by Ward Larsen
Baland answered in French.
“What the hell is going on?” Slaton replied.
A pause. “Where is—”
“Tell me what’s going on!”
“I sent a car to bring you to headquarters with Uday and Sarah. We have to discuss—”
“Why isn’t Uday being protected?” Slaton broke in. “He’s a valuable asset, and the men you put on him are not DGSI. They’re amateurs.”
Another pause. The call suddenly ended. Slaton stood staring at the phone. Seconds later a flourish of motion caught his eye. Outside, movement near the car.
The driver had gotten out. He looked agitated and alert as he stood at the street-side door. With two open palms he gave a “stay right there” gesture to Uday and Sarah in the backseat. Slaton expected the man to come running inside to help his partner. Instead, he rounded the rear of the limo and set off down the street on a dead run.
In a terrible rush, Slaton suddenly understood. “No … no!”
He sprinted toward the entrance, but far too late. He’d barely cleared the hotel’s front doors when the bomb went off.
FIFTY-FIVE
Slaton was hurled to the ground by the blast, glass raining down all around him. The sound was deafening, and he lay stunned for a time. He blinked his eyes open and struggled to his knees, trying to get his bearings in a cloud of smoke and dust.
He should have heard screams and car alarms, but for a time there was only the crash of a relentless cymbal, a pounding in his head. He willed himself to his feet, encouraged that he succeeded, and did a quick personal inventory. Shards of glass and debris carpeted the marble around him, but he could find only a few minor scratches. One sleeve on his jacket was torn, but he saw no blood beneath.
The smell hit him next, a chemical, sulfuric tang, along with the first hints of burning flesh. He turned his attention outward and saw vortices of dust curling through the air, obscuring the world beyond and muting the surviving streetlights. The rain was still coming, already cleansing, and as the smoke and dust dissipated, Slaton noticed what was directly in front of him: a full-scale carving of a sitting lion, its stone head on the ground at his feet. By pure chance, the sculpture had absorbed the blast in his direction, a tiny cone of protection in the sphere of destructive energy.
Far less fortunate were Uday and Sarah.
Only moments ago he’d seen them in the limo. The car was barely recognizable, a twisted heap of metal. A massive crater marked ground zero, and bits of burning debris were strewn across the boulevard. Slaton saw bodies on the distant sidewalk, some writhing, others ominously still. Dozens of passing cars had been stilled in the street. He saw a policeman giving aid to a survivor as he talked on his mobile. Sirens were rising in the distance. The emergency response here, so close to the signature landmarks of Paris, would be quick and overwhelming.
Slaton walked unsteadily toward the street, his legs barely compliant. He stepped over leg-thick tree branches that were smoldering like spent matchsticks. Two blocks away he realized the guard’s phone was still in his hand. He crossed the street easily—traffic had seized, no movement in either direction—and sent the phone spinning into the back of an open-bed truck that was filled with construction refuse.
Slaton turned up the opposite sidewalk. One by one his senses came back online, and he gradually picked up his pace. The sirens behind him seemed to fuse into a single wail. As if Paris itself was crying for help.
* * *
The first of Chadeh’s attacks occurred, by sheer chance, only minutes after the bombing at The Peninsula. Two young men walked into a kosher grocery store in Reuilly, removed handguns from beneath their long raincoats, and began firing indiscriminately. A clerk and a manager were the first killed, and six customers perished in the aisles. A quick-thinking stock clerk, a young girl of Moroccan extraction who was in fact a Muslim, ushered the three remaining customers out the back door. Seeing the place empty, the terrorists inadvisably emptied their magazines, taking out windows and a wine display before venturing outside. Whatever luck they enjoyed to that point ended abruptly when they encountered the wrong off-duty policeman, an officer from a special weapons and tactics team who was a champion marksman, and who happened to be carrying his service weapon. Four bullets, all in one direction, ended the affair.
Before news of the crime even reached a police dispatcher, the second attack commenced in Toulon. Three young men rushed a newspaper office, only to be stymied by a heavy lock on the front door. Two carried semiautomatic weapons, and the third wore a suicide vest under his bulky jacket. A frantic debate ensued about whether the bomb might breach the steel door, and as the three shouted among themselves, fate intervened once again. This time it was in favor of ISIS.
A small bus carrying a group of Jewish students from a nearby college, there to take a tour of the newspaper’s offices, parked directly outside the entrance. The driver of the bus saw what was happening, but all too late, and one of the terrorists shot him in the head. The bomber ran onto the bus, and with a scream of “Allahu akbar!” he pressed the switch that snuffed out thirteen young lives. The only mercy for France was that his collaborators were among them.
* * *
Baland held a news conference within the hour in the media room of DGSI headquarters. He confirmed that seven people were dead in the bombing at The Peninsula, including both occupants of the car carrying the explosives. Twelve bystanders had been injured. He assured frazzled Parisians, as verified by new first-responder protocol, that no radioactive material had been involved. He also addressed attacks in Reuilly and Toulon, before pivoting to his most delicate briefing point.
