Children of War

by Martin Walker

  They were on their fifth game when Bruno rose to answer a discreet knock on the door. The Brigadier signalled him to come into the corridor, where Bruno saw Nancy Sutton standing to the side of the door. She had changed into a baggy sweatshirt and cargo pants. Her hair was loose and her face washed clean of make-up. It made her look younger and rather more vulnerable than the fashionably packaged woman who had stepped off the plane at Périgueux that morning. She gave Bruno a hesitant smile and they shook hands.

  ‘I’d like Mademoiselle Sutton to sit in,’ said the Brigadier. ‘Will you make the introductions?’

  ‘Please, call me Nancy,’ she said, and then went on, ‘That business with the bomb sketch was interesting.’ When she saw Bruno’s questioning look, she said, ‘We were watching the video feed.’

  ‘Maybe you should ask Deutz.’ Of course the rooms would have been wired. ‘He’s trying to establish a rapport with Sami. A new face might disturb that.’

  ‘I’ll take responsibility,’ said the Brigadier, and opened the door to steer Nancy inside. Bruno followed quickly and took Nancy’s arm to signal to Sami that they were friends. Deutz remained on the floor, looking irritated. He raised his eyebrows at Bruno, who shrugged, as if to say this was none of his doing. Bruno made the introductions, ending with Balzac, who approached her wagging his tail and then clambered onto her lap as she sat beside Sami on the floor. Balzac had always liked women.

  ‘This is the dog Isabelle gave you,’ said Nancy, as if to establish that she knew Bruno well. ‘He’s wonderful. How big will he grow?’

  ‘Thirty kilos or so.’

  Nancy’s eyes missed nothing: the radio on the small table, the game of checkers, the crayons and sketches.

  ‘I have some cards, too, different cards and all pictures,’ she said, pulling a plastic envelope from her shoulder bag. ‘Can we play, Sami? Tell me if you know any of these people.’

  The photos were a mixture of police mugshots, stills from surveillance cameras and snapshots taken on the street, paparazzi-style. She showed them to Sami one at a time.

  He shrugged at the first two, photos of bearded men with sunburned faces except for their foreheads, where their turbans had been removed for the police cameras.

  ‘Emir,’ he said, at the third photo, one of the world’s most famous faces, Osama bin Laden himself.

  ‘Did you meet him?’ she asked with a friendly smile.

  ‘Saw him,’ said Sami, his eyes darting to Nancy in the same watchful way. ‘Never spoke.’

  He took the remaining stack of photos from her and began sorting them into piles, speaking names as he laid some of the cards down. He tossed discarded cards carelessly to one side. ‘Don’t know,’ he said of them, shrugging. ‘Never seen him.’

  Once he had finished, he pointed to the smallest pile, of eight photos. ‘Friends,’ he said, and rattled through a list of names: ‘Ali, Mustaf’, Ibrahim, Yassu, Fati, Hamid, Dullah, Adja.’

  Bruno had never heard Sami speak so many words at once. Bruno wondered if he’d guessed that the American was a woman he needed to impress. Thinking of Fabiola, Bruno wondered if Sami simply responded better to women. Nobody was taking notes, but Bruno knew the microphones would pick up Sami’s words and the video cameras would allow them to match each of the names to faces.

  His second pile was larger, perhaps twenty photos. ‘I know them,’ he said, and pulled out four. ‘Bad men,’ he said of the first three, and repeated their names, this time using surnames: Bahdad, Yemani, Azaid. The fourth one was a face Bruno recognized, the shorter of the two men who had attacked him.

  ‘This one is Ali, in Toulouse mosque,’ Sami said of this fourth photo. ‘He hit me with electric stick.’

  From her chair Dillah gave a small sob. Bruno thought electric stick was not a bad way to describe the cattle prod.

  ‘In Peshawar, Yemani and Azaid beat me, tied me up,’ Sami went on, and then turned to the pile he’d called friends. ‘Ibrahim and Ali made him stop and gave me food when I fix things. Hamid played basketball and Adja gave me sweet figs. Adja from Chechnya, Fati from Bosnia, they showed me photos of their homes.’

  The room was utterly silent. Even Balzac seemed frozen in place. Bruno had never heard him speak so many words at once. For the first time he began to think that they might be able to access the gold mine of intelligence in Sami’s head. A glimmer of hope began to grow. If Sami was able to go on providing useful information, the Americans might settle for that rather than cause a political storm by demanding his extradition.

