The Paris Betrayal

by James R. Hannibal

  Ben made a calm down motion to Clara. “We’re good, okay? Nobody’s getting shot. Like I said”—he shifted his gaze to Sensen, who still had half his body in the closet—“I’m here to talk.”

  “And this is why you brought backup?”

  “For what it’s worth, I told her to stay in the car.”

  “She didn’t listen.”

  “She never does. But if we want to split hairs, she gave me the advantage. I could have finished you off just now. I chose not to.”

  “All right.” Sensen stepped away from the closet and showed Ben two empty hands. “You spared my life, as I spared yours. For now, we are even.” He walked into the kitchen and picked an apple from a wicker basket, taking a bite before continuing. “But I don’t buy into your plea of innocence. The Director does not cut a man off without cause.”

  The Director. Cut off. Those words spoken together drove a spike of ice into Ben’s heart. He shook his head. “Our comm network is compromised. Has to be. It’s why my phone went crazy just before you shot at me in the alley. It’s how Massir and Hagen set us up in Rome. This is all a misdirect by an entity called Leviathan, framing me to break us up from the inside.”

  The name sent a flicker of recognition across Sensen’s features. Clearly he’d heard the rumors about Leviathan too.

  The moment passed, and his expression hardened. “Are you so important, Ben? We are all type T personalities with an extra measure of pride, but do you really believe an attempt to bring down the world’s most important covert agency begins with you?” He shrugged, holding the apple in a limp hand. “Why not me? Why not Giselle? She’s twice as smart as the rest of us.”

  Another spike of ice. The same numbing emptiness as before. Ben didn’t answer. He couldn’t bring her name to his lips, and Sensen didn’t know they’d been seeing each other.

  Ben and Clara joined Sensen in the kitchen, and Ben kept a watchful eye on their host. They’d left the guns behind in the living area, but he imagined Sensen had hidden one or more firearms in every room. Ben would respect him less if he hadn’t.

  Sensen lit a fire in a wood-burning stove, and the three sat at a long table of gnarled and polished wood.

  Ben knocked on the tabletop. “Belgian honey oak? Like the door and the entry table?”

  “All part of a set I bought at auction. Some know-nothing Hollywood actor remodeled his newly purchased castle and discarded its best features.” For the first time, he looked Ben up and down. “You look terrible.”

  “Thanks. I’m trying out a muddy furrow survival grunge thing.”

  The German cracked a smile and leaned across the tiny space to retrieve a tan bottle from the refrigerator. He offered one to Ben, who waved it off, accepting a clear bottle of Gerolsteiner sparkling water instead. Sensen offered one of each to Clara. “Calix failed to properly introduce us. Call me Sensen. Ben and I used to work together.”

  “Clara.” She chose the sparkling water and used it to point at the dachshund, curled up on the floor beside her. “And this is Otto.”

  Ben didn’t like the way Sensen said used to, as if they would never work together again. He finally brought himself to say the words he’d been struggling with since the moment before Clara’s entrance. “Giselle’s dead.”

  The smile dropped from Sensen’s lips. “I’m sorry. I know you two were close. I could see it in the way she looked at you. And you contend this is part of what’s happening to you?”

  Contend? Ben didn’t argue the semantics. He nodded.

  The German did the same and took in a long breath. He steepled his fingers, a surgeon bringing bad news. “You must realize how this looks to all of us. The mission in Rome went awry. The intel you attained is bad. The enemy agent you blame is dead—burned by your own hand. And the only Company witness who could either exonerate or condemn you is also dead.”

  Ben pounded the table. “Are you saying I murdered Giselle?”

  “I was there,” Clara said at the same time, fire in her voice. “Ben’s innocent.”

  Sensen raised his hands. “I’m only bringing the perception to your attention. You were cut off and your Company protections removed. Perhaps your closeness with Giselle exposed her too. Either way, you must try to picture this through the Company’s eyes. To them, your sins are apparent. And to me, these calamities can be explained by only one thing—a severance.”

  A severance. Ben hadn’t heard that term in years.

  Clara cocked her head. “Ben? What’s a severance?”

  He didn’t like the change in the way she looked at him. “When a spy goes bad, or demonstrates gross incompetence, the Company cuts him off—with extreme prejudice. All protection for covers is removed. All support is gone.” He lowered his forehead into his palm. “Enemies can move in and take you at will.”

  “We call it a severance,” Sensen said.

