The Bombmaker: A Michael Thomas Thriller

by Gavin Reese

  “I’m Andrew. What should I call you?” Michael saw recognition, maybe even relief, flash in the man’s eyes.

  “I am Gerard.” The contact had regained his emotionless poker face. “What is it you hope to accomplish here, Andrew? You’ve been sent to a Muslim enclave to investigate the population during their holiest holiday? I fear you'll find no success, but plenty of danger for your effort.”

  Silence again hung between them, and Michael considered what else to reveal. “What about you, Gerard? I don’t think you’re here for a haircut.”

  The man smirked and then chuckled. “No, I suppose I am not. One of us has to go first, yes?”

  Michael only nodded and offered a pleasant smile.

  “I’m here to determine if a particular threat exists, and I hope to save a great number of people from harm.”

  “As do we all.”

  The cabbie stood up straighter and cocked his head to the side in surprise. “We all? Who is we?”

  “You and me. Us. We.”

  “You’re American, yes?”

  Michael shrugged. “Something like that, but, mostly, I’m skeptical. You asked for this meeting, so you wanna tell me what you want, or do I need to walk away?”

  Gerard hung his head in frustration and exhaled. He swore in French under his breath, something Michael understood only in context. The cabbie lifted his head and held strong eye contact with Michael. “I’m a counter-terror cop,” he whispered. “I’m investigating a possible bomber, and I can use your help, if that’s also why you’re here.”

  Michael slowly nodded, grateful for the man’s candor. “I think that’s exactly the kind of thing I would like to help with. Gerard, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “How did you learn about me?”

  Gerard averted his gaze and shrugged. “One sees things while watching such a homogenous neighborhood. One learns things over time.”

  Michael chose not to challenge the lie. Bullshit. I’ve got a leak, and I bet his name rhymes with ‘Father Luc.’ “What now?”

  “Now? I think we have to put ourselves at further risk and see if we may trust one another.” Gerard walked around the car and nodded for Michael to follow. “I still don't know if I’ll have to arrest you, kill you, or be buried next to you, but fate and God will tell us when the time is right.”

  Michael gave the parking garage another quick scan and then followed Gerard to a set of heavy metal double-doors that had been painted bright yellow. He opened the door on the right and led Michael into a short hallway. A storage room door stood to their left, and Gerard unlocked the deadbolt and handle on a metal door to their right.

  “My darkest secrets are not in here, but all my newest ones are.” Gerard pushed the door open and motioned for Michael to step inside.

  “After you.”

  “As you wish.” Gerard nodded and stepped into the room and out of view. Michael hesitantly moved in behind him. Finding the room unoccupied, he focused on the other potential threat: cameras.

  Gerard watched him scan the room. “There is no surveillance equipment in here. You may relax, as impossible as that may be for us both.” He stepped into an inner, windowless room, and Michael stayed close enough to deny him the chance to take up an unseen weapon. A large array of ten television monitors stood on a desk to the right. Gerard shook a mouse on the desktop, and they turned on to display various feeds and angles.

  Michael recognized his target building, as well as the same surveillance camera photograph of Abrini he’d seen in his intel packet. Several more photos hung next to it that Michael didn’t have. Each showed the same man at different places, lighting, and clothing. That confirms we’re hunting the same man, even if for different outcomes. “What is this?”

  “I hope to God it’s what you’re here for,” Gerard scoffed. He pointed to the apartment building Michael still needed to penetrate. “What can you tell me about this place?”

  Michael cleared his throat. “Well, it stands at 8 Rue du Corbillon, and, as I understand it, a bad man might live there.”

  Gerard nodded and dropped his hand. “Yes, perhaps. Or, it is also possible there are many, or none.” He turned to Michael and crossed his arms over his chest. “What are your intelligence and analysis capabilities? Not what you can get or find out weeks or months from now, but what can you find out in the next twenty-four to forty-eight hours?”

  Michael shrugged and crossed his arms to mimic Gerard’s body language. “It’s easier to answer your question if I know what you’re looking for.”

  Gerard's anger and frustration showed in his body language and tone. “I’ve just lifted my skirt, so to speak, and showed you everything you or my superiors need to ruin me and my family. I have to know something in return. It’s now your turn to take the same risk. That’s how these things work, Andrew.”

  May 8, 11:03am

  13 Rue de Corbillon. Seine-Saint-Denis, France.

  Michael inhaled through his nose. He took one last look around the small, windowless office and realized he wouldn’t spot any recording equipment concealed in there. Gerard better be who and what he says he is. Here goes.

  “Maybe this will help,” he began. “I can’t tell you my intel capabilities, but I will know more in the next day or two than I do right now. I expect to identify the known occupants of the building through postal records, employment records, vehicle registrations, and refugee databases. That information will be cross-referenced against itself, and then compared to utility records. I hope to narrow my investigation to one or two apartments by then.”

  Disbelief showed on Gerard’s face. “He lives in 415, at the top northwest corner of building. You don’t yet know that?”

  “No.”

