And there was fear there now, that emotion so easily confused with guilt. “But that was your bomb!”
“And I warned everyone,” Harry retorted, his voice filled with the soulless intensity of a man with nothing left to lose, “that it was dangerous. That it had to be handled with the utmost of care. And you didn’t—you pushed him on, to his death.”
You couldn’t care about your own survival if you wanted to live. A contradiction, in the eyes of anyone who had never been here. Who had never looked Death in the face. Who didn’t know that it was caring that killed you.
“What did you think—that you would pick us off, one by one?” His own play, turned back on Marwan. Projection. That was what a psychologist would have called it, but that didn’t mean it didn’t work. “That you could weaken us and bring us down?”
“No, no,” Marwan replied, his face betraying confusion and fear—his eyes flickering between Harry and Belkaïd’s men. “Nothing like that. I didn’t—”
“You killed Reza?” Yassin demanded, finding his voice unexpectedly, his voice filling with grief and rage. “You drew a gun on Ibrahim in the beginning, threatened to kill him there in the boxing club. Risked bringing the police down on all of us, even then. Is that what you wanted? Did you—”
“Enough!” Belkaïd spat, barking an order to his men—the muzzle of a gun thrust suddenly into Yassin’s face checking his attempt to charge forward, seize Marwan by the throat. “All of you. We’re not going to get to the bottom of anything like this.”
“And you don’t have the time, Gamal,” Harry replied, his voice even. In control. “Not here, not now. Suspect me if you must, investigate this fool’s accusations to their fullest, but right now—we need to leave. Before the security services come and find us here, all of us together, holding each other at gunpoint.”
Belkaïd seemed to hesitate for a long moment, searching Harry’s face for any sign of duplicity. Of betrayal. Then he nodded. “You’re right.”
“And before your men leave,” Harry continued, turning back to look Belkaïd in the eye as several of his bodyguards began to shepherd them from the room with barked curses and rough shoves, “make sure they go through everyone’s room and belongings. Thoroughly.”
6:07 P.M.
DGSE Headquarters
Paris, France
“Are you certain, Armand? It wasn’t there?” Anaïs Brunet swore softly to herself as she heard Césaire repeat his assertion, in the negative. This was getting out of control. Perhaps it had been, long before this. Perhaps Vukovic had even been right, from the beginning, in his insistence that they maintain their dependence on technical collection, instead of risking an officer in the field.
“I don’t understand it,” the case officer went on after a long moment. “He should have proceeded straight from leaving the signal to the cinema—made the drop at once. One, but not the other. Cela n'a pas de sens.”
It makes no sense. Unless LYSANDER had been compromised en route, as they both knew.
An aide entered the room just then, and Brunet pressed the “mute” button on the microphone before her as the woman began speaking quietly into her ear, her face changing as she listened.
“Certainement,” she said finally, “have it transferred through to this room. Merci.”
Gauthier, sitting a few feet away down the table, shot her a quizzical look. The general looked weary, a mirror, she was certain, of her own exhaustion. She hadn’t been back to the apartment which served as her Paris residence in nearly thirty hours.
Both of them, running on fumes.
“Thank you for the report, Armand,” she said, unmuting the microphone once more as the aide left the room. “Please keep us apprised of developments. Paris out.”
“What’s going on?” Gauthier asked then, waiting until Césaire had signed off.
“An update from Brussels, apparently,” Brunet replied, reaching for the remote beside her briefing notes and aiming it at the television screen on the far wall. The face of the VSSE administrator-general materializing on-screen a moment later.
“Bonsoir, Christian. What do you have for us?”
From the moment he began speaking, she knew that her greeting had been a lie. There was nothing “good” about this evening. . .
6:31 P.M.
Liège, Belgium
“They’re still back there,” Harry announced quietly, glancing behind him through the tinted windows of the SUV. They had been driving south for twenty-five minutes, out of Liège, following east along the banks of the Ourthe as it flowed west into the Meuse.
There were two of Belkaïd’s men in the vehicle with them—one of them sitting only a foot away from Harry on the back seat of SUV, his hand on the butt of his holstered pistol—plus the driver. Driss occupying the front passenger seat. Neither of them were bound—presumably to avoid undue questions if they were stopped—but there was the gun.
Easy enough to take, if it came to that. If it were expedient—and it wasn’t. He had to play the long game here, had to see this through.
He had wanted to go with Marwan, to keep the younger man off balance, to prevent him from gaining Belkaïd’s ear further—but that had proved impossible, with the younger man being herded away from him as they split up into multiple vehicles, taking multiple routes out of the city.
Belkaïd had at least possessed the instincts to do that. Offer their surveillance as many targets as possible—count on them not having the manpower to follow up on them all.
But somehow, even so. . .they’d drawn a short straw.
He saw the driver react, startled, at his announcement—something of fear and defiance passing across the man’s face, seeming instinctively to depress the accelerator, the SUV lurching into a higher gear.
