There was something familiar about the elder of the pair, an uncanny feeling of recognition that Kolesnikov couldn’t seem to shake, no matter how hard he tried.
Perhaps it was just the smell—the ghastly odor that clung about both of them like a garment. A smell he remembered vividly from Syria, six months before, gathering intelligence in the ruins of an Ahrar al-Sham camp along with a contingent of Russian “mercenaries.” TATP.
Belkaïd wasn’t waiting. He’d been cooking his own explosives—linked to the explosion outside of Liège which was still featuring prominently in the news cycle, perhaps?
It meant he was going to have to handle them carefully, if his mission here was to have its desired impact. He glanced up once again at the arch, Vasiliev’s words running once more through his head.
One day.
7:34 A.M. Eastern Daylight Time
Vienna, Virginia
The house was quiet. Painfully so, Roy Coftey thought, leaning heavily against the counter as he brought the cup of coffee to his lips.
Melody had been gone all week, visiting an old college friend in New Hampshire. Or so she’d said.
The doubt emerged unbidden, in his mind almost before he was aware of thinking it. But she’d been distant these last few weeks—ever since returning from Oklahoma, really. They’d had sex. . .three times, was it? No more than four. And even in those intimate moments of union, she had seemed withdrawn, as though she were withholding something from him—as never before.
He took another sip of the steaming coffee, glancing down at the phone in his other hand, scrolling absently through her social media accounts, looking for any sign that she was where she said she was. She had posted a picture the night before, of her and her friend, captioning it, “So great to see this girl again #memories”
But it was an old picture, of the two of them together in Paris, back during college, standing at the foot of the Eiffel Tower.
Why an old picture? It was a question he couldn’t shake, no matter how foolish it made him feel, as though he were some kind of jealous lover. . .
Perhaps because that’s exactly what he was.
He left the phone on the counter, taking the coffee with him as he padded barefoot back to the master bedroom, pulling open the drawer of the nightstand on his side of the bed—withdrawing his old Vietnam-era M1911 and laying the big pistol to one side as he rummaged through the drawer’s contents.
He found the small square velvet box tucked in the back, beneath a jumble of papers—the light coming in through the open shades of the bedroom glinting off a diamond set in gold as he opened the lid.
He’d taken Jessie’s wedding ring to a jeweler two months before—asked them to take the old diamond and place it in a modern setting, the centerpiece of a far more expensive ring than he could ever have afforded back in those days as a newly minted SF officer.
Since then. . .he’d just been waiting for the right moment. To give it to the only woman who had ever truly begun to fill the void Jessie had left.
In his heart—not just in his bed.
And now, sitting on the edge of the bed looking down at the new setting, the velvet box perched delicately between the fingers of his big hand—the M1911 lying forgotten on the sheets beside him—Roy Coftey began to wonder if it had all been a mistake.
2:30 P.M. Central European Summer Time
DGSE Headquarters
Paris, France
“I am sorry,” Christian Donlay responded, his face impassive on the screen at the head of the conference table. “But what you are asking is simply impossible.”
“I am asking,” Anaïs Brunet responded, favoring the camera with an icy glare, “for you to keep your word—to honor the agreement we reached when you were first read in on this operation, not even three weeks ago. We had an understanding, Christian.”
“Circumstances have changed.”
“You knew we were tracking an active terror cell three weeks ago. That remains the case today. Nothing, substantively, has changed. In fact—one could argue that with the loss of a significant amount of explosives and even personnel, their potential operational capability has been degraded.”
On-screen, the Belgian intelligence chief went quiet for a moment. “I am going to be utterly frank with you, Anaïs.”
“S’il vous plait.”
“You and I do not serve at our own pleasure, non? We act at the behest of the political leadership in our respective countries. Three weeks ago, you and I knew of the Molenbeek cell, but our political leadership did not. Now they do—and that makes all the difference in the world, even if the operational realities were to remain unchanged.”
He wasn’t wrong, Brunet thought. But that didn’t make the reality of this any easier. Or change the responsibility she bore.
“You have to be seen to be doing something,” she responded flatly. “Even if it means endangering the life of our officer.”
Danloy murmured something just off-mike that sounded like an exasperated curse. “Your officer may no longer be alive—you know this as well as I do. You’ve heard nothing from him since the explosion, have you?”
“That doesn’t mean anything, in itself,” Brunet countered, refusing to back down. “The cell will be working to minimize their exposure right now, in the wake of the explosion. I wouldn’t have expected LYSANDER to make contact under the circumstances.”
“What do you expect of your officer?” There was heat in Danloy’s voice, a hard edge.
“This has to be about more than one bomb, Christian,” she exclaimed, the tension in her voice rising to match his. “This is about our best chance to effect a long-term penetration of jihadist networks in Western Europe. Give us time to re-establish contact with LYSANDER. Then we can more properly assess the situation.”
“Respectfully, Anaïs, for the last day the Belgian media has featured nothing but ‘expert’ analysis of the damage such an explosion could have done if it had been set off in Brussels. And people are panicked. One bomb is one too many. I can give you twenty-four hours, no more. After that, we’ll have to proceed to place physical surveillance on Gamal Belkaïd and anyone else of the Molenbeek cell who can be located.”
