Presence of Mine Enemies

by Stephen England

  So many of whom would be dead or injured by the time this night was over. The Russian intelligence officer smiled—he shouldn’t allow himself to think of this attack in terms of body count, they would be lucky to even rival Bataclan, and only then if Belkaïd’s martyrs got very, very lucky in the chaos at the gates.

  But terrorism was never about body count. It was about fear. And every one of these thousands who filed past him toward the lettered gates of the Stade de France was going to know fear by the time this night ended.

  The assassination of their head of state, before their very eyes. . .gunfire and even more bombings filling the night as men and women poured uncontrollably from the stadium following the attack. Likely more people would be trampled than killed by the explosives he had supplied to Belkaïd.

  And what would happen after, as an already-destabilized France reacted to the chaos. . .another quiet smile lit up Litvinov’s face as he turned away, melting into the crowd.

  Another barrier to Russia’s ascendancy in Europe, removed. Glory.

  5:26 P.M. British Summer Time

  HMP Belmarsh

  Thamesmead, Southeast London

  “. . .and if you will just sign here, please. . .yes, and also here. . .”

  Julian Marsh looked away as Alec MacCallum took the pen, his former colleague’s hand seeming to tremble as he scrawled his signature across the forms, pausing only briefly to ask another question of the female officer. The very last formalities, prior to his release.

  He would leave here a free man, Her Majesty’s government dropping all charges against him in the wake of Norris’ confession.

  A free man but a shattered one, Marsh thought, noting the pallor of the man’s face, the unsteadiness of his hand. For a careerist like MacCallum—a man who had given so much of his life to the Service—the very suspicion of treason had been worse than any death sentence.

  He was gaunt now, the street clothes Marsh had brought hanging loosely on his body—his eyes ringed with loss of sleep. A shell of the once-confident branch head who had run G Branch for so much of Marsh’s own tenure at Thames House.

  “Thanks for coming out here today, sir,” MacCallum said a few minutes later, as they made their way out past uniformed guards to the carpark, his voice hesitant, uncertain. Barely above a whisper.

  “Julian,” the former director-general corrected gently, searching for words. “We’re not at Thames House anymore.”

  And weren’t going to be, either of them, ever again. That hardest of truths. A door closing, forever.

  “I should have believed you,” he continued after a moment, the sun burning down upon them as they walked out through the rows of parked vehicles, heat radiating up from the asphalt. “You deserved that much.”

  No response, and he shook his head. “Mehreen, Darren, all of the chaos with the Americans, and then Colville. . .it was a time of great uncertainty, and my faith in you wavered. Forgive me.”

  Another long, painful pause. “You did what you felt best. . .Julian. For the good of the Service. I don’t blame you.” MacCallum stopped short, his voice faltering. “There were moments in. . .there, I hardly believed myself innocent, given all the evidence. Hardly could have expected you to have done so.”

  “That doesn’t change a thing,” Marsh replied grimly. “I had a duty to my officers, as well as the Service. And you were one of my best.”

  Were. All of that, now behind them both. They reached the silver Vauxhall just then, and Marsh opened the back door for his colleague, catching the shock in MacCallum’s eyes as he recognized Phillip Greer sitting behind the wheel. One could feel the hesitation with which he closed the door, the uncertainty. Recognizing in the head of CI the man who had, more than perhaps anyone else besides Norris, been responsible for his confinement.

  A tense silence reigning in the car as Marsh opened his own door, sliding in on the passenger seat. Then Greer reached forward to shift the car into drive, glancing in his rear-view mirror at MacCallum as he pulled out of the space.

  “I’m sorry.”

  A weary shake of the head served as MacCallum’s answer, weary and saddened. “I told you that you had the wrong man.”

  Greer nodded soberly. “You did. I don’t apologize for not believing you—there was no reason to. But I apologize for not looking closer, for not finding those reasons. That was my job, and I failed.”

  And that failure had destroyed a man’s career, as they all knew. As MacCallum grasped without bothering to ask. The charges might have been dropped, but he’d never work for the Service again. He’d have to find some way to start over—find a new career, more than half-way through his life.

  It wasn’t an enviable lot.

  “At least you got him,” Alec MacCallum observed finally, as Greer pulled out onto the A2016, merging with traffic. “You found the mole.”

  And so they had, Marsh reflected, knowing what MacCallum did not. His eyes growing hard as he stared at the road ahead. But not in time.

  6:33 P.M. Central European Summer Time

  Saint-Denis, Seine-Saint-Denis,

  Paris, France

  Sergeant Nathalie Jobert wiped away sweat from her forehead with the back of a gloved hand as she scanned the crowd toward the stadium through her binoculars. There had been a warning of possible protesters in the final GSPR briefing—remnants of the crowd which had besieged the US Embassy in the early weeks of July, protesting against American drone policy in the Middle East—but there was no sign of them, yet. The Parisian summer had seemed to sap their fervor as the weeks went by, all but the most dedicated melting away—back into the streets.

  Here, now—she could understand why. The late afternoon sun still beating down with a fierce intensity, the bare roof offering no cover—no relief from the oppressive, baking heat.