  Gerard stepped closer and pointed to one of the monitors. “I hid this camera in the stairwell just below his apartment. You can see his door here, and these stairs are the only avenue to his residence. He leaves once every few days, and always for less than an hour. A family, grandparents, I think, live across from him.” The cop put his hands on his hips. “What do you know?”

  “He received a series of suspicious packages thought to be chemical precursors for making the explosive part of a bomb, an I-E-D. The investigation has since stalled, and no one’s been able to get a look into Abrini’s apartment to confirm the allegations.”

  More disbelief. “Abrini? You know his name? This man?” Gerard pointed to the suspect photos pinned to the wall next to the monitors.

  “Yes. Abdel Abdullah Abrini. Did you not?”

  “No, not yet, I knew only the horseshit name from the parcels. How did you learn of ‘Abrini?’”

  “That was part of the original intel package.” Michael shrugged and changed the subject. “Is Abrini associated with anyone in apartment 105 or 213?”

  “No, why?”

  Michael broke eye contact and scanned the monitor array to find the second and third floors that might show those doorways. “Just a lead we developed. Those apartments are leased to single women with no other identified tenants, which is consistent with someone who’s hiding from the government, for whatever reason.”

  “How do you know this, Abrini, and the tenants in 105 and 213?”

  Michael recognized the cop’s growing suspicion and worked to allay the man’s concerns. “I assumed it must have come from your government or someone like you.”

  “Wait. You have access to my unit’s records, the police and counterterror databases?”

  Michael’s chest tightened. Dammit. “Maybe, maybe not. I just meant that, in general, I thought it came from various government records.”

  Silence ground on both men.

  “I don’t expect this will be comfortable for either of us,” Gerard finally offered. “If we’re to confirm or dispel the allegations, though, in this neighborhood where we can trust no others, we have to trust each other, if only for the task at hand. We will both fail if we cannot work together.”

  Michael had to
risk exposing himself a little further. He needs to see competency, in more than just my intel and analysis assets. “What else do you need to know?”

  “You can defend yourself, Andrew?”

  “I’ve picked up a thing or two.”

  “Such as, what?”

  “This and that.”

  “You train to fight in the ring, yes?”

  Michael shook his head. “No. For me and those like me, fighting in the ring is training.”

  “I might need you to prove that before I trust my life to your combat skills.”

  “You should know that I don't spar, Gerard. I teach, sometimes, but I don’t spar. I can’t train my mind and muscle groups to go easy or merciful. If I have to put hands on someone, Inspector, I need to know I’m gonna give them everything I have.”

  The cop eyed him, as though using the man’s title and the discreet warning had its intended result. “Do you understand what you’re walking into here, in this place, this neighborhood?”

  “Back home, we’d call it a hornet’s nest. Lots of anger directed at innocents, not much discrimination, thought, or remorse in who and what they attack.”

  “A perfect description, but I wonder if your hornets, ‘back home’ as you say, do they strap on vests and detonate themselves for their God?”

  “No, those assholes live to sting again.”

  The inspector looked at him quizzically. “Who do you work for, again?”

  Michael smirked at the attempt. Hell, he’s a cop with his neck stretched out for the government’s guillotine if this goes sideways. “My current employer isn’t really important, but ‘O-G-A’ will work if you need to blame someone. I used to be one of you, actually.”

  “A police?”

  “For a time.”

  “What made you change careers? Tired of the continual disappointment in humanity?”

  “Long story. Maybe I’ll tell you sometime, if we survive this as free men who avoided both prison and the morgue.”

  “I hope to hear it. If, as you say, we escape either ending.” Gerard turned to the monitors. “I expect these are my greatest contribution to our efforts. I may be wrong, but I assume you do not have surveillance installed yet?”

  “No, I do not.” Michael leaned over, put both hands on the desk, and studied the locations and angles of the various camera feeds. Gotta stay out of their sight when I’m out on my own. Gerard and I can work together, fine, but there’s no way he gets to know everything that John passes along, or every move I make.

  “As I’m sure you see, I have no view of the apartment windows. They face to the north, and they are four stories above the ground. I have nowhere close and tall enough to put my little cameras. They are quite good, and quite clear, with limited optical zoom, but they are not sufficient for that purpose.”

  Michael understood the inferred question but didn’t want to answer. “Can you get FLIR?”

  “FLIR? How do you say, what’s the damned word--”

  “Thermal?”

  “Yes, thermal! In short, yes, but not for us. Because of the expense of those items, there’s a massive stack of approvals to borrow them from the quartermaster, and that will require the signatures or forgery of my superiors. That, I cannot do.”

  Michael pointed to an area on one of the monitors near the southeast corner of the apartment building. “What’s in this blind spot?”

  Gerard chuckled. “That was fast, you’re very good at finding the failures of those around you. Just part of the job, no? I kid. There is a small neighborhood mosque, a majrid in Arabic, of course. It is not built for that purpose, but that ground-level corner had once been a halal market. It closed after the last round of terror attacks in 2015, and a local imam took the space for his small neighborhood congregation.”

  “Is it possible to watch the entrance?”

  “Oh, sure, if I had more cameras, but our focus was finding the one suspect up to this moment, so we allocated our resources there. The mosque hasn’t been under surveillance for more than a year, and we didn’t think it would help us find the bomber’s apartment.”

