Night Blind Read online

  Also by Michael W. Sherer

  Island Life

  Emerson Ward Series

  Death on a Budget

  Death Is No Bargain

  A Forever Death

  Death Came Dressed in White

  Little Use for Death

  An Option on Death

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Text copyright © 2012 by Michael W. Sherer

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Thomas & Mercer

  P.O. Box 400818

  Las Vegas, NV 89140

  ISBN-13: 9781612184180

  ISBN-10: 1612184189

  To Roger for planting the seed.

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 38

  CHAPTER 39

  CHAPTER 40

  CHAPTER 41

  CHAPTER 42

  CHAPTER 43

  CHAPTER 44

  CHAPTER 45

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  1

  Gagnon pulled back into the shadows as a car passed, alert to the sights, sounds, and even the smells around him. The Quai d’Orsay was busy all the time—after all, this was Paris, the City of Lights—but he’d come at perhaps the least busy time of day, when one could best appreciate the city. Alive, but in repose, a slumber interlaced with dreams, even fitful nightmares, as traffic coursed through the arteries and veins of its streets and chimneys huffed clouds of breath into the night air.

  Footsteps echoed faintly under the bridge, the Pont Alexandre III, and Gagnon hugged the wall, peering toward the sound. He’d been a fool to agree to meet so close to MAEE—the Ministère des Affaires Étrangères et Européennes, the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs. His contact had insisted, since it was convenient to his office, a short walk that wouldn’t arouse suspicion, even at the late hour. And who would believe Gagnon would dare come so close to those in the foreign ministry who would have his head for the things he’d done?

  Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Africa—he’d traveled halfway around the world on secret missions for France, ferreting out information and even killing to protect the French state. He’d spent most of his career in Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco long after those places had been part of the French colonial empire, trying to foment the kind of unrest that would eventually produce the Arab Spring. He’d done the dirty work of several administrations for no personal or political gain, only his love for his country.

  Fortunately, he still had value to DPSD, la Direction de la Protection et de la Sécurité de la Défense. He’d been their best intelligence agent for the past twenty years. Unfortunately, the branch of DPSD he worked for didn’t exist on paper. His accomplishments went unknown to all but a few within the agency—and even fewer at MAEE—and if they chose not to acknowledge him or what he’d done, then he didn’t exist, either. One of those men, he knew, stood on a precipice. For years, the defense minister himself had conducted an ongoing internal investigation to root out a small faction of devout Catholic right-wing officers intent on influencing national affairs. Among them were Gagnon and his contact at DPSD. Gagnon knew his superior was prepared to give him up to avoid discovery as a member of that cabal. He’d already planted the seed with someone at MAEE, though Gagnon hadn’t yet discovered who.

  A man’s gaunt profile drew closer, the dim lights under the bridge barely illuminating the chiseled face, the aquiline nose. Dressed all in black, the man blended into the shadows. Were it not for the pale visage and the square of white beneath the man’s Adam’s apple, he might have been a shadow. Gagnon breathed a little easier now that he recognized Jules Baroche. How ironic that the monseigneur had the same name as the minister of foreign affairs at the time all this had started—if any of what Baroche had told him was true. Now Gagnon was about to find out. He stepped out of the shadows into the bishop’s path.

  Baroche flung out an arm. “Mon Dieu! Oh, it’s you. You frightened me.”

  “Oui, c’est moi. So, my friend. What have you learned?”

  Baroche looked in both directions and tipped his head toward the other side of the single express lane.

  “Come. Let’s walk.”

  Gagnon followed as the priest stepped over the guardrail and hurried across. The sidewalk on the other side overlooked the water beneath the iron trestles of the bridge. Gagnon sniffed the scent of algae and decayed fish and heard the lap of water against stone over the whir of traffic overhead.

  “I verified the call,” Baroche said as Gagnon fell in step. “The number traces back to Monseigneur Delacroix.”

  “And the message?”

  “Passed on from the sisterhood in Montréal. The protocol, while out of use for the past century, was correct.”

  “Suggesting it’s authentic.”

  “Mais oui.” Baroche pulled an envelope from an inside pocket of his sport coat and handed it to him. “This is what I found in the archives.”

  Gagnon stopped and opened the envelope. He pulled out a thin sheaf of papers, yellowed and brittle with age.

  “Alors, c’est vrai! The legend is true after all.”

  “Peut-être. After all these years, who knows if anything is left? If there was ever anything of value on board.”

  “You think I care about what the Americans may have buried?” Gagnon said.

  Baroche shrugged. “The sisters seemed to think—”

  “I’m concerned only with what transpired between the captain and the sisterhood,” Gagnon said sharply, his words echoing off the stone walls. He held up the papers. “This confirms their meeting?”

  Baroche nodded.

  “Who else knows about this?” Gagnon said.

  “No one. My staff knows only that Delacroix called and passed on a message for Cardinal Villards. I searched the archives myself.”

  “And Villards?”

  “Knows nothing yet.”