  Too hot for Glatigny to spend long on the roof—she wouldn’t be bringing the eagle’s carrier up for a while yet, in fact, she would be going back down herself in twenty minutes.

  But it was as good a vantage point as she could have hoped for, the swelling sides of Stade de France itself rising to the west—her view to the east unobstructed out across the Seine, the runways of Le Bourget just barely visible nearly six kilometers away.

  She lowered the binoculars, exchanging a tight-lipped smile with the young airman who had been tasked to work as her assistant. “This is going to work, Jacques. Now, just to hope we are not needed, non?”

  He simply nodded quickly, his nerves showing on his face as Jobert checked her watch. Another couple hours before President Albéric arrived on site. . .

  Not very long.

  7:48 P.M.

  Montmorency Forest, Val d’Oise

  North of Paris

  Paradise. It almost seemed as if they might already have entered jannah, Harry thought, drinking in the cool of the shade, dappled sunlight filtering through the leaves of the chestnut trees above to strike his face.

  Arms folded easily across his chest as he scanned the open field out toward the pond—watching as Yassin, Aryn, and a younger enforcer named Abdelatif kicked a soccer ball back and forth across the grass. Idling away their remaining time before launch.

  It reminded him strangely of a picnic—a barbecue back home, though it had been years since the last one he’d bothered to attend. The younger guys, out back playing touch football as meat sizzled on the grill.

  A hundred meters away, Nora strolled aimlessly over by the pond, her hair uncovered for the first time since he had seen her in Reza’s bed there in Molenbeek, striving now to look as non-Muslim as possible.

  It came naturally to her.

  Of their little band of shahid, only Faouzi seemed determined not to enjoy his last few hours on earth. . .a scowl plastered across the older man’s face as he sprawled in the grass—leaning up against the nearmost van’s rear tire, whittling away at a scrap piece of wood with a penknife. A carving he would never finish.

  Perhaps he was thinking of his crippled son. Or hi
s coming vengeance. Likely both.

  They were not alone in this part of the forest—there had been at least four or five groups of passerby in the hour since they had arrived, but it was about as secluded as they were likely to get, this close to Paris.

  No one had given them more than a passing glance. There would be no salvation coming from that direction—no heroic bystander, coming to the rescue. “If you see something, say something.”

  He had thought it might be possible to place a call—even now—to the French police, but their cellphones had been stripped and destroyed back in Coulommiers, just before their departure. All that remained to them, the presumably encrypted radios they would use to coordinate the attack, down to the very last second.

  “It is nearly time, brother,” Gamal Belkaïd said, a smile on the older man’s face as he came up to Harry. “The moment we have all dreamed of for so long.”

  Harry nodded, suppressing the bile that seemed to rise in his throat at the words. This was really happening.

  “Insh’allah,” he replied simply. “We are in God’s hands now, as ever before.”

  A nod. “Call your men in. . .it’s time to give them their final instructions.”

  8:05 P.M.

  DGSE Headquarters

  Paris, France

  The tension in the small office in the basement of the Boulevard Mortier headquarters building had become nearly unbearable—silence broken only by murmured suggestions, followed by the rapid-fire click of keys, answered always with the technical officer’s crestfallen, almost sullen “Non.”

  Armand Césaire kneaded his brow with the fingertips of both hands, wishing for all the world that he could lock himself away in a room for an hour, with only his classic jazz to keep him company. Perhaps something from Jo Maka. . .music had always helped him think, relax—process hard problems. But his phone, with all his music, was securely locked away, several floors up.

  He let out a heavy sigh, burying his head in his hands as he struggled to think of what they could possibly be missing, what they might have overlooked. Some aspect of Daniel Mahrez’s life they hadn’t considered, they hadn’t known. . .some. . .

  Wait. What had he just thought? Of Daniel Mahrez’s life. . .but of course!

  “Je suis imbécile!” he exclaimed, punctuating his words with a curse. Of course. Godard looked over at him with a start, the supervisor’s eyes betraying bewilderment at the sudden outburst.

  “He wouldn’t have used anything connected to his real life,” Césaire explained, the words pouring out of him in a rush as he cursed himself for this oversight, brought on by lack of sleep, the emotion of the day. “It would have been based in his legend. I need everything we worked up to backstop Marwan Abdellaoui. And I need it now.”

  8:07 P.M.

  The Montmorency Forest, Val D’oise

  North of Paris

  “. . .in another thirty minutes, we’ll launch the drones,” Harry said, looking around into the faces of the jihadists surrounding him. His men, perverse as that seemed, “and bring them to an altitude of two hundred feet ASL, placing them in a pre-programmed orbit over the densest part of the forest. That’s where they’ll stay, as we make our way into Saint-Denis itself. . .we have no good way of knowing how long it will take us to work our way through traffic into our launch positions for the final attack, and we don’t need the quadcopters drawing attention to themselves during that delay. With the President in play, the security presence will no doubt be heavy.”

