Presence of Mine Enemies

by Stephen England

  “Al-Almani?” Césaire asked quietly, his eyes never leaving the younger officer’s face. Seeing the fire flashing just behind those dark eyes.

  A hurried nod. “He’s far beyond anything we expected when we initiated this operation. The other members of the cell. . .they’re wannabes. Even Lahcen, whatever else he was, was little more than a criminal using religion as a cover for his own activities. But Al-Almani—he’s the real thing. He has killed for his faith, in Syria, perhaps elsewhere. You know what he did to Lahcen, and he only thought he was a threat. It’s something in his eyes, it’s just. . .”

  “And that’s all the more reason we need you to go back under, Daniel,” he pressed, the officer’s real name sounding strange on his lips. The roles they all played. “Because the threat is greater than we knew. I need you to do this. Your country needs–”

  “But you don’t have to face him either, do you?” the younger man spat, fear and anger playing across his features. He was scared, Armand realized. Very scared. “It’s easy for you to say what needs to be done, just like it is for them—but none of you actually have to do it.”

  “I’m an old man, Daniel,” Césaire replied, transfixing his fellow officer with a hard look—his voice losing none of its calm. “Don’t allow that to lead you to make the mistake of thinking that I haven’t stood exactly where you stand today. We’ve both risked our lives in the service of a country that had marginalized us, viewed us as something less than citizens of France, each in our own time—in the belief that one day, that would change. That we could, by our sacrifice, bring such change. That day has come for my people, and it yet will for yours.”

  He paused, watching Daniel’s face, watching the younger man flush. “Do you really believe that?” he asked finally, recovering himself.

  Césaire nodded, summoning up every ounce of conviction in his being. “I do. And you do too—I’ve seen it in your eyes, heard it in your voice. That last night in Paris. . .why did you tell me you were doing this? Do you remember?”

  Daniel seemed to deflate, the anger going out of him in that moment. A nod. “I told you that I was doing this for my son. That I wanted him to one day live in a world—a France–where he could be proud of his faith. Where he could hold his head up and tell the world that he was a Muslim without fear. Without shame.”

  “Do you still want that?”

  “Of course,” came the anguished reply, the look in his eyes haunting Césaire. His conscience reproaching him for having asked the question. For using this. And yet, it had been necessary. “More than anything else in this world.”

  “Then we both know what must be done.”

  Another slow, reluctant nod. “Is it possible to call my wife? To speak with her, before I make contact with. . .him.”

  To say good-bye, the older man thought, but he only nodded in reply.

  “Of course.”

  Chapter 14

  6:13 P.M.

  Reims, France

  It would be hours before the sun set, but the interior of the office building was dark, the beam of the flashlight in Harry’s hand pointing upward at the ceiling as he tested yet another door, the knob giving way beneath his hand.

  Empty, just like the rest.

  These were the corporate offices, he realized—or at least that had been the intention when the building had been first constructed, years before. Constructed, but never occupied—the economic downturn taking its toll.

  And now it was left abandoned like so many other buildings across the country, abandoned and already decaying—the province of vagrants and squatters, the myriad homeless of France. People like them.

  Except this one seemed deserted, he thought, walking out into the open second-floor office area, his flashlight’s beam probing toward a worn bedroll tucked in one corner—a few cans of food scattered about. The cans were rusty, dust and cobwebs covering the bedroll.

  No one had been here in some time.

  He heard a footstep behind him and turned on heel, finding Reza standing there, apparently having followed him up from where he’d left the others on the ground floor.

  Their eyes meeting in the semi-darkness, seeing the uncertainty, the unease written across the young man’s face.

  “She’ll be of use to us, brother,” he said finally, earnestly, breaking the silence between them. “I promise you that. Having a woman will be of value to our mission—the Westerners will never suspect, they will never–”

  “Stop talking.” There was no emotion in Harry’s voice, just a cold, pitiless warning. “You’ve found a way to justify this to yourself, that’s all your words mean. Nothing more. You haven’t stopped thinking about her body long enough to seriously ask whether she is with us or against us.”

  “That’s not true, I–”

  “Do you even know what it was that caused her to revert to Islam?” Harry asked quietly, watching the confusion in Reza’s eyes as he stammered to produce an answer. “You don’t, do you? And if you don’t even know that. . .how can you possibly know whether she has even begun to understand the sacrifices demanded of us by God’s struggle?”

  “I’m sorry, brother, if you want me to send her back to Brussels, I can put her on a bus. I only wanted–”

  Harry shook his head dismissively. “What’s done is done. To send her back now would be worse than to never have brought her here at all. There will be a time for her to be tested, as we all must be. But not today. Keep her close to you—ensure that she behaves modestly, that she does not become the cause of jealousy among the brothers. We’re going to be staying here a while.”

  “How long?”

  “Until we can move freely once more,” Harry replied, turning away from the younger man, his flashlight playing once more around the corners of the expansive room. “Until we learn what’s become of the others. Allah knows.”

  “Do you think Yassin is all right?”

