Goodbye Paris

by Mike Bond

  I nodded at the Indian. “Not on that.”

  She buckled her helmet, tucking her black hair inside it. “Afraid?”

  “You can ride that ugly thing if you want but I’m getting a car.” (Vous pouvez conduire cette chose moche si ça vous plaît. Mais moi, je vais prendre une voiture.) I took a breath, rather pleased with myself for such a long harangue.

  She slapped the back seat. “Get on!”

  She was right; we didn’t have time. I’ve jumped from airplanes, been shot at, climbed nasty cliffs and fell off a few, took on killer waves with sad results, and have done many other dangerous things and yet survived. So what was one more high-speed motorcycle crash?

  She gunned the Indian, turned back to me. “By the way, on our team we don’t vouvoyer each other. We’re family, we use the family tense. You could say Tu peux conduire cette chose moche, but that’s very ugly French. No one will listen to you if you talk like that.”

  We roared out the heavily guarded DGSE exit right on Boulevard Mortier and howled through ratty roads to the Péréphérique, the high-speed four-lane highway that circles and chokes Paris, much of it along the old line of the city’s castle walls.

  Walls that do no good anymore because the attacker is already inside.

  She accelerated fast, darting in and out among cars and down the narrow spaces between them, me holding on dearly around her trim waist, my forearms across her bare thighs where she’d tugged up her short skirt to wrap her legs around the hundred pulsing horses of the Indian’s snarling screaming engine, and I leaned when she did and tried not to show that I was terrified and sure we were both going to die.

  Nonetheless we didn’t die, and after what seemed an eternity we pulled into the Préfecture of Police forensic garage, where technicians from the INPS, the National Institute of Scientific Police, were going over Mack’s car.

  A black BMW M240. 6-cylinder turbo, 335 Horsepower, a 6-speed stick and fast Pirellis. A demon car. A technician in white was leaning in the open driver door, another swabbing the back seat. When they saw Anne they stood up. “What you got?” she said.

  “Cherchez la femme,” one grinned.

  “It was a woman in the car,” the other said. “Who hit him.”

  “Nuts!” Anne snapped.

  “She left a hair. A long black hair dyed blonde.”

  “Maybe his wife?” the first said.

  “She has short blonde hair. And doesn’t dye it,” Anne pointed out.

  I could have told them that. And Gisèle has always worn her hair short, ever since I first knew her when she and Mack hooked up in Waziristan.

  “This could’ve been some other time. Anybody.”

  “No, it’s fresh. She took a shower this morning. Le Petit Marseillais Shampoo with Shea Butter and Honey. Made in France.”

  “Merde,” Anne said very quietly. “You got this already?”

  “We’re not stupid.”

  “How you know she hit him?”

  “When she reached across from the passenger seat and hit the back of his head, a few molecules of his blood spattered on her hair, this hair, that got caught in the seat belt and broke off when she pulled back.” He shrugged. “That’s how it seems.”

  “DNA?”

  “Nothing yet.”

  “Prints?”

  “Not yet.”

  Anne turned to me. “This makes no sense. Let’s go see Gisèle.”

  “I’ll call her,” I said.

  Gisèle’s land line was still busy. “Maybe she’s gone shopping,” Anne said.

  “When her husband’s missing?”

  We jumped on the Indian for another shorter but equally mind-blowing trip through raging traffic and smog on the Péréphérique, up Avenue Foch – named for one of France’s many World War I generals under whose command 1.4 million young Frenchmen died – and around the Étoile’s grand Arc de Triomphe, which in true Roman fashion celebrates Napoleon’s victory at Austerlitz, in which many more thousands died. And all the Pyrrhic victories since.

  We decelerated like a returning space shuttle to the 16th Arrondissement and Mack and Gisèle’s house.

  It didn’t matter how many times we rang the bell or called the land line, Gisèle didn’t answer. “You don’t have her cell?” Anne said sharply.

  “Just the land line.”

  “Where you from, the last century?”

  She was getting irritated because things weren’t looking good. “I’ll call Thierry,” she snapped. “He’ll have her cell.”

