The gate seemed to disintegrate as a large explosion took place, and Le Pavillon disappeared in an eruption of flame and black smoke.
A suicide bomber, Bruno realized, cursing. He should have thought of that. He began running toward the Toyota, shouting into his phone for Gaston as he ran. There was no reply. He pulled the handgun from his belly pocket as he reached the Toyota, partly sheltered from the blast by the stone wall around the building but with loose stones strewn across its roof and hood.
The man he had seen go down was slumped on the earth beside the Toyota, alive and panting for breath but not moving, and his weapon was under a big stone from the demolished archway. The driver had been blown off his seat by someone’s bullet, and his body was crumpled in the foot well of the passenger side. There was not much left of his head, and the whole interior of the Toyota seemed to have been sprayed with blood. He could hear Pierre screaming from inside the vehicle.
Bruno opened the rear door and scooped out Pierre from where he lay on the floor behind the front seats. Quickly he examined his limbs, and Pierre stopped his shrieking and began sucking in great gulps of air that turned into sobs. None of the blood on the child seemed to be his own. Bruno held him tight against his chest, trying to murmur words of comfort. Thank heaven all the members of the security team were such good shots. Suddenly Nancy was there with the Land Rover. He handed the child to her and told her to take the boy to the jeep and then come back.
Bruno tried Gaston again but still got no reply. The smoke was clearing, and the pigeon tower’s roof and the window where Gaston had been on watch were both gone. Bruno crept into the courtyard and saw complete devastation. The front wall and roof of Le Pavillon had disappeared, and the courtyard was a mass of stones and roof tiles. What was left of the house was burning fiercely. A crater close to where the main door had been was all that remained of the suicide bomber.
Bruno half ran, half jumped across to the pigeon tower, picking his way between the loose stones that covered the steps. He clambered up to where Gaston had been. Gaston was slumped below the window, unconscious, with blood on his face and his limbs slack. But he had a pulse. Bruno slung him over his shoulder and carried him down to the courtyard, staggering under the weight as he navigated the obstacle course beneath his feet. Nancy was coming back in the Land Rover, followed by the jeep with the driver and the other two security men aboard.
They loaded Gaston into the backseat of the Land Rover and the wounded terrorist into the rear.
“The kid can go on your lap in the front seat,” Nancy told Bruno. “Let’s go.”
“Wait,” he said, and turned to Marcel. “We’ll take them to the medical center in St. Denis. Can you stay here, see if there’s any trace of Robert and report in to the brigadier? And ask him to tell the pompiers to hold off until we can clear away the Toyota and the weapons.”
Marcel nodded distractedly, his eyes on Gaston in the backseat.
“I should have stopped that goddamn Toyota long before it got close enough.”
“Then we’d have lost the kid,” Nancy said. “Pull yourself together, man, we’ve got to get your guy to a doctor.”
Pierre, shocked and silent, in his arms, Bruno jumped in beside her, and she bounced away over the rough terrain. A thick plume of dark smoke was rising and drifting slowly to the east, visible for miles. Bruno called Yveline to see if she could spare any gendarmes to keep curious locals from driving up to see the source of the explosion and the smoke. Then he called Karim to say Pierre was safe.
Bruno said he was going to call the medical center to tell them he was bringing in two gunshot victims when Nancy said, “Don’t.”
Bruno glanced at her in surprise.
“Brigadier’s orders. We’re taking them to the château. We have a better-equipped medical team there, with more experience of gunshot wounds. And it’s secure.”
Bruno closed his phone with a sigh. “That bomber, if only I’d thought …”
“Don’t blame yourself,” said Nancy. “I didn’t think of a suicide bomber either. And the little boy is fine.”
Bruno looked down at the child now sleeping in his arms. As soon as they delivered the wounded men to the medical team at the château he would drive Pierre home to his parents. Perhaps he’d better try to clean him up first.