  “Good.” Gagnon pocketed the envelope and palmed the Laguiole switchblade there.

  “What now?” Baroche said.

  Gagnon flicked the blade out, wrapped his arm around the thin man’s chest, and drove the point under his chin. Baroche arched backward as if jolted with electricity, mouth stretched in a grimace of shock and pain. The knife sank in to the hilt, blood seeping around it, staining the clerical collar black in the darkness. Gagnon twisted his wrist and worked the blade up into Baroche’s brain until the man went limp.

  Gagnon dragged the body to the rail and flipped it over into the water below, pulling the knife out at the last second. He glanced around to see if anyone had heard the splash. At this hour of the night, only cabbies, prostitutes, and bums roamed the streets. Without bothering to wipe the handle clean, he dropped the knife into the Seine. Darting back to the other side of the street, he hurried out from under the bridge. He vaulted the low wrought-iron fence fronting the sidewalk and disappeared into the pedestrian tunnel that led to the Invalides metro station.

  Soon he’d be safe. And if the papers in his pocket were real, he would possess the power to topple governments and lay waste to entire countries, if not continents. Let them try to marginalize him now.

  2

  The day Cole Sanders died, I lost my voice. I found it again the night of November twenty-fifth. Or rather, early the morning of the twenty-sixth.

  People still read newspapers. Fewer each year, true, but they do. I know because I deliver them, one of two jobs I manage to hold down. It’s not a bad job, really, but not one that many people aspire to, not like the career I’d had in public affairs once. And out on the street I sometimes witness tomorrow’s newspaper news as it happens. This morning looked to be no exception.

  Brake lights punctuated the darkness ahead. I let the car slow of its own accord in the tire tracks molded in the mantle of fresh snow, and lightly pressed the pedal. The car stopped with a jerk. Snow draped the green rhododendrons, laurels, and firs, even sticking to branches that had lost their leaves a few weeks earlier. Light trapped between snow and low scudding clouds cast an orange glow across the face of the city.

  Another set of brake lights rouged the snow ahead of the car in front of me. Normally devoid of traffic at this late hour, the winding street was as clogged as a sclerotic artery. I sighed,
shoved the gearshift into park, opened the door, and put one foot out onto the snowy road, slowly easing weight onto my bum leg. My knee ached like a bad tooth, the pain probing and stirring up the sediment of memory. I hung ungloved hands on the top of the doorframe, pulled myself out, craned my head above the roof, and squinted. Light as feathers, icy flakes caressed my face, melted quickly, and rolled like tears down my cheeks.

  Limned in the headlights of the short line of cars, a late-model Lexus sprawled sideways, straddling the one-lane bridge, its nose up on the opposite curb. Outside the headlight beams, shadowy curtains of falling snow swirled into waves of amorphous gray ghosts, the scent of winter wafting after them. I gripped the frozen metal tightly to keep from flinching as dozens of sensory impressions rushed at me like the tumbling snowflakes.

  “Fuck it, lady,” an angry voice, heavily accented, called from the open window of the taxicab at the head of the line. “Just do it!”

  Beyond the Lexus, a dark figure huddled atop the bridge abutment at the edge of an orange pool of light spilling from a lamppost. I stiffened involuntarily, throat constricting and pulse racing. More sediment churned, this time as if excavated by a dredge, the torrent of memories turbid with raw emotion, diffuse and indistinguishable.

  Impulsively, I pulled the other foot out of the car and trudged toward the cab, my eyes on the stationary figure on the bridge. An hour earlier, when I’d been more focused, before the drugs had begun to wear off, I might not have gotten involved.

  A nervous voice near my elbow asked, “What’s going on?”

  “Call nine one one,” I said. “Get some cops out here. And an ambulance.” I kept walking, the snow crunching under my feet.

  “Christ, lady, make up fucking mind,” the cabbie yelled. Russian, I decided, or maybe Ukrainian.

  “Hey, give it a rest,” I said as I came up beside the cab.

  His head swiveled, mouth open in surprise. Dark eyes in an angular face narrowed. “Who in fuck are you?”

  I stopped. “You’re not helping matters. I’m going to ask you again, nicely, to be quiet. I’ll go talk to her.”

  “What are you, cop or something?” He craned his neck and gestured dismissively. He dropped his gaze, looked past me, and yelled again. “Lady, move your fucking car or—”

  My short, hard right jab to his jaw cut him off. His head whipped around, throwing drops of spittle onto the dash, the wet spots shiny even in the darkness. He turned back, eyes glazed. I hit him again on the point of his chin, aiming for a spot two feet past him. The blow turned his shoulders and pulled him away from the window. He fell forward, forehead hitting the top of the steering wheel with a heavy thud.

  Ignoring the sharp intake of breath from the passenger inside, I flexed the fingers of my right hand and stepped carefully through the snow toward the figure across the road.

  The woman on the bridge stiffened. She wore a dark wool coat, the collar pulled up around her chin. “Don’t come any closer.”

