Assassin's Code

by Ward Larsen

  Baland stood staring at him, waiting for a reaction.

  Slaton said, “I saw you for the first time yesterday. I followed you when you walked to work in the morning. By bringing me to Paris she was putting you at risk.”

  “Very much so, which speaks to how committed she is to her vengeance.”

  Slaton watched warily as the Frenchman reached into his pocket. He produced a photograph. “Malika gave me this yesterday afternoon.”

  Slaton recognized the scene instantly—he was sitting on the bench in Courbevoie. Waiting for Baland. The photo was distant, taken from a high elevation. He remembered surveying the buildings across the street, but doing so with an offensive mind-set. Apparently he hadn’t looked closely enough. “I think I’ve seriously underestimated this woman.”

  “You would not be the first.”

  “She came to Le Quinze to kill me.”

  “Certainly.”

  “She failed in that, but managed to eliminate Michelis. That clears the way for your advancement.”

  “She is a clever girl.”

  Or maybe you’re a clever man, Slaton thought. He was struck by the idea that Baland was the winner in everything that had happened. Yet tactically he couldn’t find a way to hold him responsible for the outcome—Baland had shot and wounded Malika before she’d killed Michelis. If they’d been colluding, that didn’t make sense.

  They started walking the path again.

  “So where do we go from here?” Slaton asked. “You’ll soon become director, but you’ve been compromised. Do you expect me to sit silently and let that happen?”

  “Is this a matter of conscience? Or perhaps a nudge from old friends in Tel Aviv?”

  “Believe me when I say that Tel Aviv wants very much to stay out of this.”

  “From what I have heard about Director Nurin … I doubt that. Still, there might be a way forward for us all. I’m quite sure Malika has not told anyone in Raqqa of my kinship to Ali Samir.” Baland let that sit, allowing Slaton to consider it.

  “You regret your aim wasn’t better today,” Slaton suggested.

  “She is my niece by blood alone—I had never set eyes on her until last year. If Malika were out of the picture, a great many of my problems would be solved. It’s how I should have handled things when she first started blackmailing me.”

  “That’s very frank.”

  “Perhaps. But then, if anyone on earth would understand, I’d think it would be you.”

  “Even with Malika removed, aren’t there individuals in the caliphate who could call you out? There’s a flow of information that could be linked to you.”

  “I’m not so sure. A leak could be proven, yes—but France’s counterterrorism establishment is a vast machine. There are many possible sources, and a man in my position could do a great deal to ensure that attribution remains clouded.”

  “You’ve given this some thought.”

  Baland’s voice went to a shrill whisper. “I have awakened every night for a year trying to find a way out of this! It’s as though I’ve fallen into quicksand. The more I struggle, the deeper I get.”

  “So,” Slaton said, “if you knew where Malika was right now, at this very moment … what would you do?”

  Baland eyed him critically. “I would assemble a raid, of course. I’m sure Malika would resist—it is her nature. She might not be a religious woman, but she is a martyr to her sins. She would never be taken alive.”

  Slaton said nothing. He looked out over the Seine in its timeless drift, ripples and eddies marking movement beneath the surface.

  “You know where she is,” Baland deduced.

  “Am I that bad a poker player?”

  “Rather the opposite. You have a special brand of composure. You never lost your nerve in the shooting today—and I noticed that you disappeared immediately afterward. I think you might have caught up with Malika and tracked her from Le Quinze. Followed her to whatever safe house she is using.”

  Slaton gave a thoughtful nod.

  “Is anyone watching her now?”

  “Yes.”

  “Mossad?”

  Slaton let silence be his answer.

  “Then I’ll assume Mossad also knows about my twisted family tree.”

  The sidewalk ended—the underpass in front of them was under construction, and a detour arrow pointed up a set of stairs toward the street. They stood facing one another, and Baland said, “I want Malika, but neither you nor Director Nurin has any reason to tell me where she is.”

  “No, not really.”

  “Then let me give you one.”

  For the next ten minutes Slaton listened. At the end, he admitted Baland was right. He had presented Slaton a very good reason for the two of them to work together. An opportunity like none that had ever existed.

  THIRTY-SIX

  Slaton parted ways with Baland, and as soon as he was alone he sent a text to Talia: He needed an immediate conference call with both Bloch and Mossad director Nurin. Halfway back to his room Slaton got his wish, and he diverted to a riverside overlook to pick up the call.

  “Hello, David,” Nurin said. It was a voice Slaton had not heard in over a year.

  “Director. Is Anton on as well?”

  “Yes,” Bloch replied in his distinctive voice.

  Everyone went through an authentication process for security communications before Nurin said, “We’ve had discussions about how to handle this situation in Monceau.”

  “I’m sure you have. Has anything changed there?”

  “No, our katsas are still outside. We’ve added some manpower to the surveillance op, three more individuals rotating in. By all accounts, the place remains quiet. I would guess either the woman is sleeping, or her injuries have gotten the better of her.”

  Slaton didn’t comment on that, but said, “I’m guessing you’ve decided to hand this matter over to the French?”

  “Yes. As much as we prefer to take ownership of such opportunities, in this case our only option is to step away.”