  For an insidious moment I thought of a prison cell not a cellphone, and was back pacing a cell of my own, even the one in Beirut, worst of them all.

  Five minutes later Thierry called with Gisèle’s cell number, but it too didn’t answer. “Merde, merde et merde!” Anne hissed, stalking back and forth, lit a cigarette, took one puff and tossed it in the gutter. She called Thierry again; even I could understand her angry slang, “This’s truly screwed up.”

  He said something and she nodded at me. “We need to go in.”

  “Mack’ll have tons of security on that door,” I said. As if she wouldn’t know.

  “Thierry’s sending someone.”

  I’d been barely five hours in France and already Mack was missing, injured and maybe dead, clobbered by a woman with dyed blonde hair. And now his wife was missing too.

  She could be at a meeting. But the medical office where she worked as a spinal injury specialist said she hadn’t been there all day.

  Why wouldn’t she answer?

  I was dead tired. Grainy eyes, slumping shoulders, aching spine, the dizzy unreality after a long flight, when midnight is noon, and the bright Pacific becomes the rainy Paris smog.

  I bent over hands on knees and took a breath. On Tahiti it’d be nearly sunrise now; soon Lexie would leave for her endless flight back to Maine, Abigail would be patrolling the beaches for some hunk she couldn’t turn down, and Erica would be earning eight hundred bucks an hour lounging on the lanai drinking gin, smoking weed, and writing briefs for clients on the other side of the world.

  Thierry’s ‘someone’ arrived ten minutes later, a balding potbellied guy with a thin black mustache and mothy black sweater, in his mid-forties, a worn black jacket, beret and jeans, with a strange cellphone and a little toolkit he took from his pocket. Five minutes later we followed him into Mack and Gisèle’s house, expecting to find her dead on the floor.

  Room by room we checked, the double séjour, the dining room, the four bedrooms and assorted baths. On the kitchen counter lay the flashing phone, off the hook.

  Dead or alive, Gisèle was not there.

  —

  THE HALAL TRUCK wandered the bumpy rutted streets of Mosul for maybe ten minutes. Away from the Coalition sector deep into the lawless labyrinth where our soldiers had not yet gone to conquer and die.

  In the distance you heard the normal gunfire and explosions: just a regular afternoon in Mosul. Occasionally the jangle of Arab music, the rumble of vehicles or clatter of voices. “This’s got to be the Shia quarter,” I whispered to Mack, and a crushing pain thudded into my kidneys.

  “Shut up,” somebody said. “Or I kill.”

  Despair washed over me. No way we’d survive this. The pain in my kidneys from being kicked radiated out into my body and linked to my despair: the antithesis of life. Why had I come to this bedeviled, beleaguered country to fight these fanatics?

  I’d ended up fighting the Taliban in the rough frigid mountains of Afghanistan, settling scores for what the Saudis had done to the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and all the poor people on the United and American flights who died that day. I’d seen the pictures of people jumping to their deaths from the burning buildings. And I was going to avenge them.

  Then GW Bush told Tommy Franks at CENTCOM to let Osama Bin Laden escape from Tora
Bora. It took a while for us to figure out what had happened, that indeed we’d had Bin Laden pinned down and GW let him walk with a thousand Al Qaeda across the Paki border into the wilds of Waziristan. Because GW wanted Bin Laden alive so he could say that Saddam Hussein was sheltering him in Baghdad, and thus we had to attack Iraq. Then he lied, 264 times according to the record, about Iraq’s so-called Weapons of Mass Destruction, and to prove he was a man, he and five-time draft-dodger Vice President Cheney, had sucked our combat effort dry in Afghanistan, and sent me and so many of my comrades into the endless pit of horror, danger and despair known as Iraq. A soldier can know a war is evil and wrong, but he doesn’t get to choose whether or not he fights in it.

  Now, rattling through the dusty, hot and fetid Mosul streets in the back of the halal truck – halal being the Muslim butchering process of hanging an animal upside down and cutting its throat so it bleeds to death – I realized how ironic it was.

  They were going to cut our throats too.

