“Investigation upstairs. What is your flat number?”

Court couldn’t see the address cards on the wall by the entryway, but when he’d been inside before, he’d gotten a handle on the organization of the building. “Five oh two.” He smiled. “Hope it’s not me you’re investigating.”

The cop shook his head. “Three zero one. Still . . . you’ll need to remain outside. Only for a few minutes.”

Court knew the Halabys lived in 102, but he didn’t believe they were off the hook in this. No . . . these guys down here had been given the wrong apartment number by the shady cops upstairs to disguise their real operation.

Court ignored the cop’s request and continued up to the door by stepping between the policemen, but he kept smiling. The English-speaking cop spoke louder now. “Hey . . . can you hear?”

Now there were two men on each side of him, all on the street or the narrow sidewalk. Court’s hand was extended towards the propped-open door, still eight feet away. He kept moving and took another step on the sidewalk until the closest motorcycle cop reached out with a hand and put it on Court’s right bicep to stop him.

And that was all Court needed.

He locked the cop’s grasp down on his arm with his left hand, then spun hard to the right, taking the young man by surprise, yanking him off balance, and sending him stumbling helmet-first into his motorcycle. Behind him, Court heard the snap of a telescoping baton firing out to its full length, and in front of him Court saw a second officer reaching for his baton, an instant away from bringing the steel shaft into the fight.

Court spun around and charged; he took the wrist of the first officer who had his baton out and controlled the weapon with his left hand. The other officer flicked his own baton, telescoping it into a two-foot-long pipe that he moved to swing at Court’s forehead, but Court yanked the baton arm of the man in front of him forward and used this man’s weapon to block the strike from the second officer. After the blow bounced off, Court stripped the weapon in the hand he held by twisting it hard and down, and he body-checked the man over the top of the same motorcycle the first man had crashed into.

Pedestrians on the Rue Mazarine all around shouted and screamed in alarm.

The fourth cop snapped open his baton with one hand while he keyed the radio on his shoulder with his other, preparing either to call in reinforcements or to alert the pair upstairs, but Court swung his baton and smashed the radio and the officer’s hand, sending the man to the ground clutching his wounded fingers.

Two cops swung at him nearly simultaneously with their blunt weapons; he blocked the first blow, then jabbed the butt of his baton forward, striking the attacker in the mouth and knocking him backwards. As soon as his hit was achieved, he moved his body low and into the man swinging from behind, closing the distance and halving the efficiency of the man’s blow. Court took this weak baton strike off his shoulder, absorbing the pain to process it later, and he swept around the man’s backswing with his right hand, bringing his baton around and slamming it hard into the officer’s helmet at the left temple.

The first man who’d fallen was back up; he readied his own baton, but Court targeted his hand, picked it up with his own, and closed his body into the threat. Their batons both swung and struck each other, first low, then high over their heads.

The second officer Court struck was now pulling himself up to a standing position with the aid of his motorcycle, and Court saw him reaching for his pistol. Court looked back to his present adversary, and on his next swing, Court caught the inside of the man’s elbow with his hand and did something no cop was trained to defend against in baton class. Court let go of his baton, fired his hand straight forward at the officer’s face, and rammed his fingers under the cop’s sunglasses and into his eyes.

The man dropped with a shout. His eyes would be bruised and burning and swollen. He’d be out of the fight for the rest of the day, if not the week, but Court hadn’t done to this man a tenth of what this man was trying to do to him.

As the cop fell, he released his baton. Court grabbed it by the telescoped end, swung it in a full-power 180-degree arc, and cracked the handle of the weapon against the slide of the SIG handgun that had been rising behind him.

The pistol flew from the officer’s hand, spun through the air across the street, and clanged along the sidewalk there.

This man realized he didn’t have a gun or a baton now, so he charged in desperation, but Court sidestepped him, took him in a headlock, and reached down to the man’s utility belt. He pulled off the can of chemical spray attached there, thumbed open the safety tab, and shoved the man away. As the uniformed officer spun back around to face his attacker, Court fired the thick gel across the man’s face, sending him to his knees screaming, clawing at the chemical irritant in his eyes.

All four officers lay in the narrow street now. Two were unconscious, one rolled around grabbing at his face, and the fourth moaned in the fetal position clutching his broken fingers. And around the scene, twenty or so passersby, men and women of all ages, stood and stared in disbelief at what they’d just witnessed.

Court now pulled his own pistol from his belt and held it over his head. In French he said, “Anybody who points a camera at me is getting shot.”

No one reached for their camera phones.

Court ran to the door to the apartment building and moved the planter holding it open as he entered. He pulled an item that looked like a silver key from his pocket and pushed the device into the deadbolt lock on the outside. The item was an instrument used to slow down any pursuers—a generic metal key that fit in most any lock, but where the bow met the shaft of the little instrument the metal had been filed down. Court snapped off the bow, leaving the shaft all the way in the lock and making it difficult if not impossible to open the door without either removing the lock or carefully digging in and picking out the metal of the shaft with a pair of needle-nose pliers.

He pulled the door closed, the lock engaged, and Court knew he’d removed this door as an entry point for the police, at least for the time being. Still, there was a side entrance to the building on a pedestrian passage on the north side, so he knew he had to hurry to both stop the dirty cops from kidnapping or killing the Halabys and avoid getting gunned down by furious police reinforcements.

* * *

? ? ?

While the fight raged downstairs, in the Halabys’ apartment a man’s voice came over the speaker phone. “’Allo?”

Allard placed the phone down on the coffee table in front of him and said, “Monsieur Eric? I have them here. You are on the speaker.”

A man spoke in French. “Bonjour, Drs. Halaby . . . My name is Eric, and it is a pleasure to speak with you, even if we must just do it over the mobile phone.”

The Halabys did not respond.

“I’ll cut to the chase. We are in a predicament, and you can help us.”

“Who . . . who are you?”

“I work for a party with an interest in locating Bianca Medina. It is our understanding she is in your care and, I must tell you, I will do whatever it takes to achieve my objective.”

Tarek said, “We will tell you nothing.”

“We? How wonderful to hear your harmony and cohesion with your spouse. But you see, Tarek, the truth is, I only need one of you alive to tell me where Medina has been taken. Lieutenant Allard? Will you do me a favor and put the barrel of your pistol against Rima’s head?”

Allard looked at the phone, and then at Foss. Slowly he lifted his weapon and followed the instructions of the voice on the phone.

When the weapon was flush with Rima’s forehead, the middle-aged Syrian woman shut her eyes and tears dripped out.

“Please!” Tarek said.

Just then, the radio in Allard’s back pocket chirped. A broken transmission came through, first of a man coughing, then words. “Lieutenant? This is Belin . . . downstairs. An armed man is inside the building!”

The two police officers in the Halabys’ apartment looked at each other, and then they spun their heads to the door.

Into his walkie-talkie Allard said, “Who is he, and why the fuck did you let him in?”

“He . . . I don’t know who he is. And we did not let him do anything.”

“Get up here, now!” Allard ordered.

“We are . . . we are all wounded! We’ve called for backup.”

“Shit!” Allard said.

Eric spoke up now over the mobile phone. “What’s going on?”

The policemen ignored him; they were focused on this new danger. Allard put down the radio, because he could hear someone sprinting up the hallway outside.

CHAPTER 17