Go hunting. He didn’t want to be trapped in this room with only the window for an escape route.
He eased open the study door and poked his head out. To his left was a long hallway of dark tumbled stone tile. Beyond the hallway, he could see what looked like a living room decorated in robin’s-egg-blue-and-white shabby chic. To his right, through an open arch, a winding stairway led to the second floor.
Jack heard what sounded like a burst from a dental drill followed by a soft double snick. He recognized the noise: an electric lock-pick tool known as a snap gun. Whoever was coming, they weren’t wasting any time.
Jack raised the HK and crept down the hallway to the living room, where he paused to listen. He heard another sound, this one a door clicking shut. Somewhere to his right. He looked around the corner. Through an archway was the villa’s kitchen.
As Jack watched, the back door swung open an inch, then went still.
Jack took aim.
The door moved again, just a few more inches, then clicked shut again.
Wind, Jack thought. Probably. Jack kept his gun trained on the door but let his eyes glide to either side of it, watching for movement. If the intruder had come through this door, what options did he have? Take cover behind the kitchen counter, or slip into the nook, or come through the living room arch toward Jack. Or . . . To the right of the back door was another set of stairs leading to the second floor.
As if on cue, Jack heard a floorboard creak above his head. If the intruder was familiar with the villa he might be crossing the second floor to the stairway behind Jack. Jack pivoted slowly on his heel, aimed the HK down the hall and waited for a five count, then pivoted back toward the living room.
From the second floor came a soft crash, as though someone had bumped a piece of furniture.
Move now.
With the HK raised and tracking, Jack paced through the arch and into the kitchen. A quick glance left told him the nook was clear. He circled behind the kitchen counter, saw no one hiding there, and continued toward the stairway door.
As he approached it, a semiautomatic pistol poked through the opening, almost crossing Jack’s own weapon. Startled, he stepped back. His heel rapped against the baseboard. A figure rushed through the door, gun coming around to bear on Jack. The man’s stance was straight-armed and overextended. Jack took advantage of this, batting aside the man’s gun, stepping in close, and snapping the point of his elbow into the man’s head. The man grunted but went along with the blow, using its momentum to coil his body for a counterpunch. Jack lifted his knee, slowing the strike, but not enough. The man’s fist landed just below Jack’s bottom rib. He gasped and bent sideways and felt his left leg buckle.
Strong and fast son of a bitch.
Jack drove his still-raised knee downward. His boot heel slammed into the tile, clipping the inner edge of the man’s foot. The man yelped in pain. Jack repeated the maneuver, this time raking his boot’s knurled edge down the length of the man’s shin before stomping the man’s foot a second time. Now the man collapsed sideways. Jack helped him, palming the side of his head and banging it against the doorjamb. The man dropped his gun. Jack kicked it, sending it twirling across the tile floor, then took a rapid step back and leveled the HK with the man’s head.
“Are you done?” Jack asked, panting.
The man tried to get up, pressing himself off the floor with his left hand. Jack stepped forward and kicked it out from under him. He collapsed and his head banged against the tile.
“I said, Are . . . you . . . done?” Jack said.
“J’ai fini,” the man replied. And then he added in lightly accented English, “I am done.”
Jack clicked on his penlight. “Let me see your face.”
“Why?”
“Show me your face,” Jack growled.
Slowly the man lifted his head.
It was René Allemand.
WÄDENSWIL, SWITZERLAND
We’ve been looking for you,” Jack said.
“Many people have been looking for me,” Allemand replied. He sat upright and began massaging his shin and foot. “Can you stop shining that light in my eyes?”
Jack lowered the beam slightly. He keyed his radio and said, “What’s happening out there? Do we have any more company?”
Effrem replied, “No. What’s happening in there?”
“Everything’s fine. Stand by.”
Allemand asked Jack, “Who are you? Who are you talking to?”
