Presence of Mine Enemies

by Stephen England

  France

  “Let’s just make sure we don’t crash into each other on the day of the attack, okay, habibi?” Driss laughed, seeming to have recovered his good humor as he and Harry picked their way deeper into the woods, the GPS beacons of the downed drones beckoning them on. The sun, filtering down upon them through the trees above.

  “It still seems impossible to think that we’re really doing it,” the young Moroccan went on, his voice growing thoughtful. “You know how it is, Ibrahim, when you’ve dreamed of something so long. . .a woman, perhaps. And then you finally have her, and you almost can’t believe it.”

  The moment when fantasy meets reality. Rarely as idyllic as the younger man imagined, Harry reflected, moving a few steps behind Driss—his eyes flickering through the trees and underbrush surrounding them. Hearing the sound of birds in limbs above, singing their summer song. Things looked so very different down here, but they had to be at least six hundred meters away from the staging area in the clearing now. It couldn’t be much farther.

  He recognized a dead oak off to the left in that moment—shattered by lightning and slowly decaying, its branches breaking and falling to the forest floor. And somewhere in front, he could hear the faint gurgle of water. Almost there.

  They were on the precipice of the ravine almost before even Harry realized it, Driss recoiling from the brink—an almost involuntary obscenity escaping his lips—staring down into the flowing waters of the small creek which ran beneath them, large, water-smoothed rocks breaking from its surface. The ravine wasn’t very broad—no more than seven meters, if that, but it was at least five meters deep. And there were the rocks.

  “How are we going to get around?” he demanded, glancing up and down the stream. “I had no idea this was here.”

  But I did, Harry thought, moving in close behind him—his hand descending firmly on his young friend’s shoulder, seizing his arm. There was no time to react, no time to shout—just the look of confusion passing across Driss’ face in the split-second before he lost his footing, Harry’s forceful shove propelling him out over the stream.

  A scream escaping his lips, cut short suddenly as he hit the rocks, landing on his back—his arms splayed out helplessly in the water.

  He was still moaning in pain when Harry reached him five minutes later, wading out into the stream to get to his body. Taking in the look of agony and confusion in the boy’s eyes as he looked up to see Harry standing over him.

  “Pour quoi?” Driss managed, weakly, as Harry took a knee in the stream beside him—seeing his own pain reflected in Harry’s eyes. Why?

  It was a question he couldn’t bring himself to answer. He looked so. . .harmless, laying there. So innocent. But there was no room for mercy, not here. Not now.

  “Shhhh,” Harry whispered, gripping his hand firmly—as if to comfort him in these final moments. And then he reached up and took him by the shoulder, dragging his helpless, broken body off the rock and into the deeper pool of water just downstream—hands on his chest, forcing his head below the surface.

  Watching through the distorted lens of the water as Driss’ face convulsed in the agonies of death, bubbles escaping his lips as he struggled for air, flailing weakly against Harry’s hands.

  And the tears began to stream down Harry’s own cheeks, tears of pain. Of regret.

  By the time the body went limp beneath his hands, floating listlessly below the surface, he was weeping openly and unashamed, the young Moroccan’s face flickering before his eyes as it had appeared so many times before. So full of life. Of hope.

  He dragged Driss’ lifeless corpse from the stream with an effort, silent, bitter sobs wracking his body as he knelt down beside him in the gravel of the bank, shadowed by the overhang of the ravine above. Staring up into the sky, the rays of summer sun streaming through the trees. A perfect day.

  The injustice of it all. It seemed as if the birds had stopped their singing, hushed in the presence of death. His hand, groping blindly for the cellphone in his pants pocket—scarce able to see the screen as he pulled it open, dialing a number.

  “Gamal,” he began, his voice choked with scarcely feigned sorrow as the other end was picked up, “Gamal, there’s been a terrible accident. You must come quickly. . .”

