The Monroe Decision

by Patrick Clark

  Aaron slipped the Ducati into traffic three cars behind the van and maintained between a five and ten car separation in traffic for the duration of a forty-five-minute route they took through busy city streets to a warehouse in the Saint Denis district near the railroad tracks adjacent to the Autoroute du Nord on the north side of Paris.

  The van stopped in front of the locked gate of a chain-link fence that surrounded a small gravel parking lot that also separated the warehouse from warehouses on either side. Aaron stopped the bike and watched from a vantage point thirty meters away on the dimly-lit access road. The passenger got out of the van, then unlocked and opened the gate. After the van passed through, he closed and locked the gate before returning to the passenger seat.

  Aaron parked the Ducati where he was on the access road. He turned off his cell phone and pulled a pair of latex gloves from his backpack and drew one of the Sig Sauers from his shoulder holster. He attached a sound suppressor. He crouched low and moved alongside the fence and remained out of the light that was emitted from the open carriage-style door. The van entered the warehouse, the door closed, and the parking lot went nearly dark; the only light came from the quarter moon overhead and the ambient light of the industrial area. Advantage to me.

  The warehouse was an old two-story building. The ground floor was at least twenty feet high and the second floor was smaller and was likely where the office space was located many years ago when the warehouse area was bustling. The only windows were on the second floor and they appeared to be boarded over.

  Aaron walked on the outside of the fence toward the railroad tracks. At the tracks the fence ended and he saw this side of the warehouse had a loading dock adjacent to the tracks and a lone railroad car was positioned there. The loading dock doors were closed. He crouched low again, and with the M11 in his right hand pointed toward the platform he stepped around the fence, then ran and stood next to the outside wall of the warehouse.

  There was a door a few steps away so he inched close to it and heard what sounded like a sporting event playing loudly on a television. As he leaned toward the door he sensed motion out of the corner of his eye. He dropped to his knee with the pistol aimed. A shadow and two gold-colored eyes moved along the track toward him. C’mon man, whatever you are, don’t come over here. I don’t want to shoot you.

  A German shepherd charged so he raised the M11, and just before he squeezed the trigger the dog pounced on something Aaron thought was a raccoon. The two wild animals fought fiercely and loudly for less than a minute, then they both ran off to lick their wounds. Aaron took a deep breath. “Fuck!” he cursed quietly as he leaned his back against the wall and closed his eyes.

  He heard the sound of a key in the door where he was standing so he quickly ran around the corner of the building and stood between the tracks and the building. I’m in plain sight if someone steps out on the loading dock. This is not good. I’m vulnerable here.

  Two men came out the side door speaking Arabic.

  Shit! I can start it now and out these two but I don’t know what I’m up against inside. That’s high risk. I’d like better situational awareness. He looked around and saw a ladder that ran up the side of the wall to the loading dock. Go for it. He skittered up the ladder, laid prone on the platform, and held his is M11 in both hands aimed at the corner of the building where he had just been.

  The door creaked as it closed and the light went dark. On the loading dock platform, Aaron saw three narrow beams of light coming from the loading dock door. He crept over to the first beam. The light was coming from a space between the door and the frame. He put his eye up to the space and looked inside. One large room, concrete floor, and metal beams. The van was parked just inside the warehouse entrance and there were three men. Two sat on a couch and one sat in a metal folding chair. All were facing a television and the man on the folding chair was cleaning an AK-47 assault rifle. Aaron recognized the two on the couch as the two men from the van.

  Where the hell are the girls? Aaron crawled over to the next shaft of light and peeked through that hole. The vantage point was slightly different but still no sign of the girls. He sat on the platform with his back against the wall. I can take down the watchers pretty easy, but I don’t know where the girls are and I don’t know if they are guarded, wherever they are. He exhaled hard.

  He climbed back down the ladder and walked over to the side door. He pulled another suppressor out of his backpack and twisted it on his second M11 and with one gun in each hand Aaron kicked the flimsy door open, walked inside and opened fire. Fffut, ffut. The man cleaning the AK-47 fell backward and his chair tipped over. He had two holes in his forehead. Aaron swung to his right. Fffut, ffut and then ffut, ffut. The heads of two men on the couch initially jerked backward, then they both slumped on the couch as the gold-colored fabric cover began to darken crimson around them.

  Then Aaron saw the girls and it made him angry.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  PARIS, FRANCE

  TUESDAY JUNE 21ST

  10:15 P.M.

  Asterile, glass-enclosed room was located under the loading platform separated from the warehouse area by steel bars. The window was less than a meter from where Aaron stood and all eyes from inside the room were on him.

  There were twelve hospital beds and one surgery station in the room. The girls had all been stripped of their clothes and all wore blue hospital gowns. They were all tied together with a rope and shackle around the waist and were huddled at one end of the room.

  Except one girl. She had short brown hair and wide, frightened brown eyes. Aaron estimated her age to be thirteen or fourteen. She was naked and strapped to the surgical table and a nurse who wore green scrubs stood over the girl, razor in hand. She had just completed shaving the girl in preparation for circumcision surgery. Aaron made eye contact with her and she dropped the razor to the floor.

