Goodbye Paris

by Mike Bond

  I glanced at the Tower, nearly invisible in fog but for its beacons like lost lighthouses. “Okay then. You right, me left.”

  We’re almost the same height so we looked straight into each other’s eyes. Hers were black and flashing; she exhaled a ferocious intensity that made me love her and fear for her. “You see something, you tell me,” I said. “You don’t do a fucking thing.”

  She gave me a feral grin. “If it’s Mustafa?”

  “Not without me.”

  She laughed and we slipped into the dark alleys of trees on each side of the Champ de Mars, the Tower rising like a dark steel god far overhead, the long grassy park naked in moonlight, pebbles on the path glowing like crystals. There were the usual drunks sleeping against the trees, hustlers doing hash deals in dark corners, a hooker arguing with four African guys, a few illegals pandering toy Towers to the last straggling tourists.

  No Mustafa. Just the same sad travesty of this beautiful place where cops don’t go at night. Stink of piss and stale beer, rotting leaves and rain, the Field of Mars, sacred to the God of War. And the Tower high above it all.

  “Nothing,” I said into my radio.

  “Me neither,” she said.

  “In the dream, where’d you see him?”

  “Over here by the pony rides.”

  “I’ll circle to you.”

  Seven minutes later I came up to her. “I’m an idiot.” She leaned against me.

  “Let’s go home.”

  “Yeah.” She nestled against me. “We haven’t fed Stranger.”

  “Imagine the trouble we’d be in, if we forgot his dinner ...”

  Blood of Jerusalem

  IT WAS 05:45 when Thierry called. “Nous sommes les idiots bénis de Dieu,” he said. We are the blessed idiots of God.

  “How’s that?” I mumbled, trying to wake up.

  “We have an amazing match.”

  “We do?”

  “You and her,” he said. “Get in here.”

  —

  IT’S EASY WHEN you’ve had only a couple of nights with no sleep to hang in there as if everything’s fine and you’re just a little fatigued. By the time it gets to four days with no sleep you’re done. By the time it’s two weeks, three weeks, you’re living on borrowed life, unaware, a zombie crushed by time. But you keep going.

  At 06:47 we were there. Thierry buzzed in a minion with coffees and croissants. “Those phones,” he said when the minion left, “associated with Mustafa’s?”

  I tried to remember. “The three other phones physically close to his, like an aide, a wife ...”

  “One of them has had seven recent conversations with Rachid.”

  “You correlated dates?” Anne said.

  “Of course. The first call from this phone was May 25.”

  “When Mack called me in Tahiti.”

  “That explains it,” Thierry said. “They had Mack’s phone ...”

  “That you guys were supposed to keep clean –”

  “Mack had been tracking Mustafa. That’s how they got him.”

  “Then that’s how they got me.” I was so furious my stomach came burning up my throat; I needed to walk out in the hall and punch someone.

  “The second call’s when you landed at CDG.”

  “Before they tailed me from the airport.”

  “To Passage Landrieu, then to Mack and Gisèle’s.”

  “But they already knew where that was ...”

  “Third call,” Thierry said, “was after Pono visited Les Quatre Vents.”

  “When Rachid warned Mustafa to stay away.” I took a breath, trying to sort this out. “How’d he know?”

  “That’s what we don’t know.”

  Of course the other four calls fit in perfectly: at 02:17 the night Bruno was killed. The next was two hours before we crashed the door at the Avon HLM where Gisèle had been held – the call the kidnappers had received that made them angry. The third was fifteen minutes after I’d chased the guy with the Broncos hat across the rooftops. The last was from Mustafa to Rachid, telling him his nephew was a faithful believer and not to worry.

  That’s how they speak of young men about to die in a suicide attack.

  “You tracking the nephew?”

  “He’s skipped parole. We find him, we bring him in.”

  I imagined Mustafa hovering, smiling in the shadows, swinging his cleaver shiny with new blood.