Jack paused to consider his answers. While he tended to agree with Effrem that René Allemand was a victim in all this, there was a chance they were both wrong. “I can tell you who I’m not,” he replied. “I’m not one of Jürgen Rostock’s people.”
This got Allemand’s attention. He looked up at Jack with narrowed eyes. “What does that mean?”
“It means you’re not the only one who’s pissed off Herr General. Do you know a man named Eric Schrader? Very tall, German . . .”
“Perhaps.”
“You met with him in Lyon.”
Allemand didn’t reply. Jack decided to go all in. “After you two parted company he flew to the United States and tried to slit my throat.”
Allemand offered a Gallic shrug. “Well. It appears he didn’t succeed.”
“No, but it was close. He’s dead now.”
“You killed him?”
“Not exactly, but the result was the same. Captain Allemand, in case you hadn’t noticed, you’re still alive, and you’re not zip-tied in the trunk of a car. If I was with RSG we wouldn’t be talking.”
“What you say makes some sense, but it doesn’t explain why you’re here and why you’ve been looking for me.”
Jack was getting annoyed with their uneven information exchange. Then he reminded himself what René Allemand had been through. In fact, something told Jack he and Effrem probably knew only a fraction of the story.
“I know about Abidjan,” Jack said. “At least part of it. I don’t think you had anything to do with the attacks in Lyon. And I’d bet money there was a lot more to your kidnapping than anyone knows.”
Allemand smiled. “And now this is the part where I unburden myself and we become fast friends, yes?”
“That’s your call. As soon as I get done cloning the hard drive on the computer in that study—the one I believe belongs to Alexander Bossard—I’m leaving. You can either come with me and look at the data or go to ground again and pray you find a way to clear your name and get your life back. You decide.”
—
Jack was reasonably confident he’d gained a sliver of trust from Allemand, but not so confident he would risk turning his back on the man. After collecting Allemand’s weapon, a Walther P22, Jack returned to the study to find Mitch’s flash drive had nearly finished its task. Jack sat down before the computer and watched the progress bar inch closer to one hundred percent.
Allemand appeared in the study’s doorway. “Can I have my gun back?”
“I’ll leave it beside the wall by the front gate,” Jack replied. “Or you can join us for coffee and I’ll give it back to you then.”
“‘Us’? It’s not just you?”
“No. We come as a package deal, though. If you’re going to trust me, you’ll have to trust him.”
“I do not think we’re quite at trust yet, do you?”
Jack offered Allemand what he hoped was his best “couldn’t care less” shrug. They desperately needed Allemand’s cooperation, but Jack’s gut told him playing hard-to-get was the smart move. “There’s an all-night coffeehouse in Wädenswil, right off the Zugerstrasse and across from the police station. We’ll be there for the next hour.”
Jack removed the flash drive, powered down the computer, and stood up. “And you might want to retrace your steps before you leave.”
“Pardon?”
“You’re not wearing gloves. If you don’t want your fingerprints found here, I’d wipe down everything you touched.”
—
Jack and Effrem hadn’t gotten through their first cups of coffee when they saw, through their booth’s window, Allemand’s van pull into the parking lot. The electrician’s placard was gone. Jack said to Effrem, “Good call about that, by the way.”
Effrem smiled. “I’m a learner.”
Allemand walked inside and the hostess approached him. He gestured toward Jack and Effrem, then walked over. He grabbed a chair from a nearby table, plopped it down at the end of their booth, and sat.
To Jack he said, “This is your partner?”
“Yes.”
“Do I get my gun back now?”
Jack nodded at the folded newspaper on the table. “In there. It’s not loaded. Leave it that way until you’re back in the van.”
Allemand made no move to touch the newspaper. “You know my name, but I don’t know yours.”
Jack made the introductions, first names only. Allemand shook their hands and said, “René. Jack, you said Eric Schrader is dead. Is that true?”
