One for One (John Flynn Thrillers Book 3)

by A. J. Stewart

  “Shall we go into town, find something to eat?” asked Gorski.

  “I didn’t get the feeling the town was open, but I suppose we could try.”

  “You two clowns want some dinner?” asked Elyse from the door to the barn. “Monsieur Pepard has made coq au vin.”

  That sealed the deal. They followed Elyse back to the farmhouse. She opened the front door to the most amazing smell. It was like a top restaurant in Paris, without the fanfare. Gorski smiled as he stepped through the door. Then he stopped and spoke over his shoulder.

  “Adjudant,” he said to Flynn. “Perhaps we eat outside?”

  Flynn nodded, and let the door close in front of him. He had felt the warmth from within, and seen the pulsing light against the living room wall. Monsieur Pepard had a fire burning in his living room, as he might. The evening was cool, and would get colder. It made sense. Flynn felt the tingle go down his spine and he took a seat on the steps.

  A couple of minutes later, Gorski appeared with a plate. He sat on the step and put the plate between he and Flynn.

  “Charcuterie,’ Gorski said. “Monsieur Pepard makes his own. Salami and saucisson and chèvre. I’m trying this blood sausage.” He picked up a chocolate colored piece of sausage and ate it.

  “What is it with you and eating blood?”

  “Blood has been used for thousands of years. Why is it okay to eat the meat but not the blood? Not so long ago it would have been heresy to waste any part of the animal. And this is excellent. Monsieur Pepard has one of his cattle processed each year and they keep everything. He said he freezes the blood and keeps it to make sausage in the winter.”

  “It’s not too bad,” said Flynn.

  Gorski nodded. He took some chèvre and spread it on a piece of baguette. The men ate in silence and watched the breeze blow through the long grass by the side of the driveway. There were no other sounds. No cars, no talking, not even the quiet electronic buzz that cities give off. It was cold but pleasant. When they had eaten the plate clean, Gorski took it inside.

  He returned with two steaming plates of coq au vin. Peasant food, once upon a time. A way to make old birds palatable. Now served in the finest French restaurants around the world. None better than Monsieur Pepard’s, if the smell was anything to go by.

  Gorski took a seat by Flynn and handed him a plate and a fork. Again they ate in silence. Gorski mentioned nothing of sitting outside as the temperature dropped. Flynn didn’t ask what reason Gorski had given for them not accepting their host’s hospitality to join him at dinner. Perhaps Gorski had told the farmer the truth.

  “I tell you the French are a pain in my backside,” said Gorski. “But they cook like the gods.”

  “At least Monsieur Pepard does.”

  They ate hungrily and and finished by wiping crusty bread around their plates. Then they sat out and enjoyed the stars. The light pollution wasn’t as low in rural France as it was in the Iraqi desert or the African savanna, but the stars still came out to play. The clouds had cleared and the milky way bled across the sky like a watercolor.

  The front door creaked and Elyse stepped out. She stopped for a moment. There was no way past the two bodies on the steps. Gorski stood and Elyse protested, but he said he would take their dishes inside, and perhaps offer his host a cigarette. Gorski stepped away but Elyse didn’t take a seat until Flynn gestured for her to join him.

  “Monsieur Pepard is quite the chef,” said Flynn.

  “Everything in the dish came from his property, except the wine. That’s from his nephew’s vineyard.”

  “Can I ask you a question?”

  “Are you going to ask it anyway?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you may.”

  “Why are you here?”

  “I told you. I’m working on a story.”

  “I mean right here. In this village. At this farm. Why aren’t you in a hotel?”

  “You think I believe I’m too good for it? I’m a princess?”

  “I can’t answer that. I don’t know you. But ever since we got to the village you have avoided everyone. We didn’t speak to a single person there. And that is where everything is happening, so you say. So what gives?”

  “You want me to come clean?” asked Elyse. “Tell you my story?”

  “Sure, if you want to?”

  “If I want to? Ha. I tell you what. You first.”

  “Pardon?”

  “You first. I don’t know a single thing about you. So why are you here?”

  Flynn kicked his boots in the dirt.

  “Okay. Alex and I were in the military.”

  “Army?”

  “Something like that. We had a mission. It didn’t so much go bad as go off the rails. Terrorists were buying arms and we intercepted them. Only someone, I don’t know who, maybe the seller, didn’t like us getting in the way. They were powerful. They knew people. They turned the mission on us. We had to go underground. I lived like that for a few years. And then they found me.”

  “What happened?”

  “They kidnapped my fiancée.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Well, to be honest, I hadn’t even asked her yet. They took her the night I planned to propose.”

  “Oh.”

  There was silence for a while, before Elyse spoke.

  “What was her name?”

  “Is. Beth.”

  “You got her back?”

  “I got her out.”

  “But you’re not with her now?”

  Flynn shifted his feet again. “I could get her out. I couldn’t get her back.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Not your fault.”

  “I didn’t mean it like that. She blamed you?”

  “I blame myself.”

  They sat in silence again and Flynn watched his boots and Elyse watched the stars.

