Presence of Mine Enemies

by Stephen England

  “No,” he responded firmly, punctuating his words with a shake of his head. “No, we’re not going there again, Barney. We can never—”

  “We will do what is necessary,” came the unbending answer, Kranemeyer’s gaze never wavering.

  “No,” Coftey swore angrily, his voice rising. “The kind of thing we did with Haskel, with Shapiro, we can’t—”

  The chair scraped back over the wood of the farmhouse floor as Kranemeyer came to his feet, a long finger jabbing out toward the senator. “We do not discuss that. Ever.”

  “It’s just you and I here, Barney,” Coftey said, looking up at his old friend. Seeing in him the man who had stood before him that dark December night in Foxstone Park, blood already on his hands. On both their hands, for there was no way for the senator to extricate himself from the responsibility for what had been done that night. Two of the highest officials in the American intelligence bureaucracy dead—one murdered, the other driven to suicide, a header off the Key Bridge.

  So always to traitors. But they could never go down that road again, not like that. . .

  “The only other person for miles is Melody,” he continued, collecting himself after a moment, “and I’d trust her with my life.”

  Kranemeyer stabbed his cigarette into the ashtray, a faint burst of flame flickering in the semi-darkness as he extinguished it with a savage gesture.

  “That’s your choice, Roy. Just don’t trust her with mine.”

  8:04 A.M. Central European Summer Time, July 5th

  Sint-Jans-Molenbeek

  Belgium

  Fired up, fired up. Feels good.

  Harry could feel the sweat beading on his forehead as he ran down the sidewalk, the early morning sun beating down on him from above. The words of the old cadence running through his mind, the way they had during Jump School at Benning, so many years before.

  A deep-throated drill sergeant, bellowing out commands, leading he and his fellow CIA trainees on a run every morning. Young men and women, fresh from the Farm, running in the hot Georgia sun. Fired up. Feels good.

  Just keep putting one foot in front of the other, he kept hearing a voice say, driving him onward—his legs burning, his lungs feeling as though they might explode. It was what had gotten him through Jump School, through all that had followed. A dogged, obstinate refusal to quit.

  One of these days, it was going to get him killed.

  “So tell me, this attack of yours. . .what have you been planning?” Echoes of the night before, running over and over through his mind as he collapsed to his knees, leaning back into the wall of the building behind him—at the point of exhaustion, his breath coming in great gasps. Struggling to collect himself.

  Marwan, recalcitrant as ever, hadn’t wanted to answer the question—but Driss, the young Moroccan who’d helped disarm him, had been more than ready to fill the void.

  “There’s a police officer in Koekelberg. . .” he’d begun, referencing the tiny Brussels municipality just to the north of Molenbeek. Just a few miles away, really. “The man is former military—a member of the Western crusade in Afghanistan.”

  He’d had photos of their target and his family on his phone, a montage cobbled together from social media, police websites. . .and a few that appeared to have been taken on the street. By them, presumably.

  Their plan, so very straightforward. Ambush the man outside his house—kill him, his wife and children. Burn the house. Send a message.

  Simple. Devastatingly simple, Harry thought, wiping the sweat from his forehead with the front of his stained t-shirt as his breathing slowed—feeling the hard concrete of the storefront against his back. He felt a shadow fall across him and looked up to see a middle-aged Muslima standing there, her head swathed in a dark, drab hijab.

  She met his gaze for a half-second before averting her eyes hastily—hurrying on by down the street toward the corner market.

  Simple, and almost impossible to thwart. They’d clearly had the officer under surveillance for several weeks—amateur though it might have been, he couldn’t allow himself to underestimate them.

  That most dangerous of mistakes.

  There was no way to warn him without them noticing the shift in routine, without them suspecting. And what if that’s all this was anyway—a dangle? A ploy to flush him out, force him to show his hand.

  Was one life—a handful, even—worth the consequences of that? The loss of life which could follow, if he lost control.

  That damnable math, the calculations which had governed his life. As cold and brutal as ever before.

  And yet he could still see those photographs—the faces of the officer's family. A man in combat gear, standing outside Kandahar Airport. The same man, playing with his children in the grass of the Cinquantenaire.

  Stop it. Harry closed his eyes, remembering his own words to Mehreen, the two of them there in Leeds—not so long after he'd been responsible for the death of another soldier. A former comrade in arms.

  “They all have families.”

  If you once allowed that to factor into it, where would you stop? The paralysis of indecision, seizing hold.

  And yet. . .he put a hand back against the concrete, forcing himself to his feet. To continue on. There had to be another way.

  If only he could find it. . .

  9:35 A.M.

  DGSE Headquarters

  Paris, France

  “Merci beaucoup,” Armand Césaire acknowledged, closing the door of the taxicab behind him as he stepped to the curb, taking a deep breath as he paused for a moment—looking up at the DSGE Headquarters building, its massive façade nearly shrouded from view from the street, a low wall topped with barbed wire surrounding the perimeter immediately before him.

  He was already on camera, and he knew it, Claire’s final words to him still echoing in his mind—her hands reaching up to straighten his tie as he’d left their Brussels apartment. Her lips meeting his.

