by Gary Haynes
He’d seen a light go on in what he’d guessed to be the hall and a young, clean-shaven man had opened the door a fraction and peered out, the stretched security chain in place.
Lester had kicked Habib in the shin through the gap and had shoulder barged the door in. Habib had cried out and as he’d hobbled about Lester had sent him to the tiled floor with the sole of his boot as it had contacted with his victim’s lower stomach.
Wincing through clenched teeth, Habib had confirmed that no one else was home, as his wife and children had gone to his mother-in-law’s for the weekend. It had taken about three minutes and the threat of a round at close quarters in Habib’s groin and the prospect of bleeding to death in a terrible way before he’d told Lester what he’d wanted to know, namely who had taken Tom and why.
But even Lester had been shocked when Habib had almost casually added that Jack Donaldson was even more corrupt than a Turkish regional official. But then he’d guessed that Habib had given Donaldson up in an attempt to minimize his own betrayal, first of the general and then of Tom. One thing had been for certain, Habib was going to talk.
Habib had known the main addresses that baba Maroof used, both for business and private use, and it’d been a question of elimination, although in truth he’d only ever held torture victims at the farm. Using Habib as an unwilling and terrified chauffeur, Lester had crouched in the footwell of Habib’s Mercedes as they’d arrived at the villa.
They passed out of onto the country lane now. Tom said, “Did you kill Habib?”
“What I did was to ensure that we got outta there.”
“So you killed him?”
“Damn right I did,” Lester said, checking the rearview just to be sure. “He took a swing at me and tried to scoot. I hit him, caught him in the jugular, with a hook from behind. He died. He didn’t give a damn what happened to your ass.”
“That’s not the point,” Tom said, thinking Habib could’ve been useful.
“Is too.”
Tom shook his head. “He took a swing at you, Lester?” he asked incredulously.
“Damn right he did. Just after he told me that sonofabitch Donaldson has been on the take from the baba for years. Goddamned traitor. I figure Donaldson told them where the safe house was.”
Tom reckoned that was how it had gone down. He reckoned, too, that Ibrahim had eluded them.
And he remembered again that early morning at the diner’s lot in Louisiana. Lester was on a roll and he’d have to get him out of Turkey quick.
But he said, “Thanks, man. You saved my ass for sure.”
Lester pouted his lips and nodded. “You saved my ass, Tom, and Lester Wilson don’t forget a friend, no, sir. And no one’s got a better friend than you, Tom.”
And, despite his misgivings about Habib’s death, Tom knew that in his heart, he felt the same way about Lester too.
Chapter 58
Aboard the boat crewed by the Turks, Ibrahim was sitting in the cabin, fingering the small plastic handgun he’d produced from the 3D printer. Known as addictive manufacturing, the weapon had been made by a process in which successive layers had been laid under the control of a scanner.
The scanner had analyzed digital data on the shape of a Kel-Tec P3AT double-action automatic, which could fire two hundred .380 ACP cartridges before malfunctioning. With a barrel length of just over two and a half inches, it was easily concealable. He’d taken six 25mm rimless cartridges from a secret compartment in his backpack and had inserted them into the clip. He’d seen the outline of the southern French coast an hour ago and estimated that the boat was roughly ten miles from Marseilles. The wind was up, the boat pitching from side to side, and the wind was good, he thought.
After easing himself up the narrow wooden steps to the deck, clutching at the rigid rope that was a makeshift banister, with his free hand to steady himself, Ibrahim checked on the position of the four crew members. Two were standing by the mast at the stern, smoking cigarettes, the third was bent over the gunwale in the bow, flicking through a cellphone. The captain was in the wheelhouse, his eyes checking the choppy sea for driftwood or worse, Ibrahim guessed.
If a man didn’t wonder at the greatness of God, he need only survey the stars this night, Ibrahim thought, scattered as they were in luminous clusters like the rings of Saudi princesses. He turned his face windward.