  “You think Loup took her?”

  “No. I know who took her.”

  “So why aren’t you after them?”

  Flynn looked at her. “I did that already.”

  This time Elyse mouthed the word, oh.

  “So what exactly are you doing here? Why Loup?”

  “He’s the next in the chain. See, whoever took Beth had been looking for me for years. It meant they were still motivated. Which means that no one I care about, no one I ever know will be safe. So I’m done waiting for them to come get me. I’m going after them.”

  “But Loup?”

  “I think of it like a tree. It looks like one big thing—say, a massive oak. But really an oak is a lot of smaller parts, tiny organism. We see the leaves—like we see the criminals on the street, or in my case the guys who took Beth, or came after Alex’s parents. But the leaves are just the outer extremities. They’re easy to see and easy to pick off, but losing them really does no damage to the tree. Because behind them are branches—small organizations, but bigger than those individual leaves. And the trunk, the body of the whole thing. That’s like the companies and governments who perpetrate the crimes. The arms that get sold and the rules that get made to ensure they get away with it.”

  “And you want the trunk?”

  “No. I want the roots. They’re the ones buried underground—the people you never see. Pulling the levers, operating the puppets. You kill the roots, you well and truly kill the tree.”

  “And Loup is a root?”

  “I think so.”

  “And you want to kill him.”

  Flynn sighed. “It’s a metaphor. I want to take him down.”

  “So how will you prove that Loup is a root. Maybe he’s not the bad guy you think.”

  “Like I said, we follow the chain. From leaf to branch to trunk.” He looked at Elyse. “To root. So I linked who took Beth to the person that gave them the order, or did once upon a time, and they linked to another guy.”

  “Who?”

  “It might be better that you don’t know.”

  “I’m a journalist. I can push these guys out
in the open.”

  “These are powerful people.”

  “So is information.”

  “Information can be used against you.”

  “I don’t care.”

  Flynn sat for a while thinking about Elyse. She was determined, that was for sure. But what he didn’t understand was why. And the why could be dangerous.

  “You should care,” he said. “Journalism doesn’t need martyrs, it needs journalists.”

  “I don’t have a death wish, John. I just don’t think the playing field should be so uneven simply because of where you happened to be born.”

  Flynn nodded. “Is that why you’re here?”

  “Oui.”

  “There’s more to it.”

  “Why does there have to be more to it?”

  “Because most people don’t like the uneven playing field, but most people don’t do anything about it. That sets you apart, and there’s always a reason for something like that.”

  “What do you want to know? That some tragic event with my parents drove me to become a crusader?”

  “Sure, if it’s the truth. But sometimes the truth is more prosaic.”

  “I grew up in Southern Germany,” she said. “Bavaria, you know it?”

  Flynn nodded.

  “I had a normal, happy childhood. I worked on the school paper and a local newspaper gave me a summer job typing hand-written notes into a computer. I read the stories, and I knew I wanted to write them. So I went to university and I got a job afterward, covering local news. Then I worked in TV for a while in Austria, but the news cycle was too fast. They never really got their teeth into a story, you know? It was all sound bites and follow up from stories broken by other outlets. Even in the digital age, good investigative journalism is done by newspapers. Even if they are online newspapers, like Mediapart. You don’t see the big stories breaking television, do you? The Panama Papers, for example, that was Süddeutsche Zeitung, a newspaper in Munich.”

  “So you work for a newspaper?”

  “Now I am freelance, but I have a retainer with Der Spiegel. They are the ones who have shown most interest in this story.”

  “And what is the story? That Loup is running a private refugee processing center? That seems public knowledge.”

  “It’s public record, not public knowledge. We have no idea what is happening in there. And that is what I want to know.”

  “What if it’s nothing? What if they are being treated well and processed in a timely fashion? You’re doing a lot of work with very little to go on.”

  “Let me ask you, what do you think of this village, Saint-Suliac-de-Bugey?”

  “I think it’s too good to be true. It looks like a movie set. Everything is clean, the cars are all new, the flowers are all bright, even in winter.”

  Elyse nodded. “And everybody is employed. At Loup’s factory or Loup’s prison.”

  “It’s no prison.”

  “It’s no holiday camp.”

  “No, it’s not that,” said Flynn. “But what about this farm? It’s not part of the village.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it looks real. There’s dirt and it smells like a farm. The farmhouse hasn’t been power washed like the village has.”

  “The farm is technically part of the village, but Monsieur Pepard is not one of them.”

  “One of them? What does that mean? And why exactly are you staying out here instead of a hotel in town, if that is where your suspicions lie? It doesn’t add up. It’s like you’re hiding out here.”

  “I’m not hiding. But I’ve been in the village. I’m known there. And I wouldn’t get a room, even if I wanted one, even if there was a hotel, which there isn’t.”

  “Why wouldn’t you get a room?”

  “John, they know what I’m doing. I’m asking questions. Too many questions. About the wrong things. About the detention center and about Loup. And no one’s talking. Literally. The villagers won’t even open their mouths near me. It’s like I’ve got the plague and speaking will mean they’ll catch it.”

