by Mike Bond
“You shoulda told me sooner,” he muttered.
“It’s got bad real fast.” It had barely been a week since I’d come to Paris but seemed like forever.
“What you need?”
“Two things. One, can ATS find other numbers that ‘associate’ with Mustafa’s number that we do have, even if its GPS is switched off, and it’s used only once?”
He thought about this. “Sometimes. Depends on provider, type of phone, all that stuff.”
I gave him Mustafa’s number, the one he’d used just once to call Abdel, and all its details. “I’ll see what shows up,” he said, getting impatient.
“One other question.” I told him what Thierry and Harris had said about the financial and other links between French politicians and media and Middle East interests.
“Middle East interests? The ones who financed Al Qaeda? ISIS?”
“The Saudis, Qataris, Bahrainis – all of them.”
“If it started long ago, it’s almost impossible to track now.”
“You saying you can’t do it?”
He thought a moment. “No, I ain’t sayin that.”
“So how would you do it?” I said, enticing him into this. “If you had the chance?”
“Well, like we do now, we track financial transfers. From one bank to another. Every financial transfer leaves a trace.”
“Unless it’s hawala.” The Islamic money transfer process which leaves no trace, hawala involves middlemen who pay each other based on honor, and in which money is transferred but never actually moves. Originating perhaps in Biblical times, it was further developed by merchants along the Silk Road in the 8th century because of bandits pillaging their caravans.
“Even hawala,” Mitchell said. “I’ve got my ways.”
“What are you waiting for?”
“You think I sit around expecting you to call and hassle me with all your stupid provocations?”
“Mack and Gisèle could be dead now.”
“I’ll call you back,” he said irritatedly, and rang off.
I sat there worrying maybe I shouldn’t have bothered him with all this. But if the Saudis and other Wahhabis had been financing French politicians and media to assist in Islamic expansion in France, Mitchell would be the one to find out.
But how? And if we learned they had, what then?
The process of hawala is simple. Say, a banker in Riyadh tells a hawala broker there that he wishes to give ten million dollars for the growth of Islam in France. The broker then contacts another who has a colleague in Marseilles who contacts the destination accounts depending on passwords and other verbal agreements.
The hawala broker in France dispenses the proceeds less a small commission. The broker in Riyadh now owes him this amount, which may be erased by the next transaction.
Half the money may be for the construction of new mosques, a quarter for new madrassas and other Islamic schools, and a quarter to “protect the rights of Muslims in France,” meaning the financing of terrorist actions against the French people.
And nobody along the chain knows both the source and final destination of the funds. And no paper or digital trail exists.
Hawala brokers settle the debts between them often not by money but by other services or goods, whether it be a commission on the purchase of jet fighters for the Saudi Air Force, rockets for Palestinians, architectural services in Abu Dhabi, an apartment in Paris or a Capri estate.
If Mitchell thought he could unravel any hawala connections between Islamic funding and French politicians, he’d have to look not at financial transfers but at benefits accrued, a much more difficult process ... A French senator introduces a bill allowing people from certain Islamic countries automatic French visas, and two years later he retires to a newly-bought castle in the Dordogne – how to find the link?
—
THE BELL of St. John the Baptist up the Rue du Commerce had just tolled 11:00. We’d had a good three hours’ sleep and had finished a breakfast of pain au chocolates and lots of coffee. I cleared the crumbs off the wooden table and took out a pad of paper, wrote across the top, “What we know.”
“That’s a good start,” she said.
“Stop being negative.”
“Okay so I’ll list for you what we know.”
“Please do.”
“We know Mustafa’s in touch with Abdel who’s doing something with the other three guys. That all four attended Al Rawda Mosque in Stains when it was preaching hatred and working with ISIS heavies tied into Bataclan and other massacres ... All four seem to have adopted taqiya – we need more intel on them –”
“Tomàs is doing that.”
She sighed, rubbed her face. “Too many unanswered questions.”
I leaned forward, elbows on the table. “There’s just seven unanswered questions:
“What’s happened to Mack and Gisèle?
“What is Mustafa planning? What’s his link with Abdel?
“Who killed Bruno at Les Quatre Vents? And why? Because he could ID Mustafa?
“What is the Yasmina-Mustafa connection? She’d implied there was none. Was she lying?
“Who came after you but instead killed the Romanian girl?”
“What about the Iranian nuke? If there was one? How is it getting to Paris?
“Who was paying whom? Hawala?
“And last, why are your people getting in our way? Who at the top is trying to protect Mustafa?”
Anne sighed and dropped her pencil. “Everybody’s working on all of these, but we’re getting nowhere.”
“Not true. How long have we had this Mustafa-Abdel connection? A few hours. We have Mustafa’s pics now, we didn’t before –”
“And we’re no closer to finding Mack and Gisèle.”
“We will find them.” I somehow found the strength to say it. “I promise we will.”
In any investigation, the more you dig the more you turn up. I’d come to Paris to help get Mustafa. We didn’t have Mustafa yet, but now we had film, a phone, several sightings, and a growing list of his friends.
