Presence of Mine Enemies

by Stephen England

  Albéric didn’t wait for her to finish. “Then none of you, truly, have anything new—anything which would justify a decision on my part to cancel my attendance.”

  “The presence of Gamal Belkaïd within this country—”

  “Then find him. I stood before you,” he began, looking around him at their faces, “not four days ago—in this very room—and gave you my decision. It stands. I will be attending the World Cup qualifier at the Stade de France tomorrow night, as planned.”

  12:31 P.M. Moscow Time

  FSB Headquarters

  Lubyanka Square, Moscow

  The man at the the desk appeared slight, almost gaunt in the light streaming in through the large window behind him, the room itself nearly swallowing him up—his hair silver and thinning, betraying an age one never could have guessed from his plain, unremarkable face.

  His eyes, though, were what people remembered about him, their irises a curious shade of brown, almost amber. Eyes like those of Iosif Vissarionovich, some said—and he did nothing to discourage such talk. His origins, as simple as those of Stalin himself—though he had been born in the old Perm Oblast, not far from the banks of the Kama. The son of a factory foreman. Humble beginnings, but it was what a man made of his beginnings that counted, and he had made much of his.

  It had been a long road from that crowded, stinking, tenement in Perm, but one which had led, ultimately, to where he found himself today. One of the most powerful men in the new Russia, with the ear—and more importantly, the secrets—of the most powerful.

  Dmitri Andreyevich Mironov reached forward, picking up the classified memo from the desk before him, holding it poised delicately between the long, thin fingers of a classically-trained pianist, his eyes scanning the Cyrillic, though he knew already what it said. Had read the brief message three times since it had arrived, transmitted over secure channels from Paris.

  Everything is in order. Another day will decide the issue.

  Simple, professional. To the point. Just the way the Centre had trained him. A good man.

  After a moment more, the FSB director stood, extending the memo wordlessly to the man occupying the lone chair in front of his desk. Turning his back on him to move to the window, staring out over Lubyanka Square, toward the familiar shape of the Solovetsky Stone, resting barely a hundred meters from the facade of the FSB’s headquarters—a stark, desolate rock monument raised in commemoration of those who had fallen in the prison camps, the gulags of the Soviet Union. “To the victims of the Communist Terror. . .”

  An eyesore, Mironov thought, a contemptuous sneer curling at his lips. He’d sent no one to those camps himself—his remit, like that of the man sitting before his desk, had always been foreign, not domestic, intelligence collection. But he knew those who had, and they had been good men. Professionals. Doing their duty to their country.

  To have such a monument, standing in the very shadow of their old headquarters—it was more than an insult, it was a public slap in the face. Humiliation.

  “But what does this mean?” a voice asked from behind him, and Mironov turned, regarding the man with a grim smile.

  “It means, Alexei Mikhailovich, that you were right, and I was wrong.”

  There was caution in the man’s ice-blue eyes, a moment’s hesitation before Vasiliev answered the smile with one of his own.

  “In what way?”

  “Your protégé. . .years ago, you believed in him, when few others did. When some, like myself, believed him far too young for the trust you reposed in him. You told us we were old men, who had forgotten our own youth. The mistakes, and the triumphs.”

  Mironov’s smile warmed at the memory. “It’s been years since then. But tomorrow, all your trust will be validated. . .”

  7:54 A.M. Eastern Daylight Time

  The apartment

  Washington, D.C.

  A worn face looked back at Bernard Kranemeyer from the mirror as he draped the necktie around the back of his neck, adjusting it briefly before bringing it up in the beginnings of a half Windsor.

  Coftey had left after only a few hours, but his words had stayed behind, ominous and foreboding. Costing Kranemeyer his already tenuous claim on sleep.

  “Be careful going down this road, Barney. These hearings aren’t about getting at the truth—they never are—but that doesn’t mean the truth won’t be used against you, if it ever comes out.”

  “How did you know?” It was a question he’d had to ask, despite himself. He didn’t like placing himself further in Coftey’s debt, though, he had to confess, perjury was a relatively minor charge compared to what the senator already knew.

  A short laugh. “I know Lawrence. And I know you—one of the few who do, so you’re likely safe. Before yesterday, few people in this town even knew your name.”

  Would that it could have remained so, the DCS thought grimly, bringing the knot of the tie in tight against his throat. But the gods of democracy present had demanded a sacrifice.

  Transparency. . .

  2:06 P.M. Central European Summer Time

  The safehouse

  Coulommiers, France

  “. . .and in so doing, have jeopardized our chances of success in tomorrow’s attack!” Harry spat angrily, glaring across the room at Gamal Belkaïd, his voice rising with each word.

  “And if you had listened to me, none of this would have happened to begin with,” the Algerian fired back, his hands resting on the tabletop as he leaned forward, his eyes flashing.

  Harry began to respond, but stopped, glaring around at those surrounding them. “Give us the room. Yalla!”

  Yassin and Aryn moved to obey immediately, Faouzi and the other two bodyguards hesitating until Belkaïd gave his assent with a quick, angry nod.

