by Mark Greaney
Court now pulled his own pistol from his belt and held it over his head. In French he said, “Anybody who points a camera at me is getting shot.”
No one reached for their camera phones.
Court ran to the door to the apartment building and moved the planter holding it open as he entered. He pulled an item that looked like a silver key from his pocket and pushed the device into the deadbolt lock on the outside. The item was an instrument used to slow down any pursuers—a generic metal key that fit in most any lock, but where the bow met the shaft of the little instrument the metal had been filed down. Court snapped off the bow, leaving the shaft all the way in the lock and making it difficult if not impossible to open the door without either removing the lock or carefully digging in and picking out the metal of the shaft with a pair of needle-nose pliers.
He pulled the door closed, the lock engaged, and Court knew he’d removed this door as an entry point for the police, at least for the time being. Still, there was a side entrance to the building on a pedestrian passage on the north side, so he knew he had to hurry to both stop the dirty cops from kidnapping or killing the Halabys and avoid getting gunned down by furious police reinforcements.
* * *
• • •
While the fight raged downstairs, in the Halabys’ apartment a man’s voice came over the speaker phone. “’Allo?”
Allard placed the phone down on the coffee table in front of him and said, “Monsieur Eric? I have them here. You are on the speaker.”
A man spoke in French. “Bonjour, Drs. Halaby . . . My name is Eric, and it is a pleasure to speak with you, even if we must just do it over the mobile phone.”
The Halabys did not respond.
“I’ll cut to the chase. We are in a predicament, and you can help us.”
“Who . . . who are you?”
“I work for a party with an interest in locating Bianca Medina. It is our understanding she is in your care and, I must tell you, I will do whatever it takes to achieve my objective.”
Tarek said, “We will tell you nothing.”
“We? How wonderful to hear your harmony and cohesion with your spouse. But you see, Tarek, the truth is, I only need one of you alive to tell me where Medina has been taken. Lieutenant Allard? Will you do me a favor and put the barrel of your pistol against Rima’s head?”
Allard looked at the phone, and then at Foss. Slowly he lifted his weapon and followed the instructions of the voice on the phone.
When the weapon was flush with Rima’s forehead, the middle-aged Syrian woman shut her eyes and tears dripped out.
“Please!” Tarek said.
Just then, the radio in Allard’s back pocket chirped. A broken transmission came through, first of a man coughing, then words. “Lieutenant? This is Belin . . . downstairs. An armed man is inside the building!”
The two police officers in the Halabys’ apartment looked at each other, and then they spun their heads to the door.
Into his walkie-talkie Allard said, “Who is he, and why the fuck did you let him in?”
“He . . . I don’t know who he is. And we did not let him do anything.”
“Get up here, now!” Allard ordered.
“We are . . . we are all wounded! We’ve called for backup.”
“Shit!” Allard said.
Eric spoke up now over the mobile phone. “What’s going on?”
The policemen ignored him; they were focused on this new danger. Allard put down the radio, because he could hear someone sprinting up the hallway outside.
CHAPTER 17
Court raced up the creaky wooden-floored second-story hallway, closing on a right turn that led to the door to the Halabys’ apartment. His right shoulder was sore from the blow he took from the baton in the street, even more so now because his suppressed Glock 19 was in his right hand and out in front of him, causing the muscles in his rear deltoid to flex right where he’d been hit by the weapon. On his left as he ran was a row of windows that looked down on the Passage Dauphine, a cobblestoned pedestrian alley that led back to the east, away from the front of the building. The windows went down the length of the hall—the last one was right there at the turn, and Court knew that just beyond that was a window into the Halabys’ living room, on the other side of the wall ahead of him.
And this gave him an idea.
He continued running forward with his weapon raised in front of him, carefully aimed it high on the wall between the hall and the Halabys’ apartment, and pressed his finger against the trigger.
* * *
• • •
Allard and Foss listened to the sound of the approaching runner and kept their pistols trained on the door, but as the footsteps neared the turn in the hallway ahead and to the right on the far side of the wall of the living room, the footsteps were replaced by the snaps of gunfire. Holes appeared high in the wall ahead of them, a framed painting fell to the ground and crashed, and the two men dove to the floor.
“Who’s shooting?” called out the man they knew as Eric on the speakerphone, but neither man was interested in providing a running commentary of what was going on. They heard the crash of broken glass an instant later; they tried to train their weapons on the origin of the sound, somewhere on the other side of the wall, but just as their focus turned back to the door, a much louder explosion of glass on their right grabbed their attention.
A figure came crashing through the living room window, fewer than ten meters from where they knelt. A man fell to the floor and rolled in front of the television, shattered glass still flying through the air all around him.
Both cops swiveled their aim to the movement across the room, but the man rolling up into a crouch by the TV fired first. Foss’s head snapped back before he could sight on the target, and his weapon spilled from his hand. Allard got a shot off, high and off the right shoulder of the figure, and as he made to squeeze his trigger again, he just had slight recognition of a flash of light emanating from the silencer of the man’s pistol before his world went black.
