“Shafer sent you?” Good news at last.
“Ellis, right? He called me from Virginia, talked me into it. Even though he sounds like he’s about nine hundred. Idiot.”
“He’s hardly that.”
“I meant me. For listening.”
“So he knows you’re in Villepinte.”
“Yeah. But there’s a prison here, too, he might think I’m there.” Coyle explained how he’d searched for Wells, and how on his last call with Shafer he’d said he was going to the prison. “Then I looked again, this place was on the way. I decided I’d hit it first. Stupid. Should have told him.”
“He’ll figure it. He’ll be here tomorrow morning.”
“Unless they arrest him, too.”
“If Americans keep showing up, they’ll have to listen.” But Wells saw Coyle’s point. The guards at the prison wouldn’t have heard about Wells. Shafer could be abrasive. And the guards would be on edge. They might hold Shafer on general principles, at least until the funeral was done.
On the other hand, Shafer would have his diplo passport and CIA identification, and he’d surely be on his best behavior. Wells wondered at the odds, gave up.
“I think I’ve earned a full explanation, Mr. Wells.”
“Fair enough.” Wells walked him through the last months, holding nothing back.
“You get your money’s worth,” Coyle said when Wells was done.
“I try.”
“You really think you’re going to find the answer in this garage?”
“Shafer’s theory about the Puma wanting to keep his stuff close makes sense. And I think they’re going for the funeral. The world’s fattest target.”
“With security to match.”
“They must have some trick.” Though Wells couldn’t imagine what.
They sat in silence, the grim companionable silence of fighting men stuck behind the lines.
Outside, the sun disappeared. Wells made his ablutions and prayed. Coyle stared at the wall. He seemed embarrassed.
“You a Christian, Staff Sergeant?” Wells said afterward.
“I used to play baseball, Mr. Wells. Center field for the Long Beach State Dirtbags. Our actual name.” Coyle looked around the cell like he was back in California, waiting to shag flies. “I was good, too. I mean, I was never going pro, couldn’t hit a slider to save my life, but I was all right. I was twenty, my little brother was twelve. Lincoln, real old-school Negro name. Worse than Winston. I don’t know what my parents were thinking. Sweetest kid in the world, and he loved me. Came to every game. This old bike he’d bought himself with his chores money so he didn’t have to beg rides. Always there in time for my first at bat.”
Coyle’s voice was a whisper, but his dark eyes screamed a thousand decibels. “See where I’m going with this?”
Wells waited.
“Some jackass in a Buick. Three blocks from the stadium. Ran a yellow.” Coyle spoke in telegraph rhythm now, a price on every word. “Said he wasn’t texting. I know he was. Nine-month suspended sentence.”
“I’m sorry.”
“My parents got churchy. God’s plan. Not me.”
“You quit baseball, too?”
The question seemed to break the spell on Coyle’s voice. “As a matter of fact, I did. Week after we put him in the ground, I found a recruiting station. My parents asked me not to. I told ’em God would look after me same as Lincoln.”
“You shouldn’t have said that.”
“I know.” Coyle closed his eyes. “I don’t normally tell people, especially ones I’ve just met. You struck me as the kind who could hear it without saying something stupid. Worst is when they ask me if I have other brothers.”
“So? Do you?”
Coyle’s eyes snapped open.
“That would be way better. Spares. Am I right? Tell me I’m right.”
“Go to hell, Mr. Wells.” But Coyle was smiling. Sort of.
“Too soon?”
“’Til the day I die, it’ll be too soon.” Wells watched Coyle stuff the pain deep down. The only place for it, as far as Wells was concerned. “Gonna pull rank, make me sleep on the floor?”
“I think that story won you the pallet.”
“If we get out of here tomorrow, I’m coming with you. If you’ll have me. Time for a little R and R.”
“Long as you’re not just one of those pretty embassy Marines.”