“Google it. Alexandria, Virginia. Unidentified man walks into oncoming traffic and is killed instantly.”
“That’s unfortunate. I was hoping to catch up to him. We were overdue for a chat.”
Allemand smiled when he said this, but there was none of it in his eyes. Jack suspected that if Schrader hadn’t died in Alexandria, he wouldn’t have survived his run-in with Allemand. Jack assumed their “chat” would have involved power tools and electricity. If so, Jack wondered, had Allemand already had that kind of brutality in him, or had his experiences since Ivory Coast taken him to that dark place?
The waitress appeared and asked if Allemand wanted anything. He waved her off. Once she was out of earshot he said, “So, how do we proceed, the three of us?”
Jack and Effrem had discussed this. They’d decided to lay everything out for René and hope they were bringing something valuable to the table.
Jack said, “Effrem tells you his story, then I tell you mine.”
“And if I do not want to share my own?”
Jack answered with a little steel in his voice: “Then that’s on you. Get in your van and leave, but stay out of our way. Effrem, tell him.”
Effrem took Allemand through his story, starting with Fabrice the café owner in Abidjan, then his tailing Eric Schrader after Allemand’s meeting with Madeline in the Parc de la Feyssine, then finally his encounter with Jack and Stephan Möller at the nature preserve.
“That was you in the Parc de la Feyssine?” asked Allemand. “I thought I might have picked up a tail, but after I left it was gone. Madeline brought you to our meeting? Truly?”
“She’s worried about you. She’s trying to help.”
Allemand frowned; it was almost a snarl. “I shouldn’t have called her. Sentimentality is weakness. So. You followed Schrader to Virginia, then found this Möller person . . .”
Jack asked, “You’ve never heard the name?” When Allemand shook his head, Jack showed him a screen capture from the West Haven gas station’s surveillance camera. “He’s since lost his beard.”
“Doesn’t look familiar. You think he’s with Rostock?”
“We have no evidence of a connection—to Möller or Schrader. Do you?”
“Nothing that would suffice in court.”
This statement surprised Jack. Was Allemand merely using a colloquialism, or did he really believe this situation could be resolved on the white side of the law?
“Please go on,” Allemand said. “After the nature preserve . . .”
Jack continued the story, but first backtracked to the attack at the Supermercado before recounting their hunt for Möller, his escape at the Vermont airstrip, their foray into Munich, then their meeting at the villa.
Effrem asked Allemand, “You were tailing us this morning. How did you know we’d be here tonight?”
“Like you, I had to leave Munich in a hurry. The only other trail I could follow was the same one that brought you here: Alexander Bossard and Schrader. I’ve been here for a week. I set up real-time game cameras in the trees across from the villa, hoping either Bossard or someone else would show up. He’s impossible to get to at his office or his apartment in the city. I saw you pass by the villa a few times, got curious, and drove down here. I picked you up on your way back to Zurich. Jack, why would Jürgen Rostock want you dead?”
“I was hoping you could tell me.”
“I can’t.”
“Effrem has a theory about you,” Jack said. “He thinks you were false-flagged. That’s when a—”
“I know what it is. What makes you think that, Effrem?”
“It’s what you said to Madeline—‘He isn’t who he claims to be.’”
Allemand shook his head, scratched furiously at his arm, then replied, “I don’t recall saying that.”
“Not good enough,” Jack replied. He shoved the newspaper toward Allemand. “Time for you to go.”
“Pardon me?”
“We’ve been straight with you. If you’re not going to reciprocate, we’ve got no use for you. In fact, from what I can tell, you’re more of a liability than an asset.” Jack intended this last comment to sting, and the change in Allemand’s eyes told him it’d worked. “We’ll be better off without you.”
