by AJ Stewart
The sun was a ribbon of crimson on the western horizon when Fontaine got back to the hotel. His men were waiting in the lounge like regular folks waited for the next train. Hutton was sitting apart in a corner of the lounge. She wore a hijab that matched the blue of her t-shirt. The scarf covered her head and shoulders but not her face. Fontaine stepped over to her.
“Looks nice,” he said.
“A present from our host. Felt rude to refuse.”
“Looks nice,” Fontaine repeated.
“Any news?”
He shook his head. “Soon. We wait. Is your room okay?”
“I have a whole floor to myself, so yeah, it’s okay.”
The hotel owner offered them dinner and they ate flat bread and crumbled lamb with raisins and spices, and soup. There was more tea and coffee. Fontaine’s men took the food in good nature but without their usual repartee. Anxiety hung over the group like a storm cloud waiting to break. After dinner they resumed waiting. Fontaine sat with Hutton. She told him she was looking forward to getting back to New York. He said he was looking forward to a swim in the Mediterranean. He could see she had questions. Things she wanted to know about him. She was piecing things together but big gaps remained. And he felt like for the first time in a long time he would answer them, if she asked.
They heard the sound of the motorcycle pulling up outside because traffic noise was so infrequent. A young man dressed like all the others, dusty white shirt and gray trousers, stepped in through the front door. He held an envelope. The young man spoke to the owner, who took the envelope and turned to Fontaine. The young courier left, and the owner took the envelope to the bar where the coffee was made, placed it on a silver tray and carried the tray with considerable pomp to Fontaine. Fontaine took the envelope with a nod and received a smile in return. He slit the envelope open with his finger and read it. It was written in a hurried hand on plain letter-sized notepaper.
“Mon adjudant?” asked Babar.
“Looks like we have a guardian angel,” said Fontaine. “Staff Sergeant Dennison is at Camp Bravo. He is required on duty until 1 p.m. tomorrow.”
“Good,” said Gorecki. “Gives us time to prepare.”
“And sleep,” said Thorn. He stood. “Bonne nuit,” he said and he marched out of the room.
Manu followed his lead. Then Gorecki stood.
“Do you have all you require, mon Adjudant?”
“Oui, Gorecki. I do. Merci.”
Gorecki nodded an informal salute and left them.
Fontaine picked up his day pack. “Goodnight,” he said to Hutton, and he followed Gorecki out of the room.
Hutton watched him go. She wasn’t sure if she was reading the signs right. Did he want her to follow? Was he playing coy in front of his men? Things had ended suddenly between them that morning but they had ended well. But a lot of water had passed under the bridge since then. Now that the adrenaline had subsided she wasn’t even sure of her own feelings. Did she want to follow him? She stood and brushed the hijab across her shoulders. Walked past the giant of a man called Babar. Offered him a goodnight smile.
His hand shot out and grabbed her arm. The rest of him remained stationary. She looked down at him with a question written across her face. His eyes were serene.
“Not tonight, mademoiselle. Not tonight.”
She looked at him for a moment longer and then nodded softly. He let his hand drop and she continued out of the room. She walked up the stairs. The door to Fontaine’s apartment area was closed. She watched it for a moment, and then she turned and continued up the stairs to her room.
Fontaine sat on his bed without light. There was much work to do in the morning. And much to do tonight. The compartments must be opened, and the contents dealt with. He removed his boots and his socks and lay them out neatly on the floor. Then he opened the day pack and removed a paper bag. He unwrapped the bag and took from it a bottle of bourbon. There wasn’t much alcohol available in Iraq, but even in a predominantly Muslim country things could be found, items procured. It was a matter of choosing the right store, and the right store owner.
He propped himself against the wall and stuffed the pillow behind his back. Then he broke the seal and cracked open the cap. He poured a large slug into a chipped glass and set the bottle down. He looked at the glass but didn’t pick it up. He waited for the scent of the drink to fill the small room, like a perfumed candle.
Fontaine’s eyes closed as the smell of the bourbon reached him. Soft and harsh, like his father. The smell took him back, as it always did, to the apartment in Brussels. His father would leave before he and his brother woke and return after they had gone to bed. As a United States marine, routine was ingrained in his father: first hang up his coat, then his wife would hand him a short glass of Kentucky bourbon, and then he would kiss his sleeping boys while she put dinner on the table. Fontaine recalled the smell on his father’s breath after a long day at NATO headquarters, always half asleep so he barely stirred, but the scent lingered and enveloped his dreams and became as much part of him as his DNA.
Fontaine’s breathing slowed to the point that a doctor might have performed CPR. His thoughts moved from the apartment in Brussels to the resort in Abu Dhabi. The same scent on his father’s breath pushing out the last words they would share. Harsh, bitter words. Then the sound of the explosion and the colors of the fire. What followed was confusion, his family dead to a terrorist bombing, his government looking for someone to blame and laying its eye on him for reasons he couldn’t fathom. The help from his father’s commanding officer, fleeing the Middle East and disappearing in Europe, a young man full of commitment to service but without a nation to serve.
Then the day he met Bernard Laporte and he found a new home and a new name.
