The young Algerian lifted his hands up in front of his face, the fingers visibly trembling. “I went to add the powder to the drum like you said. . .couldn’t do it, they were shaking so badly.”
Harry just stared at him, that dark fear within suddenly very real. The knowledge of just how his plans had gone astray, only too clear. “Then. . .you just left it for later?”
A shake of the head, driving home that fear like an icy dagger. Disaster. “No—Reza came in and I asked him to do it. He’s fresh, he should be—”
It was a sentence Marwan would never finish—their world exploding into fire in that moment, the shockwave rippling outward from the epicenter of the blast as the shed which had been their workshop disintegrated, flying bits of rubble peppering Harry’s body—a seven-inch splinter of wood stabbing through his jeans like a knife, burying itself in the meat of his thigh.
He ended up on the ground, Nora pressed to the earth beneath him—dazed, his ears ringing with the blast as he sheltered her with his body.
Her eyes were wide with shock and fear as she stared up at him—her hijab coming loose to reveal her blonde hair. He rolled off her, raising himself to one knee as he stared at the devastated remains of the workshop fifty meters away, nearly leveled by the force of the explosion.
Flames licking at what little remained of the wooden beams outlining where the structure had once stood. He heard Nora scream Reza’s name, reached out to seize her as she tried to run toward the flames.
She swung into him—her fists beating against his chest, hot tears running down her cheeks as he held her close.
And as he looked over her shoulder into the consuming flames, he found to his surprise that a tear was making its way down his own weathered cheek—testament to a grief, all too real.
Loss.
Chapter 22
8:36 A.M. Central European Summer Time, July 29th
The farmhouse
Outside Liège, Belgium
There had to have been at least thirty emergency vehicles clustered around the burnt-out ruins of the farmhouse and its outbuildings, Anaïs Brunet thought as she dismounted from a Eurocopter Dauphin emblazoned with the familiar DGSE emblem—a globe, sheltered within the wings of a bird of prey.
Partout où nécessité fait loi. Wherever necessity makes law.
She ducked her head, feeling the rotor wash whip at the jacket of her pantsuit as she and her bodyguard moved together across the open field toward the remains of the dwelling. It had been ten hours since the call had come in from their counterparts in Brussels, a call taken by the DGSE’s duty officer.
Reports of a massive explosion on the outskirts of Liège—passing motorists dialing 101 to report a fireball off the roadway, just visible through the trees.
Early forensic reports had indicated TATP—one of the most common homemade explosives favored by terrorist groups.
She saw Danloy and one of his VSSE lieutenants standing on the periphery of the police line and made her way over to them.
“Bonjour,” Danloy greeted, extending a hand as she reached him. “I was surprised to learn that you were coming in person, Anaïs. Surely a subordinate would have been—”
“Insufficient,” she replied, cutting him off with a hard look. There needed to be someone on-scene who knew the details of LYSANDER’s operation. And there was no way she was going to ask Césaire to expose himself like this. “What are we looking at here, Christian?”
“A bomb-making operation gone wrong, most likely. At least based on the preliminary forensics.” The administrator-general seemed delighted by the prospect, which was perhaps not without reason. Better for the bomb-makers to blow themselves up here, out in the countryside, than in the city center of Brussels. And yet. . .
“Were the bomb-makers killed in the blast?” she asked, glancing around her at the devastation. There was one ambulance among the emergency vehicles, but it sat unattended—away from the center of activity.
Danloy’s face clouded. “We have recovered human. . .tissue from the epicenter of the blast,that shed off to the side of the main house. But no vehicles were found on the property when we arrived, and we have reason to believe the farmhouse itself was torched separately.”
“By other members of the cell, seeking to cover their tracks before they fled.”
“Oui. Presumably. What are your. . .other sources telling you, Anaïs?”
She glanced around them, taking note of the nearest Belgian police officer, nearly fifteen feet away.
“Nothing,” Brunet said finally, reaching up to brush her hair back from her face. “We’ve heard nothing from LYSANDER in a couple weeks. We have to presume that he’s being watched too closely to transmit a message.”
“Or he’s already dead.” Danloy’s voice was cold, but he wasn’t wrong. It was a possibility they had to consider. And had been.
“Or he’s already dead,” she agreed, inclining her head toward the smoldering wreckage. “We will want access to the tissue samples your technicians recovered—to run a DNA match against our officer.”
9:08 A.M.
The warehouse
Liège, Belgium
“How could something like this have happened? Answer me that, why don’t you?” Belkaïd was furious, pacing back and forth—almost beside himself with anger and fear. Both at the threat of exposure, and, he suspected, the timing, Harry thought, with their meeting with Lahcen’s mysterious “contact” in Charleroi less than twelve hours away.
“You might as well ask how could it not!” he snapped back, grief and rage finally finding their voice. The knowledge of his own actions, weighing him down. But it wasn’t supposed to have been Reza. “I warned you that the compound was extremely unstable—I suggested we move the drums off the property the moment they were filled. I was overruled.”
