by Mike Bond
So I started with the easy stuff.
I called an 888 number that gives me hyper signal detection on my iPhone, and holding it to my ear I wandered the apartment from bedroom to bath to living room to tiny kitchen. Naturally it was the bedroom where the most powerful device was located. Maybe it’s just salacious voyeurism, but the bedroom’s where most of the truth gets told. As well as the best lies.
I crawled around on hands and knees with my iPhone till I found where the scratchy interference was loudest. It was under the bedframe up in the Philips screw hole that bolted the left headboard post to the frame. I left it alone and squirmed around under the bed trying not to breathe dust bunnies but could find no other bugs. As I moved away from that single device the hissing scramble in my iPhone got weaker.
In the living room was another bug where no idiot should put one – in the middle of a two-circuit electric outlet behind the couch. It was a working camera as well as audio, but why had they placed it right behind the couch, where no camera could see a thing?
Or had somebody moved the couch?
I shut off the lights, waited for my night vision to return, and checked every room for the minuscule flicker of an LED. Rolling my right fist into a tube I scanned every ceiling and wall for the glint of a pinhole camera.
The best bet for a camera was the bedroom. Every spymaster I’ve ever known loves a good show.
Again I left it as it was.
Another camera was on the icemaker control of the refrigerator, the usual one on the toaster, another in the Wi-Fi adapter stuck in a living room wall, and of course one in the microwave’s display panel. None in the smoke detectors, the stereo, the clock radio in the bedroom, or in any other weird place like the toothbrush holder in the bathroom.
I had a moment’s concern for the national debt of both nations that they should spend so much on such a silly process. Then I got tired of looking for more, pretended I’d seen nothing, and went to bed.
Lying there, I worried why Hair-Ass had first tried to chase me off but now was urging me on? Why the fake empathy? When the only feeling for which the smarmy little lifer could be accused was sadistic ecstasy over another person’s heartbreak?
—
03:44 AND STILL couldn’t sleep. Imagining how an Iranian backpack nuke might make it to Paris. Or were Thierry’s jihadis bullshitting? We knew they weren’t lying about Mustafa – he was here and may have grabbed Mack and Gisèle. Nothing compared to the trail of sorrow he’d left numerous times in Iraq.
And far worse even than destroying the Eiffel Tower was the little evil box that would blow Paris apart. And maybe start a chain reaction till everyplace on earth was tattered and charred.
I tossed off the covers, got cold and squirmed under them again. Wandered into the kitchen for a glass of milk and stubbed my toe. Glanced out the window at the half-lit cobbled alley, the trash bins hunched like sleeping bums, the pale drained façades with the telephone wires across them like jailyard chains. Listened to the silence and wondered why would Mack have a 22-year-old dyed-blonde Algerian woman in his car?
A hooker? Would he do that? My mind said no.
A girlfriend? No.
How then did she get in his car? How did she get close enough to hit him?
Mack was not a guy you surprised; even asleep he was dangerous. Why had he let down his guard? How hadn’t he seen it coming?
Was she a source? His? Whose?
I stood looking in the bathroom mirror not seeing myself, not seeing the dirty sink edge and tarnished faucet, the despair of it all. Wanting to launch myself into an abyss of forgetfulness. That was the weariness of it, the grinding down with no respite.
I wanted to call Anne but remembered I was mad at her and at this whole French goatfuck that had maybe lost us a chance at Mustafa.
Too late to call her anyway. I took a leak and scratched my itchy back against the doorjamb.
Suddenly I felt alive, aware, energized, didn’t want sleep.
Ready for war.
Wanted to call her and make up somehow. She’s asleep, I reminded myself.
Out my window the Tower loomed over the half-lit city like a great dark angel in its sacred cradle of night. This is who we are, we humans. This is what we can do.
Nothing was totally lost, while it stood.
Lionheart
THOUSANDS of Paris street cameras had grabbed countless algorithmic matches for our Mustafa image. Faces picked out of Métro crowds, intersections, bus lines, sidewalks, stores, and public buildings that sort of matched the image Antoine and I had created yesterday.
So here I was on a stool in a dark room scanning all these matches for a face I barely remembered. The trouble with GaussianFace and all the traditional FRAs, Face Recognition Algorithms, is they miss the human factor. I’ve learned that recognition is more than what you see. Each person has an individual essence, a separate aura, something our body and brain recognize before our rational mind does. Or we have that delayed sensation of “I know that person ...”
In my first hour of scanning I found Mustafa nineteen times, the next hour five, and by noon another seventy-nine. You never knew for sure, had to check out every possible face, and all the positives got put on the master file and then we would try to trace each one.
Did the FRA provide a possible name? An address or driver’s license? Did he take the Métro? What exit did he use? Where did his trip begin? End? Who did he know?
Was he carrying anything?
What did he do during the ride?
Was he alone?
Then we went back and scanned the crowd around him – did anyone arrive or leave with him? Follow him to another train? For each and every instant of film, we did this. For all the possible Mustafa’s. Over and over, to make sure we hadn’t missed him.
What did he look like, anyway? Could I even remember?