It wasn’t enough. Brunet shook her head. “That may not be—”
“Twenty-four hours, Anaïs.”
4:30 P.M.
An apartment building
Liège, Belgium
“It still doesn’t seem real.” The young man’s voice was numb, scarce above a whisper. He stirred idly at the long-dissolved sugar in his tea, seeming scarce conscious of the movement of his own hand. “It feels as though I should expect him to walk back through that door, any moment now.”
“I know.” It wasn’t even a lie, Harry thought, turning away from the open window of the apartment toward where Yassin sat, scarce a breath of air stirring the faded, dirty curtains. That was the worst of it. He’d killed so many men, over the years, and Reza Harrak had deserved it no less than any of them.
But the detachment he’d enjoyed back then was. . .strangely absent.
It was different when you had come to know the man in those quiet, intimate moments which formed the inevitable foundation of brotherhood. In another life, they could have been friends—no, that was evasion. In this life, they had been friends.
In another life, that friendship might even have endured.
Harry stared down into the glass of tea in his hand, finding in it no relief from the nearly claustrophobic heat of the late afternoon. The familiar taste of spearmint permeating his mouth.
It wasn’t the first time he’d killed such a man, but always before there had been a team there for him when he’d come back in from the cold—there to help re-orient him, get his head back in the right place. Re-tasked, pressing on. Next mission.
Now? There was no one—the line between friend and enemy blurring irreparably, leaving him standing here alone, hands stained with the blood of his brother. Cain.
“Your broth
er was a good man,” he said finally, unable to find other words to express the way he felt. Taking another sip of the tea. “I regret that I could not have known him for longer. . .but such was not the will of Allah.”
“And this was?” Yassin demanded, a raw edge creeping into his voice. Bitterness and grief, intermixed.
“What else could it have been?” There was a seductive comfort in fatalism, Harry mused. A freedom from agency. “All our lives are ordered by God, and we die only in the time and the place appointed us.”
Like Carol. It was a comfort he would have desired for himself, if he could have come to a place of believing in it.
“But what purpose could there possibly be in Reza’s death?” Yassin spat, tears shining in his dark eyes as he rose angrily to his feet, a grimace of pain passing across his face. The wound he had received there on the Outremeuse, so nearly healed—yet still causing him pain in unexpected moments.
What purpose?
That familiar, unanswerable question. The very question he had himself asked, so many times over the months, the only answer a mocking echo in the void. Or so it seemed.
“That’s not for us to know,” he said finally, collecting himself with an effort. “None of us are going to live to see the end of this war, brother. I learned that on the battlefields of Sham. It has to be enough for us to know that Reza died no less a martyr in that shed than if he had given his life in an attack on the West. A noble sacrifice, in the cause of God.”
“Insh’allah.” There was acceptance in Yassin’s voice, grudging, but inevitable. The acceptance of one who had been raised for generations to believe it was the truth. Fate.
“How is Nora faring with all of. . .this?” Harry asked, realizing suddenly that he hadn’t seen the young woman since shortly after their return to Liège.
Yassin shook his head. “I don’t know. Belkaïd sent her to stay with his sister, across the city. I haven’t spoken to her since.”
“I should go see her.”
7:57 P.M. Moscow Time
A dacha
Rublyovka, Moscow Oblast
“You did good work in England, tovarisch.” Igor Zakirov smiled, extending a tumbler of brandy toward Vasiliev. “Or so I have been told. Unofficially, of course.”
Of course. Alexei accepted the tumbler with a smile, the crystal poised delicately between his long fingers. Officially, a man like Zakirov no longer occupied any place in the FSB’s intelligence hierarchy.
Unofficially. . .the influence of the siloviki, high-ranking “former” intelligence officers like Igor Petrovich, was far-reaching and undiminished by their transition to private life.
“I hope I was not too. . .harsh on your son,” Vasiliev said, taking a seat across from his old friend in the library of the dacha, looking around him at the thousands of volumes covering the towering shelves. Unsure, suddenly, in the presence of the man himself, whether he might not have transgressed too far.
“Roman? Nichevo,” Zakirov smiled, shaking his massive head. It does not matter. “He could use someone like you in his life. I fear I have been too lenient with him. . .he is given to excess, like so many of our young people these days. They don’t understand what life was like back when you and I were coming up—how hard we had to fight for everything we achieved.”
Everything we earned, Vasiliev thought, aware of just how ironic that idea was in the context of the system under which they had become men.
But however beautiful it might have seemed to a political philosopher, the First Chief Directorate had had no place for “each according to his need.”
In that world, only the strong survived—or thrived, as he and Igor Petrovich had done. The weak. . .remained only to be trampled underfoot, as they ever had been throughout the history of humanity. Their rightful place.