  The two men, just looking at each other as those around them filed out—the door closing finally, with an audible click.

  Alone. Harry could feel the bulge of the CZ on his hip, beneath the shirt—wanted nothing more but to draw and fire it. Two rounds, right between the eyes, nearly impossible to miss at this distance.

  Two hollowpoint bullets, mushrooming through Belkaïd’s brain. Exiting out the back of his head.

  But the pistol stayed in its holster, a hard look in Harry’s eyes as he glared at the Algerian. “Do you have any idea what you’ve done?”

  “I have done what was—”

  “I saw this happen so many times in Sham,” Harry went on, cutting him off. Stalking restlessly back and forth along the one end of the room, his eyes flashing cold daggers at Belkaïd. “Young men, fresh recruits, handed a rifle and a couple mags. . .thrown right into the front line against the safawi regime of Damascus. No training, no preparation. It was a sin to waste such lives, given to us by Allah, but at the very least we had more men. You do not, and yet you are prepared to risk their lives with almost no preparation. Que fais-vous?”

  What are you doing?

  The older man shook his head. “Non. What has happened is not my fault, Ibrahim, no matter how much you would like to make it so. It is yours. I warned you that if you buried him and his body was discovered, the police would assume he had been murdered. And so it has happened.”

  “And you would have left a brother’s body to the vultures and the dogs,” Harry replied, subsiding after a long moment. “Do they know who he was?”

  “The media is still reporting it as an unidentified body. But we cannot take that risk. Enough, Ibrahim,” the Algerian said, raising his hand to stop Harry just as he started to speak. “I have made my decision. . .until tomorrow afternoon, no one will leave this house. The risk, thanks to your actions, is now too great. As to the ultimate success of our mission, that—as you once told me—rests in the hands of Allah.”

  11:07 A.M. Eastern Daylight Time

  Capitol Hill

  Washington, D.C.

  It had been clear the moment they walked in, Kranemeyer reflected, a seemingly attentive mask plastered on his face as he stared across the room
at the ranking member.

  Hank Imler had arrived for the second day of the hearings loaded for bear. Where he had gotten all of his information, was impossible to say. Perhaps he truly had been paying attention to his briefings.

  “. . .has now, in the wake of your abortive strike, established himself as the Emir of the Islamic State’s Sinai province. That doesn’t sound like success to me, Mr. Bell, nor, I think, to anyone else in the room. It sounds as though Umar ibn Hassan’s position has been strengthened, not weakened, by the intelligence community’s actions.”

  And so it had. But the question—or statement, rather, for there were few questions this morning—had been directed to Bell, not himself.

  “With due respect, Mr. Imler,” Bell replied, taking a long, deep breath before replying, “when you decapitate the leadership of a network, someone is always going to ‘benefit’ from your action. If Umar ibn Hassan had been killed in the strike along with the others, it would have been someone else. It’s not something which can favor prominently in our calculus.”

  “And the position which you reference as ‘strengthened’, Mr. Imler,” Kranemeyer interjected, “is itself growing weaker by the day, as the United States continues to liaise with its Egyptian partners to place pressure on the remnants of Wilayat Sayna.”

  He regretted the words the moment they were out of his mouth, Imler’s attention immediately re-focusing on him. Why had he spoken? Perhaps it was because Bell seemed worn this morning, less sure of himself—the cancer exacting its inevitable toll.

  Move out and draw fire.

  “Your Egyptian partners?” the ranking member asked, somehow seeming incredulous. “And have these partnerships actually survived the events of the last two months?”

  “The intelligence community’s partnerships are ones which have been developed and nurtured over the course of decades,” Bell replied for them both, meeting Imler’s gaze. “They are resilient enough to weather more damaging circumstances than this.”

  “‘Than this?’” Kranemeyer saw the look in the ranking member’s eyes, knew the DNI had made a misstep. “So you would acknowledge that this administration’s decision to prosecute the strike against Umar ibn Hassan was damaging to America’s foreign partnerships in the region?”

  11:24 A.M.

  The White House

  Washington, D.C.

  “. . .with due respect, Mr. Imler, the question you’ve asked me is a political one, and thus not one which I am able to comment upon in this context.”

  President Norton swore under his breath, his eyes fixed on the television screen—glaring at the image of DNI Lawrence Bell as if he expected the man to somehow sense his gaze. Quail under it.

  “This is turning into a disaster,” he announced, muting the television with a gesture of frustration—looking back at the man who stood a few feet away. Dennis Froelich, his chief of staff.

  “We always knew the hearings would be a risk, Mr. President,” Froelich responded, shaking his head. “But given the public outcry which followed the strike. . .we had few other options. We—”

  “Don’t lecture me on what our options were, Dennis,” Norton spat, the words coming out through clenched teeth. “I know why we made the choice we did, and I know that Tamariz assured us—me, personally—that he had the situation under control. That the responsibility for the decision to take the strike could be confined to the intelligence community. That this was, in fact, the perfect opportunity to use the Clandestine Service’s incompetence to re-open our attempt to pass the intelligence bill through Congress. None of that has proved to be true. None of it, Dennis.”

