by Mike Bond
Anne? No way, same as me.
Thierry? An ancient comrade of many combats. My gut told me what I already knew: impossible. Though I had to admit I understood him less and less.
And how much was he under the government’s thumb? Sworn to secrecy, unable to refuse?
Was it someone else at DGSE? In all the hidden back rooms and prohibited areas at DGSE, who was really pulling the strings? Did Thierry even know?
And how much did Harris really know?
“What we think,” Tomàs said, “is maybe our phones are getting hit, or calls between you and us ...”
“Or ATS and you,” Anne said.
“How can we work without phones?” Thierry answered. “Until we find which one ...”
Without our phones we’d be even more handicapped. Not only could we not find our enemies, we’d lost the tools to do so.
—
“MUSTAFA GOT A CALL from an unknown number,” Tomàs said. “It seems in the Seventh Arrondissement, but we can’t locate it.”
I rubbed my eyes and tried to see if it was still dark outside. “When?”
“One-forty-eight this morning. Then he called Abdel.”
“What’d they say?”
“Nothing. Ten seconds of silence, then hung up. Possibly a signal?”
“It was about when Gisèle’s captors got that call ...”
“And then another four hours later –”
I took in a breath. “What are they doing now?”
“Abdel’s been staying at home and his three buddies are too.”
“Mustafa?”
“From the few hits we get he’s mostly in the area around La République or out in St. Denis, but we don’t know if those are false, or from a device someone else is using ...”
“We still don’t know shit.”
“Though we seem to be dropping further behind, we’re getting some answers. Mustafa and Abdel, or their devices, are in contact again.”
“Yeah, sure. And we just lost Gisèle ...”
—
09:49, A SUNNY Paris morning. I was half asleep, Anne beside me on her stomach in a red negligée writing on a piece of paper on the cover of a book about Paris Impressionists.
It was time, again, to list what we did and didn’t know.
“So far ...” I spat a feather. “We’ve lost at every turn.”
“No!” She shook her head angrily. “We have Mustafa’s pix and phone –”
“A phone he’s never used before. That’s probably in the Seine now.”
“No, because he just got a mystery call from the Seventh Arrondissement then called Abdel.”
“We still have no proof. That he and Gisèle-Mack are connected.”
“Yes we do, because Mack was tracking Mustafa before he was grabbed ...” She bit her lip. “What did it have to do with that welfare tower in Les Andelys where Mack went? Yet no one says they’ve seen him.”
“Somebody’s lying.”
“I can’t figure any connections. It’s driving me nuts.”
I sighed, lay back, exhausted. Stared with gritty eyes at the dirty white ceiling. We’re alive such a short time, why torment each other? I imagined being a Jew in the Ukraine in 1943, or an Israeli today. When the prospect of a peaceful life was not in the picture.
I yawned, rubbed my eyes, thought of her slim body under the red negligée and wondered if I had the energy to make love.
“If what Thierry’s two jihadis said is true,” she said, “about Mustafa’s Martel plan to attack the Tower, then his phone link with Abdel, followed by Abdel’s high-speed trial run on the Tower, is a first-degree connection.”
I slid my hand up the lithe muscles of her back and around her strong shoulder. “You’re a first-degree connection ...”
“Mustafa and Abdel,” she turned toward me, “plan to attack the Tower. Mack and Gisèle were grabbed while he was tracking Mustafa. Yasmina was connected to Mustafa and also knew where Mack and Gisèle were, before she blew herself up. And Bruno at Les Quatre Vents was killed because he identified Mustafa. Am I right?”
“Maybe. So who called Mustafa last night? Before Mustafa called Abdel? Before somebody snatched Gisèle out of the place in Avon, two hours before we raided it?”
“The gods,” she sighed. “Maybe the gods know.”
—
BY 11:05 that morning we were back at ATS finishing the latest To Do List. Most of it would be done by ATS with other police teams plus DGSI and Thierry’s teams too.
1.Track down the two goons who killed the Romanian girl thinking she was Anne. Find out from them who ordered the hit.
2.Cover Abdel and friends. Check their networks. See where they lead us.
3.Keep looking for Mustafa. Scan faces everywhere he might be and hook them up instantaneously. As ATS refined its grid of locations where he’d been ID’d, they would deploy agents on the streets there, to grab him if he was ID’d again.
4.Keep looking for Gisèle and Mack on every camera, particularly in and out of Paris. Interrogate the bank tellers again, see if there’s anything more they remember.
5.Keep interrogating the two guys we’d caught in the Avon welfare tower. So far they knew nothing, were low-level nobodies. The police had sampled their peckers however and both had recently had sex with the same woman. The cops expected the DNA would come back Gisèle’s. For this they could do ten years. Or if they got a sympathetic judge, nothing.
6.Bruno’s murder: Paris police were doing door-to-door around the St. Martin canal, but so far no one had seen or heard a thing.
7.Yasmina: A test would soon ID her explosives. ATS was digging into her past, her networks, and where did they cross Mustafa’s or any of these others?
8.Mustafa’s phone: As Tomàs had explained, they were getting hits from cell towers activated by Mustafa’s phone, building a map that seemed centered in the area around La République. ATS was now checking other numbers that “associated” with the one we had.