  It was a moment before Harry spoke, the shadows playing strangely across his face. Yassin had made contact thirty minutes before, in the Drafts folder of the e-mail account they were all using. Just the same, simple message—no explanation, no detail, nothing for law enforcement to pick up.

  But he was alive. For now.

  “Allah knows,” he repeated finally. “If he does as I’ve instructed, he’ll be calling soon. Until then, we can only wait.”

  6:03 P.M. British Summer Time

  A terraced house

  Hounslow, West London

  “. . .Irina sent me a video of Katya this morning—they’re on holiday in Baku, and she was building a castle in the sand of the shore. . .”

  The signal had been set, Dmitri Litvinov thought, sipping absently at his wine, his food still nearly untouched on his plate. Knowing he should eat, knowing he should be focusing on his wife’s words, but unable to do either.

  It was a careless mark on the wall of the Tube station—just below waist-level. White chalk. Almost invisible, unless you were looking for it.

  And Roth would be. The signal that everything was proceeding according to plan—so far.

  He’d found himself checking for a tail in the Underground—convinced somehow that Valeriy would have sent someone to follow him. That–

  “. . .is everything all right, Dima?” he heard his wife ask, his head coming up suddenly. “You haven’t eaten, and you seem to be somewhere else tonight. Are you okay?”

  “Of course, of course,” he nodded quickly, emptying his glass in a final swallow, his hand trembling noticeably as he replaced it on the table. “Just a rather. . .difficult day at the rezidentura. You were saying about Irina–more wine?”

  She nodded and he rose, retreating into the kitchen to retrieve the bottle. Letting out a long, shuddering sigh as soon as he was out of sight. Get hold of yourself.

  How would she take it, if she knew? It was an impossible question, as he was all too well aware. His betrayal had been years behind him when they’d met in the mid-’90s. Him, a rising officer in the newly-
minted SVR, her a financial analyst in Russia’s burgeoning private sector, a job she still held—remotely, from their home here in London. A capitalist.

  The embodiment of everything he had hated in the old days—but that hadn’t mattered to him, then. Perhaps his embrace of her had in some unconscious sense been a final act of repudiation. Of all which had gone before.

  Yet she was a Russian, for all that. Fiercely patriotic, and proud of the Rodina’s rebirth over the last decade. He knew he would have to tell her, at some point.

  But something within him feared that moment almost more than he feared Valeriy Kudrin. . .

  7:13 P.M. Central European Summer Time

  The abandoned office building

  Reims, France

  “I understand,” Harry said, feeling Reza’s eyes on him as he went on. “It is good to hear your voice, my brother. We had grown. . .concerned.”

  But Yassin’s voice was strained, Harry realized, subsiding once more into silence as he listened. Weak.

  A frail shadow of its former self.

  Clearly, Driss had been right—his young friend had been shot, there in the park. Injured badly, by the sound of his voice. By the painful subtext there in between his guarded words. It raised questions as to how he had survived at all. How he had escaped. . .

  Or if he had.

  “Of course,” he responded finally, glancing at his watch. He would have to move quickly, but what Yassin wanted was possible.

  Possible. And preferable to the alternative—leaving him out there, twisting in the wind. Vulnerable, exposed. A danger to them all. To him. “You know it, brother. . .I’ll come for you. Insh’allah, I’ll be there soon. Salaam alaikum.”

  Harry ended the call without another word, turning off the phone and turning it over to remove the back of the case and the battery, his weathered hands moving in quick, efficient motions.

  “Is he all right?” he heard Reza blurt out, unable to stand the silence any longer. Impetuous as ever.

  A shake of the head. “He was injured, as you feared,” Harry said, inclining his head toward Driss. “He has found refuge among brothers in Liège, but he needs to leave the city. He wants me to come for him. Tonight, if it is possible. There should still be a bus. . .”

  “I’ll go with you.” There was no mistaking the determination in Reza’s voice, but Harry shook his head.

  “Together, we would draw attention to ourselves,” he responded firmly, his eyes flickering past Reza to where his girlfriend stood, her face shadowed by the glare of the emergency light—her expression impossible to read. “I’ll do this myself.”

  She hadn’t said much, over the last few hours, since she and Reza had joined them. He couldn’t tell whether it was simply an acceptation of her role—her place—as a Muslim woman in the company of fundamentalists. . .or something else.

  It would bear watching.

  “If anyone is going to go, it should be me,” Reza protested, taking a step away from her and toward Harry, into the glare of the light. “I’m his brother.”

  “As am I,” was Harry’s quiet reply. “We are all brothers, in the sight of God, we who have pledged our lives to Allah’s struggle—and the ties of faith are no less than those of blood. And unlike you, I helped treat casualties on the battlefields of Sham. If his injuries are severe. . .”

  “Can we be sure he hasn’t been taken?” Driss asked, surprising Harry with his perception. Of course he had thought it, but he hadn’t expected. . . “You could be walking into a trap.”

  Reza swore, his face distorting with sudden rage. “My brother would never betray us!”

  “We can’t be sure,” Harry replied, ignoring the outburst, his eyes locked with Driss’ across the vacant room. “But it’s a risk I will have to take. Because we are brothers.”