Jacques Fontaine.
Now it was time. He let visions of his family dissolve into another family, one that had taken him in on a cold night while hiking in the French Alps. It wasn’t his fault. He hadn’t started the fire that consumed their mountain chalet and took their lives. He had declined their offer of a bed for the lesser comfort but greater privacy of the barn. It was there he was lying, unconscious, an empty bottle of bourbon on the straw beside him as the flames took down the house and the people he could have saved. The flames lapped at his imagination and the faces of two families swept across his mind’s eye. That night in the barn would be the last time he touched alcohol and the last night he slept without the company of the flames that made him sweat as if he had malaria. He kept his eyes shut tight and let the visions come.
Then he felt himself fall into the present. He saw the women and children lying in an abandoned building in the Baghdad suburbs break from their compartments where he had tucked them away. He took a long, slow breath and let his mind open to whatever dark alleyways it chose to go down. To relive the sins so he could purge his mind as clean as it would ever get. So that tomorrow he could function at his best, or at all.
Chapter Eleven
Staff Sergeant Dennison was clearly a creature of habit. He liked crowded places like markets for his meets.
He spent the morning on base at Camp Bravo, part of Contingency Operating Base Basra, doing inventory on food and beverage stores. The southern operating base was winding down, like all the other major US military bases in Iraq. Dennison’s was an exercise in economics. He got reports and spreadsheets that he would take back to his superiors in Baghdad, detailing what stores were in place and what stores would be consumed and what stores would spoil and what stores needed to be ordered and shipped in to minimize waste. The system was computerized so his role was more a visual inspection, which he did, after which he roamed around the warehouse, killing time. Once his shift was done he took a vehicle from the motor pool.
Peter Thorn followed him out of Camp Bravo. Thorn had found a visitor’s pass waiting for him at the main gate that morning. He too wandered around the base. He restricted his wandering to a perimeter of the warehouse area where Dennison was w
orking. The base was organized chaos. There were boots marching all over the place. It had the feel of a scout troop breaking camp, just a thousand times bigger.
Thorn was sitting in a sand-colored SUV when Dennison left the motor pool. Dennison drove north until he hit the river, and then he followed the bank down toward the southeast. He cut back into the city and drove to the Al Jumhuriyah market. Thorn called in the location and the rest of the team descended on the area in two vehicles. Thorn parked farther down a dusty street from Dennison and followed him into the throng of the market on foot.
“Where is he?” asked Fontaine as they parked on a street near the market.
“He’s stopping at a coffee stand, north end of the market,” said Thorn.
“We’ll be there in thirty seconds.”
“Then I’m out.” Thorn turned from the corner where he was watching Dennison and walked away through the market stalls. Even under a watch cap his blond hair and pale complexion gave him a short shelf life as a tail in an Iraqi marketplace.
“Babar?”
“I’m there, mon Adjudant.” Babar marched to the north end of the market. There were stalls selling fruit and cloth and fake watches. He stopped by a fishmonger selling a wide variety of seafood. The stall holder was making change for a customer and pouring water on the fish to keep it fresh.
“I have visual,” said Babar.
The coffee stand was an open-air place with a counter and a small glass cabinet of pastries. Plastic tables and chairs were set up and mostly taken by heavyset men.
“What’s he doing?” asked Fontaine. Yusuf drove Fontaine and Hutton around the perimeter of the market toward where Babar stood.
“Taking tea.”
Dennison was sipping something from a china cup and slowly looking around. He might have been people watching the way people do in a crowded place like a market. He might have been looking for a tail.
Yusuf stopped a block away but Fontaine and Hutton stayed in the vehicle.
“A meet?” asked Hutton.
Fontaine shrugged.
Dennison took his time finishing his drink. He stood and paid at the counter and walked out into the street. There were cars and bikes everywhere. It was the opposite of the sleepy suburb where the abandoned house was. Babar followed Dennison from fifty meters back. Dennison didn’t stop or change direction or look for a tail. He walked to the corner and glanced down the cross street, and then the other way. Then he ambled across the busy road, cutting between trucks and cars, and headed back to his vehicle.
“He’s leaving,” said Babar.
“Thorn?” asked Fontaine into his radio.
“Yes, I have him.”
Thorn narrated the journey back. Dennison took the same route back. He didn’t stop, driving straight to Camp Bravo, where he returned the vehicle to the motor pool. Thorn watched him walk back to the portable cube that was his temporary barracks. Each cube housed up to four grunts or two officers. Dennison seemed to have one to himself. After two hours Dennison came out and walked to the mess hall, where he ate dinner, something that resembled potatoes according to Thorn, and then he took his time to wander back to his billet.
“Mon adjudant, I am at PU,” Thorn called in.
“Understood. Come in,” returned Fontaine, who was waiting in the Highlander a mile from the camp entrance. “Team, let’s go home.”
Hutton sat next to him, bored out of her mind. She wasn’t as good at the waiting game.
“We’re going back?” she asked.
Fontaine nodded.
“What if Dennison leaves the base?”
“He won’t.”
“How do you know?”
