Even though Mark was being filmed and recorded, all four FBI agents and all five grim-faced young men from the U.S. Attorney’s office scribbled furiously as if their notes were important.

McGregor said, “Okay, if there were only five, then who is this guy?” Bryan Bayer’s face appeared on the screen.

“Never seen him before.”

Petrocelli said, “That’s the guy who slapped me around in the parking lot a few weeks back. Warned me to tell my client to keep his mouth shut.”

McGregor said, “We caught him with Denny in Florida. A career thug, name of Bryan Bayer but went by Rooker.”

“Don’t know him,” Mark said. “He was not part of our team. Must be someone Denny picked up to look for the manuscripts.”

“We don’t know much about him and he’s not talking,” McGregor said.

“He was not a player,” Mark said.

“We’ll get back to the team. Tell us about the plan. How did it get started?”

Mark smiled, relaxed, took a long sip of coffee, and began his narrative.

8.

Deep in the Left Bank of Paris, in the heart of the 6th arrondissement on Rue St.-Sulpice, Monsieur Gaston Chappelle ran a tidy little bookshop that had changed little in twenty-eight years. Such stores are scattered throughout the center of the city, each with a different specialty. Monsieur Chappelle’s was rare French, Spanish, and American novels of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Two doors down, a friend dealt only in ancient maps and atlases. Around the corner, another traded in old prints and letters written by historic figures. Generally, there was little foot traffic in and out of these stores; a lot of window-shopping but few customers. Their clients were serious collectors from around the world, not tourists looking for something to read.

On Monday, July 25, Monsieur Chappelle locked his shop at 11:00 a.m. and stepped into a waiting taxi. Twenty minutes later, it stopped in front of an office building on Avenue Montaigne, in the 8th arrondissement, and he got out. As he entered the building, he gave a cautious look at the street behind him, though he expected to see nothing unusual. There was nothing illegal about his mission, at least not under French law.

He spoke to the lovely receptionist and waited as she called upstairs. He shuffled about the lobby, admiring the art on the walls and taking in the breadth and reach of the law firm’s ambition. Scully & Pershing, announced the bold bronze lettering, with offices in, and he counted them, forty-four cities in every important country and a few lesser ones. He’d spent some time with its website and knew that Scully boasted of having three thousand lawyers and being the largest firm in the world.

Once his presence was approved, the receptionist cleared him to proceed to the third floor. He took the stairs and soon found the office of one Thomas Kendrick, a ranking partner chosen solely because of his undergraduate degree from Princeton. That was followed by two law degrees, first from Columbia and then from the Sorbonne. Mr. Kendrick was forty-eight years old, originally from Vermont but now with dual citizenship. He was married to a French lady and had never left Paris after the Sorbonne. He specialized in complex litigation of an international nature and, at least on the phone, had seemed reluctant to grant an appointment to a lowly bookshop owner. Monsieur Chappelle, though, had been persistent.