Chapter 58
This was the one chance they had of ever catching up again with Nazim al-Kassar, and Ben wasn’t about to let it slip between his fingers. He blew through the country lanes at 130 kilometres an hour and jammed it to over 160 as he hit the network of broader, smoother D-roads in pursuit of the target. Roth’s phone hung cradled in the holder on the dashboard and the little red inverted teardrop was still moving steadily southwards ahead of them, moving at a decent pace.
Ben went faster. As they skirted back past Le Havre he wondered if Julien Segal was still with Margot at the guest house, but Segal didn’t remain in his thoughts for long. They hit the D579 and signs flashed by for Lisieux and Le Breuil en Auge. Then onto the D406, speeding towards Hauteville. Thankfully little traffic was travelling on the minor roads that day. What there was, the Alpina slammed past as though it was accelerating backwards. Ben was holding steady at 220 kilometres an hour whenever and wherever he could, burning wild amounts of fuel and triggering speed traps all over the place. All it took was one police car to flag them and take up the chase, and then there’d be a whole world of trouble because Ben would have no intention of slowing down for anyone or anything, short of an anti-tank barrage. But that was a risk he had to take.
Shooting a glance sideways at Roth in the passenger seat he noticed that the American had strapped himself in tight and was gripping the door handle, the muscles in his jaw tight as piano strings. It gave Ben a certain fiendish satisfaction to know that Roth was crapping his pants and doing all he could to hide it. Ben rocketed towards the tail of a lumbering goods truck that filled the lane up ahead and waited until the last millisecond before he swerved around it towards the oncoming traffic, then blasted through the narrow gap with the needle at the 170 mark and hammered it back up past 200 on the straight. Just to scare Roth a bit more. It was either that, or punch him in the head.
The Alpina’s throaty engine drone filled the cabin and would have made it hard to have a conversation, even if Ben hadn’t been so intent on driving that he had nothing to say. But his mind was crowded with one troubling concern after another. It was bothering him that he couldn’t figure out where Nazim was going. There was a plan at work here. If only he knew what it was.
Almost forty-five minutes had passed since leaving Vaucottes. Towns and villages, farms and forests and signposts flashed past in a mad blur. They were cutting due south straight through the heart of Normandy. Getting closer to the point where they’d pick up the motorway just beyond Gacé, and catching up fast with the target. Too fast, Ben thought. The little red teardrop was still moving in the same direction as before, but it seemed to have slowed right down. Then, speaking for the first time in a while, Roth said, ‘They’ve stopped moving.’
Sure enough, a few kilometres before the motorway, Ben spotted the little red Citroën C1 with a chromed fish on the back, parked up in a layby at the side of the road. He braked hard and pulled into the layby in front of them.
The Citroën’s bonnet was up, and there was smoke rising from under it. A pair of young guys were standing looking inside the engine bay, one of them scratching his head and the other with his arms folded in obvious disgust. Another two were sitting inside the car, smoking cigarettes and looking glum, frustrated and angry. All four were hefty country boys like Axel Roux, in jeans and denim and check shirts.
Ben and Roth got out of the Alpina and walked towards them. The two country boys in the car got out too, and stood defensively with their fists bunched. The two standing by the open bonnet turned around and scowled at the approaching strangers. It looked like the preliminaries to a bar fight, but Ben understood that it was just a bunch of angry, grief-stricken and deeply frustrated young blokes posturing as a way of working off their emotions. He said, ‘Which one of you is Jean-Luc?’
‘That’d be me,’ replied the one with folded arms.
‘That’s what I thought,’ Ben said. Jean-Luc was the eldest and the biggest of the bunch, and he had the most aggressive scowl. Behind all the angry expressions Ben could make out some facial resemblances among the three surviving brothers. Which made the fourth fellow Noah, the cousin who’d managed to escape unscathed.
Jean-Luc asked, ‘Are you the guy who phoned?’
Ben took out Axel’s phone and tossed it to Jean-Luc. ‘You can give it to him when you visit him in jail.’
Jean-Luc frowned at the smears of dried blood on the casing. ‘How’s he doing?’
‘He’ll survive. But he might not have, if he hadn’t been persuaded to turn himself in.’
