Presence of Mine Enemies

by Stephen England

  The boxing club

  Death. Coming to meet him once again, as it had on those docks of Aberdeen. As so many times before.

  Harry stood there, rooted in place—watching the gun come up in Marwan’s hand. Describing that familiar, inexorable arc through the air.

  Certain as the grave.

  He could still see Mehreen standing there in the mist of the docks, the Heckler & Koch leveled in her hand, smoke curling from its barrel as he collapsed backward.

  Death returning now to claim the due of which it had been cheated that night. So many times before.

  But hard as he might look, there was nothing of death to be found in the young man’s eyes. Only uncertainty and. . .fear—the barrel of the pistol continuing upward until its muzzle was pointing at the ceiling.

  Trembling in Marwan’s hand as he swore in Arabic, his face distorted in anger, knuckles whitening around the grip. “This is how I will bring the struggle of God to the kuffar. Here. Where they live.”

  Harry just looked at him, taking his measure in that moment. A young man, full of passion and zeal. A dangerous opponent, not to be underestimated—but far out of his depth.

  “Have you ever used one of those, boy?” he asked softly, his voice barely above a whisper, his eyes locked with Marwan’s. “Do you know what it feels like to kill a man?”

  There was no answer, just an angry curse as the student stood there, seething with anger. Harry shook his head, his gaze sweeping the rest of the young men as he turned away from Marwan. “Have any of you?”

  They looked as if he had slapped them across the face, no one seeming to dare respond, most of them refusing to meet his eyes.

  “Children,” he said, shaking his head once again, “children, led by a child, playing at war. This is not the way of Allah, this—”

  “We are not—”

  “Is folly,” Harry finished, cutting Marwan off—his eyes searching the faces before him. “And I will have no part of any of this. You’ve chosen your leader, now let him lead. Go play.”

  “But Ibrahim,” Yassin burst out, finally seeming to find his voice as he stepped forth from the circle, “if we are to be successful, we need your knowledge, your experience, we—”

  “No you don’t,” Harry responded bluntly, meeting his young friend’s eyes. “You’ve made your choice, and now it’s time for me to leave. If you want to continue playing these games, go ahead—follow this proud fool. If you want to fight in the way of Allah, then follow me.”

  Walk away. The most critical tool of any salesman, equally that of the intelligence officer. He turned, placing his hand on the shoulder of the young man standing behind him and pushing him aside as he began to make his way to the door.

  “No.” Marwan’s voice, arresting him in his steps. “You’re not going anywhere.”

  Harry looked back to see the muzzle of the Beretta aimed now at his head, just a few feet away, a black hole in the dim light of the locker room. The barrel wavering back and forth, clutched in an outstretched, trembling hand. He smiled, despite himself.

  “So you’re going to shoot me now, are you?” he demanded, a baleful glint entering his eyes as he stared at the young man. “A fellow Muslim, a mujahid?”

  “If I have to, yes, by Allah,” Marwan swore loudly, moving a step closer.

  Another smile, as Harry spread out his hands to the rest of the cell. “So you see the kind of man you have chosen for your leader? A child who would kill one of the faithful, who would bring the politie down upon all your heads with the discharge of his weapon—bring all your plans to nothing—all to soothe his own injured pride. Truly it is as the Prophet has spoken, ‘he who harbors in his heart the weight of a mustard seed of pride shall not enter Paradise.’”

  “Go ahead and shoot, boy,” he continued, turning his back on Marwan as he headed once more for the door, “shoot a mujahid in the back.”

  Eight steps to the door, a half-dozen sets of eyes boring into his back as he went.

  Hearing in his mind’s ear the crash of a pistol shot ringing out, over and again—a bullet mushrooming through his body, tearing apart muscle and tissue.

  Harry’s hand hit the door of the locker room, pushing it open as he walked out into the common area of the boxing club. No gunshot shattering the air, no bullet pursuing him as the door closed behind him.

