Girl Stalks the Ruins

by Jacques Antoine

  “Enough small talk,” she said.

  “It’s like there’s a war going on within the French intelligence services,” he said, once she’d relaxed her grip. “We captured two phone calls, and we couldn’t get them to listen...”

  “What was so special about the calls?”

  “We haven’t cracked their code, but what seemed really interesting about them… was the language, or languages. Russian, or Serbian, and Pashtu.”

  She glanced at Perry. His original surmise seemed to have been correct.

  “You translated them?”

  “Yes, but like I said, they’re in a ‘dumb’ code… not a cipher, just oblique references. ‘Two extra packages,’ a false destination, the casino at Deauville, scrambled times and dates, that sort of thing.”

  “You say the French weren’t interested?” Perry asked.

  “The Police Judiciale… sort of like your FBI, they wanted to act on our intel, but the DGSI gummed up the works.”

  “The DGSI?”

  “It’s their spy agency, like MI-5, or your CIA. Their man refused to allow that any of our intel was actionable.”

  “Was anything actionable in it?” Emily asked.

  “The mention of the casino at Deauville in one call, our people think it’s a misdirection and really refers to Monaco. But the DGSI is convinced the terrorists have headed north and mean to cross into Belgium near Lille, and then to Amsterdam.”

  “But you think they’re heading south?” Perry asked.

  “… merely on the strength of a reference to a casino?” Emily asked.

  “That, and a GPS ping detected last night by your NSA, near Orléans. If they don’t want to attract attention, the next suitable stop before Marseilles and the southern coast is Clermont-Ferrand. The Director of Clandestine Services at your CIA relayed this theory to my boss. This is what I have for you.”

  “And your people think they were speaking Pashtu?” Perry asked.

  Sounds of a commotion on the other side of the café filtered through the foliage that so far had concealed them, before he could get an answer. When Emily glanced at him, Perry guessed at the urgency she felt. This was where they’d go their separate ways, and he’d need to occupy their contact for an extra moment or two while she put some distance between them. He didn’t like to consider the possibility, but he might have to lead Rémy’s men away, or Levautrin’s, if that’s who they were, to give her a chance to escape. Perhaps he’d be able to catch up to her at Clermont-Ferrand, wherever that was. But parting with her now could have the result that she’d end up having to run down their prey alone, and he shivered to think about how such a confrontation might end… especially given the dark turn her thoughts had begun to take over the past day and a half.

  Before his imagination could go too far down this path, she shimmied out of her blouse without undoing the buttons, and gave him one of those looks as if to say, “I’m working here, give me some cover.” He recovered himself and twisted their contact into the wall, and hissed into the man’s ear.

  “Respect the lady’s privacy, and stay very quiet.” Of course, he knew very well Emily’s modesty, or lack of it, was inconsequential at this moment. The rustle of her trousers slipping down as she stepped out of them pulled his head back, and he could hardly keep from gaping at her long limbs. His heart seemed to pause for an instant at the sight of her surrounded by foliage, in underwear and sports bra, like Botticelli’s vision of Venus, who seems acutely aware of how out of place she must always be, and yet appears serenely indifferent to the paradox.

  His charge tried to shift so as to turn his head, and Perry pressed him even more firmly into the wall – “Not so hard, chief,” he groaned.

  “Leave me the scarf,” he said, over one shoulder.

  She stuffed pants and blouse into her bag and pulled a loose fitting sundress over her head, a yellow and pink floral pattern, and he couldn’t recall when she’d acquired it. After she’d unwound the headscarf, and run fingers through her hair to fluff up the new pixie cut, the blond hair framed her dark eyes in a quite arresting way. It occurred to him that if passing unnoticed had been the goal, this outfit might be less effective than she’d hoped. With sunglasses, and a bag hoisted onto her shoulder, the light shifted, and she seemed less translucent. In fact, desire’s own object never seemed more obscure than when she tipped her head to him, and turned toward the public areas of the garden.

