by Blake Banner
He hung up and I called Mary. It rang twice and she answered.
“I am driving. It’s not safe and it’s against the law. What do you want?”
“Buddy says you’re to stand down, don’t make inquiries…”
“Too late. I made some discreet inquiries. They’re going to get back to me with more relevant intel. It’s OK, I made it sound innocuous, like I was just researching background.”
“Well the boss says don’t. We have to kill time. He said we should go to the beach.”
“The beach?”
“Or something.”
“I prefer something. Are you going to continue to be an asshole today? You were fun last night.”
“I’ll be fun. I promise. I’m going to hire a car at the desk and come over and pick you up. You choose where you want to go.”
“OK, cowboy.” She blew me a noisy kiss and hung up.
I called down and told reception I wanted to rent an F-Type Jaguar convertible for the day. He said that was no problem at all. So I packed my bags, put the P226 in my belt and the Maxim 9 in the safe in the wardrobe, and went down to sign for the car and collect it.
It took twenty minutes for the paperwork to be done and for the car to arrive. I punched Mary’s address into the GPS and let it take me at a leisurely pace through the streets of Paris, feeling the sun on my face and trying to relax while I let my unconscious mind work out what purpose was drawing al-Qaeda and Sinaloa together. Not drugs for weapons, she had said. What then? What purpose did they each have if not drugs and guns?
Sinaloa was driven by lust for money and power. Al-Qaeda was driven by ideological fanaticism and hatred. Their aim was to establish the empire of Allah on Earth: all kafirs must be either killed or enslaved.
Much as I turned it around and around in my head, it was like a Chinese puzzle: everything you tried cancelled out everything else you tried. Al-Qaeda was not buying drugs. If they wanted them they could grow as much as they liked in Afghanistan. And if they wanted weapons, they could buy them from suppliers a lot more easily than having to go all the way to Mexico. On the other hand, Mexico had all the drugs and weapons it needed, right there in their own country.
So what? What the hell were they talking about in that apartment, with the CIA?
By the time I got to Franklin Roosevelt Avenue I was none the wiser. I parked outside her block, killed the engine and climbed out of the car, deciding to take Buddy’s advice and enjoy a day of rest, with a beautiful, intelligent woman. There was fuck all else to do.
Chapter Twelve
When I got to her front door it was open a couple of inches. I stood a moment and listened, but I couldn’t hear anything. I looked at the lock. There were no obvious signs it had been picked, no scratches or scuffs. I eased the door a little farther with my toe. It didn’t creak, so I pushed another couple of inches and stepped inside. I could smell coffee, toast, and fresh air from an open window. But there were still no sounds.
I took the P226 from my belt and followed the long passage to the living room door. It too was a couple of inches open, and here the smell of fresh air was stronger. I eased the door open a little wider and saw the big oblongs of luminescence lying across the wooden floor, at the end of leaning dusty beams. The calico sofa was also bathed in light. Her shoes, the ones I had taken off that night, were on the floor beside it. Her bag was lying in the nook of the arm and the back, on a cushion. It was open and I could see her phone.
I turned and made my way back along the corridor to the kitchen. There was an open carton of milk on the surface beside the sink. Next to it was a cup, and next to that was a saucepan. There was milk in the saucepan ready to be heated. A coffee percolator sat in the middle space between the electric rings. It was still warm, but not hot. The coffee had come up, but the rings were cold. I wondered how long it would have taken for them to cool.
My mind was making a movie: she’d come in feeling tired from the night before. She went to the living room, kicked off her shoes, dropped her bag on the sofa and opened the windows. Then she went to the kitchen to make coffee and toast to nurse her hangover. The coffee had come up and she was about to heat the milk. That was twenty minutes ago, half an hour tops.
It wouldn’t have taken her that long to get to her apartment. So she had been somewhere before she came home. Where? I skipped it and went on with the movie in my head.