‘Then I suppose I should thank you. What’s your name?’
‘You can call me Ben,’ Ben said. ‘No thanks are necessary.’
‘And who’s this guy?’
Ben jerked a thumb at Roth. ‘Him? He’s just a hitch-hiker I picked up.’ He nodded towards the smoking engine bay of the Citroën. The little red car wasn’t going anywhere. ‘Looks like you were right about the bullet in the radiator.’
‘Yeah. Fuck this piece of crap.’ Jean-Luc spat angrily at the car and lashed out a savage kick, smashing a headlamp.
‘Easy,’ Ben told him. ‘This car just saved your lives. Because if you caught up with Nazim, you wouldn’t last a minute.’
‘We can handle ourselves,’ said one of the brothers, pointing inside the car. A shotgun and a scoped hunting rifle were propped against the back seat, fairly incongruous in a jaunty little urban runaround. The breakdown recovery crew were going to love it when they got here.
‘Everybody thinks that until they find themselves eating a bullet,’ Ben replied. ‘Which way did they go?’
A lorry sped past with a slap of wind that made the little car rock on its springs. Jean-Luc pointed sullenly in the direction it was heading. The rumble of the motorway could be heard in the distance.
Ben asked, ‘Any idea where they’re going?’
One of the other brothers said, ‘How the hell should we know?’
‘Wherever it is, they’ve got a hell of a head start on you,’ Jean-Luc said.
Ben thought, He’s beating us. He’s going to get away. He raked his mind for ideas. Nothing much was coming to him. He asked, ‘What kind of trucks do you have?’
‘Did we have,’ said Cousin Noah.
Jean-Luc said sourly, ‘Mine’s the black Toyota Hilux. Jacked up and tuned to the max with a full performance upgrade kit. You’ll have a hard time catching it. Even in that thing.’ Pointing at the Alpina. One of his brothers said, ‘Mine’s the silver Nissan Navara.’
Ben was in the realm of guesswork now, and it wasn’t a place he liked being. He turned to Roth and asked in English, ‘Any more magic tricks up your sleeve?’ But Roth was acting evasive and Ben was in no mood to waste time.
He carried a detailed map of Normandy in the glove compartment. Fetching it from the car he spread it out over the bonnet. The metallic blue paintwork was filmed with dust and the metal was hot to the touch. He leaned over the map and studied the familiar road layout in the hope that something would come to him. He quickly found Vaucottes, an almost unnoticeable dot on the northern coastline. From there, his eye traced two descending, diverging routes. The one he’d first expected Nazim to take, and the one they were following instead. The former tracing a line south-eastwards towards Paris, the latter breaking further and further away the more it edged towards the west. The two lines formed a lopsided inverted V with the starting point at the top, Paris on the end of the bottom right fork, and Nazim’s unknown destination somewhere on the bottom left. That was assuming that Nazim kept to his current course and hit the A28 motorway heading further south. If he continued on that path he’d eventually reach Le Mans, the home of Ben’s reclusive billionaire acquaintance Auguste Kaprisky.
Ben couldn’t understand why Nazim would want to travel so far south. Maybe he didn’t. Maybe his destination lay closer. Just a few kilometres after the road merged with the motorway lay the northern edge of the Normandie-Maine Regional Natural Park, a hug
e area of protected forest, pastureland and Alpine meadows covering over half a million acres. It was a haven for trail walkers, climbers, canoeists and nature lovers. Perhaps it could offer sanctuary to escaping terrorists carrying enough deadly pharmaceuticals to eliminate the entire population of the country. Ben pictured Nazim in a canoe, paddling through some scenic river valley, cackling with glee as he emptied gallons of fentanyl into the water. The image was ludicrous.
Ben sighed and stared at the map, trying to put himself in Nazim’s shoes, to get into his mind. Which was relatively easy to do, in some ways. He and his enemy had much in common. Like him, the Iraqi was a dedicated and uncompromising warrior who wouldn’t turn away from his objective once his intention was set. A man for whom failure was not an option. When challenged by the failure of one strategic plan, he would do what any clever tactician does: adapt, improvise, overcome that challenge by whatever means possible and form an alternative strategy that the enemy hadn’t anticipated. And when presented with a golden opportunity to strike a punishing blow against the opposition, he would use it with great intelligence and ruthless efficiency.
