“In your opinion,” Kranemeyer began, lifting his eyes to look into the camera, “could the mission have been accomplished if the ANA forces had chosen to press on to the objective?”
There was a long moment’s pause, and then he saw Krahling slowly shake his head. “I don’t believe so, no—not with the forces we had at our disposal. The ISIS-K presence was far stronger than we’d been led to believe—we were up against eighty to ninety fighters at one point, minimum.”
The gambit Bell was proposing was not without its own risks. To perjure oneself before Congress. . .at one point, he would have considered it unthinkable. Now? After last December?
Lying was the least of his sins.
“Thank you,” he replied, his eyes never wavering from the camera. “You did good work today, Mr. Krahling. We win some, and we lose some. I look forward to your full report.”
2:30 A.M. Central European Summer Time, July 10th
Liège Rue Lairesse Bus Station
Liège, Belgium
Returning to the scene of the crime. That’s what it felt like, Harry thought, dismounting the steps of the bus—casting a glance back toward the island of the Outremeuse, just visible in the glow of the streetlights, off in the distance.
The place he had murdered a man, just three days before. And now here he was, again, prepared to commit another murder.
Or at least he thought he was. He crossed the street, his eyes flickering back and forth between the shadows. Only too aware of just how exposed he’d been, getting off the bus. One of only four passengers.
If Driss was right—if it was a trap—they could have been waiting. Watching for him.
But he’d seen no one, and he struggled to credit Lahcen’s organization with the ability to pull off surveillance on the level it would take for him to be unable to detect it.
The Belgian security services? The French? They were another question entirely, and he forced himself to slow as he made his way down the street, past darkened storefronts. Look casual.
He had four and a half miles to cover before arriving at the address Yassin had given him—there had been another bus station, closer, but he’d rejected it as too obvious. Too likely to be watched.
But if they had the resources of the VSSE or the DGSE. . .anything was on the table. The risks, far too difficult to calculate.
Harry caught a glimpse of his reflection in the plate glass of a store window, a haggard, bearded face, eyes staring out from deep, shadowed sockets.
What are you doing here? They seemed to ask. Another question he had no answer for.
Fate.
3:05 A.M.
An apartment
Paris, France
It was happening. Anaïs Brunet lay back against the pillow, the sheets pushed away from her body—staring up into the rhythmically revolving blades of the ceiling fan above her head, stirring the humid air of the apartment.
She hadn’t been able to sleep at all, and it had little to do with the onset of the summer heat. Armand’s last message, still weighing heavily on her mind.
He’d done it. All the skills that had made him one of the DGSE’s most successful case officers over the years, used to convince LYSANDER to go back under. After the younger officer placed one more call to his wife. His young son.
One final call, was the way Césaire had put it in his report, the reproach clearly audible even in the written words. His opinion of her handling of this operation, still clearly unchanged.
She’d read his file prior to this operation—knew he had lost assets before. One in particular, back during the collapse of Zaire in the mid-‘90s, a highly-placed Tutsi lieutenant of Laurent-Désiré Kabila. He had provided the French with intelligence from within the burgeoning civil war for five months—up until the day Césaire had gone to the regular dead drop to find the man’s severed head there, staring sightlessly back at him.
And now, this was no ordinary asset, but a fellow intelligence officer. The stakes, that much higher. The cost of failure, so much the greater.
Brunet swore softly under her breath, cursing the sleep that would not come. If everything had proceeded on schedule, LYSANDER would have already made contact.
By morning, perhaps sooner, he’d be face-to-face once more with Ibrahim Abu Musab al-Almani. Back on the inside.
Their operation, underway once again. For better or worse. . .
4:19 A.M.
Liège, Belgium
There was nothing to be learned from without. Harry had come to that conclusion over the course of an hour of examining the Liège apartment building from the outside.
It was ten stories tall, stark and modern, just another faceless one in a long row of such structures, stretching on down the street, looming dark against the night—a scattered light visible here and there, as though the inhabitants were waking.
“Did Yassin have friends in Liège?” he’d asked Reza, just before parting. “People he could seek out in an emergency?”
There had been a long, reflective pause before the kid shook his head. “Not that I know of.”
All of which increased the likelihood that this was some kind of trap, Harry thought, making his way across the street toward the main access door—one he’d already seen several people use during his time of surveillance.
But he was committed now. Yassin was a loose end—he couldn’t afford to leave him out here.
Not alive.
The door gave noiselessly under his hand and he was inside, his eyes re-adjusting to the low light as he glanced up and down the corridors—finding his way to the stairs.
Six stories up. He worked his way up, pausing at each landing to look. Listen. Nerves alert for any sign of danger, any hint that an ambush lay ahead.
But there was nothing out of the ordinary—just the usual sounds of a tower slowly waking to greet the morn.
It reminded him of the tower block in Leeds that night with Mehreen. Looking for her nephew.
A quest that had gone. . .badly, ending with a pair of broken bodies lying crumpled in the gravel of an empty lot. Shots ringing out through the dawn.
A good man, and a messed-up kid, caught up in events far beyond their control. Both of them, dead.