  8:09 A.M. Eastern Daylight Time

  CIA Headquarters

  Langley, Virginia

  “. . . In the name of Allah, I give you back your spy. Allahu akbar!” Carter paused the audio, running it back. Kranemeyer’s eyes narrowing as they focused in on the screen. The video playing out once again in all its macabre, gruesome tragedy.

  Neither man flinched as the knife went in, bright red blood spurting from the arteries of the neck. The last anguished agony of the doomed man, picked up all too clearly on the microphone.

  They’d watched far too many of these, for far too many years. Too many years at war, but this. . .this wasn’t war, Kranemeyer thought. This was butchery, pure and simple.

  “What am I watching for, Ron?” he asked finally, watching with cold, hard eyes as the masked jihadist took a step toward the camera, holding the severed head in his left hand, the bloody knife in his right.

  “May God’s judgment so fall on all such traitors.”

  “You don’t recognize the voice?” Carter asked grimly, tension written in the lines of his dark face. “I didn’t either, at first. But the machine is smarter than both of us, put together. It’s Nichols.”

  Chapter 32

  8:13 A.M. Eastern Standard Time

  CIA Headquarters

  Langley, Virginia

  Kranemeyer just stared at him, the color draining away from his face. “You can’t be serious,” he spat, the words coming out in a hiss.

  Carter pursed his lips. “I wish I wasn’t. But the algorithms are returning an 87% match between our file recordings of Nichols and the voice of this man the French believe to be Ibrahim Abu Musab Al-Almani. The odds of that being a coincidence. . .”

  Were a statistical long shot, as Kranemeyer knew well. And yet it was impossible. To think of one of their own, having gone over to the enemy. Nichols always had been something of a rare breed, adapting himself to the faith, the culture, of the Global War on Terror’s primary antagonists with an ease few Agency hands ever mastered.

  But that had been his job—then. A long way from taking that final step of becoming the enemy. A very long way.

  And yet, if he closed his eyes, he could once more see the photos of the carnage there on the docks of Aberdeen, the burned-out hulk of a vehicle destroyed by a suicide vest—the mangled bodies of the dead.

  He had gone farther that night than any of those who knew him could ever have imagined. And perhaps they’d underestimated him, all along.

  “Who else knows about this?” Kranemeyer asked suddenly, shooting the analyst a sharp glance. “Were you. . .?”

  He let the question hang there, meaningfully, in the air between them, seeing the recognition in Carter’s eyes.

  “No, I wasn’t the one who did the original audio analysis,” Carter returned flatly, meeting Kranemeyer’s gaze. “It’s already been filed. I couldn’t suppress it if you asked me too—even if I was willing to go back out on that limb, and I’m not. Not on this. Too many people already know.”

  “But not the French?”

  “Not yet.”

  2:19 P.M. Central European Summer Time

  Ardennes Department

  France

  “Leave him,” Gamal Belkaïd announced finally, gazing down at Driss’ broken body.

  Harry heard Yassin’s sharp intake of breath, felt something even within himself protest at the injustice of this. Even knowing his own part in all this, all too well.

  The part of Cain.

  “No,” he heard himself say, scarcely knowing what prompted the words. “He was our brother, Gamal. We’re not going to leave him here, for the dogs and the birds. He deserves a proper burial, in accordance with Islam.”

  He sta
ggered to his feet, his cheeks shining with tears. Taking a step closer to Belkaïd, heedless of the man’s bodyguards—a blind, unreasoning anger filling his body. There came a moment when you became lost in your own deception, when you could no longer tell black from white, white from black.

  When right and wrong became little but names.

  Perhaps all that had been drowned in the waters along with Driss, perhaps. . .it had died long ago. He no longer knew.

  “And what if you do?” Belkaïd countered, his eyes transfixing Harry. Did he know? How could he? “And they find him—find a buried body, where they could have simply found the victim of an accident?”

  “By the time anyone would find him, we’ll all be dead.” And he believed that, too, with the assurance of a man who had accepted his fate. So long ago.