  Once she’d gone, Perry could almost imagine she hadn’t been there at all. No traces remained of her sudden transformation from cancer survivor to woodland fairy, and he shivered to think he might never see her again, in either guise. He relaxed his grip.

  “Your girl, mate? She seems like a handful.”

  “You don’t know the half of it,” Perry said, before realizing he hadn’t meant to allow this fellow into his confidence. It was stunning how quickly a pro can initiate a counter-interrogation, and the reminder snapped him back into focus.

  “If you’re not operatives, how are you involved in this kerfuffle, then? I mean, your CIA has a regular pipeline from special forces into the company,” he repeated, while he tried to shrug the reminder of Perry’s grip out of his neck and shoulder. “… but the bird doesn’t fit that story quite so easily.”

  “They aren’t terrorists,” Perry said, to derail the interrogation, while he counted off the seconds before he could depart, too. And he also wanted to get something more out of this agent, if he could. “That’s the first thing. But you’ve already tumbled to that already, right?”

  “The Police Judiciale has already identified four of the dead as known jihadists from Afghanistan. That sounds rather like terrorists, don’t you think?” With one hand on his chin, he reflected on this prospect. “Of course, Afghan jihadists don’t have an obvious natural grudge against the French. I’d have expected them to come from North Africa, you know, Algeria or Morocco… and they did release the children this morning. On the other hand, they found a disarmed suicide vest on the scene.”

  “What do you mean, released the children?” Perry demanded.

  “It’s been all over the news, the Roussel woman’s two boys, they were discovered this morning, just outside St. Denis. We assumed they were the ‘two extra packages’ mentioned in that other call.”

  Perry searched his memory of the morning. They’d passed a TV in a shop window near the open-air market, and there had been video of two boys. But he hadn’t been able to read the news scroll at the bottom of the screen, and took it for more human interest footage of the victims. He mainly noticed one of the boys holding a broken electronic toy. The news cameras seemed to dwell on it, as if to suggest the cruelty of the men who’d break a child’s toy.

  He’d waited long enough for her to get clear. Now it was time for him to leave, too. But what to do with this contact he didn’t entirely trust?

  “Jacket, wallet, keys, hand ’em over.”

  Some grumbling ensued, but he eventually complied. “That’s not on, mate. I’m not the enemy here.”

  “Sorry. I can’t take any chances. Where’s it parked?”

  Once he’d passed out from the chokehold, Perry bound his hands in Emily’s scarf, and his feet in a length of cord from a nearby trashcan. Once he’d been stowed securely behind a stack of banana crates, Perry put on the man’s jacket. The fit was on the snug side, but the sleeves were the right length. He’d toss it once he was clear of the café area. Now to find the Boulevard de la Reine, where Emily had said to meet.

  Chapter 13

  Le Massif Central

  “We took his car,” Emily said into the phone, while Perry angled onto the ramp leading from the A10 to the A71. “Are you sure this is wise?” She’d taken the phone from her ear to address him directly.

  “He wasn’t expecting me to take his keys, which probably means there’s no active tracking on this thing.”

  “He was supposed to give you a car,” Michael barked, once Emily had him on speaker. “That was
the point of having you meet him.”

  “Well, it didn’t seem to be his intention,” Perry said. “Plus, there were French plain clothes officers all over the gardens. If they weren’t there for us, they were looking for him.”

  “It was hotter than we expected,” Emily chimed in.

  “Hmmm,” Michael growled. “What the hell is MI-6 up to?”

  “He expected to be deported at any moment. Perhaps he’d decided that was more important than helping us.”

  “Perry’s probably right about the active tracking, then.”

  “But the auto-routes are lousy with traffic cameras,” Emily said. “They’ll be able to find us that way.”

  “Eventually,” Perry said. “But it’s only two and half hours to Clermont-Ferrand this way. By the time they find that guy… even if he spills the beans, and they can organize an interface with the traffic cams, we’ll already have ditched the car. You said it yourself, the train trip would take nine or ten hours, and there’s cameras that way, too.”

