The Riviera Contract

by Arthur Kerns

  “One other thing, sir. Mr. Harrington called and said the police were about to place him under arrest. He needs your help.”

  Damn! Wahab straightened his back. The police would trace the call to his suite, and soon they would be knocking on the door. “Pack my things, and purchase a ticket for me to London, first-class.”

  The lights from the police cars and ambulances flashed continually, making the palace resemble a gaily-colored resort. He sat down again and picked up his cup of coffee. It tasted burnt.

  “Begging your pardon, sir … one more thing.” The aide stood behind him.

  “What, for the sake of Allah?”

  “I received a call from Marseille. The French port authorities confiscated the opium shipment from Afghanistan.”

  His mind numbed, Wahab waved him off and watched the fading running lights of the Red Scorpion. The faint crescent moon hung over the bay, to the left, a faint glow appeared along the eastern horizon. Pockets of mist appeared here and there on the mountain. At Cambridge, he remembered his Don referring to this magical time of dawn, known in Middle English as uht. He bit his lip. From his pocket, he took a sterling silver case. He pulled out a cigarette and lit it with his lighter. The sharp Turkish tobacco made him cough.

  Now he remembered where he had seen Stone. While in Afghanistan, during an attack on his Taliban encampment, he recalled seeing a bearded American with strange eyes, wearing Afghan garb. This American had jumped his horse over the perimeter walls of the hamlet, shooting and killing his Taliban brothers.

  The cigarette smoke drifted up in the direction of the palace. Wahab had managed to escape that attack. As he fled the battle, he’d glanced back through the dust and smoke, but the American had disappeared. That man had been Hayden Stone, the cause of all his ill fortune. Certainly, he was a djinn … an evil spirit.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Montpellier

  During the short flight from Nice to Montpellier, Stone tried to nap. He had as much luck as he had in the lounge sitting in the Nice Côte d’Azur Airport. “Let’s wrap up all the loose ends as soon as we can,” Colonel Frederick had said back at the safehouse in Nice. “I think we’ve about worn out our welcome here in France.” Being kept out of the circle of trust by those two men still angered him. “Frederick and Fleming.” He snorted. Sounds like a law firm.

  Sandra and Eric met him at the airport terminal. They appeared relieved that he had joined them. On the way to the stakeout on Hassan, the city of Montpellier appeared less trendy than Nice. It had a small-town look, similar to one found playing host to a New England college: lots of trees along the streets, many conservatively-dressed pedestrians.

  Eric drove the Peugeot sedan and Stone sat in the back. Sandra, up front, turned around to face him. “That address the French got from Rashid’s workman belongs to an automobile repair garage. An immigrant from Tunisia owns it. This morning, one of Colmont’s agents caught a glimpse of Rashid’s panel truck parked inside.”

  “So they invited us in on the stakeout?”

  “Yes. You and I will sit in a surveillance van while Eric goes to the police command center. Say, Colmont seems pissed about the palace business. Did you guys wax bin Zanni?”

  “No,” Stone said. “We got in and mixed it up a bit with his thugs, but apparently some of his compatriots killed him. Don’t know the whole story. Frederick’s working on it.”

  “Well, anyway, Colmont’s keeping us on a short leash.” Sandra turned away.

  “Should I drop you two near the surveillance van?” Eric asked, easing down a tree-lined street.

  “Yeah, but slow down,” Sandra said. “I want to tell Stone about Hassan.” She talked quickly. “More important than Colmont’s hard feelings, we have two concerns. First, this wine business that Hassan is involved in. A week ago, the French followed Hassan and Rashid when they went to some wine wholesaler in Marseille. Afterward, Colmont’s people interrogated the guy, who told them he suspected Hassan wanted to play a swindle against Americans with bogus vintage wine. The wholesaler said he finally believed the deal seemed legit, except that Hassan wanted to ship only a few cases to three American cities. Not enough to make a decent profit.”