Something had drawn her away from her coffee. Did somebody ring at the bell? Did she think it was me? No, she would have known I couldn’t make it that fast. So she went to the door, opened it, and for some reason never closed it.
I stepped out into the corridor again and moved to the john. There was nothing unusual in there except the lid was up and it hadn’t been flushed. So I moved on, past the open front door, to the bedroom.
That was the only door in the apartment that was closed. Had she forgotten the coffee and gone to sleep? I listened at the door. There was no sound of breathing or snoring. Using a handkerchief I turned the handle and pushed the door gently open.
For a moment I wanted to laugh. She was lying on the bed. She still had her little black dress on. In a split second I saw the movie complete itself. She had come in, needing to pee. She’d gone to the living room, forgetting to close the front door, dropped her shoes and bag, opened the windows, run to the bathroom, peed, forgotten to flush, started to make coffee, come to the bedroom to change her clothes and fallen asleep.
All that took a fraction of a second. Then the smile faded from my face because I saw that her eyes, which had looked closed in the dimness of the room, were in fact slightly open.
A wave of nausea washed over me. My belly burned hot and I could feel my heart pounding high in my chest. Her face was turned to my left, toward the window. I stepped to my right and walked around the bed, so I was looking at the back of her head. Her hair was matted, caked in blood, as were the sheets just beneath the inch-wide gash at the base of her skull.
The grief was intense and bitter, but I suppressed it fast. There would be time for that later. Now I moved quickly to the living room, took her bag and dumped the contents on the floor. I sorted through everything but found nothing of interest except her phone. I took that to her bedroom, showed her face to the screen and it opened. I checked her WhatsApp and her text messages, but there was nothing there of any interest so I had a look at her recent calls.
There was one she’d made about fifteen minutes after she left me at the hotel. The next one in the register was when I called her. I sent the number to Buddy with the message, Last number she called. Trace it.
Then I checked her maps and GPS for the last location she’d used it for. It was one of those rare hunches that pays off: Rue Condorcet 18, that morning at ten thirty. She had saved the location as “George.”
I slipped out of the front door and closed it behind me. Then I ran down the stairs, climbed into the Jaguar, punched Rue Condorcet 18 into the satnav and took off at a nice, sedate pace.
As I pulled onto the Avenue de Paris I called Buddy. He answered straight away.
“This is becoming a habit, Bauer. It isn’t advisable. What’s going on?”
“Mary has been murdered in her apartment.”
“Jesus!”
“Who did she go and see this morning before she went home?”
“No one that I’m aware of. What makes you think she went to see anybody? I told you to tell her…”
“She told me she’d made some discreet inquiries and they were going to get back to her. Two gets you twenty she spoke to somebody in the Agency. They shut her up.”
“Don’t jump to conclusions, Harry. There are a lot of interests at work here.”
“Yeah. Do you know what’s going on?”
“I have an idea, but I’m not sure. You need to get out of France right now. Charter an air taxi. Go to London and get the next available flight to the USA. I’ll have somebody pick you up.”
“Sure. OK. I’ll keep you posted.”
The GPS took me north and east, and the farther we went in that direction, the more rough and seedy the surroundings became. This was not the elegant Paris of the Golden Triangle; this was the ugly underbelly of a failed empire trying to sweep its abandoned policies of multiculturalism and euro-federalism under an ever-dirtier carpet.
I turned off the Avenue du President Wilson, onto Avenue Gabriel Peri, and then left and north onto Rue Condorcet. There I cruised slowly past dirty old houses and peeling, whitewashed walls with faded graffiti, over an intersection and past a vast, ugly school that looked more like a prison than a place of learning. All the while I was watching the numbers drop until I came to a big, pink, double-fronted house that had the number twenty over the door. Beside it was an alleyway that had been sealed off with cinder blocks and a steel door. Beside that was a dirty, unpainted house with bare concrete walls. That door had the number eighteen. Out front there was a white Citroen van. I felt the hood. It was hot. So I went and hammered on the door.
