Presence of Mine Enemies

by Stephen England

  Too late. The fourteen-year-old panicked, flinging the backpack away from him with a reflexive gesture as he skidded almost to a stop—the bike swaying beneath him as he struggled to turn, to reclaim his speed. The voice of the gendarme ringing again and again in his ears.

  The backpack skidding across the rough asphalt to a resting place near the curb, not far from the entrance.

  Bilel turned his head back toward the east, nearly standing up on the bike as his tired legs began to pump the pedals once more.

  The teenager would never hear the rippling burst of gunfire that killed him, the 5.56mm rounds ripping into his back, tearing through muscle and tissue as they exited his chest, dropping him in his tracks.

  He went down hard, falling in a mangled heap of bike and boy on the asphalt boulevard. Dead, before he hit the ground.

  Long before the street itself flooded with light, uniformed officers everywhere as they cordoned off the area around the entrance to DGSE Headquarters. Marking out a cautious stand-off distance from his body.

  And the backpack.

  5:30 A.M.

  The safehouse

  Ardennes Department, France

  There were moments, over the years, that stayed with a man. Seared into the memory—a crimson stain.

  Harry pulled back the kitchen chair, listening to it scrape across the kitchen floor, nearly the only sound in the house at this hour. The low murmur of voices filtering through the open window from without, where Belkaïd’s men stood post.

  There had been no sleep for him, the previous night—no rest to be found at all. Marwan’s face, haunting him whenever he closed his eyes.

  The Romans had believed that the spirit of a man slain would haunt the place—and the instrument—of his death, forever seeking a rest which could only be found in the blood of the guilty. Di Manes.

  He didn’t know that he believed it, but it was hard to find a better explanation for what he had experienced, all through the years. The faces. Each one of them, more indelible than the last.

  And Marwan had died far more horribly than any man deserved to die—the knife, nowhere near sharp enough for the work. And that had been deliberate, Harry thought, remembering the look on Belkaïd’s face. A purposeful cruelty.

  Revenge, in some way, for his own family? For his sister—for that day he couldn’t remember, in Algiers?

  Impossible to know. Even more impossible to forgive. Because he’d recognized himself in Marwan’s eyes in those final, fateful moments. Knew what it was like to know your cover was blown past any chance of redemption.

  Harry lifted the cup of coffee to his lips, taking a long sip of the steaming liquid. Feeling the heat rush down his throat, a fire filling him from the inside. That could have been him in that chair.

  Might be, even yet.

  Harry looked up from his coffee to see Gamal Belkaïd standing in the doorway of the kitchen, dressed—as a couple days earlier—in a wifebeater and sweatpants.

  “Bonjour,” the Algerian announced, a quiet smile playing across the older man’s face. Satisfaction. No doubt it was a good morning to him.

  A quick, reflexive nod by way of reply. “Bonjour.”

  “We are supposed to have clear skies today,” Belkaïd said, moving over to the window and gazing critically out at the early morning twilight, the sun just beginning to filter through the treeline thirty meters to the west of the house. “Should be a good day to begin giving your people flight time on the drones. Insh’allah.”

  Harry’s head came up. “You’re still going ahead with it?”

  “Of course.” Belkaïd looked at him as though there had never been a question of doing anything else.

  “But the recording. . .Marwan gave us up. He gave them everything, Gamal. If we go ahead, if we carry out this attack—they’re going to be waiting for us.”

  Buy time. That’s all he could do now—give himself time to come up with a plan. Force Belkaïd to recalibrate.

  But the older man shook his head. “No, he didn’t. He may have made the recording, but he didn’t deliver it. If he had, we’d already be dead. They would never wait.”

  A smile. “We’re in the clear, brother.”

  “Alhamdullilah,” Harry murmured, unsure for once if his face matched his words. Praise be to God. And the worst of it was that Belkaïd was right.

  He took another sip of his coffee, looking over to find Belkaïd regarding him curiously.

  “What did you say to him?” the older man asked, his dark eyes transfixing Harry. “There at the last. I was watching the video, and. . .you said something to him. What was it?”

  Harry froze, the cup of coffee poised half-way between his lips and the table—Belkaïd’s words carrying him back once more to that basement room, the morning before.

  “Jazakallah khair,” he’d whispered, his lips only inches from the young officer’s ear. Feeling Marwan’s body react in that final moment—stiffening against the hand around his throat. May God reward you goodness.

  An acknowledgment that he died at the hands of a friend—that his death would not be for nothing.

  One last mercy for the damned.

  “I told him,” Harry replied, his face a mask, “that I would see him burning. In the fires of hell.”

  6:03 A.M.

  Life Style Fitness Liège

  Liège, Belgium

  The strains of Jef Gilson’s Modalité pour Mimi filled Césaire’s ears as his feet hit a steady rhythm on the treadmill, the sound of the big band’s trumpets through his earbuds driving the remaining tendrils of sleep from his brain.

  Gilson had been one of the greats of his own childhood, and the music took him back, to his youth. To his early years with the Deuxième Bureau.

  To a simpler time? No, not really. Not when he reflected on how hard those years had been—the discrimination he had faced when he had first joined France’s foreign intelligence service.