He pulled up just short of adding“by you.” The arms trafficker had—not at all without reason—been concerned that the drums could blow up in-transit, on the open road, compromising their operation before it could even get underway. So now here they were.
With Belgian and French security services swarming over the ruins of the isolated farmstead.
“And now my brother is dead.” Struggling to master his own raging emotions, Harry glanced over to the laptop sitting on the desk a few feet away, its screen displaying the streaming video feed from a thousand feet over the smoldering farmhouse.
At some point, deep down he still hadn’t been able to process that it was by his own hand that Reza had died. That he—and he alone—was responsible. He closed his eyes, wrestling with the memories. The strange, inexplicable guilt.
“I’d also pull in the drone,” he observed, this time more quietly. “It’s only a matter of time before someone notices that something is in the sky which doesn’t belong there—starts asking questions.”
Belkaïd turned, glaring at him for a long moment as if there was an angry retort poised there on his lips, but he left it unspoken, turning toward the man seated before the laptop. “Get word out to the truck—tell them to bring it down.”
It was impossible for him to even know why he had said that—why he hadn’t simply allowed Belkaïd to make his own mistakes. Bring them all crashing down.
Just another mistake of his own, he mused as the man rose, leaving the room to place the call. Now too many to count.
“Where do we go from here?” he heard Aryn ask, a cold chill permeating his body as the young man rose to his feet at the other side of the small warehouse office. Their mission, still clearly uppermost in his mind. “The explosives with which we’d planned to carry out our attack are gone.”
“My brother is gone!” Yassin exploded, the words coming out in a choking sob as he finally found his voice, the young man’s cheeks wet with tears.
“As is my mother,” his older friend retorted, not giving an inch. “It doesn’t alter our responsibility to follow in the way of the Prophet, to play our part in Allah’s struggle.”
“Aryn is right,” Harry interjected, mastering himself with a final effort. Knowing he had to take control of this. Now or never. “Our brother died a shahid. He would want us to honor his memory by continuing his mission. The only question is how to do it.”
He found Driss looking at him—the young Moroccan’s eyes shifting between him and the now-abandoned laptop. “What about the drone?”
Devastation. Harry stole a glance at Marwan, but he seemed as surprised by the question as anyone else. “What?” he demanded, refocusing his attention on Driss. “What do you mean?”
“Couldn’t drones like the ones we’re using for surveillance—couldn’t they be armed for an attack? Think of it, brother, we would turn the crusaders’ weapons against them, bring home to them the very terror they have sowed in Muslim lands.”
“It wouldn’t work,” Harry responded, striving to inject his voice with a note of confidence which was completely unfelt. “You would need military-grade high explosives to work with the limited payload of the system. Those were hard enough to come by in Sham. Here? Impossible.”
Or so he hoped, recognizing in the young Moroccan’s eyes that this was an idea that wasn’t going to die.
“But what if—”
“None of this matters right now,” Belkaïd said, cutting Driss off. “What matters is our meeting with Lahcen’s contact. We leave for Charleroi in three hours.”
11:23 A.M. Eastern Daylight Time
A diner
Potomac Falls, Virginia
“Seriously? You haven’t found anything yet?” Melody Lawlor asked, stabbing once more at her salad, the irritable motion betraying the anxiety there, just below the surface. Threatening to break through. “I thought you said you had this covered. You promised me that—”
“I do,” Ian Cahill responded, leaning back against the faded red faux leather of the booth. The diner had seen better days, that was for sure, but there was something comforting about it, for all that. Americana. A reminder of what the world had been like when he was a boy.
So much simpler.
“The food here is awful,” she said finally, a look of disgust on her face as she laid down her fork.
“The burgers aren’t,” Cahill observed, replacing the remains of his on his plate and dusting the crumbs from his fingertips. “And no one recognizes either of us here, which is far more important than the food. You need to be taking this seriously.”
She half-rolled her eyes, murmuring an obscenity beneath her breath. “I’m the one who has to live with this, day in and day out, and you think you have to remind me?”
“I do,” Cahill replied, suppressing a curse of his own as he favored the young woman with a baleful glare. “Are you still sleeping with him?”
Her fork paused in mid-air, half-way to her mouth. “I don’t see how that’s—”
“Answer the question,” the political operative spat, losing his patience—his voice coming out far louder than he had intended. His head suddenly coming up to find a middle-aged waitress standing at his elbow, eyeing him with a look of weary disapproval. “More coffee?”
“Yes, please,” he said more calmly, gesturing to his cup. He waited until she had filled it and moved on a few booths down before he pressed the question once more. “So?”
“As little as possible,” she managed finally, refusing to look him in the eye. “The last few weeks, only when I can’t put him off.”
He swore, his worst fears confirmed in that moment. “We’ve talked about this—you can’t be doing anything that would cause him to suspect. To think that anything has changed.”
“That’s easy for you to say,” she fired back, her eyes flashing fire. Her salad, now long-forgotten. “You’re not the one who has to put on an act, every day, pretending to love someone.”
“You never had any problem before.”
She just looked at him. “I’m not a prostitute, Ian.”
