Free Scorpion Deception by Andrew Kaplan Page B

the buildings, he could see the upper part of the Eiffel Tower, glittering gold with electric lights. He took a breath. Time to move.
    The footing was precarious; he crept slowly, one step at a time. It seemed to take forever to reach the corner of the building. Clinging to the side, he edged around the corner. The parapet on this other side was sloped and he had to hold on as he inched forward, conscious of the sound of traffic on the tree-lined street below. It would be the Boulevard de Courcelles, he thought. About ten meters from the corner he saw a mansard window, though he wasn’t sure if it was real or decorative.
    Time to decide, he thought. If the sniper was at the Avenue de Wagram parapet, coming over the top he would be to the side and behind him. Then, even if he made a sound, he would have time to aim before the sniper could turn around and shoot. Grabbing the edge of the window molding, Scorpion reached up to the pitched top of the parapet with his left hand. In his right, he held the Glock. It would all depend on which way the sniper was facing, he thought as he put the toe of his shoe into an indented part of the molding. He listened intently. No sound from the roof. Here we go, he thought. Pulling with his left hand, he leaped over the top of the parapet onto the slanted metal roof.
    Landing, his feet at an angle, he snapped into a firing position and scanned the length of the parapet just as he heard the snap of a door closing. He whirled, ready to shoot, but the sniper was gone, out the roof door he hadn’t wanted to use. He straightened. The rooftop was empty.
    He made a tour of the parapet to make sure the sniper hadn’t gone over onto the ledge on the Avenue de Wagram side. That was empty too. Then he ran to the roof door, readied himself to fire, and ripped it open. There was no one on the landing, but he could hear the elevator descending. The son of a bitch was getting away!
    Scorpion raced to the stairs, took them three or four at a time, leaping down to the landings, then ripped around and down the next flight, racing the elevator. As he reached the second floor, he could hear the elevator door opening, then someone running on the tile floor of the front hallway. Leaping nearly the entire flight of stairs to the landing, he was just in time to see the front door close and an older woman—the concierge—opening her apartment door.
    â€œRetournez à l’intérieur, madame!” Go back inside! he shouted as he raced past her and out the front door. A man with a rifle case was running hard toward the Metro entrance. Scorpion took off after him.
    The man leaped down the stairs to the Metro, causing people coming up to stare at him. Scorpion raced across the street, nearly getting sideswiped by a BMW. He ran down the stairs, holding his Glock in his pocket. The man with the rifle case had already gone through the turnstile; he wasn’t there.
    Scorpion used a one-day ticket to go through the turnstile, then had to choose which tunnel platform: PORTE DAUPHINE or NATION. No way to know which platform the sniper had gone to. Trains came by every couple of minutes. If he chose wrong, he might give the sniper a shot at him, or the man would get away and he’d never have a chance to find out who was after him—whether it was Bern or something else. Only if it wasn’t Bern, how the hell had they picked up on him in the middle of Paris?
    Time to choose. Two passageways: NATION would be the train heading east into the 11th Arrondissement; PORTE DAUPHINE was the shorter part of the line, he could see from glancing at the map. The next stop that way was Charles de Gaulle–Étoile. If he were the sniper, he would try to lose someone in all the traffic and people on the Champs-Elysées and around the Arc de Triomphe, and so he sprinted down the passage to the Porte Dauphine platform.
    He stopped at the opening to the platform and crouched low. A young woman a few