  Like he’d told Daniel, standing there in the Place Poelart in the heart of Brussels. On the dark afternoon when he’d convinced him to go back under.

  “We’ve both risked our lives in the service of a country that had marginalized us, viewed us as something less than citizens of France, each in our own time—in the belief that one day, that would change. That we could, by our sacrifice, bring such change.”

  Had it? He wanted to believe it had, certainly, that everything he had done had been worth something. Perhaps that was it—the desire to believe. Overriding all else.

  His music cut out suddenly, in the middle of the song, and he pulled the phone out of his pocket to see a familiar number displayed on-screen. He turned off the treadmill, wiping the sweat from his forehead with a small towel as he raised the phone to his ear.

  “Allô ?”

  He listened for a long moment, feeling the blood drain from his face—his eyes staring unseeing at the far wall of the gym. No. It wasn’t possible.

  But it was. And Césaire murmured a low, bitter curse which went unheard in Paris, knowing, in that moment, the truth.

  He had failed.

  8:39 A.M.

  DGSE Headquarters

  Paris, France

  “. . .so in the name of Allah. . .I give you back your spy. Allahu akbar!”

  The first time Anaïs Brunet had watched the video, she had flinched when the knife went in, blood spurting from Daniel Mahrez’s throat as he slowly died.

  Now she simply watched, stone-faced, as the executioner sawed back and forth, blood spattering Daniel’s clothes and the plastic drop cloths spread out beneath him.

  Watched, the rage burning inside her building to a barely-suppressed fury, until it was over—the masked jihadist presenting the severed head of their officer to the camera.

  “How did they know?” she demanded quietly when the screen went black. The one question none of them had the answer to.

  Somewhere, somehow, they had slipped up. . .or been betrayed, or. . .the possibilities were truly endless.

&n
bsp; “What do we have on the identity of the courier?” Brunet asked then, brushing aside her briefing papers to reveal the photo of the boy now laying out on a cold slab in a Paris morgue. So very young.

  He reminded her strangely of her own nephew, Guillaume, just past his twelfth birthday.

  “Nothing yet,” Albert Godard replied, glancing down the conference table. “He carried no identification whatsoever. . .we can assume that he was likely from the banlieus, but that is only an assumption. It’s likely that identifying him will be a long process, and even once we do—it’s hard to say whether we’ll learn who tasked him with delivering the. . .the head to our door.”

  Dead ends. “What about the officer who shot him?”

  “Aspirant Brémond has been suspended pending a judicial review of the incident, and has already been interviewed about the details by our officers. He’s still here, in the building, though, if you would like to speak to him yourself.”

  “Non,” Brunet shook her head. “That won’t be necessary.”

  The man’s initial after action report was already in her briefing notes, and it revealed next to nothing. And he would be fine, legally speaking—the gendarmerie operated under far looser restrictions on firearms use than the regular Paris police. Particularly those officers tasked with protecting sensitive sites like the DGSE. The CCTV footage alone would exonerate him from any wrongdoing.

  How he would cope with having killed a boy. . .that was another question, and one he would have to answer for himself.

  Probably no better than she would deal with losing an officer. She inclined her head toward the now-darkened screen. “The man in the video—the executioner—what do we have? Is this Abu Musab l-Almani?”

  “C’est possible,” Godard nodded, clicking a button to bring the man’s image up on-screen once more, a baleful masked figure, frozen in time. “We don’t have any confirmed photos to compare against, but it would fit with what Daniel had told us of his leadership role in the cell.”

  “We are going to find him,” she began, her face itself a frozen mask as she stared into the figure’s eyes, “and we are going to kill him.”

  Godard shook his head, his voice rising in protest. “Madame le directeur, it would perhaps be wiser—”

  “I said, ‘kill him’, Albert,” came the ice-cold response as Brunet turned to glare at her subordinate. “There is ample précédent, surely.”

  “Oui, but—”

  “No, Albert, there will be no ‘buts.’ We will have our vengeance, come what may. However long that takes.” Brunet paused. “Have we informed Daniel’s family yet?”

  “Non. Once we do that, we have to be prepared for the news to go public. We’re not there yet. And when we do. . .Césaire has requested that he be allowed to serve as the notifying officer.”

  3:23 P.M.

  Ardennes Department

  France

  “Look out, habibi, you’re going to wreck us! Bring it up, bring it up!”

  On-screen, the quadcopter seemed to jerk upwards briefly before the sound of an impact came over the speakers with a sickening thud, the camera tumbling into a spinning blur, offering a brief glimpse of the tree branch above as it tumbled to the earth, somewhere off in the woods.

  A general laugh arose, echoing through the clearing as Aryn stared down, shame-faced, at the controller in his hands—the screen of the laptop on the tailgate of the light utility vehicle sitting in front of them.

  “It’s about four hundred meters out,” Harry observed grimly, not joining in the laughter—his thumbs guiding the controller’s joysticks as he brought his own quadcopter back around to hover over the downed drone. “South-by-southwest. You’re going to need to be more careful, brother—if something like this happens on the day of the operation. . .”