  “Can you set something up now?”

  “Now that Ramadan has started, the families will be out right after sundown, and they’ll fall asleep only just before sunrise. It’s too risky to plant them during that narrow timeframe. No reason for anyone but residents to be there, and especially not us Caucasians.”

  “What do you know of the imam?” Michael hoped to avoid revealing his uncorroborated watchlist intel.

  “He’s self-declared, we think, with no formal training, but he’s called Abdul Siddiqi. We know nothing between his arrival in France from Morocco and his takeover of the market space. My team never got anyone inside the mosque to hear what he has to say. He is very attentive and suspicious of outsiders, though, and he’s never looked at me as though glad to see my white, French-Catholic face in his neighborhood.”

  “Any access into the building from there?”

  “No. The mosque has no interior doorway into the building. So, the only route between them requires your beloved Spiderman to climb the wall to his balcony windows or all the way up to the roof.”

  Michael smiled at the man’s joke and tried not to show his elation. That’s what I was hoping you’d say.

  Gerard stood upright and again crossed his arms. “So, we know each other, enough, anyway. You’ve seen my video surveillance, and we now know that neither of us has a thermal camera ready to go. What, besides the bomber’s name, do you intend to bring to this investigation?”

  Michael continued to memorize the camera angles as he spoke. “Do you know who he’s talking to, or what he’s saying and reading online?”

  “No, we have none of that.”

  Michael stood and retrieved his work cell from a pants pocket. “You ever heard the term, ‘triggerfish’ or ‘IMSI Catcher?’”

  “No.”

  “I’m hoping to get a peek inside the building and see what’s being said and read online, and who’s talking to whom. No idea what we’ll learn, but the data might reveal whether we’re looking at a lone wolf or a conspiracy. Maybe even find out Abrini’s real name.”

  Gerard tightened his arms. “How do you know it’s a fraudulent name?”

  “Sometimes, Gerard, we’ll have to accept information without much explanation, but no one with that name ever legally entered France, and no one with that name and his approximate age is known to any European government for any reason.”

  “Okay, I’ll trust that for now. How do you intend to enter the building?”

  “I considered using an orange maintenance worker jumpsuit, but I have passable documents that identify me as a relief worker.”

  “A reflective orange uniform will get you behind most doors in Europe, but, not so much here.” Gerard regarded Michael as though still sizing him up. “What’s next, then?”

  “Next, I have to make a few calls and find out the status of my intel and asset requests.” Michael started for the door. “If I’m not back in a couple hours, you should send an ambulance.”

  Gerard winced. “A couple hours. Do not be early, do not be late.”

  Michael strode back out of the small office and waited until he reached the sidewalk along Rue de Chaumettes to access his phone apps. Before checking in with John, he first needed to find a second-hand clothing store. I wonder what the French equivalent of Goodwill is? I need to look homeless and a little mental to carry out tonight’s objectives.

  After skimming a few of the most recent online articles, Michael set a course for the Canal Saint-Martin and a large homeless tent encampment there. I’ll get to complete one kind of God’s work on the way to another.

  May 8, 11:52am

  8 Rue du Corbillon #415. Saint-Denis, France.

  Abdel Abrini opened his laptop, logged in his password, and activated its virtual private network software. After confirming his data signal routed through several computers across the globe and emerged at a termin
al in Oslo, Sweden, he logged into his preferred messaging site. Although the majority of its millions of customers used the open-source software for its reliability and convenience, Abdel and his second group of subordinates coveted its end-to-end encryption.

  With the additional security provided by the VPN, Abdel had no concern that French authorities could identify and locate him in time to stop the imminent reckoning. They would unlikely ever find me, but they will certainly not do so in the next three days.

  Abdel opened a dialogue with a contact called Athnan, the English sound for the Arabic word meaning “Two,” and began typing his last series of communications in Arabic with the leader of his second team. Peace be unto you.

  And peace be unto you, as well, came the immediate response.

  “Good,” Abdel murmured to himself, “he’s ready and waiting for me.” He typed the last of their sequenced authentication phrases, a series of numbers that identified specific suras from the Qur’an that reinforced that those killed fighting for Allah ascend to Paradise and justified their intended action.

  47:4-6

  3:157

  Abdel smiled at the immediate reply. One more, just to be sure. This time, he typed out part of a sura that chided those who shrink from warfare and praised the servants who wished for death. Did ye think that ye would enter heaven without Allah testing those of you who fought hard in His cause and remained steadfast?

  The cursor blinked for several seconds before a small blue bubble appeared in the dialogue to indicate Two was typing.

  Ye did indeed wish for death before ye met him: Now ye have seen him with our own eyes!

  Abdel typed furiously, his heart and mind energized by the obvious dedication of his men and the well-lit path they walked together.

  My brothers. Be ready, be vigilant, be prepared in all ways. I will meet you at the predetermined location on Ramadan-6, no later than 1000. All of you must wear football jerseys, preferably those of the Paris-Saint-Germain Football Club. The crowds outside the contest that day will be your target.