by Mike Bond
She leaped off me. “Tall guy in a hoodie just came out the door. He’s got something in his right hand and he’s coming this way.”
I rolled up pulling my Glock. I’d seen nothing my way, turned to face rear. “Ten meters.”
“I’m not blind.” She raised her Glock and stretched out on the seat facing the sidewalk. He’d have to look in the car window to see us. But we couldn’t see him unless he did.
All was softly quiet but for a distant hiss of tires on the Péréphérique. A tiny click as Anne slid off safety. I took a silent breath, gauging the odds he’d look in, that he’d yank a gun and fire and we’d somehow have to shoot him before he did. Tried to remember where the lift mechanism was in the car door that might deflect my bullet: best option was to shoot him through the glass.
But I didn’t want to shoot him. Not yet.
I wanted him to take me to Mustafa.
Then I’d shoot him.
The whisper of soft footfalls on the sidewalk, a snuffle, a spit, its whack on concrete. A slap-slap of sneakers as he neared, his shadow flitting across the window when he passed. Keeping my weapon aimed at him, I counted five seconds and was readying to slide out of the car and follow him but Anne shoved me down. “He’s coming back!”
On the floor, face up, bent backward over the bump of the transmission drive shaft, the Glock in both hands, I tried to see through the car window glazed with our breath. “Maybe he saw something,” she whispered. “Coming back to check us out.”
“How far?”
“Fifteen meters ... He’s pulling something from his coat –”
“A gun?”
“Can’t tell.”
“If it’s a gun we have to shoot him.”
“Then we lose everything ...”
“How far?”
“Five meters.”
I slid to a half-sitting position, still below the door window, Glock ready.
“It’s a phone. He’s got a phone in his right hand.”
“Get down!”
Again the shadow flitted across us. It paused, backed up a step, went on.
“What’d he see?” I whispered. “What did he see?”
“Can’t tell. He stopped a second, by the window, then went on ... He’s crossing the street. Back toward the house. Still talking on the phone.”
I rose up to look as he climbed the steps and entered the building. About twenty seconds later a second-floor window lit up, went dark.
“Gone to bed,” I said, pulling myself against her.
“Mon Dieu, you’re still hard.”
“I lost it when we were going to shoot him. Just got it back.”
She eased down, tucking her panties aside as I rose up into her again, long and slow and hot and slick, how amazing it feels sliding into someone you’re falling in love with ... “Don’t stop,” she whispered. “Don’t stop watching.”
“I’m not.” I stared through the windshield seeing everything out there, every thing, as we rocked harder, faster, softer, slower, in this delectable heaven.
“He’s back!” She dove aside and I edged up to watch through the rear window.
“Every time I start to come,” she snapped, “he kills it.”
He stood on the stoop, glanced up and down the street, took out a cigarette and lit it.
Something flashed further down the street: a car had turned onto ours, a block away, its lights off.
“Get ready!” I rolled into the front.
Another vague glimmer as a second car turned up this street, a block behind the first. “They’re going to do a driveby,” I said. “Or one or both of them will pull over and they’ll all pile out and rake us.”
“It’ll be AKs ...”
“Probably.”
“We’re fucked.”
She was right; there was no time to drive off, to run, we were trapped. Had Abdel known we were there? Had he set this up?
The first car eased to a stop at Abdel’s door. He tossed the cigarette, hopped down the steps and got in the back. The car slid past us, then the second, as we took quick phone pix of both. At the corner they both flicked on their headlights and turned left toward Stains and the A1.
I leaped into the driver’s seat, gave them a few seconds and started after them as Anne scrambled up beside me.
“That son of a bitch,” she said. “I was just about to come.”
“Sorry.”
“Did you?”
“Twice.”
“Liar!”
“Put on your seat belt. This could be a fast trip.”
She put her Glock on safety, opened the glove box and took out two more clips. “Inshallah.”
Decoy
IT WAS DANGEROUS to drive with no headlights but otherwise the cars ahead would see us.
“Why did he walk past us?” Anne yelled over the Beast’s engine as she scanned the dark streets. “Then came back, went into the house and came right out?”
I hit third gear at a hundred ten just to keep up with the two cars ahead. “He was checking the street? Didn’t see us?”
“He had us.” She snickered. “Dead to rights.”
I shivered at the thought of it, the bullets blunted by metal and glass punching through our bodies at three times the speed of sound, smashing and wrenching and ripping and shattering out the other side of us, pieces of us flying after them ... It was so awful my body refused to think of it.
The two cars ahead of us were heading away from Charles de Gaulle Airport onto the A1 south toward Paris. The Renault Espace that had been in second place passed the white Mercedes with Abdel in it, turned west on the Péréphérique, took the Porte Maillot exit and Avenue de la Grande Armée toward the Arc de Triomphe.
“This is crazy,” I said. “They’re taking us for a ride.”