He shivered, the night was beautiful beyond doubt, but the contrast with the heat of the day was stark. He shot the Turk with the cellphone first, hitting him in the cheek and shattering his jaw. The man made a sound like a hog being chased then vomited. He stayed upright but dropped the cell onto the deck, so wet with seawater now that it looked as if it had been sluiced with hoses. A split second later Ibrahim fired two shots into the wheelhouse through an open sliding window, the entry holes in the captain’s broad back appearing to instantly smoulder. The guy with the cell could’ve texted someone, the captain could’ve used the VHF radio, Ibrahim figured.
He moved purposefully towards the two men who’d been smoking by the mast, their undershirts tucked into their lean waists, their feet in thongs the colour of the Turkish flag. Like his first two victims they weren’t armed, not even with boning knives, which they kept secured in sheaths nailed to the back of the wooden wheelhouse in case they tripped on deck and impaled themselves.
One had his mouth open in disbelief, the cigarette dangling from it, the burning tip resembling some outsized and inquisitive firefly. The other stumbled backwards and toppled onto a pile of lobster pots. He made a pushing movement with his hands, said, “Değil, değil, değil.” No, no, no.
Ibrahim shot them both in the centre of their chests and then again in the head at close quarters, watching their bodies jolt as a result of the impact. He turned and saw that the guy he’d shot in the cheek was scrambling around on the deck on all fours like a pampered dog way out of its comfort zone. The cell had gone, but so had the man’s reason. Blood dropped in thick globs from his face and, positioning himself behind the man, Ibrahim shot him in the back of the neck, severing the spinal cord. Lying splayed on the wooden deck, his head flung backwards, his mouth wide open, he resembled a grotesque statue of some baying mythological beast.
He walked back up the deck to the wheelhouse, past the drums of spare fuel. The captain was slumped over the fixed stool in front of the instrument panel. Blood was oozing from the entry wounds, his left hand twitched as if an electric current was passing through it.
He couldn’t allow any potential witnesses so close to mission time. Men spoke the secrets of their hearts, Ibrahim knew, if the conditions were right, brought about by either torture or brides. Men were weak and God was Almighty, and so it was.
One by one he dragged the three corpses up and laid them side by side on the inward deck, like cadavers about to undergo post-mortem examinations. He would drop them over the side of the boat at intervals of about a mile so. He didn’t want to arouse immediate suspicion if some pleasure boat or coastguard craft came upon them drifting facedown together. He would carry out and push the captain over first, dead or not.
He leant on the gunwale, catching his breath. He took out the gun and tossed it into the rapacious waters, which swallowed it in its great black mouth eagerly. The 3D printer would follow, and anything else that might be used to position him here. But did it matter? he thought. Any investigation, even if it gathered momentum, would take weeks, if not months to come to a conclusion, and long before then he would be eating lamb in Paradise.
As for the Turkish mafia, their days were almost over. When Sharia took its rightful place, they would be slaughtered. They were worse than Shia apostates in his eyes; ignoble peddlers of filth.
He looked at the great expanse of the sea once more. The water was as black as tar, flecked here and there with spindrift. A disorientated seabird, probably sick with hunger or fatigue, bobbed up and down close to the stern. There are fresh morsels for you tonight, Ibrahim thought.
Then the bird squawked
so fretfully that it sounded like a discordant solemnity for the dead.
Chapter 59
The harbour walls, as thick as a ten-ton truck, had been built from locally quarried stone over three centuries ago. The harbour, situated a few miles to the north of Marseilles, had been abandoned after the Napoleonic Wars when the hamlet’s population had died from an unexpected outbreak of smallpox and their bodies had been burnt on a communal funeral pyre.
Twenty yards away, with the cold Mistral wind blowing and dawn just breaking on the Eastern Mediterranean, Claudette Montaigne had left her clothes on the white cliffs and had dived into the cool waters for her daily constitutional swim.
The fifty-six-year-old, with lean limbs and grey hair pulled back in a ponytail, swam naked here because it was far enough away from the beaches, and even the backpackers weren’t up at this hour. Too Catholic to be a full-blown naturist, it suited her, especially when she knew the swell made her image almost indecipherable from the cliff tops.