  A man, who also wore blue scrubs, had just finished washing his hands at the sink on the back wall of the room. He turned around and faced Aaron. Then stood motionless.

  Aaron opened the door and walked into the room. He felt the rush of his pulse in his temple and breathed deeply to calm himself. He pointed one gun at the doctor and the other at the nurse. He spoke in French, “Remove the straps from the girl.” Neither the nurse nor the doctor moved. Aaron lifted the gun in his right hand, aimed it at the nurse’s forehead, and growled. “Do it now!”

  The nurse quickly undid the straps and stepped back away from the table. Aaron looked at the girl. She was shivering and her lips were trembling. Aaron cocked his head toward the other girls and she understood. The girl slowly moved her legs over the side of the table, and when her feet touched the floor she grabbed a surgical gown from the end of the table and slipped her arms into it as she ran to the side of the room where the other girls were huddled.

  Aaron motioned with his guns toward the door and both the doctor and nurse understood and slowly walked toward the door. The doctor stopped when he reached it.

  “Out there. Now. Both of you,” Aaron commanded. They entered the warehouse area and Aaron told them each to pick up a folding chair from a stack of six that stood next to the door to the surgical room. Aaron holstered one gun and picked up a chair for himself. “Sit there. Face away from the room.” They did as they were ordered, then Aaron opened a chair and sat backward on it a few feet away and faced the doctor and nurse. His M11 pointed in their direction. “Take off your surgical masks.” The girls in the room remained huddled together with their eyes glued on Aaron and his captives.

  Aaron made eye contact with the doctor and did not blink. “You’re going to tell me what this is all about. Do you understand?”

  “You killed those men,” replied the doctor.

  “You’re very observant.” Aaron lifted the pistol and aimed it at the doctor. “Now consider this. If you don’t answer my questions, you’ll be just as dead.”

  The doctor glanced toward the nurse and back at Aaron. “She is
very young,” he said. “And she is only my assistant.”

  “Cut the bullshit. She’s as guilty as you are. Now tell me. Why were you going to butcher those girls?” Aaron raised his voice. “Are you ISIS? What is the connection to the man from the UAE embassy?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Aaron didn’t let him finish. He reached over and landed a powerful blow to the side of the doctor’s face that sent him flying off his chair. The nurse whimpered and covered her face. Aaron stood and yelled, “Get up! Get back in the chair!”

  The doctor’s face started to swell immediately. “You broke my jaw, you son of a bitch.”

  “Yeah,” Aaron answered. “And I wasn’t pissed off then. Now I am so you better start answering my fucking questions!” he hollered as he placed the barrel of the pistol on the doctor’s forehead.

  “Alright,” the doctor cried as he raised his hands to protect his face. He then explained he had been doing these surgeries for two years and he saw an average of ten to twelve girls every month. He was paid five hundred euros for each circumcision and one hundred and fifty euros each day to care for the girls after the surgery, until they were ready to be transported. The doctor paid the nurse 30 percent.

  When the girls were healthy, usually seven to ten days, they were loaded onto a boxcar and transported by rail to a location in Trieste. From there they were transported by boat to Syria.

  “What about the man from the UAE embassy?”

  The doctor explained he was a colonel in the UAE air force. His name was Malik. He had been at the UAE embassy for about four years. All the doctor knew about the colonel was that he was part of an ISIS recruiting organization and the colonel was the doctor’s single point of contact. He believed there were as many as ten recruiters and, except for the colonel, none of those recruiters knew the identities of the others. The colonel had some type of leadership role in the organization and notified the doctor when he had girls to be treated and he paid in cash. He knew he was an ISIS sympathizer and had two sons fighting for ISIS in Iraq. The doctor did not know exactly what his position at the embassy was but thought that he purchased French military weapons and equipment for the UAE.

  Aaron tied the two in a standing position to separate concrete ceiling support beams. The doctor explained that neither he nor the nurse sympathized or agreed with ISIS.

  “We do get paid well to do this, but if you think about it, it is better that we prepare them as brides here in a clean surgical environment than to send them on without the surgery. If that were allowed to happen, the girls would undergo the procedure in a much less sanitary environment and they would be much more likely to develop an infection.”

  Aaron shook his head in disgust. “And you think that justifies this? How would you like it if I blew your nuts off?” He aimed his M11 at the doctor’s groin.

  The doctor’s mouth and eyes grew wide.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  WASHINGTON, DC

  TUESDAY JUNE 21ST

  5:30 P.M.

  Vice President Patterson removed his glasses and placed them on the desk in front of him. He rubbed the bridge of his nose for a moment and exhaled heavily.

  “He’s off the reservation.”

  “Yes, sir, Mr. Vice President,” Stafford answered. “But it does sound like the information he received from Abdul-Aziz is worth investigating.”

  “Right. The information he received right before he pumped a couple bullets into him.”

  “Mr. Vice President.”

  “Yeah,” interrupted Patterson, “I know. That’s what we trained him to do. Leave no trail.”

