Girl Stalks the Ruins

by Jacques Antoine

  As if a circuit had been closed, the waitress’s eyes lit up. “Les Russes… attendez, s’il vous plait.” She gestured to the man who ran the other side of the business, the newspaper and tobacco counter, and went over to confer with him. “Ah, oui,” he said with a snort. “Les Russes, c’est toujours leurs cigarettes sales, Yelets Prima, Yelets Prima, c’est toujours Yelets Prima.”

  The waitress returned with information. “Il m’a dit… pardon, I mean he says les Russes have been here, but he has not seen a blonde lady. He thinks they are staying in une gîte… a cottage sur le chemin de la montagne.”

  “The mountain?” Emily asked.

  “Le Puy de Dôme, the volcano west of town.”

  It didn’t take long to work out directions and head for the car, and the change in Emily’s mood was palpable. Not the excitement Perry might have expected, the raw nervous energy of a pursuit’s final stage – she sat quietly in the passenger seat as they headed west to begin the ascent, her passions calm and her breathing slow. This was how she prepared for battle. Perry remembered seeing it before, most recently just before she leapt from a burning plane into the waters off Y’Ami island on the northernmost end of the Philippine chain. She took the lives of many that night, a pallid demon slashing at them from the shadows, ripping the life from chests and throats. He shuddered at the thought, but also couldn’t suppress a visceral thrill at the prospect of fighting at her side once more. Was this what home had come to mean to him?

  The cottage more or less fit Michael’s description of it, hanging on a hillside above high meadows. It was really more a farmhouse then a cottage, and in some disrepair. Broken shingles and creeping moss suggested the mildew within. Perry lodged the car behind a stand of poplars a half klick away, and Emily stood quietly by the boot for a moment, weighing the merits of a change of clothes.

  “How do you want to approach?” Perry asked, crouching behind a hedge.

  “I could just knock on the door.”

  Perry considered her face, and then the hundred meters or so of open field in which she’d be exposed to gunfire before she got anywhere near the house. He didn’t doubt for a second that she had the nerve to do it. “It might work, you know, in that dress. But perhaps it’s not really worth the risk.”

  “I suppose you have a point. I take it you’d prefer to circle around the hill and enter where the house is close to the tree line.”

  The phone in his pocket vibrated, and Perry handed it to her. “We’re looking at the house now. No sign of activity or vehicles.” A moment later she passed it back to him. “Michael says we may be out of time.”

  “How’s he so sure?”

  “Satellite imagery shows the roadblock we dodged has been taken down, and a couple of choppers were scrambled out of Auvergne.”

  “If they’re headed here, we may not have time to get back out, if we go in.” The words had barely left Perry’s mouth before Emily had launched herself at a dead run, bare knees churning in the fading light of the afternoon, seeking cover where she could behind the hedgerow that had so far shielded them from the house. She slipped through two thirds of the way along, which he figured provided the shortest path to the windows on the west side. “Always a vector,” he muttered, and heaved himself across an embankment to follow.

  The thought struck a deep chord – that’s who she really is, not so much a predator, more a herding dog than a wolf, a defender more than an attacker, always preferring indirection to direct confrontation when possible, though never one to back down either. He could see how this character trait might even be maternal at its core. What he couldn’t exactly see was if she would want to be a mother, much less to make a family with him. But why not? It’s not like she’d ever shown any interest in anyone else, not even the playboy billionaire she’d been assigned to turn in Beijing.

  A side door dangled open, and she made for it at top speed. He crashed through right behind her, ready for whatever they might find. But they found nothing, no terrorists, no hostages. The debris of a few meals littered the main room, with little in the way of furniture to get in the way of the flow of food wrappers and other trash. A few wooden chairs, a wobbly table, a sprung sofa with ancient perspiration stains, and a moth-eaten blanket – Emily glanced around the room, pointed to a crumpled cigarette pack, and cursed under her breath.

  “Yelets Prima,” Perry said. “This is the right farm house.”