“Don’t react,” Harry said through clenched teeth, his eyes meeting the driver’s in the rear-view mirror. “If you react, you’ll give them a reason to stop us. And I don’t think you want that, mon frere,” he said, addressing himself to the bodyguard beside him in the back seat, “unless that pistol is licensed.”
“Why do you care?” the man spat, and Harry could smell the fear, the rancid odor of sweat coming off the man’s body.
“Because it’s not true what he said,” he replied simply. “I would have given my life for the Caliphate, but I survived its fall. Survived when I should have died.”
The best lie was always the truth, Harry thought, looking steadily into the man’s eyes. His story. So many times through his life—living on when he should have died, face-down in a ditch. When better men had taken a bullet, right beside him.
“This is my one chance to redeem myself. To finish what I began. And I will let nothing stand in our way.” He cleared his throat, gazing forward once more at the driver—catching sight of a blue street sign bearing the words Chênée-Centre as they rolled out onto the bridge. “Take the next left—follow the road along the banks of the Vesdre to the west.”
7:06 P.M.
DGSE Headquarters
Paris, France
“It’s him, it’s Daniel,” Brunet whispered, a raw edge in her voice as she stared at the CCTV footage. Recognizing, even in the low-resolution imagery, the familiar figure of their officer being hustled into the back of a darkened SUV. Shoved?
It was impossible to tell, from this distance, whether he was going willingly or being coerced—but one thing was clear. Gamal Belkaïd was shifting his base of operations. Suddenly.
Gauthier nodded, and she saw the same recognition of their reality. This was trouble.
“C’est vrai, Christian?” she blazed, unmuting the microphone on the table before her. “You’ve blown this operation wide open. How could your people be this incompetent?”
On-screen, she saw Danloy take a deep breath, clearly measuring his own words. “We don’t know this, Anaïs, not yet, si’l vous plait. It remains possible that—”
“Non,” she fired back, venom permeating her voice. Righteous fury. “You can�
�t possibly believe this. Less than twelve hours since you first put surveillance on Gamal Belkaïd, and he’s already in the wind. He knows, Christian, he has to know.”
Brunet paused, bridling her anger as she glared at the figure on-screen. “Tell me you at least still have them.”
There was a long moment’s pause. Too long. “Je suis désolé, Anaïs. C’est ma faute. The follow teams lost track of them outside the city.”
Chapter 29
6:03 A.M., Central European Summer Time, August 2nd
Somewhere in northern France
Deja vu. It felt as though they were beginning, all over again—like climbing out of a well, only to lose one’s footing once more, stone and mortar giving way beneath one’s hand. That heart-stopping moment, just before the fall.
“I have told you all this before, Gamal,” Harry said wearily, staring across the table into Belkaïd’s dark, unyielding eyes. His hands were cuffed behind him—his body bound to the frame of the wooden chair. He hadn’t slept in over twenty-four hours, and he now had no idea where they were—somewhere in northern France, most likely, but he and Driss had been hooded shortly after their successful crossing of the border. “Why would I lie?”
“To protect yourself?” Belkaïd asked, his face impassive. “That’s usually why men lie.”
Harry shook his head. “If I wanted to protect myself, if the betrayal Marwan accuses me of were true, I would have killed you there in your own apartment. The knife was in my hand.”
“I had a gun.”
“And I have been in battle.”
Belkaïd seemed to consider that response for a long moment, as if he was once again re-assessing the man in front of him. “You believe you could have done that?”
“Had Allah willed,” Harry responded evenly, only too aware of how this could escalate. He’d been hearing the screams, coming from some other part of the house, for hours—but so far, he’d only been knocked about. “But He ordained instead that we should both live, brother—that we should live to carry out His war against the West.”
“Nora tells me that you tried to send her away,” the older man said, changing tack suddenly—as if looking to catch Harry off-guard. “Tried to convince her to leave us, go back to her family. Why?”
You tried to save someone, and ended up only damning yourself. Another piece of evidence, in Belkaïd’s case against him—the weight, bearing him down beneath the surface, legs kicking desperately against the water in the effort to rise.
Your mind, screaming that it was already too late. Only your body, still refusing to give up. To die.
“She is a distraction,” he replied, injecting as much calm into his voice as he could muster. “To you, now, Gamal, as she was to Reza before.”
He saw Belkaïd flinch, knew the dangerous ground he was treading on—but knew he had to sell this, even if it meant offense. And it surely would.
“Wherever there is a woman, there will always be a man willing to take advantage of her.”
Belkaïd’s eyes flashed fire, and a cuff from the bodyguard’s hand caught Harry in the side of the cheek, rocking the chair back on its legs—nearly going over.
Harry recovered, working his jaw muscles as if to make sure they were still functional as he opened his eyes, staring back across the table at the Algerian. “Have me beaten, if you like. . .but the truth will remain the truth. And sharia will remain sharia. I spoke to her because I perceived the temptation she was already becoming to you, to others—even more so after Reza’s death. There is no place for a woman in the day of battle, and I saw only trouble in her continued presence among us.”
The silence hung heavy between them in the empty room for a long moment.