  Patterson angrily pushed his chair away from the table and walked to a window that faced the White House. “The next election is three years away and I plan to be the party’s candidate. The president, the party chairman, the governor’s committee and with Senator Walsh’s endorsement, the party legislative committee will all be onboard. What Monroe is doing could blow up into a major international scandal and my fingerprints would be all over it, and then Senator Walsh would have the clearest path to the convention as the nominee. I can’t allow that.”

  Stafford nodded. “I understand, sir.”

  “Walsh is the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee,” the vice president continued, “and I’m obligated to keep him informed of this Council’s activities. He has already raised his concerns about Monroe. “You bring Aaron Monroe back in and let’s get this under control.”

  * * *

  Stafford sat at the yellow Formica table in the Executive Office Building cafeteria to eat his take-out chicken veggie delight he picked up from a Thai restaurant a few blocks away. As he peeled back the wrap on his dinner his secure cell phone rang. He recognized the code. It was Monroe. He tapped the answer icon, then entered his secure six-digit code. The lines synched instantly.

  “Aaron, what the hell is going on? I keep calling you and you don’t pick up. I need to talk to you.”

  There was a short silence, then Aaron answered. “I need a cleaning crew.”

  Nigel pushed away from the table and stood. He rubbed the back of his neck as he walked toward the exit and his office. “What do you mean you need a cleaning crew? What have you done, Aaron?”

  “There are three down,” replied Aaron cryptically “two detained and eight innocents confined. Global coordinates are forty-eight, fifty-five, twenty-eight, north and two, twenty-one, thirty-six, east. Do you copy?”

  “Goddamn it Aaron! What have you done? I’m supposed to call you in and you’re now telling me you just took down three more foreign nationals you call alleged extremists? You’re on the verge of being considered rogue!”

  “Nigel. I need a cleanup because there are more girls here in the ISIS pipeline and I don’t know what to do with them.”

  Stafford put his head in his hand and exhaled heavily. “You’re going to have to give me more than this, Aaron. There are red flags all over this and the vice president will likely be very pissed about it. Not to mention Senator Walsh who would like to have you arrested.”

  “Alright. Here’s what went down.”

  Stafford listened closely and took notes as Aaron described what he knew about the recruitment network and the colonel from the UAE embassy at the head of the network in Paris. He described the surgical center and the procedure the girls would have been forced to endure. And he explained that was why he killed the three thugs that provided security for the surgical center.

  “Nigel, if I had not stepped in, these girls would have been placed on a rail car and transported to Trieste. Don’t you see? Trieste is the assembly point. From there the girls go to Syria. Nigel, this proves there is a sophisticated recruiting network at least throughout Europe and probably back to America.”

  Stafford stood and walked to a window that overlooked the White House. “I’ll have to talk to the vice president.”

  “There’s no time,” replied Aaron.

  Stafford thought about that for a moment. “Alright Monroe, and I’m just doing this because I used to have a great deal of respect for you. I’ll call in a CIA cleanup crew to that location and they’ll square it with the French DGSI, but you have to stop what you’re doing. Come in and let’s talk to the vice president about it. But as of now, what you are doing is not authorized and therefore you are breaking the law. Do you understand?”

  There was a brief pause, then Aaron answered, “Roger.”

  “Tell me again the specifics of the clean-up.”

  “Three down. Eight innocent girls are confined in the surgical room I described and the doctor and nurse are restrained.”

  “What is the condition of the two that are restrained?” Stafford asked.

  “They’re fine. The doctor probably has a broken jaw. I was tempted to shoot his nuts off but I didn’t.”

  “Aaron. Just to be clear. You are now under orders to come in.”

  “I understood that,” replied Aaron. “I just have one more thing to do.”


  “Aaron. Do not go after the colonel from the embassy!”

  The line disconnected on Aaron’s end.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  PARIS, FRANCE

  WEDNESDAY JUNE 22ND

  12:35 A.M.

  Aaron parked the Ducati behind the Peugeot where Sarah still waited and watched the house. He opened the passenger door and stepped inside. Sarah looked worried.

  “Is everything alright?” Aaron asked.

  Aaron had called Sarah before he left the warehouse and explained what had happened there and also told her about his conversation with Stafford.

  “I’ve thought of nothing else since you called earlier,” she replied. “Maybe Stafford is right. This is getting very scary, Aaron. I don’t want to be on the wrong side of the government or law enforcement. And I don’t want you to be, either.”

  Aaron pulled one of the M11s out of his shoulder holster and released a partially used clip and then slapped a full clip into the grip of the gun and chambered a round. Then he screwed on the sound suppressor.

  “I know. I’m putting you too close to harm’s way and I’m jeopardizing my career with the government.” Aaron leaned toward Sarah and placed his hand on her thigh and smiled. “Let’s go home tomorrow, okay?”

  Sarah’s eyes glistened. “Thank you. I’ll make arrangements with NetJet.”

  They said nothing for a few moments. Their gaze locked on each other’s eyes.

  “Have you been here the entire time?” Aaron asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Did anyone come or go while I was gone?”

  “No,” answered Sarah warily.

  “So as far as you know he’s still in there.”