—
MUSTAFA NEVER reappeared that day on any street or public camera. According to his ATS tails, Abdel slept the sleep of the just in his St. Denis digs (at least he stayed inside, unless he had a tunnel out the back). His three Stains Mosque buddies had quiet days as well, except for one erupting into the parking lot behind his building to beat a large, ugly, chained dog with a stick.
“Someday that guy,” Tomàs said, “we feed him to that dog.”
At 18:05 we were still in an ATS view room when he got the call. He turned to me, eyes wide, a huge grin. “We have a positive for Gisèle!”
It nearly knocked me off my feet. “Alive?”
“Today, 14:40, she went into a Crédit Agricole in Melun with two guys and cleared out her and Mack’s account – twenty-seven thousand euros ...”
“Oh shit. Who were the guys?”
“Arabs, late twenties. Kept their faces from the cameras.”
“Oh shit oh shit!” I walked in circles trying to think. “Then what?”
“She vanished off the outside camera with one Arab on each side of her.”
“Your guys’ve talked to the tellers?”
“They say she seemed tired. Told them she and Mack were buying a sailboat from these guys, and they wanted cash ...”
“She’s drugged. Or ...”
“We think one of them had a gun on her. From what we can see.”
“No sign of Mack.”
“None.”
“They’re using him to control her. They have him somewhere, cutting him apart in front of her ... She’s trying to keep him alive.”
Five Seconds
WE WAITED TILL MIDNIGHT for another sighting but there was none, so Anne and I went home to Place de C
ommerce where I lay in bed thinking about Gisèle. How to be ready, if she was seen again. How to accelerate camera review, so there’s not a four-hour lapse between the pix and the ID.
In the morning we could go to Melun, talk to the tellers. But what more to learn? And ATS had doubled up on camera coverages: focusing on Gisèle and her two captors, but so far nothing.
Melun was only 12 miles by car from Fontainebleau. The other side of the Forest. The bank was only 10 miles from where Mustafa’s tan Passat with the Austrian plates had vanished.
ATS had also increased surveillance on Abdel and his three buddies, but there seemed no link. They were going about their usual business, Abdel selling opioids in St. Denis, calling his clients “brothers,” the other three on their daily jobs as vacuum cleaner salesman, halal driver, and second grade teacher.
One more dead alley.
Not true, I told myself. Abdel had spoken with Mustafa. Then he’d gone with the three others in two cars on this mad race to the Tower and back. What had been in the bag he’d carried over his shoulder? Why had he walked past us when we hid in the car, ready to kill and die?
Had he pretended not to see us?
—
HIGHWAY TO HELL on my phone. I twisted around in bed trying to find it without waking Anne.
“Another hit!” Tomàs said.
I glanced out the window at the dark street, then at my phone. 02:18. “Don’t you ever sleep?”
Anne sat up. “Merde!”
“Four hours and ten minutes ago, Gisèle was a front seat passenger in a red 2014 Clio headed toward Fontainebleau on the A6.”
“The two guys?”
“The driver beside her, the other guy behind her.”
“Now they have the money, maybe don’t need her anymore. Taking her somewhere to bury ...”
“We have a partial plate, 77.”
“Where’s that?”
“Fontainebleau.”
“How much?”
“The 77 and maybe three digits before it. There’s a hundred and thirty-eight red Clios in 77 that match that.”
I looked out the window inhaling the cool Paris night. “When will you know?”
“Ten, fifteen minutes. We’ll have a short list.”
I glanced at Anne, who was stepping into her jeans. “We’re headed to Fontainebleau.”
“That’s why I called.”
I threw water on my face and rubbed it with a dirty towel, gulped down last night’s cold coffee, holstered the Glock under my left arm and the Kabar on my right calf, and Anne and I tore in the Beast across the 15th to the A6 south toward Fontainebleau.
—
WE’D REACHED the forest above town when Thierry called. “Pono, we need you to ID Mustafa if he’s there, nothing more. We take it from there.”
“Promise me: you don’t kill him. Not till we have Mack and Gisèle. Agreed?”
“Of course. Of course.”
I didn’t believe him. Pocketed my phone and stared at the passing wall of black trees. Easy out here to get killed.
Anne was her usual 3 a.m. crabby self. “Imagine,” she said, “a few years ago we didn’t have cameras everywhere tracking everything. So why are crime rates going way up?”
“You know the answer to that,” I said.
The bud in my right ear came to life. “We’re on them,” Tomàs said. “Avon, four and a half hours ago. Turning into the parking of an HLM on the right off the traffic circle.”
Avon is the ugly, poorer and more ancient sister of Fontainebleau. In the middle of the forest that was once the private hunting reserve of King François the First and for centuries before that a Gallic encampment on the hills above the Seine upriver of Paris. An old town of ancient stone houses and surrounded by welfare towers for all the folks the French economy carries on its back. Some of whom are even on the S-List. Nothing beats feeding and sheltering the people who want to kill you.
“One guy in front?” I asked.
“With her, and the other guy in the back.”
“When?”
