“The French had them on video from the second they climbed down into the damn room, Paul! Come on, this is amateur night, here!”

“Are they being —”

“They’re being released under diplomatic immunity. But the frogs are gonna take ’em straight to the airport and put ’em on the first plane to Washington. They’re totally, completely, and thoroughly blown. I’ll tell you another thing—the reason that they got to stay so long in that very secure facility was so that the Sûreté could record every damn keystroke they made as they hacked their way into the database. They know how they did it, what they found—everything.”

“I’m on my way.”

He didn’t know the Métro well, but he did know that it was the fastest way around Paris in midday traffic. He got in the train at Montparnasse. It moved off at what seemed to him to be a maddeningly leisurely pace. His mind clicked methodically from possibility to possibility as he tried to devise a new way of saving Becky and Charlie and his whole operation.

In less than fifteen minutes he was trotting up the steps into the Place de la Concorde.

The American embassy was beautiful and very well guarded. It was also quiet, unlike many of its counterparts around the world. The crowds of visa seekers and unhappy citizens reporting lost passports were at the consulate a few blocks away. His own diplomatic passport got him straight past the French guards and the marines.

He entered through a metal detector, declaring and checking the gun that his false Interpol ID allowed him to carry. Well, false was maybe too strong a word. The Interpol papers his team used were the result of an accommodation between the CIA and the international police agency.

Sam’s office was halfway down a wide corridor that looked as if it belonged in a palace. As indeed, it did. This building had been one before it became the U.S. embassy. He went in, and the atmosphere changed at once. Here there were computer screens and filing cabinets and a dropped ceiling. The outer office blazed with fluorescent light.

“I’m Paul Ward,” he said to a receptionist who, to his surprise, turned out to be French. What a local national was doing working in a clearance-required job he did not know. Times had changed.

Sam sat at a steel desk. His venetian blinds were firmly shut on what was probably a view of an air shaft. The rumble of air-conditioning equipment shook the floor, but this office, itself, was not air-conditioned. It was just near the equipment.

“Paul, you old asshole, I thought you’d be arrested on your way here.”

“What about my people?”

“Business class on Air France. Not too bad.”