Presence of Mine Enemies

by Stephen England

  Once again, she left unsaid—unnecessary given the self-reproach she saw mirrored in the eyes of everyone gathered around the conference table. They had all spent the night coming to terms with the consequences of their failure. No reason to throw it in their faces.

  “Our counterparts at the DGSI,” she went on, after a moment’s pause, “are focused on the domestic aspect—continuing to run down any and all information on Belkaïd’s known associates within France, while we will focus on the foreign aspect, namely al-Almani.”

  “And to that end”—she gestured to where Daniel Vukovic sat, a few feet away—“the Americans have offered to make available any and all resources which may prove necessary to bring these men to justice.”

  Vukovic nodded, glancing around the table. His face grave, yet strangely unreadable. “Anything my agency can do to help. We stand together.”

  12:21 A.M.

  The house outside Béville-le-Comte

  Eure-et-Loire Department, France

  Voices. In the next room, a low murmur of noise in the stillness of the house.

  Harry pushed forward through the darkness, the compact CZ up in both hands, hammer back on a loaded chamber, its muzzle leading the way—the familiar, flickering glow of a television screen coming into view as he neared the open doorway leading into the living room.

  He recognized it as a news channel, the hosts continuing to talk, unregarded, on-screen as his weapon swept the corners of the room—his eyes only then falling upon the crumpled form in the middle of the floor. Ghaniyah Belkaïd.

  The pair of bodies in the drive, each man shot twice to the head, had been his first indication that something was wrong—very wrong—that someone else had beaten him here. But the house was dark and quiet, this wasn’t a GIGN raid. Wasn’t the way they would have played this.

  Her right hand was splayed out, away from her side, the stumps of her missing fingers clearly visible. A strange look of resignation on her face, as if she had seen Death coming for her. As if she had known.

  He could remember the first time he had met her, in that little apartment on the Rue Denis Sotiau. Sharing a cup of Maghrebi tea as she told him of Algiers, of the horror her family had suffered there.

  “I understand you are the mujahid.”

  The flower garden. Beauty in the midst of the darkness. An attempt at healing.

  But it hadn’t been enough.

  “My brother has forgotten our suffering. . .”

  And where was her brother now? Was he even still alive?Or was he dead too, lying in a broken heap like his sister, a bullet hole disfiguring his forehead. Harry stooped down by her body—pushing away the folds of cloth around her broken face, pressing the fingers of his free hand against her carotid artery. No pulse, as he expected, but the flesh was still warm.

  The killer was still here, he realized, suddenly aware of his own vulnerability—rising from his crouch, pistol in hand.

  Moving back to the doorway. Leave, a voice in his head whispered, but he was no longer listening to it. The other voice, guiding him now—the voice of the ghost, driving him onward. Marwan.

  His decision made, back there on that desolate stretch of highway between Rabouillet and Ablis. He knew how this would end.

  The only way it ever could have ended.

  Another guard lay dead in the hallway as he made his way carefully down it, his footfalls soft against the thick rug. Another low murmur of voices striking his ears as he neared the back of the house—and this time, he knew it wasn’t a television, words floating to him through the still night air.

  “. . .men like you, who destroyed my brother. Whom the West used, in their attempt to destroy my country. . .men just like you, who grew wealthy even as they traded in human lives.”

  Be sure your sins will find you out. As his own had, certain as fate. It took him a long moment to place the voice, but then he knew.

  The pistol raised, he stepped into the open doorway of the office—taking in the sight of Gamal Belkaïd sitting propped up in a chair to the left of the desk, blood trickling down his face from a gash on his forehead, the right knee of his pants torn and soaked with blood. It looked as though he’d been shot through the kneecap.

  And between the two of them, pacing back and forth before the desk—the Russian. A pistol clutched in his right hand.

  “Grigoriy,” Harry announced quietly, summoning up the name out of the past. Memories of Iraq, streaming to the fore. Of standing on that road in Anbar, the sun beating down from above—bodies scattered all around.

