One for One (John Flynn Thrillers Book 3)

by A. J. Stewart

  “I’m sorry,” said Flynn.

  He wished them all a good night, and then stepped out into the night. He didn’t vault the fence out of the goat pen. He just stood there, watching the Milky Way watching him. Elyse took a couple of minutes and then joined him.

  “That’s why you want to get into the camp?” asked Flynn. “To find his wife and sister.”

  “No, not just them. They’re how I know something bad is happening in there. I want to expose it all.”

  “How does them being moved into another camp for processing show anything bad is happening?”

  “Because Monsieur Betesh’s wife and sister weren’t transported by the EU, or the UN or the French government. I have a colleague in Greece, investigating that end. He says he can find no record of them. Not arriving and not leaving. But we think they came here on the same bus as all the others.”

  Flynn watched her. He could see the fury in her eyes. He wondered if she could see the fury building in his.

  “So that’s where you got the idea about smugglers taking refugees after arriving at the camps.”

  “No. I already believed that. Monsieur Betesh is not the first. But he confirmed it.”

  Flynn turned to her in the dark goat pen.

  “What will you do if you get inside.”

  “I’ll try to find Monsieur Betesh’s family. I will talk to any of the refugees about what is happening in there, and how they came to be there. I will get to the bottom of it. And I will throw it back in Jean Loup’s face. But it’s a big if. Because even if I can get in, how do I get out? Prison’s are designed to prevent that, right?”

  “I told you before, it’s not a prison.”

  “Semantics, John.”

  “No, Elyse. Not semantics. You’re right about prisons. They are designed to keep people in. But that detention center? It’s designed to keep people out.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because I’ve seen a lot of prisons, and I’ve seen the opposite. Forts, barracks, military bases, designed to keep people out. And they intrinsically shared some of the same characteristics. But there are important differences. The fencing, for a start. The external fencing is angled to prevent people climbing in, not out. It’s topped with razor wire, so it’s not an easy thing either way. But getting in is harder.”

  “I didn’t notice.”

  “No real reason you should. Then there’s the entrance we saw earlier. Booms and gates and fences. But they are more fortified on the way in than on the way out. The process is designed to check more fastidiously as you enter. If they really cared about escape, they would check harder on the way out.”

  “So you’re saying I could get out, but I can’t get in? Same result for me.”

  “No, I’m saying it’s harder to get in. Not impossible. It isn’t Alcatraz. I just need to come up with a plan to make it happen.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Flynn and Gorski stood out the back of the barn watching the night sky. It was clear and the temperature was dropping. They had closed up the barn to keep in what little warmth had been deposited by the day. Now they sipped on mugs of hot tea.

  “This is not our problem,” said Gorski.

  “You don’t think there’s some bad stuff going on here?”

  “Refugees are being processed. Maybe it takes longer than it should, but you know as well as I do that terrorists will do anything to sneak in. France has every right to confirm the identity of the people it lets in.”

  “You’re not concerned that some of these people seem to be going missing?”

  “I’m saying that we have a mission. We have our own objectives. If we start worrying about everyone we will achieve nothing. And cutting off Loup’s head—figuratively, although I don’t care if it happens literally—will help these people as much as it will us.”

  “I’m not saying we forget our mission,” said Flynn. “I’m just suggesting that while we plan for our mission we might be able to help them. All Elyse wants is to get into the detention facility.”

  “It’s mission creep, John.”

  “I know, but not as much as you think. Because if we want to get to Loup, we need him looking the other way.”

  “He has no weakness,” said Gorski, his breath visible in the darkness. “The tower, the home, the estate. There’s a lot of security. To get in will take a full scale attack. And we are two men.”

  Flynn smiled. “You don’t sound confident.”

  “We can do it, of course. But it will be messy. Wherever it happens. And that’s a problem.”

  “How so?”

  “Because of all our links are circumstantial,” said Gorski. “We have nothing concrete to link Loup to your situation, or my situation. Talking to Loup is the only way to know for sure, but to get to him we have to take some of his guys down. And that might prove justified. But what if it doesn’t? Are we to become the bad guys? Kill whoever we please without a modicum of evidence?”

  Flynn drank his tea. As always his number-two had articulated what Flynn was thinking. The links were there. Events in Iraq to General Thoreaux to Alain Beaumont to Loup. And on Gorski’s side: His parents to the tax officer to the lawyer to Pierre Robert to Loup. But Gorski was right. It wasn’t enough.

  Flynn and Gorski and their team had been hunters. At first they hunted down deserters from the Legion, but then there had been a terrorist attack on French targets in North Africa, and they had been given a new role. To hunt down the terrorists that would do harm to France.

  It was hard work but they had been good at it. They had tracked the worst of the worst across Africa and the Middle East, from Morocco to Iran, from Afghanistan and Pakistan to the avenues of Paris. They had found bad men who did unspeakable things, and sometimes they had delivered them to justice. And sometimes they had handed out the justice. Although it was outside both French and international law, they had never once backed down from taking out a bad guy. Sometimes the bad guys fought and were killed in the fight. Sometimes they were executed. Flynn understood the politics of it. He had no desire to make martyrs of these men. But he lived with their deaths every day. And he did so knowing that they were evil men, who had done evil things and would do again. He had proof. He had seen it with his own eyes.