“Three tours in Helmand”—the bloodiest province in Afghanistan. Nearly a thousand Marines and British soldiers had died fighting the Taliban there.
“Good enough.”
—
WELLS WOKE TO the clatter of a tray in the slot. Coyle was doing push-ups against the wall.
“Sleepyhead.”
“Save your energy, Marine.”
“How much does it take to pull a trigger?” But Coyle stopped.
“Shafer tell you when he’d get in?”
“Six fifty-five.”
If the plane landed on time . . . Shafer cleared immigration fast . . . and had a car waiting . . . he could be here in forty-five minutes. Maybe. But what if he went to the prison first? What if they held him?
They would need to break into the garage and hope the Puma was running late, or had left some clue to his plans. Then they’d have to deliver whatever they’d found to a commander who understood its importance and was senior enough to act on it. Which meant fighting through the traffic and the police cordons and getting to the church itself.
An hour later, two hours, he didn’t know, the door swung open. The cop who’d taken his name yesterday. He stared at Wells with the mix of irritation and respect that seemed to be this mission’s signature. Even before he spoke, Wells knew they were free.
If only they weren’t too late.
In the lobby, Shafer, twitchy and rumpled from the overnight flight. Beside him, a fortyish brunette, wearing a black suit and a stylish pageboy haircut. Lively hazel eyes. Wells assumed she was French until Coyle saluted her.
“John.” Shafer tapped Wells’s cheek. “The pleasure is yours. Please meet our secret weapon. Deputy Head of Mission Jean Simmons.”
“I just do what I’m told,” Simmons said.
“You can thank her for freedom. Her French beats mine. Possibly her people skills, too.”
“Thank you, Ms. Simmons.”
“Call me Jean, please.” She had a soft Virginia twang. Wells bet it played nicely over here. “Shall we?”
Two men with bodyguard haircuts waited outside the station, along with two Chevy Yukons with diplomatic plates, both black, their bodies thick with armor and ballistic glass. A single French police motorcycle waited, too. Wells looked around, realized the N2 was no more than fifty meters north. He’d been arrested barely five hundred meters away.
“What time is it?” He should have asked already.
“Nine-ten. My flight was half an hour late, and we had trouble at the prison—”
Wells didn’t care. “Can you spare an SUV, ma’am?”
“She can’t,” the taller bodyguard said.
“Done,” Simmons said.
“Ma’am, a chase car is a necessity, especially now.”
“I’m a State Department functionary, not the Queen of England, Eddie. No one cares about me. And I’ve got an official escort.”
“Ma’am—”
“Enough. Let’s go.”
“One more question—” Wells said.
“You want guns, that’s a no,” the guard said.
“Actually . . .” Simmons said.
The guard stared at Wells with real anger and plucked a key ring from his pocket. Two keys. “The little one unlocks the center console. Spare Sig in there. The big one, there’s a shotgun in back.”
“Thankee.”
“Hope
you know what you’re doing, cowboy.”
Me, too.
—
A COUPLE of kilometers southwest, at 279 Allée Richelieu, Soufiane Kassani finished cleaning the last of a dozen AKs. Firas the engineer threw spare magazines into a canvas bag. A white Mazda sedan waited in front, its nose poking through the open gate.
Kassani had desperately wanted to have the honor of being part of this attack. But Bourgua had told him the night before that he was too important to die.
“What about you, Raouf?”
“I only give orders. You’re a scientist.”
“Anyone can do what I did.”
“It seems not. They’ve barely made any of the stuff since you left. Back to Raqqa for you.”
“But—”
“These orders, they come from the caliph.”
“If you say so.”
“He says so.”
“Let me do something tomorrow, at least.”
“Like what?”
“Bring in the AKs from the garage.” Bourgua’s jihadis could hardly ride the RER and Paris Métro toting assault rifles. The weapons were being transported separately in cars that would be parked close to the perimeter and serve as rendezvous points.
“Soufiane—”
“You said yourself you’re short on drivers.”