Fontaine looked to the west. “Sun’s going down. They won’t allow him out the gate after dark by himself. Security. And he doesn’t seem to have too many buddies down here. So it’s tomorrow.”
Yusuf pulled the vehicle away and Hutton watched the streets pass by. Kids were kicking a football, dust flying everywhere. The colors of the city were growing more vivid in the lee of the setting sun. She looked away from the scene.
“What’s PU?”
Fontaine turned to her, his face blank.
“PU?” she repeated.
“En position utilité,” he said. “Usefulness in position. He was afraid of getting made. There’s only so long someone who doesn’t belong can be somewhere without being noticed.”
“On a busy base?”
“That’s why he got a couple of hours. But someone would notice eventually. Worst case it’s the target. But regardless, it’s better to pull out and live another day than get made and never be able to go back.”
They arrived back at the hotel. There were people on the streets, unlike the previous night. An old bus dropped a group of men at a corner. There was a lot of hand shaking and farewells and the men all turned in separate directions, headed for homes nearby. Fontaine’s team wandered in and dropped into chairs in the lounge. The owner had coffee brewing before they made it through the door.
“How do you drink that stuff?” Hutton asked.
“It’s an acquired taste,” said Fontaine. “One I acquired a long time ago.”
“So, what do you think, mon Adjudant?” Gorecki asked.
“About Dennison?”
Gorecki nodded.
Hutton took out her hijab and removed her FBI cap. “I was wondering that. What was he doing today?”
“Gorecki?” Fontaine threw the question back to his man.
“Scoping out, mon Adjudant. Checking out the lay of the land.”
“Why?” Hutton asked. “You think it’s a new meeting place?”
“This isn’t his patch,” said Fontaine. “He’s not comfortable here. And he’s a creature of habit. He likes markets for meets. That’s for sure. He’s got a meet, and he was figuring out where to have it. Looking at the angles. Assessing the threats.”
“So we know where, but we don’t know when. And Thorn thinks he’s close to getting made on base. How do we follow him?”
“We don’t.”
Hutton frowned. “Explain.”
“The meet will be at the market.”
“But when? That’s the problem.”
“Tomorrow. 2 p.m.”
Hutton shook her head and looked around the group. They were all smiling.
“Okay, joke’s on me,” she said. “How do you know that?”
Fontaine shrugged. “I’ll tell you if I’m right.”
Like most of Fontaine’s team, General Thoreaux’s man, Bandy, couldn’t remain in the souk for long with rousing suspicion. He wore heavy Gallic features, and the film of dirt that had settled on his body served to camouflage him to an extent, but it was not enough. He knew this, so he kept his focus not on the market but on Fontaine. Wherever he went, wherever he fit in, Bandy could too. He watched Fontaine sitting in an SUV with the woman, and then he followed them to the outskirts of the American military base. They waited again. Bandy could not see what they were watching but he had a good idea what—or who—it was. After a couple hours they returned to the small hotel. It was a good location for them, and not for him. There were enough people around to notice a stranger, but not enough to blend into a crowd. It was largely residential. He parked his vehicle a block away and then took the small pack he had procured and climbed up a conduit on the rear of an apartment. The roof was open and exposed to the sky. Heat radiated from the raw concrete as he crossed to the opposite street. His position overlooked the hotel where Fontaine was staying. Bandy settled down low and took a blanket from his pack. For the next few hours the blanket would provide cover from the heat that was searing even in the late afternoon. Soon the sun would fall, and the temperature would become pleasant, and Bandy would sit and watch.
The truck hissed angrily as it came to a stop, perhaps, the driver thought, from exhaustion. It had been a long day. He had left his origin prior to dawn and took the first section out of the city a little slow as he acclimated to the controls a
nd loose handling of the truck. Driving such a vehicle was not something someone like him did. Not often. Not ever. Not anymore. His position dictated that other men drove for him. It would have been so on this journey too, but he had volunteered. It was an important assignment, one that he feared could not be trusted to some lowly soldier. There were also the political implications. He wore enough medals on his uniform to not desire any more. What he wanted now was far more valuable. He wanted their trust, and he wanted in. He was on the cusp of the inner sanctum of the regime, and undertaking such a task—one that most would not touch with their washed hands and clipped nails—was the final test.
The journey was long, over fourteen hours, but despite what the west thought the roads were good—four-lane freeway for most of the way. The truck labored through the mountains cutting from Lorestan province into Khuzestan. It felt like the top of the world, majestic peaks reaching as close to Allah as any man ought to get. He wound around herds of sheep and then down the other side, into fields of sugarcane and on toward the Gulf.
He jumped down from the cab of the American-made truck and brushed himself off and ran the sweat from the silver hair at his temples. He had two units of men with him—one a kilometer forward and another a kilometer behind, so as to not raise suspicion that his was anything more than a regular transport of goods. The men would form a loose perimeter around the truck while he washed and then went to the masjid. He had a room in a residence above where he had parked the truck. He knew people in Khorramshahr—that was part of the reason he had terminated his day’s journey there. The other reason was tactical. He wished to spend no more time than necessary in enemy territory. He would time his run just so. And he was only forty-five kilometers from his final destination.