The Caliphate

by André Le Gallo

  Karim nodded and gave him the name of a small hotel near the Cornavin railroad station. They had been together for less than a minute. Steve left by the back door that opened onto the parking lot after repeating his instructions.

  He waved a taxi to the Montbrillant Hotel. He walked to the Cornavin station and took a taxi to his hotel, the Ramada Encore, back in the Carouge district. If the police were looking for him, they would no doubt find him, but not right away. He would have time to meet with Karim and, with any luck, Kella. His hand traced the edge of Hussein’s knife under his shirt with both satisfaction and apprehension.

  ***

  The next day, as agreed, Steve waited in the atrium of the Beau Rivage Hotel. Behind his Journal de Genève, he was inspecting the rose-marble columns and tapestried walls when he saw Karim walk in. He folded his newspaper after he was sure Karim had spotted him and walked out and down toward the river shuttle service. The boats, called mouettes, or seagulls, provided convenient conveyances and were part of the city’s public-transport system.

  As instructed, Karim followed him from a distance, giving Steve a chance to take a position on one of the mouettes, from which he could observe the back of the hotel as well as the people boarding. He was looking for anyone paying undue attention to Karim, an obviously young Arab.

  As he waited, he wondered if he had made a mistake directing him into an environment where a young Arab man might stand out, especially to the hotel security staff. He hoped Karim would become invisible among the forty-percent foreign-resident population. Swiss hotel security staffs profiled their foreign clientele only out of necessity.

  Steve had noticed several Arabs in the atrium wearing the ankle-length gallabiyya robes and kufiyya head covering. The hotel clearly did not discriminate among its wealthy clients no matter where they came from. But Karim would not fool anyone into believing he was a rich Arab sheikh in Geneva on business.

  Karim boarded the mouette and Steve noticed a well-dressed man who seemed to have his eyes glued to Karim’s back. He stayed on the dock until the boat pulled away and began to cross the river. Apparently satisfied that Karim was no longer his problem, the man turned away and headed toward the hotel. His obvious interest in Karim marked him as someone comfortable and secure in his operational environment, not a foreign intelligence officer or agent. Steve pegged him for a retired cop now working for hotel security.

  Karim approached him and they leaned over the side of the boat as they talked.

  “How much time do you have? What happened last night?”

  “Hussein saw you and recognized you. I told him to let me go and kill you. He liked that but said no, he was going to do it, to make sure. There was nothing I could do. He told me not to move. When I went to get him somebody was hitting him with a chain. I stopped him. The police did come but about twenty minutes later. They arrested the guy who was beating up Hussein. He is still in the hospital; broken arm.”

  Karim smiled.

  “The Swiss guy said he hadn’t done it, that someone else had been fighting Hussein before he went into the bathroom. I heard him give the police a good description of you, even that you were an American. Did you break his arm, Monsieur Christophe?”

  “I didn’t have a choice. What’s your schedule?”

  Steve could see from Karim’s expression that he had gained status by surviving Hussein’s assault.

  Karim looked questioningly at Steve.

  “You could have killed him. That’s what he told me.”

  Steve glanced around at the other passengers to confirm no one was paying attention to them. Then he took Hussein’s knife from his jacket inside pocket.

  “That’s Hussein’s favorite thing, his knife!” Karim exclaimed.

  Steve held it for a few seconds before throwing it into the water. Karim let out an involuntary gasp.

  “What about your schedule?”

  “We’re leaving tomorrow, I think. I will go get him at the hospital this afternoon.”

  Karim grinned. “The only thing Hussein asked me to do was to buy him Swiss chocolates.”

  “How about your brother? Tell me what happened.”

  “I don’t have the details. There was a firefight. He was in the wrong place. He never hurt anyone. He was a good person.”

  Steve knew how much Karim’s brother meant to him. He touched his shoulder.

  “I’m so sorry.” Seeing that Karim was not going to say anything further about his brother, he asked, “What happened after I left Mali?”

  “Your friend Monsieur Gregoire didn’t like me. He asked me to tell Tariq that an American from the Embassy wanted to talk to him and to bring Tariq to a meeting with him, with Monsieur Gregoire. That was like asking for my own execution. He didn’t want to talk about how I was supposed to do that and still stay alive. He said I was not worth the money and that you had been too generous. So that money you said was being set aside, is it gone? Did Monsieur Gregoire keep it for himself?”

  The boat was nearing the Jet d’Eau fountain and tourists moved to their side of the boat to see it up close. Steve overheard someone say the jet of water was over four-hundred-feet high. Steve could see Karim was enthralled and he let him take in the sight.

  “No, I don’t think he stole it. Don’t worry; I’ll get that money reinstated. And start thinking of yourself. That money wasn’t just for your brother. It was for anything you wanted to use it for—your mother, maybe, yourself?”

  Then he turned to business.

  “So, tell me about your plans.”

  He let Karim talk, asking infrequent but targeted questions to keep him on track. But a major piece of the puzzle was missing. Hussein had not divulged what they were getting ready for.