It was opened after a moment by a big, black guy. He was six four and built like a brick shithouse. His shoulders were massive and so were his thighs. He considered my face with hostile eyes and said, “Oui?”
“I’m looking for George.”
“Who are you?”
He was American. I smiled at him. “I’m the guy who’s looking for George. Are you George? I think you’re George.”
“Yeah? Maybe I am, dude. What’s your problem? Did I screw your wife? Either tell me who you are or get the fuck out of my face!”
I gave a small laugh and raised my hands as I looked down at his shoes.
“I apologize. I meant no disrespect.” Then I looked into his eyes and smashed my right instep into his balls. His eyes went wide and he doubled up. I didn’t hit him again. I didn’t need to. I made a fist and gripped his nose between my index and middle finger, and twisted savagely. I pushed him back as I did so. He screamed a little and stumbled back, trying to get away from me. I followed and kicked the door closed behind me.
His living room was the first door on the right and I shoved him in there, then kicked his feet out from under him so he fell on his back on the floor. I stepped over him and pulled the drapes half closed, then drew the P226 and shoved it in his groin.
“You’re a big, tough, dangerous guy, George. You know, there’s a chance you could still overpower me and kill me. But if I were you, with your testicles hurting the way they are right now, I wouldn’t risk it. After all, you might just get out of this alive anyway, if you’re smart, you cooperate and tell me everything I need to know.”
His voice was a thin, feeble rasp.
“Who the fuck are you?”
“Now that’s a bad start, George. What you should have said is, ‘What do you want to know?’ Then I would have known that you were keen to cooperate. Now, let’s get something clear. I ask you questions and you answer without hesitation and without lying. Break those rules once, and I will blow your left kneecap off. Do I need to prove that I am serious?”
He shook his head. “No. What do you need to know?”
“Why did Mary come here earlier? You may know her by a different name. She’s cute, attractive, little black dress.”
He swallowed hard. “She, oh man, she needed to ask me something…” I shifted the muzzle of the Sig to his left knee. His hands flew up, panic in his eyes. “No! No! Wait, she wanted to know if my employers were doing business with Afghan terrorists.”
“Who are your employers?”
“I can’t tell you that…”
I pulled the trigger and the 9mm slug hammered through his knee at point-blank range. He screamed, went pasty, sweaty gray and passed out. He was sweating profusely, like he had a fever. I went to the kitchen, found a bucket and filled it with cold water. Then I returned to the living room and poured it over him. He came to, gasping and groaning.
I knelt beside his right knee and put the muzzle on his kneecap.
“You can still save the leg if you’re quick. But if I have to blow your other kneecap off, and then I leave you here without calling the ambulance, you’ll probably die of gangrene infection. If I do the same to your shoulders, it won’t be worth surviving, pal. Life just won’t be worth living. My advice to you, George, is stop this process before it gets completely out of hand. Now, again, who are your employers?”
He was weeping like a child, his wet lower lip curling and trembling. “The Central Intelligence Agency…”
“And are they doing business with Afghan terrorists, or with al-Qaeda?”
He shook his head. “No. No, that’s crazy.”
“OK, good. See? We’re doing well now. So I have just one more question and then I’ll call an ambulance for you. Where is Mary now?”
“I…”
“Think, very carefully, before you answer. I need the truth. Lie to me, and what is left of your life will be hell. Remember, you don’t know how much I know. And if you lie I might well catch you out. So your best policy, your only policy right now, is the truth.”
He swallowed three times before he said, “She’s dead.”
“Who killed her?”
“I was ordered to…”
“By whom?”
“My unit chief…”
“Name?” He swallowed again, three times. “Don’t make me do it.”
“Samy, Samy Arain.”
“And he is in charge of the deal with the Afghans and al-Qaeda?”
“I don’t know anything about that. Honest…”
“What’s your full name?”
“George Santos.”
I nodded. “That beautiful young woman you killed today? She was a CIA consulting analyst. And she was my friend.”
