I Am Pilgrim(29)

Nothing. What was stopping them? I guessed that, having lost me down at the place de la Madeleine, they had returned immediately to my apartment. Uncertain if I had arrived back yet, the knock on the door was an attempt to find out.

Just as well I hadn’t answered. I was almost certain there were two of them – that’s how many I would have used – and they were hiding right now near the elevator, waiting for me to return. That gave me a chance – if I entered by the front doors and took the stairs, I was pretty sure I could surprise them. I was never the best shot in my graduating class, but I was good enough to take them both out.

I slowed to a walk as I emerged from the lane, and ran a professional eye over the pedestrians, just to be certain that the guys inside didn’t have help on the street. I saw women on their way home from shopping at the luxury stores on avenue Montaigne, couples walking their dogs, a guy in a Mets cap with his back to me – a tourist by the look of it – window-shopping at the patisserie next to my building, but I didn’t see anyone who fitted the profile I had in mind. I turned to the vehicles and, equally, there was no white cab or shooters sitting in parked cars that I could see.

I moved up close behind a fifty-year-old woman in high heels and her boyfriend, twenty years her junior. They wouldn’t completely shield me from a sniper on a roof but they would certainly make the job more difficult. Under cover of them, I steadily closed down the distance to my building: eighty yards, forty, twenty …

As I passed the patisserie, the guy in the Mets cap spoke to my back: ‘Wouldn’t it have been easier just to open the fucking door, Mr Campbell?’

My heart stopped, every fear I had collapsing into the void that was once my stomach. In the next moment two distinct and contradictory thoughts fought for primacy. The first was: so this is how it ends? The retired agent outsmarted on a street in Paris, shot through the head, probably by somebody standing inside the patisserie. Vyshaya mera to me, I guess, bleeding out on the sidewalk, a man I don’t even know pocketing the gun as he and the guy in the Mets cap walk away to be picked up by – what else? – a white taxi.

The other thought was – there’s no way they’re killing me. Even if there was a shooter on a building or in a room at the Plaza Athenée hotel, the guy in the cap would have signalled silently and the marksman would have done his job. They don’t talk to you in the real world: only in movies do the bad guys have this pathological need to tell you their life story before they pull the trigger. Out here, there’s too much danger and your mind’s way too revved not to just get it over with. Look at Santorini.

Nevertheless, there was always a first time – so I still wasn’t sure whether to piss myself from fear or from relief. I looked at the man: he was a black guy in his fifties with a lean body and a handsome face, worn around the edges. More Reject China than fine Limoges, I told myself. This assessment was confirmed as he stepped a little closer and I realized he was limping badly on his right leg.

‘I think you called me Mr Campbell. You’re mistaken,’ I said in French, filling every syllable with my best imitation of Parisian disdain. ‘My name isn’t Campbell.’ I was buying time, trying to work out what was going on.

‘I guess that’s one thing we agree on,’ he said in English, ‘given that no Peter Campbell holds a Wall Street trading licence, and the hedge fund he manages doesn’t exist.’

How the hell did he know that? I shifted casually, putting him more squarely between me and the patisserie window.

‘So if you’re not Campbell, who are you?’ he went on. ‘Jude Garrett, FBI agent and author? Well, that’s difficult too – him being dead. Here’s another weird thing about Garrett,’ he said calmly. ‘I spoke to his cousin down in New Orleans. She was pretty amazed about his literary achievement – she doubted he ever read a book, let alone wrote one.’

He knew all this stuff about me, but I was still alive! That was the important point and he seemed to be missing it. I scanned the rooftops, trying to see if there was a sniper.

He watched my eyes, knowing what I was doing, but it didn’t affect his swing: ‘This is what I figure, Mr Campbell-or-whoever-you-are, you live under a fake identity but you wrote the book using a dead man’s name, just to be safe.

‘I think you worked for the government and only a handful of people know your real name. Maybe not even that many.

‘To me, that says it’s probably not wise to ask what kind of work you did but, the truth is, I don’t care. Your book is the best work on investigative technique I have ever read. I just want to talk about it.’