“Promise to leave by nine. I want the car there by nine forty-five, you on the ten thirty-seven to Marseille.” French TGVs ran nonstop from Paris to Marseille, three hours and four hundred miles south, on the Mediterranean coast.
“Of course.”
So Kassani was a few minutes late. Even so, he should have the Mazda parked by 10. He’d reach the Gare de Lyon station twenty or thirty minutes later, depending on the Métro connections. He might have to run, but he should make the train.
“Let’s go, Soufiane,” Firas said now.
“Two minutes.” Kassani grabbed another canvas bag.
—
WELLS DROVE, with Shafer next to him in the Yukon’s front seat. This road passed between the two cités that Wells had visited Saturday. A half-dozen police cars and vans were parked on the side of the road, with only a dozen or so cops posted around them. Wells had expected more. Probably the police had moved officers to the center of Paris today, trying to make sure nothing happened during the funeral. Wells wondered how long they would need to respond to shots fired a kilometer south. Not very. Though they might have orders to stay near the banlieue.
“How’s this go?” Coyle said from the back.
“Remember Helmand? The garage, same ROE.” Rules of engagement. “Men with weapons, don’t need to identify yourself or wait for fire. Assume hostile intent.”
“What about taking them alive?”
“Fine if we do, but nobody there is going to tell us anything in time to make a difference. Most important thing is to make sure we get inside quick and clean.”
“It’s like that.”
“Exactly like that.”
“If we’re wrong?”
“Hope you liked that cell.”
Left onto the N370. Maybe ninety seconds out. The traffic circle where the N2 met the N370 lay a couple hundred meters to the right. The roadblock that had undone Wells was gone now.
“We’ll take one fast pass from the north, I’m not even going to slow down. See if the gate’s open, anyone’s inside. Then around the block, I’ll park one building up, we’ll go right in.” Wells didn’t love making the pass. The Yukon stood out, especially with the diplo plates. But they couldn’t come out shooting without knowing if civilians were close by.
“Hope nobody’s there,” Shafer said.
“Wrong,” Wells said.
“If they’re present, the gate will be open already,” Coyle said. “Probably the door, too. Easier breach.”
“Military genius in stereo,” Shafer said.
Wells swung left onto Avenue Liégeard, then right onto Allée Richelieu. The garage was fifty meters down, on the east side. He was happy to see they had the street to themselves. The plumbing store was open but empty. The good and not-so-good citizens of Sevran were battening down.
They sped by the garage. The gate and front door were open. A white Mazda sedan was parked at the edge of the driveway. Wells just had time to see its back lid was raised. A man was putting a big duffel bag into the trunk. The bag’s canvas was stretched from the inside by—
Rifle barrels—
“You saw,” Coyle said.
“I did.”
“Saw what?” Shafer said.
“AKs.” Wells swung left. These blocks were short, no more than fifty meters. They’d be back in front less than a minute.
—
“COME ON, SOUFIANE! We’re going to be late, this isn’t a joke.”
Kassani looked around the garage one last time, pulled the door shut. Firas slammed down the trunk lid.
—
LEFT, LEFT, LEFT, they were back on Allée Richelieu. The white sedan was edging forward now from the open gate.
Wells jammed the gas. The Yukon was a beast, four tons with the armor, but it had a V-8 engine bored out for 495 horsepower. After the briefest lag, it jumped ahead.
—
IN THE MAZDA, Kassani was looking left when he heard the Yukon’s engine roaring on the other side of the car. He glanced right, saw the big black SUV speeding. Strange. Hadn’t it just passed?
“Soufiane—”
Real fear in Firas’s voice. A second later, a second too late, Kassani understood.
Firas reached between his legs as Kassani pressed the accelerator.
—
WELLS SAW the Mazda jump ahead as the man in the passenger seat came up with a pistol.