As Nancy turned into the road that led to the château, Bruno’s phone rang. It was Yveline. The white Peugeot had been spotted in the Intermarché parking lot. The driver was under arrest and had been taken to the gendarmerie. In the car was a receipt from a filling station just outside Cahors for a full tank of gas and an extra five liters plus a plastic can. He’d paid cash, but the car’s carte grise showed it was registered to the welfare department of the Toulouse mosque.
16
The story broke the next day, in a wire report from Agence France-Presse in Kabul. Quoting NATO sources, it said simply that in a dramatic coup for French intelligence, the expert terrorist bomb maker known as the Engineer had been found by French troops in Afghanistan in the course of a special operation and was now in French custody.
This was followed within minutes by the Associated Press, in a story datelined Washington, which said U.S. officials were liaising with the French authorities over the Engineer’s fate. Reuters, from London, in a story titled “The Most Wanted Man in the World,” then reported that the Engineer had been secretly smuggled out of Afghanistan in a French military plane and was now being held in an unknown location in France.
Within minutes, United Press International was quoting senators and congressmen in Washington demanding that the Engineer be delivered into American custody. One senator called him “a mass murderer of American boys.” Then Deutsche Presse-Agentur filed a story from Berlin that a European arrest warrant would be sent to the French government, asserting that the Engineer had been responsible for the deaths of at least four German soldiers and requiring him to stand trial in Germany.
Soon the official spokesmen and politicians were all over TV, and the press secretary of the European Union’s commissioner for external relations made an important point. In response to a question from a reporter from Holland’s De Telegraaf, he agreed that it would be against European law for any suspect to be handed over to American jurisdiction if there were any prospect of the death penalty. The newspaper’s resulting headline was: “Europe to Washington: Thou Shalt Not Kill.” Asked to comment, the official spokesman for the U.S. Justice Department retorted, “In that case, we’ll settle for life in Guantánamo.”
Bruno followed the gathering media storm closely. A regional paper, Le Républicain Lorrain, close to the German frontier, gave the next new lead. The editors ran it as an exclusive on their website edition, not waiting for the next day’s printed newspaper. They quoted a returning French soldier saying that an Afghan in French uniform had been huddled, drugged and weeping, aboard his plane from Dushanbe. The soldier complained that he had lost part of his leave since their flight had unexpectedly landed at Évreux for unspecified security reasons. There had then been a special flight to Bordeaux for the Afghan.
Bruno decided not to answer several calls from Philippe Delaron of Sud Ouest. Philippe was no fool. He knew that something unusual was under way at the château. Furniture and food had been delivered, military helicopters were coming and going, and soldiers were guarding the gates. He also knew, of course, that Bruno had been viciously attacked at the collège in St. Denis and would probably soon learn that the Muslim teacher, Momu, had taken a sudden leave of absence and disappeared, along with his Muslim wife. And gendarmes had turned Philippe away when he’d tried take a picture of the ruins of Le Pavillon and get more details of the mysterious propane-gas explosion that had supposedly caused it.
“I don’t think we have long before the media knows that the Engineer is here and that he has something to do with Momu,” Bruno said.
Bruno and Nancy were in the brigadier’s office, sipping some of their host’s Bowmore malt whisky. They were reviewing in so
mething close to disbelief the transcripts of that day’s session with Sami. He had identified more than sixty photographs, remembered precisely where and when he had seen each person and how often.
When Nancy brought out a map and asked him how he had gotten from the Toulouse mosque to Afghanistan without a passport, Sami had recounted his journey step by step. It had started with a long car ride to Germany, then he was aboard a charter flight full of Turkish families going to Ankara. A charter flight to Abu Dhabi followed. Finally, a rusty merchant ship flying Liberian colors had taken him and his companions to the Pakistani port of Karachi. He remembered addresses and names of the couriers who had met his Toulouse group. He was proving to be an extraordinary source, and he took obvious pride in pleasing Nancy by being able to answer her questions.
“I’d like to check these reports about his skills at electronics,” Nancy said. “Can we learn how he turns cell phones into detonators? We can get it on video, send it to your guys in Paris and mine in Washington. I’d like to know if he was building these IEDs from scratch or just assembling them to order.”
