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  “Mon Dieu,” one of the doormen said, picking himself up. “Was it an oil truck?”

  “Did you see the flames?” the other asked, stunned.

  “That was no fuel truck,” Maria said, more to herself than to them, recognizing the blast for exactly what it was. She’d spent enough time under fire to know the difference between a fuel explosion and the blast of high explosives.

  Other guests were streaming out of the hotel now. “What the hell was that?” someone demanded.

  “It was a bomb, I think,” a woman cried.

  “A big one.”

  Carleton Reid, the American she’d met at Höehner’s table, emerged from the hotel at a dead run, skidding to a stop on the sidewalk, the distant flames reflecting vividly in his eyes. A taxi was just passing, and he rushed out into the street and hailed it, yanking open the rear door before it came to a complete stop.

  Maria roused herself and sprinted after him, grabbing the door before he could close it and forcing her way into the back seat with him.

  “Get the hell out of here!” he shouted.

  “I can help,” she said.

  Reid didn’t wait to consider his choices. “The American embassy, on the double,” he ordered the cabbie.

  Maria glanced over her shoulder as they sped away. The French cop, Gavalet, came out of the hotel, and she allowed herself a brief, little smile. She figured she would have a much better chance one-on-one with the American. She didn’t know what his relationship with Höehner was, but he might have some influence with the man. It was even possible he would have some indirect influence in Freiburg. There might be a lot of possibilities with the Americans, in view of the relationship they had with the Germans.

  The driver hauled the taxi around the corner onto the broad rue de Rivoli, almost losing the rear end in the slush. Some windows there had been shattered by the explosion, and a few cars and trucks had slid sideways to a halt.

  “Is it your embassy?” Maria asked. The flames shooting a hundred feet into the air seemed to be coming from somewhere beyond the Automobile Club.

  Reid, perched on the edge of his seat, intently stared through the windshield. “Probably,” he mumbled offhandedly. Then he turned and looked at her. “What the hell do you want?”

  “How do you know it’s your embassy, Senor Reid?” she asked.

  “I asked you a question, Ms. Schimmer,” Reid said sharply, his attention now completely fixed on her. “Who are you? Exactly what is it you want?”

  “Your help.”

  “I don’t get involved in treasure hunts.”

  “Just a word to Höehner, or even to the Germans at the records archives in Freiburg. It’s all I’m asking.”

  Reid glanced out the windshield again as they approached the Place de la Concorde. A large crowd was gathering and in the distance they could hear sirens, a lot of them. “In exchange for what?” he asked coldly. “What can you do for me?”

  “I’m an archaeologist. I know how to dig. And I’m a pretty fair nurse.”

  “No, thanks,” Reid said.

  They came out into the broad plaza and from there they could suddenly see the embassy. The entire rear section of the building had collapsed, filling the courtyard with hundreds of tons of debris. The front of the building leaned dangerously inward, apparently on the verge of falling. A huge tower of flame shot straight up into the air from the northeast corner of the massive pile of rubble. No one in that part of the building could have survived.

  “Sacre …” the driver said in awe, pulling around a big block of concrete lying in the middle of the street. He brought the cab to a halt at the police barricades that were hastily going up.

  Reid tossed a couple of bills over the front seat and leaped out of the cab. Maria scrambled after him.

  There was a lot of confusion. People continued to stream into the area, but from what she could see, no one had yet mounted any real attempt to rescue people who might be trapped in the burning building.

  Reid was stopped at the barriers by a pair of gendarmes and had to show his identification before they would let him through. They had seen Maria get out of the cab with him, and they said nothing to her as she slipped through directly after him.

  This close she could actually feel the heat from the flames. The wind had picked up and the snow was blowing into her face, yet the air was warm. A dozen or more people, most of them without coats or jackets, stood across the street. From their dazed expressions she figured they had come out of the building, possibly before the explosion, which meant they’d been warned.

  Reid cut across the edge of the square and rushed down the street. Three fire trucks raced from the rue Boissy-d’Anglas and screeched to a halt in the middle of the street. The firemen leaped from the trucks and immediately began pulling hoses and connecting them to the water supply.

  Reid stopped to look back. He held out his hand. “Go back,” he said, out of breath, and he turned and hurried the rest of the way up the street to where the people from the embassy were standing. He took off his jacket and draped it over the shoulders of one of the women as he had a hasty conference with a couple of the others.

  Maria hesitated about twenty yards away, as Reid crossed the street and entered the embassy. Then she headed after him.

  She’d just reached the stairs when he came back out, half carrying, half dragging a Marine whose uniform was in smoldering tatters. Blood streamed from dozens of cuts on the boy’s face and chest.

  She helped Reid bring the young man down to the sidewalk, away from the building, and lay him down. Then she took off her coat and covered him.

  “I told you to stay the hell away,” Reid said angrily.

  “There’s no time for that now,” she replied, stuffing her scarf inside the remnants of the young man’s tunic in an effort to staunch the greatest flow of blood. “Are there others inside?”