It was as though the visage of Dmitri Pavlovich Litvinov flickered across his mind’s eye in that moment, the way he had looked, hanging there in his London flat, the chair kicked away beneath his dangling feet. The life slowly leaving his body with each desperate, tormented breath. Sometimes the weak survived far longer than they had any right. But they all found their place in the end. Sometimes with help.
“Speaking of sons,” Zakirov said, easing himself back in his chair, “I commend you on the accomplishments of your protégé, no less than your own. He’s turned into a fine officer.”
“Grigoriy?” A smile touched Vasiliev’s thin lips. He’d mentored many young officers over the years, as the old world was changed for the new, but really only one of them deserved the name “son.” Grigoriy Stepanovich Kolesnikov. “I told you to give him time, didn’t I, Igor?”
A nod, a smile spreading across his old colleague’s face to match his own. “He was exceedingly raw, in those days, even you must admit.”
“An uncut diamond.”
6:05 P.M. Central European Summer Time
Amercoeur District
Liège, Belgium
The shadows were lengthening down the narrow city streets as Harry stopped in front of the open gate, glancing in at the narrow opening sandwiched between a turn-of-the-previous century brick townhouse on the left, and a squat building with modern siding on the right.
There were no overt signs of security, but perhaps Belkaïd’s reputation was simply formidable enough to assure his family’s safety. Or perhaps he was simply missing something.
That latter, more likely, Harry thought as he stepped through the entrance, finding himself in a small, cobblestoned courtyard filled with plants. The fronds of a potted palm brushing against his bearded face as he pushed past it, making his way toward the door of a third house that sat back, perhaps fifteen meters off the street.
Fifteen meters of space that someone had, with painstaking care, turned into a garden—flowers everywhere, a carpet of red begonias surrounding a young planetree in the center of the courtyard. More palms, scattered across the cobblestones. Clustered pots of aloe vera atop a picnic table not far from the door.
It reminded him, with a pang, of his own grandmother. Of the love with which she had always tended her plants. Love evident here, in this strangest of places.
He lifted his hand and knocked, the sound awkwardly loud in this place—removed as it seemed from the bustle of the street.
A few moments, barely audible footsteps, and then a woman’s voice. “Yes?”
“It’s Ibrahim,” he announced, the false name, by now, seeming far more natural than his own.
A moment’s pause and the bolt slid back, the door coming open to reveal a slight, leathery-faced woman perhaps eight or nine years Belkaïd’s senior standing in the opening, her form cloaked in a dark abaya, a loose hijab wrapped hastily about her hair.
“Salaam alaikum.”
“Wa’ alaikum as-salaam. Gamal said to expect you,” she said flatly, her voice devoid of emotion, containing neither approval nor disapproval. “I’ve made tea.”
6:12 P.M.
The hotel
Paris, France
Grigoriy walked over to the window of his hotel room, gazing out toward the Eiffel Tower in the distance for a long moment before drawing the curtains, walking back toward the bed.
Still nothing from Moscow—no official response to his report on the meet with Belkaïd. Perhaps he should have known better than to expect one. He had been at this business for over a decade, and it seemed as though the Centre’s responsiveness only became more lethargic with every advance in communications technology.
The Night Wolves were gone, though, and of that he was glad. Any explicit tie to the Rodina was a hazard, given his strictly non-official status here in Paris, but his superiors had believed they would help sell his mafiya cover with Belkaïd.
Perhaps they had, but they had posed a risk, even so. The Centre was not all-knowing, or all-wise.
Which was just as well for him, the FSB officer thought, unzipping his laptop case and retrieving the holstered Smith & Wesson M&P Compact from within, along with the loaded
magazines of 9mm Parabellum.
Maxim’s gun. Left behind, at his insistence, when the bikers had departed. The man hadn’t argued with him—had no way of knowing the Centre’s policies against arming their officers in Europe.
But what they didn’t know, wouldn’t hurt them. A smile played at his lips as he shoved one of the magazines into the butt of the pistol, racking the slide back with a smooth, practiced motion.
And that was another thing Vasiliev would have said.
6:15 P.M.
Amercoeur District
Liège, Belgium
Harry leaned back into the threadbare cushions of the couch, listening to the sounds of the woman bustling about in the kitchen, glancing around at the sparse furnishings of the small home. He didn’t quite know what he had expected, but this was something. . .less than he had imagined Belkaïd would provide for his family.
“You may call me Ghaniyah,” she announced, returning with a tray bearing three tall glasses and a silver teapot with steam escaping from its spout. “Nora will be out in a few minutes.”
The name meant beautiful woman, Harry thought, smiling up at her with a murmured mash’allah. And perhaps she had been so, once. But the years had not been kind.
But then, life and time left few without their marks.
She poured the steaming tea into the foremost glass, extending it toward him—and he noticed only then that two of the fingers of her right hand were missing from above the knuckle, the sleeve of her abaya falling away with the movement to reveal deep lacerations scarring the flesh of her wrist. Old scars, weathered by years.
Wounds.
He lifted the glass to his lips, savoring once again the characteristically strong spearmint of Maghrebi tea as the older woman settled into the chair across from him, regarding him with a penetrating gaze.
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