  “Check upstairs,” she said. “I’ll take the basement.”

  Perry took the stairs two at a time, no need for caution now. If the terrorists had been here, they’d have shot them by now. Three rooms, no closets – the French had preferred armoires in the previous century – more filthy bedding strewn across the floor. Downstairs again, he cleared the kitchen and a mildew-stained loo, when Emily called up to him.

  “No lights down here?” he said, feeling his way down until his eyes had time to adjust.

  “Just what you see from the casement windows. I found something… over here.”

  “Is that a body?” Fortunately, even in the dim light, Perry could see that it was a bearded male, not Andie. His heart slowly crept back down his throat.

  “Yeah, but that’s not the important thing. Check this out.”

  “Is that what I think it is?” He peered over Emily’s shoulder as she crouched to inspect a pipe running low against a wall. Two symbols had been scratched into the cement: 天月.

  “Here, on the pipe, the paint is flaked off, and these fibers on the floor. This is where they tied up their hostages.”

  “And those, they look like what the kids were carving at that Roman ruin.”

  “Sky and moon,” Emily muttered. “Andie must have learned it from Li Li. This proves she’s alive. They must still have a use for hostages.”

  Perry began to speculate about where their quarry might be headed next – his best guesses involved borders, either Spain or Italy, or the Mediterranean coast – when the thump-thump-thump of heavy rotors told them time was up.

  Chapter 14

  Persuading the Pursuit

  In a matter of moments, the Gendarmes had executed a full breach. Seconds later, several men in full tactical gear came crashing down the basement stairs with weapons leveled. Emily glanced over to Perry, her hands held above her shoulders, and her eyes seemed to have a message in them. What was she trying to tell him? Two burly men tried to shove them roughly to the floor, and he wondered if she would resist. If she didn’t, it wouldn’t make sense for him to either.

  In that fraction of a second in which decisions are taken, Perry saw one of the Gendarmes strike at her shoulder with the butt of his rifle, while another seized her elbow and tried to spin her toward the floor. The hemline of her dress flared up as she turned and he glimpsed the ribbon frill on her underwear – a pink print featuring tiny detectives in yellow or blue, each one holding a magnifying glass and wearing a deerhunter cap. He’d teased her about the design only this morning, as she got dressed. The men noticed it, too, and one of them seemed frozen, his mouth agape.

  If she meant to act, this was her moment, in the instant of vulnerability her assailant had inadvertently created. A voice behind him barked again, something like “sur le sol,” and shoved him. But how would she act… if she did? His mind ran through the possibilities, flashing images of what he’d seen her do in other situations. She’d seize the hand gripping her elbow, fingers wrapping around his thumb and palm, twist it in and up, swinging the man into his partner, neutralizing his weapon in the same movement. A sharp blow under his arm, or to the base of his throat would incapacitate him for an instant. From there, she’d glance across, needing him to strike one of the men standing at his back, while she disposed of the other. Four heavily armed men – it would be almost impossible to control all of their weapons without injuring or even maiming at least one of them, if not more. This, he knew, she’d be reluctant to do.

  Perry felt the blunt impact of the rifle butt between his shoulder blades
just as his fantasy turned to the injuries she was likely to sustain in resisting, and the vow he’d made to protect her from such things. His face contacted the floor, and he hardly noticed, content at least to see that she’d suffered nothing so serious.

  He glanced over to where Emily lay, a few feet away, a man in tactical gear pressing a knee into her back as several others trained Mini-14s at them. Her eyes flashed at him, and behind the warrior spirit that always resided there, he thought a warmer light glowed back at him.

  “Arrête,” a husky voice growled, in familiar tones. “Laisse les… lève toi.”

  Perry recognized Colonel Hassan’s voice – this must be what she had counted on, why she hadn’t resisted – and he took an offered hand, while other men helped Emily to her feet with confused apologies. One of his officers, more senior perhaps than the rest, complained to the colonel and gestured to the dead body.