  Sandra said, her lisp now returning, “Anyway, this morning some guy drives up to the garage. He’s well dressed and apparently doesn’t have car problems. He goes inside the garage and shortly afterward, two men, one resembling our man Hassan, come out. They lug chrome canisters, six of them, from the car into the garage. Tried to conceal them with towels, but the French got photographs while they were lying in the backseat of the car.”

  “Some form of explosive, perhaps?” Stone suggested.

  “One would imagine, except when they traced the license tag, they found the car was registered to a Dr. Mohammed Aziz, a scientist at a research center here in Montpellier. His field of expertise is pathology, specializing in the study of African diseases.”

  “Why does that make me feel very uncomfortable?” Stone muttered.

  The Peugeot sedan pulled up in front of a brick apartment house. “I’ll drop you two off here,” Eric said.

  When Stone and Sandra got out of the car, Maurice Colmont suddenly materialized.

  “Hi, Maurice. Seems you found Hassan and now have good surveillance underway.”

  “Mr. Stone, I want a word with you. Alone.” Colmont turned and walked away from the car.

  “I’ll meet you down the block,” Sandra whispered, whose big eyes and barely held-back smile broadcasted, you’re in for a Colmont lecture.

  When Stone caught up with him, the French intelligence man stopped and then stared ahead. For a long while, Colmont avoided eye contact. Finally, he said, “Mr. Stone, I’m disappointed with your actions.”

  Good God! Stone held back a laugh. He truly was going to give him a lecture. Colmont seemed to be controlling his words. Spinning around and bringing his face close to Stone’s, a little too uncomfortable for Stone’s liking, the Frenchman said through clinched teeth, “I thought you and your colleagues had more of a sense for politics!” He shook his head and turned away. “You all have put me in a very bad position with Paris. I had assured my superiors we were dealing with competent allies.”

  “Get to the point, Monsieur Colmont.”

  “Your raid on the contessa’s palace was stupidité. Idiocy! I had told Colonel Frederick that we, the French government, opposed such action. The authorities in Paris were against it for many reasons … reasons that we did not wish to share with you.” Colmont took a deep breath. “What did you accomplish? Rien! Nothing! Just the ruin of our cooperative efforts against the terrorists.”

  “Look Maurice—”

  “You are a good friend of Frederick. He is a military man. Military men think in very direct ways. If you had thought about the potential consequences of such an action, you could have influenced him to hold off. Instead, you used your muscles instead of your brains.”

  Stone put his hands in his pockets and started to walk away.

  “I am not finished, Mr. Stone! As I say, I thought you were different. You have a sensible friend in Jonathan Deville. He is a good man.” Colmont moved closer. “How do you think your actions will affect his professional future in Paris? French doors will be closed to him now.”

  The tone in Colmont’s voice concerned Stone. This was the Frenchman’s turf. Colmont could make life very unpleasant. Stone was accustomed to putting people in jail, not sitting in one himself. Any defense of the CIA’s attack on the palace was out of the question, and doing so would admit complicity.

  “You know, Mr. Stone, we believe the United States is too old to still act the innocent. Recently, you Americans have lost a lot of your charm.”

  “Okay, Monsieur Colmont, point taken. Where does that leave us?”

  “No, where does that leave France? We have a terrorist problem here that grows each day. We must work with our allies to combat it, just like you need your allies.”

  Stone spoke
in the same measured cadence that Colmont used. “We had an al Qaeda leader in our sights. We were not going to let him escape to have another chance to kill Americans. Good allies would realize that.”

  Colmont waved his hand and shook his head. “Go sit with Sandra and watch your good allies stop Hassan from killing Americans.”

  Stone wanted to tell Colmont to shove the favor, but he decided to end the conversation.

  “Oh, by the way. Tell Colonel Frederick we could have told him that bin Zanni would be dead when you found him. If he had talked with us, he could have prevented some fine Americans from getting shot. We knew bin Zanni was marked for death by his own people.”

  Stone stopped. “You still could have told us.”

  “You are on my country’s territory, so we decide when you should be informed.” As Stone walked away, Colmont said, “What’s more, it was not gentlemanly to use the contessa to further your foolish aims.”

  “Up yours, Colmont.”