In an announcement that had been preapproved by his superior, the minister of the interior, he warned that reliable intelligence suggested further attacks might be imminent. In a confident tone, Baland promised his countrymen that security agencies across northern Europe were working tirelessly to interdict any planned strikes, and that no one in his section would rest until every plot had been stopped.
In the final segment of his briefing, Baland acknowledged that the Islamic State was almost certainly responsible for the day’s mayhem. He also let slip that the woman being sought for the murder of Director Claude Michelis, whose ties to ISIS had been proved, was being studied as a suspect in the bombing at The Peninsula. This last comment took much of France’s leadership by surprise, not the least of whom was a flummoxed minister of the interior, and would generate considerable debate that evening in official halls around Paris. In that moment, however, fixed steadfastly under the strobes of so many cameras, the director-select was certainty itself, and few doubted him in light of his past prescience on matters of terrorism.
Baland preempted any questions by leaving the podium abruptly, but he did lob one afterthought within range of the microphone bouquet.
“Expect no changes to the ceremony the day after tomorrow. I will take command of this department from the Place des Invalides at nine o’clock Saturday morning. The cowards can do nothing to stop that.” His jaw resolute and his stride determined, Zavier Baland left the media room with the air of a man on a mission.
* * *
Slaton approached his room carefully.
With heightened senses, he looked up and down the hall, seeking the slightest deviation. He pulled the H&K before moving inside, and cleared the small room in seconds. His bed had been made and clean towels were racked in the bathroom. The only addition he noted was a mint on his pillow. With nothing obviously amiss, he went to his suitcase. He’d left it on the dresser, the two halves shelled open to put all his possessions on display—a veritable invitation.
He pulled his phone from his pocket and turned it on. It vibrated to announce a message, but he ignored that momentarily to call up a photo of the suitcase he’d taken earlier. In the image he compared three specific markers to what was before him now: a bent collar on one shirt, the orientation of his toothbrush, and a half-buried sock that lined up perfectly with
the top left side of the case. Had anyone gone through his things, no matter how carefully, they could never have reconfigured all three in precisely the same manner. The suitcase looked exactly like the picture.
Slaton set his gun on the dresser.
Has caution got the better of me? he wondered. The answer was fast in coming. Certainly not. The acting director of DGSI had just tried to lure him into an explosive-laden car. Then there was Malika, who’d brought him to Paris with but one aim. Caution was paramount.
His ears had stopped ringing from the blast, and his only injury of note was a minor laceration on the back of one hand. He went to the bathroom mirror. His hair was wet and disheveled, and his shirt had a tattered sleeve and blood on one cuff. Slaton began unbuttoning his shirt, and he was reaching for the shower handle when he remembered the message. He pulled it up and saw that it was from Bloch: CALL IMMEDIATELY.
The connection went right through, and when Bloch answered, Slaton said, “I’m okay.”
A pause, then, “Why wouldn’t you be?”
“You haven’t heard about the bombing?”
“Bombing? I’ve been traveling—what’s happened?”
Slaton gave Bloch the bad news.
“Dear God … Uday and Sarah, you’re sure they were in the car?”
“Positive. I was supposed to be with them, but when it became clear that wasn’t going to happen, someone settled for two out of three.”
“Baland.”
Slaton was momentarily put off. “Yes … but I would have expected you to say Malika.”
“Something has come up on our end—I’ll explain later. How do you know it was Baland?”
“He arranged the meeting, and I was talking to him right before the blast. He hung up on me when he realized I wasn’t going to get in the car. Seconds later, the driver ran away and the bomb went off. It was a complete setup.”
“Apparently so. But a man in his position will have no trouble blaming others.” Bloch almost said something else, but his voice seemed to cut out. Slaton thought he heard Talia whispering in the background. Bloch said, “Apparently there is more. A second attack has occurred in Paris, and another in Toulon.”
Slaton blew out a long, steady breath. “Okay, so where do we go from here?”
“Israel’s Paris embassy. As I said, we have new information. It is imperative that we talk in a secure place.”
Slaton pulled the phone slightly away from his ear. “You’re here? In Paris?”
“I told you, I’ve been traveling. Talia is with me. What I have to tell you will reinforce what Baland has just done. Thirty minutes?”
Slaton hesitated as he tried to make sense of things. It was hopeless. “All right. Thirty minutes.”
“And be very careful, David. You are now a marked man.”
Slaton ended the call with Bloch’s final words pounding in his head.
He was still in front of the mirror. The smell of the blast clung to his clothing, a tainted blend of smoke and death. He turned on the tap and leaned into the basin, scrubbing his hands and pulling water onto his face. After toweling down and changing into fresh clothes, he wedged the H&K back into his rear waistband, covered by the loose tail of his shirt. The steel frame felt hard on the small of his back—cold, bulky, and undeniably reassuring. He surveyed the room: a suitcase full of clothing, a few toiletries in the bathroom, an empty roller bag in the closet. The Arctic Warfare Covert remained hidden in the frame of the folding bed, along with the Glock.