  “Have you made contact with anyone yet?”

  “I just finished briefing our foreign minister. He is trying to contact his French counterpart as we speak. As you know, Mossad prefers to stay in the background whenever—”

  “Stop it!” Slaton ordered.

  “What?”

  “Get on another phone; break this connection if you need to. Do not let that call take place until you’ve heard what I have to say.”

  “David—” Anton began, only to be cut off.

  “If you let that call go through you will miss the greatest intelligence coup since the Stuxnet virus ruined Iran’s centrifuges! I am going to hang up now. Do not let that information advance through those channels. Call me back when it’s done.”

  Slaton heard one syllable of Nurin’s protest before he ended the call.

  * * *

  Uday rushed inside and found Sarah at the stove. She looked up when the door closed and smiled. An expression that vaporized when he said, “We are leaving!”

  He went to her and put his hands on her shoulders—not a romantic embrace, but more as if shoring her up.

  “What’s happened?” she asked.

  “I’ll explain later. For now you must trust me—we have to get out of Raqqa!”

  “All right,” she replied in a tenuous tone. “Where are we going?”

  “Destinations are unimportant at the moment. The only place we cannot be is here.”

  Sarah didn’t seem surprised. They had talked circles around the idea for days, neither saying it in so many words, but both confiding the hopelessness of their situation. They’d discussed at length his insider’s knowledge of the caliphate, and also that his position within it had proved a frightfully tenuous post. Sarah’s own fears were far more basic: At any time Chadeh’s men could come and take her away as easily as they’d brought her here. To where and what neither of them wanted to imagine.

  Now, in a moment, it had all burst from the
realm of cautious musings to reality.

  “What should I bring?” she asked.

  He took a step back and looked at her. “Change to your old abaya. Bring nothing else.”

  “How will we travel?”

  “My brother, Faisal—his truck still runs and he has enough petrol to take us south.”

  “South? That is a difficult passage.”

  “Which is why no one will expect it. I know where the checkpoints are—I updated the map for our military commanders only yesterday. If we move quickly, we can be halfway to Damascus before anyone realizes that I…” Uday’s words caught there, like a dragging anchor finding a rock.

  Sarah looked at him expectantly, waiting for the rest. “What have you done, Aziz?”

  Doubts washed over him in a great wave, a fear more palpable than any he had felt through years of war. He looked at Sarah and understood why—the risks he was incurring were not his alone. He stood frozen, suddenly overwhelmed.

  Sarah saved him. “Yes, Aziz, let’s do it! Let’s go right now!”

  * * *

  Anisa was running performance scans on the computers in the old mosque. For that reason she was the first to see the attack on their servers. One by one their internal networks were going down. When she finally regained administrative access to one system, she found file after file corrupted. Even their most recent inputs, Uday’s newly created personnel database, had become no more than a stew of electronic rubbish.

  At first she suspected the Americans, but then Anisa reconsidered, thinking the hacktivists might be at it again. She got on her mobile phone, which was getting a signal through Aleppo, and navigated to a few of their current Facebook and Twitter recruiting accounts. Every feed had been frozen. Whoever had hit them had hit them hard, comprehensively shut down their networks. This gave rise to a new idea. A handful of social media accounts were managed by individuals in her group using smartphones, and a few others by sympathizers across the Middle East and Europe. Looking at a sample of these accounts, she saw normal activity. Which meant the problem was local—only Raqqa had fallen into cyber darkness. She began digging through code, and within minutes found what looked like malicious commands. Anisa was dumbstruck. An internal problem?

  She then remembered her last conversation with Uday.

  He’d been acting strangely for some time, and never had he berated her as he had today. She remembered how he’d hesitated to schedule a meeting with Chadeh and the council. They were a frightening bunch, to be sure, but for Anisa the anarchy under her fingertips was even more so. Something told her that Uday might be late for that meeting. Very late indeed.

  And if she was right?

  Woman or not, the old buzzards were going to let her inside. If things were as she suspected, they needed to know exactly how much trouble they were in.

  * * *

  Slaton was still waiting for Director Nurin to call back. How long had it been? Ten minutes? Fifteen? His eyes were active as he navigated the busy sidewalks of a commercial district, and his neck was getting sore by the time he reached Courbevoie. He knew the precise whereabouts of the only person in Paris known to be gunning for him, but that very fact—that he had been targeted—did wonders to enhance his alertness.

  His hotel was within sight when Nurin called back. “Whatever you have, David, I hope it is very good.”

  “I take it you were successful?”

  “Yes, the foreign minister is waiting for me to call him back.”

  “Well done.” Slaton began with Baland’s admission that his niece had been blackmailing him, and that he’d been surrendering information to ISIS. Slaton ended with, “He wants to eliminate Malika before she’s captured.”

  “That seems risky.”

  “From his point of view, less of a risk than allowing her to be interrogated. Baland is in a good position to manage any fallout.”

  Bloch asked, “You’re saying this girl, Malika, is not directly under ISIS’ control?”

  “Baland doesn’t think so. He’s also convinced that no one in Syria knows about his connection to Ali Samir—and consequently, that Malika is his niece.”

