by Ward Larsen
He exited into the alley behind the hotel. It was open on either end of the block, but instead of turning Slaton held a straight line to the service entrance of the opposing building. Having observed the place for days, he knew that back door was unlocked during business hours, and that it accessed a hallway where the establishment’s toilets were located. Seconds later he emerged into the hub of a busy café. Patrons gathered around bistro tables, taking espressos and croissants. The line at the counter was three deep. No one gave a second glance to the casual, athletic man carrying a suitcase who left unhurriedly through the front door, hailed a taxi, and disappeared into the rush on Boulevard Saint-Denis.
* * *
After spending most of the night crafting attacks against Jewish interests across Europe, an exhausted Baland reported for work the following morning to learn the status of the ongoing battles.
At the Élysée command center the mood had brightened. Only one new attack had been reported overnight, giving hope that the worst was behind them. Also to the positive, the mosque in Raqqa had been bombed hours ago, and the initial battle-damage assessment confirmed that the place had been flattened. There were no apparent survivors, and ISIS message traffic had fallen off precipitously. A few analysts went so far as to suggest that elements of the caliphate’s leadership could have been inside. Such claims were maddeningly difficult to verify, and the degree of the victory would take weeks to ascertain, but clearly Uday’s information had been accurate.
The buoyant mood in the command center faded just after nine o’clock that morning when a senior officer from Baland’s cyber unit delivered sobering news. From the trove of Uday’s personnel list, certain phone numbers had been given special scrutiny, and a day-old message was uncovered. Overnight, the encryption had been cracked, revealing a grave directive: A cell of four young men in Lille had been instructed to assemble a truck bomb, which they’d been preparing for months, and obliterate the city’s main synagogue.
The Élysée command center went into action, every element of France’s police and intelligence establishments focused as one. Within thirty minutes signals intelligence had pinpointed the receiving address, and an oversized assault team launched a raid on a small home in Roubaix. What they found was alarming: four unmade beds, signs of a hasty departure, and residue from a sizable stash of explosives. Worse yet, in a small attached garage they discovered a laboratory, precursor chemicals, and tracks where a heavy vehicle—a work truck, according to neighbors—had recently departed over a sodden driveway. The working estimate was that the crew were carrying enough explosives to level a city block.
With a fair understanding of the weapon, as well as the target, authorities placed Lille and the surrounding townships under virtual martial law. Incredibly, nothing was found. The cell of four men, along with a truck carrying over a hundred pounds of TATP, had simply disappeared. Orders were given for the net to be widened.
In a private thought, Baland suspected they were chasing the last of Chadeh’s attacks, and he would eventually be proved correct. In that moment, however, as he sat quietly in a chair at the back of the room, he silently cheered the cell on, hoping they succeeded spectacularly. With a strange new detachment he watched people around him, men and women he’d once considered his countrymen, as they worked frantically to avert the strike. He observed their procedures in the way a chemistry student might critique a peer’s laboratory demonstration—seeking faults in the process.
As it turned out, the joint team in the Élysée command center had it mostly right. They were looking for the right people and the right weapon—but in altogether the wrong place.
SIXTY-THREE
The essential reason the cell could not be found was that its commander, a transplanted Egyptian, was clinically psychotic. He had arrived in France as a student five years earlier, but dropped out of school and overstayed his visa. He’d quickly fallen in with a group of three other young men in Lille, each a societal orphan in his own right, and risen to become their de facto leader. A group of lost boys, they were precisely the kind of castaways targeted by jihadi recruiters. Once established in the fold of ISIS, however, they proved an unusually patient bunch, plotting their bombing for the best part of a year.
It was only recently that the leader’s mood swings had begun. On good days he was a man of thoughtfulness and some cunning who could steal a truckload of fertilizer from a farm without it being missed. On others he claimed to have lengthy conversations with God. Yesterday he’d been drifting toward the latter persona when the order had come through: They were to immediately cobble together their bomb and attack a synagogue in Lille.