I shot him between the eyes and went out to my car. I stood a moment on the narrow sidewalk, looking up at the pale blue sky. It didn’t feel any better having killed George, but still I knew it was something that had to be done. Her death could not go unpunished, or unavenged. Like all those other victims, the dead who came in the night, who tormented my dreams. They had to be avenged, and maybe, one day, their souls could rest.
I climbed in the Jag and drove sedately back to the Four Seasons. There I phoned for an air taxi to take me to London. I packed my bags, wiped my prints off the Maxim 9 and the P226, had the hotel store them in a safe deposit box and charged it to my credit card.
Then I drove the Jag to Paris, Charles de Gaulle Airport. I handed over the keys at the rental office, found the AirTaxi office and was fast-tracked through security. Twenty minutes later I boarded a Gulfstream 550 and, twenty minutes after that, I was sipping a martini dry, looking down over the receding countryside of northern France.
I remembered Mary Brown saying to me that this was a very different game than what I had been used to. She had been right. Soldiering was black and white. The objectives were clear. You didn’t get involved in the politics, or the espionage. You did your job, and you went home.
But this, this was hard to grasp. A CIA cell in Paris, commanded by one Samy Arain, charged with doing a deal with the Mujahidin and al-Qaeda, and Sinaloa, a deal so sensitive, so important, that they were prepared to kill their own consulting analyst in order to keep it quiet. Here, in this Alice in Wonderland no-man’s land, there was no way of telling who was your enemy and who was your friend. Here, there could be no friends. Everyone was an enemy.
Did I want this? Was this something I wanted? Now that I was in, could I ever leave?
I asked the hostess for another martini and closed my eyes. I didn’t sleep, I spent the next half hour deciding what I was going to do, and in what order. My first priority would be to give peace and rest to those souls, the slaughtered villagers of Al-Landy. So, my first order of business would be to find Mohammed Ben-Amini, wherever the hell he was, and execute him. After that, when I was done with him, I would go after Hussein Saleh, of Consolidated Yemeni Oil, his colleague, Captain Jaden Abdullah of the Yemeni Air Force and, last but not least,
Bernardo Muller of the Mexican Embassy in Paris, close pal of Ismael Zambada, “El Mayo.” And when I was done with them, I would decide whether I wanted to resign and buy a ranch in Wyoming.
Or whether I wanted to keep on taking out the trash.
Chapter Thirteen
In the end I flew to Boston. I was met at Logan International Airport by a man whose neck was wider than his head. He was wearing an expensive Italian suit that made him look like his name was Tony and he took care of business. He was holding a photograph and methodically checking the faces of passengers emerging from arrivals. When he saw me he stepped over and spoke in a surprisingly agreeable voice.
“Mr. Bauer?” I told him I was and he said, “Lieutenant Bernstein. The brigadier sends his regards. I have a car waiting, may I take your bag?”
The waiting car was a black Chevy Tahoe. The lieutenant opened the rear door for me and closed it as I climbed in. I wasn’t surprised to see Brigadier Alexander “Buddy” Byrd sitting on the black leather seat, waiting for me.
“You made it,” he said, like I’d crossed the Atlantic swimming. “Well done. Sorry about the change of venue. Going straight to Los Angeles struck me as a little on the nose. Have you seen the French news?”
I settled in my seat and Lt. Bernstein got behind the wheel and fired up four-hundred-brake horsepower of whispering engine. I said, “I just got off the plane, sir.”
He ignored me and went on as we cruised toward the spaghetti junction at Jeffries Point.
“The Police Nationale are scratching their heads over the murder of two Afghan nationals in an apartment on the Rue de Naples the day before yesterday. One of the two men appeared to have been tortured before he was killed. They are attributing it to internal conflicts among rival Muslim factions, as it seems the two men had links to the Mujahidin.” He examined his black leather gloves a moment. “There was also an, apparently, unrelated murder in one of the poorer districts of Paris, an American, shot in the knee and then in the head. They put that one down to drug trafficking for some reason.”