* * *
• • •
Court rose to his feet, crossed the living room, and fired an additional round into the heads of both men. Rima Halaby screamed in shock at the sight of even more blood splattering across her living room. He trained his weapon on the Halabys quickly, and Rima covered her eyes.
Now he spun his weapon towards the dead Syrian security man in the doorway to the kitchen, then swiveled it down the hallway to the back of the apartment.
Still covering the unknown space down the hall, Court shouted at the couple. “Anyone else?”
“No,” Tarek said. “No one.”
Court lowered his pistol. “Are you hurt?”
Tarek checked on his wife; she was sobbing in near panic but he felt over her body, and then he checked himself out. Neither of them appeared to be bleeding. “We’re . . . I think we are okay.”
Court jerked his head towards the two dead cops. “They were working for the Syrians.”
“We know,” Tarek replied, staring at the three dead bodies on the floor of his apartment. Next to him, Rima brought her hands from her eyes. She was still sobbing, but Court could see that she’d handled the terror and chaos of the past few moments better than most, be they male or female.
Court holstered his weapon in his waistband, ignored the hot suppressor touching his thigh, then helped the couple up to their feet. “Listen to me carefully.”
“Wait!” Tarek said. He looked down at the phone on the table and pointed to it.
Court looked at it, picked it up, and saw that there was an active call. He put his finger over the microphone. “Who the hell is this?”
“A man’s voice,” Rima said. “He said he is working for someone trying to find Bianca. He sent these men.”
Court still had the mic covered when the voice spoke. “Fr
om the sound of things, I might need to hire some new men in Paris.”
Court nodded to Tarek.
The doctor leaned closer to the phone. “Your men are dead. You will never find Bianca now.”
“Your new guest, the American. Is he too shy to talk?”
It was silent in the room for seconds, except for the sound of police sirens coming outside the broken window.
“Who are you?” Court finally said.
The man on the other end of the line replied, “Who are you? Of course I can work out on my own that you are the mystery man who abducted Bianca last night, but beyond that, I admit that I’m at a loss.”
Court studied the man’s voice. Court thought French was probably this man’s native tongue, so he suspected he, too, might be a local police officer, just like the dead men on the floor.
Rima Halaby was still panic stricken, but she was a strong woman, and it was clear to Court she knew the importance of this moment. She shouted into the phone. “You are working for a monster! A man who has ordered the wholesale genocide of my people.”
“He is fighting a rebellion,” the voice replied calmly. “But I’m not going to get into a political discussion with you. It sounds to me like you all need to get out of there before the police arrive. Frankly I hope you make it.”
“You are helping us now?” Tarek asked.
Court answered for the man on the phone. “He can’t get his hands on you if you’re locked up.”
“Smart man,” the voice said. “Mr. American, why don’t you take this phone so you and I can discuss this further when you are somewhere safe from the police?”
Court replied, “Sure, asshole. Why don’t I stick this tracking device in my pocket? Why don’t you go fuck yourself?”
There was a short, perfunctory chuckle. “Very well. But know this. Whoever you are, your involvement has ensured that a lot of people are going to die, including the Halabys, including yourself. I have more men in France, and they will be seeing you soon. I have a funny feeling you and I have not heard the last from each other.”
“You can count on that.” Court hung up the phone, then wiped off the keypad.
As soon as he did so, Tarek said, “He claimed his name was Eric, and he didn’t say it, but he is definitely Swiss.”
“How do you know that?” asked Court.
Rima answered. “We were speaking French with him before you arrived. The word for ‘mobile phone’ in France is portable. But he said natal. Only the Swiss call a mobile a natal.”
Court wondered why a Swiss would be involved in this, but he didn’t have time to think it over. He said, “Fifty cops are going to be flooding through this building in a few seconds. But the police downstairs think the detectives were going up to the third floor. You need to leave now, out the side door, and just keep on going.”
Rima nodded. “Okay . . . just let me pack some—”
“No packing! Just go! March right through the cops, they aren’t looking for you.”
“But . . .” Tarek said, “they’ll find the bodies in our flat.”
“At which point the police will start looking for you. You’ll be able to prove these two cops were working for Syrian interests, that this was an assassination attempt, and then you will be in the clear. But for now, you’ll have to run.”
The couple stood and put on their overcoats as they headed for the front door. “Thank you,” Rima muttered, but in her hurry and shock she did not even look Court’s way.
“Wait,” Court said. “You have to do one thing for me now.”
Tarek turned back to him. “What is that?”
Court told him what he needed, Tarek Halaby complied, and then the Halabys left their apartment, heading for the elevator and the side exit. The sounds of sirens echoed off every building in the Left Bank now; the police were already covering the front and back streets, but Court just closed and locked the apartment door, then headed back to the smashed window, leaving all the bodies as they were. Climbing through the window, he looked down towards the Passage Dauphine and saw a pair of cops standing at the side door, almost directly under Court’s position. They weren’t looking up, so Court swung out silently and moved along from window ledge to window ledge. Once he was out of view of their position he descended via a drainpipe and ran off to the east, ducking into a travel agency for a brochure as a cavalcade of police cars rolled by.
