by Gary Haynes
His mind went back to his college days. Funny, he thought, how often he thought of the past the older he got. An enthusiastic law professor had told him once that the Rule of Law was like theoretical physics, because neither dealt in absolutes, that there were no absolute truths as such. Instead they dealt with accumulating evidence and examining it to reach a conclusion. The conclusion was not an absolute truth. It was an approximate based on probabilities.
Is the universe one of many universes? he was fond of saying. Is a man guilty or not guilty? Evidence, despite what forensic scientists claim, is rarely conclusive in an absolute sense. It can be tampered with. It can be planted. This is why we have trials. This is why it is argued that the death penalty should be abolished. In most cases, the accused is not sentenced to death on the basis of absolute guilt. Remember that when you leave here today, even if you forget everything else.
Crane snapped the cigar between his fingers. It was playing on his habit and it irritated him. It irritated him that he’d decided to send Tom to Gaza. The memory of that law professor irritated him, too. It was conceivable that the man Ibrahim might have nothing to do with what was still a perceived threat. He sure as hell wouldn’t get anything resembling a trial. He’d get a bullet and that was as absolute as it got.
Chapter 62
Tom had been met by an associate of the Smiling Man at the Charles de Gaulle airport as planned. He’d received medical attention to his wounds at the air force base in Turkey, which, despite the way they’d looked, were, he’d been told, essentially superficial. Besides, his blood was up.
The man he’d met hadn’t been obvious. He’d expected someone very different, like a French equivalent of Lester, perhaps. But not the gaunt-looking guy, his skin as pale as cod steaks, who’d worn tortoiseshell eyeglasses and a woollen scarf, and had stood no more than five-six in sneakers. It had been clear, despite his bald patches and wispy hair that he was in his mid-twenties. Tom had thought he looked like a computer nerd. But had decided that he’d been wholly inconspicuous, which had meant TSM was as good as Crane had said he was.
He’d been standing by an airport bookstore when Tom had walked past, and had gently tugged him by the arm before smiling and introducing himself. He’d said his name was Nicolas. They’d walked through the arrivals lounge to one of the public parking lots, and Tom had been driven into the heart of the city in the man’s white Mazda. They’d stopped outside a Paris bar. Tom had had no idea where. Nicolas had given him a cellphone number scribbled on a piece of crumpled paper, and had told Tom to ring the number via the public payphone opposite.
Now, after standing a few feet from a blue and white, umbrella-shaped Paris payphone shelter for a minute or more, Tom felt cold and a little unsure of himself. He checked his watch. It was 19:34. The wind rose and he pulled up the collar on his double-breasted black overcoat. There were two public phones opposite one another under the same shelter, less than a yard apart. One was being used by a man in his fifties, waving his free hand around in a typically Parisian display of histrionics. He reminded Tom of Yves Montand, the 1950s film star. The man slammed the handset down, then repeated the action twice more. He lit a cigarette, gestured to himself angrily and walked off.
Tom moved under the circular roof of the half-hearted structure and dialled the number on the paper. The dial tone stopped after about five seconds. He figured the cell was stolen, or disposable.
“Yes?” the man said in French. His voice was thinly accented and mellow.
“Tom Dupree.”
A middle-aged English couple, his arm around her shoulders, walked past, smiling and laughing, discussing their day.
“Don’t say anything else,” the voice said. “Nothing, you understand me?”
Feeling like a rebuked kid, Tom said, “Yeah, sure.”
“Hotel Le Meridien Etoile. 81 Boulevard Gouvion Saint-Cyr. Half past midnight.”
The line went dead.
Chapter 63
As soon as Tom entered the bar area, he knew who TSM was, a tall, lean man wearing a blue suit and a pale pink open-necked shirt, a pair of russet tasselled loafers on his feet. He was sitting on a leather sofa just off the bar proper. The interior of the hotel was all marble, chrome and dim light. He had a large round glass of what looked like cognac in his left hand, and appeared to have a nonchalant manner.