  “Be careful.”

  But it wasn’t for himself that he feared.

  “Non,” he heard himself say, the single word seeming to reverberate through the small conference room, every eye around the table suddenly focused on him.

  Nothing like putting yourself on the spot, mon ami, he thought uncomfortably, suppressing a wry smile.

  “Excuse me?” he heard Director Brunet ask, her dark eyes meeting his as she glanced down the conference table from her place at its head. Cold and emotionless, the way he had always seen her in the years since she had assumed control of the intelligence agency—though he had only found himself together in a room with her like this on a handful of occasions. Something about her demeanor that made her come across detached. Clinical.

  Perfect for the job.

  “The risk you are proposing,” he began, glancing around the table in search of support for what he was about to say, “is simply unacceptable. After all that we have put on the line to—”

  She never let him finish, her voice slicing across the conference room like a knife.

  “What happened in Berlin—that is ‘unacceptable.’ Anything short of that, anything we need to sacrifice to ensure that we don’t all end up having to watch similar video streamed live from the streets of France, is not only acceptable, it is what we will do.”

  “And with all due respect, madame le directeur,” he began, biting back the first response which came to mind, “it is my professional opinion that the most effective way of ensuring that is to continue on the course we have already been pursuing in this operation.”

  He was too old to lose his temper—had sat in far too many meetings just like this one over the years. Few of them this high-level, but the fundamentals never changed.

  Men and women sitting around a table, gambling with human lives.

  “It’s already been weeks since he made contact with this cell, Armand,” she said after a long moment, her eyes never leaving his face. “And thus far, all LYSANDER has been able to give us is a name. The name of
a man who could even now be preparing to carry out an attack against this country. We have to push him harder.”

  “In my days in Africa,” Césaire replied, his voice neutral, “it was considered nothing short of miraculous if an asset began to pay dividends months following a recruitment.”

  Brunet shook her head. “And in your days in Africa, France wasn’t facing an imminent threat from the targets of your intelligence collection. This man—Al-Almani—is, if we assume LYSANDER’s intelligence to be correct, a veteran of the fighting in Syria. If he’s been sent back here, we have to assume an attack is being planned. And we have to know the nature of it. Circumstances have changed.”

  They were both right, that was the worst of it, he mused—feeling his supervisor glare an unspoken warning from just across the table. Stand down.

  But he couldn’t. Not and live with himself.

  “The circumstances may have changed, madame,” he began, steeling himself for what he needed to say, “but the realities of human intelligence have not. Infiltrating a hostile network takes time—and any attempt to accelerate that process risks not only the life of our asset, but the entire operation. One chance is all we get to penetrate a cell like Al-Almani’s, that’s it. If LYSANDER is compromised because we forced him to push too hard, too fast—it all goes dark. Everything goes dark.”

  8:51 A.M. British Summer Time

  A terraced house

  Abbey Road, London

  “. . .cameras provided this image of an as-yet-unidentified young man, believed to be responsible for driving the car into the café of the Hotel Adlon moments later.”

  It was maddening, Marsh thought, staring across the room at the telly as he finished his tea. The helpless feeling of inaction.

  He’d never known anything like it. The reality of being forced to sit back, to take the news as it came—unable to do anything but watch, like any other common citizen. It was an unsettling awareness.

  A few months before, such an attack would have meant long hours at Thames House—sleeping on the couch in his office. The hours and days following spent working feverishly to coordinate the UK response, to liaise with their allies, to ensure that terror abroad did not serve as a trigger for similar attacks at home.

  He wondered if that was what Patrick Ashworth was doing now, his mind returning to Phillip Greer’s words at the pub.

  There was no doubt in his mind that Patrick was doing exactly what he believed to be in the best interests of the Security Service—to say nothing of his own. But the consequences of all this, if he were wrong, were staggering.

  If something wasn’t done to avert them—but he was in no better position to do so than he was to stop another attack like the one in Berlin.

  Marsh swore angrily, turning the television off as he reached for the burner phone Greer had given him two nights before. He’d heard nothing from the counter-intel spook since, and. . .there was nothing now, he realized—sliding his thumb clumsily across the screen.

  Another curse exploding from his lips as he tucked it into his pocket, angry at everything and nothing at the same time.

  Helpless.

  10:13 A.M. Central European Summer Time

  DGSE Headquarters

  Paris, France

  “. . .of course, any information you can obtain,” Armand Césaire responded, smiling as he clasped the analyst's hand. “Fore-warned is fore-armed, non?”

  His smile faded as he caught sight of his supervisor, Albert Godard, approaching from down the hall toward the conference room they'd all left just minutes earlier. A dark cloud written across the bureaucrat's countenance.

  “Merci,” he said by way of acknowledgment, dismissing the analyst even as Godard reached him.

  “What in God’s name were you thinking, Armand?” the man demanded, taking him by the arm as they both moved toward the corner. “Mon Dieu. . .challenging Brunet like that? Have you lost your mind?”