  “Lots of villages are distrustful of strangers.”

  “This is beyond that. Loup has bought their silence. With jobs and civic funding. Every child in the school has a laptop, Every adult has a job. Their homes are renovated and their cars are new. They’ve been bought and paid for. The entire village.”

  “But why? Why on earth does Loup need an entire village to keep quiet? What they hell could he possibly be doing?”

  “The short answer? Everything. The long answer?”

  Flynn waited for the long answer. Elyse looked at him. Right in his eyes, like she was looking for something.

  Then she stood. Dusted off her jeans and stepped down onto the dirt.

  “You want the long story? I’ll show you.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  Elyse walked across the open space in front of the farmhouse, past the rental car and the barn where their cots were set up. Flynn followed her as she cut in between the barn and a large shed. For a moment he thought she was taking him out into the fields, but then he noticed the other structure. It was another stone building, tucked in behind a line of old trees. Flynn hadn’t noticed it before, being hidden from both the road and the farmhouse. It looked like the kind of building where a caretaker might have lived, long ago when the people who owned the land certainly didn’t work it. But Monsieur Pepard’s property was not that grand. He was a farmer, not a land owner. And as Flynn got closer he saw the waist-high fence around the front of the building, and the barn doors, and the cut up ground in front of them.

  “Pigs?” said Flynn.

  Elyse nodded. “Once upon a time. Monsieur Pepard says he had many hogs here. But he got out of that business to focus on goats, and milk and cheese. Now it’s a goat pen. Was a goat pen.” She vaulted over the fence and kept walking to the large doors. They were unusual, only about six feet high but each eight feet across. Elyse pulled open one door and slipped inside. Flynn followed. There were no goats.

  There were people.

  About a dozen of them. Women, children, men. The straw that had been used for the goats had been swept out and the floors hosed down. At the front of the space a trestle table had been set up. A man sat at the table. Beyond him, cots lined the walls like a boarding school or an orphanage. The same cots that had been set up for Flynn and Gorski. The same blankets. Some of the beds had children in them. Women were sitting on other beds.

  A flickering camping lamp on the table was the only light source so the rear of the space was dim and hard to make out. But Flynn could see every eye was on him. Elyse spoke to the man at the table in French.

  “He’s a friend,” she said.

  The man looked at Flynn without expression. Then a second look with perhaps a dose of suspicion. Then the man spoke to the room. To the others. In Arabic. He translated what Elyse had said. The man then turned back to Flynn. He had a hard face that spoke of a hard life. He spoke to Flynn in French.

  “They do not speak French,” he said.

  Flynn nodded and then looked at Elyse for answers.

  “They are refugees.” She smiled as she said it but Flynn wasn’t sure there was happiness behind the expression. He suspected she was using her tone of voice to mask the fact from the refugees that she was talking about them.

  “I got that,” said Flynn. “From the refugee center?”

  “No. This is part of an underground railroad. Refugees that leave the camps in Greece or come through Hungary. Some come here because they know people. And because of the colonial history, some people in Syria speak French as a second language, which makes it easier than going to Germany. Other Syrians speak some English, so they are trying to get to Calais and on to the UK.”

  Flynn looked across them. The adults were mostly women, and the children were mostly young. Flynn saw one man sitting on a cot, watching him. He and the man at the table were the only two men.

  “Where are they from?”

&nbs
p; “Monsiuer Betesh is from Damascus,” said Elyse nodding at the man at the table. The man nodded to Flynn that this was true. “These women and children are from Aleppo.”

  Flynn noticed that they smiled and nodded at the mention of their hometown.

  “Their husbands and brothers were killed. They had no protection and no means to make money or get food. Most of them lost their houses in bombings. When you have nothing but the cloth on your back, what do you do?”

  Flynn didn’t answer. He didn’t think she’d want to hear his response. Because he had been to a point where he had nothing but the cloth on his back. His family were killed in a terrorist attack. He lived. But the people looking for someone to blame looked at him. Like these women and children he had no choice but to flee. To turn his back on his old life, on everything he knew. On the country whose flag he had grown up saluting but where he had never lived. Through dumb luck or cosmic design, he found the Legion, and there he was broken down and built back up again. He found a home. Until it, too, was taken. But he didn’t have nothing to show for it. Now he had skills. Now he had experience. Now he knew his response would be to flee. Now he would fight.

  Flynn looked at Monsieur Betesh. He was thin and had sucked cheeks, and his hair was close cropped. Flynn guessed him to be in his late thirties but it was a guess, because his skin was aged by war.

  “Where is your family?” Flynn asked.

  “Here,” said Betesh.

  Flynn glanced at the women and children.

  Betesh said, “No. Not here. The camp.”

  Flynn wasn’t sure what he meant.

  “Monsieur Betesh’s wife and sister were taken,” said Elyse.

  “Taken from where?”

  “The refugee camps in Greece.”

  “And brought where? Here?”

  “Monsieur Betesh believes his wife and sister are being held in Loup’s detention center.”