  ‘Very good, Sami,’ Nancy said, and beamed at him. Bruno thought her warmth seemed genuine, as though she was not simply professionally pleased at Sami’s revelations but also enjoyed his company.

  ‘That was a good game and you did very well. Maybe we can play that game some more.’ She patted the back of Sami’s hand, now resting on Balzac’s back. ‘Is Balzac your friend, too?’

  Sami looked startled by the question, and then to Bruno’s surprise delivered the clearest sentence he’d ever heard Sami speak. ‘Balzac is Bruno’s dog, and Bruno is my old friend from before.’

  Nancy nodded, and turned to Bruno. ‘Does Balzac run well?’

  ‘Well enough to come jogging with me.’

  ‘Can we jog with him this evening, maybe around the grounds here? They seem big enough.’ She turned to Sami. ‘Do you jog, Sami? Do you want to run with us before dinner? And maybe a dip in the swimming pool?’

  ‘I like the pool,’ said Sami, brightening.

  ‘Could be a good idea,’ said Deutz, grudgingly, looking at his watch, as if trying to resume control of the session. ‘We have an hour or so but I want to run some other basic tests this evening, a Bender-Gestalt for a basic neuro-psychological screen and at some point a Wechsler intelligence test for his cognitive skills.’

  ‘Are his linguistic skills up to it?’ Nancy asked.

  ‘I’ll just use coding, picture arrangement, pattern completion and see where that takes us. As for this idea of a run, he needs a break. Perhaps we’d better clear it with the Brigadier. I don’t know if the grounds are secure.’

  The Brigadier had no objection, so long as Sami was not obviously recognizable. With his shaven head and minus his beard, he looked nothing like the photo of him that had been left in the white van.

  Sami looked a little bemused but happy to join in when he realized that Balzac would be coming. Once Sami was kitted out in an army tracksuit, they gathered in the courtyard and Nancy led off. Deutz sprinted around Bruno to catch her. After a moment she slowed, dropping back to join Bruno, who was running alongside Sami and Balzac, leaving Deutz running alone ahead of the group. Bruno smiled to himself, thinking that the dynamics between her and Deutz would be interesting. She had taken over his session, changed the agenda, secured an important result and made Deutz accept it; a formidable woman, this American. Bruno could understand how she and Isabelle had become friends.

  15

  Karim’s voice on the phone sounded frantic and in the background he could hear Rashida shrieking something that sounded like her son’s name, Pierre.

  ‘They used a kid to lure me away and they’ve taken Pierre,’ Karim shouted. ‘Bruno, you’ve got to get down here.’

  ‘On my way, Karim, but who’s got him? Who is they?’

  ‘Those jihadists. Rashida told them about Le Pavillon. Just get here.’ He rang off.

  Still in his jogging gear, Bruno ran to his Land Rover, hardly noticing that Nancy was half a step behind him. He punched in the speed-dial for the Gendarmerie and told Sergeant Jules to get to the Café des Sports and inform Yveline that they had a kidnapping on their hands.

  ‘Wait,’ Nancy shouted as he unlocked the vehicle door. ‘You aren’t armed and you’ll need back-up.’

  Bruno stopped and looked at her, about to say his hunting rifle and shotgun were still in the locked cabinet in the back of the Land Rover. But she was right, they needed back-up.

  ‘Call the Brigadier and I’ll
get weapons and be back here as soon as I can,’ she said, and raced off.

  Bruno briefed the Brigadier, who calmly said he’d have one of his security teams meet Bruno at Karim’s café. The other team, Gaston and Robert, were still at Le Pavillon, packing up, and he’d warn them. He took Bruno’s directions to the café and added he’d call the hostage specialists in Paris and find where the nearest ones would be. Nancy was running back towards him, a heavy sports bag swinging from one arm. She climbed into the passenger seat and he accelerated away.

  ‘Two handguns and one of your assault weapons, three magazines,’ she said. ‘I told the guardhouse it was an emergency, Brigadier’s orders.’

  ‘Karim is Momu’s son, married to Rashida. They have a baby and a toddler called Pierre. He’s the one that’s been taken, he said by jihadists.’

  ‘Jesus, they’ll try to trade the kid for Sami. But they must know we won’t let that happen.’