The bar was sparsely populated. There was what looked like a local couple, sipping red wine, and two middle-aged executives, apparently too shy to speak to one another. One of them was eating olives from a bowl, the other, using his thumb to flick though a smartphone. A young black bartender, with a white shirt and black necktie, was drying a glass with a cloth, the old-fashioned way.
Tom walked over and TSM looked up, nodded assuredly and gestured to the matching leather sofa in front of him. He put his drink on the rectangular glass table by his extended legs. Tom sat down, inhaling the sofa’s distinctive smell. At once, he noticed the man’s pointed nose, the plump lips; the attentive eyes, the same hue as cornflowers. He had a small purple birthmark, half hidden in the sweeps of his thick grey, immaculately cut hair.
“Please, and forgive me, but—”
He placed his hand inside his breast pocket, glanced around and pulled out what Tom took for a cellphone.
Handing it over, the Frenchman said, “Just brush yourself down with this, please.”
Tom eyed him warily, unsure of what to think, but took it just the same.
“Just to be sure, my friend,” he said, making himself comfortable, arms splayed, his head back. “You have anything on you apart from a watch or a regular cellphone?”
“No,” Tom said.
“No problem then. Take the battery out of your phone, if you please. Did you know that people can listen to conversations via a cellphone, even when it is turned off? They activate the microphone. It’s how your FBI eavesdropped on the Genovese crime family all those years ago.” He grinned then. “Of course you know.”
Tom unclipped his watch and took out the secure cellphone that Lester had handed back to him when they’d arrived at the Charles de Gaulle. He removed the battery, did a cursory scan of his body and handed the detector back to TSM.
“Good.” The Frenchman picked up his glass, let the brandy slide down his throat. “How did you learn about me?”
“Look, we can dance around all night, if you like,” Tom said.
TSM raised his hands, palms up.
“C’mon,” Tom said.
“Is it you who is dancing now, Mr Dupree.”
“Okay. Dan Crane.”
“Thank you. He’s a one-off, no?”
“As you say.”
He bent over and picked up his glass again. He took another relaxed sip of cognac. “My goodness, how rude of me. A drink?”
“I’m fine,” Tom said.
“Not by the look of you,” he said, referring to Tom’s scars. “Crane has a particular habit. What is it?”
Crane had many habits, Tom thought. He smoked cigars. He was downright rude. But he knew instinctively that those weren’t what TSM meant. He racked his brain for ten seconds before he said, “He rides chairs.”
TSM made a disinterested face and shrugged a little. “Okay. Now to business.”
Chapter 64
The mosque in Paris was two semi-detached three-storey nineteenth-century houses, with the adjoining wall knocked down. It had a reputation for being non-radical and attracted local store owners, cab drivers and artisans, but the imam was an ex-jihadist and knew Ibrahim from Syria.
They had learned that preaching extremist sermons wasn’t a good idea if a Muslim wanted anonymity. Without anonymity there would be no chance of evading the national and international intelligence communities, and if they didn’t there was no chance of being able to carry out successful jihadist acts. It was simple pragmatism. The imam, whose name was Mohammed, had said that Ibrahim was a scholar and a refugee from Yemen, who was resting up in the converted loft before he made hi
s way to London.
They were sitting now, cross-legged and barefoot in an empty room on the second floor, the high ceiling draped with a black sheet like a sail. They were wearing eggshell-white dishdashas and had spoken openly about the jihad taking place in Iraq and Syria, the fact that their enemies in Shia Iran and the infidels in the US were sharing intelligence and opening up diplomatic ties. It was something that no one could have predicted, just like all the major geopolitical events that had happened in the last decade or more. There were no experts when it came to predicting world events, Ibrahim knew. There were just old enemies, and unlike the Christians and the Shias, who had all but forgotten the past, Sunnis didn’t forget.