  “You told Baland you followed her to this safe house?”

  “No. He figured that out on his own—but I didn’t deny it.”

  Nurin said, “I am still not seeing any great intelligence value here, David. Why do I have the Israeli foreign minister sitting on his hands?”

  “If you go through diplomatic channels, there’s no telling which police unit will be ordered to haul Malika in. Baland wants to lead the raid himself.”

  “And it will end badly for her.”

  “Almost certainly. But in exchange for her location, he has something to offer. His contact with the Islamic State has always been through Malika, but she recently gave him a backup, a burner phone in case she was compromised as a handler. After the altercation today that seemed to be the case, and Baland got a call a few hours ago. On the Syrian end was a man named Aziz Uday.”

  A pause, and Nurin said, “I recall that name—he is in their technology and media division?”

  “He recently became the number one—Aziz Uday heads the Islamic State Institution for Public Information.”

  “And you’re saying Uday established contact because they were worried Malika was out of the picture?”

  “No, that’s the interesting part. He wasn’t calling on behalf of the Islamic State at all. He wants out.”

  “Out?” Bloch and Nurin said in near unison.

  “He wants to defect, along with a woman. Uday needs help escaping Syria, and he’s offered information in exchange.”

  “What kind of information?” Nurin prompted.

  Slaton could not suppress a grin—he envisioned Nurin leaning forward in his chair with a handset clamped to his ear. “I thought you’d be interested. Apparently Uday undertook a project recently to create a new database—a detailed personnel file on every known member of the Islamic State, both at home and abroad. Before he escaped Raqqa, Uday burned his bridges. He destroyed ISIS’ only register of that database … but not before making one copy for himself.”

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  The search of Raqqa was undertaken with frantic urgency. Doors slammed inward all across town as armed detachments raided apartments and buildings. Nearby farmhouses were next in line, and even fighters had their quarters turned over. In the end, Anisa was proved right. Aziz Uday was nowhere to be found, nor was Sarah, the idolatrous Christian slave he’d been issued.

  Anisa sat silently on a case of Turkish motor oil. Chadeh had told her to remain present while the search ran its course, and she watched with increasing apprehension as a look of thunder overtook his already-dark features. One by one, reports filtered in of failure in every quadrant. Chadeh paced the floor of their newest government venue, an automotive garage that had been requisitioned for the night. Tools were scattered about the place, and sawdust carpeted the floor. The air reeked of grease and gasoline. There were three others in attendance—two senior military officers, and a grossly overweight council member who glared at Anisa intensely, weighing, she supposed, either a spontaneous stoning or a roll in the hay. Not sure which would be more unbearable, she simply ignored his stare and said nothing.

  Chadeh finally stopped pacing, and asked, “Can we retrieve the personnel information?”

  It took a few moments for Anisa to realize he was addressing her, then another beat to get past the implication. By default, she now headed the Islamic State Institution for Public Information. Of course, the promotion would last only until a man could be found, probably one of the technicians she’d trained. Still, she decided to make the best of it.

  “I don’t know if it is recoverable. It will take days, possibly even weeks, to get things up and running. From what I’ve seen, this is a malicious attack intended to wipe out data. If it was thorough, the information may never be recovered.” Chadeh glowered at her, and she immediately added, “Of course, we could do it all
over again … create a new database that can be made more secure.” Anisa knew, but did not say, that doing so would be a nightmare. The source listings from which they’d compiled the database had been physically destroyed—a matter of security, according to Uday.

  Chadeh’s iron gaze was unrelenting. “Might Uday have stolen this information?”

  She’d already had the same troubling thought. “It is possible … yes.”

  “Which means our enemies might soon have the identity of every member of our army, both inside the caliphate and abroad.”

  Anisa did not deny it.

  “If he did take it,” Chadeh asked, “what form would it be in?”

  She considered her answer carefully. “It would be possible to transmit it—but I don’t think he would have taken that course.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because if Uday is truly defecting, I think he would keep the data in hand in order to bargain for his safety. Certain intelligence agencies would go to great lengths to help him escape with such information. If it were me, I would carry it on a storage device, probably a flash drive.” She immediately regretted the reflexive phrasing of this last thought, but Chadeh was too incensed to notice.

  The next ten minutes were the longest of Anisa’s life. The caliphate’s leaders were worried, and justifiably so. Worst of all, her unit was responsible for the debacle. By the time she left the building, she was hoping they actually would choose a man to take her place, and the sooner the better.

  In the meantime, however, she was given two clear assignments to carry out.

  Her second priority: Find out how much damage had been done.

  Her first: Locate the traitorous Aziz Uday.

  * * *

  Nurin had interrupted their second call, and Slaton waited for him to call back. He reached his hotel, but not wanting to continue the conversation inside, he took a turn around the block, ending on a quiet residential street. He saw a playground Davy would have enjoyed immensely, and in the wash of a streetlight a pair of old women engaged in a good-natured quarrel. He’d originally thought the decision of whether to get involved in Aziz Uday’s defection would be Nurin’s to make. Now he realized it was going one rung higher.