  More sirens were converging on the embassy, and hundreds of people continued to pour into the street and plaza. Already the police were having trouble keeping them back.

  Reid was obviously torn between ordering her away and accepting her help.

  “Madre,” she breathed. “No bargains. You can have my help for nothing, señor. But if there are people inside, they are dying.”

  “All right,” Reid said, getting to his feet. “But just stay the fuck off the third floor.”

  She looked at the building. “I don’t think there’s much of a third floor left,” she pointed out, but Reid was already sprinting up the stairs.

  One of the embassy women came over and took charge of the Marine. She had a vacant, stunned look on her face, yet she knelt down beside the Marine and gently began wiping the blood from his cheeks. She was the one to whom Reid had given his jacket.

  “What happened?” Maria asked.

  “It was a bomb on the second floor, I think.” She looked up at the building, her eyes and mouth opening in fear. “There have to be other people up there!” she cried. “Someone has got to help them!”

  “Just stay here,” Maria said soothingly. “Help is on its way. I promise you, it won’t be long now.”

  The woman nodded uncertainly. Maria rose and hurried up the walk and into the building.

  There was smoke everywhere, though it wasn’t as bad as she had feared it might be. Part of the ceiling on the east side of the main hall had collapsed. Desks and file cabinets from the first-floor offices lay in twisted heaps. Papers were scattered everywhere. She could see through the gaping hole all the way up to the second and third floors, and she could even see a section of night sky lit by flames.

  The stairway was partially blocked by debris blown down from the upper levels. She figured Reid had gone up that way. He was worried about the third floor. Whatever secrets were contained in the embassy, she figured, were probably up there. The Americans would be particularly sensitive just now, so she would have to be careful. She didn’t want to be shot to death by a trigger-happy Marine. Yet if she was going t
o win their respect and therefore their help, she was going to have to go where the need was greatest.

  At the bottom of the rubble-choked stairs she took off her boots and broke the high stacked heels against a piece of concrete. She put them back on, hiked up her long woolen skirt, and started up, scrambling over big chunks of ceiling, hunks of twisted steel, splintered wood, and shattered bricks, and books, papers, files, and newspapers.

  The stairway end of the corridor on the first floor was burning furiously, and the stairs leading to what remained of the second floor was shaky underfoot.

  She had to duck beneath a big oak beam and crawl on her hands and knees the last eight or ten feet. The corridor floor slanted away sharply toward the back of the building, and the heat and smoke were intense.

  She was conscious that her hands and knees were cut and bleeding. It was very hard to breathe, and she was beginning to think she had gotten in over her head, and that it might be wiser if she turned around and went back down, when Reid appeared in an office doorway halfway down the corridor.

  Through the smoke and flickering flames, it looked as if he was in trouble. He was dragging a body out of the office, but he seemed to be on the verge of collapse.

  “Wait!” she cried. She had just started forward, when what was left of the ceiling collapsed on her. The floor began to cant farther and farther back, the entire front of the building threatening to collapse into the burning mass of debris below in the courtyard.

  Maria’s legs were pushed painfully up against her chest, and she thought she might be upside down, though in the pitch-darkness she wasn’t sure.

  Smoke was very thick, and between it and the heavy pressure against her chest, she was becoming light-headed from lack of oxygen.

  It was stupid, she realized, but she was probably going to die here. But she wasn’t ready. Not yet. There was the other thing she had to finish first. Besides, she had never thought she would die without the chance of fighting back.

  All her life she’d had to fight back. To stand up for herself. She just knew this wasn’t the time or the place for her death.

  Except for the woman outside, no one knew she was here. And Reid was the only one who’d known her name. For a second or two, panic threatened to blot out rational thought and she struggled against whatever was holding her in place. A trickle of plaster dust ran down her leg and settled grittily between her thighs.

  “Madre de Dios,” she whispered.

  More dust streamed down from above her, and then pieces of brick and chunks of plaster and slivers of lath tumbled through a widening hole.

  The building was settling. She was going to be buried alive.

  “No!” she screamed. “Oh, God, no! Please help me!”

  Suddenly there was a light above her and she looked up between her knees as a hand came into view. She reached up.

  “Are you all right?” a man’s voice filtered down to her.

  “Oh, God, I don’t know!” she cried. “I think so. Help me, please!”

  “Any broken bones?”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “All right, just take it easy, and I’ll get you out of there. There’ll be some more dust and things falling down on you. But it’ll be okay.”

  “All right, all right. Just hurry, please!”

  The hand was withdrawn, and panic rose up in her breast. “Don’t go!” she screamed.

  “Easy,” he said. “The name is Kirk McGarvey, and I’m not going to leave you.”

  She looked up and suddenly she could see his face. He was smiling, and for some reason she thought that she was going to be all right.

  “What’s your name?” he asked, pulling away a big chunk of plaster.

  “Maria,” she gasped.

  “Well, Maria, after I get you out of here you’re going to owe me a drink. A deal?”

  “A deal,” she agreed.

  The opening was getting larger, and all of a sudden the pressure was off the soles of her feet and she could almost straighten her legs, and then McGarvey’s wonderfully strong hands were pulling her gently up through the opening.

