Presence of Mine Enemies

by Stephen England

  He tightened his grip on the bag of spices he had purchased in a shop here on the second floor of the mall, resisting the urge to wipe his sweaty palms against his pants as he made his way toward the escalators down. And the exit.

  He’d have to ditch the drive on the way out. Try again, another time.

  2:23 P.M.

  VSSE Headquarters

  Brussels, Belgium

  “. . .exiting the mall now—we’re still with the target.”

  “Goed,” Christian Danloy responded, circling the table in the center of the room—listening to the report from one of the half-dozen surveillance teams they now had spread out over the city of Liège, tracking Belkaïd’s people. The members of the Molenbeek cell identified by the DGSE. “Stay on him. Did he do anything other than buy spices at the shop?”

  “Nee.”

  “All right, then,” the VSSE chief said, breaking off the connection as he glanced around him at the gathered officers. “File a warrant to access the mall CCTV footage in and around that shop. If any other members of the cell have frequented it over the last month, we need to know. Let me know when it’s done.”

  3:41 P.M.

  Parc Astrid, Anderlecht

  Brussels, Belgium

  The shrill blast of a whistle broke through the humid summer air, a man’s voice barking out sharp commands as a couple dozen young players ages eleven and below spread out across the stadium’s field, awaiting their coach’s next signal.

  Youssef was lucky to get in this camp, Jan Vertens thought idly, glancing up from the game on his phone—recognizing the coach as one of R.S.C. Anderlecht’s top footballers.

  Perhaps he might even play for the club himself some day—if he stuck with it. Kids often didn’t, even kids as dedicated and earnest as Youssef. A year gone by and he thought of him almost as his own son. Perhaps. . .

  Vertens leaned back into his seat in the bleachers, tapped the screen again, once, twice, watching the brightly-colored blocks cascade down into a new position. He certainly hadn’t intended to be a policeman as a kid. He—

  His phone began to pulse with an incoming call just then, a strange number displayed on the screen. He stared at it for a long moment, frozen, as if entranced—as if he suddenly found himself holding a poisonous snake in his hand.

  Willing it to stop. To go to voicemail. Anything to delay the inevitable. But having such a message on his phone. . .

  He pressed Accept, lifting the phone to his ear with a trembling hand. “Ja?”

  “I’ve been waiting on your call, Jan. Is a football camp really so much more important than the obligations between the two of us?”

  A chill ran through his body. He knew the voice, even if he had heard it so very rarely over the years. Gamal Belkaïd.

  And he knew where he was.

  “What are you thinking?” Vertens demanded, finding his voice. “Calling me like this—on my personal phone.”

  He realized suddenly that he was speaking far too loudly—other parents beginning to look at him strangely. He flushed red, rising from his seat and shuffling along the seats toward the exit.

  “If you didn’t want me to call you, Jan,” the black market trafficker replied calmly, “you should have made contact before this. What did you learn?”

  Silence. He made his way out of the bright sunlight and into the darkened corridors of the stadium, his mind racing. He couldn’t betray the French asset—couldn’t endanger a man’s life like that. Couldn’t—

  “Don’t trifle with me, Jan,” Belkaïd said after a long moment of dead silence. “You’re there with the boy, aren’t you?”

  “Ja. Waarom?” Why. But he knew why, his heart congealing into an icy fist in the pit of his stomach.

  “A couple of my men are there as well. They may, perhaps, be even closer to him than you are yourself.”

  “Don’t you dare harm him!” Vertens exploded, his voice trembling with fear and rage—his eyes measuring the distance back down the corridor. Could he make it in time?

  “It’s you who will harm him, Jan. Think carefully about what you say next.”

  Vertens closed his eyes, leaning against the wall—his free hand clenching and unclenching spasmodically, a thousand unspoken curses passing across his lips. There was no choice.

  He took a long, deep breath, knowing what he had to do. Struggling to steady his voice as he spoke again. “You have a mole. . .”

  Chapter 28

  5:34 P.M.

