitutes.

He grinned.

The Ripper seemed to interest only foreigners. He wondered if those same people would pay money in their own countries to be taken on a tour of a mass murderer’s haunts.

He was on the city’s east side, in Whitechapel, walking down a crowded sidewalk. To his left, across a busy street, rose the Tower of London, its taupe-colored stones awash in sodium vapor light. What was once an enormous moat was now a sea of emerald winter grass. A cold breeze eased inland off the nearby Thames, with the Tower Bridge lighted in the distance.

“Good evening, Lord Ashby.”

The woman who appeared beside

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