CHAPTER 18
Sebastian Drexler sat in his office, thinking over his conversation with the Halabys and this mysterious American working for them. He’d told the man he expected they would have more dealings with one another, and he fully anticipated this to be the case. He hoped he’d see him at the end of a gun barrel, and on the streets of Paris, for two reasons.
One, Drexler saw himself as more than capable in a fight, and taking down this American who was making so much trouble for his operation would be supremely satisfying. And two . . . More than anything on this Earth, Sebastian Drexler wanted to go home to Europe.
Here in Damascus he had money, power, women, and respect, but he dreamed of seeing his home continent again, of being around Westerners and Western food, customs, and ideals.
But he knew he had to be careful in Europe, because if the police in any nation on the continent picked him up, he’d never set foot outside a prison as long as he lived.
Drexler was born in the picturesque Swiss mountain village of Lauterbrunnen to parents who owned a climbing-expedition tour company, and he became a top-ranked youth alpinist before leaving the nation of his birth for university. Educated in international relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science, he then spent a few years in his nation’s foreign intelligence service. But the slow pace of Switzerland bored him, so he left his home country and took a job for a private risk management firm specializing in helping large corporations navigate their business interests in dangerous African conflict zones.
Drexler was bright, cunning, ruthless when he needed to be, and ambitious. After a couple years working for multinationals, he went out on his own, peddling his expertise as a veteran intelligence operative with third-world experience to well-heeled African warlords. He spent two years working under Gaddafi but got out before the fall of Libya. Then he spent two more years in Europe doing the remote bidding of Nigeria’s corrupt leader Julius Abubaker, and then he did stints supporting the aims of the leadership in Egypt under Mubarak, in Zimbabwe under Mugabe, and in Sudan under Bakri Ali Abboud.
He was a field man who could think, not a mindless gunman but a well-versed and broadly trained operative. He could protect, he could investigate, he could surveil his clients’ opposition and assess his clients’ threats. And yes . . . he could assassinate.
Hell, Sebastian Drexler could raise armies and sack nations.
But he grew tired of the Third World and sought employment back on his home continent. It took Sebastian Drexler years to make his way back to Europe, but finally he left Africa and was discreetly hired by one of the oldest family-owned banks on Earth, Meier Privatbank of Gstaad. The institution employed him as a “consultant” for ultra-affluent private clients, assigning him to those who needed Drexler’s discreet physical and mental abilities to help keep their funds right where they belonged: at Meier Privatbank.
He broke up family squabbles that threatened accounts with all manner of subterfuge and silenced his clients’ legal problems with intrigue and violence. In rural Denmark, a wealthy family patriarch with cancer decided he wanted to remove all his holdings at Meier, some thirty million euros, and donate them to medical research. The younger members of the family were livid, but legally, there was nothing they could do.
The children consulted the bank; Sebastian Drexler arrived at the family estate outside Silkeborg and poisoned the patriarch to death with tainted meds before he could complete the transaction.
The patr
iarch’s kids were pleased, as were Drexler’s employers at Meier.
Drexler did not have a conscience; he had a code. He served the wishes of his employer without question or hesitation. He would cheat, intimidate, maim, kill; he would fund an insurgent attack on a factory in Morocco, contract and sanction a street criminal to stab a lawyer over his wallet in Athens to get him off a case—do anything that would further the wishes of his bank’s clients to keep his bank’s balance sheet large and risks to his clients’ assets small.
Life was going well for Drexler, but eventually his crimes caught up with him. Interpol identified him as a criminal and a killer for his actions in Africa, the Middle East, and Europe, and they began investigating his rumored ties to the Swiss banking industry.
His employers could have washed their hands of him, but instead they made him an offer. He was told there was work for him, lucrative work, in a place Interpol would never persuade the local police to arrest and extradite him.
One of his bank’s largest clients had a need for a personal agent, someone to help her navigate a tricky political and criminal climate both at home and abroad, and a well-rounded, well-connected operative like Herr Drexler might be able to succeed in this mission quite handily.
He was offered the job as the personal action arm of Shakira al-Azzam. He would not be stationed in Europe—which was good news, because Drexler was now persona non grata in Europe—but in Syria itself. If he moved to Damascus to work for the beautiful and powerful first lady, she would win, the bank would win, and Drexler would win.
Well . . . that was how it was all sold to him, and he leapt at the chance to get out of his dangerous predicament in Switzerland. But he had no idea of the dangers in which he’d find himself in Damascus. Even as a personal agent of a member of the first family, it was a perilous environment.
Syrian president Ahmed al-Azzam himself had to sign off on the plan, and he was agreeable to the idea, for the very simple reason that the hundred million euros in Switzerland at Meier Privatbank was essentially the last of the money he and his wife had socked away abroad as a hedge against being overthrown at home. If the Swiss bankers who’d managed to hide his loot this long wanted to send a European spy to work full-time keeping their financial interests protected, then Ahmed knew this would work better than his own intelligence service trying to do the same.