9.Of these “associated” phone numbers was one Mustafa had called seven times, and that had called him five times, that we couldn’t track. It appeared to be located in the Seventh Arrondissement of Paris, but was blocked and we could get no closer. “We find this number, and we’ll know who’s giving Mustafa directions,” Tomàs said. “Or who he’s telling what to do,” I countered.
10.The police and the Army would increase security on the Tower, Air France, and incoming Middle East flights. Maybe that would slow things down.
11.As always, there were three worries: One, had our interviews at the Les Andelys welfare towers spooked Mack’s contacts there? Who were they? Two, did our smash-down in the Avon welfare tower warn the people holding Gisèle, and now we’d never find her? And Three, how badly could we fail?
—
“THIS INFORMATION’S out of control,” Mitchell said. “The French are very good at encryption, their mathematics is superb, their cohesion and team spirit formidable, their penetration excellent. But think how complex their connections – places where France has high-level intelligence links. From Morocco and Algeria to Sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, Iran, Pakistan and China ... Russia, too, Russia more than most. Some of these connections France has to keep in the loop – at least partially – on lots of their own operations.”
“The Russians?” I said. “You think that’s it?”
“Nah. They’ve been very grateful for our recent CIA feeds. We warned them of a major massacre in Saint Pete before it happened. Saved probably hundreds of lives. Putin even publicly thanked us ...”
“As you know we have leaks too,” he continued. “We share with the Brits and they share with some folks we don’t want to share with and the shit comes down the line and we can’t catch it all.”
“I don’t have the clearances, but is that what you
’re doing now?”
“Most of it. My little deck of cards gets hacked about every seven seconds. You know how few of us there are to man the walls.”
“How much gets through?”
He sniffed. “Very little, actually.” Thought a moment. “But every year’s triple the previous year’s hacks. Don’t know how much longer we can keep up.”
So instead of spending his time in the desert of digital death hunting down our adversaries, Mitchell was now fighting a defensive war against the growing thousands of hackers at our gates.
When once he and I, free as cave warriors, had hunted our enemies across the desperate frigid ridges of Afghanistan, now were we all battling a rearguard action, and the enemy already within the walls?
I could tell myself no, don’t worry. But couldn’t stop.
—
“YOUR ORDERS ARE to tell me where the Hell you are!” Harris, raspy and belligerent as ever, on my phone.
“I may work with you, but I don’t take orders anymore. Not from you. Not anyone.”
“You signed up for this!”
“I’m here to protect my country. My friends. Nothing else.”
“What the Hell are you doing on the Place du Commerce?”
“Had to hide out somewhere. Decided to keep it to ourselves.”
“Good luck with that ...”
“Remember what you’ve told me, sooner or later the watcher is watched.”
“Your French pals had you wired in hours. Gave us a feed.”
“That’s reassuring.”
I told him about the goatfuck of the Avon welfare tower smashdown, how we’d missed Gisèle, the leak somewhere ... Bruno’s murder, the camera hits on Mustafa near La République, Abdel and his buddies and our high-speed trip to the Tower.
And I got the impression he hardly cared, his mind was elsewhere. Or he already knew this.
And as I’d wondered before, maybe Harris had brought me to Paris as bait for Mustafa. Was I, as that old saying goes, “just a pawn in their game?”
Since the French had found our new place on the Place du Commerce, maybe Mustafa had too. Or had somebody passed it along to him?
It’s dangerous when even your friends can be enemies. When even an ally might cut your throat.
—
SHE SLID THE CANDLE nearer to relight the pipe, leaning on her elbows, her silky hair tumbling down her shoulders like a midnight waterfall, breasts loose against the sheet. I stroked her back, up and down her vertebrae like little seashells, the soft lithe flesh, the muscles around the shoulder blades. The velvet strength of her. She took a hit from the pipe and passed it, rolled onto her side, eyes on mine. “This sucks,” she whispered.
“The hash? It’s good.”
“That we have to limit fucking to a few moments here and there. Because what really matters is Mack and Gisèle. And catching Mustafa. And there’s no time for even five minutes ... When all I want to do is make love with you.”
“I thought that’s what we have been doing.”
She scratched fingernails lightly across my chest. “It’s spooky, but when I saw Mustafa in my dream it was just like that video. I recognize even the trash on the sidewalk, the backs of other people. The For Sale sign in that dress store window ...”
I laid back on the dirty sheets, dizzy with exhaustion. “Do they go anywhere, these dreams?”
She chuckled. “I dreamt of fucking you. Before we ever did.”
I snuggled my face into her lovely hair. “How was it?”
She reached between my legs, gave it a nice caress. “About like it is.”
“As bad as that ...”
She laced a thigh around mine. “As bad as that ...”
“You should have another dream about Mustafa. See where he is now.”
“Afterwards.” She leaned forward, eyes in mine. “We go somewhere? Even just a few days?”
“Sure. Afterwards.” I brushed her upper lip with mine; she was so enticing, the softness of her, her musk, the look in her eyes when she came down on top of me. But all these wonderful things seemed criminal, a sin, till we fixed what was wrong.