  He let out a deep breath he didn’t know he’d been holding, realizing only then that his heart was beating like a trip-hammer—his legs suddenly as heavy as if he’d run a marathon, the pain in his side jolting through him with every step.

  His mind racing as he forced himself to push ahead, moving past boxing rings as he made his way toward the entrance. Walking away was a last resort—a desperate gambler’s throw of the die.

  If they landed wrong. . .

  And then he heard it, Yassin’s voice calling out after him. “Ibrahim!”

  5:15 P.M.

  The United States Embassy

  Paris, France

  “I understand, Anaïs,” Daniel Vukovic said after a moment’s pause from the other end of the line, the receiver of the Secure Telephone Unit tucked tight to his ear as he kneaded his forehead between his fingers. “I truly do.”

  All too well, he thought, letting out a heavy sigh as he glanced around his small Paris Station office. This was the danger of human intelligence—of trying to run assets deep inside your enemy’s network—at its most fundamental.

  What happened when the policy makers got cold feet? When they realized that the intel wasn’t going to come quickly enough to save them.

  And just whose life did you place in jeopardy then, when the pressure came down from on high?

  He’d been against the LYSANDER operation from the beginning, from the time the DGSE had first placed the idea of infiltrating an asset—no, not an asset, but one of their own trained intelligence officers—into Molenbeek on the table.

  “What happened in Berlin today can't be allowed to happen here, Daniel,” Brunet replied, a hard edge creeping into the Frenchwoman’s voice. Witness to the corporate executive she had once been. “That is not negotiable—we will not, we cannot run such a risk. President Albéric has made that clear.”

  Oh, yes. Albéric. The narrowly re-elected president, whose government would be hanging by a thread if there was any repetition of Berlin. French administrations had been brought down by far less.

  Vukovic shook his head. The talking heads liked to prattle on about the “politicization of intelligence,” and associated dangers. What they lacked the knowledge to understand was that intelligence was inherently political. Ever at the mercy of those who made policy, who had been elected to carry out their vision of how things should be.

  The nature of the beast.

  “I understand,” he repeated. “And the Agency will stand ready to help with whatever resources we are capable of providing, as ever. Just be careful, Anaïs, whatever you do. Very careful.”

  He listened for a couple more moments before signing off, replacing the phone in its cradle with a heavy sigh.

  The casters of his office chair squeaked loudly in the stillness of the room as he pushed it back, walking over to the window and staring out over the boulevard, into the declining sun. The American flag, stirred restlessly by the warm summer breeze. The Fourth of July.

  The protesters outside the embassy had dissipated earlier in the afternoon, dispersed by fears of a similar attack to the one in Berlin—and the resultant appearance of heavily-armed Marines deploying with M4 carbines.

  But they'd be back. He swore to himself, rubbing the back of his neck under the loosened collar of his sweat-stained dress shirt as he turned back to his desk.

  Six months. He just had to hold it together for six more months before he rotated back to the States, his three years as chief of station coming to an end. Up finally, after all these years, for a promotion to the Senior Intelligence Service, a flag officer-level position. All the problems of Station Paris, becoming th
ose of someone else.

  The last few kilometers of a marathon, the finish line almost in sight. So close you could taste it.

  But try as he might, he couldn't shake the premonition that it was going to feel like an eternity. . .

  6:03 P.M.

  The boxing club

  Harry pulled up short, turning to find the young man hurrying up behind him. Breathless. Flushed with excitement.

  Glancing around them as if to see if anyone was watching as he reached out, pressing something cold and hard into Harry’s hand.

  The gun.

  Suppressing a sharp intake of breath, he shoved the Beretta quickly into the waistband of his jeans—seizing Yassin by the shoulder and drawing him in close.

  “What is this? What’s going on?”

  “Marwan, he—he wanted to come after you, to kill you,” Yassin gasped, the words spilling unstoppably from his lips. His dark eyes burning with a passionate fire. “Driss and I—we took the gun away from him.”