Bruno made a note. Florence’s computer club had a box full of broken electronics awaiting repair. Sami rattled off radio frequencies and cell-phone numbers for remotely controlled bombs and remembered the addresses on the packaging in which they had arrived. He recalled e-mail addresses and credit card numbers he had heard being used. He seemed to have forgotten nothing he had seen or heard.
“We knew this media fuss would happen,” replied the brigadier calmly. “That’s why we’re here in the château, sealed off and guarded. The media may speculate, but all inquiries have to go to the Ministry of the Interior in Paris.”
“The White House press corps won’t swallow that,” said Nancy.
The brigadier looked at her patiently. “Don’t you think our work here is of considerable importance?”
“You know it is,” she replied. “This is the best intelligence out of Afghanistan I’ve ever seen. We’ve got teams back at Fort Meade correlating all of this with our own databases. We’re getting voiceprints, cell-phone numbers, e-mail addresses, connecting all manner of dots. It’s a gold mine.”
“So our priority is to continue our work and not permit the media to distract us,” said the brigadier. “Anybody who matters in Washington and Paris knows the value of what we are gleaning here. In the meantime our press officials will give full but empty answers to the media hordes. That’s what they’re paid to do.”
“Washington doesn’t quite work like that.”
“In that case, my dear Nancy, you have my profound sympathies. Paris, thank heavens, does work like that.”
Bruno knew that St. Denis worked in a different way altogether, but even he was startled by the text message he received later that day from Gilles at Paris Match. He went straight to the brigadier to warn him that the storm was about to break over their heads.
“Fabiola told me full story about Sami, Pavillon, chateau,” Gilles had texted. “She insists Sami innocent victim and unfit to stand trial. On my way to St. Denis. Will you call me or do I run the story?”
“I assume he’s going to run the story anyway, whether you call him or not,” said the brigadier, once Nancy had been summoned to join them.
“Probably,” said Bruno. “I can try asking him to hold off, but Fabiola would just go to Philippe Delaron at Sud Ouest. And remember, Sami is officially her patient. I’m surprised she hasn’t turned up already, demanding to see him.”
“Maybe there’s a way we can make this work for us,” Nancy interjected. “We tell the truth. Sami is autistic, long since declared legally unfit to take care of himself. These jihadis viciously used this poor, pathetic boy, even whipped him to build bombs. Let’s spin it that way.”
Bruno felt instantly that Nancy was right. The strategic objective was not simply to penetrate al-Qaeda, and not even to break open the network of European jihadis that funneled young Muslims to the Taliban. These were simply tactical goals that did not address the fundamental web of politics, religion and public opinion. The crucial task was to force a separation between the jihadists and the millions of peaceful Muslims all across Europe, and exposing the ruthless and cynical treatment of someone like Sami at the hands of the Taliban would help accomplish this.
“It’s a question of how we build the narrative. If we spin this right, we can make Sami into a hero,” Nancy went on.
“If we are going to build this story around Sami, it might help to offer some media access,” Bruno said. “I’m thinking of photos of Sami playing with Balzac, some photos of the whipping scars on his back. Maybe Paris Match is the best vehicle for it.”
“If we offer them an exclusive, we can keep some control of the story,” the brigadier said thoughtfully.
The other two members of the medical tribunal arrived later that day. Under French tradition, a medical tribunal that seeks to establish the mental competence of someone charged with a serious crime consists of a psychologist, a psychoanalyst and a practicing psychiatrist. Pascal Deutz, deputy head of the prison psychiatric service, fulfilled the last of the three roles. The psychologist was Bernard Weill, an eminent professor from Paris who had also taught in London and Chicago. In his sixties, Weill had a fringe of bushy white hair above his ears and the back of his neck, but his scalp was bald and suntanned. Bruno was surprised that someone whose life was spent probing the unconscious minds of unhappy people could look so cheerful. Weill’s dark eyes twinkled and his plump face broke into frequent smiles. Bruno liked him at once.