  Not so with Jean Loup. He was the son of a successful businessman who had gone on to become a very successful businessman. He had turned hundreds of millions of euros into billions of euros. Flynn had no doubt that there were skeletons in his closet as a result. But the deaths of his security detail would not rest well with him without proof of something more.

  “We need more evidence, I agree. We will find it, if it is there. And we will find Loup’s weakness.”

  “If he has one.”

  “He has one. And it’s here somewhere. Not in Paris. What we need to find is here. The village, the factory, the refugee center, the estate. It’s all here.” Flynn looked at his comrade. “And something’s nagging at me. Something about Iraq.”

  “What about it?”

  “When we were investigating the shipment, I met a US Army major called Bradshaw.”

  “I remember. What does he have to do with this?”

  “He was working the thing from the US side. He felt like there were arms being traded during the drawdown, but someone above him didn’t want him looking into it.”

  “Who?”

  “He didn’t know. But his CO told him to keep at it in back channels. That’s when he contacted a guy he knew in France who he believed was looking into similar things.”

  “Colonel Laporte?”

  “Exactly,” said Flynn. “They had come across each other years before and kept in touch. Bradshaw was hamstrung. He couldn’t get his own people to continue investigating because he didn’t know who he could trust. So he called the colonel. And Laporte sent us in.”

  “I know, I was there. What’s the point?”

  “The point is, none of it made sense. We couldn’t tell where the arms
were coming from. In the end we believed the shipment came from inside Iran, into Iraq. Not from US stockpiles. Major Bradshaw said that they had as good an inventory system as anyone, and that their stuff wasn’t going missing on any kind of large scale. But he had evidence that shipments were coming into Iraq and then moving on into Iran and Afghanistan. From France.”

  “From France? France wasn’t in Iraq. That’s why we were there. Deniability.”

  “Exactly right. But Bradshaw said he had traced stuff back to an airfield in France.”

  “Ambérieu-en-Bugey,” said Gorski.

  “You have it.”

  “But this is a tiny base. They do maintenance.”

  “So perhaps less eyes to see what is going on. And perhaps it is the closest place to whatever and whoever is running it.”

  “It’s not enough,” said Gorski.

  “I agree. But it tells me we are digging in the right place.”

  The two men wandered in from the cold. The barn was warmer but only marginally. Flynn hoped the women and children in the other barn were warm enough. Elyse was sitting under a blanket on her cot, still wearing a thick sweater. She watched them come in.

  “I will close my eyes while you change, if you want,” she said.

  “Not necessary,” said Flynn. Both men sat on their cots facing each other but looking at her.

  “You wouldn’t be more comfortable in the farmhouse?” Flynn asked.

  “Why? Because I’m a woman?”

  “No, because the farmhouse is warmer. We’re used to it. This is luxury compared to some of the places we’ve slept.”

  Gorski nodded in agreement.

  “I’m fine where I am,” she said.

  Flynn dropped it. He didn’t care where she slept, and if she wanted to be cold out of principle, then that was fine with him.

  “Elyse, what can you tell us about Jean Loup’s business?” asked Gorski. “We know his father was a successful businessman and Loup took over. Was that after his death?”

  “Oui. Jean was already very involved by that time. His father had concentrated on building the business inside France, and then within the EU. But Jean drove the expansion beyond Europe. He was heavily invested in China before his father died. Now even more so, I think.”

  “Was that where the growth came from? He’s worth billions now, correct?”

  “It was. The French businesses grew some. Loup got into defense manufacturing. That’s what we think the factory does here, for example. But he also expanded internationally. That was where the real growth came from.”

  “Where did he expand?”

  “Everywhere,” said Elyse. “Building and infrastructure partnerships in China and Hong Kong, he built roads in Egypt and the UAE, he developed oil fields and telecommunications in Nigeria, he got defense contracts in Algeria and South Africa and the Philippines. He developed partnerships in Saudi Arabia and Jordan. There are rumors he built telecommunications systems in Iran and Libya but those are unconfirmed. In short, he spread far and wide.”

  “How has he done compared to other French companies?” asked Flynn.

  “There is no comparison. In terms of growth he is miles in front of any other French multinational. All the others that were of similar size—in the hundred million plus euro range—are still in that ballpark, up to maybe three or four hundred million. And the larger companies that were already close or at a billion have not gotten that much bigger. Loup is the one. He’s the success story. In twenty years he has become a major player in a number of industries right across the world. Now he’s even into luxury resorts. Just last month he opened a new 6-star resort in Dubai.”

  Gorski glanced at Flynn, who stood, picked up his small pack and slipped it onto his shoulder.

  “Food for thought,” Flynn said. “Let’s think on it. I’m going for a walk.”

  Flynn strode out of the barn and Elyse watched him go and then looked at Gorski.

  “Did I say something?” she asked.

  “No. He thinks best on his feet. And alone.” Gorski pulled off his boots and slipped under the blanket.