  Stone shifted his position on the hard metal floor of the stuffy police van. Using a pair of binoculars, he studied the garage through the one-way window. The single-story building had two large bay doors in front for vehicles and on the left side, a smaller workers entrance. The heavy traffic on the street in front of the garage concerned him. “It would be good to wait until things quieted down along the street before we go in,” he said to Sandra, crammed in next to him. She didn’t appear uncomfortable having her body touch him, and from her he caught a whiff of jasmine.

  “Colmont doesn’t want us in on the attack,” she whispered. “He’s really antsy with our presence here. So, how did it go?”

  Stone looked at the French intelligence man sitting up front behind the wheel of the van and spoke quietly in her ear. “I don’t know about you, but I’m on his shit list.”

  “Now that wouldn’t be the first time for a guy like you, would it?” She touched his leg. “You seem like someone who’s bent a few rules in his career.”

  “Who, me?” He grinned. “Colmont pissed me off.” That wise prick had brought up Lucinda. “I think he’s agreed to let us observe just so he can keep tabs on us. After this operation, I’ll probably be escorted to a plane headed for the States.”

  Sandra shrugged.

  “Meanwhile, we have a problem here,” Stone said. “Colmont let it slip that he thinks Hassan is out to kill a lot of Americans. Whatever Hassan is playing with is headed for the USA.” He laid down the binoculars and shifted his cramped legs to a new position. “My guess is that right now they’re filling those wine bottles with the stuff.”

  Sandra squirmed her rear until she seemed comfortable. “Eric is checking to see if the French have contacted their biohazard people. If any of that stuff spills, it could be a disaster.”

  The Frenchman in the driver’s seat answered a call on his phone. He turned around and handed the phone to Sandra. She listened, said “Oui” a couple of times, then exclaimed, “Holy shit!” She handed the phone back to the driver. “Colmont’s people are about to go in.”

  “What about us?”

  She shook her head. “We stay here. Here’s the story. Colmont’s people went to Doctor Aziz’s lab and looked at his research papers. He’s been working on a strain of Ebola.”

  “Ebola! Hassan must be mad! Sandra, do you realize what that can do?”

  Stone recalled images of the village of Mnemdo, on the border of Sudan and the Congo. Three years before. His team hadn’t needed map coordinates to find the sad collection of huts, they’d just headed toward the circling vultures. He remembered standing in the center of the village and feeling the eerie silence broken only by the scavengers arguing over the corpses scattered on the hard-baked ground. The three CIA technicians, one still barely alive, lay in a low-hanging thatched hut. Blood flowed from all their orifices: even, it seemed, from the sockets of their eyes. Before the last man died, they watched him go through mental and physical convulsions. He had pleaded for them to shoot him. Instead, they’d waited for him to die, then burned the village and all the bodies.

  “I understand it’s bad shit. No cure, right?” Sandra asked.

  “So far, no. In Africa, some say it’s bad Juju. Even the scientists don’t know where it originates, only that if a person touches or eats a piece of contaminated bush meat, say a chimp, they can catch the virus.”

  “What are the chances they’ll spill some of it?” Sandra said, more to herself. “Best for the French to wait for those biohazard people.”

  “Handling Ebola is tricky. All research is done in a maximum biological containment setup known as Biosafety Level Four.”

  She studied him. “You know a lot about it.”

  “I was exposed to it, so I learned all I could.” Stone thought for a moment. “The way I see it, Hassan plans to ship the virus to the States and then spread it. God knows how. Can you imagine the number of deaths? Horrible deaths? And we wasted our time going after bin Zanni. Hassan’s the threat.”

  “He’s a scary bastard,” she agreed. Then she returned her attention to the scene on the street and yelled, “Colmont’s not waiting! There they go!”

  The police came out from the side of an adjacent building. Four groups, two men in each group, wearing military-style fatigues, moved quickly toward the garage. One pair went to the front door, two groups went to the side door, and one held back with Colmont as a reserve force.

  Sandra pointed. “Look! Gendarmes are blocking off the street at both ends.”