  9

  MARIA LAY AT THE EDGE of the crazily canted stairs looking up at her rescuer, his broad face illuminated by the flames. “I thought I was going to die,” she said, her own voice somehow sounding far away.

  Her skirt was hiked up around her waist and her panty hose were in tatters, but she felt no sense of modesty with him. His hands were gentle as he wrapped his handkerchief around her leg, and then pulled down her skirt.

  “You’ll need stitches, but it doesn’t look so bad.”

  “Thank you,” she mumbled, and then she suddenly remembered Reid and the man he’d been dragging out of the office. With a little cry she struggled to sit up. “They were just down the hall …”

  But the corridor was gone, and for several seconds she had trouble getting her bearings. She’d been standing at the head of the stairs just within the second-floor corridor when Reid and the other man came out of the office twenty or thirty feet away.

  But now the office was gone. A huge pile of twisted rubble and plaster and wooden beams slanted up into the third floor, where she could see flames and other lights. The outside? She couldn’t tell. Everything was different, confusing.

  “Who was there?” McGarvey demanded.

  “Reid and another man. They were coming from an … office. There.” She pointed toward the pile of rubble that had collapsed from above.

  “Just the two of them?”

  “I think so,” she replied, a wave of dizziness and nausea passing over her. Again she almost panicked; only McGarvey’s strong hands holding her made her feel safe. “But they’re gone. The office is gone.”

  “Can you get back downstairs by yourself?”

  “I don’t know …”

  “Just hang on, then. I don’t want you hurting yourself any more than you already are,” McGarvey said, and he turned and crawled up onto the pile of debris that completely blocked the corridor. The entire section of the building shifted with his weight. He stopped short.

  Maria was watching him. “Is it going to fall down?”

  “I don’t know,” McGarvey said. Carefully he pulled himself the rest of the way up until he was lying on top of what might have been a collapsed wall. He was looking at something on the other side.

  “Can you see anything?” Maria called up to him.

  “A section of the corridor. Part of a doorway.”

  Someone came crawling up the shattered stairs and Maria turned. A Marine emerged from the narrow opening beneath the big oak beam. He carried a flashlight, and he shined the beam on her face.

  “Who the hell are you?” he demanded.

  “Maria Schimmer,” she said.

  “She’s hurt. Get her downstairs,” McGarvey called from his perch.

  The Marine shifted the beam of his flashlight toward McGarvey, the blank look on his face changing to one of incredulous anger. “Jesus H. Christ, now who the hell are you?” he shouted. “And what the hell are you people doing up here?” It was obvious he was frightened.

  “Your chief of security, Carleton Reid, and another man are buried back here. With any luck I might be able to dig them out before the rest of this floor collapses.”

  “I asked who you were!”

  “There’s no time for that,” McGarvey said. “Get her out of here. She needs medical attention.”

  “Get down from there …”

  “Listen, you stupid bastard, there are people dying back here.”

  The Marine started to reach for his pistol, but McGarvey pulled his Walther out first, pointed it at the Marine, and cocked the hammer.

  “It’s your choice, kid. There’s not much time to screw around.”

  The Marine looked from McGarvey to Maria and back again. “I can’t let you go up there, sir,” he said uncertainly.

  “There’s only one way out. Get the woman outside, and then guard the stairway if you want. But ha
ve your medical people standing by. I may be needing some help.”

  Still the Marine was uncertain.

  The floor shifted a few inches under his feet, and they could hear the sounds of falling rubble somewhere below them.

  “Will do,” the Marine said.

  “Where can I reach you when this is over?” McGarvey asked Maria.

  She could hardly believe it. “The Hotel Roblin on the Chauveau-Legarde,” she told him. “It’s not too far from here.”

  “I’ll find it,” he said. He holstered his gun and a second later he disappeared over the top, the floor shifting again and more debris rumbling below.

  Bob Graves was extremely cold. He was wedged in place beneath Carleton Reid’s body. They’d been halfway out the door when the ceiling had collapsed on top of them. Behind him the outer wall and most of the ceiling of the office was gone, and the wind blew snow around his head and shoulders. In addition, a great deal of water from somewhere was running along the steeply sloped floor, soaking his battered legs and back.

  For a long time he thought he was hearing sirens, but then he wasn’t certain, although intellectually he understood that by now there must be dozens of fire and police units around the embassy, and probably a thousand or more onlookers.

  Reid had shown up a few minutes after the explosion, and had started to drag him out of the office where the bodies of Berringer and Vaughan lay, when the ceiling had given way. Reid was dead; there was absolutely no doubt of it. The heavy lintel above the door had fallen on top of him, snapping his back and crushing his skull.

  Tom Lord and the Marine with him would be dead as well, their bodies undoubtedly disintegrated by the tremendous blast. They had probably been standing very close to the plastique when it went off.

  That thought tightened his jaw. The son of a bitch who had done this had probably been standing outside, watching for someone to enter Kevin Hewlett’s second-floor office. The light had come on and he’d hit the trigger.