  Elyse lay down and put her hand on the camp light by her cot.

  “Should I leave the light on?”

  “No,” said Gorski. “He can see fine in the dark. Like an owl.”

  He couldn’t see quite as well as an owl, but under clear skies he could see well enough. Flynn stepped out into the yard where he picked up a rusted can, that might have once been used to carry water. Then he trod around the barn. Flynn had noticed a livestock trailer out behind the shed that housed a tractor. The trailer seemed too large to hold the goats that wandered around the place, and Flynn wondered if perhaps Monsieur Pepard had once raised a lot more cattle. Flynn stepped up into the trailer. The floor was covered in dirt and straw, as if it had not been used in quite some time. He settled down into the corner and pulled his jacket tight. Then he opened his pack and pulled out the bottle of bourbon he had found in Ambérieu. He looked at the label. It was always bourbon. Nothing else would do.

  He took a deep breath of cold air. It smelled of hay and manure. Then he cracked open the bottle and let the first hints of the liquor consume him. He poured half the bottle into the rusted can, and then set the bottle down and let the fumes fill the confined space. He closed his eyes. It had been weeks since he had taken the time to clear his thoughts, and the images came thick and fast.

  There was usually a logic to them, a sequence, but tonight his mind played them back in a different order. First he saw Monsieur Pepard’s farm. The gravel and dirt driveway and the stone farmhouse and outbuildings. Then the farmhouse vaporized and reformed as a wooden structure, another farmhouse from another time, years before. The snow covered the land, just as it had blanketed Gorski’s property, and Flynn had marched up to the house in the falling snow. The family there, a farmer and his wife and children, had offered him refuge. A hot meal and a bed. He had thanked them, but asked if he might use their barn, just as he and Gorski and Elyse were using Monsieur Pepard’s. They gave him a blanket and a kerosene lamp from the kitchen. He took to the privacy of the barn and opened a bottle of bourbon as he had just done again. But that night years ago, he had pushed thoughts of his family from his mind—the final bitter words with his father, before the bomber took his mother and brother and father from him. He had lay against the hay on a cold, snowy night and drunk the bottle dry, and had been woken by a neighbor checking on the animals, after he had been alerted by the fire in the night sky.

  Flynn hadn’t been able to save the family. Their house was half gone by the time he staggered out into the snow. The police told him they suspected a kerosene lamp had been left lit, and perhaps knocked over by the family cat. The officer eyed Flynn with suspicion but had told him there was nothing he could have done. But Flynn knew they were both thinking the same thing.

  They left the lamp burning in case you came back in from the cold.

  It was the last time Flynn had allowed alcohol to pass his lips. Even the tobacco scent of the bourbon that enveloped him in the trailer didn’t persuade him to drink it. The image of the farmhouse burning, the knowledge that the children were still inside, quelled any thirst.

  And then Flynn waited for the visions of his father to come. Usually they came first, but there was no rhyme or reason to it. The flames of the farmhouse became the flames of the resort in Abu Dhabi, and even in a trailer in a field in France, Flynn recoiled from them. He saw the face of the State Department representative who interrogated, and his father’s CO arriving and saving him from the accusations of being involved in the bombing.

  And then back in time, just a few hours before the blast. To their last conversation. The smell of bourbon on his father’s breath. The disappointment in his eyes. Trying to explain to his dad why he wanted to join the army instead of following his father into the marines. But his father’s allegiances held firm and their final words were words of spite. Perhaps his father would have understood, in time. T
hat the son wanted to follow his father into a life of duty and service, but to blaze his own trail at the same time.

  Flynn wasn’t sure what his father would have made of his choices since then. As the scent of his father’s drink wafted away on the air, he hoped that the old man would have understood that his message of service and sacrifice had been heard, and his core belief—that those who have the capacity to protect those who cannot protect themselves, have a duty to do so—had become the guiding principle of his son’s unconventional life.

  Chapter Nineteen

  A brisk morning saw the village of Saint-Suliac-de-Bugey buzzing. The quiet of the previous day had been replaced by an energy that ran counter to the ideals of the sabbath. Especially in France, where leisure time was enshrined in law.

  Flynn and Gorski marched into town to find a sense of industry about the place. People were on the streets, moving with purpose. Clearly some were making their way to church, but that didn’t account for the buzz. The smell of baking bread wafted across the village square and they could see the butcher at work with a cleaver despite having no meat on display in his window.

  They found a cafe on the square that was serving coffees to villagers on their way to church. Flynn stepped inside and took in the instant silence, as every head in the room turned to the door. Flynn didn’t offer a smile. It really wasn’t the French way. Smiles were for after coffee. Flynn nodded to a plump woman behind the bar.

  “Bonjour,” he said. The woman offered no response.

  “Deux café, s'il vous plait.”

  The woman gave Flynn a frown and then offered the same to Gorski. It took her so long to move that Flynn wondered if she was going to pretend she hadn’t heard him. But eventually she must have figured they were there and they weren’t going away without a coffee. She banged and pulled at her machine, sending great wafts of steam into the room. Then she dropped two small cups of black coffee onto the bar.