  Police cars maneuvered into blocking positions. With the last car in place, Stone heard a long shrill from a whistle. The police crashed through the side door of the garage and disappeared. The whistle blew again and the reserve unit moved in. A few seconds later, Stone heard a series of single shots, followed by short bursts of machine gun fire. Colmont’s men rushed out of the garage. The last gendarme emerged and turned to get off a shot. A bottle thrown out of the open door hit him, but fell unbroken on the ground. He was not so lucky when more shots came from the garage and he fell to the ground.

  The French agent in the van jumped out and ran to assist his comrades, now in the process of backing away from the garage. Stone watched as Colmont shouted in his hand-held radio and waved his men back. Sirens wailed in the distance. The two men stationed at the front bay doors advanced. One smashed the pane glass window in one of the doors and the other tossed a concussion grenade through the opening. The front bay doors shook from the blast. He threw in another grenade, which again shook the doors.

  “Good God!” Stone said. “They’re going to scatter the virus into the air!” He slid toward the back door of the van.

  Sandra yelled, “Hassan’s coming out from the other side of the building!”

  In the garage, Doctor Aziz had filled only two wine bottles with the Ebola virus before the police barged in. Hassan raced to the end of the building, looking for his Uzi machine gun. Meanwhile, the Tunisian garage owner had pulled out his automatic pistol and began firing at the police. Hassan found the machine gun and started spraying shots at the gendarmes, almost hitting Aziz. The police retreated out the garage door. Screaming oaths, Aziz threw one of the bottles filled with the virus out the door at the retreating police officers. Then a grenade came through the garage front window. The blast threw Hassan to the ground. Dazed, his eardrums ringing, he picked himself up, seeing Aziz also struggling to get to his feet. The second wine bottle filled with the virus lay on the floor and as Hassan reached over for it, another grenade exploded inside the garage.

  Hassan shook his head and saw, through the smoke, Aziz lying on the ground. The wine bottle now lay next to him. He snatched it, then crawled over to a side window. He broke the glass, climbed out, and dropped to the ground. The Tunisian followed him. The two ran toward the street and turned the corner. A gendarme with a drawn pistol emerged from behind a police car and ordered them to stop. Hassan pointed his automatic and squeezed the trigger, but the weapon failed to fire. He tried again, and then yell
ed to the Tunisian, who raised his gun and dropped the gendarme. From behind them, a short burst of machine gun fire from the French hit the Tunisian and he slumped to the ground, blood coming from the back of his right shoulder. He cried to Hassan, “Help me!”

  “No time,” Hassan shouted, yanking the gun from his hand. Throwing off shots in the direction of gendarmes crouching behind cars, he raced through the blockade. Taking long strides, he almost ran into a police car pulling up to the curb. The occupants looked confused as he passed by. Good, Hassan thought as he bumped aside frightened pedestrians, the more confusion, the better.

  Shouts and footsteps came from far behind, and Hassan pushed his legs to go faster. He had to get off the street, out of sight. Across an intersection stood a large, two-story stone building, the word École etched on its façade. He crossed over and headed for the school’s entrance. Once inside, he caught his breath and peered through the window. He saw a man and a woman cross the street and head in his direction. The man he recognized as the American agent, Stone. The woman was Sandra. So the whore was a CIA agent.

  He spun around and faced what looked like a group of women teachers backed against the wall staring at him. Through an open door to his right, he saw stairs leading down. Waving his gun at the women to back away, he took the stairs.

  Half way down he paused for his eyes to adjust to the darkened basement. Hassan inched down the next few steps, then rushed the rest of the way down. An old black boiler dominated the open room. A single light bulb hung from the ceiling, giving off the dim light.

  “Who are you? What are you doing here?” asked a bald man wearing dirty grey coveralls.

  Hassan demanded, “Give me your car keys.”

  “Fous le camp!” Fuck you!

  Hassan pistol-whipped the man and the gun went off, striking the man in the chest. He collapsed on the floor. In the man’s pocket, Hassan found an old set of keys he recognized belonged to a Citroen deux chevaux. Not exactly the fastest get-away car, he thought.