My alien-looking escorts and I hurried out of the designated "hot zone" to where two black bomb-squad vans were parked. Of course, the van was still in the "hot zone" as well. If a nuclear bomb went off, at least a square mile of Paris would be vaporized instantly.

From inside one of the vans I watched the team of technicians work to deactivate the bomb. If they could. I never considered leaving the scene, and the next few minutes were the longest of my life. No one in the van spoke, and we were all holding our breath. The idea of dying like this, so suddenly, was almost impossible to conceive.

Word came back from the French bomb technicians: "The suitcase is open."

Then, less than a minute later, "The fissile material is there. It's real. It seems to be in working order, unfortunately."

The bomb was real. It wasn't a fake threat. The Wolf was still keeping his promises, wasn't he? The sadistic bastard was everything he said he was.

Then I saw one of the technicians pump his arm in the air. A cheer went up around the console in the van. I didn't understand exactly what had happened at first, but it seemed like good news. No one explained anything to me.

"What just happened?" I finally asked in French.

One of the techs turned to me. "There's no trigger! It couldn't blow up. They didn't want it to explode, thank God. They only wanted to scare the shit out of us."

"It worked," I told him. "I shit you not."

Chapter 82

Over the next couple of hours it was revealed that the suitcase bomb had everything necessary for a nuclear explosion except a single part, a pulsed neutron emitter, a trigger. All the difficult elements were there. I couldn't eat that night, couldn't keep anything down, couldn't concentrate at all. I'd been tested, but I couldn't get the idea of radiation poisoning to leave my brain.

I also couldn't get Maud Boulard out of my mind: her face, the tenor of her voice, our absurd lunch together, the detective's stubbornness and naïveté, her red hair splayed out on the sidewalk. The casual brutality of the Wolf and his people.

I kept flashing back to the Russian who had struck me in the farmhouse. Had it been the Wolf? Why would he let me see him? And then, why not?

I went back to the Relais and suddenly wished that I hadn't asked for a room facing the street. My body felt numb all over, exhausted, but my mind wouldn't stop racing at warp speed. The noise rising from the street was a disturbance that I couldn't handle right now. They have nuclear weapons. This isn't a bluff. It's going to happen. A holocaust.

I decided to call the kids at about six o'clock, their time. I talked to them about all the things in Paris that I didn't see that day—everything except what had really happened to me. So far, the media had none of it, but that wouldn't last.