  He stood there, his shoes sinking in the soft, damp earth on the edge of the stream, holding Belkaïd’s gaze—watching the conflicting emotions play over the older man’s face. Feeling Yassin move up in support, standing at his own shoulder.

  Standing with the murderer, if he’d only known. Irony of ironies.

  A moment more, and Belkaïd relented, nodding, “All right, then. Bury him, best you can. Pray over him. And then get ready to leave. We can’t stay here any longer.”

  Harry stood there, watching as the older man turned to leave—picking his way through the mud and gravel of the riverbank along with his bodyguards as he retraced his path back out of the ravine.

  He was almost out of sight when Harry saw Belkaïd reach down and pluck his phone from the back pocket of his jeans, raising it to his ear to answer a call.

  And what is that about? Harry’s eyes narrowed as he stared after the Algerian. But he was too far away. And he had a duty to perform, he thought, staring down into Driss’ empty eyes.

  A final duty. . .to a brother.

  “You get his feet,” he said, motioning to Aryn as he stooped down by the head, lolled lifelessly to one side. “Yassin, help me lift his shoulders.”

  2:23 P.M.

  Northbound on European Route E17

  Marne Department

  “What do you mean?” Grigoriy Kolesnikov demanded, staring out through the windshield of the semi-trailer as it sped north, only a handful of clouds in the sky above—doing nothing to provide shade from the merciless summer sun. The air-conditioning in the semi’s cab was broken—something his local contact had failed to tell him in advance, and it had to be at least forty degrees Celsius in the cab, with the window now rolled up to allow him to hear the voice on the other end of the phone.

  “Exactly what I said, monsieur,” Gamal Belkaïd replied, a strange edge in the older man’s voice. He was rattled, Kolesnikov thought. But why? “We cannot make the rendezvous tonight to take delivery of your agricultural equipment. It will have to wait. Vous comprenez?”

  “Has something taken place?” the Russian asked, warning bells exploding in his brain. If Belkaïd had been compromised. . .

  “Non,” the Algerian responded. Almost certainly a lie. “I simply must ask you to postpone the delivery. A day, only.”

  It was in moments like this that you had to make a decision—on your own authority—no turning to the Centre for approval. For sanction.

  He never felt more alive than at such times. On his own.

  It was an attitude which might not guarantee rapid promotion up through the ranks of the Rodina’s hide-bound intelligence bureaucracies—anymore than it had for his mentor—but he would live while he could. And leave his mark on the world, even from the shadows.

  “Very well,” he replied, finally, deliberately having let the silence build between them for a long moment. “I can give you a day. Nothing more.”

  10:05 A.M. Eastern Daylight Time

  The Russell Senate Office Building

  Washington, D.C.

  “. . .what do you see as the outcome of these hearings, Congressman Imler?”

  “The truth, I hope,” the man on-screen replied, visibly straightening to his full height—what there was of it. Hank Imler was a small man, Roy Coftey thought, gazing at the image on the television. Small man, small mind, as he knew from years of having served with him in the same party. Only thing large about him was his ego—an ego his position as ranking member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence—HPSCI—had only inflated. “The Sinai affair illustrates the remarkable disparity between this President’s rhetoric and his actual actions, behind closed doors. When Richard Norton was elected, I had hoped that this might mark a turning point, that perhaps we might finally see the dawning of a new age of transparency in the national security sphere. Instead, all we have is another president in the tradition of Republican presidents post-9/11, using the blanket of ‘national security’ as a cover for their actions.”

  Hank had hoped for nothing of the sort, Coftey mused ironically, watching the eyes of the man on the television as the camera zoomed in for a close-up. He’d been in the meetings, after all, watched the reaction of his fellow Democratic leaders to Norton’s surprise victory. The only man in the room to whom it hadn’t come as a surprise.

  Because he had engineered it.

  And what had that wrought, in the end? Hancock’s treason had required his removal, but Norton. . .his administration was proving more chaotic than anyone could have expected. The pity, it seemed, was that they both couldn’t have lost.