  Allah Promises

  “MAYBE GISÈLE has a safe hole,” Thierry said when I called. “Someplace she and Mack could’ve set up, outside us, that only they know? Maybe she didn’t trust us to keep her safe.”

  “You didn’t keep her safe.”

  “Maybe she went undercover?”

  “She’d never do anything to complicate finding Mack.” I glanced out the rain-streaked window of Mack’s living room, umbrellas like bobbing pansies below, cars like scuttling bright-eyed mice.

  Anne came from the dining room. “Gisèle got that last call at two-forty-seven.”

  I could see it from where I stood in the living room – the flashing phone on the kitchen counter. “The one she didn’t hang up.”

  “And guess where from? A public phone in Molenbeek.”

  “Oh God.” Molenbeek is another huge Muslim enclave like Seine St. Denis – this one in Brussels. From Molenbeek many of the major terrorist attacks in the last ten years had been launched. In 20 years it’s projected that Muslims will be the majority in Brussels, the capital of Europe, then Molenbeek will be a shrine, the place where it all began.

  If something big was going on, Molenbeek was part of it.

  —

  “WHY WAS MACK GOING TO NORMANDY?” I asked when we got back to Thierry’s office.

  He raised an eyebrow. “Normandy?”

  “What are you saying?” Anne snapped.

  “Gisèle said he was planning to go to Normandy the day he got grabbed.”

  Thierry sat back, hands behind his head. “Oh fuck.”

  Anne stared at me darkly. “We didn’t know.”

  “Why was he going?” Thierry said.

  “Gisèle didn’t know.”

  Anne looked out the window, took a breath. “Jesus.”

  “Who was Mack running?” I said.

  Thierry looked surprised. “No one.”

  “Not that we know,” Anne added.

  “Then what,” I said, “was he doing?”

  She turned to me. “He didn’t tell you?”

  “He said Mustafa had shown up and could I help track him down. He said my side would carry the costs but I’d be working with you. Why – what else is there?”

  She glanced at Thierry, who took a breath, nodded.

  “He didn’t mention Martel?”

  “What’s that?”

  Thierry leaned forward. “He did tell you we’d brought in a couple of jihadis fresh back from Syria, didn’t he?”

  I sensed Thierry knew exactly what Mack had said. “You tell me.”

  “It took time, but these two guys finally opened up. We’d shipped them to Morocco – so much better to discuss things in your own language – and eventually they both told us, independently, that ‘a great man is coming. He has killed many unbelievers. He will unleash great sorrow on you.’”

  “‘What kind of sorrow?’ we asked. They said this great man has come to direct an operation called Martel.”

  “Named derisively, of course,” Anne said, “for Charles Martel, the king who chased the Muslims out of France in 732.”

  “I know that ...” I snapped.

  “One action is to fly an Airbus into the Eiffel Tower. ‘The infidels have already lost their ugly cathedral,’ one of the jihadis said. ‘Now they will lose their Tower.’”

  An icy feeling shot down my spine. “Those Algerians tried it with an Air France plane in Marseille, way back in 1994 ... wasn’t it?”

  “December 24 to 26.”

  “And you guys killed them all.”

  “But we lost a man.” This of course was not widely known. What was known was that a group of Algerians hijacked an Airbus 300 with 220 passengers in Algiers. They began to execute passengers and ordered the pilot to fly to Paris. Air France insisted the plane didn’t have enough fuel to reach Paris. The Algerians agreed to a fuel stop in Marseille. There, after hours and hours of stalling, of fake press conferences and tense waiting, a team of the GIGN tactical intervention force assaulted the plane, killed the four hijackers, and freed the passengers.

  Like the Israelis at Entebbe, one of the most amazing successes in the almost impossible craft of hostage recovery.

  “But no way they can blow the Tower up,” Thierry said. “Damn thing weighs over ten thousand tons, over a thousand feet tall. And unlike the World Trade towers it won’t burn because it’s all exposed steel –”

  I scratched my head, trying to kick-start my brain. “One of these jihadis told you all this? About using a plane to take down the Tower?”

  Thierry nodded.