Yet in so many other ways Ben could no more get into Nazim’s mindset than he could relate to an extraterrestrial being. Nazim was a terrorist. Probably the most natural-born terrorist Ben had ever known. His whole raison d’être was to cause havoc against innocent people. He had been responsible for a great many deaths in his lifetime, but never until now had he had the means to wreak such mass destruction on the hated West. As his options diminished, the pressure mounted and time turned against him, all his energy would be focused on coming up with the quickest and most effective new method of carrying out genocidal murder.
And now Ben had to go against his own nature and try to think like that himself.
What would he do, in Nazim’s place? Possessed of the means to rub out the lives of millions of ordinary, unsuspecting civilians, what would be the most rapid and direct way to launch his strike? You wouldn’t waste time and energy depending on middlemen to distribute the fentanyl onto the streets. That opportunity had come and gone. No, instead you’d focus on deploying that weapon directly against its targets. As many of them as possible, and all at once. Causing maximum damage, instantly, like detonating a nuclear warhead over a population-dense area.
Ben stared at the map until its little lines and squiggles seemed to float in front of his eyes and lost all meaning. Willing it to yield up its secret. His mind churning so hard that his brain ached. He flashed back on the image he’d pictured, of Nazim in his canoe, polluting the clear sparkling river water with his poison.
And that image led to another. One that made sudden and terrifying sense. He looked again at the map, and traced Nazim’s route downwards with his finger, and landed on the spot, and understood.
When the realisation hit him, it made his guts twist.
He turned to Roth.
‘I think I know what they’re going to do.’
Chapter 59
From the moment he’d heard the first crackle of gunfire coming from the village, even before the skirmish on the beach with the idiot locals who thought they could stop him, Nazim had known that he was going to have to abandon his strategy. The new one hadn’t been long coming. As he and his remaining men hurriedly loaded as many barrels as they could aboard the pickup trucks, piled in and took off, he’d already decided what he must do next. And he liked it.
Nazim was in the jacked-up black Toyota Hilux, sitting up front next to Abbud at the wheel. Mahmud, Dariush and two other men were jammed in the rear crew cab seats, and another pair were riding in the hardtop load bed with the eight drums of fentanyl salvaged from the boat. The remaining six drums were aboard the silver Nissan following close behind, driven by Zahran. The trucks hammered up the shore, hit the track and set off on their winding high-speed journey through the maze of country roads.
Nobody had as yet mentioned anything about poor Shaykh, lying dead on the beach with the two infidels they’d killed. He was on his way to Paradise now, or whatever attenuated form of it the Prophet had reserved for raisin heads. If the police found the body before it was claimed by the tide, they’d almost certainly identify him from their terror watchlist and connect him with known associates, including some of the present company. Nobody much cared about that, either.
As they hurried away from Vaucottes Nazim took out his phone and did an internet search, which led him to a list of links, which in turn led him to a specific website, which he spent a few moments studying with great interest. It was perfect. Not too far away, just a couple of hours’ drive. If possible, they would ditch these vehicles en route and switch them for something less conspicuous. Perhaps pick up a hostage on the way, too.
The four-wheel-drive Toyota was a macho boy’s toy with all the bells and whistles, including a fancy inbuilt sat nav system. Abbud was fiddling with it as he drove. A text input box popped up on the screen, prompting him to program their destination. Abbud punched in the letters P-A-R-I-S and the winding route towards the capital instantly appeared. ‘Looks like we can get there in less than three hours via the A13,’ he said, looking pleased that the temporary glitch in their plans was now behind them and they were back in the game.
Nazim didn’t answer right away. He was thinking about the Islamic State’s call to all believers in the West to attack all infidels by whatever means possible. ‘If you are not able to find a bullet or an IED, then single out the disbelieving American, Frenchman, or any of their allies. Smash his head with a rock, or slaughter him with your knife, or run him down with your car, or throw him down from a high place, or choke him, or poison him.’