  “Not that I am aware of,” he replied mildly, keeping his voice even with an effort. Nearly twenty years his junior, Godard had spent most his career in the DGSE behind a desk—first at embassy postings overseas, then back here in Paris, working his way up the ladder with relentless zeal.

  It tended to make for someone who was. . .how would the Americans put it? “Risk-averse.” And that had been his perception of the man, from their first time working together, two years before. Little had served to alter it since.

  “I was thinking of the success of the operation,” he continued, choosing his words carefully. “Of the security of our asset.”

  “That doesn’t mean you can just rebuke the director in front of everyone—in front of the Americans.” Godard shook his head. “There are ways to handle this, Armand—but that was not one of them.”

  And there are things in this dark, shadowy world of ours more important than saving face for those appointed above us, the old intelligence officer thought, staring unflinchingly at his younger colleague. “It had to be said. Someone had to say it to her, and no one else in that room was going to.”

  Certainly not you.

  Not that it had done any good in the end. “Duly noted, Armand,” Brunet had replied, her voice perfectly even. “But we have to move this forward. And we have a plan. . .”

  Godard gestured with his finger, seeming on the verge of saying something when Brunet herself emerged from the conference room barely thirty feet away, accompanied by the American station chief, Vukovic.

  “You’ve made your point, Armand,” he said finally, apparently reconsidering his words. “And now you have your instructions. Make sure you communicate them to your asset.”

  “Of course,” Césaire nodded. He knew how this was done—knew the only alternative to executing his orders was to resign in protest. And that would only serve to imperil his asset even further.

  Brunet’s plan was nothing if not a high risk/high reward gambit. If it worked, LYSANDER’s credibility within the Molenbeek cell would be cemented, giving him—and them—the kind of access they so desperately needed. If it failed. . .

  He looked over his shoulder as Brunet walked past, the American still at her side—unable to escape the feeling that his warning had fallen on deaf ears.

  8:34 A.M. Mountain Daylight Time

  The farmhouse

  Chandler, Oklahoma

  The sun was already high above the horizon by the time she felt the mattress shift beneath them, the smell of whiskey thick on Coftey’s breath as he leaned over to kiss her cheek.

  Melody didn’t open her eyes, stirring ever so slightly as if still in sleep—willing him to go away. To leave her alone.

  She felt him turn away, sitting on the side of the bed for a long moment before rising, disappearing into the bathroom. A few moments later, she heard the shower come on and only then did she release the breath she’d been holding—her body trembling despite the summer warmth as she hugged the sheets closer to her.

  He was lying to her, she knew that much—for the first time since their relationship had begun, all those months ago, in a hotel room following the symphony. It was strange, she found, how much that bothered her. She’d been lying to him, almost since the beginning. But to find the roles reversed. . .

  An old friend from the Army. That’s how he had described the man who had spent the night in the guest bedroom, but she didn’t believe it for a moment.

  He wasn’t old enough to have served with the senator, and there was something about his eyes—she felt another chill shudder through her body at the memory of the way he’d looked at her when he first arrived at the farm.

  The two men had talked and drunk late into the night, their voices rising and falling through the thin walls of the old farmhouse. She’d risen at one point, planning to get a drink from the kitchen, only to be arrested by the sound of Coftey’s voice.

  “The kind of thing we did with Haskel, with Shapiro—”

  His friend, cutting him off, his voice like ice. “We do not discuss that. Ever
.”

  “It’s just you and I here, Barney. The only other person for miles is Melody, and I’d trust her with my life.”

  Eric Haskel, she thought, feeling herself tremble once again. The director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Mike Shapiro. The deputy director of the CIA. Both of them dead, in a single December night just days before Christmas—the talk of D.C. for months.

  Shapiro’s body had washed up on the banks of the Potomac following an apparent suicide—commuters on the Key Bridge having reported a man preparing to jump. Haskel, found dead in his D.C.-area home, the victim of what the coroner had determined was a massive stroke.

  But what if that wasn’t what had happened at all? What if Coftey—

  She hardly dared allow herself to finish the thought. And if it were true. . .

  Melody reached for her phone, cursing beneath her breath as her trembling fingers fumbled with the lockscreen, opening her last text to Cahill. The screen lit up in the semi-darkness of the bedroom and she lay there for a long moment, chewing her lip as she stared at the message, weighing her options.

  He was the only one who could help her now, but even so—could it possibly be enough?

  We need to meet, she began finally, her nails tapping against the screen, as soon as I get back to the city. It’s urgent.

  3:58 P.M. British Summer Time

  Thames House

  London

  The eyes were just as he remembered them, Philip Greer thought, staring at the old photo clutched in his right hand as he leaned back in his office chair. Hard and cold, startlingly blue—shadowed by the visor of the KGB officer’s cap.

  Something almost. . .insolent in the expression. The insolence of a young man, of someone at the top of their game, their entire life yet ahead of them. The confidence of youth.

  Greer laid the photo aside to shuffle through the contents of the “Eyes-Only” jacket he had retrieved from the Registry three hours before, picking out another, newer, photo—only a couple years old.