The two cars reached the Arc and barreled straight down Marceau toward the Seine. Anne kept taking pix but we were too far behind to be accurate, the Beast throbbing and swaying with speed and bumps and turns. We were halfway there when ahead of us above the dark stone skyline I saw the Tower’s lights.
“Yeah,” she nodded. “Trial run.”
I wiped my hand against the mist on the inside of the windshield but that made it worse. The stop light ahead of us turned red but the two cars howled through it almost nailing a taxi and a trash truck that seconds later I missed by swerving at high speed onto the sidewalk knocking down three bicycle racks whang whang-whang with clattering steel and headlight glass flying, then the newly one-eyed Beast found the road again, narrowing the distance between it and Abdelasalaam and his friends.
“Damn!” I yelled, feeling bad for the car.
“You should let me drive,” she yelled.
“Easing back now. Know where they’re going –”
“Like I said. A trial run.”
“What does this guy Abdelasalaam have to do with the Tower?”
She nodded her chin at the two cars as they swung off the Alma Bridge onto Quai Branly. “Nothing and everything.”
The two cars passed the Tower and dove left onto Avenue du Suffren, a wide tree-lined boulevard and behind it a narrow street of beautiful carved stone apartments facing the Champ de Mars, in front of the Tower. “This is crap,” I said.
“Shut up and drive.”
I laughed. “That’s from a movie somewhere.”
“It’s mine now. Because I said it ... Hold it – they’re slowing, pull back!”
I parked the Beast at a convenient hydrant. Fifty yards ahead the two cars slid into a bus zone on Avenue Suffren. Two guys got out of each car. One slung a big backpack over his shoulders. They locked their cars so the lights flashed, ambled across Suffren against the light and trotted through the trees along the back streets toward the Tower. Anne took closeups of the license plates and we went a
fter them.
We slipped through the shadowed plane trees along the Champ, trying to stay out of their sight but not lose them. The Tower’s red searchlights cast an eerie red through the thick trunks and rubbled ground; the wind from the Seine was cold and uncaring: We’ve seen this for thousands of years: man against man. We don’t give a damn.
The four guys crossed the circle at Avenue Bouvard where in the day the tour buses park.
Now even at four a.m. the cops were here, moving toward these guys, and at least five Sentinelle soldiers coming forward from the pillars.
This is how they get you, came into my mind. Decoy.
Decoy. What did they want to distract us from?
If you win, I realized, it will be because you understand.
“They’re coming back,” Anne whispered. “The cops are turning away.”
They were coming straight at us. I pointed at a tree. “There!”
She leaned back against a plane tree moaning as I shoved my body up and down her – nobody could tell, in the dark.
The guys passed in a silent hustle, one snickering, sneaker steps dying out in the hiss of Seine wind through the plane boughs, a sole siren far away, the throbbing night hum of Paris.
We followed them back to the Arc de Triomphe and Seine St. Denis till they deposited our alleged Abdelasalaam at his doorstep and two ATS teams picked up the tail, and she and I drove to DGSE.
In the DGSE parking lot I draped my head on my arms over the steering wheel. It felt good. “I’m so fucking tired.”
“Tant pis. We have a full day ahead.”
“So why were they driving that fast, if it was just a trial run? Why risk being pulled over or caught on camera, and then your whole scene is blown?”
“Two possibilities –”
“With you it’s always two possibilities –”
“Either they saw us and were trying to lose us ...”
“Or taking us for a ride ...”
“Or it was a trial run for speed, to see how fast they could make that distance, if they had to ... That’s why it was after two a.m., when there’s nothing to slow you down.”
“When do we take them?”
“Thierry’s eternal question.” She raised her chin and shoved open the passenger door. “Let’s go see him.”
—
“WE’VE ID’d Abdel’s three friends.” Thierry looked at Anne. “Thanks to your pix.”
“And?”
“They all went home. Three to St. Denis, one to Senlis.”
“Senlis?” I almost laughed, dizzily exhausted. One more lovely French medieval town living around its grand cathedral.
“You’d be surprised,” he said. “They run the place.”
Where didn’t they? I suddenly felt bowed down, helpless.
Yet we had their license plates. “Who are they?”
An amazing amount of information had already been collected by ATS. After barely five hours we had their prints, phone conversations, DNA, the works. Most of all, we could now look for them on encrypted Telegram sites, the true heart of Islam.
“Nothing yet. Normal arrest records. Used to attend the same Salafist mosque in Stains –”
“Al Rawda,” Anne said.
“But both dropped out a year ago.”
“Because it got closed –”
“No beards, occasional visits to other mosques. One guy now drinks pastis, the other a little red wine. Both screw Western women ...”
“Taqiya,” I said.
“Most guys, when they drop fundamentalism, it’s taqiya.” This was the subterfuge taught in the Koran, that a believer can adopt infidel ways in order to dupe his enemies into thinking he poses no danger.
“You going to bring them in?”
“For speeding?” He leaned back, unwilling to bear bad news. “We have to prove guilt, Pono, before we grab someone.”