The shots were surprisingly accurate, two hitting the windshield and flattening into the ballistic glass. The Mazda turned left, into the street, south, away from the Yukon. Wells fought the natural instinct to lay off the gas as the crash came. He kept the pedal pressed to the floor.
Impact. Crunch of steel bending, crinkle of glass breaking. With the sedan turning away, the initial collision came not quite broadside but at an angle to the Mazda’s right rear door and trunk. The Yukon weighed three times as much as the Mazda. Its engine block beat through the Mazda’s skin like a fist plunging into an apple pie.
The crash didn’t end there. The Yukon was so much bigger and heavier than the Mazda, and moving so much faster, that the collision turned the Mazda around. The sedan had been turning counterclockwise. Now it spun the other way, clockwise, bringing its passenger side back toward the Yukon. The SUV still had plenty of forward momentum. It was this second half of the collision that caved in the Mazda’s front passenger door and crushed Firas’s legs and drove the door frame into his ribs, tearing open his heart, killing him instantly.
The Yukon’s crash sensors turned off its engine, but its momentum carried the Mazda another five meters before the two vehicles finally skidded to a stop. A dozen air bags exploded inside the SUV. Wells and Shafer and Coyle were jolted hard against their belts but unhurt otherwise.
Wells extracted himself and pulled the Sig from the center console and looked down at the Mazda that was now grafted to the Yukon’s grille.
The man in the passenger seat was dead, his head hanging over the steel bar that had pierced his chest. The driver was very much alive. The body of the Mazda had protected him from the worst of the crash. Because of the way the Mazda had spun, he had wound up on the right side of the Yukon, closer to Coyle than Wells. Wells recognized him, the man with the strange gray skin Wells had seen at the store two days before.
Wells checked over his shoulder, one last look to be sure he wouldn’t be ambushed by someone coming out of the garage. The door to the building itself was shut tight now.
In the back seat, Coyle racked his s
hotgun.
Wells opened the door, stepped out.
—
KASSANI HAD WANTED his own pistol. He’d wanted to be sure that if everything went wrong the kaffirs wouldn’t take him alive. But the Puma had absolutely forbidden him to carry any weapons to Marseille. If he ran into a police checkpoint or a metal detector, he could never explain a pistol. And the police would be watching the TGV trains hard.
He shouldn’t have listened.
He didn’t know what had happened, how these men had found him. He didn’t know who they were, though he recognized the driver from the store on Sunday. American, French, Syrian secret police, no matter. All that mattered was that he kill them. And leave at least one bullet for himself.
The attack was barely an hour away, they couldn’t stop it.
He reached over Firas’s corpse, not just slick but wet with fresh arterial blood. The pistol must have fallen between his feet. It must have.
He couldn’t find it in the wreckage. Then he felt the grip square in his hand.
—
WELLS WAS STEPPING around the front of the Yukon when the driver came up with a pistol. The guy twisted toward him, and he and Coyle fired almost at once, the shotgun’s roar and the Sig’s pop blending, echoing through the morning. Not a fair fight. The driver’s chest exploded. He slumped in his seat, twitching. Wells ran for him as Coyle pulled open the driver’s door, dragged him out, laid him on the pavement.
He was alive, but he wouldn’t be for more than another minute or two. A mass of shotgun pellets ripened his skin. Blood drooled from the spaces between. All the king’s horses and all the king’s trauma surgeons couldn’t put him together again. His eyes were glassy and unfocused, and he was mumbling in Arabic. Wells got on his hands and knees, put his ear an inch of the man’s lips.
“Too late, too late . . .”
“For what—”
“Allahu akbar—” He didn’t finish the prayer, and never would. His breath went throaty and liquid and dried into a gurgle.
“John—”
Wells looked up. Shafer stood by the garage door.
“Locked.”
“Check the car,” Wells said to Coyle. The driver wore cargo pants with deep pockets. Wells rifled them, came up with a wallet fat with euros, a key ring.
The Prisoner Page 36