His failure.
But there was no time to dwell on the past, not now—the rasping sound of a door opening coming from above as he rounded the landing to the final flight of stairs, his breath quickening at the noise.
He palmed the switchblade in his left hand, its blade extended back along the underside of his forearm as he mounted the stairs, head down–his pace slow, unhurried.
A figure, descending the stairs toward him. A brief glimpse of a man’s face in the semi-darkness.
Young, swarthy—Middle Eastern or North African, by the look of him.
Familiar. One of Lahcen’s men in the park, Harry realized suddenly—every fiber of his body coming alive, alert to the presence of danger. If he had been recognized. . .
Another moment, another three steps further up and he heard it—a voice raised in sudden challenge. “Hold up there.”
He kept moving, the same stolid pace—his face now fully obscured in shadow. Hearing the young man begin to re-ascend the stairs behind him, repeating the challenge in first French and then Arabic—punctuating the words with an aggravated curse.
He knew that he had been betrayed, that Yassin had—somehow–been forced to give him up, but there was no time to think of that. Not now.
His grip tightening on the knife—gauging the man’s approach by sound, by feel. Just a few more steps.
4:26 A.M.
Clinique St. Jean
Boulevard du Jardin Botanique
Brussels
The hospital room was quiet—the only sounds that familiar, insistent beep of the heartbeat monitor, seeming to falter now and again, the murmur of nurses’ voices in the corridor without.
The form of the woman in the bed, deathly still, her eyes closed in the semi-darkness—the glow of
the monitors reflecting strangely off her jaundiced, sickly skin.
Her breathing, increasingly shallow.
I’ll see you Tuesday nite, right? The young police officer’s thumbs flew over his phone’s keyboard. Drinks after I get off?
He pressed Send, letting the phone rest on his knee as he looked up from his seat in the corner, scanning the dark room once more. Just another hour and he’d be relieved—another officer coming in to take his place. Another tiresome night of this duty, over.
His superiors had been sure that this woman’s son—the wannabe terrorist they seemed to believe was out there–would try to come see her, one final time before the end.
After two nights, he wasn’t so sure.
His phone buzzed with an incoming text and he opened it to see his girlfriend’s reply—his thumb scrolling down the screen.
And then he heard it, a sudden chill gripping his heart—the monitor’s beep replaced by a loud, flat tone.
The phone fell from his hands to crash against the floor of the hospital room as he raced to the bed, calling out for the nurse.
But it was already too late. Far too late.
4:27 A.M.
The apartment buildings
Liège, Belgium
“Can’t you hear me, you idiot? I asked you–”
Harry felt the young man’s hand descend roughly on his shoulder, his left arm suddenly whipping out and back, all its force behind the blade of the knife as it plunged into the man’s ribs, going in deep—puncturing a lung.
In. A wild scream echoing off the hollow confines of the stairwell. An anguished, animal sound.
And back out, the blade ripping through reluctant flesh and muscle as Harry tore it from the Algerian’s body, bringing it up and across his throat in a single, smooth motion—blood spraying over Harry’s shirt as he pushed his opponent back against the railing.
Bending him back over the rail, his knife hand entwined in the bloody collar of the man’s shirt, groping for the gun in his waistband.
There was fear in his eyes—a desperate, panicked strength filling his weakening body as he pushed back against Harry, trying to throw him off—regain the upper hand. But he was already off-balance, his fate. . .already sealed.
Harry’s fingers closed around the grip of the small semiautomatic, pulling it from the man’s waistband even as he released his grip on his collar.
A strange gurgling cry escaped from the man’s slashed throat as he toppled backward over the railing, hurtling six stories down through the darkness to smash against the concrete floor below.
Harry heard the impact, only then letting out the breath he’d been holding ever since the fight had begun. . .what, sixty seconds before? Even that?
He didn’t think so. He looked down at the blood on his hands, struggling to catch his breath as he folded the knife back in on itself and replaced it in a pocket of his jeans. There wasn’t much time. If the alarm was raised. . .
Harry brought the compact CZ up in his hand, quickly brass-checking the chamber in the dim light. Loaded.
One in the chamber, another nine in the mag. Little enough, he mused, manually cocking the hammer.
A few more steps upward, and he was on the sixth floor landing, pausing only briefly before moving out into the corridor—covering the distance to the apartment door in a handful of strides, the pistol tucked just out of sight, against the back of his leg.
He glanced briefly up and down the corridor before knocking, a hard, insistent rap.
“Hakim, is that you?” he heard a voice in French ask from within. A young man’s voice, by the sound of it—perhaps the age of the man he had just killed in the stairwell.
“Certainement,” he replied, standing well back and to the side—out of the line of the door’s peephole. “Don’t keep me standing out here.”
A rattle of a chain being undone, and the door slid open—revealing a swarthy face silhouetted against the room light. Surprise filling its features. “You’re not–”
They were the last words to leave his mouth, the door slamming into him as Harry’s foot lashed out, connecting with the thin plywood—sending him staggering back against the wall.