  The FSB officer’s head snapped back around, finding himself staring down the barrel of Harry’s pistol. Once again. “You.”

  He spat the single word as a curse, rage and disbelief mixing until they were indistinguishable.

  “Ibrahim, what are you doing here?” he heard Belkaïd demand, confusion in the Algerian’s voice. Harry ignored him, focusing on the Russian, the face framed in the sights of his pistol, pale in the semi-darkness.

  “I knew I knew you from somewhere before,” the Russian intelligence officer spat, his voice bitter. “I knew it.”

  “Anbar Province,” Harry said quietly, supplying the missing information. “Winter of ‘07. You were in-country as the the No. 2 of Alexei Mikhailovich. His protégé, or so it seemed at the time.”

  And he could see the pride in the young man’s eyes, at the memory. Pride, and defiance at the sudden realization, the recognition, breaking through.

  “And you were CIA!”

  Harry simply nodded. “I was, then. I’m no one now.”

  “What is going on, Ibrahim?” Belkaïd demanded once again, his voice rising, drenched in pain. His words punctuated with curses in French and Arabic. “Enough with the talking, this man came here to kill me.”

  “So did I,” Harry replied coldly, his eyes never leaving the young Russian’s face. The pistol.

  “Drop the gun, Grigoriy.”

  “What is the meaning of this, Ibrahim—what—”

  The Russian started to laugh, a harsh, mirthless sound, shaking his head helplessly as he glanced between Harry and Belkaïd. Still retaining his grip on the pistol.

  “Don’t you see, you fool? He was playing you all along—”

  “Drop the gun on the floor, and kick it over here. Do it now.”

  “He convinced you that he was one of you, one of your mujahideen.” There were tears in Grigoriy’s eyes now, his body shaking with laughter, a mad laughter in the face of death. The irony of it all. “And all the while, he betrayed you. Sold you out. Destroyed you from within. If you want to know why you failed. . .he stands before you.”

  The look in Belkaïd’s eyes was one of utter disbelief, his mind struggling to process the Russian’s words through the pain. “B-b-but that’s impossible. I watched him, I was there when he beheaded a French agent, I—”

  The FSB officer shook his head. “Then you know how good he is.”

  “The gun, Grigoriy—”

  The pistol came up in the Russian’s hand, a blur of motion—fire blossoming from the barrel into the darkness of the room. Harry’s own finger, reflexively curling around the CZ’s trigger—taking up slack, the two shots so close together they sounded almost as one.

  He saw Gamal Belkaïd collapse in the chair, shot through the head, his brains spattering over the nearby bookcase. Saw his own bullet strike Grigoriy high in the chest, the FSB officer’s weapon coming up and around even as he stumbled back toward the desk.

  And Harry shot him again, the CZ recoiling back into his palm, the report deafening in the confines of the room—leaving his ears ringing.

  The Russian went down, slumped on the rug in front of the desk—the pistol clattering to the bare wood, a few feet away.

  He looked up at Harry, still standing there in the doorway, making no move to retrieve his weapon. An ironic smile, twisting at his lips.

  “I just had to kill him, you see,” he coughed weakly, his shoulders shaking ever so slightly wi
th the same mad laughter. “For my brother. No matter what happened after, I had to be the one. And I was tired of hearing him talk. I should have shot you.”

  Harry nodded slowly, taking a cautious step into the room—his weapon still trained on the FSB officer’s face. “You should have. But you didn’t. And now we’re going to talk about the role the Centre played in all of this—the orders from Moscow which led you to place weapons in the hands of a Belgian terror cell. And once you’ve told me your story, I’ll patch you up and you can tell it all again to the DGSI.”

  The Russian just smiled, coughing once again, and Harry edged into the room, moving toward the pistol lying there on the floor between them. He had to secure it, before he could do anything else. Put it out of his reach—permanently.

  “So you think I’ll talk?” He seemed amused by that, that same ironic smile, still playing at the corners of his mouth. “I was trained in a hard school.”