  ***

  They arrived to the other side of the lake and walked up the Quai Gustave Ador to a park on the right where they sat. Small children and their nannies seemed to be in the majority. After five minutes Steve got up, concerned about sticking out. They resumed their walk.

  “Hussein has stopped talking about operations in Niger or Mauritania or those places. He and al Khalil have another objective in mind ever since Gao. But I don’t know what it is. Hussein talks to me. He trusts me. But he’s not talking about the final objective. No one knows anything. Only al Khalil and Hussein, and they’re not telling the rest of us. Oh, and he has a new recruit, Habib, a Tunisian who studied in America. He’s a scientist. Anyway, Tariq and he have long conversations. I don’t know about what.

  “Since we’ve been here in Geneva, Hussein slipped once and told me that I would be taking my UAVs off a beach, close to water. At first I thought the plan was to use the UAVs like smart bombs. But now I don’t think so. Rashid, the UAV patron, he said the targets would be about twenty-five to thirty-five kilometers away. We’re buying more UAVs here in Geneva. The sales agent is an American. I met him with Hussein yesterday. His name is Spaceck. Hussein calls him ‘colonel,’ which pleases the American, I can tell. The new UAVs are being shipped to Cyprus and from there, I was able to learn that they will be shipped on a second leg, to Alexandria, Egypt, but I don’t think that’s the final destination.”

  “Could the target be in Egypt? Where do you think they’ll go from there?”

  Karim shrugged.

  Before they ended their meeting, Karim promised to find a way to send an email to Steve with additional information as soon as he found it.

  ***

  Kella arrived the next day. Before going to meet her at the airport, Steve checked out of the hotel. During the night, he realized he had made a mistake by paying for his first visit at the Le Chat Noir with his credit card, which Luke could easily find if the police asked for it.

  He watched her stride toward him. Without wearing heels, she still could see over most of the other passengers coming out toward the luggage area and the exits—beauty in the middle of an otherwise unremarkable gaggle of humanity.

  “You don’t know how good it is to see you,” he told her. She
responded with a radiant smile and a kiss.

  “There’s been a little change in plans,” he continued as he led her toward the central part of the airport. “We’re going to a village at the base of the Alps, on the other side of the border in France. Do you have any luggage?”

  “Of course I have luggage. I thought we were staying in Geneva, in the Carouge district. I was looking forward to it. It’s supposed to be an old and eclectic and fun. In other words it’s not totally Calvinist.”

  “That’s why I wanted to talk to you.”

  “You mean to discuss Calvinism? I thought this was going to be a romantic weekend.”

  “Well, that’s certainly not excluded. Sit here a second.”

  They had reached a restaurant with tables adjacent to the passengers’ main route to and from their gates.

  “Here’s what we’re going to do: take a cab to the main bus station and a bus to a village in France. Something has happened. The police are looking for me and I’m not interested in trying to convince the Swiss authorities of my innocence.”

  “What did you do? Double-park?”

  “This is serious. Another Salafist came at me with a knife. It’s a long story. I’ll tell you everything when we’re alone.”

  “No! Are you all right? Why are you running if someone attacked you?”

  She looked at him a second, as if wondering whether to speak her mind.

  “If I didn’t know you better, I’d say you were living an exciting fantasy life. Tell me, are you still a photojournalist? Or are you into some other ‘temporary’ profession? Is this some CIA mission?”

  “No. but that’s sort of what I want to talk to you about—later. Let’s get out of here. Too many cops in airports!”

  They followed the crowd, retrieved Kella’s luggage, and took a cab to the Gare Routière.

  “I checked my suitcase in here before going to the airport. While I get it, how about finding out about buses to Saint Genis Pouilly in France? It’s probably about fifteen or twenty miles. If I rent a car, the police would find me in a second. From everything I’ve heard, the Swiss police are a very thorough lot, and the incident was important enough for a paragraph in the Tribune de Genève.”

  “I could rent a car in my name.”

  “Let’s keep it simple. For now, we’ll use public transportation. Maybe you can rent a car in France.”

  ***

  The bus crossed the border without stopping and, in forty-five minutes, Steve and Kella were in a larger town than Steve had anticipated from his quick Internet search. They quickly settled on the Kyriad Genève Hotel.

  “This could be a Holiday Inn,” he said.

  When they checked in, the lady at the counter asked, “Are you with the CERN? Do you have your discount card?”

  “No, Madame, we’re tourists,” Kella replied.

  On the way to their room, Steve asked, “CERN? What is it?”

  “It’s the European Organization for Nuclear Research. A CERN representative spoke to us when I was still at the ENA. This is their headquarters. If you thought there were too many cops at the airport, wait till you see this place. I imagine it’s crawling with security.”

  They had not been able to talk on the bus, so after freshening up, Kella suggested they go for a walk.

  “This may be like a Holiday Inn,” she said, “but the mountains are pretty.”

  Once outside, Steve said, “I don’t think you ever told me what your job was. Didn’t you say a long time ago that it was time for true confessions? Except it wasn’t. I think that now, it is. Do you work for your grandfather the general? It’s an important question.”

  They turned up Route de la Faucille walking slowly. She held his hand.