  Norton lapsed into silence, staring at the screen. It had seemed so clear, once. So certain—viewing the presidency from without. It was a clarity which seemed to be slipping ever further away from him with each day spent in this job.

  He knew what he had been elected to do, knew what he had said he would do. And yet it seemed that each day required some compromise, some. . .alteration of those plans, as if ideological purity was itself ill-adapted for governing a nation.

  It was maddening, the helplessness. The President of the United States was supposed to be the most powerful man in the world—was the most powerful man in the world, in so many ways—and yet when it came to pursuing the agenda for which he had been elected, he so often found his hands tied, hamstrung by the very checks and balances of the government he was trying to restore.

  The Founders’ system of meticulously divided governance had been fine when it first began, the President thought, his face shadowed as he stared at the screen. Now? It only hampered the task of setting things right.

  But there were some things still within his control, and he would control what he could. “Dennis?” he asked, a hard look coming across his face.

  “Yes, Mr. President?”

  “Contact the ODNI. I want Bell’s resignation on my desk by Monday.”

  5:23 P.M. Central European Summer Time

  Avenue Henri Delaunay, Saint-Denis,

  Suburbs of Paris

  They were already setting up the vehicle barricades, Sergeant Nathalie Jobert realized, moving quickly past uniformed police officers as she made her way down the street toward the command trailer which served as the GSPR’s tactical operations center, or “TOC” as it was commonly referred to in military parlance. Her own uniform had been traded in for civilian clothes, part of Leseur’s effort not to draw attention to the GSPR personnel in the day leading up to the event—the late afternoon sun burning into her bare arms.

  Just to her south, the stadium itself rose into the sky, a looming presence.

  The vehicle barricades—and the permanent bollards behind them, closer in to the Stade de France itself—would serve to prevent any disaster like that which had happened at the Christmas market in Nantes in 2014, a man ramming his vehicle into the crowds gathered at the gates. But aside from that. . .the situation was a security nightmare, Jobert thought, raising her hand to knock on the door of the command trailer.

  There would be tens of thousands of people everywhere, flooding the area, funneled through the security checkpoints at each of the stadium’s gates. Each of them, a painfully vulnerable target.

  But the safety of the crowd was, strictly speaking, the responsibility of the gendarmes, Jobert reflected, the door of the trailer opening as a middle-aged man wearing a holstered pistol on his hip ushered her into the darkened interior. Their responsibility was President Albéric—and that was more than enough.

  Commissaire Leseur stood in front of a bank of screens which lined one wall of the trailer, the hum of the air-conditioning—working overtime to keep the electronics cool in the Paris heat—muffling the sound of her voice as she spoke to the analyst at her side.

  She turned, seeing the Air Force sergeant standing there. “Bonsoir, sergeant. What have you found?”

  “I believe I have located a vantage point from which my eagle and I can conduct operations, madame commissaire.” Jobert turned toward the digital satellite map thrown up on one of the big screens. Picking out a big, flat-roofed building to the west of the stadium itself, just across the Avenue Jules Rimet. She had passed it on the street less than five minutes before, the blue “Decathlon” sign ornamenting its facade marking the building distinctly. “Can you get me roof access?”

  Leseur took a brief look before nodding. “Oui. Certainement.”

  7:02 P.M.

  DGSI Headquarters

  Levallois-Peret, Paris

  “Oui, si’l vous plait. Merci.” Raoul Dubois nodded, managing a tight, joyless smile as he picked up his tray and strode back across the cafeteria in the basement of the towering modern glass-and-steel building on the Rue de Villiers which housed the headquarters of France’s internal security agency.

  Most Friday nights, he would have been home by now—or perhaps out at dinner, with his wife and some of their friends.

  But he had woken, nearly fourteen hours before, to the news of the discover
y of Idriss Benslimane’s body, bringing with it the near-certainty of Gamal Belkaïd’s presence within the borders of France. Which meant that Brunet’s problem had now become his.

  He had considered her plan to infiltrate an officer into the jihadist underworld of Molenbeek inexcusably hazardous from the first he’d heard of it. The kind of risk that a careerist like himself would never have even considered, had he been read in at the beginning.

  But even he could never have anticipated the disaster this had. . .somehow, become.

  He let out a heavy sigh, picking at his coq au vin. It wasn’t that Gamal Belkaïd hadn’t crossed their radar in the past—he had, many times. As a criminal.

  Not a terrorist.

  It was impossible to know, in this moment, what had flipped the switch. Perhaps it was just a natural consequence of France and her neighbors having accepted the presence of so many. . .“others” within their borders, over the decades.

  Those who would never become truly French, no matter how many decades they and their children spent taking up space. Their inability to assimilate, leading first to crime—then to terrorism. And perhaps the path Gamal Belkaïd had followed really was that simple.

  A path leading them all. . .where, precisely? They still didn’t know, and that was the question he and his officers had spent the day, without success, attempting to answer.

  Futility.

  The DGSI head took another bite, savoring the taste of the wine-soaked chicken—almost startled when he heard the scrape of the chair across from him being pulled out, looking up into the face of one of his deputies.