by Mark Greaney
Of course as soon as Drexler arrived, he was thoroughly vetted by Syria’s notorious Mukhabarat, their General Intelligence Service, but he was cleared, and then he began doing the bidding of both Shakira and Ahmed, and he began working with the Mukhabarat on operations that involved keeping the foreign assets of the first family secure.
There were a great number of threats to the Azzams’ offshore finances. Government entities searching for them, reporters inquiring about them, third-party banks with questions about the legitimacy of the nominees on the trusts. Over time Drexler developed a large network of European employees to further the Azzams’ aims on the continent: cops in Paris, intelligence officials in the UK, corrupt lawyers in Luxembourg, computer hackers in Ukraine.
Shakira’s accounts stayed safe, and more money was funneled into them from time to time from the Azzams’ corruption schemes in Damascus.
This relationship between Drexler and the Azzams had been working well for all parties involved, and the Swiss contract agent had been fully busy with his tasks, when an affair between the first lady and Drexler developed. From Shakira’s side it was easy to see what fueled the desire. She was a woman locked away in a palace with few around her other than sycophants who were completely beholden to her loveless husband. When dangerous but exotic Drexler came into the picture, he met her gaze and showed his interest in her, and unlike other men, he was allowed confidential meetings with her in her private apartment.
It took no time for her to make a move on the attractive European.
Drexler, on the other hand, was motivated by a combination of two simple drugs: adrenaline and lust. He’d slept with a warlord’s mistress, a concubine of the Egyptian president, the wife of a Nigerian general, and even the daughter of the chief Interpol inspector in Greece in charge of his case. Sebastian Drexler was a hunter of pelts, and Shakira was suitable for hanging over his mantel.
There was nothing special about their affair to him. He’d had better, but over time he had come to worry that the cold and cruel woman might actually think she was in love with him, and in the dead of night he found this more terrifying than the prospect that Ahmed Azzam could find out about the affair and have him killed.
Sleeping with the first lady had been the riskiest thing in Sebastian Drexler’s life of danger a year earlier, when Shakira summoned him to her offices and asked him for discreet help on a delicate personal matter. Drexler, only too glad to ingratiate himself even further to the first lady and thereby solidify himself as a fixture in the Syrian regime, heeded the strange request to track down a Spanish woman living in Damascus and find out just what she was up to.
It seemed like it would be easy work. Shakira had made an enemy of some woman here in her country, she did not want to go through official channels to pursue what Drexler assumed was nothing more than a catfight, and he figured he’d have the matter taken care of in a couple of days.
He could not have been more wrong.
Drexler conducted a tail on Bianca Medina, doing most of the legwork himself, and he slowly came to the realization that this squabble between two women was, in fact, something much more.
The first tip-off was the high-level security protection. Medina never went anywhere without a special group of Alawi close protection officers ringing her. For a civilian this was unheard of in Damascus. His research into the detail showed him they were being paid for out of a special fund at a bank owned by high-ranking members of the ruling Ba’ath Party, and this worried Drexler even more than the security itself.
But he continued because the first lady was not one to piss off, and if his employers at Meier Privatbank ever heard that he wasn’t doing as instructed by their client, there would be hell to pay in Gstaad as well as in Damascus.
His surveillance of the woman’s home in the Mezzeh 86 neighborhood told him she didn’t seem to leave the house for work, and although she was single and she loved the nightlife, she definitely wasn’t connected to a large group of friends or acquaintances. She frequented the best clubs and restaurants in the city, but she always returned home alone, surrounded by her guards.
Drexler determined that unless she was sleeping with one of her protection detail, she was celibate.
And then, on the eighth day of his coverage, his worries that this operation might turn into something delicate were confirmed. Around midnight he noticed three nondescript vehicles rolling along Zaid bin al-Khattab Avenue in Bianca Medina’s neighborhood. Through his night vision binoculars he saw that they bore plates indicating they were owned by the presidential security force.
When the detail turned into the circular drive in front of Medina’s property, Drexler’s apprehension grew. And when the Alawi private security force left the house minutes later, the Swiss agent began to have grave concerns that he knew what was going on.
His fears were proven right when two more vehicles pulled into the property just after. President Ahmed al-Azzam himself climbed out and entered the home.
So . . . there it was. The president of Syria was clearly having an affair with this twenty-five-year-old Spanish model, and Drexler’s client in this matter was the president’s wife.
He knew instantly he had found himself between the biggest rock and the hardest place of his entire, exceptionally dangerous career. He could lie to the first lady: say he learned nothing about Bianca Medina. Or he could inform on the president of Syria, a man who could have him shot and dumped in a ditch whenever he wanted.
Drexler immediately went back to the first lady and told her that because of his obligation to his mission working to protect the assets held in Meier Privatbank, he no longer had the time he needed to devote to this personal side mission. This ruse lasted about five seconds. He’d known Shakira was an intelligent woman, but he’d not been prepared for how quickly she saw through his bullshit.
“Ahmed showed up at her house, didn’t he?” she asked.
