Suspects(51)
They tied her hands behind her, and she was making muffled sounds, which weren’t loud enough for Franck and her driver to hear her in the kitchen. Just as they reached the windows, there was an explosion of sound near her ear, and she saw the leader standing only inches from her, with his brain exploding from his head. He’d been shot in the head, and pitched forward, his brain splattering all over her face and chest, his blood splashing everywhere as he collapsed. There was a second explosion immediately, then two more, and the two men carrying her collapsed behind her—one dead, and the other shot in the shoulder and the back of his leg. Both were lying on the floor in a pool of blood, as she stood there trying to scream, with her hands behind her back, and the tape over her mouth, shaking violently as Franck and Christophe, her driver, came running into the room, while the three remaining movers fled through the long French windows they were intending to use as an exit to carry her to the truck.
Her two employees looked wild-eyed, there was blood everywhere and through the window they could see the French DGSE agent in hot pursuit of the three men, shooting at them as they leapt into the moving truck and took off at full speed. He was certain he had wounded one of them, and the one he had injured in the living room was too badly hurt to move. The other two were dead.
As soon as the truck sped off, he called in the description and license plate to his superiors, reported what had happened, and rushed back into the house to make sure that Theo wasn’t hurt. She was badly shaken and sitting on the floor, the tape and rope binding her hands removed. She sat between the two dead men, and the DGSE man put handcuffs on the injured man who’d been shot in the shoulder and leg. The agent had saved Theo’s life, and had been chosen for the detail for his expert marksman skills. He was well aware of the risk he had taken, shooting so close to her, but he was certain that if they took her, they would kill her sooner or later, probably after they got the ransom again. His shooting the foreman in the head had been an act of desperation, which had saved her.
She had bits of the dead man’s brain all over her, and blood smeared everywhere. The agent knelt beside her to make sure she wasn’t hurt, and he asked her questions while carefully examining her. She was untouched. The bullet had gone right past her into its intended target.
“I’m sorry,” the agent said kindly. “I had no choice, before they took you.”
“Thank you,” she said in a shaking voice. “I’m okay.” She looked like she was about to faint. There was a pool of blood soaking into the Persian carpet, and more splashed on the upholstery. The agent helped her to her feet to lead her away from the bodies and the injured kidnapper, then asked Franck to take her to the kitchen and sit her in a chair. Her legs could hardly hold her as he walked her to the kitchen with an arm around her waist. The agent remained with his gun pointed at the injured kidnapper.
They could hear sirens in the distance by then. A moment later, the driveway was filled with police cars and an ambulance. And moments after that, an unmarked DGSE car arrived with two senior agents. The injured kidnapper was bleeding profusely but not at risk of dying, and a police paramedic tended to him. They wanted a statement from him before they took him away. They put him on a gurney where the DGSE sergeant gave him the opportunity to confess and inform on his co-conspirators, only to discover that he spoke no French and only Russian.
“Get us a translator,” the agent in charge said harshly. “I want to know where the others are going.” They hadn’t loaded anything on the truck yet, so nothing had been stolen. Theo realized then that she had heard the foreman’s accent but hadn’t made the connection that these men were the same nationality as the original kidnappers, and possibly the same ones. She had been too overwhelmed by memories of Axel and Matthieu to pay close attention to them.
It was all a blur of activity after that. A forensics team arrived to collect fingerprints and samples of DNA to see if there was a match with Matthieu and Axel’s kidnappers. Theo remained in the kitchen, and various people came to talk to her, including a female police sergeant and the senior DGSE agent. Franck helped her clean off some of the blood and brought her a clean sweater from one of her suitcases, her jeans were soaked through with blood and her shoes were covered with it, but all of her clothes were packed.
Somewhere in the melee, Guy Thomas appeared and was very kind to her. She told him everything she had observed. She said that they hadn’t worn gloves while handling the art, and he assured her they would get fingerprints from the frames, and the police uncrated everything they’d packed while the forensics team went to work.
The DGSE marksman assigned to her had saved her life. But there were still three of the kidnappers at large, one of them possibly badly injured.
“We’ll find them. We want to know if they’re the same men who kidnapped your husband and son,” he said, and she nodded. Guy had already advised Robert Richmond about what had happened. The British police and MI6 would be looking for them and for any information they could get from their informants all the way to Moscow.
Guy told her she could go home, and they would be in touch with her. He was going to provide four agents to protect her, until the remaining three kidnappers were caught, however long that took. As her own men drove her away, Guy called Mike Andrews in New York. It was three o’clock in Paris by then, nine a.m. in New York, and Mike had just gotten to his office and had his hands full with his own serious cases at the moment. The natives were restless these days, particularly in the drug world. They were waiting for a shipment to hit New York, via Bolivia, and Mike was determined to stop the activities of a particularly bad gang of Colombians he’d been trying to catch for two years.