  Emily took the phone off speaker. “I’m sorry the meet didn’t go as you expected, but the situation on the ground really didn’t look promising. If we’d stayed there, we’d have accomplished nothing, and your SAS contact said the French mean to concentrate their assets up north.” She grunted in response to whatever Michael said, and asked him to put Yuki on the line. A few close exchanges in Japanese followed – Perry assumed it was merely something personal to reassure her mother. Would she have any reason to keep whatever they said from Michael, or him? He was reminded again that the person they were bending all their efforts to find was also her mother, and the emotional stakes were high for all of them.

  The next two hours passed in relative silence. She closed her eyes, once she’d related Michael’s news: they’d detected another ping on Andie’s GPS chip, outside the town of Orcine. Unfortunately, the burner phones they had weren’t smart enough to find a location by GPS coordinates, but it was a remote region, in the central mountain range, so it might not be difficult to track a gang of Russians or Afghanis there.

  Was she really sleeping, or was this merely one of her meditative moods? Perry thought he detected a subtle snore over the engine noise. When the phone vibrated, he picked it off her lap and heard Michael’s voice again.

  “NSA managed to get inside their traffic system. They have a roadblock just north of Clermont-Ferrand.”

  He nudged Emily. “You hacked the DGSI?” he asked.

  “Not exactly. We hacked the highway system’s traffic cams, and they show official activity on your route, a major concentration of flashing lights at Clermont-Ferrand. It’s just an educated guess, but I think that’s for you.”

  “What should we do?” Emily snorted awake to hear Michael’s directions.

  “Get off at Cébazat.” Michael plotted a route to the vicinity of the GPS location using the ‘D’ routes, mainly slower country roads with the occasional stop at an intersection, but with no active alerts on them, and few cameras. “Take D2 west to the 941. That should keep you out of their way.”

  Emily finally collected herself and took over the conversation on speaker, while Perry maneuvered the car off the highway. “Is there any more news?”

  “No new developments, but I’m beginning to think your suspicions about the DGSI are right. There have been a lot of uncharacteristic personnel moves in the past year involving the Gendarmes, and they may have been orchestrated out of the DGSI. My contacts at State think there’s a major shakeup going on, and with no motivation prior to this incident… well, the timing invites speculation.”

  “I told you about Nassim’s uncle… you remember, the waiter we rescued? Anyway, does any of this involve his uncle, who’s a colonel in the Gendarmes?”

  “Perhaps, though that adds an extra layer of complexity to whatever’s going on.”

  “You mean because of the Mini-14s they were carrying?”

  “Unfortunately, we can’t broach that with the French without giving them reason to believe you were running an op, that we had advance knowledge of the attack, and so on. It’s a dead end.”

  “Maybe not,” Perry said. “They must already know about the guns, but probably don’t want to admit it in public, for whatever reason. After all, it was their crime scene at the Louvre. Let the Brits bring it up, imply they picked it up in chatter via SIGINT… and have them approach the French police, not the spooks at DGSI.”

  “Rémy’s the cop running that side of the investigation,” Emily added. “There’s definitely some tension between him and the intel officer, Levautrin.”

  “You mean apply a little pressure to Rémy… or maybe give him an incentive to break ranks with the intel side?”

  Plowed fields and evergreen hedgerows quilted the scene unfolding around them. An occasional farm vehicle clogged the road, and sometimes there was extra traffic around a church or a memorial to the forgotten dead of another generation’s war. Perry caught himself slipping into a reverie about the prospects of a different sort of holiday, one to be spent with Emily alone, a Provençal idyll, free of family encumbrances, free to fantasize about the family he would make with her. No, another errand demanded his attention, both much more urgent and much less quixotic.

  “This would be a lot easier if we had access to Michael’s satellite imagery,” Perry groaned.