  2:57 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time

  Liberty Crossing Intelligence Campus

  McLean, Virginia

  “Word travels fast,” Lawrence Bell observed, a wary glint in the eyes of the Director of National Intelligence as he gestured for Kranemeyer to take a seat. “I only learned of the hearings myself a few minutes before noon. Your secretary’s call had come five minutes earlier.”

  “I have my sources,” Kranemeyer replied, taking his seat on the sofa against the wall on the left side—glancing over to where Bell sat behind his desk.

  “Domestically?” There was a trace of humor in the DNI’s voice, but Kranemeyer didn’t join in the laugh. There was nothing funny about the situation they found themselves in. Or the road that had brought them here.

  “Mine. Not the Agency’s,” he replied, favoring Bell with a hard stare. “I keep my ear to the ground.”

  The older man nodded, a weary look passing across his face. He looked even worse than he had the day of the strike in the Sinai, Kranemeyer thought—the last time the two of them had been in the same room together. “This is a bad business, Barney. We don’t have a lot of friends on the Hill these days—particularly not in the House. And those we might have. . .are no friends of the President. They’ll go through us to get at him. Without thinking twice. And they now have all the ammunition they need.”

  Thanks to you. The DNI might never say the words, but Kranemeyer knew he had thought them, the unspoken reproach all too audible in Bell’s voice.

  And he wasn’t wrong. It had been his call, his decision to execute the strike on his own authority, taking advantage of the absence of the DNI.

  It had been what the situation required of any leader worthy of the name—the willingness to act, decisively, when lives hung in the balance and time was slipping away.

  So he’d acted. And it had been the wrong call, in the end—an incredibly public failure of intelligence the like of which the Agency had rarely known.

  And taking responsibility for one’s failures was also a part of leadership. With all that entailed.

  “They’re going to find a scapegoat for this mess,” Bell continued heavily, clearing his throat as he stared across his desk at Kranemeyer. “Sooner or later. Someone’s going to have to take the fall. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  Kranemeyer nodded, a distant memory from his childhood coming unbidden to his mind. An image from a Sunday School lesson, long ago. A priest, placing his hands on the head of a goat, to be led away into the wilderness. Carrying away the sins of the people.

  As a child, it had seemed silly—an absurd relic of an ancient religion he had never himself believed in. Not even then.

  But sitting here now. . .there was no longer anything silly about it.

  “I do.”

  10:57 P.M. Central European Summer Time

  The Luxembourg/Belgium Border

  The border was a ghost in the night, nothing more than a sign, flickering past in the lights of the Flixbus. The word Belgique against a blue field, surrounded by the gold stars of the European Union, arranged in that familiar unbreakable, unending circle. One Europe, together. It was a beautiful dream.

  Unity. Fraternity. Brotherhood.

  “We are brothers,” Harry remembered, gazing out the window of the darkened bus at the Belgian countryside, reflecting on his own words to Reza. Knowing that they had been a lie—that there had been another, far different reason for this journey tonight.

  Knowing that before morning, he would need to kill his brother. Because there was no other way.

  The raids hadn’t been enough, hadn’t taken out the core of the cell. He had to begin removing pieces from the board, one by one.

  Starting with Yassin.

  But he saved your life, a voice deep within him whispered, reminding him painfully of the debt. The remnants of his conscience, torn and tattered by the years?

  No. For surely his conscience would recognize the necessity of this, as ever before.

  Yassin was alone, isolated. Weakened. There would be no difficulty in eliminating him.

  No difficulty. . .except in finding the will to do it, Harry thought, forcing himself t
o confront his own vulnerability.

  He’d been desperately weak when he’d arrived in Brussels in search of shelter, a hiding-place. Raw holes still marking the places where Mehreen’s bullets had ripped into his flesh.

  And in the weeks of convalescence which had followed, the brothers had nursed him back to health—sharing their home and their table, encouraging him at each step of the way.

  It was as close as he had come to family in a very long time, as perverse as that was.

  A family he now had to destroy. If he could.

  And as the bus rolled deeper into the Ardennes, through the sleepy Walloon town of Bastogne, it was a question Harry still had no answer to.

  5:09 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time

  CIA Headquarters

  Langley, Virginia

  “I don’t think you do, Barney.” Kranemeyer leaned back in his chair, attempting to refocus on the post-mission briefing—the video feed coming in from half a world away in Jalalabad—the DNI’s words still running through his mind. As they had ever since leaving his office, an hour before. “This situation can still be managed, if we’re careful. They want blood, the higher the better. So? We give them blood.”

  “. . .but were finally brought to a halt, five klicks out from the target compound, when the ANA force refused to advance further, after suffering heavy casualties.” The satellite uplink from Afghanistan was choppy, but Kranemeyer could see the fatigue in Josiah Krahling’s eyes as the paramilitary officer continued, “We lost three of them on the way back—couldn’t stabilize them in time. The whole force was pretty shot up.”

  Another failed operation, the DCS thought. But at least this one wasn’t going to be ending up on CNN. Some small consolation.

  Bell’s plan had taken him by surprise—he hadn’t thought the long-time Washington bureaucrat had it in him. But life had a way of changing a man. Even near the end.