  The apartment

  Liège, Belgium

  “When I was raped, I thought my life was over. My boyfriend left me, refused to believe that I hadn’t in some way brought it on myself. Perhaps he was right, even, I don’t know—I was so far from the truth then. I was already taking drugs. . .thought I would just lock myself in my chambre and end myself. And then there was Reza.”

  But of course, Harry thought, lifting the spoon to his lips—the fiery taste of red pepper spreading throughout his mouth as he tested the muhammara. Not enough lemon, he realized, moving away from the counter to rummage in the apartment’s refrigerator.

  Reza. Generous and impulsive as ever, stepping in where no one else saw a need—where no one else cared. Like he had when Harry had first arrived in Molenbeek, half-dead.

  Both of the brothers had welcomed him into their apartment, but it had been Reza who had recognized the need that day at the mosque—Harry nearly collapsing into him as they rose together from Friday prayers. Insisted on taking him to the hospital—then back to their own apartment when Harry explained why a hospital was impossible.

  That he would have found Nora in her lowest moment of despair—would have helped her get back on her feet—was so like him. The sad ghost of a smile passed across Harry’s face. And now he was dead.

  “This meant everything to Reza,” she had continued, her bright blue eyes burning with passion. “He would talk so often of the way Muslims in the Middle East were oppressed by America, by the West, in an effort to force them to change—to no longer shelter their women from the kind of violence which had left its scars on me.”

  And he had listened, as she continued, knowing the reality was so very different—knowing that he couldn’t trust her enough to save her. Knowing then how it would end, for her, like all the rest.

  “How could I betray him by leaving—now, when we’re so close? When we finally have a chance to show the world the pain they’ve so carelessly inflicted everywhere else? To show them how it feels.”

  He’d realized something then, watching her—something he should have picked up about her behavior long before. “You said you had done drugs, once. . .have you touched them, recently?”

  “No,” she’d answered quickly. Far too quickly. And he knew then how Belkaïd had seduced her. A temptation beyond any personal charm of his own—too strong for her to resist.

  “How’s it going, habibi?” Harry’s head came up from stirring the muhammara into a thick red paste to find Aryn standing in the doorway, eyeing the food.

  “Good,” he responded absently, the young man’s appearance pulling his mind from his thoughts. He reached out, tearing off a hunk of bread from the loaf on the counter, ladling the dip onto it. “I think this is almost ready to eat, if you want to try it? There was a man in Sham, who taught me how to make this. We rarely had the vegetables there to do it, but a few occasions. . .mash’allah.”

  5:42 P.M.

  VSSE Headquarters

  Brussels, Belgium

  “Hold up, hold up,” one of the targeting officers announced, raising his finger to point to one of the screens, a traffic camera covering the street in front of the towering apartment building they had identified as providing residences for the majority—if not all—of the Molenbeek cell members, and more than a few of Belkaïd’s own men. “We have activity on the street.”

  Christian Danloy hurried over to look where he was pointing, watching as four SUVs pulled in off the street, one right after the other—men piling out
almost before they had come to a stop.

  “What’s going on?” The administrateur général’s eyes narrowed, watching the scene unfold before them—the men spreading out as if to form a perimeter. “That’s Belkaïd himself—why weren’t we alerted that he was inbound?”

  “His follow team lost him fifteen minutes ago,” came the infuriating reply. “Heavy traffic—they weren’t able to make up the difference and re-acquire him. We need eyes in the sky.”

  And they had known that, but tasking it and working through the legal issues had been other matters entirely. Danloy stood there, watching as a small group of men closed around Belkaïd, disappearing into the building itself—the rest remaining, as if on guard, without.

  “What do we have on the inside in terms of audio/visual surveillance?” he demanded, glancing around at his team. “Talk to me.”

  “Vergeef mij, meneer,” his lead officer responded, shaking his head. Forgive me. “We’ve not been able to get officers inside, not yet—the neighborhood. . .it’s difficult to do so unobtrusively.”