Numerous national security services monitored myriad Internet, cellphone and landline communications from all over the world on a minute-by-minute basis. Not least the US National Security Agency’s complex at Fort George G. Meade in Maryland. The computers, which were programmed to identify, among other things, key words and phrases, or repeatedly used commonplace ones in an unfamiliar context, were some of the most powerful in the world. But the jihadists had become wily and were more than familiar with the methodology which had resulted in the imprisonment of many of their brothers in Guantanamo and the death of the modern father of jihad, Osama bin Laden. They no longer used cellphone communication regularly, and since the incident with the Mossad spy, Ibrahim no longer spoke to anyone who hadn’t already killed in action and had pledged his life to the Silent Jihad.
“How long do I have, brother?” Mohammed said.
He was a softly-spoken man, with eyes at once intimate and detached. Ibrahim noticed that he kept his beard short, his hair shaved at the back. He worried that here in France the anti-Muslim state was baring down too hard on his faith and gradually emasculating it. But he too was aware of the need to be seen to be as invisible as possible, and looking like a crazy prophet fresh out of the desert wasn’t the way to go in the long term. Still, he had kept on his scruffy beard and long hairpiece. In Gaza, the Mossad had photographs of him looking quite different, after all.
“Two weeks at most,” Ibrahim said.
“Are we safe?”
“Yes,” Ibrahim said, although he thought then of the two Americans who had escaped from the baba in Turkey. He still had no idea how, given the mafia’s connections, but it was so.
“Strength lies in your resilience, brother.”
Mohammed nodded.
“I will bring the phials and we shall drink together,” Ibrahim said.
The virulent and deadly virus would be transported by Ibrahim to the brothers in France, Germany, the UK, and, chiefly, the United States, given their primary role in what they considered to be the invasion of Muslim soil and the bloodshed that had resulted from those sacrilegious Crusades.
“It will be a terrible and wonderful thing, brother,” Mohammed said.
Ibrahim put his hand into his pocket and offered Mohammed what appeared to be a tiny rubber ball about the size of a pea.
“What is it?”
“You know what it is,” Ibrahim said. “The rubber’s thin, the glass wall inside is thinner. But it should stop it breaking by accident. You mustn’t swallow it, or it will just pass through your system like a marble. Crunch it with your back teeth. It contains potassium cyanide. You’ll be dead in minutes.”
Mohammed took it, and wrapped it in his handkerchief before popping it into his own pocket.
“If anything happens, don’t let them take you alive, brother,” Ibrahim said. “If you speak, we will be undone.”
Chapter 65
The room in Paris was part of a small basement apartment that TSM had said he rented from a distant relative, who never checked up on him as long as the rent was paid on time and who had no idea what it was used for, and wouldn’t care if she did. He’d added that the apartment was useful to him because it was only a few miles from the suburbs where the majority of immigrants lived, and that most of his freelance work was centred around there these days.
The drapes were drawn, the windows protected by shutters on the outside and bars on the inside. It was a rundown area of the city, inhabited by teenage drugs gangs and the unemployed. The security was in place to protect what TSM had said was close to one hundred thousand Euro worth of computer software and surveillance equipment.
He had access to sophisticated espionage equipment, including massive databases and satellite images. He’d said the world was full of corrupt government employees, freelance cryptographers and ex-secret service personnel, acting now as private security specialists. It just took enough money and the right contacts to have a surveillance operation equal to that of a minor state.
Tom and Lester were standing behind TSM, who was sitting on a high-backed swivel chair in front of an L-shaped desk, with a bank of flat screens. Atop the table, a transmitter and radio equipment was strewn about, the cables looking like a nest of snakes. He said that he didn’t have to worry about the authorities interfering with his business. He was protected. An acne-ridden freelance IT specialist he’d employed for the task had charged him six thousand Euro. For that, he’d gotten untraceable access, impenetrable firewalls, and the most sophisticated encryption programmes. He knew the IT guy didn’t know the real reason for his role. He guessed he just thought it was extra security precautions against bored geeks, or business competitors, the means of dealing with disabling viruses, or online espionage. He said he’d given him a generous tip and had said he’d recommend him to friends. He said he never had.
