It was a long moment before she spoke, and then, unexpectedly, “I understand that you are the mujahid.”
He nodded quietly, unsure of his ground.
“Good.”
It wasn’t the reaction he had expected, and yet. . .he remained silent, watching her face. Waiting for her to continue.
“Gamal has become distracted over the years,” she said, wrapping both hands around her own glass of tea—resting it and them contemplatively on her lap. “His ‘business interests’ have consumed far too much of his focus—he’s allowed himself to forget.”
“Forget what?” Harry asked quietly, gauging her reaction. He had to be careful not to press too far, but there was something here—something important. All thoughts of Nora, his original purpose for the visit, forgotten in this moment.
“Our suffering,” the woman spat, her dark eyes flashing with a sudden intensity. Her gaze shifted toward a small, framed black-and-white photograph sitting on an end table at one end of the couch.
It was an old, weathered picture of a family, taken somewhere in Northern Africa, judging by the architecture of the building in the backdrop.
A husband and wife and their teenaged son. And standing before them, in the foreground of the picture, a young girl—not quite yet in her teens, clasping the hand of another boy more than a few years younger. Her and Gamal?
“My father,” she began slowly, her voice trembling with emotion as if the memory were still fresh, “was a shopkeeper in Algiers at the time of the revolution. They came to suspect him of having driven a car for the FLN during the bombing campaigns, and one night when I was thirteen the French paratroopers came to take him away. My older brother Youcef tried to stop them and they shot him in the head, left him to bleed out on the floor of our kitchen. My mother was raped—I was raped—that, I suppose, I have in common with Nora, if little else. We didn’t see my father again for nine months, and when he returned, he was a broken man. He died before Algeria could ever become free.”
“Nora?” Harry asked, taken off-guard by her words. “She was. . .?”
“You didn’t know?” the older woman asked, favoring him with a skeptical glance. “But you wouldn’t, would you?”
He fell silent for a moment, accepting the implicit rebuke. “It wasn’t. . .it wasn’t Reza, was it?”
A snort. “Reza saved her, as I have understood it. But that’s now a part of her past, as it is of mine. And now here you are, come to remind my brother of his obligations, long overdue.”
“Insh’allah.”
It was growing dark by the time Harry left the small house on the Rue Denis Sotiau, making his way out once more into the garden—Nora showing him to the gate. The two of them, alone for the first time all evening—though he had no doubt Ghaniyah Belkaïd was still watching from a window.
He stooped down on one knee, brushing back the leaves of an overhanging dwarf palm to reveal the African violets nestled beneath, their rich hue vivid even in the gathering twilight.
It surprised him that there was enough sun for them, in this small courtyard, but here they were, flourishing. Evidence of love. In the presence of death.
For there had been death in the older woman’s eyes—memories of wounds never healed, a life which might have been, ripped away from her in the flower of youth. A pain which now sought only to be assuaged in destruction. And, perhaps, these flowers.
Contradictions. Ever the nature of man. Trying to reconcile them all would drive you mad.
“Mash’allah,” he whispered, rising once more to stand by Nora’s side. “She has put so much work into these flowers. . .it is beautiful.”
She nodded as he turned to face her, self-consciously tucking a loose strand of blonde hair up under her hijab. “She’s a good woman. The love she has showed me. . .”
And love was a seductive thing, Harry realized, painful memories of his own, rising to the fore. It drew you in—held you in its power. Until it was far too late.
“You should leave,” he said suddenly, his eyes locking with hers. “Go back to the university. There’s nothing here for you, anymore.”
Leave now, before I bring everything crashing down around all of us, he thought, not daring to speak the words. To warn of the darkness to come.
She started to respond, surprise visible in her features, but he shook his head, holding up a hand to cut her off. “This isn’t a woman’s war, little sister. Think about it.”
And then he was gone, vanishing through the gate into the lonely street beyond. Into the night.
6:32 P.M.
Gare de Liège-Guillemins
Liège, Belgium
Twenty-four hours. And too much of that, already come and gone, Armand Césaire thought, stepping from the carriage of the Thalys train onto the platform of Liège’s massive railway station.
It wasn’t going to be enough. He knew that. Director Brunet knew it. Likely enough, the Belgians even knew it.
But it wasn’t their officer in harm’s way. And maybe even that wouldn’t have made any difference. They weren’t about to risk another bomb going off in Brussels—their citizens, crying out for protection the government seemed powerless to afford.
Anything but that. Even if someone had to die, along the way.
It was the reality of what he had warned Brunet, weeks before. The kinetic nature of this new threat, forcing everyone’s hand—rendering all but unworkable the patient, thorough spycraft of an earlier age. Operations, forced to the harvest long before they could ripen. Develop.
Césaire sighed, the exhaustion showing in the lines of his dark face as the intelligence officer pushed his way through the crowds of commuters exiting the station. There had been so many mistakes in this operation—that all of them had been forced on him, from above, was small consolation.
Daniel was still his responsibility, morally speaking. The one last vestige of morality that had not escaped him in decades of this sordid business. Honor.