The group had always known it might happen this way, a sudden call to action. It was the leader who balked first. He told the others that men in Raqqa should not dictate what target they struck or when. There was general agreement at first, but as they all watched the news it became clear that a broad wave of attacks was indeed being unleashed against France. French authorities had gone into a martial tizzy, and when it became clear that one strike had been interrupted by police, the cell in Lille realized that if they didn’t act quickly their chance might be lost. The three underlings deferred to their leader, and in a moment of divine inspiration, he gave them the good news. God had told him what they needed to do.
They worked throughout the night, taking advantage of the horrendous weather conditions, and by early the next morning everything was in place.
* * *
In keeping with his promise to minimize Israel’s involvement, Slaton had not used embassy computers to plan his assassination. He did, however, need internet access in order to begin his preparations.
He began at a midgrade hotel, where he made an inquiry about reserving a banquet room for a corporate event in the coming summer. Halfway through the sales pitch, he expressed a need to check dates on his calendar, but claimed to be stymied by a dead mobile phone. The corporate sales agent, a smiling middle-aged woman whose English was flawless, graciously granted him access to the hotel’s business center. Slaton asked for fifteen minutes, and she discreetly disappeared.
He worked quickly, and had no trouble learning that the change-of-command ceremony for the General Directorate for Internal Security was to be presided over by the minister of the interior, and would take place the next morning at nine o’clock sharp on the forecourt plaza of the Place des Invalides.
This last element surprised but did not disappoint Slaton. He would have expected such a shadowed organization as DGSI to change leadership behind closed doors. Indeed, more purist intelligence agencies, the likes of Mossad and MI6, had for generations gone to great lengths to conceal the identities of their senior officers. Slaton had expected DGSI to take something of a middle ground—a low-key gathering of families and friends, along with the upward-aspiring heads of agency divisions, all shrouded within a headquarters conference room. As it turned out, DGSI’s custom was for a modest outdoor affair, and the recent attacks seemed not to have changed anyone’s thinking. Baland himself was on record as saying, “The bastards won’t keep us from living our lives in the open.”
Which only made the assassin’s job that much easier.
The ceremony was to be staged in the shadows of Les Invalides, the grand collection of museums and monuments that was testament to the French fighting will. As a backdrop Baland would have Napoléon’s tomb, the enduring standard of the glory of France. Tomorrow’s event would be a modest affair, no brass band or troops in formation. An honor guard, perhaps, and a handful of dignitaries with nothing better on their calendars. Regrettably, the number of family and friends in attendance would be markedly lower than at the last handover, since the outgoing director’s camp would be preparing for his funeral. As put by one officer in a press release, “It will be a wedding with one side of the church empty.”
Even so, Slaton expected a solid security effort in light of the recent attacks.
He departed the hotel discreetly, avoiding furthe
r contact with the sales associate, and was lost in thought as he turned toward the river. When he had snatched Uday out of Syria two days ago, he’d had the benefit of state support. Drones, satellites, manpower, all the necessary equipment. This would be a very different kind of op.
In essence, Slaton was undertaking a political assassination. The embassy had provided a phone and a weapon that were clean, and a contact number for their backup assassin—a woman who lived as deeply in the black as Slaton ever had. Otherwise, he was very much on his own.
The plan crystallizing in his head was going to change that.
SIXTY-FOUR
The terrorist cell from Lille was exposed, rather surprisingly, not by the legions of police and military who were swarming across northern France, but by a marine mechanic who’d been called in to investigate—at double-time wages—a forty-six-foot Bertram cabin cruiser that had begun taking on water in the storm.
The boat lay moored in the municipal basin along the Chenal de Gravelines, just west of Dunkirk, and the alarm had been raised by the owner of a neighboring yacht who’d ventured to the piers at the height of the maelstrom to check on his own boat. The man wasn’t much of a sailor in his own right, so when he saw the problem he did what he always did—he called Viktor Foulon.