  I slowed, my empty hands out where she could see them. “I just want to talk.”

  “There’s nothing left to talk about.”

  “There’s always something to talk about.”

  “You wouldn’t understand.”

  An aliform shadow flapped heavily across the snow, alighting on my shoulder, cloaking me in her despair. I shuddered, her pain a vise grip on my heart. I did not want to lose this one.

  “You’re right. I don’t know what it’s like to be you right now. But I can guess you’re in pain. You want to make it stop, and this is the only answer you can come up with right now.”

  Talking about it won’t put the idea in her head; she’s already thought about it.

  For a moment she sat frozen, then her head bobbed.

  I jammed my frozen hands in my coat, hunching my shoulders against the cold. “What made you decide to jump? You know, instead of some other way?”

  She turned away from me and leaned back over the edge. I held my breath, the susurrant snowfall loud in the hush. I feared she’d go over, but after a moment she faced me again, giving me a glimpse of large, expressive eyes rimmed with dark circles above a delicate nose.

  “It’s okay if you don’t want to talk,” I said, “I’m glad you’re here, actually. Because I need to talk.” Her head tilted slightly. “I need to tell someone that I didn’t get it before. I didn’t understand the pain, how someone can look around at all this”—I spread my arms with hands still in my pockets, the gesture opening my coat—“the beauty of all this, the joy, and see nothing but bleakness. But now I do.”

  I pulled the coat flaps in to ward off the cold that knifed through the thin fabric. Then I took another step. She didn’t react.

  “I’m glad you’re here because now I finally have a chance to listen. Understand, even. Maybe we can help each other. What do you say?”

  In the dim light, inquisitiveness glinted behind the sadness in her eyes.

  I stamped my feet against the cold, and waited. How long until you know if you’re getting through?

  “I thought it would feel like flying,” she said.

  I nodded. “Makes sense. But why this bridge? Why not Aurora Avenue?”

  She considered the question—a good sign. “I didn’t want to have time to regret it. You know, jumping.”

  “You mind if I sit down?” I hunched my shoulders. “I’m tired. Long day.”

  She stiffened. “Not too close.”

  I brushed snow off the cold stone abutment and perched a few feet away from her, the chill quickly seeping through the seat of my jeans. Sweat trickled down over my ribs. The falling snow thinned to random flakes. I turned away and focused on slow, complete breaths—dirgha pranayama. Darkness covered the Arboretum. The street below curved north. The drop was maybe twenty feet. Not much, but enough if she went over headfirst.

  Most jumpers in Seattle pick the Aurora Bridge. The distance from the bridge deck to the water of Lake Union is 167 feet. Anyone falling from that height travels close to sixty miles per hour by the end of the journey. Hitting water at that speed is like hitting cement. It’s pretty final. Taking a header off a bridge wouldn’t be my choice, but until recently I’d never considered the options. And the woman had a point—a three-second fall from the Aurora Bridge could feel like a lifetime of regret.

  3

  Despite the cold, the air inside the car felt tropical, close, and humid, something fetid assailing his nostrils that he realized was his own breath. He leaned forward and rubbed a hole in the condensation on the windshield with his gloved hand. He’d waited long enough to steel his conviction to a fine edge, and now it carried him out of the car and down the street.

  The cottage door beckoned. Despite the late hour, the window facing the street glowed yellow. Resolved, he went up the walk, the falling snow thickening now. He had to dissuade her from taking any further action. The old woman had stirred up enough trouble already, pestering the city with the threat of lawsuits. The fact that a well-known firm was even considering taking on her case made it clear that she posed a real threat. If she persisted, she could ruin everything.

  He sweet-talked his way in, then argued with her, cajoled, followed her from room to room pleading his case. Now, after nearly half an hour, she asked him to leave, her voice firm, her meaning clear. That’s when something in him changed, as if her obstinacy had triggered a pressure switch deep inside him, and he picked up the knife from the counter by the sink in his gloved hand. She had to be stopped, silenced.

  His first swipe was hesitant, as if he meant to warn, not hurt, her. It drew blood nonetheless. She didn’t seem to feel it, but he saw a black line well from her arm and drip red onto the kitchen floor. She slapped him, ordered him out of her house. The humanity disappeared from his soul, replaced by something primal. He struck again, more forcefully this time. Again she warded off the blow but felt the bite of the blade.

  He drove her back through the door into the living room with more slashing blows. She caught his wrist in her grip and held the knife away from her, twisting his arm. Jerking away from her grasp, he struck again, a downward stabbing blow this time that pierced her shoulder, causing her to cry out in pain.

  She was no match for his strength and the fury of his assault. She was old, frail, but her will to survive gave her strength she didn’t know she had. She quickly hobbled into the kitchen, lifted a saucepan from the stove, and girded herself for his final onslaught. The old bird was tough, but he finished her quickly with a savagery that filled him with bloodlust. He almost let it overwhelm him, but he contained it, let it cool, his mind thinking through the variables now that he’d been forced into this course of action.