From the World of the Eddie Grant Saga: Meet My New Heroine
After four Paris thrillers with Eddie Grant, it’s time to meet Sandi Brennan—spy, soldier, and survivor of one very bad day in Timbuktu
After Treasure of Saint-Lazare and the three follow up novels in the Eddie Grant Saga of Paris thrillers, it's time for me to publish something new. I have several works in progress, but the next will be a novella I've entitled Paris Fling, which started as a short romance and has turned into a full-length adventure story.
Paris Fling is designed to be a free introduction to my writing, and to be the first part of a more conventional transatlantic spy novel, with romance, Russian mafiosi, and Mexican drug smugglers.
It introduces a new protagonist, Sandrine O’Callahan Brennan, a twenty-year Army officer who rose from the enlisted ranks to command an MP company, be a detective, and end her career as a CIA agent in West Africa. She's a true friend of Paris, a frequent visitor, and is about to take up a new job representing an old Upstate New York company that wants to sell arms to the EU military.
The extract below comes early in the novella. Sandi has taken up her post in Niger, where she's assigned to look for drug and diamond smugglers. She gets a lead and follows it to the dusty souk of Timbuktu, with her fellow agent and partner Marcia Willson.
This scene is set on the plaza above the huge Châtelet métro station, which is on the Right Bank directly across the Seine from the original center of Paris, Île de la Cité. For history buffs, it's within sight of the spot where Henri IV was stabbed to death in 1610 by François Ravaillac, a religious fanatic who was convinced Henri planned to make war on the Pope. It is adjacent to the original site of the cemetery whose bodies and bones were moved in the next century to the Catacombs, across the Seine on the Left Bank. The Catacombs are a worthwhile site for visitors.
From Paris Fling, a novella in progress
Marcia Willson
Sandi paused in front of the same homeless man she’d seen two years before, the one with the sleepy German shepherd mix that lay beside him, and dropped a euro coin into his paper cup. She returned his vague smile and, distracted and on autopilot, walked down the old concrete stairs into the labyrinthine Châtelet metro station. Passing the fruit seller, she stood for a few minutes to listen as the Ukrainian orchestra played something from Beethoven. They were good, she thought, but waved off the man offering CDs for sale and followed the corridor to the right.
She knew the trip would take 20 minutes or so, including nine stops and a change of trains at Concord, which gave her time to think. She’d have more time—Germain was habitually ten or fifteen minutes late but the staff in his busy shop was always ready with an espresso.
Steve had been a surprise, and a happy one. She hadn’t been without a regular boyfriend since high school, and didn’t much like the feeling of sleeping alone. She knew the next two months, or two months minus the week that had already passed, would be busy, but she had learned one sure thing during her thirty-seven years. There is always time for love.
She spent an hour in Germain’s chair, then stepped two storefronts to the left and went shopping for a new dress. It took only a few minutes to settle on a green number that would do for both business and pleasure.
Marcia would like it, too. Tonight she would see her friend Marcia Willson, who had been her partner in Niger. They’d saved each other’s lives once when a Wagner Group killer spotted them at the old municipal market in Timbuktu and cornered them in a narrow alley running between a police station and the mosque.
Sandi knew the Army could be a dangerous place before she enlisted—but that alley in Timbuktu was the closest she’d ever come to dying on the job. It was a memory she couldn’t escape. On the long métro ride back downtown she replayed one especially fateful day in her mind.
It was just a few months after she arrived, and she’d gone to Timbuktu with Marcia. They had become friends and worked well together, so when she got a lead on a dissatisfied Russian officer who might be willing to part with information, she made the appointment and enlisted Marcia.
The attack
The day remained as sharp in her memory as the jagged shadows the crumbling mud brick minaret Djinguereber Mosque cast across the sunbaked square.
Vendors shouted over one another in Arabic, French, and several other languages she couldn’t identify, their voices rising in the dry wind. Flies danced over burlap sacks of millet and rice. A boy balanced a tray of roasted goat on his head, weaving through men in flowing boubous and Tuareg in indigo veils, their faces unreadable behind wraparound sunglasses.
Sandi and Marcia paused under the shade of a tattered awning, catching their breath. The air smelled of dust, sweat, cumin, and camel shit. Beside them, a silver dealer held up a pair of hammered bracelets, their spirals echoing ancient Saharan designs. Marcia shook her head and they moved on, stepping around a camel tethered loosely to a rusted motorbike.