Or was he really even in Paris?
Yes, because Bruno at Les Quatre Vents had recognized him. Or had he only identified my pictorial memory of a man last seen more than seven years ago? Who bore no resemblance to the man who might be now wandering France with a small nuclear weapon?
Had Mustafa been staying in Fontainebleau but going to Paris for meetings? What meetings? What were they planning?
My eyes burned. I was staring through a wall of melting glass that divided me from the world. A sense of failure overwhelmed me.
Gisèle. Right now they might be raping her. Tying her down on a table somewhere and raping her one after the other. In front of Mack.
—
“BUT WHY,” I repeated, “was Mack going to Normandy?” We were back in Thierry’s office bolting down a quick lunch of pâté sandwiches, chips, and Orangina.
He leaned across his desk as if protecting it. “I wish I knew.”
“He never gave you a hint? Nothing?”
“Let’s say it’s not covered by our intra-governmental agreements on information sharing.”
“Mack was on some other deal? Is that what you’re saying? For you? While he was hunting Mustafa with Anne and Home Office and all your friends?”
“The Normandy thing was for that afternoon. He got grabbed in the morning while on his way to work. Normandy’s not relevant.”
“We can’t assume that.”
Thierry gave me a bleak look. “As I just said ... We don’t know why he was going to Normandy. Nobody does.”
“You know where in Normandy?”
“Les Andelys, maybe, according to the car’s computer from the last trip,” Anne put in. She was acting friendly, as if we hadn’t had a nasty fight last night. “A village on the Seine, with a town a mile inland from it. Hour and a half drive down the Seine from Paris.”
“But why there?”
She shook her head.
“We don’t even know,” Thierry said.
A new thought stunned me. “I’ve been stupid,” I said. “Stupid all along. Whoever kidnapped Mack left the BMW where it was as a joke. They’re making fun of us.”
“Don’t be silly!” Anne snapped.
“What is Max and Gisèle’s address?” I shot back.
Thierry shuffled in his papers, grabbed his phone, checked it.
“49 Boulevard de Beauséjour in the 16th,” Anne said.
“And whoever snatched him left the BMW on Rue Beaurepaire in the 10th.”
Thierry looked at us; his eyebrows rose. “They’re saying they took him from his lovely home to their home territory? Taunting us to find them?”
“You’re snatching at spiderwebs,” Anne said.
“I don’t think –” I started to say.
She cut me off – “Or it’s coincidence.”
“The two addresses,” Thierry put in, “I’m inclined to think are not coincidence.”
“They’re just fucking with our heads,” I said.
“Mustafa’s got bigger fish to fry,” Anne said.
“No, no, no.” Thierry shook a finger. “Mustafa’s probably behind Mack and Gisèle’s grab.”
“And the Eiffel Tower attack.”
“And the Air France Airbus.”
“And the bomb.”
“And Notre Dame?” Thierry clenched his fists. “And Normandy?”
—
THE EIFFEL TOWER high above us buckled, lurched, twisted, its huge steel beams screaming and wrenching apart as it toppled down on us with a gigantic howl. Then the camera view changed and from a distance you saw the Tower smash down on the Pont d’Iéna and into the Seine.
“Assholes,” I said.
“You have to admit it looks real,” Anne said. We were sitting around a screen at DGSE, she, Nisa, Thierry and I, watching an ISIS Twitter video of the Tower collapsing from a terrorist attack, linked to photos of an Air France Airbus. Then a terrorist’s face, speaking French into the camera. “Things are going to happen, worse than 9/11.”
Then a second Twitter video, this one promising to blow up France.
“Probably made in Qatar,” Nisa said, “or some other Salafist place, the Emirates, Saudi ...”
“So many Middle Eastern airlines landing now in Paris,” Anne said. “All it takes is one pilot –”
“Like the Air Egypt flight out of New York,” Thierry said morosely, “where the pilot dove the plane into the sea shouting Allahu Akhbar?”
“Or the Malaysian,” Tomàs added, “reciting Allahu Akhbar as he practiced the crash of Flight 370 on his flight simulator ...”
“For Muslims,” Nisa said, “the Tower is an insult. An offense.”
“It’s beautiful,” I countered. “What’s offensive about that?”
“Look at its shape.”
“Yeah, it’s what the French were saying, back in 1887: we have the world’s biggest dick.”
Anne raised a finger. “There was a study done on that. Koreans have the smallest, and French do have the biggest.”
“I doubt that,” I said patriotically.
“There’s a study on everything,” Thierry said placatingly.
It irritated me, his efforts to minimize the hostility between Anne and me.
“Look what the Saudis knocked down in 9/11,” he added. “The World Trade Center, the two most powerful pricks on the planet.”
“For many fundamentalists,” Nisa said, “the Tower is the apogee of evil. Why, they say, are we so poor and backward, while these infidels are given all these gifts by God? It is an evil that must be corrected.”
“Technologies are evolving so fast we can’t keep up,” Thierry said. “Weapons we can’t see, explosives we can’t find, tactics to take over an airliner in flight that five years ago we couldn’t have imagined.”