  “I’m the one who should be asking questions, don’t you think? What was the photojournalist story you told all of us in Mali? Weren’t you then working for the CIA?”

  It was now late afternoon. A gray cloud cover had turned black. The breeze from the southwest had picked up. Almost imperceptibly, they picked up their pace. A light cream-colored sweater was draped on her shoulders with the sleeves tied loosely around her neck. She stopped to put it on.

  As she put her arms through the sleeves of her sweater, Steve said, “Because of my father’s connection, the CIA asked me to try to get some basic information on IMRA and al Khalil—because I had met al Khalil before in school. But as things worked out, I didn’t have to meet him. Probably a good thing, since the Salafists all think I’m the devil. Then I went back to work for West Gate. And that’s what I have been doing. So, your turn. Who pays your salary?”

  “I did join the DGSE after graduating. But I would be fired if they knew that I was sharing this information with anyone, especially a foreigner.”

  The admission opened a floodgate and Kella told Steve about the CIMETERRE file and Captain Roger, al Khalil’s DGSE contact.

  “The DGSE is paying al Khalil? He’s a killer!”

  Kella nodded and said, “But not on French soil. That’s the deal.”

  “Bullshit! They killed Ted Coogan in the middle of Paris.”

  “But he was an American.”

  Steve was about to explode again when she added, “I’m giving you the DGSE rational.”

  He had noticed two police cars go by during their half-hour walk. He became self-conscious and they turned off on a street with less traffic.

  “I want to stop, or slow down, the Salafists. But I can’t function under the myopic rules of the CIA bureaucracy. I gather that you feel the same way about the DGSE. Am I right?”

  “Well, I’m not contributing much right now, that’s for sure. And the DGSE is not going to do anything against the Salafists. At least not until they attack French interests directly. What’s your idea?”

  “That we work outside of government rules and constraints. Watching the Salafists is not enough. They killed your friend Faridah in Paris and my friend Ted Coogan. They tried to kill me on … let me count … three times. And you told me there had been more murders. Al Khalil has a free pass. And that really pisses me off. It’s not right!”

  “How can we possibly stop them? By ourselves? We don’t have the resources. What do you want to do exactly?”

  He stopped and took her arm.

  “At least slow them down. To make this workable, we can take small bites. For example, just publicizing al Khalil’s activities in Mali would be a start.”

  “You mean bring public attention to the camp and hope that governments and organizations then take action, having been shamed into it?”

  “Right! That would be a start. Let the media do its job, inform the public…”

  He looked up at the sky.

  “Let’s turn around. It looks like those clouds are about to burst open.”

  He steered her toward the hotel at a brisk pace. It started raining. In a few minutes, it would pour. They were now close to the hotel and ran at an easy pace that Steve thought Kella, who had told him that she hated to jog, could sustain.

  ***

  The almost continuous rain and thunder of the night made Kella snuggle closer to Steve under the covers. The weather didn’t improve the following day. They stayed close to the hotel and discovered to their dismay that it offered no Internet access. After breakfast in the restaurant, they each brought a cup of coffee to their room.

  “You told me about Karim and the satellite phone last night. What about Izem?” Kella said.

  “Yes, I think Izem is ready to help. We could use him inside al Kahlil’s group. Since Karim seems to be specializing on those UAVs, having Izem help us from the inside of the fighters’ group would be good. Do you think you can pull rank as a Tuareg queen? The next time you go to Timbuktu.”

  “What do we want him to do?”

  “He already has military experience and Hussein would love to pick him up, I’m sure. He would get paid whatever al Khalil pays plus, later, I think I could talk somebody in the CIA to reward him. Communications will be a prob
lem. Neither of us lives in Mali. And I doubt that Izem knows about computers. That’s something you would have to explore with him. What do you think? Of course, this would be outside of the DGSE as much as it’s outside of the CIA. Your Captain Roger can’t be witting.”

  “With Izem inside the fighters’ group, we should be able to prevent some of al Khalil’s murders. I’ll talk to Izem on my next trip.”

  Steve finished his coffee. “For the first time, I’m beginning to feel that I’m getting some control over events. Until now, we’ve been like corks on the waves.”

  “Do you feel like you’re creating a new intelligence agency?”

  He moved toward the bed. “I’m not that ambitious. But we can’t just sit on our hands and watch the CIA and the DGSE simply monitor this movement that is trying to change the world as we know it thinking it’s getting direct orders from God.”

  Kella moved toward the bed from the other side. “Do we know what we’re doing?”

  Steve reached for her from across the bed. “The biggest mistake intelligence agencies usually make is to not coordinate; to build Chinese walls between each other. Let’s work on that.”

  Lightning lit up the sky. A second later, thunder shook the windows of their room.

  37. Brussels: Salim’s Apartment

  Tariq walked into Salim’s stylish place on Avenue Louise, an environment more suited to his tastes than the camps in the African Sahel. He noticed a framed painting on the floor leaning against the wall and picked it up: a crowd of villagers around a horseman in the center and huts on the sides.

  “New?” he asked.

  Salim took it from him and said, “Brueghel the Elder.” He disappeared for a moment in a side bedroom and came back empty handed. He motioned for Tariq to sit.