  “Alhamdullilah,” Harry responded, putting his arm around his friend’s shoulders—embracing him fiercely. May God be praised.

  Feeling something of a shudder run through his body as he stared into the blank, vacant wall of the gym past the young man’s shoulder, his eyes filling with sadness.

  Yassin had risked his life for his own, a bond forming between them in that moment. A debt of blood.

  A bond he intended to exploit. A debt. . .which would only be betrayed.

  His knuckles whitened as his fingers dug into Yassin’s back, summoning up every last reserve of his strength, fighting against the raw surge of emotion. Don’t give in. Don’t weaken.

  He closed his eyes, conjuring up an image of Berlin, of the bombing earlier. Men and women, running in terror. Fear.

  His face, hardening into an implacable mask. There could be nothing but death at the end of this road, for any of them.

  Himself included.

  He smiled, clapping Yassin on the shoulder as he took a step backward, releasing his young friend.

  “Let’s go back in, shall we?”

  A residence

  Brussels, Belgium

  Nights like this had been so rare over the years, Armand Césaire thought, scooping the crisp rice of bhel puri onto his spoon as the sound of slow '50s jazz drifted through the small apartment from a small vintage gramophone in the corner of the living room, a relic of his childhood. Nights at home.

  He'd spent far too many of them sitting in a parked car, all alone. Waiting for an asset. Conducting surveillance. Far from his home, his bed. His wife.

  “You're quiet tonight, Armand,” she said after a long moment, his head coming up from his food to meet her eyes. Devastatingly blue. “Is everything all right?”

  He smiled. Claire's once-blonde hair had turned to silver, like what little remained of his own, but she still reminded him of the day they'd first met.

  Her, the only daughter of an army captain, from an old French family and a veteran of Indochina. Him, a young officer with what was then still being informally called the “Deuxième Bureau,” the SDECE. A spy, to put it more baldly.

  And a negro.

  Their affair had been a scandal, their marriage more so. But neither of them had cared—it had been an age of rebellion, after all.

  “Of course, ma cherie,” he replied, dabbing his lips with a napkin. “This food is delicious. Forgive me. . .there's just been a lot on my mind of late.”

  LYSANDER. Another week, and no further contact from his agent. And now, with the bombing in Berlin, he was growing worried.

  “Let me put something else on,” he smiled then, rising from his seat as the record shifted to its final song. “Something more cheerful, perhaps?”

  The intelligence officer felt his wife's eyes on him as he went, disappearing out of view into the living room. She was accustomed to this by now after four decades of marriage, the life of secrets, those parts of his life which could never be disclosed or discussed.

  He was sorting through the stack of records beside the gramophone when his mobile rang, a jarring, discordant sound in place of the music which had so recently filled the apartment.

  Alliance Base, he realized, looking at the number—running a dark thumb across the screen as he raised the phone to his ear.

  He listened to the voice on the other end for a few moments, finally responding with a simple, “Oui.”

  It was the call he’d been expecting, ever since watching the footage streaming from the Adlon in Berlin, hours before. As certain as fate.

  He knew them, a knowledge borne of decades of hard, bitter experience. Had known how they’d react.

  “What is it?” Claire asked as he returned to take his place at the table—the silence hanging over them like a pall.

  “I have to go to Paris in the morning,” he replied, picking at his food. It went without saying who was calling him away—the same force which had separated them so very many times through the years.

  She simply nodded her acceptance, her eyes searching his face. “But we have tonight?”

  “We have tonight.”

  6:05 P.M.

  The boxing club

  Tension. Harry could feel it, pervading the air as he and Yassin re-entered the locker room—dark eyes flickering in his direction. Hushed murmurs rippling around the room.

  Marwan, sitting off to himself, his head in his hand. Blood trickling from a nasty gash in his left temple. The young Moroccan—the one Yassin had called “Driss”—standing a few feet away, his tense, poised stance that of a man who had delivered the blow and stood ready to do so again.