  ‘Apparently Rashida told them about Le Pavillon, the place where we kept Sami and Momu before we moved here. The Brigadier is warning the security team that’s still there.’

  ‘How do you want to play this?’

  Bruno was thinking as he hurled the vehicle down the lane, honking before each bend.

  ‘We go to Karim’s first and find out what happened, how many they are, what vehicles and weapons they have, and then we take a back road to Le Pavillon and try to catch them between us and the security team. I know them, they’re good.’

  ‘Makes sense.’ Nancy was checking the handguns, taking out magazines and testing the springs. She pulled from the sports bag a FAMAS, the French army automatic rifle, pointed the muzzle at the floor and began to strip it. She evidently knew what she was doing.

  ‘Should you be doing this?’ he asked.

  ‘They’re my enemies, too. Besides, it’s an emergency.’

  Sergeant Jules’s personal car was parked askew in front of the café. That meant the Gendarmerie van was out on patrol somewhere. He and Karim came to the door as Bruno honked his horn and pulled in, noting that the café’s plate-glass window was broken. As he turned off the engine Bruno heard Rashida having hysterics in a back room.

  ‘The big café window was broken by a couple of kids,’ Karim announced. ‘I ran after them and caught one and we’ve got him here but the other boy, a black kid, ran away. They’re strangers, not from here, both beurs.’ Karim used the slang term for North Africans.

  ‘When I was catching him, two guys came in with guns, submachine guns not pistols, grabbed Pierre from Rashida’s arms and demanded to know where Sami was.’

  ‘Was she hurt?’ Bruno asked.

  ‘She was pushed to the ground and they put a gun to her head when they asked about Sami. One of the customers, Valéry, tried to stop them but they hit him with a gun butt. I think they broke his jaw. We’ve called the doctor. They took Pierre and ran back to their car, a black Toyota four-by-four. They had a driver waiting.’

  Valéry was one of Karim’s teammates on the town’s rugby squad, an aggressive wing forward, just the type to take on armed men, thought Bruno.

  ‘What direction did they take when they left?’

  ‘South, toward Le Buisson.’

  ‘You saw just the two guns?’

  ‘Yes, short ones, all metal with curved magazines.’ Karim glanced curiously at Nancy, still in her tracksuit, handgun at her side, watching the road while Bruno asked his questions.

  ‘Did they speak French or Arabic?’

  ‘Both. One of them used French to tell the customers to sit still after he belted Valéry, but he had an accent. The one who knocked Rashida down and grabbed Pierre called her bad names in Arabic and then he asked about Sami.’

  ‘They were in black leather jackets and jeans, little woollen skullcaps,’ chimed in Gervaise, one of the customers who worked at the farmers’ co-op just up the road. ‘The driver of their Toyota had a map open on the steering wheel in front of him. I got the number plate and here’s one of the little bastards.’

  Sergeant Jules was holding a brown-skinned boy of twelve or so firmly by one arm. The boy was just short of puberty, wearing dirty jeans and sweatshirt and a faded denim jacket that was several sizes too big for him. On his feet were a pair of new and expensive trainers and on his face an expression that was both surly and defiant.

  ‘He hasn’t said a word,’ Karim said. ‘The other kid was about the same age, a bit bigger and ran a lot faster.’

  At the sight of Bruno the boy curled his lip. Bruno ignored him, shook Karim’s hand and asked after Rashida.

  ‘You can hear her, she’s in a bad way. Monique is with her. She was buying lottery tickets when it all happened.’

  Bruno eyed the boy. ‘What’s your name?’ he asked.

  ‘Va te faire foutre, flic.’

  Despite the situation, Bruno almost laughed at the strangeness of the obscenity coming from such young and apparently innocent lips. Sergeant Jules shook the boy a little, evidently re-straining himself.

  ‘I know all the Arab families round here and this kid’s a stranger,’ said Karim. ‘There was nothing in his pockets except for a few ten-euro notes and this phone.’ He pointed to it on the counter. It looked cheap, like a disposable, and was wrapped in a plastic bag.

  ‘I saw it in his pocket so I borrowed Rashida’s washing-up gloves to take it from him. I thought about fingerprints.’

  ‘Good for you,’ said Bruno, slipping on a pair of evidence gloves and then opening the phone’s list of recent calls. There was only one incoming call listed, from a mobile that began with 06. They might be able to trace that. The address book contained only a single number and it began with 0534, which meant Toulouse. Merde, thought Bruno; this was starting to get complicated.