“Of course you’re not.” Prostitutes were far more honest, Cahill thought. The strictly transactional nature of the relationship. . .far more clear.
Not that Coftey wasn’t old enough to know better. “Still, what has changed, really?”
“He scares me.” She wasn’t lying—he could see the fear in her eyes, cracking through the too-old-for-her-years D.C. exterior. She had finally encountered something she didn’t recognize, and had no idea how to handle it.
“He should,” he responded coldly. “And always should have. If you ever thought Roy Coftey was just an oversexed good old boy who could be trifled with without consequence, you were a little fool.”
The expression on her face was as though he had slapped her. Perhaps he should have. Long ago.
“And that’s why you need to handle him carefully,” Cahill pressed, leaning forward and covering her hand with his own. “These people are dangerous.”
“I thought you said you didn’t know anything about them,” she replied, pulling her hand away—suddenly wary.
“I don’t. But I know who’s not talking, all of a sudden.” Cahill’s eyes grew hard. “And that. . .tells me plenty.”
5:57 P.M. Central European Summer Time
An abandoned industrial site
Charleroi, Belgium
Charleroi had once been the capital of le pays noir, Grigoriy Stepanovich Kolesnikov mused, glancing around him at the desolation of the colliery—the heavy grass and weeds growing through the rotting ties of the deserted railway tracks not fifty meters to his west. The black country.
The vast coal mining operations that had fueled the Belgian economy for more than a century, his intel packet from Moscow had noted, until deposits had begun to run out in the second half of the 20th Century and Wallonia had spiraled into decline—a deep economic depression that some observers likened to the American Detroit.
He had seen it on the ride over, he thought, shutting off the big Harley’s throbbing engine and dismounting. The desolation, palpable in the small villages one passed through—in abandoned buildings like these, scattered across the landscape.
The vaunted West, buckling under a mere taste of the pain they had inflicted upon his own country.
Soon, they would know far more than a taste. And the promise of that made even working with the likes of Gamal Belkaïd palatable. Just barely.
He removed his helmet, hanging it over the handlebars of the Harley as he turned to Nikolai Timofeyevich. “Have your men spread out—there along the rails—one up there near the entry road. I want you to stay here with me.”
The Night Wolves’ leader nodded, relaying the orders to his men as he drew a compact Smith & Wesson semiautomatic from its holster in the small of his back, beneath his cut.
“And keep your weapons holstered,” Kolesnikov admonished sternly, shooting him a warning look. “I don’t want this to escalate unnecessarily.”
Something he wouldn’t have even had to say if he were working with professionals, he realized, watching as the biker grudgingly reholstered his weapon—wishing, not for the first time, that he had some of the men from Spetsgruppa A he’d served beside in the Ukraine two years before. Put one of them up on the top of that coal elevator with a long rifle. . .
But there was no point in wasting time wishing for that which was out of reach. No profit in it. Kolesnikov turned back toward the Harley, noticing for the first time the icon of Gregory of Nazianzus mounted above the headlight.
As though the bike was meant for me, he thought, a smile crossing his lips at the familiar image of the saint for whom he’d been named. Fate.
“You crushed his ribs, you know that,” Nikolai Timofeyevich announced behind him, clearly referencing the bike’s previous owner.
“What of it?” Kolesnikov asked, turning to face the biker—his gaze cold and appraising.
“One of the ribs punctured a lung—he’s struggling, may not make the night unless we were to take him to hospital.”
And that was out of the question, and he could tell from the look in the older ma
n’s eyes that he didn’t need the reminder. He simply needed to make his point—to lay the guilt at Kolesnikov’s feet, as it were.
“He was a good man.”
“A good man, perhaps,” the FSB officer replied, leaning back against the saddle of the Harley—his body utterly relaxed, his eyes never leaving Nikolai’s face, “but one who failed you utterly in the time of testing.”
“Testing?”
“Of course,” Kolesnikov said, his gaze still unwavering. “Why do you think God brought me here, if not to test your faith.”
6:05 P.M.
A van
Seven kilometers to the southwest, along the banks of the Sambre
“And there they are,” Harry observed, rising from his seat in the back of the van, watching as the Guardian drone described its slow orbit more than a thousand feet above the decaying ruins of the colliery, its cameras focused in on the small group of men gathered by their bikes along the train track.
They looked like members of a motorcycle gang—all except for one man leaning against a Harley in the rough center of the outspread men, his suit clearly distinguishing him from the rest.
Their principal, that much was evident. But who was it? What did they want?
Questions he had no answers to, like so many over the course of his career in intelligence. Moving—fighting—in a world of shadows.
“Do you see anyone else moving into the area?” Gamal Belkaïd asked, his hand resting on the drone operator’s shoulder as the man manipulated the UAV’s videogame-like controller—bringing the cameras out once more to pan around the vicinity.
“Nothing yet.”
Belkaïd seemed to consider the answer for a long moment, the pale glow of the electronics strangely illuminating his swarthy face in the darkness of the van. “All right—we give it ten minutes, and then we go in.”
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