  “He was dead when we got here,” Perry offered.

  Hassan held up one hand, to discourage any further explanations, and turned back to his officer, whom he dismissed with a few curt phrases. Perry guessed this meant they’d been under surveillance longer than they knew. There was some comfort in this thought: first, that the Gendarmes were more capable than he’d initially assumed, but also, and mainly, that at least one branch of the French authorities had gotten their heads out of their asses far enough to recognize what had really transpired at the museum.

  “You believe us now?” Emily asked. Hassan nodded, and she reached out to touch his wrist. There was a certain magic in a woman’s touch, and she knew how to wield it in moments like this, creating a bond with a man to soften the usual claims of his professionalism. “What has changed since yesterday?”

  “The boys,” Perry said, in a sudden revelation, as quietly as he could. “The two little boys were released in St. Denis. That was meant to cast suspicion on your family, wasn’t it?”

  Hassan pulled them aside and waved his men away. “Oui, this is what I think. Also the guns recovered at the musée, we were able to trace les chiffres… the serial numbers, to our armory in Satory.”

  “Is Nassim safe?” Emily asked. “…and Akram and his family?”

  “Oui. Merci, mademoiselle. They are all safe. The captive children were found outside Akram’s building last night, and all the residents have been detained for questioning. But Nassim and Akram, and the children, were apparently visiting relatives in Amiens.”

  “Then it really was meant to draw suspicion on them?” Perry asked.

  “But why would anyone wish to target them?” Emily asked. “First Nassim, at the museum, and then the others at home.”

  “C’est assez clair, c’est moi…I must be the target, mademoiselle. Nassim is merely another of the ‘usual suspects.’ But someone wants to use me to embarrass toute la Gendarmerie, perhaps the gouvernement aussi.”

  “You must have your suspicions as well, then.”

  “It is an election year,” Perry suggested.

  Hassan frowned at the thought. “Oui, monsieur. The far right candidate might expect to benefit from such a scandal, especially if it involved someone like me.”

  Another of his men, standing over the corpse in the corner, signaled to the colonel. He rolled the body over, and pointed out the entry and exit wounds from two bullets, in the hip and chest. “Il a saigné à mort, Colonel,” he said.

  “He doesn’t look like the others,” Perry said. “He’s not Afghani.”

  “Do you recognize him?” Hassan asked.

  “Just as a type. Strong, rough, powerful hands, probably ex-special forces… if he got those wounds in the initial attack…”

  “… then one of us probably did shoot him,” Emily added, and both Perry and Hassan stared at her. “… at the museum. No one else has been shooting back at these guys, have they?”

  “If they carried him this far, he must be important, or useful. Otherwise they’d have left him there to die with the others.”

  “With the others?” Hassan asked.

  “This looks like a Russian operation,” Perry said. “Russian cigarettes upstairs, and the tabac owner in the village complained about rude Russians in his shop.

  “Les Russes…” Hassan rubbed his chin as he considered Perry’s speculation.

  “I’d guess they’re former Spetsnaz, Russian special forces, maybe working as mercenaries. But they hired some Afghan helpers, maybe disenchanted mujahideen or Taliban. I expect they meant to leave their bodies in the museum as a false lead. That may be why they couldn’t afford to leave him behind, too. It would have destroyed the illusion.”

  “Then these are not terrorists, in the usual sense of the word,” Emily said. “They must be working with…”

  “…avec quelq’un dans le DGSI,” Hassan muttered. “I mean, someone within the sécurité. The guns, the children, even the strenuous effort to escape… a concerted effort to mislead, this is not terrorism. If you are right about les mercenaires Russes, it could not have been coordinated without an insider.” Hassan paused to consider the two foreigners who loomed so large in his investigation, rubbing the bristle of his unshaven cheek. “But perhaps you can tell me now, mes amis, how you come to be involved so deeply in this affair. Why are you still in pursuit of these men? What concern is it of yours? Why did you not simply return aux Etats Unis, after our last meeting?”