With those last inspiring words resonating in his mind, Nazim felt his fate being sealed. He smiled to himself. Then more words came to him, this time from a verse of the Holy Book, one he’d memorised a long, long time ago:
‘If there are twenty among you with determination they will vanquish two hundred; if there are a hundred then they will slaughter a thousand unbelievers, for the infidels are a people devoid of understanding.’
Nazim didn’t have as many as twenty men, let alone a hundred. But the sacrifice they’d make would bring about the slaughter of many more than a thousand unbelievers. And for that, Allah would smile upon them and take them to His bosom for all eternity.
A feeling of great peace and serenity washed over Nazim. The dull, grey morning sky was gradually brightening and a pale October sun twinkled through the clouds. Today would be a fine day to die.
He calmly told Abbud, ‘We’re not returning to Paris. Our future lies along a different path.’
Abbud looked puzzled. ‘Then where are we going, Nazim?’
‘To Jannah,’ Nazim said, with the solemn reverence that was due when speaking of the final abode of the righteous and devout. ‘But first, to this place.’ He reached across to the sat nav screen and tapped in a new destination in place of Paris. The revised route instantly showed up on the display. A completely new set of directions heading in a totally different direction. The alternative location was the city of Alençon, 189 kilometres south of the coast and 173 kilometres west of Paris.
‘What’s there?’ Abbud asked, having never even heard of it before.
‘Our destiny is there,’ Nazim replied. ‘Allah, in His infinite wisdom, intends a special new purpose for us. A short distance away from that town is a certain high-security facility. One that we are going to attack, invade and capture, and use to launch a death blow against the infidels.’
A glow of excitement came into Abbud’s eyes. The prospect of an early arrival in Paradise didn’t faze him in the least. If today was to be his last day on this earth, he welcomed his fate. ‘A military base?’
Not just Abbud. The men in the back of the crew cab were listening intently to the conversation. This was the moment they’d spent their lives dreaming of. They had utter faith in their leader and would follow him to whatever end Allah had in store.
‘Better
than a military base,’ Nazim said. ‘It’s the biggest water treatment plant in Northern France and one of the largest in Europe. It pipes water to millions of homes across the region. Countless people, every minute of every day, drink that water. They cook their stinking food with it. Make their coffee with it. Brush their teeth and clean their clothes, wash themselves and bathe their infants in it. Allowing us to deliver our weapon straight into the bodies of the infidels. We’re going to poison them all.’
Allahu Akbar! The men were delighted. If they’d been riding in an open-top vehicle, they’d have started firing their weapons in the air out of sheer exuberance. The guys in the crew cab repeated the glorious message for those in the back, who might not have heard.
In fact this was nothing entirely new, since waterborne attacks were a familiar and well-tried terrorist tactic. In 2003 Iraqi agents in Jordan had been arrested for trying to poison water supplying US troops near the Iraq border. Yet nothing remotely on this kind of scale had ever been attempted, or even dreamed of, before. It was as ambitious as 9/11 and could even eclipse it. If they could pull it off, they’d be heroes for the rest of time.
Only Abbud wanted to know the specifics of Nazim’s scheme. ‘How are we going to do this?’
‘It’s very simple. I expect that we will meet a significant security presence as we push our way inside. We kill as many as we can find, as quickly as we can, until there’s no more resistance. Then we find the right pipe, or reservoir, or whatever, and dump in all fourteen barrels.’
‘You’re talking about thousands and thousands of cubic metres of water pumping out every day,’ Abbud said, putting his engineer’s hat back on. ‘What we have will be as dilute as a drop in the ocean.’
‘But still concentrated enough to make a great many infidels very, very sick,’ Nazim replied with supreme confidence. ‘It takes only a small amount of the poison to be effective. The young and the elderly will be most vulnerable to the toxic effect. They will die in large numbers. Inshallah, we can kill hundreds of thousands of healthy adults too. Not to mention the terror it will strike into the entire country as people become afraid to drink, or splash even a single drop on their skin. Fear will be as effective a weapon as the weapon itself. The authorities will overreact by cutting off the water supply. Without water, even a strong nation is brought to its knees. Businesses and factories will shut down. Agriculture and food production will be crippled. Their whole economic infrastructure will collapse, and there will be rioting and crime as the survivors of the attack begin to starve and fight among themselves. The shockwaves will continue for months afterwards.’
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