“Last night, 22:47.”
“They park there?”
“Right by the elevator. We’re trying to get updates from the building cameras, but it appears they took the stairs to the third floor, with Gisèle in the middle between the two guys. They turned left, went 22 meters and turned right into Apartment 49.”
“You don’t have newer pix? From the building?”
“Working on it.”
I tried to breathe. “We can’t kill her.”
“If we make a mistake, they will.”
“If we grab her, do they kill Mack?”
“If they haven’t already.”
“They’re using what’s left of him to run her.”
“So?” He waited. “You on board with this?”
I took a breath. “How fast can you line it up?”
“We’re already there.”
“You check with Harris?”
“No time. They could be killing her. Right now.”
“We have to get in fast. Make sure we don’t kill her.”
—
THEY SET IT UP the usual way. The TAC squad on both sides of the door with me and Anne behind. Four more guys who looked like wrestlers backing us, more down the corridor, more outside where you couldn’t see them. It was a long thin hallway with worn welcome mats in front of some doors, waning lights with bulbs missing, the whole sad migrant welfare syndrome.
We flashbanged in and had the two guys cuffed and up against the wall spitting with fear.
We ran back and forth through the three rooms but no Gisèle.
“Where is she?” I screamed at one guy, slammed him by the chin up against a wall, spittles of his fear down my knuckles. “Where is she?”
I was so angry I wasn’t giving him time to answer, my ears so numbed by the flashbangs I couldn’t hear. Anne smashed the other guy face-first into the wall, spun him around and clamped a hand on his throat. “Where is she?”
I shoved the tip of my Kabar against my guy’s left eye. I wanted to kill him so badly my wrist was shaking. “Where is she?” I said. “I give you five seconds.”
“He’s going to kill you!” Anne screamed at him. “If he doesn’t I will!”
“Two seconds,” I said.
Anne had the other guy on his knees pleading, “They take her, I don’t know where, they didn’t tell us –”
“Who didn’t tell you?” she yelled.
The guy looked up, eyes wide. “The Brother didn’t tell us.” He twisted his chin one way then the other. “This place, we were told to come and keep her, nothing more.”
“The Brother?” She wrenched his head sideways, an inch from breaking his neck. “Say it all. Now!”
“Please,” my guy begged. “Is all we know.”
Over her shoulder she pointed to my guy, the bedroom. “Take him in there and kill him.”
“We’re not supposed to –”
“Do it!” she yelled. “Now!” She gave her guy another wrench of his neck, handed him off to the TAC team and followed me as I crab-walked my guy into the bedroom, my knife at his throat. We tied him to the bed while he mumbled and begged till she yanked a wad of duct tape across his mouth and he devoted his attention to trying to breathe. She yanked down his pants and his tawdry underpants, yanked out his dick and scratched a line across it with her slim little razor knife as he screamed silently through the duct tape.
She shoved a pillow down over his mouth, waited till he stopped bucking and writhing, took it away. “If you don’t talk I will cut it off.” She pushed the pillow down tighter then released it. “Tell us where the man is and you live to stand trial.”
He broke easily but his story didn’t help. Nor did the other guy’s. We interrogated them separately; both sa
id they’d been asked by two “brothers” at one of the four mosques near Melun to do a favor. The mosque was Salafist so these guys didn’t dare say no. The favor was to stay in this empty unit and watch over a person being brought from Paris. They’d waited since yesterday; about three hours ago the other two guys showed up with a woman whose face was covered and who was very quiet. After an hour one of her captors got a call that made him angry. He swore at the other one for a while then they left with the woman, one man going over the garden wall while the other wrestled Gisèle toward the Clio.
Gisèle was gone again, probably for good. And the two guys who had driven her from Paris in the red Clio were gone too, they who knew where she’d been and where she was now. And maybe where Mack was.
—
“WHAT was in that phone call,” Anne asked as we sat benumbed in the Beast trying to figure out what had gone wrong, “that made the one guy so angry they took Gisèle away?”
“Had to be a tipoff. That it wasn’t safe, that place. Or that we were coming.”
“How, how did they know?”
“Picked up the transmission? Or it’s somebody on our side?”
Whatever the reason, Gisèle and her two captors had come and gone. ATS was dusting the apartment for prints of the two guys who’d come with Gisèle, but that was a long shot.
And we’d gained nothing.
But her captors had gained a lot: now they knew how close we were. And they’d figure why. And wouldn’t make that mistake again.
Don’t Get Caught
WE’D COME SO CLOSE to grabbing Gisèle, then blew it because of the time lapse between when an image is picked up on one of the thousands of cameras in the Paris area and when it finally pops up in your in-box. Provided you have the right kind of in-box.
Plus the time it takes for you to get to where the action is.
But really, we’d blown it because Gisèle’s keepers got a call that we were closing in on the Avon HLM. They decided to take her, not kill her. Why? Where were they now?
Where was our leak?
Not me. I’d been scanned multiple times by the best, and nothing was found. I had a new, clean phone. The Beast was clean, as far as modern technology could tell.