  “Het maakt niet uit,” Danloy replied, his eyes fixed on the cameras. It doesn’t matter. Not now.

  And yet somehow, as he watched the men on-screen, he knew. It mattered very much indeed.

  “Find out who we have in the area—move them to cover the apartments. Snel.”

  Quickly.

  5:46 P.M.

  The apartments

  Liège, Belgium

  “It seems hard to believe,” Aryn said thoughtfully, his mouth full of bread and muhammara, chewing slowly and with evident relish as he spoke.

  “What?” Harry scooped more of the dip onto his own bread, remembering another kitchen in another apartment—it didn’t seem so long ago—cooking dinner for himself and Mehreen Crawford. But that had been before it had all fallen apart. . .fallen?

  No. That implied an accident. Something unintentional. But there could have been nothing more intentional than the way he had destroyed them both.

  “That we could be this close,” the young man replied, something almost. . .reverential about his tone. “All those years, as I took care of my mother—I followed the news coming out of Iraq, Afghanistan, then Syria. And I wanted nothing more in this world than to be a part of it. To finally take action. And it’s finally almost here.”

  He crammed the rest of the bread in his mouth, bringing an unbidden smile to Harry’s face as it bulged out against his bearded cheek. “We’re doing this, Ibrahim. We’re actually doing this!”

  “Insh’allah,” Harry whispered, the smile vanishing as quick as it had come. “Be careful what you say, brother.”

  He hadn’t told the other cell members about the surveillance yet—Belkaïd had, for reasons known only to himself, insisted that he wait. But he had swept the apartment for listening devices, and found nothing. They were in the clear, if only for the moment.

  “But how could this be anything other than the will of God?” Aryn exclaimed, seeming incredulous. “How could—”

  Whatever he might have been about to say next was forever lost as the sound of splintering wood announced the flimsy outer door of the apartment being kicked open—the sound of booted feet against the tile, moving toward them.

  Harry saw Aryn’s eyes darting around wildly, looking for a weapon—any weapon—torn between his instincts for fight or flight. He left his own pistol where it was, in its holster inside his waistband, beneath the loose shirt. If this was the police, he wasn’t getting shot. Not if he could help it.

  Aryn’s eyes fell on the knife block, his hand whipping out to seize a steak knife even as Gamal Belkaïd appeared in the doorway of the kitchen, flanked by two of his men. Their pistols already drawn, muzzles sweeping the kitchen.

  Down the hall, Harry could hear another crash as one of the bedroom doors was kicked in—a cry of surprise from Driss. Or Marwan. Yassin was in the shower, the sound of the running water filtering its way through the adjoining wall.

  “What is the meaning of this, Gamal?” he demanded, finding his voice finally. “What are you even thinking, risking coming in here like this, when you know they’re watching?”

  Belkaïd transfixed him with a murderous glance, a gaze that seemed to pierce to Harry’s very soul. “Perhaps you know, Ibrahim. Perhaps you’ve always known.”

  “What are you saying?” Aryn asked, staring open-mouthed into the muzzles of the guns. The knife dropped, uselessly at his feet.

  “I’m saying,” Belkaïd replied coldly, turning on the younger man, “that one of you is a Western spy.”

  5:51 P.M.

  Médiacité

  Liège, Belgium

  The fifth row from the front, third chair in, Armand Césaire thought, his gaze flickering around the nearly-deserted cinema to make sure what few eyes remained were focused on the screen before stooping down in the semi-darkness, examining the bottom of the theater chair’s metal frame. The drive should be somewhere here. . .

  He had seen the flag an hour before—the acknowledgment that LYSANDER had finally seen his signals and would be making a drop. And this was the first of the drop sites.

  But nothing except metal met Césaire’s probing fingers. Nothing.

  He felt a cold chill run through him, as if seized by some premonition of evil. And he left the theater, just as quickly as he had come.

  Paris would need to be informed.

  5:53 P.M.