  “I think all men talk, no matter their school.” And this one was talking too much, Harry realized, even as his foot closed down on the Smith & Wesson lying there on the floor, kicking it away—some warning light piercing through the weariness, the fatigue. Too late.

  He felt the impact of Grigoriy’s kick, catching him off-balance—sweeping his legs out from under him as he crashed down hard to the floor—losing his grasp on the CZ, groping for it, in the semi-darkness.

  And then the Russian was on top of him, hammer blows crashing into his unprotected side, nearly doubling him up—pain shooting through his weary, tortured body as he struggled to fight back.

  Knowing that it was a fight he would lose, the Russian’s fingers closing around his throat in a deathly grip. The younger man, the stronger of the two of them, even with his wounds.

  So this is how it ends. It was strange how abstract that seemed, his mind seeming to accept the inevitability of his fate, even as his body fought against it. His vision blurring as he struggled for air, the world around him narrowing to a faint pinprick of light.

  This is how it was always going to end.

  And he felt something cool beneath his fingers, scarce even aware of how they had found their way to his belt—the faint snick of the switchblade opening sounding loud in his ears, as if he was hearing it in an empty room.

  He closed his eyes, fighting for breath as he brought his arm up, the blade describing a half-arc in the darkness as he summoned up his last reserves of strength, driving it deep into the Russian’s ribs.

  The hands around his throat relaxed instantly—a violent scream reverberating through the room as the FSB officer rolled backward—clutching at the knife, struggling to pull it from his body. Blood spurting from around the hilt.

  And he was free, his oxygen-starved lungs gasping for breath as he pushed himself to his hands and knees, struggling to rise. Every fiber of his body crying out in protest. In pain.

  His vision clearing as he looked around for his gun. Finish this.

  Looked for it, and found it even as Grigoriy’s hand closed around the pistol’s grip—his mind measuring the distance even as the weapon came up. Too far.

  The first shot went wild, fired off-hand as the Russian clutched at his stomach, and Harry didn’t wait for the second—plunging backward into the darkness of the hall, nearly going down.

  Pain searing like fire through his veins as he pushed himself aright, madness seizing hold. Flight.

  Madness? Or the remnants of a sanity he’d thought long since abandoned? He was unarmed now, defenseless—long past the end of his tether.

  He had to get out of here. Run. His hand propping himself up against the wall as he pushed himself along, making for the door—and into the summer night beyond.

  Hearing the Russian’s bellow of anger and pain behind him, the sound of another shot crashing out through the house—then another, the shots going wild in the darkness.

  Harry’s shoulder hit the door with a crash, knocking it open as he staggered out into the night—gazing up at the stars as they seemed to revolve above him. The woods nearby, reaching out for him, beckoning.

  Come and be at peace.

  Epilogue

  4:07 P.M. Central European Summer Time, August 29th (three weeks later)

  DGSE Headquarters

  Paris, France

  It was quiet in the office, the only sound the gentle tapping of Anaïs Brunet’s pen against the wooden surface of her desk. A look of intense concentration on her face as she stared at the computer print-out lying on the desk before her.

  Where are you?

  But the balaclava-masked face of Ibrahim Abu Musab al-Almani held no more answers for her now than ever it had—the vaguely steel-blue eyes staring back at her from the photograph with a hard, enigmatic gaze.

  He might even be dead, by now—though he hadn’t been among the bodies recovered at the Stade. All those had been Maghrebi Arabs, with the exception of the young woman, identified as Nora Bercot, a native of Provence—a student at the Universite Libre de Bruxelles in Belgium.

  Perhaps he had been the first suicide bomber there on the Avenue Jules Rimet, but she doubted that, very much. He had been too far up in the hierarchy of this group to have sacrificed himself in such a manner. A planner, not a foot soldier. Like Gamal Belkaïd.

  Belkaïd. He was dead, along with his sister and a handful of his criminal network, all of them officially killed in a GIGN raid on one of his residences, in the Eure-et-Loire department, in the countryside outside the small commune of Béville-le-Comte. Shot while resisting arrest.