  I closed my eyes. “Rachid’s phone. What else is on it?”

  “Another throwaway. Four other calls ...”

  “Yeah?”

  “Pizza.”

  Anne snickered. “Pizza’s not halal.”

  “Neither is Rachid.”

  “He’s an imam and he doesn’t do halal?”

  “Taqiya.”

  “The next call?” I said.

  Thierry chuckled. “To his mistress. Normally, we’re learning, he calls her on a different phone.”

  “He already has three wives ...”

  “Hey, give the guy a break.”

  “Who’s this mistress?”

  “Élysée Pétain.”

  “No!” Anne said.

  “Yes.”

  “Damn! We’re way out of our league. When was the last time you balled the top anchor on public TV?”

  Thierry yawned. “Happens all the time.”

  Anne turned to me. “This fake peacemaker, this taqiya guy, he’s fucking the biggest mouth on television.”

  “It’s called oral sex, in case you didn’t know,” Thierry snickered.

  “You have her?” I said.

  “She’s caviar ultra-left – that whole mix of far-left media, university fanatics, anti-Semites, anarchists and Socialists. They call for killing the police, protest what they call Islamophobia, organize demonstrations and attacks on the government, all that. They say young Arabs need to express their discontent by spraying graffiti over every wall, but don’t you dare tag the lovely stone walls of their own high-class abodes.”

  “This is where politics, media, money and sex all come together,” Anne said. “She’s not only a talking head but politically well-connected ...” Anne thought a moment. “And she’s got a huge viewer base – and the government doesn’t want to mess with that.”

  I thought of the mysterious groups that had made it possible for Islam to so quickly conquer so much of France. “This is the best news we’ve had in a long time.”

  “What,” Anne said, “that France has a suicidal left?”

  “Let’s follow these bastards.” I exhaled happily. “Follow them all. They’re going to lead us somewhere.”

  “Rachid’s two other calls?” Anne said.

  “First was the cleaning lady,” Thierry said. “Rachid wanted her to come in early.”

  “The other?”

  “A hooker. Last night.”

  “To crack his place we work the cleaning lady. Did you talk to the hooker?”

  “Local Tunisian girl, goes by Mimette. Said he couldn’t get it up, wanted anal but she said no. He offered her two hundred euros if he could burn her cunt with a cigarette. Said then he could get it up.”

  “She said no?”

  “Apparently not.”

  —

  “YOUR IRANIAN,” Peter said from Moscow, “could be trouble.”

  “I told you ...”

  “You guys being so backward and all, you probably don’t know about Directional Control.”

  “Heavens, Peter, yes, I actually do know about Directional Control.”

  “We’ve caught it twice on people trying to board our regional airlines, once Kazan, once Ural. Somebody gets on with this little video game, and with a matching transponder on the ground he can take over control of the plane and drive it to that transponder ... There’s noth
ing the pilots can do ... I’m sure you know of this –”

  “Sadly, yes.”

  “This Iranian, you sent us his stuff ... In Teheran and Pakistan he has developed these tools.”

  “Directional Control?”

  “Did I not just say that?”

  “He could be on a plane and direct it somewhere.”

  “Is not what I said?”

  —

  WE GOT THE LATEST from Gisèle at 09:18 that morning, in the same backward hand:

  This is being dictated to me. Since Pono seems to like Les Andelys we do the swap there. He must be there at ten to nine tonight. Or Mack and I die. We send a precise location when he reaches Les Andelys. If anyone besides Pono shows up, or if he’s wired, these guys cut my throat in front of the church that Richard the Lionheart built with the blood of Jerusalem.

  I tried to figure what this meant. For sure Mustafa had no intention to let Gisèle go. She’d been kept alive to lure me, or to trade for something else, and once that was done she was dead.

  And the Richard the Lionheart jab was just to remind us how ancient this war was, and that they were going to win. Or had they overheard us somehow, the day that Anne and I first drove to Les Andelys?