Foulon was at his kitchen table, settling down behind a bowl of hot cereal, when his mobile phone trilled. His first inclination was to ignore the call, but at a glance he saw who it was. He sighed and picked up.
“Monsieur Dumas, what can I do for you on this lovely day?”
“Viktor, you must come to the harbor at once!”
Viktor looked out the window. He saw pelting rain and a black sky. “Is there a problem with Cassandra?” he asked. Cassandra was Dumas’ old eighty-five-foot Feadship, which without Foulon’s regular attentions would no longer be afloat. He nearly made a living off the old barge, which had decayed to the point that it was more a floating cocktail patio than a seagoing vessel. Which was fine with Foulon, since Dumas had more money than sense.
“No, it is not my boat,” said Dumas. “The Bertram next to her is listing badly. I think she may go down.”
Foulon knew the boat, but had never met her owner. “Do you know whose boat it is?” he asked.
“I can’t recall his name, but he’s one of those financial managers from Paris—I had a martini with him once on Cassandra.”
A financial manager, thought Foulon. A possibility. A gust of wind caused his roof to creak. “All right,” he said despairingly, “I’ll come have a look.”
“Very well. If you need me I’ll be at the café on the quay.” Dumas rang off.
Café on the quay. Foulon cursed and let his breakfast go cold on the table.
Suspecting a faulty bilge pump, he retrieved his toolbox, then donned his heavy slicker for the walk to the harbor. The wind had been howling all night, and rain was still sheeting up and down the coast. If it had been anyone but Cassandra’s owner, his longtime financial anchor, Foulon would have told them to go to hell.
Arriving at the dockmaster’s office ten minutes later, he was more wet than dry, and the hair under his loose hood was tousled, like that of a child whose favorite aunt had rubbed his head. He explained to the man on duty, old Bernard, that there might be an emergency. Foulon was given a key to the vessel without question. Back out in the rain, he headed up Pier 3 to the deep-water slips at the end and found the boat in question. She was named Formidable, but at that moment she was hardly living up to it—standing by her transom, Foulon saw a list to port that must have exceeded ten degrees. He also noticed that her bilge pumps were working furiously, steady streams of water spewing from fittings above the waterline. Not good.
As he stepped onto her off-kilter deck, the next thing he noticed was that he didn’t need the key—the sliding door to the main salon was already wide open. Foulon came under shelter, and with the driving rain no longer pounding his oilskin, he pulled back his hood. As soon as he did, he registered what sounded like a hushed argument inside the cabin. The tone was sharp, but the language made no sense to him. He walked into the main salon to find three dark-skinned men who looked more surprised than he was.
Foulon blinked away the rain, and right away saw a number of peculiarities. On the settee nearby was a big suitcase, its flap hanging open, full of what looked like white clay. On the dining table he saw snarls of wiring and colored tape and batteries. The three men were all on their knees, and between them was what could only be described as a small crater. The floor of the boat had been breached, and a jagged meter-wide hole was edged in soot—undoubtedly the reason Formidable was sinking. Then Foulon saw the most disturbing sight: on the floor just beyond the hole, what was left of a fourth man, his body ripped to shreds in a pool of blood.
“Merde! What the devil is going on here?” Foulon demanded.
To anyone who did not know Foulon, what happened in the next twenty seconds might have seemed chaotic and unexpected. In fact, it was an outburst thirty years in the making. Viktor Foulon’s true talent had nothing to do with either bilge pumps or wrenches. Having spent eight years in the French Foreign Legion, he had killed more men than he cared to remember in the darkened jungles of Congo and Ivory Coast. After leaving the service, he’d earned a solid reputation as a brawler in the watering holes of Gravelines, and as any local policeman would attest, Foulon was a volatile handful when he was drunk. What most did not realize was that he was far more dangerous when sober.