  The apartments

  Liège, Belgium

  Harry shook his head, staring incredulously at Belkaïd as his men hustled Driss and Marwan into the cramped kitchen of the apartment—roughly shoving them forward into the middle of the room. Followed a moment or two later by a dripping Yassin, a towel wrapped hastily around his mid-section.

  “We’ve already been down this road, Gamal, you and I—yesterday,” he said quietly, keeping his hands away from his sides. Easily visible. “And now your paranoia has endangered us all. If the Belgian surveillance picked up you and your men coming in here like this, with weapons. . .”

  “It’s not paranoia when you know, Ibrahim,” Belkaïd said harshly, their eyes locking across the room. “And now I do, thanks to my source in the security services. The French DGSE has a spy in our midst.”

  The French. That call, again, Harry realized, proving his undoing. No good deed. At least he’d had the chance to plant the phone—wiped to clean off any stray prints and slipped beneath Marwan’s mattress. The SIM card and battery removed but lying only inches away, the call still logged, easily retrievable.

  He saw the surprise in the young men’s eyes, the sudden suspicion—glances flickering back and forth. Fear.

  His eyes locked with Marwan’s across the room, recognizing a bitter animosity in the young man’s face. Danger.

  He started to speak, but the younger man beat him to the punch, taking a step forward into the center of the room—seeming to ignore the guns leveled at them.

  “It’s you, isn’t it?” he demanded, looking straight at Harry. “You, who have betrayed us. You came to us, said that you had fought in Syria—but no one you claim to have served with seems to have survived. No one who could support your claims—or deny them. And from the very beginning, at every turn you tried to delay, to obstruct—to prevent us from carrying out an attack here.”

  The truth. Always the worst enemy of the spy. It was impossible not to wonder where, exactly, he had slipped up. What it was which had betrayed him. No—killed him. His eyes never left Marwan’s face as he reached up, slowly and deliberately beginning to unbutton his shirt—each small, almost imperceptible gesture breathing defiance.

  Harry shrugged the shirt back off his shoulders, letting it fall unheeded to the floor. Standing there before them, stripped to the waist, the pistol now visible in its holster inside his waistband. The pair of ugly, purplish pockmarks decorating his upper abdomen stark against the ghostly pallor of his flesh. Memories of that dark night in Aberdeen. Only the most recent of his scars.

&n
bsp; “Go on, boy,” he said, his hands outstretched toward Marwan, “show us the wounds you have received in the struggle of God.”

  5:55 P.M.

  VSSE Headquarters

  Brussels, Belgium

  “They haven’t moved,” Christian Danloy breathed, watching the CCTV closely. The fanned-out group of men spread out around the apartment building’s main entrance, just standing there—a few of them smoking, but alert. Waiting. For what?

  That was the question none of them had the answer to. “How long before we have officers on-scene?”

  “Another five minutes,” came the infuriating response. “Twenty before we get a full team together—we’re having to pull officers off the warehouse, off Belkaïd’s apartment and—”

  “Just do it,” the VSSE chief replied. “Get them there, and move them into position—if you can, without alerting them to our presence in the neighborhood.”

  5:56 P.M.

  The apartments

  Liège, Belgium

  Harry saw the look in the young man’s eyes, saw him recoil onto the defensive. Knew, in that moment, that he had him. Move in for the kill.

  “This afternoon,” he began, his eyes going cold and hard, “you went out—where were you going?”

  “You know,” Marwan retorted angrily, “I went to Médiacité, to buy spices. For you.”

  Harry shook his head. “No, ‘brother.’ I asked you to get them only after you’d already told me you were going out. So, where were you going?”

  And that was a lie—he had asked him to go out, to give him time to plant the phone—but only the two of them knew that. The irrefutable lie. Always the best kind.

  “And what about the other night?” he continued, keeping him off-balance, pressing the counterattack home with a merciless intensity. “Again, with no explanation, you had to ‘go out.’ What about Reza’s death? I left you with instructions for transferring the compound—the next thing I know, you’re standing beside me and he’s dead.”