  Mustafa’s attempt to lure me in could also mean that Mack was still alive, if Mustafa’s plan was to execute us together.

  But why not just kill each of us when he could? Maybe because we were a stain on his past, the two infidels that got away – horrible to think of all the poor people who hadn’t. And we were Special Forces, whom he hated for the severe damage and casualties we’d done to his terrorist militia, till we’d finally driven them into the desert and a Foreign Legion ambush.

  And somehow tied in his head to Allah’s will, that much he’d said during one execution, grinning down on us with his sweaty finger on the trigger.

  I had barely twelve hours to figure this out. A problem with no solution.

  Mustafa didn’t need Gisèle. He’d kill her once he had me.

  Would I die for Gisèle? Of course, that’s what soldiers do.

  The difference was that my dying wouldn’t keep her alive.

  —

  “WE HAVE TO SAY NO,” Anne said. “We don’t have time to set up. We can’t cover you. You’ll both be killed.”

  I saw Gisèle with her lovely grin and mischievous eyes, her gorgeous golden hair. She who cared for everyone.

  How do you choose among your friends which of them should die?

  If we did the swap Gisèle might live. But Mack and I would die.

  Anne, I don’t want to die. Because I’d lose you.

  The Homicidal Mind

  IN SPECIAL FORCES you automatically learn reverse thinking. It’s not taught, it comes from experience. You identify a goal and imagine being there, then figure how you got there, going backward step by step.

  As always, asking what can go wrong at each step, and what if they all go wrong together? As they usually do.

  An exercise old as the first humans. The homicidal mind, working things out.

  So now I tried to imagine Mustafa in a police van, manacled, in a jail cell, his hopeless face staring between the bars.

  Even better: his dying eyes gazing into mine.

  But I could find no way to envision it.

  —

  “ANOTHER MATCH!” Thierry charged out of his office, pulling me in.

  I stumbled in, still stunned by Gisèle’s latest message and by what Peter had just said.

  “The red Clio” – Thierry jabbed a finger at his screen – “was a 2014 Handi Rental then got bought by a woman in Melun then got stolen ...”

  My chest felt crushed, still thinking of Gisèle’s message and Peter’s news; I couldn’t breathe. “I don’t care who owned it.”

  “... We ran lots of DNA. And found someone bumped their nose against the driver’s side window. Anyone who knew what he’s doing would’ve wiped it off. But this guy didn’t.”

  I sat, watched him. “Who?”

  “Tariq,” Thierry smiled. “He of the broken jaw and two missing teeth.”

  I exhaled. “It’s enough to bring him in –”

  “But do we?”

  I leaned at him. “We know Tariq was in on Bruno’s killing. Now we know he was one of Gisèle’s keepers.”

  “And he’s Abdel’s brother.”

  “Abdel who talks to Mustafa.”

  “Who talks to Rachid.”

  “Who talks to Élysée and all that crowd ...”

  It was beginning to tie together. Slowly we were drawing a net around Mustafa. But we didn’t have time for slowly, not with the Iranian bombmaker circling closer, an attack coming on the Tower, and Mack and Gisèle on the knife edge.

  Though for the first time I had a slight feeling of optimism: We’re closing in ... “Let’s get him,” I said.

  Thierry leaned back in his chair. “Think it through.”

  I paced to the window and stared angrily at the rain-drenched courtyard, the sad Paris sky, the gray stone walls. “Two options.”

  “I’m all ears.”

  “One, we only bring in Tariq. We’ve got him on two deals, Gisèle and Bruno. Or Two, we also bring in Nassim for the keffiyeh DNA, and Abdel as a potential co-conspirator.”

  “We still need an Abdel-Rachid link.” Thierry stood beside me staring out the rain-slick window; I watched his half-reflection in the glass, his face bitter with fear of the losses to come.

  “What the fuck,” I sighed, “do we do?”

  “Nothing.”