He hardly had time to react before Harry was on him—wrapping an arm around his throat and pulling him back into his chest. The muzzle of the CZ grinding into his temple, even as another man emerged from the back, a pistol carried loosely in his hand, his eyes widening at the sight of Harry.
“Drop the weapon,” Harry ordered brusquely, his finger caressing the CZ’s trigger. “Or I put a bullet in your friend’s head. Do it now.”
“Ibrahim!” he heard Yassin call out—turning his head to see his young friend standing in the open doorway of the apartment’s kitchen, a rough, bloody bandage wrapped around his mid-section, just visible beneath his open shirt. “Don’t do this, brother–they’re on our side.”
They’d gotten to him. But there was no time to reconcile himself to that, not now. He had to extricate them both from this, before it was too late.
“Then why,” Harry began, his words coming out from between clenched teeth, returning his focus to the man with the gun, “was their boss wearing a wire? Why did they use you to lure me here? Put down the gun!”
“Go ahead,” he replied, looking him in the eye. Still holding the pistol. “Kill him. He will die in the cause of Allah, as must we all.”
He wasn’t bluffing, Harry thought, reading cold resolution in the set of the man’s face. Hearing Yassin’s voice, pleading with him, “They’re with us, brother. Just lower your weapon. We can talk this out.”
“I don’t know what they’ve told you,” he replied, rounding once more on Yassin, “or what you’ve chosen to believe. But I know what I saw. And I–”
He heard it, just a second too late, a footstep on the thin carpet behind him. Started to turn, to bring his weapon to bear.
The next moment, something heavy crashed into the side of Harry’s head and everything went black. . .
Chapter 15
11:37 A.M.
Commissariat Wallonie Liège
Liège, Belgium
“It’s not him,” Anaïs Brunet announced finally, a long, shuddering sigh escaping her lips as she stared down at the naked body lying there on the cold slab before them—the corpse’s flesh deathly pale in the bright lights of the police station’s mortuarium, the back of his skull caved in by the impact.
He’d fallen more than fifty feet to smash against the concrete floor, according to the police report. But he’d been dying well before the fall, as the long, ragged gash across his throat bore witness—the stab wound to his chest.
So familiar.
“Do you have any idea who he is?” a voice asked, and Brunet glanced up into the eyes of Christian Danloy, the administrator general of the Belgian State Security Service, the VSSE.
“No,” she replied, looking her counterpart in the eye, “but he’s not our asset. And that’s what matters.”
“To you,” Danloy acknowledged grudgingly, issuing a brusque command to the Liège police officer standing nearby as they both turned away from the body, with him falling in step behind her as they made their way back to the elevator. “We still have an unexplained murder to solve. And even more questions that need answering. At precisely what point, Anaïs, were you planning to read in my service on your operation here in this country?”
“We weren’t,” she responded bluntly, turning to face him as they entered the elevator together. Deciding that, in Danloy’s case, honesty was the only viable approach.
He would have seen through anything else.
Danloy shook his head, a flash of anger passing across the Walloon’s bluff countenance. He was a big man, only a couple years her senior, but a career intelligence officer. They’d worked together closely more than once over the years, but he’d never lost his skepticism of her. Danloy, Dubois. . .it was the theme of her career.
“It was an operational decision, Christian,�
�� she replied, ignoring his anger. “We’ve kept the circle of knowledge on this exceedingly small. Fewer than fifty people, total, between my service and the CIA.”
Danloy swore, shaking his head once more in disbelief. “The Americans?”
“They’re funding the operation,” Brunet returned coolly, watching him subside. They both knew how that worked. “Through Alliance Base, as part of the ongoing fight against the Islamic State.”
“And you believe that both this murder and that of Lahcen were committed by this German you’re tracking? Ibrahim Abu Musab al-Almani?”
“That’s why I’m here.” Why the news of the murder had precipitated her early morning flight out of De Gaulle. It had been time to read the Belgians in—past time, Vukovic likely right in his misgivings from the start. That the corpse hadn’t proved to be their asset after all, didn’t really matter. This was a conversation that needed to happen, face-to-face. “The style of the killing is almost identical, and the apartment building where that. . .young man was found lies only a few miles from the Outremeuse. Our asset had been set to re-establish contact with al-Almani overnight. When word came of this killing. . .”
“But of course,” the VSSE head replied, nodding his understanding. He reached out, holding the elevator doors closed a moment longer. “Tell me, Anaïs—do you have any pictures of this ‘ringleader’ of yours?”
“No, we do not—not as of yet.”
“That seems unusual.”
There was something there in his voice—something beyond his usual skepticism. “You don’t believe me?”
Danloy shrugged. “Last night I wouldn’t have believed that the DGSE would run an operation on our soil without apprising us of it. So now—I don’t know just what to believe. Why don’t you tell me, Anais? What am I to believe? Or perhaps better, let me tell you what is going to happen. You’re going to give my service full access to your files on this operation, with your officers coordinating their activities with mine—or else I will bring pressure to bear to have it shuttered. Permanently.”
Presence of Mine Enemies Page 24