  The big blue Gendarmerie van pulled up on the forecourt and Yveline, in civilian clothes, stepped down and stood looking at the broken windows before going to the rear of the van and opening the door. Bruno went out to join her and saw, inside the van, Françoise on the bench clutching a second youngster firmly to her side. She was determined not to let him go but knew the rules on the treatment of minors too well to put handcuffs on him. They would probably have slipped off his young wrists, thought Bruno. There was a strong smell of petrol. This boy was black, wore spectacles and also had new trainers.

  ‘Caught him at Momu’s house, trying to make a lighter work,’ said Yveline. ‘There was a plastic can of petrol against the back door. If he’d got it alight, he’d have been the first victim.’

  ‘Good work,’ said Bruno. ‘How did you find him?’

  ‘Just a hunch,’ she said. ‘I thought if they’d gone for Karim they might also be going to Momu, so I went along the riverbank to the back door while Françoise drove up to the front. The kid was crying because he couldn’t make it light.’

  ‘Get any names from the boy?’ Bruno asked.

  ‘He says he won’t say a word until he sees a lawyer, must be a hardened criminal,’ she replied, her tone mocking. ‘I called the social department but it will be an hour or so before they get here from Bergerac. We have to wait inside. Can’t take the little dears to the Gendarmerie.’

  ‘Don’t let the two kids talk to each other,’ said Bruno, and used his mobile phone to photograph each boy. ‘One should stay inside, the other in the van. Was yours carrying anything in his pocket?’

  ‘Forty euros, a Toulouse bus pass and those glasses are prescription,’ Françoise replied. ‘There’s an ID number on them so we’ll be able to trace him through the optician.’

  ‘Attempted arson is serious stuff, even for a minor,’ Bruno said, loud enough for the boy to hear him. He opened his phone and called the Brigadier to pass on the news. As he put the phone away, he saw a military jeep draw up with an army driver and two men in camouflage uniforms. One carried a sniper’s rifle and the other a Heckler & Koch assault weapon. This would be the Brigadier’s security team. He went across to shake hands and brief them.

  ‘You know ab
out the kid, Pierre, not yet two, can barely walk?’ he asked.

  ‘The Brigadier briefed us and said you’d tell us the rest,’ said the sniper. ‘I’m Marcel and this is Raymond. The driver is Jacquot. I’ll need to talk to Gaston and Robert. Who’s the woman?’

  Bruno explained and then left Yveline in charge at the café as he and Nancy climbed back into the Land Rover. He took the side street past the rugby stadium to get onto the road to Audrix and take the back way to St Chamassy. He handed Nancy his phone and asked her to call the Brigadier. The line was busy so Bruno left a message about the black Toyota and its licence plate. Then he asked Nancy to look up Gaston on the address book.

  ‘This is like Isabelle’s phone,’ she said. ‘One of the special ones.’ She handed it back to him when she heard it start to ring at the other end.

  ‘It’s Bruno,’ he said. ‘Have you heard from the Brigadier?’

  ‘Yes, and we’re ready,’ Gaston replied. ‘I’m in the pigeon tower on lookout, Robert is in the courtyard. No sign of them yet.’

  ‘They don’t know the area, they’ll be looking. They’re in a black Toyota four-by-four.’

  ‘They may have another car.’

  ‘I know. I’m coming in from the north-east in my Land Rover, from a village called Audrix. I’ve got a good rifle and a partner with a FAMAS and two of your friends, Raymond and Marcel. They’re in a jeep. From the direction the Toyota took, you should expect the bad guys to arrive from the west, through the village of St Chamassy.’

  ‘Got it. I’ll call if we see them and you call me when you’re in position.’

  As Bruno turned off through Audrix, the Brigadier called him back. A white Peugeot 206 had been seen leaving the Toulouse mosque that morning with two boys in the back seat. The driver was identified as one of the mosque’s security team and an alert had been placed on the car’s number plate. Bruno scribbled down the registration.

  ‘The driver must be getting worried about the boys,’ Bruno told him. ‘Probably he’ll have chosen somewhere central to pick them up. There can’t be many places in town. I have photos of the two kids, you might be able to identify them from the surveillance cameras at the mosque. We’ll email them now.’