  I nodded, turned from the window. Anyone we grabbed would never give us Mack and Gisèle, nor Mustafa. Mack and Gisèle would die and Mustafa would back off to wait a while and hit us again. And none of these bastards would even do time.

  —

  “I DO LOVE YOU, my chicken ...” It was a gravelly deep voice, recorded perfectly by ATS surveillance.

  “What are you going to do to me,” she said, “tomorrow night?”

  “I won’t tell you now. You’ll have an orgasm even thinking about it.”

  “Dirty Arab.”

  “I love it when you say that.”

  “That’s why I say it.”

  “Dear friend, I do have a small favor to ask –”

  “How many times have I told you,” she giggled. “I won’t do anal.”

  “You,” he chuckled. “You are funny.” His voice softened. “Can you put out some more good news for us?”

  “What do I get?”

  “You already know, little chicken, what you get ... Here it is: I’m hearing, through the grapevine of course, a big Islamic event is coming very soon. Even bigger than Notre Dame. A protest against all this discrimination against us ...”

  She sighed. “It’s about time.”

  “You must remind everyone about why we’re forced to do these things, because of the yoke on our necks. The police violence, the discrimination, the prisons, the refusal to ban pork or teach our language in their schools ...”

  “Everything you do makes things better.”

  “You can’t source me on this, remember. It may be bigger than you think.”

  “Good.”

  “I’ll give you more background soon. But to highlight our grievances, all the terrible things French culture does to ours, how they’re arresting our young men, they don’t respect our religion ...”

  “It’s true ...”

  “Can you send something out tomorrow?” His voice grew seductive. “Like what would happen if Paris got hit by a meteor? But no one knew why?”

  “I’ll send it out. But you better be here tomorrow night.”

  “I’ll be there ten-thirty, maybe eleven.”

  “I’ll wait up, you big rooster. I’m going to bang your brains out.”

  �
��Inshallah!”

  “Inshallah!” The phone died.

  “His voice,” I said. “When I chased those two guys in the Forest. The guy with the Maserati.”

  “Rachid, last night,” Tomàs smiled. “Speaking to his beloved Élysée Pétain.”

  “Does he say the same stuff,” I said, “to his three wives?”

  Tomàs made a sour face. “I can you show you pictures. They’re fat.”

  I checked my phone: “So what’s the big Islamic event that’s coming soon? When would that be?”

  “Like if a meteor hit Paris?” Thierry checked his phone. “According to Rachid, about eleven-thirty tonight.”

  —

  IN MUSTAFA’S MOSUL PRISON Mack and I had had no way to escape. Amid intensive security in an extremely hostile environment, we were taken out to be killed almost daily, then taunted with death and returned to our cells.

  It was, I think, the seventh day. That’s what, in any case, the later investigation determined. For me and Mack until then was an unending time of sorrow and pain, one torture after another, a rain of hatred poured down on us.

  In SF we’d been taught the usual E&E regimes, Escape and Evasion, but they were little help. We were in two different cells – cells are not the word, they were four-foot tall concrete coffins in which you couldn’t sit, lie down or stand. You squatted with your chin on your knees and your arms crossed or hanging along your sides; after a while your knees began to hurt so bad you couldn’t stand even if that option were available. They thought it was funny, our jailers, and when they took us out to use the hole in the back yard they would kick us in the knees to prove how funny it was.

  I had no contact with Mack, no way to reach anyone but the bearded men guarding my door, and then of course Mustafa and his buddies when they took us out to cut our throats or shoot us.

  There was a water leak down the side of my little coffin that made a steady plunk plunk plunk on the floor next to my left foot. It was comforting, that sound, almost friendly like a ticking clock. By comparing it to my pulse, which in resting situations is about forty-eight beats a minute, I figured it made about sixty drops a minute, or three thousand six hundred beats an hour. In this way I measured the passing time, tried to take my mind off the agony in my knees and the pounding headache from being hit by the rifle butt.