Allemand said nothing for several seconds. “It’s difficult, you must realize. I don’t have a home, Madeline is the only person from my former life that knows I’m alive, and a good portion of my fellow Frenchmen think I died either a deserter or a traitor and therefore got what I deserved. Jürgen Rostock is a powerful man. I’ve been walking on a razor’s edge since Abidjan. I feel like I’m sometimes in a dream, other times not. And now, to find out my Madeline confided in a . . . reporter. Is it hard to see why trust is hard for me?”
“I get it, I do,” Jack replied. “But here’s what I know, René: Whatever your connection is to Rostock, it’s a miracle you’re still alive. I don’t think you’ll last out here on your own much longer. You’ve got to trust somebody sometime. Whether that’s us, only you can decide.”
Allemand, who’d been staring at his hands, clasping and unclasping them while Jack was talking, now looked up. He held Jack’s gaze for a long five seconds; Allemand’s eyes were twitching slightly. He said, “What do you want to know?”
WÄDENSWIL, SWITZERLAND
Let’s go back to the start,” Jack replied. “What happened in Abidjan?”
“The night they took me I was going to meet a girl, a Red Cross worker from Strasbourg. We met when her orientation group came to get some basic first-aid training before going into the field.”
“What’s her name?” Effrem asked.
“Uh . . .” Allemand thought for moment. “Janine Pelletier. No, Périer, that’s it.
“Do you have a picture of her?” Jack asked.
“Perhaps in my OneDrive account . . .” René got out his phone, tapped a few keys, then handed it to Jack.
He studied the photo and returned the phone to René. “Go on,” he said.
“Not long after I got there, a van pulled up. Five men in balaclavas poured out, swarmed me, put a hood over my head, and shoved me into the van. It happened so fast . . .” Allemand shook his head. “I barely put up a struggle, I was so shocked. After that, it was all something of a blur. We drove for hours, I don’t know in which direction, but it was almost dawn when the van stopped. I was put in a basement, I think, in a small brick room with no windows.”
Effrem asked, “Did anyone speak to you, ask you anything?”
“No, and that made it all the worse. No one said a word, not from the time I was taken to the day I got free. Once a day, every day, someone would come into the room wearing the same balaclava, give me
food and water and change my waste bucket, then leave. A couple times a day two or three of them would come in, beat me and kick me until I passed out. Every few days another one would come in, put a gun to my head and pull the trigger, but the gun was always empty. Several times they had me stand on a chair with my head in a noose, and they would simply watch me. For hours. There were other . . . things, too, but I can’t . . .” Allemand’s words trailed off.
“How did you get free?”
“I was rescued. One night, very late, I heard two explosions. I recognized them as flash-bangs—you know, stun grenades—and then there was a lot of automatic weapons fire. About ten minutes after it started, the door to my cell opened and a pair of men in camouflage came in. They told me they’d come to rescue me. They took me somewhere by vehicle, maybe Abidjan, but I can’t be sure. It was a private home, some kind of compound. Waiting for me were a doctor and a nurse. I had broken bones, torn ligaments and muscles, contusions on my liver and spleen. Even with the medication, the pain was indescribable. A few days later Jürgen Rostock showed up. It was his men who rescued me, he told me.
“From there we moved around a lot. Rostock told me my life was in danger, that people were hunting for me, that it had something to do with my father and the Army Defense Staff. I never quite understood it. I was fuzzy, you know, from the drugs, but eventually, after about six weeks, Rostock said they’d eliminated the threat.”
“Which was what?” asked Effrem.
Allemand shook his head. “I’m not sure. I’m sorry, it’s, uh . . .”
“That’s okay,” Jack said.
Was René a junkie? he wondered, René’s demeanor suggested a narcotic addiction, perhaps to oxycodone. His injuries certainly warranted such a prescription.
Pieces began falling into place for Jack: What kind of group, terrorist or otherwise, kidnaps a soldier—a soldier from a famous family, no less—but claims no credit for it and asks for no ransom? His captors had tortured him, but had neither asked him questions nor tried to coerce him into some trumped-up, inflammatory confession.
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