  “What was the other action?”

  “The other strategy involves some kind of backpack nuke from Iran or Pakistan.” He gave a weary puff.

  “The Soviet nukes?” I turned to Anne. “They’re long past their use-by date.”

  She actually snickered. “And you’re the one who believed Mustafa was dead?”

  “Guy rises from the dead,” Thierry said, trying to soften the tension between her and me.

  “There’s more.” Anne sat forward, hands clasped one on top of the other over one knee. She cocked her head at Thierry; he nodded. “There are sixty-seven nuclear launch sites in Pakistan, as best we can tell. And from what Indian intelligence tells us –”

  “Indian intelligence,” I huffed, “lies about Pakistan.”

  “Everybody,” Thierry grinned, “lies about Pakistan.”

  “Pakistan’s always ready to knife us in the back,” I said. “They sheltered Bin Laden and wouldn’t tell us, though they knew where he was ... And it’s the Pakis,” I added, “who gave the North Koreans nukes ...”

  “Pakistan’s a terrorist money conduit,” Thierry said, “from Saudi, the Emirates, Qatar, Abu Dhabi, and all those other Salafist desert dictatorships to ISIS and other terrorists. We can’t get them to stop.”

  “Even Hezbollah, the Iranians,” Anne said, “the Pakis are working with them.”

  “And that,” Thierry said, “could mean the damn backpacks.”

  Out of the corner of my eye I glanced at Anne, stark and severe in the short black skirt and black cashmere. “And now we, the French,” she said, “are in bed with Iran.”

  “And you’re the ones,” I said, “who gave us Ayatollah Khomeini –”

  “And you’re the ones who made him inevitable,” she said, referring to the American 1953 coup that removed the democratically elected Iranian president Mohammed Mosaddegh and turned power over to the Shah. “And the purpose of that coup” – she looked at me balefully – “was to give you guys and the Brits Iran’s huge oil fields –”

  “In any case,” Thierry broke in, “jihadi number two tells us some of those Soviet backpack nukes made it to Iran, and now – le bon Dieu only knows how – Mustafa and his ISIS buddies have one that may work.”

  “Your
new best friends in Teheran,” I snapped at Anne, “what do they say?”

  “They’re looking into it.”

  “Since when?”

  “Since we told them. Five days ago.”

  “They know.”

  “Of course they know,” Thierry said. “But they’re working fiendishly on their own nuclear weapons. They don’t want inspectors or journalists or anyone else coming around.”

  “So –” I took a breath. “They won’t help.”

  She half-smiled. “They’re making every effort.”

  Not only was there a plan to take down the Eiffel Tower, maybe with an Airbus, there was another plan involving a small nuclear weapon to take down Paris. I exhaled like a man who’s just been condemned to death. Now it wasn’t just Mack and Gisèle in great danger. It was the Tower. And maybe Paris. Maybe the world.

  I felt a bit nauseous. “Where’s Mustafa now?”

  “Our two jihadis said he’s traveling in a tan Passat with Austrian plates. They saw him once, in the car, but recognized him. Then we backed up border cameras and caught him crossing at Strasbourg, got the license plate. He may have come through Stuttgart from Munich and down to Freiburg. Stolen in Torino a few days earlier.”

  “When was this, Strasbourg?”

  “Six weeks ago. We found the car again on backed-up satellite pix as it was entering Fontainebleau Forest, heading southwest. Sky clouded over and we lost it. Could never find it again.”

  “Shit!” I said uselessly. My mind screamed with tactics to catch him, fears we’d lose him, the harm he’d do. “How you know it’s him?” I persevered, against hope.

  “They’d seen him twice in Baghdad, in Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s HQ. They never broke, on that one.”

  I glanced at Anne. “He’s still in Fontainebleau?”

  She shrugged. “But we have no photo of him.”

  “And that,” Thierry smiled at me, “is why you’re here.”

  All this suddenly felt like a trap. One you willingly enter but can never get out.

  “As soon as we heard Mustafa was here,” Thierry added, “and about the Martel operation, we notified Harris.”

  “What’s he got to do with it?”