Bloch was right. One moment of madness at The Peninsula had changed everything. That hail of glass and steel served as a private declaration of war. Baland had tried to kill him. Slaton didn’t understand why, but he would find out soon. He considered whether Baland would order the police of France to hunt him down, as he’d already done with Malika. Given the day’s chaos, it would be simple to drum up a justification for his arrest.
Still, Slaton saw problems with an all-out manhunt. Unlike Malika, who was tied to ISIS, Slaton had Israel in his corner. Reluctant as they might be, Bloch and Nurin would not stand in silence if he were declared an enemy of France. He reasoned that Baland would try to kill him—but he would do so under the radar. All while trying to stamp down a new string of ISIS attacks.
He began to view things more positively: in the coming days DGSI would be monumentally distracted, battling ISIS on its home ground. That gave Slaton a narrow window in which to operate.
He looked all around and made decisions.
Does Baland know about this room? Probably not. But he would uncover it soon enough. Slaton gave it a day, no more than two.
Should I take everything or leave it in place? He looked around, saw nothing that couldn’t be replaced, and decided to leave it all where it was. When Slaton locked the door behind him seconds later, he had no way of knowing how vital that decision would be.
FIFTY-SIX
Baland met the recently elected president of France for the second time at 11:34 that evening. The leader of the republic looked weary as he wandered the room shaking hands and gathering the latest information. France was under siege, and while there had been an executive briefing an hour ago, the president evidently felt a need to visit the command center—a show of support for the troops, if thirty technicians and senior officers could be referred to as such.
When he reached Baland, the balding and thickly built president said in his famous baritone, “I have great confidence in you and your department, Zavier.”
“Thank you, sir. We will not rest until France is secure.”
Baland felt a supportive hand on his shoulder, and could not deny a brief jolt of exhilaration. How far I have come, he thought. The hand pulled away, and after a few words to the woman next in line, the president excused himself, Baland was sure, to retire to his private suite in the adjacent wing of the Élysée Palace.
The room regained its momentum, everyone going back to keyboards and phone calls. A third attack had only recently been interdicted: A suspicious young man seen loitering outside a Jewish community center in Montparnasse had been confronted by a pair of policemen. He’d tried to run, but was quickly caught, and within the hour an unarmed suitcase bomb was uncovered in a nearby apartment, along with two other suspects. All in all, a noteworthy victory for good police work.
Baland was increasingly struck by the dichotomy of his position. His mission for the last fifteen years had been to stop this very kind of thing, and he’d taken to it wholeheartedly. He’d earned the trust of coworkers and had a family to protect. But now? Now he had personally given the enemy a target list that was playing out before his eyes. If this had to happen, he thought, at least it is happening to the Jews. They will never be my countrymen.
But how many more attacks would there be? He began doodling on a scratchpad the names of possible targets from the report he’d given Malika. He came up with almost thirty that had not yet been struck, but certainly there were more. He’d already seen a preliminary download of the personnel list brought out by Uday, and those numbers were staggering: over three hundred individuals and small cells across France, and half again as many in nearby Belgium. He supposed there was some mathematical model to calculate the permutations. The more critical estimate, however, was far more simple. How long until it is all brought back to me?
He’d been lucky so far. The exclusivity of Jewish targets had not been an absolute, thanks to the bombing at The Peninsula that he himself had coordinated. Baland had intended that most of his problems would be resolved in one cataclysmic moment. The men he’d hired for the job were no more than thugs, and he’d expected they would perish in the blast. Both had unfortunately survived, and one was already in custody—unconscious, but expected to recover. One more loose end in his fast-fraying existence. All thanks to one man.
Slaton …
Baland’s errant thoughts were interrupted when an Air Force colonel stepped to the front of the room. He began a briefing on a mission under way from a forward ai
r base in Turkey, and Baland listened with great interest. He was suppressing an urge to ask the colonel for targeting details when Charlotte LeFevre, who would soon head up his technology division, rushed into the room and made a beeline for him.
“Sir, I have news on another case.”
“Not now,” said Baland, as he decided to engage the colonel privately after the briefing. “What we are doing here takes absolute priority.”
“But this is very unusual,” LeFevre said.
Baland felt her insistence as she stood by his shoulder. “Does it relate to this woman who tried to kill me? Or one of the recent attacks?”
“Actually, both.”
He finally gave LeFevre his undivided attention.
She handed over a report titled “Lab Analysis,” along with a case number. “What is this?” he asked, waving the paper at her.
“The lab report on the woman who killed Director Michelis. We recovered DNA material from the apartment she was using as a safe house.”
Baland looked at the bottom of the page. “This says there was no match to any of our databases.”
“Which was true when the report was drafted.”
He looked at the date. “That was only yesterday.”
LeFevre produced a second lab analysis. “This is a report on the remains of the bomber from Grenoble. It also had no match in our database.”
Baland’s impatience got the better of him, and he barked, “Tell me what you’re trying to say!”
“These two samples have an unusually high degree of commonality. We think it very likely they are brother and sister.”