Anarchy of the Mice

Chapter Forty-Seven

As my limo wound through the rubble-strewn boulevards of Paris (talk about words I never expected would apply to me), I distracted myself from the ridiculous danger I was walking into with polite chatter. I asked the driver if he missed the Eiffel Tower. Were these hot temps about typical for the season? Did he have any children?

"Ah oui, four sons." The man raised so many fingers over the headrest.

"That must keep you hopping," I said. "How do they all get along?"

He did a side-to-side hand wag. "This violence everywhere, it does not help. But my wife has better tricks for making them..."

He slicked his thumb and forefinger together for the word.

I said, "Behave?"

"Yes, yes. To not kill the other." He smiled and switched lanes. "Et vous? You are American—it is said that American children are loud. Is it true? Are your children quite loud?"

I felt my lips press, but refused to take it personally—his assumption that I had kids. Between this wig and the brow prosthetic, I was barely me. Right?

"You quit noticing after a few years," I said. "I'll bet they're in the same decibel range as yours."

He huffed lightly, accelerating toward a tunnel marked ROCHE RIVARD.

My breezy answer notwithstanding, I did worry about Zach and Karen. As I'd been saying goodbyes, about to leave for my second international trip in a month, they'd both felt oddly disconnected. Zach kept asking when my flight was—"Closer to two? When're you probably hitting the road?"—like he had big plans for my absence.

Karen hugged me hard but was preoccupied with finishing her dolls' "safety fortress"—a cardboard and tape structure that already encompassed one whole corner of the living room. It still needed a boudoir and beading room, and a bulletproof roof for the second story.

Granny insisted they were fine.

"You aren't meant to know every little drip dropping through their heads," she'd say, putting her hair up in curlers for bed. "We never did, and look—we raised the Greatest Generation."

The taxi emerged from the tunnel, out of Paris proper now and in the Boulonge Woods. Even inside the car, I felt immediately cooler. Heavy limbs draped over the expressway—several literally across the road, such that we had to drive around on the shoulder.

Six winding miles later, the road straightened and a hulking tower rose before us. It was primarily black glass, with stone shoulders and a barbed-wire skirt. Small crafts hovered about its upper reaches like flies buzzing a stallion's head.

My veins thinned. "Is that..."

The driver did not look back. "Oui, Madame, Roche Rivard."

I took several deliberate breaths, imagining oxygen flowing through my brain, washing away the dread.

I can't believe they talked me into this.

Roche Rivard had security like Saturn has rings. A quarter-mile out, I was required to show identification at a guard tower. This permitted me through an electrified fence and into a labyrinth of lanes winding through various sensors—like an automated car wash, only with infrared and invisible rays rather than suds and water jets.

The driver said, "Nothing in your bag, one hopes?"

I clutched my distressed leather satchel, thinking of the time Zach slipped an XBOX game into my purse and the supermarket exit bleated at us.

"One hopes," I agreed.

I passed through the final checkpoint on foot, paying my driver— "Bon chance," he said crookedly—and providing the name of the Rivard person I had come to see. A severe woman in epaulets had me wait in a windowless antechamber with foam, cream-colored walls.