“Ahmed? You mean your husband?” was Drexler’s too-casual reply, and he cursed himself for being so transparent.
To his shock, though, Shakira just smiled a little.
“I knew about the affair. I won’t tell you how I knew. Nothing scientific. Woman’s intuition, I guess. I thought perhaps you could bring me proof of the extent of it.”
There was no way Drexler was going to continue spying on Bianca Medina, not even for the second most powerful person in his patron nation. He replied, “I do not feel comfortable doing that. You understand, I’m certain, that President Azzam could make serious trouble for me.”
Shakira shrugged, then kissed her lover. “You’re sleeping with his wife. You think this is worse?”
Drexler said, “Here, in your apartment . . . your husband isn’t going to find out what I’m doing unless you tell him. But out there? Running surveillance on his mistress? I will be detected, and that will be seen as a hostile act.”
Shakira sighed and shrugged. “No matter. What you have done has been more than enough.”
This confused Drexler, and he pulled back out of her grasp angrily. “What have I done? I have no photographs. No information of what, exactly, is taking place.”
Now Shakira’s smile was genuine. “You try telling Ahmed that. I won’t tell him that I know of his affair with Bianca, but if he does ever find out I know, he’ll probably assume my own personal intelligence agent was the one who informed on him.”
It was a chilling comment, and Drexler did not know how to process it, but Shakira released Drexler from his duties regarding Medina that very night, and this relaxed him greatly.
He returned to his work for the General Intelligence Service and the interests of Shakira’s accounts at Meier Privatbank, and he considered himself lucky to be clear of the danger of reporting against one of his benefactors to his other.
But it was just months later when he was with Shakira in her private quarters. They were both nude and c
overed in a thin sheen of sweat; around them the Egyptian cotton bedsheets were twisted and balled and damp, pillows strewn about the floor.
Drexler was deep in the aftereffects of postcoital calm, and not in the mood for a serious talk, but while Drexler had been in charge during their lovemaking, the second the sex was over, she reacquired her air of authority and detachment.
As a complete non sequitur Shakira sat up in the bed. “I’ve heard a rumor, Sebastian, and I need you to find out if it’s true.”
“Any chance I can take a shower first?”
When Shakira told him that she had learned Bianca was pregnant, Drexler was incredulous. He could envision no scenario where Ahmed would allow a mistress to have his baby.
But Shakira felt differently. She worried that a boy was on the way, and a boy was a threat to her children, to her own power in the nation.
If Drexler had been uncomfortable earlier with the prospect of informing on the president to his wife about an affair, now he was out of his mind with the quandary he found himself in.
He was in a corner, but he went to work. He began digging, hoping like hell there was no pregnancy, no child, but after a time he found, to his horror, that the mistress had indeed given Azzam a son. And, in the worst news of all, the boy was named after Ahmed’s father, the man who’d ruled Syria for thirty-five years. Instantly Drexler knew for certain he had information that Ahmed al-Azzam would kill to keep under wraps.
He worried about telling Shakira, but she demanded information, and he knew she could make things difficult at Meier if he did not reveal what he knew.
Drexler found himself once again in the center of a very dangerous game, so he did what he had to do. He picked a side. He knew that telling Shakira about baby Jamal would not give her reason to kill him, but if he told Ahmed Azzam about his discovery, the Syrian president might just kill him for finding out.
When he told her the news, she took it stoically, then said, “The only reason Ahmed has kept me around is because of my relationship in the Sunni community. When the war is over, when the Russians and Iranians have pushed out all the foreign threats, then he won’t need the help of the Sunni groups any longer. Think about it, Sebastian. If he starts a new family with his young Alawi concubine and his new child . . . what do you suppose he will do with me? And if something happens to me, what will happen to you? You know too much.”
Only because you made me an accessory after the fact, Drexler raged inside.
Shakira continued, thinking about all aspects of her and Drexler’s shared predicament. “And what of the money at Meier Privatbank? After all, it was you—their agent—who found out about the affair. Do you think Ahmed will leave the hundred million euros in Switzerland, knowing that they have this information about him? He will kill me, take the money from your bank, and you will be here in Syria with no benefactor at home or abroad. You will be a loose end.”
It occurred to Drexler that if he could only get away with strangling Shakira Azzam to death right then and there, it would solve a lot of his problems.
But it wouldn’t solve all of them and he would not get far, certainly not out of Syria. Drexler understood that for now, at least, his own personal fortunes were inexorably tied to the continued good health and good standing of the first lady.
“What do you propose we do?” he asked.
“Stopping this woman is the only way to safeguard the account at Meier, and that is your job, is it not?”
He shrugged. Despondent now.
She leaned forward to him with a conspiratorial look. “We’re in this together, Sebastian. We need to find a way to get rid of Bianca.”
The Swiss man looked at her like she was crazy. “How does that help you? If you kill his lover, you think that will make you safe?”