He would go to the funeral, if there was to be one. Look his survivors in the eye, tell them what they needed to hear.
A brave man was owed that much.
But this brave man wasn’t dead just yet, despite their superiors’ best efforts. And it was up to him to ensure that their recklessness didn’t end in disaster.
Césaire glanced at his watch as he made his way out onto the street. He would leave the emergency signals tonight, in the
locations he and Daniel had agreed upon following their meeting in the Place Poelart, more than three weeks before.
And then, he would wait. And pray.
6:57 P.M.
Pont de Fragnée
Liège, Belgium
The night was quiet, reflected blue light from the bridge above shimmering off the waters of the Meuse, only a few meters away from his outstretched feet.
Harry leaned back into the concrete wall, looking up at the naked girders of the first arch, stretching out across the water. The lights above reflecting briefly off the darkened screen of the burner phone in his hand.
How had he gotten here? It was a question he’d asked himself a thousand times, and the answers weren’t getting any better as he went along.
But he had run as far as he dared. To keep running would jeopardize far more lives than he had any desire to risk. Any right.
It was time to come in out of the cold.
He reached down, powering on the burner—finding himself hesitating, even in this moment. The costs of his chosen course of action, all too apparent.
But like so many other moments in his life. . .this decision was necessary. Nothing else for it.
No choice at all, really. A singular course.
He ran a hand across his beard, staring at the phone for another long moment before he began to enter a number from memory—a fragment of his past. A lifetime ago, now. Or so it seemed.
He could only hope it hadn’t been changed.
Moment of truth.
Taking a deep breath, he p
ressed SEND, bringing the phone up to his ear, the glow of its screen casting strange shadows across his face. Waiting as it rang once, then twice. Then, a woman’s voice, clipped. Professional. The duty officer, no doubt. “Allô?”
“Listen to me,” Harry began, “very carefully. . .”
Chapter 25
7:37 A.M. Central European Summer Time, July 31st
DGSE Headquarters
Paris, France
“. . .details of an attack being plotted by Gamal Belkaïd. I will divulge this information only in person, to a French intelligence officer and a French intelligence officer alone. Your Belgian counterparts are compromised. Have such an officer meet me beneath the Pont de Fragnée on the east bank of river Meuse, tomorrow night at this time.”
“That doesn’t give us much time,” Anaïs Brunet heard the duty officer respond, her disembodied voice coming through clear over the recording.
“To set up a full surveillance operation?” the strangely distorted voice of the caller asked in French. “Non. But to send a single officer. . .it’s all the time you could need. If you send more, I will see them. And I will disappear.”
One could hear the voice of the duty officer attempting to say something further in reply, but the line was no longer open—the recording ending with a startling abruptness.
“Is that everything?” Brunet asked, glancing up.
“Oui,” the duty officer herself responded from the other end of the conference table, visibly taking a deep, weary breath. She hadn’t left since the call. “I did my best to keep him on the phone, madame le directeur, but I was unable—”
“He knew we would be tracking him,” Brunet replied. “There was nothing more you could have done. What did we get?”
“The call was placed from Liège.” Césaire’s supervisory officer, Albert Godard, took the question, putting on his glasses to look down the table at Brunet. “Somewhere near the Pont de Fragnée itself—within a mile radius. We weren’t able to get closer, given the time.”
“And what does the audio itself give us?”
“We’ve run voiceprint analysis, but it seems that the caller was using some kind of voice distortion app. If we are able to isolate which app was used, we may be able to reverse-engineer the audio, but that’s going to be a lengthy process. We—”
“The point, Albert. S’il vous plait.”
“His French is relatively fluent, but not native, in our assessment. Without hearing it naturally, it’s impossible to analyze any possible accent.”
“There’s no possibility that this is an attempt by LYSANDER to make emergency contact?” It was beyond unlikely, and Godard looked surprised that she had even asked the question.
“Not in our estimation, madame. That would mean that he had disclosed his status to a third party, and the odds he would take such a risk. . .”
“Then how did this man obtain the number he used?” That was the question that had been troubling them all, ever since the call came in. “It’s not as though he called a publicly available number—this is an emergency contact line for assets and officers in the field. If this is not someone who has worked with us in the past, he knows someone who has. Do we have any assets out there unaccounted for?”
Silence fell across the conference room, uneasy looks flickering back and forth between the DGSE officers present as each of them slowly shook their head. “Your thoughts, Daniel?” Brunet asked, turning to the CIA station chief, leaning back in the chair to her right.
The American was rumpled this morning, without a tie for the first time she could remember, his eyes bloodshot. A mug of coffee, sitting unattended beside his briefing papers.
“I can run the audio by Langley, if you want, but. . .I think you have a serious problem, no matter his identity. There’s someone, presumably in Belkaïd’s organization, presumably not your officer, who nevertheless knows your internal communication protocols well enough to contact your headquarters and reach the duty officer directly. And he’s telling you that the partners you’ve been sharing intel with have themselves been compromised.”