The flat screens were showing various chunks of hacked computer information and live CCTV footage from Muslim-dominated suburbs.
He said that the rule against wearing the burqa was being enforced more stringently now and that it was causing problems with an already ostracized Muslim minority, mostly from France’s former colonies and protectorates, including Algeria and Palestine. But at least it meant that men couldn’t disguise themselves as women, something that was happening in other more PC European countries where criminals were carrying out their acts with facial-recognition impunity; jihadists, too. He said that he’d been working unofficially for the CIA for years, and Tom wondered why he was being so open with them.
“The word is that Ibrahim is a hero among Sunni fighters. Like the leader of al-Nusra, no one knows his real name or where he’s from. The Mossad took photographs of him, so he’s still likely to be in disguise,” he said, as if he was talking about something mundane like the weather.
Hours later, the black transmitter on the table before TSM began to blink and made a trilling sound. TSM swivelled sideways, picked up a pair of padded headphones and placed them over his neat ears.
After a minute or more he took them off and without turning around said, “The DCRI are moving in on something. We’re moving, too.”
Tom couldn’t stop from tensing up. It was personal, after all.
Chapter 66
The street in which the mosque stood in the small Muslim suburb was made up of other three-storey houses and flat-roofed apartment blocks. On the roofs and at every street corner in the vicinity teenage lookouts were standing with cellphones, paid a minimum wage for their services. As a light drizzle fell from the grey sky at 06:13 three Renault minivans with darkened windows came down a side street, heading for the mosque. The boys looked about like startled gazelles on the savannah and began to make calls frantically and send text messages.
Inside the mosque in the converted loft, Ibrahim was rolling up the thin padded mat on which he had slept. He’d washed, said his prayers, shaved meticulously and snipped at a few straggly hairs at the nape. He’d put on his false hair and beard and prosthetic nose. He hadn’t even told Mohammed, who was the one to be infected in France, that his hair and nose were false.
He stood up and turned around to face the door after it had been opened. He saw Mohammed standing there. He was panting and looked distressed.
“We have to leave now.” he said. “A brother is waiti
ng for you two streets away on a red moped. He has a spare helmet. Wear it.”
Ibrahim moved over to the corner of the room and snatched up a hessian bag before darting outside the room, following Mohammed.
By the time they had gotten to the third floor Ibrahim heard the crackling sound of splintering wood. He rushed to the street-side window and peered down. Outside, a team of men were readying themselves on the sidewalk, wearing regulation bulletproof vests, heavy Kevlar helmets, and carrying blast-resistant shields and MP5 submachine guns fixed with red-dot sights. Some wore infrared googles, while others had small cameras perched on their shoulders. The mosque had a CCTV camera above the wooden door and just inside of it a steel inner door, which Mohammed had said he’d explained away to the authorities as being a necessary deterrent to gangs of extremist right wingers.
Ibrahim knew that the team on the street below would have breaching charges and that all of the exit routes on the ground would be covered. He turned and looked at Mohammed.
“The roof hatch,” Mohammed said.
Feeling desperate but refusing to give up hope, Ibrahim nodded just as a dull explosion meant the inner door had been breached. As they ran up the narrow staircase to the loft he heard heavy footsteps as the French charged up the first flight of wooden stairs.
Less than a minute later, after Ibrahim had scrambled through the roof hatch, Mohammed took his handkerchief from his pocket, unwrapped it and put the pea-shaped pellet into his mouth. He could have tried to escape, too, but his sacrifice would give Ibrahim valuable time, however brief. He counted two swings from what he guessed was a two-handed steel ram before the door’s locks and bolts were smashed through. He’d closed the roof hatch already and had switched off the light.