Up ahead, near a stall stacked with salt slabs from the Taoudenni mines, a ripple of motion caught her eye—a young man slipping between market tents, too quickly, too smoothly. She felt the tickle of instinct at the back of her neck.
Behind her, the muezzin’s afternoon call to prayer echoed from the mosque’s ancient tower, eerie and haunting, as if Timbuktu itself had drawn a breath.
Something was wrong.
Sandi pretended to study a basket of worn paperbacks, their covers bleached by sun and dust, but her eyes tracked the man slipping behind a curtain of blue tarp at the edge of the market. He wasn't shopping. He wasn’t talking. He was hunting.
Marcia wandered away to a booth selling spices and rough cloth. Sandi stepped away from the stall, keeping her distance. If the man was tailing her he was sloppy—but maybe that was the point. A feint. A distraction.
The narrow lane behind the spice seller twisted into an alley choked with broken crates and old tires, the kind of place where the smell of cardamom gave way to motor oil and urine. She signaled to Marcia to follow and cut through it anyway, boots crunching grit, hand hovering near her bag. It wasn’t the first time she’d felt eyes on her in Timbuktu.
Halfway down, the world hushed.
Then came the sharp echo of movement. A figure detached from the shadows ahead—gun up, stance wide, face obscured behind a scarf and mirrored glasses.
Sandi dove sideways just as the shot echoed like a whip crack against the mud-brick walls. A step behind, Marcia screamed and fell to the ground, her thigh spurting red.
The killer came out of nowhere, charging from behind a rusting oil drum beside a crumbling adobe wall. The heat was brutal that afternoon, the kind that soaked your shirt and baked your boots. Sandi barely had time to register the blur of movement before he slammed into her, driving her to the dirt.
She hit hard, sand grinding into her back, the sharp tang of diesel and trash in her nose. As she landed, she grabbed for his pistol and pushed its muzzle away.
She twisted, trying to rise, but the gunman already had the pistol leveled at her. Later, she’d tell the investigator that the muzzle looked like a sewer pipe—huge, black, and final.
He stepped closer, boots crunching glass and grit. She rolled left, got a knee under her. Reached up, grabbed for his belt to pull him off balance. He barely flinched—two hundred pounds of trained muscle, reeking of sweat and rage.
She wasn’t going to win. But she wasn’t going to die curled up.
She kicked him between the legs, hard. He grunted, cursed in Russian, staggered. The pistol wavered. Sandi dove for her bag—the Glock was in the side pocket—but he was too fast.
She thought that was it. Timbuktu, of all places. She’d be a star on the Memorial Wall at Langley.
Then came three shots. Marcia—pale, bleeding, but still steady—put one in his head, two in his chest. He dropped face-first into the dust, blood soaking the sand beneath him.
Sandi rushed to Marcia’s side. Blood poured from her thigh, fast and dark—but not arterial. The bullet had missed her femoral by a fraction. Lucky. Sandi yanked off her scarf, knotted it tight above the wound, and pressed down hard. Marcia gritted her teeth and nodded. She’d live.
They left the body where it fell, between a shattered blue door and a painted sign for a cellphone shop that hadn’t been open in weeks.
Sandi propped Marcia against the mud wall, making certain her pistol was ready, then jogged through the quiet back streets, past shuttered stalls and wandering goats, to the hotel on Avenue de l’Indépendance.
She borrowed a wheelchair from the front desk and wheeled Marcia back through the alleys, avoiding eye contact with the few locals who dared to glance their way.
They lay low in their room under the ceiling fan, curtains drawn tight. No one came. No one asked. In Timbuktu, people had learned not to.
The Ethiopian Airlines flight back to Niger left the next morning. They didn’t look back.
Tonight would be their first meeting since Sandi had seen Marcia off from the Agadez landing strip, headed for months of surgery and rehab in Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany. Her doctor first wanted to send her on to Walter Reed in Washington, but she prevailed and he let her stay at Landstuhl. From there she was sent to the embassy in Paris.
Marcia suggested they meet at one of her favorite restaurants on the Place Saint Michel. “If we’re lucky we’ll get a table with a good view of Notre Dame. The repairs are half finished and the scaffolding is being removed, so maybe we’ll get a better idea of how the work has gone.”
Over three hours and a bottle and a half of good Côtes du Rhône they talked out the good and bad days they had when they were thrown together as involuntary partners and made plans to stay in touch as Sandi developed her new business.
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Thanks for reading. When Paris Fling is ready, I'll let you know here. An ebook will be available free to all my subscribers.
John Pearce
Washington, DC