  He allowed his voice to trail off, the rebuke made clear. The laughter, dying away suddenly. The young man’s face flushing scarlet. “I’m sorry, this is just taking a while to—”

  “It’s all right, Aryn,” Belkaïd said, casting a curious glance in Harry’s direction. “That’s why we’re here, today. And that’s why you’re starting off on these, instead of the larger drones we will use in the attack.”

  “You will retrieve it,” he added, gesturing for one of his own men to accompany Aryn into the woods, “and we will begin again.”

  He came over to Harry a few moments thereafter, as Aryn and the guard disappeared into the woods—as the rest of the group dispersed around the clearing, taking a break. Driss kicking a soccer ball back and forth with Yassin.

  Only one of Belkaïd’s bodyguards remained, hovering at his shoulder, a dour Algerian perhaps a few years older than Harry, known to him only as “Faouzi.”

  Back in Liège, he had been one of the black marketer’s regular drone pilots—brought in now to help oversee their training. His personal motivations. . .unknown, but presumably Belkaïd wouldn’t have allowed him to accompany them from the city if he’d had any doubts of his loyalty. Or his dedication.

  “This was your idea, after all,” the older man said after a moment, his voice low, too low to carry to the rest. “You said they would need the practice, and you were right. You’re being too hard on them.”

  “And you’re not being hard enough!” Harry snapped back, the anger which had been building up within him for the last twenty-four hours finding an outlet. Channeled, as ever, into his cover. This was wrong, all of it. The laughter, the ease with which everyone had simply. . .moved on. Past the death of a man far better than any of them. Even himself. “We cannot have any more mistakes, Gamal, we cannot afford them. Not now. Not when we are this close.”

  “You think you want this more than I do?” Belkaïd smiled, a rich irony playing across the older man’s features, glancing at Faouzi. “C’est impossible. You came to know our faith, but you will never understand what it was like to grow up as a Muslim under French dominion. To know, no matter what you did, that you would never be good enough. Good enough for the society of those who had murdered and raped your own family. Those are feelings you will never—can never—understand. I’ve waited years for this.”

  Harry held his gaze for a long moment before nodding. “You’re right, of course. Je suis désolé.”

  I am sorry.

  A nod was Belkaïd’s only reply. “The French president’s father,” he began unexpectedly, staring off into the trees—the sun beating down hard upon them both, “Francois Albéric, was a paratrooper. In Algiers.”

  And there you have it. This was personal, for the older man. A motivation like no religion could ever touch. Or dissuade. Harry turned toward him, the question on his lips. “Was he. . .?”

  Was he one of them? he thought, unable to finish the question, to bring himself to speak the words. On that day?

  Belkaïd just looked at him, knowing exactly what was left unsaid. “Does it matter?”

  And Harry remembered Stephen Flaharty, sitting there with him in the car, that night on the M-1 Motorway, justifying his own actions to Harry—to himself, perhaps most of all. “You may never get the man who shot your brother in the sights of your rifle, so you shoot the sod next to him and tell yourself it’s justice.”

  Or that ‘sod’s’ son, in this case.

  And no, it didn’t. Didn’t matter at all.

  4:11 P.M.

  Rue Hors-Château

  Liège, Belgium

  This could get messy, Sergeant Benoît Renier thought, his knee pressed against the metal of the van’s floor as he went over the building schematics one last time.

  “We’re going to need to reach the apartment itself within ninety seconds of initial breach,” he stated soberly, looking up from the screen of the tablet into the eyes of his fellow operators, forming the Group Diane assault team. “Take everyone inside down before they can mount a resistance. Before they even know we’re here. Begrijpt u?”

  Do you understand?

  The men around him nodded, their eyes staring back at him thr
ough the slits in their black balaclavas. They were all professionals, like himself—they knew how this was to be done.

  “Welaan!” Very well.

  He reached up, pulling his own mask down over the lower half of his face—keying his radio to signal to the other team that they were in position. “Blue Element, be prepared to block all egress from the target building. And you know the target’s face. If you see him, take him down. Alive, if you can. Ga nu, ga nu!”

  Go now.

  And the doors of the van were flung open, Renier’s eyes taking in the familiar red facade of the Church of Our Lady of Immaculate Conception across the street as his boots met the pavement—his weapon already coming up—the sound of shuffling feet as the breach team moved toward the door, bringing their ram to bear.

  Time to do this.

  4:32 P.M.

  VSSE Headquarters

  Brussels, Belgium

  “. . .suis vraiment désolé, Anaïs,” Christian Danloy intoned, his face shadowed as he stared into the camera. I am terribly sorry. There were no words to express how he had felt watching the video, hours earlier—no way to make amends for what the actions of his agency had, apparently, precipitated.

  “Spare me your apologies, Christian,” his counterpart returned, her face like a flint. “Just tell me what is now being done about it.”

  “Group Diane is in the field,” Danloy replied, collecting himself. “Twenty minutes ago, they conducted a simultaneous assault on three of the most common locations associated with Gamal Belkaïd and his ‘business associates,’ including his own residence in the Rue Hors-Château. There have been at least fifteen arrests, and we believe that we will soon have information leading to his location.”