“Fuck that,” I said, too tired to think.
“Go home, you two,” Thierry said. “Get some sleep. Be back by two. There’ll be plenty to do.”
“You,” Anne nodded at him. “You ever sleep?”
He half-smiled. “I’ll sleep when we get our people back. And stop Mustafa.”
Already with so little sleep it was total confusion. You start with nothing and try to get somewhere. To narrow it down. To a kill.
Then you find everything you thought was right was wrong.
And vice versa.
Maybe because your enemies are smarter than you are.
—
NOW WE HAD MUSTAFA’S PHONE we could track him. “Whenever a phone is on,” Tomàs said, “it’s constantly seeking the nearest and strongest tower antennas and establishing connections. The phone’s serial number is tracked by the antennas, and that data allows us to triangulate someone within a meter or two, establish their movements, who they talk to, all that ...”
“Just like we do in the States.” I didn’t want him feeling superior about this.
“And like in the States, for some phones this only works if the person’s calling or messaging. But with smartphones and 4G, we can ping them and get a location. Or when someone uses any of the apps ... If there’s a crime we can check to see if a suspect was near the scene ... or we check the closest towers for all the phones near the scene at the time, and run them through our data base ... We don’t know where somebody is? We send him a phantom message, one he never sees, and the towers nearest him locate him.”
It was like that ancient evil goddess with infinite twirling arms who always knows where you are and can strike you down at any instant.
But that was okay with me as long as she stayed on our side.
Hawala
IT WAS 08:08 when we got to Commerce and hit the sack, but I couldn’t sleep. Drank from the milk carton in the fridge and chased it with a swig of vodka but still couldn’t sleep.
At times like this when I can’t figure what to do, I sometimes call my buddy Mitchell. Whereas I can’t find the button to start a computer, Mitchell can make the digital world sing for him, dance to his tune. And there is nothing out there he can’t find.
Nominally, Mitchell is a consultant to a division of Naval Intelligence that doesn’t exist. He spends his days and most of his nights in front of a bank of computers seeking our digital enemies: the rich Middle Easterners who fund Islamic terrorism, their money deals, their Facebook, Google, Twitter accounts and all those other media diseases that plague our modern brains.
And he tracks the thousands of hackers that assault our defense systems every day, picking the bad ones and hunting them down.
He can solve any IT problem you can imagine. He can find his way into anybody’s life, use their phone while it’s in their pocket or on their bedside table, take pictures with it, record what they say, and find out exactly where they were at every instant and what they were doing.
And if their computer’s hooked to the internet he can wander around inside it and copy, destroy, or alter anything he wants. Even if it’s not connected to the internet he can climb inside it using external radio waves, and hang out there, invisible. For the Navy, he patrols the borders of our virtual world, hunting interlopers, hackers, leakers and terrorists, the same way he and I once hunted al Qaeda in the nasty mountains of Afghanistan and Islamic jihadis in the gritty deathtraps of Mosul and Falluja.
He’d give anything to be like me, and I’d give anything not to be like him. Because in the northern Afghanistan hills he took the RPG meant for me, and on Oahu three years later I took the jail rap meant for him when I was caught with weed destined for him and other wounded buddies to ease their ongoing pain and PTSD. And thus, as mentioned, I ended up in Halawa Prison. But now I’m wandering free, surfing the oceans of the world and making love with lovely women, while Mitchell has no legs, no balls, and has to sit down to piss.
“What you up to?” I said. It was 08:13 in Paris, so 20:13 in Honolulu – exactly 12 hours apart. That meant he’d had his usual dinner of steak, papayas and Russian vodka, and was back patrolling his carpeted “Situation Room” with its twelve computers tracking nasties all over the world.
“I just found this kid, she’s thirteen, on her way back from Iraq to Brussels.”
“They’re all coming back.”
“We have pix of this one training with a suicide belt around her waist ...”
“What are you doing about her?”
“Just sent it upriver and they’re passing it to VSSE – Belgian intelligence.”
“Mitchell, I know what VSSE is –”
“They’ll detain her at Brussels Airport till some judge figures out what to do with her. Too bad, she’s a pretty kid – but same history: father’s devout and the mother can’t make a phone call or go outside without a male family member watching over her, and if somehow despite all this she manages to alert the authorities her male kin have the right to kill her.”
“I’m so sick of all this ...”
“Oh, and the girl’s pregnant. They married her to some jihadi who blew himself up ...” He took a hit of vodka. “Where are you? Why are you wasting my time calling me?”
“You should be so lucky I call you. I’m in Paris. Mustafa al-Boudienne has shown up.”
“No way. He’s dead. The Legion got him ...”
“That’s what we thought.”
“The Legion doesn’t lie,” Mitchell said.
“There wasn’t much left of his face ... Local guy who ID’d him made a mistake.” I updated Mitchell about Mack and Gisèle, all the other horrible things that had come down. Perhaps I should have told him before, but our old rule, never say what you don’t need to, got in my way.