  “Salaam alaikum, my brothers,” Harry smiled, spreading his open hands as he stepped to the center of the room, the members of the cell slowly gathering around him. Curiosity, not unmixed with suspicion, filling their faces. “A great many rash words have been said this night, but we need not dwell upon them any longer. To allow such things to continue to divide us would only play into the hands of the kuffar.”

  He paused a moment, hearing Yassin’s whispered “ameen” behind him. Knowing just how thin the ice upon which he was about to tread was. His eyes shifting from face to face. Was one of them, as he had warned Yassin and Reza, an informer? In the pay of a Western intelligence service?

  All questions whose relevance had passed—his decision made for him from the moment he’d stepped into the room. Choice, as before, itself an illusion.

  “But our brother,” he continued, gesturing briefly to Marwan, “despite his rashness. . .is not entirely wrong.”

  Harry saw the young Arab glance up in surprise, something of disbelief in those dark eyes. He had his attention.

  “It surprises you that I would say this?” Harry asked, turning to address Marwan directly. “That I would admit my fault?”

  He smiled. “When you first set foot upon the path of the mujahideen, you must lay aside your pride like a garment, never to be worn again. We are all but weapons, you and I—tools in the hands of God. Instruments of His will. Nothing more.”

  That was all he had ever really been, Harry thought, a shadow passing across his face at the memory. In all those years at the CIA. Nothing but a weapon. A tool, in the hands of another.

  “We are the instruments, not the architects, of policy.” The oft-repeated refrain of the Agency over the years. Accepted, as an article of faith.

  To find himself in his own hands, after so long. It was a strange feeling.

  “And you were right,” he went on after a long moment, his eyes locking with Marwan’s for a brief moment before he stepped back, addressing the rest. “It is the will of God that you are all gathered together here, in this place—that I was brought back from the battlefields of Sham to be your leader. And so that is where we will strike. Here, in the House of War. Allahu akbar!”

  “Allahu akbar!”

  Chapter 8

  11:49 P.M. Mountain Time

  Chandler, Oklahoma

  Silence. Only the
ticking of the old grandfather clock from out in the hall of the old farmhouse, the tapping of a single finger against the oak of the kitchen table.

  Roy Coftey leaned forward, encircling the neck of the half-empty bottle of bourbon in his big hand. Pouring a couple fingers into the glass before him, the amber liquid glistening in the dim light of the kitchen. Smoke curling upward from the tip of the thick Romeo y Julieta clenched between his teeth.

  A scrape of glass against wood breaking the stillness as Kranemeyer pushed his glass over. The tapping stopped.

  It reminded him of nights back in 'Nam, the former Green Beret thought, obliging the silent request before returning the bottle to its place on the side of the table.

  Hard men, drinking together back at base following a mission. A brotherhood. In vino veritas.

  Simpler times, looking back—hard as that would have seemed to imagine at the time. Perhaps that was always the way.

  They’d been talking for hours, as the sun slid down across the plains, as night fell over the Oklahoma prairie. Questions without answers.

  Kranemeyer cleared his throat, setting aside his empty glass and reaching forward, deftly flicking the ash from his cigarette into the ashtray on the table between them.

  “Tell me you can do this, Roy,” he said finally, taking a long draw on the cigarette as he leaned back in the rough wooden chair. Smoke obscuring his face for a moment as he exhaled.

  Coftey drained the last of his bourbon, feeling the fire race down his throat as he shook his head. “It’s all going to depend on the kind of coalition I can pull together—you know that. As long as I had Ellis, I could—”

  “Tell me you can do this,” Kranemeyer repeated in that same cold, flat voice, the smoke drifting away to reveal hard dark eyes staring across the table, snapping like coals of fire.

  The unspoken alternative, only too clear. Like a concealed dagger, just beneath the surface of the table.