  “… or even the slightest bit of local intel,” Emily added, as they coasted along the zone commercial of the village of Orcines, eyeing the shops on either side of the avenue, a supermarché, a boulangerie, a charcuterie, a few boutiques of indiscernible enterprise, perhaps a shoe store or a laundromat, until she spotted something useful. “There, stop the car. The tabac… I think it’s like an informal bar or café… we can find what we need there.”

  “What, tobacco?”

  “No, silly, intel. That’s what we need. Michael’s description of a hillside cabin with poplars isn’t going to cut it.”

  “How do you intend to communicate with the locals? Neither of us speaks French.”

  Inside, a few grizzled regulars sat at the counter, arguing about something incomprehensible, and Emily found a table by a window. Perry sized up the room while she scanned the phrase book in her travel guide. The shop seemed to be divided between a newsstand, a smoke shop, and a café. One waitress managed the counter and tables, and growls and shouts emanating from a backroom suggested an active kitchen.

  Who did she expect to be able to extract information from in this place, Perry wondered. The regulars looked too old to be able to communicate with her in English, and the waitress was probably too busy to engage in the sort of casual conversation he figured would be necessary to find anything out. Assuming, of course, the language barrier could be overcome.

  The waitress began to make the rounds in the general direction of their table, and Emily glanced up from her book to a menu on the wall behind the counter.

  “Une assiette de crudités, s’il vous plait, et une assiette de charcuterie… et deux cafés.”

  Perry’s jaw hung open as the waitress repeated the gist of whatever it was Emily had said: “Crudités, charcuterie, et deux cafés.” He figured it involved coffee, but beyond that he wondered if she knew what she’d ordered.

  “What the hell just happened?”

  “It’s not that hard, honey. You just have to listen. All I did was read stuff off the menu up there.”

  “Yeah, but what you said sounded like actual words.”

  “Maybe not so much. Did you see the look she gave me, like I was speaking Martian or something.”

  “We’ll know when whatever you just ordered arrives.”

  Much to his relief and surprise, the waitress returned a few minutes later with two cups of coffee, and said something about “lait,” whatever that might be. He nodded and grinned, and she produced a little pitcher of cream… or maybe it was milk. He couldn’t really tell, since everything here was so much richer than what he was used to back home. The thought tickled him, a
nd he wondered where, exactly, home was. Vermont, perhaps? But he hadn’t been there in over a year, and even though his mother still lived in Shelburne, she was getting ready to sell the house and move to Connecticut to be near her sister. It certainly wasn’t Coronado, where the Naval Spec War Center was housed, nor San Clemente Island, or any of the other sites around San Diego, and definitely not Kodiak Island, where they’d done cold weather training – none of them qualified, since he had no deep attachments to any of those places. He’d spent most of his time in recent years at Bagram Air Force Base, but that hardly felt like anything but a way station. The real truth was that he’d become a vagabond, a military transient, and the closest thing to home for him was wherever Emily happened to be.

  Two plates arrived, one with some sort of salad and the other a selection of sliced meats, rather like salami and prosciutto, with a few slices of crusty bread and mustard. Emily handed the woman forty euros before she could even present a bill. She returned a few minutes later with the change, eighteen euros, and a bit of curiosity about her customers.

  “Vous êtes Americains?”

  Perry nodded, and Emily said “Oui… yes. Do you speak English?”

  “A little. Do you enjoy your visite?”

  “Yes, very much. Perhaps you can help us. We are looking for a… for my mother.”

  Perry considered Emily’s expression, and wondered why she hadn’t devised a better story. She might have said they were looking for his mother. This was the first time she had identified Andie to anyone outside the family. The very words, “…looking for my mother,” carried so much freight for her, saying them out loud seemed to shake her very frame, though the waitress betrayed no awareness of it.

  “Your mother, cheri, mais oui.”

  “She’s tall, like me, with long blond hair,” – the waitress tilted her head to consider Emily from a new angle, as if to resolve some paradox – “and she may be traveling with some Russians.”