  The truth. . .was more complicated. The truth that they didn’t know the truth. That Belkaïd had been dead two days before GIGN arrived on-site, the sudden flurry of chatter among the former black marketeer’s associates enabling them to hone in on his possible location. Found propped up in his chair in the home’s small office, his brains blown out by a single 9mm round to the forehead.

  There had been a struggle, clearly—far more rounds fired within the confines of the office than could be accounted for by the almost execution-style killing of Belkaïd. Heavy blood stains on the rug before the desk that didn’t match the Algerian’s blood type.

  But his killer. . .was nowhere to be found. An enigma, wrapped in a mystery.

  Dead, nevertheless—however he had met his fate. One of the two architects of the Stade attack, removed from the earth. Which left them with the elusive al-Almani.

  “We will find you,” Brunet whispered, as much to herself as to the photograph—thinking of Emile Vautrin and his small Division Action unit out at Fort Noisy-le-Sec. “No matter how long it takes. . .we will find you.”

  7:42 P.M. Moscow Time

  Chkalovsky Airport

  Shchyolkovo, Moscow Oblast

  The sun was setting over the airport as the aging Cessna Citation taxiied to a stop on the tarmac, the business jet’s fuselage glowing in the last rays of the evening.

  Alexei Mikhailovich Vasiliev leaned back into the door of the Mercedes, his face a mask as he stared out toward the jet—watching as its door opened and the stairs unfolded—men in suits maneuvering a stretcher down the steps. FSB officers, like himself—like everyone else gathered around the small convoy of vehicles gathered here in this small corner of the airport, awaiting the jet’s arrival. Like the man on the stretcher.

  And he was home. He felt himself release a breath he didn’t realize he had been holding—moving forward to meet the party as they wheeled the stretcher toward the waiting vehicles, taking in his first sight of his. . .son, was the only word that sufficed in this moment, an unaccustomed emotion nearly overwhelming Vasiliev as he stared down into Kolesnikov’s deathly pale face.

  The young man looked worse than Vasiliev had even expected, the list of injuries that had made their way back from the rezidentura in Paris devastating enough.

  He’d been shot twice, once through the lung—shot and stabbed, the blade missing his liver by scant centimeters. The details of the incident, remaining unclear, even now—b
ut one thing was certain. He had come very close to death. Even now. . .the future remained uncertain.

  “Grisha,” Vasiliev exclaimed fiercely as he seized Kolesnikov’s hand, using the diminutive of his young friend’s name, heedless of their fellow officers all around, “my son, I had feared to never see you again.”

  A moment passed, and then he felt the answering squeeze against his hand—saw a weak smile edge its way across the pale face. “And. . .yet here I am. I’m not dead just yet.”

  “Who did this to you?” Vasiliev demanded, his eyes growing cold as ice. The one question none of the reports had answered, a cloud growing across Kolesnikov’s face in the semi-darkness as he seemed to consider it.

  “A ghost,” he replied finally, his voice a weak rasp. Almost lost amidst the whine of the idling turbines. “A ghost from our past. . .”

  6:57 P.M. Central European Summer Time

  Chateau du Fleckenstein

  Vosges Mountains, France

  “. . .and our first historical records of the castle come in 1174, when Gottfried of Fleckenstein was a member of Frederick Barbarossa’s imperial court.” Muriel Lecanuet announced, repeating the familiar litany as she looked around into the faces of the American college students surrounding her.

  She had worked as a tour guide here at the castle for twenty years, and knew the history of the place by heart. “The castle is built into a sandstone outcropping nearly a hundred meters long, sitting more than three hundred meters above sea level, and offering a commanding view of the valley below, out toward the River Sauer, enabling its owners to control the line of communication between Alsace and Lorraine, while protecting Haguenau, then the site of an imperial palace. The family expanded the castle many times over the centuries, with the stair tower we’re currently standing atop, part of renovations dating from the 16th Century, around the time that Strasbourg architect Daniel Specklin described it Chateau du Fleckenstein as ‘the ideal castle.’ A century later, the French soldiers of Louis XIV, the Sun King, took the citadel. . .”