“What do you make of that assertion?”
Daniel Vukovic shook his head. “He could easily be lying—working an angle. Tell me, what would be the first thing you would do after receiving a communication of this sort?”
Brunet paused for a moment, looking the American in the eye. There were many things, but. . . “We would try to pull surveillance footage from the area surrounding the call, look for any known actors. But that would require the cooperation of local authorities, and—”
“He’s just firewalled you off from reaching out for any such cooperation,” Vukovic replied, nodding. “If he knows your comms protocols, I suspect he knows that as well.”
Silence fell over the conference room for a long moment before General Gauthier cleared his throat, voicing the question in everyone’s mind. “But what if he is telling the truth?”
“That’s the catch-22 in which he’s placed you,” Vukovic acknowledged, glancing down the length of the table to where the former Legionnaire sat. “Information you can’t validate or disprove, but at the same time, far too important not to be taken seriously. Because if he’s telling the truth, LYSANDER is in grave danger—if not already compromised.”
An impossible dilemma. But one that demanded a decision, without delay. Brunet closed her briefing folder, looking down the table till her eyes met Godard’s. “Contact Césaire. At once.”
8:01 A.M.
VSSE Headquarters
Brussels, Belgium
“Goedemorgen, Jan.”
Jan Vertens glanced over at his coworker, returning the greeting with a slight nod as he pulled out his desk chair, its casters groaning in protest. He’d ordered a new chair three weeks before and it had yet to arrive, while this one continued its slow, inexorable destruction of his lower back.
He let out a heavy sigh as he sank into it, reaching down to power on his computer’s tower. Middle age was getting to him. A dead end. Just like this job.
“What’s on for today?” he asked over the wall of the cubicle, only half-interested in the response as he reached down, rummaging in his messenger bag. Most days, it seemed as though it was paperwork. He didn’t know why he was still in this job, really. He’d been a police officer, once upon a time—before deciding that the street was no place to grow old and transitioning over to the State Security Service.
He’d have been better served by staying on the street.
“We’re staging to provide support for a surveillance operation in Liège,” came his colleague’s unexpected answer, bringing Jan’s head up in sudden attention. “Targeting Gamal Belkaïd.”
The Belgian intelligence officer froze at the sound of the name, his breath seeming to catch in his throat. “The Algerian black marketer? Why?”
He’d first heard the man’s name years before, during his time on the Brussels force. A minor player, then, just beginning to muscle his way in on the Belgian underworld. He could never have imagined then that he would end up working for the man. Funneling him information, for a price. A price that was buying his own future, a future for he and Rana, away from all of this.
It was a long moment before his colleague responded, a moment seemingly stretching out into an eternity. Then, “No idea. They haven’t told us much, yet. All very hush-hush.”
3:15 A.M. Eastern Daylight Time
Dover Air Force Base
Dover, Delaware
He’d been here so many times, Jack Richards thought, staring out through the windshield of the Nissan toward the lights of the runways—the dark, hulking shape of the just-arrived C-130 clearly visible in their glare. The sound of an orchestra playing Frederick the Great’s Symphony in D Major coming through the car’s speakers around him.
So very many times. Leaving. Coming home. Coming here to escort back someone else who. . .had made it home only in a coffin.
And times like this, picking up a friend who’d g
one themselves. He spotted the lone figure advancing toward the car in the early morning shadows when they were still fifty meters out, his hand stealing toward the butt of the Glock holstered inside his waistband.
Another twenty meters, though, and he recognized the man, his familiar stride as he covered the ground, a light backpack slung easily over his shoulder.
His hand eased away from the gun as he reached up, unlocking the Nissan’s doors.
“Welcome back,” he said simply, a moment later, turning down the music as Thomas Parker opened the door and slid into the passenger seat beside him—throwing his backpack unceremoniously into the back seat.
“Thanks,” the New Yorker replied, glancing over with a weary, ironic smile. “It was a good trip. The travel brochures don’t lie—Niger is beautiful this time of year.”
Then, more seriously, the humor vanishing from his voice as quick as it had come, “We’ll be back there, before you know it. Things. . .aren’t good.”
They never were, Richards thought, putting the Nissan into drive—beginning to navigate his way back off the Air Force base. Like a firefighter, no one ever bothered sending them where things were good.
Or if they did. . .things were about to get worse, for someone. Firefighter. Arsonist. It was a thin line, at times. Sometimes, they just made things worse, despite their best efforts. Like the Sinai.
“I was sorry to hear about Mitt,” Thomas said after a moment, seeming to divine his thoughts. “Tough break.”
“He’ll be okay,” Richards replied, thinking of the last time he had visited Nakamura in the hospital at Bethesda, two weeks before. “Supposed to be coming home tomorrow. Long road back, but he’s going to pull through. Donna was with him last time I stopped in.”
“She’s a good woman.”
“None better.” You had to be to stay with any man long in this business. The kind of woman who would have survived out on the frontier, a century before, Richards often thought. Rare breed.
Presence of Mine Enemies Page 40