  But Imler had harbored no hopes of “turning points” or “dawnings of a new age,” whatever he might claim now. Rather he and his compatriots had gotten to work planning their opposition—their “resistance”, as they’d melodramatically styled it—to the new administration from Day One.

  “What a clown,” Coftey observed aloud even as Melody entered from the outer office, a folder in her hands.

  “Who, Imler?” she asked, glancing briefly at the screen as she set a sheaf of print-outs on his desk. “Here’s the research Sheila was able to come up with on SB 367—you asked to see it as soon as he had it ready.”

  He nodded absently, the fate of wild burros on state lands in the West the furthest thing from his mind as he stared at the screen.

  “Imler. Between he and Tony,” he replied, referencing the HPSCI chairman, Antonio Tamariz, “these hearings are going to be such a joke.”

  Coftey let out a short, barking laugh. “Just when you think HPSCI had no more credibility left to lose. . .”

  She didn’t join in the laugh, and he glanced at her, feeling once more that strange. . .distance between the two of them, a distance he still couldn’t explain, as though she had built up a wall within, that he was unable to breach.

  He cleared his throat, finishing his thought lamely. “I guess we’ll find out tomorrow.”

  1:09 P.M.

  CIA Headquarters

  Langley, Virginia

  There was a long moment of silence in the office on the seventh floor as David Lay processed Kranemeyer’s announcement, his face pale and drawn—looking as though he had been slapped, the DCS thought, watching his boss with a critical eye.

  He still hadn’t recovered from his daughter’s death—that was the reality of it, as harsh as it sounded. And yet he stayed on, having returned to his post as DCIA after only a short leave of absence, a leave precipitated more by his injuries than his grief. For better or worse.

  “How can you be sure?” Lay asked after another long pause, a strange tremor creeping into his voice.

  “I’m not. But Carter and the team which conducted the original audio analysis have expressed ‘high confidence’ in their assessment.”

  Lay nodded, letting out a heavy sigh as he settled back into his chair. He had been such a big man at one time, Kranemeyer reflected, but looking at him now, he seemed small. . .shrunken.

  He had yet to regain the weight he’d lost after the bombing—after he’d been shot. Grief, taking an even greater toll.

  “Then I suppose we have no other choice,” he said finally, seeming to have reached his
decision. “We’ll have to tell the French—tell them the truth, the whole truth, or. . .at least most of it.”

  He murmured a low curse, shaking his head. “First the British, now the French. Just how many more bridges is Nichols going to burn for us before this nightmare is over? Reach out to Vukovic there at Paris Station—have him deliver the news to Brunet. Daniel’s a good man, one of the best deputies I ever had on station—he’ll know how to handle it. Authorize him to offer whatever level of help the DGSE and their counterparts in Brussels will accept.”

  “Respectfully, David,” Kranemeyer replied, looking his old colleague in the eye, “I think that’s the wrong decision. If we give the French this, we have no guarantee that it won’t find its way to the media. None. We’re already looking down the barrel of legislation aimed at gutting the intelligence community’s ability to carry out our mission. I’m scheduled to appear before the House Select Committee in public hearings tomorrow. We can’t—”

  “You don’t have any guarantees, one way or the other,” Lay shot back, his eyes suddenly blazing to life. “Nichols left a trail of bodies across the United Kingdom in his effort to kill Tarik Abdul Muhammad, and the only thing that kept that off the networks was the UK’s rigorous control of the press and their government’s embarrassment over the whole affair. And now he’s showed up in Belgium, where he appears to have. . .somehow become part of a jihadist cell.”

  “We don’t believe he’s actually a part of the cell,” Kranemeyer said quietly. “There was an earlier piece of audio the French asked us to look at—a phone call from someone within Gamal Belkaïd’s network, claiming knowledge of an imminent attack. The voice was digitally distorted, but Carter went back after this audio analysis was done, and he believes they’re the same voice.”