Then Belkaïd nodded, slowly. With almost palpable reluctance.
“I believe you. You’re telling the truth.” His gaze flicked over to the bodyguard, standing once again a few feet away, chewing on a snack bar. “Unlock his cuffs and untie him. Give him something to eat and drink. And then you will come with me, Ibrahim. . .I have something to show you.”
6:37 A.M.
VSSE Headquarters
Brussels, Belgium
Devastation. That was the only word that Christian Danloy could think of to describe the scene on the screens before him.
It had taken twenty minutes circling the apartment building with the quadcopter UAV before they’d found it—a window in the one of the target apartments that wasn’t curtained off.
“Are you seeing this, Anaïs?”
“Oui,” the DGSE head responded, her voice still icy. Unforgiving.
And what they were seeing was the remains of an apartment which had been torn apart—utterly demolished in an effort to find. . .something, it was hard to say what—curtains torn down from the window to reveal the chaos within, a mattress ripped to shreds and left wedged awkwardly in the doorway of the bedroom—a nightstand smashed to kindling.
“Is the rest of the apartment like this? The others?”
“We’ve not been able to ascertain that. . .can’t get an angle with the drone—the only way we learn more is to get a warrant, send officers into the building itself to investigate.”
“Non.” Brunet’s voice was clear, firm. “Do that, and you’ll confirm whatever they suspect. The intelligence value you gain will be nothing compared to the value of the intelligence they’ll glean from your presence.”
“Then where do we go from here?”
“Je ne sais pas.”
I don’t know.
6:41 A.M.
A house
Northern France
The house had been abandoned, for a very long time, Harry realized—glancing around at the walls stripped bare, the floors devoid of furniture.
It had probably been built sometime in the ‘70s, judging by what he could tell of the architecture. Built, lived in for decades, and then. . .abandoned. Hard to say when Belkaïd had acquired the property. Or if he had, even.
He set down his glass of water as the Algerian motioned for him to follow—leading him down a long, dimly-lit hallway toward the back of the house, the bodyguard following behind.
There were steps there, leading down into the basement, and Belkaïd motioned for Harry to take the lead, down into the darkness.
Was it a trap? If so, he was already inside it, Harry thought, hesitating for only a moment before beginning to descend the steps—the old, threadbare carpet rough against his bare feet.
If Belkaïd wanted to blow out his brains, he could do so just as easily here as below.
A light met his eyes as he reached the bottom of the steps, his toes meeting concrete, cool and damp—the bright glare of an industrial light bursting through the doorway of a nearby room.
And then he heard it, the low moans of a man sobbing in well-nigh unbearable pain. The sequel to the screams he’d listened to earlier.
A drenched Marwan sat shivering uncontrollably in the center of the room, lashed tightly to the frame of a metal chair with electrical cords—his face bruised and bloodied, three of the fingers of his right hand mangled beyond recognition.
He’d been a boxer when they first met, Harry remembered, his eyes narrowing pitilessly as he entered the room, glancing from Marwan to his torturers. But he’d never fight again—not with those hands.
His eyes flickered over to a table sitting in one corner of the basement room, catching sight of the phone lying on the table a few feet away from the hand of Belkaïd’s man.
So they had found it. Just as he’d intended them to.
It was hard not to feel some kind of. . .sympathy, in this moment, looking at the young man before him in the chair. Helpless. Sobbing uncontrollably through his pain, tears and mucus running down his trembling cheeks. Little more than a fragile husk of the man he had once been. Before the pain began.
But it was only a scant fraction of the pain he had dreamed of inflicting. Harry’s face hardened into a mask, remembering the excitement he’d seen in Marwan’s eyes t
he day of the bombing in Berlin—every time they talked of their own plans since. The passion of a true believer. A fanatic.
The kind of man he’d sacrificed everything to stop, all through the years. No different than any of them. No more deserving of pity.
He’d corrupted the other members of the Molenbeek cell and dragged them down with him into the pit, and. . .and then Harry realized that the attention of the man sitting at the table wasn’t on the phone at all, but on the laptop computer before him.
Marwan’s laptop.
He was fiddling with the external speaker, as if struggling to produce more sound from it.
“Do you have it?” Belkaïd’s voice, from behind him, somehow chilling him to the bone. A premonition of evil.
“Oui,” the man replied, still playing with the computer. “I believe I have recovered the deleted files from the hard drive. . .they may be corrupted, but we should be able to access them.”
Harry glanced from the table back to Marwan, to Belkaïd, feeling a stab of uncertainty go through him—suddenly realizing this was about more than the phone. Much more.
The man at the computer leaned back in his seat just then, depressing a key on the laptop before him—a stream of broken audio pouring from the speakers at full volume.
A man’s voice, low but recognizable. Speaking French. Marwan.
“I apologize for not making contact before now. . .” his next words were lost in a haze of white noise, clearly the result of the file corruption. “. . .things have escalated over the last few days, and the cell is now planning to go active, within the week.”
Presence of Mine Enemies Page 45