I thought of the Eiffel Tower, its solidity. “Never happen,” I said, feeling good for being so positive.
—
THE RAIN had started again – springtime in Paris. Anne stood next to me in the DGSE elevator rattling keys. “We’re not taking that goddamn bike,” I said.
“We’re taking your car.”
I knew she was hyper-stressed, but now she was losing it. “I don’t have a car.”
“You do now.”
This worried me. French police drive mostly tinny little Renault Kangoos and Peugeot Experts, frail, underpowered, and self-destructive.
Even worse, their car radios date from 1990, almost useless today, comms often dropped, easily hacked.
She walked me to the back of the garage where a few wrecks teetered on ancient tires. In the corner lurked a dirty Peugeot 406 that once had been blue. At least a decade old, battered, scarred and faded. She handed me the keys. “You drive.”
I sneered down at it. “This’s all you’ve got?”
“Wait and see.”
It started fast and even, a smooth throaty rumble that belied its grungy appearance. I got out and popped the hood.
Anne stood beside me staring down like a new mother at the throbbing monster under the hood. “A Peugeot V6 racing engine. Fuel injection, five-speed, all that.” She squeezed my arm. “We only have a few ...”
“It’s a beast,” I said happily.
“You should call it that,” she said. “Every car needs a name.”
We eased out of the garage right then left, then onto the Péréphérique. I tapped the pedal and it howled up through the gears to 180, nearly three times the speed limit. The acceleration so quick you feared your eyeballs would get stuck to the back of your skull.
It snarled in frustration when I eased off to 120 then down to 70. “Nowhere near as fast,” Anne scoffed, “as my Indian.”
“Fuck your Indian. It’s too dangerous. And the way you drive it ...”
“That bike will never kill me.”
“Christ!” I yelled. “Don’t say that!”
She grinned and sat there smiling inside herself. This made me angry, and even angrier that it made me angry.
We quit the Péréphérique for the A13 west through the deep oak forests of Marly and St. Germain-en-Laye, then rolling orchards to Mantes-la-Jolie, Mantes-the-Beautiful, once a medieval jewel, now another dangerous ghetto of drug deals, halal butchers, constant prayers and black-gowned, veiled women.
Where the second language is French.
After Mantes the highway left the Seine and climbed through gentle hills of forest and wheat fields, the windshield wipers slapping lazily at the gray drizzle, the odors of freshly plowed earth and damp leaves through the window.
“We need to know,” I said, “why was Mack going to Les Andelys? It’s just a medieval village on the bank of the river where Richard the Lionheart built his castle, in 1198.”
She turned toward me. “You know that?”
“In Special Forces we studied all the great war strategists. Richard was brilliant and courageous. A great tactician and a great warrior – he got his name for his ferocity in battle. The European side of my ancestors came from England and Normandy, joined him on the Third Crusade.”
“Wow,” she said. “My ancestors went with him too.”
“Astounding. Maybe we’re related.”
“Yes, good we’re not lovers.”
I smiled, a little stunned, and tried not to look at her, prim and straight in her seat, feet and legs together like a schoolgirl’s, that mysterious evanescent sad look on her face as she watched the river pass below us, as if I weren’t there.
Her husband dead two years now.
I drove on silently, the Beast rumbling softly under its rusty hood, up through hills and forests down to the Seine again at the old town of Vernon, and past the ruins of the 12th century stone bridge across the Seine bombarded by mistake by American planes in 1944, then along the north bank through
miles of forests and wheat fields, antique villages of gray stone, rambling castles and dappled meadows to the soaring bend in the river of white limestone cliffs with a huge white castle towering over a vertical outcrop high above the village of Les Andelys.
“One of the masterworks of castle construction,” she said. “Built in one year, by six thousand laborers. Then Richard got killed, and we French took the castle, and for hundreds of years tried to tear it down.”
Leaving the Beast by the Seine we followed a path along a wide grassy bank with a row of very old stone and oak-beam houses with steep slate roofs facing the water. One block up its narrow stone-paved alleys was a stunning church built, she said, in six months in 1197 by Richard and his workers.
“Why would Mack be out here?” I said. “What was he trying to find?”
She nodded at the rippling silvery river. “In the Third Crusade, Richard had nearly beaten Saladin. At the same time the Mongol hordes of Genghis Khan were attacking Saladin from the north. If Richard had been able to finish the war, that probably would’ve meant the collapse of Islam. But Richard was so sick, been sick for weeks, dysentery probably, he could fight no more. They agreed on a truce that kept Jerusalem in Islamic hands, along with North Africa and the Middle East, and has led to all the tragedies since ...”
She pointed to a narrow island of jutting trees with a single jagged roofline. “In the middle of the river, there, was Richard’s personal castle ... In those days the whole place was high stone walls from behind and around the castle all the way down to the river, and pickets across the river – no one could go upriver unless Richard allowed it.” She nodded her chin across the roiling silvery water toward the dark banks and jagged trees on the other side and the wide plain behind it. “More men have died in battle out there, on that plain, historians say, than on any other single place on earth. Over many thousands of years.”