Never before in my life had I felt guilty making love.
Stranger
HE CAME IN through the bathroom window, as in the Beatles song. He was tall and rangy, his ears half-chewed off and his muzzle braided with scars. He even had scars on his chest, from which I deduced it must have been one Hell of a catfight. Or he beat up a Doberman.
He was that kind of cat. Long-legged, intensely affectionate. Would never eat without first purring and rubbing his muzzle against our faces, to thank us for the meal.
He was not even an alley cat. Far worse, he was a roof cat.
The kind who survives on the rooftops of Paris. Amid all this lovely scenery of haphazard tilting tile and slate mansards with the Eiffel Tower in the distance – the postcard you see in all the Paris gift shops – these roofs harbor thriving condominiums of rats, mice, pigeons and other deplorables, and a rooftop cat’s job is to get rid of them.
This he does by scrambling after a wily long-tailed rat across rain-slippery gutter at two a.m., with a 200-foot drop at the edge, or up a near-vertical slate mansard with the same drop below. The kind of guy who leaps across lightwells between two buildings to snag an unwary pigeon. Who will cross a kilometer of rooftops, streets, and lightwells toward the fragrance of a female in heat.
And kill any other male who shows up. And defend his own rooftops to the death.
We called him Stranger. As in Camus’ L’Étranger, whose protagonist is Meursault, Leaps over Death, which this cat did every day on the rooftops. And as in Stranger in a Strange Land – he who is king among the aliens.
Though like most males all he really wanted to do was make love, hunt, eat, wander, and sleep. That’s what’s known as the good life. What we lost in the Garden of Eden.
Normally he arrives about 02:00, just as Anne and I are falling asleep. Diffident and anxious not to intrude, he leaps down from the bathroom window onto the toilet lid, patters on soft feet along the hall to the bedroom and hops on the bed, arches his back and kneads his claws into the bedspread till she goes to the fridge and digs out some hamburger and milk and puts it on the floor.
Usually up before six, we were on the phone or video or out on the streets or at ATS or DGSE before seven. On these early risings Stranger lounged on the bedspread sleepily digging his claws. He’d yawn and rub his eyes with a forepaw as if to say I can’t believe you’re really doing this. And go back to sleep.
We gave him scraps of foie gras and duck rillettes and raw grass-fed beef.
And what he gave us was the gift of loving company when all seemed lost.
—
“THE RED CLIO,” Tomàs said, “was stolen two days ago in Melun. We found it this morning in a side street.”
It was 07:20. In his office, Anne and me, both so tired we could hardly sit straight.
It made me furious that Tomàs could go so long without sleep and we couldn’t.
“They took her there and met another car,” I said.
“And left the Clio,” Anne added wearily.
“We’re checking the whole neighborhood. So far no one saw a thing ...”
“Of course.” She shook her head.
“Prints?” I said, trying to be upbeat.
“The usual mess, takes a while to sort out. Not likely much we can use. But we’re checking all the DNA for matchups in our base ...”
“How long?”
“Could take a week, no matter how fast we go.”
—
“SO HOW did France get overrun so fast?” I asked Harris in his office later that morning as a bright sun cleared the rooftops of Faubourg St. Honoré and literally poured in the window. I’d given him the latest on Gisèle and the smashdown of
the Avon HLM.
“Overrun?”
“Thirty years ago there were hardly any Muslims in France, and now they’re nearly fifteen percent of the population and growing fast. How did this happen?”
He shrugged, always a man of few words. “You know the usual answer. When France left Algeria in ‘62 it stranded millions of pro-French Algerians, all now at risk of being slaughtered by the new regime. So many were brought to France, a million maybe. Then the government decided to let in anyone from a former colony, and then succeeding governments allowed them to bring in their families, and every Arab is related, so they say ...”
“And what’s not the usual answer?”
“Some folks wanted it to happen.”
—
“I MAY HAVE SOMETHING.” Mitchell, as usual very laid back, but you can always tell from that hesitation in his voice that he’s onto something. Like how you ease out your breath when you’re aiming at someone from 600 yards and trying for a head shot.
I’ve always wondered what it feels like, a head shot.
It was mid-morning in Paris, late evening in Honolulu.
“What?” I said quickly, not wanting to wait.
“Our friend Thierry?”
“Like I asked you –”
“When I first dug into it, via his phone, personal computer, bank accounts, I was blown away, it was so fucking obvious –”
“What?”
“He was taking twenty thousand euros a month in cryptocurrencies from a bank in Qatar – right out in the open ... On his home computer he was hitting jihadi sites –”
“That’s for his work.”
“Nuh-uh. You look at the content and it’s clear it’s not in his job description. The way he quoted the Suras, stuff like that. Bad news.”
I waited. This was all somehow explainable. “Even worse,” Mitchell said, “Holy Christ, he had seven calls to a St. Denis number that had three calls last week to Abdel.”
“No way,” I said morosely.
“And one call to guess who?”
“Don’t tell me.”
“Your friend Mustafa. On that same damn phone he used in the post office, when you guys first got the link.”