The psychoanalyst was Professor Amira Chadoub, a plump and motherly looking woman in her early fifties. She came from a family of Moroccan immigrants and had been raised as a Muslim. There was no sign of her Moroccan heritage in her clothing; she was wearing a blue linen dress, high-heeled shoes, a pearl necklace with matching earrings, and her gray hair was pulled back into a neat bun. Usually such a tribunal was assisted by a secretary from the Ministry of Justice, a role that in this case had been assigned for security reasons to the brigadier.
Once his two colleagues had unpacked, Deutz introduced them to the brigadier, who made brief welcoming remarks and offered them coffee or other beverages. Nancy had made herself scarce. Bruno was described vaguely as a local policeman who had known Sami since he was a boy and was invited to join them. The brigadier evidently wanted to set some ground rules.
There were two essential issues, he said. The first was whether Sami was able to distinguish right from wrong and be responsible for his actions. The second, equally important, was whether he was fit to stand trial, to be aware of the nature of judicial proceedings against him and able to be responsible for his own defense.
“If we judge the answer to either of those questions to be no, then he will not stand trial and will remain under medical supervision. Am I right?” asked Professor Weill. The brigadier nodded.
“Just one thing,” Deutz said. “I’ve heard that the signs of whipping on this man’s body are being taken to mean he was under duress. That might not be right; self-flagellation is common among some Islamic sects.”
“How much time do we have to spend with this young man before we decide?” Chadoub asked, ignoring Deutz’s remark.
“I’d like to say as much time as you need,” the brigadier replied. “But in practical terms we are under some time pressure. Bruno, when we have finished our coffee, perhaps you could find Sami and bring him to the main salon.”
Bruno set off to find Sami in the family rooms. He found Dillah, who told him that Momu and Sami had decided to explore the château. He’d probably find them in the tower, she said. He climbed up dozens of stone stairs and eventually located them by the austere battlements that ran from the tower the full length of the main building.
The view from this height was spectacular. He could see across the outer wall and down into the valley with a clear view of one of the long, slow bends of the river. Just beyond the stretch of water, glinting in the sunshine, w
ere the pale gray cliffs of limestone that defined the region and had sheltered its human inhabitants for tens of thousands of years. When Bruno had first arrived in St. Denis, he’d been told that humans had lived there for forty thousand years. Now the archaeologists said it was at least eighty thousand years, and some thought it was far longer, citing the flint tools found at Tayac near Les Eyzies that dated back over two hundred thousand years.
A map of the local area was spread out on the stone in the gap between the battlements before the two figures. As Bruno approached, Momu was pointing to the rounded hills that enfolded St. Denis. Sami had Balzac clutched to his chest as his eyes followed Momu’s pointing finger until Balzac’s puny bark alerted him to Bruno’s arrival. Sami put Balzac down and let him scamper to his master.
Sami grinned as he pointed out familiar places to Bruno and then located them on the map. Momu had been showing him the scale printed on the corner of the map, and Sami was using the length of his finger to work out how far away each place was from where he stood. At one point, as Sami leaned over the battlement, Momu gently pulled him back to safety, warning him of the dangers of the drop.
Sami was still wearing the army tracksuit in which he had been jogging that morning. He looked happy and very young. Just a few days of good food and medical care had done him wonders. The contrast was striking with the image of the fanatical and calculating professional bomb maker presented in the media.
“The tribunal is here, and they want to get started,” Bruno told Momu, who sighed and began to fold the map. Looking disappointed that the map game was over, Sami shrugged and followed them down the stairs to the salon.
“I think we only need Sami for this meeting,” Deutz said firmly when Bruno showed Sami and Momu into the large room, well lit by four tall windows that opened onto the park.
“Monsieur Mohammed Belloumi is Sami’s adoptive father and has been appointed his guardian by the courts,” Bruno said. “There are no legal grounds to exclude him.”
The Children Return Page 15