  “The drones should have enough battery life to account for the delay,” Gamal Belkaïd interjected, picking up where Harry had left off. “But we will want to minimize it as much as possible, to preclude unforeseen difficulties. As soon as the drivers reach their destinations, they will make contact with each other, and hand off comms to the pilots, who will then bring the UAVs out of orbit and in toward the Stade de France, while the assault teams go ahead and move into position at the gates. Once the French President has been slain, the pilots will then drive the vans in as close as is possible to the crowds fleeing the stadium, and then detonate the explosives in both vehicles.”

  Harry’s head came up at those last words, knowing that surprise—if not outright consternation—must be visible in his eyes. “I did not understand that—”

  “It was a good plan, Ibrahim,” the older man returned with a smile. “But even the best of plans can be improved—and we had unused explosives. I had my men rig the bodywork of both vans yesterday afternoon. The carnage should be. . .devastating.”

  “Alhamdullilah,” Harry whispered, forcing the words past this throat with a painful effort. Praise be to God.

  So that was what they’d been doing after their return from the abortive test flight—while he’d been arguing with Belkaïd, trying to sort out a way to yet disable the drones themselves. The folly of it all.

  He’d allowed his vision to narrow to a singular focus, ignoring all else.

  And now people were going to die. . .

  8:23 P.M.

  Saint-Denis, Seine-Saint-Denis

  Paris, France

  There he is, Sergeant Jobert thought, adjusting the binoculars to her eyes as she focused in on the figure of the French President, stepping out of the limousine—pausing briefly to wave to the crowd before the phalanx of Leseur’s officers closed back upon their principal, hurrying him in through the gates of the Stade de France—out of earshot of those few protesters who had actually shown up—perhaps forty of them, at most, waving their signs and cardboard mock-ups of American Predator drones, chanting over and again in French, “Drones kill kids.”

  “Roland Actual, this is Baligant-1,” she heard over her earpiece, the voice of one of the GSPR snipers positioned—like herself—on a nearby rooftop. “We have the principal on location, entering the Stade itself now—losing visual. No visible threats.”

  Nothing. If there was going to be an attack, this was when they had expected it to come—the moment when he was most exposed, the crowds at their peak. Jobert raised her eyes to the sky, glimpsing the majestic, regal form of Glatigny in the distance, soaring above the stadium. The massive raptor ever alert, ever watchful.

  “Magnifique,” she murmured, struck by the same awe she ever felt watching him fly. The effortless grace with which he mounted to the heavens.

  Perhaps this would be a quiet evening, after all.

  8:29 P.M.

  The Montmorency Forest, Val D’oise

  North of Paris

  Even two hundred feet up, you could hear the hum of the quadcopters’ rotors. A vague, indistinct sound—but very much there, if you knew what you were listening for.

  Harry took another look at his computer screen, marking the positions of both drones on the tracking software, confirming that they had entered their preset orbits over the forest.

  Time to move.

  “May God be praised,” he said, forcing a smile as he dismounted from the van. “We are fully operational, my brothers. Allahu akbar!”

  “Allahu akbar!” the answering shout went up, the passion—the fire—visible in the eyes of the men surrounding him.

  Nora didn’t join in the cry, taught like any good Muslim woman not to raise her voice in the company of men, but the fire was there, all the same. She was in this. No second thoughts, no hesitation.

  Aryn reached out, and Harry drew him into a fierce embrace—hugging him tight, feeling the bulk of the suicide vest beneath his loose shirt. “Till jannah, brother.”

  “Till jannah.”

  Yassin was next, his eyes shining with tears as they embraced. “I knew, brother—from the moment I met you—I knew my life had forever changed.”

  So it had, Harry thought, only too aware of the irony as he hugged the man who had saved his life in that boxing club in Molenbeek. From Marwan, irony of ironies, compounding upon each other.

  All their lives, changing in those moments. Forever. “Go with God,” he managed, the words seeming to struggle to emerge from
his throat. He clapped Yassin on the back as they disengaged, stepping back from his friend. “Till jannah.”

  “Ameen.”

  8:49 P.M.

  DGSE Headquarters

  Paris, France

  “They’re planning an attack. . .next Saturday. . .”

  Armand Césaire heard a low curse break from Brunet’s lips, his own face twisting into a grimace as they all listened to the audio fade into a distorted mass of static, the corruption of the recovered file proving fatal.

  “We have to shut them down, immédiatement,” he heard the voice of his damned officer say, uttering the words which had condemned him to death. The last message he had never lived to deliver. Perhaps even the one he had tried to leave for them in that cinema in Liège, before becoming spooked by Danloy’s officers.“We—”

  More static, the face of Daniel’s mother and the wife rising before him in this moment. The sorrow, the pain.

  “We need to know what he said,” he heard the director announce, her voice cold as ice—clearly unaffected by the personal dimension of what they were hearing.

  A part of him hated Brunet for it, a greater part recognizing that this was her job. To remain detached, above all else. Focused on the mission—their mission.

  We are all pawns, he thought, reminding himself of what he had ever known. In the service of the Republic.

  “I am sorry, madame le directeur,” the young technical officer replied, looking back over his shoulder at her. “I will do what I can, but the recovery process is very difficult for a file this corrupted. It appears that it has already been deleted and recovered once, then deleted again. And now to recover it again. . .it is not impossible, but it will be difficult to get any more than I’ve recovered already.”