It did not harm the ex-legionnaire’s prospects that he stood six feet five inches tall, or that his 260 pounds were cut from a template that might have patterned the marine diesels he worked on. The three men facing him were altogether different. In terms of size they were neither slight nor stalwart, simply the other ninety percent, and while Foulon couldn’t know it, none of them had any combat experience. Ironically, it was the only one with any kind of training—two months in a jihadist camp in southern Libya—who made the first mistake. The smallest of the three, he lunged toward a shelf.
Foulon’s eyes reached the shelf before the man’s hands, and he instantly recognized the dull-black machine pistol. As he realized that he too needed a weapon, and probably in a hurry, it occurred to Foulon that he was already holding one.
He swung his toolbox in a giant arc. It was a professional-grade item, red and rectangular, built of high-tensile steel. Inside were fifty pounds of hammers and wrenches and bolts. The box picked up speed through 180 degrees of rotation, and arrived, catastrophically, at the skull of the man fumbling with the safety on his machine pistol. Foulon immediately reversed the motion, stepped forward, and began waylaying everything in his path like a wrecking ball gone amok.
Shelves shattered and light fixtures exploded. Men screamed and blood splattered walls. A set of cabinet doors disintegrated, and the rack of radios inside was pulverized, sparks spraying outward like a miniature fireworks display. After seven or eight great swipes—Foulon wasn’t counting—he stopped and evaluated the situation. Panting like a winded bull, he saw one man on the floor with a crushed skull, certainly dead. Another was out cold, and the third lay moaning and incoherent—he had a very crooked arm, and had ended up sprawled across the already-dead fourth man. Gray smoke curled through the cabin in an acrid cloud of burning insulation.
Foulon dropped his dented toolbox and ran up the pier to the dockmaster’s office. “We need the police!” he shouted as he burst through the door.
A surprised Bernard actually chuckled. “You’re joking, right?” He pointed across the channel. On the opposite wharf Foulon saw six police cars and two military vehicles.
“What the hell is going on?” he asked.
Bernard’s eyes fell to Foulon’s heaving chest, and he said, “Maybe you should tell me.”
Foulon looked down and saw that his shirt was covered in blood—as far as he knew, not his own. He explained what had just happened.
With forty years on the docks, Bernard was not the excitable ty
pe, yet by the time Foulon finished his story the dockmaster’s face had gone ashen. “Were they Middle Eastern?” he asked.
It was Foulon’s turn to be taken aback. “How did you know that?”
“Because four thousand policemen have been scouring the north of France for them. Haven’t you seen the news?”
Foulon said he had not. He rarely watched television, and never in the morning. He vaguely remembered seeing something about terrorists on the muted television at the bar last night, but he hadn’t really paid attention. Bertrand filled him in.
As Foulon listened, he felt a bit of relief. He’d long been on a first-name basis with the harbor police, thanks to a string of minor indiscretions. Now he was sure he’d killed at least one man. But he hadn’t been drinking, and if the four men on Formidable had been up to no good, he might be all right. So Foulon got a favorable version of things straight in his head, and he told Bernard again to make the phone call. He waited nervously for the police to arrive.
He need not have worried. By that evening’s news cycle, Viktor Foulon, ex-legionnaire, marine mechanic, and saloon wrecker of some repute, would be recognized far and wide as a hero of the French Republic.
* * *
The news from the coast reached Élysée Palace within minutes of the police arriving on scene.
“We’ve found them!” announced the national police liaison. “The four men from Lille have been stopped in their tracks—they were trying to steal a pleasure boat in Gravelines.”
The president of France, a steaming espresso in front of him, had just found his way back to the command center. “Who caught them—national or local gendarmes?”
“Actually,” said the liaison, “it seems they encountered a local man. He’s a marine mechanic, and apparently an ex-legionnaire. He took matters into his own hands. Two of the four are dead, and one is unconscious.”