“He can’t know I did it, but once she’s gone, then I’ll be secure. You don’t know Ahmed. He is in love with this girl. Foolish, reckless love. He is too insulated now to ever find anyone else. The Russians want stability in his regime, and that means me in the palace, smoothing things over with the Sunnis. Ahmed will fight the Russians over his infatuation with that Spanish bitch, but he won’t go back to the drawing board if something happens to her.”
Drexler, resigned to his fate, began working for Shakira Azzam. But try as he might, he was not able to discover the location of the child. Bianca owned a home in Mezzeh 86, directly south of the palace, but it was locked and darkened now. Wherever she and her child were being kept, it was likely someplace ultra secret Azzam had set up for her.
And for Shakira’s part, she knew she could never kill Medina in Syria. Ahmed would learn of her involvement, and that would spell disaster for her. But when Drexler found out that Ahmed Azzam’s lover would be traveling to France, he helped Shakira concoct a scheme to co-opt ISIS into killing her, by framing her as the concubine of the emir of Kuwait, sworn enemies of the Islamic State.
* * *
• • •
Drexler had been sitting in his palace office, brooding over the events of the past two years, when the encrypted voice app on his mobile phone rang. He snatched it up, although he knew what he would hear.
“Oui?”
As expected, it was Henri Sauvage on the other line. “Eric? Something’s happened.”
Drexler listened to the police captain for several minutes without reply as he reported the deaths of Allard and Foss.
Sauvage closed his report by saying, “No video of the incident, but the police officers on the scene say this man, this American . . . he’s something else.”
“Keep working on finding Medina,” Drexler instructed.
“Dammit, man! This is big. Two of my men are dead, and French intelligence is working with the FSEU!”
“Wait. French intelligence? What do you mean by that?”
“A guy was rooting around the Thirty-Six this afternoon, asking questions about Foss and Allard. I didn’t know who he was, but my superiors gave him the run of the place. After he left I found out he was a recently retired internal security spook.”
“Name?” Drexler asked.
“Guys like that don’t drop names, Eric.”
Drexler thought a moment. “Answer me this. Was he midsixties, short with wavy silver hair, a faux highborn act but chewed fingernails?”
A pause. “You know him?”
“His name is Vincent Voland. I’ve never met him . . . but I know him well.”
“Listen,” Sauvage replied. “I didn’t sign on for street battles and dead cops and old spymasters rooting around my office. I don’t want any part of any of this anymore.”
Neither did Drexler. But although he found himself sympathetic to Sauvage’s sentiment, he knew he needed the man’s compliance.
“You aren’t going anywhere, Henri, and we both know why.” Just as Shakira had something on Drexler that she could use to doom him, Drexler had something on Sauvage. Evidence of all the crimes he’d committed on Syria’s behalf. The little stuff at first, the bigger stuff in the middle . . . and then the events of the past twenty-four hours.
No . . . Drexler knew Sauvage was in his back pocket. The Swiss agent said, “I’m coming up. Find Bianca Medina before I get there.”
“But—”
Drexler hung up the phone. Just then his assistant spoke over the speakerphone on his desk.
“Mr. Drexler?”
“Yes?”
“Sir . . . the president’s office called. President Azzam would like to speak with you privately this evening. Eleven p.m. in his office.”
Although his heart began hammering inside his chest, for the first time that day, Sebastian Drexler smiled.
CHAPTER 19
Sixty-five-year-old Vincent Voland breathed the vapor of the rainy evening, walking alone along the wet cobblestones as he approached the lighted sign of Tentazioni, an intimate Italian
restaurant at the top of a steep and narrow lane in Montmartre. The restaurant was nearly empty at ten p.m., but tonight’s meeting was set for this venue, at this time.
Tarek Halaby had called Voland just after his and his wife’s encounter with the two Police Judiciaire officers working for Syrian interests. He’d explained how the American had shown up minutes before the attack, then again during the attack, and about how he’d saved them both. Tarek then demanded a face-to-face meeting tonight, leaving it to Voland to determine the time and the place, and the Frenchman had picked this restaurant because of its small size, the visibility afforded by its windows, and its intimate atmosphere.
Voland knew Tentazioni well; he would sense immediately if anyone here did not belong, and he could then simply snake off down one of the nearby side streets and alleys and disappear.
The Halabys themselves weren’t particularly safe in Paris now, but Voland felt this locale would be quiet enough where they could get in and get out without encountering police or other interested parties.
The silver-haired Frenchman stopped in a wide patch of misty darkness, just down the Rue Lepic from the restaurant, far enough from the lights and tourists of the Sacré-Coeur up the hill to the east. As he stood there he looked into the windows of the little Italian eatery. There were just a few tables occupied, but Voland did not see either of the Halabys yet.
This surprised him. The Syrian couple knew next to nothing about tradecraft, so he didn’t give them credit for the play of showing up late for a meet to scout the location from afar.
He backed into the darkness along the sidewalk next to a simple storefront undergoing construction and looked down to his phone to dial Tarek on a secure voice app. But just as he lit up the screen, he felt the cold tip of a pistol’s suppressor touch him at the base of his skull. He flinched, then immediately froze, afraid to make any movement that would cause the person at the other end of the weapon to pull the trigger.