It was then she spotted the small fishing vessel, chugging around the headland towards the harbour. Curious and not a little self-conscious, she trod water, keeping her mouth close to the lapping wavelets. She had a notion it could be smugglers, or maybe people traffickers, with a human cargo from North Africa. She didn’t approve of either, and, intent on doing her civic duty, resolved to phone the gendarmes as soon as her cellphone had a connection. She always hid her bicycle behind the scrub just beyond the dilapidated cottages, and told herself she was safe.
Chapter 60
In his office at Langley, Crane was riding his chair, with his hands clasped behind his head.
With three flat screens on the desk in front of him, he was doing his best to stop himself from monitoring them with just his right eye open. One of the screens showed the aftermath of an unsuccessful and illegal raid on a house in Gaza City by CIA paramilitaries, the other two satellite imagery and real-time feeds from RQ-4 Global Hawk drones, circling miles above the Palestinian territories in readiness for the next operation.
His whole body was craving deep sleep in a manner he hadn’t experienced since being chained up in a hellhole in Beirut. Before they’d let the family and son torture team on him they’d softened him up. They’d soaked him with fetid water every few hours and had played local music on full blast via a cassette recorder outside his cell for hours at a time. Then they’d waterboarded him, almost a quarter of a century before it had become standard procedure in CIA black sites during the War on Terror.
Most experts thought that waterboarding originated as a torture technique in the fifteenth century during the Spanish Inquisition. Ironically, he thought, the US authorities had successfully brought war crimes prosecutions against the Japanese for waterboarding American servicemen, and in the Vietnam War a US army officer had been court martialled for assisting in the waterboarding of a prisoner.
They’d strapped Crane down on a wooden bench, stuck a towel over his face and used a hose to keep the water pressure constant. He’d expected the sensation of drowning and had thought that he could attune his mind to deal with it. But he also knew that what the CIA and the White House hadn’t wanted the public to know about was the pain it induced, a pain so bad that it was like having rocks piled on your chest. Worst of all, though, was the real danger of brain damage due to oxygen starvation. They’d taunted him about that every time they’d taken him to the wooden shack for the treatment.
He knew after the general had gotten him out that he couldn’t take another session. He still did.
A knock at the door brought him back from his macabre recollections. But he ignored it and stayed in the reclined position, which meant he didn’t have to survey his great girth that now seemed to make even the small of his back flabby. He’d been little more than a skeleton when he’d come home from Beirut. He’d never married but his late mother had cried when she’d seen his jaded and emancipated body. She’d wept for over an hour, in fact. He’d thought once that he might joke about going back there to lose some weight, but despite his fondness for black humour, that was simply unthinkable.
He forced a smile despite everything. “If it’s Janice,” he called out, referring to the cleaner, “come back Wednesday.”
A young analyst, Steve Colson, came into the room, a manila folder and an iPad in his left hand. Crane thought the guy’s shoes were always just that bit too shiny and guessed he kept a little kit in his desk drawer that his momma had sent him from Arkansas as a birthday present.
“You gonna take the shine off?” he said.
Colson looked bemused. “I’m sorry, sir, I don’t follow.”
“The shine off my day, son. You got bad news?” Crane said.
“On the contrary, sir.”
“Then take a seat and spit it out, son.”
Colson told him that French police had found a fishing boat a few miles from Marseilles. No one was onboard, but there were signs of a struggle and fresh bloodstains.
“A cleanup?” Crane asked.
Colson clearly didn’t know what to say.
“This ain’t the Marie Celeste, is it, son? There’s bloodstains. It could be someone didn’t want witnesses to whatever they were up to, unless it was a drunken brawl that got outta hand, or…” Crane stopped himself. He could see that Colson was desperate to speak. “Go ahead.”
“They found Turkish passports onboard and the boat is registered in Northern Cyprus.”
Crane sat upright then, daring for a breakthrough moment. “Anything else?”