  Perry glanced at Emily, uncertain what sort of response she would deem acceptable to the colonel’s quite reasonable questions. How much would she be willing to divulge to him?

  When they didn’t respond right away, Hassan continued: “I have seen the videos de la musee, and I still have the bruises from our first meeting, chez Akram… I’d have to be an idiot not to recognize that you also are special forces, just like the dead man. My family owes you a debt, I will not deny it…”

  Perhaps she’d been waiting for him to mention his family, or perhaps her own emotions finally got the better of her, but Emily let the deepest secret out right then: “She’s my mother.”

  Hassan stared uncomprehendingly at her, and she seemed unable to finish the thought. Perry offered a fuller explanation. “Yes, we are special forces, but we were in the museum by chance, with family, on vacation. We did what we did because…” Perry had to pause to catch his breath, just now noticing the toll not speaking freely about their ‘situation’ had taken on both of them. When he looked at Emily, her face was flushed.

  “You did what you were trained to do,” Hassan said, finishing the thought. “Any of my men would have done the same. But why are you still doing it?”

  “One of the hostages is her mother. That’s why we are still in pursuit.”

  The expression on Hassan’s face spoke volumes. “The blonde woman, but her identity is still unknown… she is yours? But how?” Perhaps the bleached blonde hair made it even more difficult to accept the notion that Andie could be the mother of this Asian girl standing before him. He ran a hand through his own hair as he tried to take it all in.

  “It’s a long story,” Perry said.

  “I grew up in her house,” Emily said, finally able to speak. “She is like a mother to me, and I will do anything to get her back.”

  “Including not cooperating with an official police inquiry?”

  “If you’d been in the room with Rémy and Levautrin, you would have had second thoughts about cooperating, too,” Perry said. “We were there, in the middle of the attack. We saw. Something was not right about the whole thing, like it had been staged, and afterwards, their questions also seemed not quite right.”

  “Monsieur Rémy, him I do not know. But Monsieur Levautrin I have met before. He is a very respected member of the sécurité. He has worked with les GIGN on many occasions. And yet…”

  “Something is not right in their investigation,” Emily blurted out. “I imagine if you check, you’ll find they are focusing on the north and Belgium.”

  “Yes, but that is because there are known links to terrorist groups in
and around Brussels. It is perfectly reasonable to follow such a lead.” Hassan paused again to consider her face. “But tell me, how is your intelligence so… full of insights? I can understand why you’d persist in pursuing them for your mother’s sake. But how did you know to come here, even before we did?”

  Perry knew this was a sticky question. It was one thing to reveal her relationship to Andie now. But would she reveal her connection to Michael and the CIA? If she did, Hassan might well conclude that they weren’t merely tourists on a family vacation, but agents on an operation, perhaps even that they’d failed to share prior intel that could have headed off the attack.

  “In the museum, I found her mobile phone. She must have smashed it, and removed the GPS chip. When I saw the chip was missing… we knew to look for a signal. That’s how we knew to come here. She must have found a battery and connected it.”

  “You have access to a satellite network, then, but the only thing my men found in your car is a few cheap mobile phones, like the one in your pocket,” he said to Perry. “If my men search the call log of your phone, and dial the last number, who will pick up at the other end?”

  “Her husband.”

  “… and will he be ‘like a father’ to you?”

  Emily’s eyes burned at his insinuation, as if she only now recognized how he’d been carrying on a subtle form of interrogation, until one of Hassan’s men interrupted with a discovery. They’d found a burnt out electronic chip under some rags, which seemed to confirm her story. After some hurried discussion, Hassan returned to Emily.

  “If this is the chip, it seems your mother no longer possesses it. How will you track them now?”

  “Do you mock me, sir?” Emily said with as much indignation as she could muster.

  “We’ll track them the old-fashioned way,” Perry said. “We will follow you. You do mean to pursue them, don’t you?”