“Yes, sir, a French woman, an open-water swimmer. She saw a dark-skinned guy get off the boat in an abandoned harbour. She said he had a beard and shoulder-length hair and was wearing shades. He got picked up by a Middle Eastern-looking guy in a black minivan that had driven down a dirt track she said hadn’t been used in years. She got the first three letters of the plate.”
“If she was here, I’d give her a big hug,” Crane said, making a mental note to ensure the DCRI – the direction centrale du Renseignement intérieur, the French security service – threw everything they had at it.
“The minivan has been located in Paris, a Muslim area.”
Gets even better, Crane thought. “That it?”
“Yes, sir.”
Crane nodded. “Okay, keep me updated.”
“Yes, sir.”
Colson got up to leave.
“And, Colson, make sure you shine your shoes before you turn up for work. You think this is a machine shop?” Crane just couldn’t help himself.
Chapter 61
When he’d left, Crane knew that he only had two people on his hastily-convened team who weren’t on an active trail, Tom and Lester, who he’d heard had made their way to the safety of the US embassy in Ankara. Despite what Colson had said, it might not mean that much, certainly not that the guy was definitely Ibrahim. But then again, he thought.
He was intrigued and it had to be investigated thoroughly, both by French intelligence services and his own team. After what he’d heard Tom and Lester had been through after their debriefing at the embassy, he felt bad about sending them to Paris. But he couldn’t afford himself any form of sentiment due to the level of the threat, not even in respect of Tom. But, as things had panned out, it was in fact the least risky mission he’d had to allocate in the past couple of days.
He’d arrange for a helicopter to fly them to a Turkish Air Force base and from there, a flight to France. He knew a handful of ex-DCRI operatives, who were freelancers now. He decided that Tom and Lester would need help from a local in France, and he knew just the man from among that small group.
Crane recalled the Frenchman’s nickname was the Smiling Man. Kinda ironic, really, he thought. TSM hadn’t smiled that much when he’d known him, but he knew where he’d picked up the name.
It had been acquired under dubious circumstances. TSM had been in the 2nd Rep, the elite French paratrooper regiment. He’d been a young officer and was independently wealthy. There was nothin
g remotely complicated about his nickname. When the Rep had landed on the tarmac of Kolwezi airport in south-east Zaire in May 1978, they’d been ordered to rescue the Belgian and French nationals who were being held captive by the ruthless separatist rebels, known as Tigers.
Massacres and rapes of Europeans had already occurred. The Legion had had to make an impression as they’d been heavily outnumbered. They’d grabbed a dozen rebels, had shoved them into shacks and had tossed grenades in. TSM had, well, smiled. He’d done so every time the exercise had been repeated over the next twenty-four hours, although his bravery in the face of the enemy hadn’t been questioned. He’d fought ferociously by all accounts. The military exercise had been a huge success. Upon his return to Paris, TSM had boasted that he’d been kissed by a hundred different French women.
Crane knew things were getting serious.
Three hours later, after four secure calls and calling in a couple of favours, Crane had also filled in Tom on the recent intel from the French woman and had briefed him on his plan. He and Lester would travel to Paris. Tom would meet up with an associate of TSM, who’d arrange for Tom to make contact. The French weren’t partial to interference in what they’d see as an internal counterterrorist issue, and unlike the Brits they weren’t partial to extradition, either. TSM would use his contacts and intelligence expertise to track the official DCRI operatives, who, Crane had figured, would do the work for them. He knew the chances of the director agreeing to a potential firefight in a Paris suburb by CIA paramilitaries fresh out of Afghanistan was about the same as him appearing on the front of a woman’s magazine with his shirt off. Tom and Lester would only be there to observe, to feed back intel.
He took out a cigar from his pocket, twiddled it in its plastic wrapper. He couldn’t even take a smoke when and where he wanted to these days, at least in the US. Goddamned politicians with the balls of grade teachers were taking over the world, and he felt that one day even the CIA would have to bend over backwards to accommodate them.