  Ben rolled his head to look at Clara. “But it’s a myth, a campfire ghost story told at the schoolhouse to scare the new recruits.”

  The German shook his head. “It is a reality. Your reality. A false mission. A dead team member. Incompetent. Failure. Traitor? How can the Company see you in any other light?”

  Ben shook his head, closing his eyes. “They’re wrong. I’m clean.”

  “None of us are clean, my friend. Not one of us is pure.”

  Clara finished a swallow of her water and stared at him hard. “How so?”

  “Consider the graveyard at the edge of my property. Consider the unnamed buried there, rotted, long ago abandoned by even the worms and maggots.”

  Her bravado seemed to falter at the mention of the graves. Her glass bottle clinked on the table as she set it down. “Wh-what about them?”

  “I’m sure each, in life, proclaimed his own purity, as Calix proclaims his now. And upon their deaths, each prayed to God for paradise in the hereafter. Yet each knew in their deepest hearts that they deserved eternal fire.” He shifted his gaze to Ben. “This is the nature of man.”

  “A philosophical opinion,” Ben said, waving it away with his Gerolsteiner.

  “A fact. Especially in our business. Stop living in denial, Calix. Turn to introspection, and perhaps you’ll find your answers.”

  Introspection. Could this executioner-philosopher be right? Ben had made mistakes in the past. He’d committed acts the rest of the world might see as atrocities. He’d fallen for Massir’s gambit. In Rome, he had desecrated a temple, stolen from the homeless, and burned a corpse. In Paris, he’d fought the police. He’d killed a man.

  He felt the sniper’s eyes weighing on him and raised his own. “You’re wrong. This isn’t on me. And this isn’t on the Company—not entirely. At the source, this is Leviathan.”

  “Mm.” Sensen left the table to stoke his fire, muttering to himself. “Leviathan. A sea monster.”

  “What do you know of them? Have you heard of an individual called Jupiter?”

  “No. But . . . it’s odd. A coincidence.”

  Clara watched them both. “Ben tells me you spies don’t believe in coincidences.”

  “Genau.” Sensen stirred his embers with a set of iron tongs. “Just so. And that is the only reason I bring this up. I saw it on my last mission, a month before Paris—a hasty kill in Rotterdam.”

  “The failed bombing,” Ben said.

  “Correct.” Sensen added a log, positioned it with his tongs, and closed the door. He looked at Clara, as if wary about speaking in front of her, but then wobbled his head, seeming to let it go, and turned to Ben. “Radio traffic from the Rotterdam customs authority alerted the Company to the bomber’s presence. A bomb-sniffing dog at the docks had flagged a backpack, but the target escaped.”

  “A red flag priority,” Ben said, filling in the details from what he knew of Company operations. “Protocol requires the watch commander at headquarters to reroute the nearest asset.”

  “Yes. In this case—me, only one city away, prepping for another job. Cyber ops used cameras across the ci
ty to locate the threat and predict his path. I intercepted and neutralized his weapon.”

  “I saw the news reports,” Clara said, looking from one to the other. “They said the bomber accidentally set off his explosives before reaching his target. Only a dozen warehouse workers were injured, but if he’d reached a public square, hundreds might have died.”

  The German chuckled. “The bomb went off early, yes. But the bomber made no error beyond choosing a predictable path.”

  Ben followed Sensen with his eyes as the German returned to his chair. “You shot the bomb.”

  “Cyber ops forecast his route and sent me a location surrounded by warehouses, minimizing the blast effect and loss of life. But a fraction of a second before I took the shot, he turned, and I saw a design on the backpack’s top pocket.”

  “A design,” Clara said. “You mean a logo?”

  “No . . . Ein Gekritzel . . . What do the Americans call it?” Sensen snapped his fingers and pointed at her. “A doodle, in silver pen—small but definite. Our would-be bomber fancied himself an artist. He’d drawn a sea monster.”

  “A leviathan,” Ben said.

  Sensen pursed his lips. “Probably nothing, hmm? A thread as thin as spider’s silk.”

  “Not a thread. A lifeline. Rotterdam is where Leviathan made their first big mistake—where the whole case breaks.” Ben rummaged in his inside coat pocket. “I can fix this. I can find out their plans and prove my innocence.”

  “My friend—”

  “No. Listen. A sea monster must have been on the bomber’s mind. There must be a connection. Did you see any part of the device itself?”

  “I saw nothing. After the shot, I had to leave. You know the drill. Get far fast. Then get farther faster.”

  “Please.” Ben slapped the fragment he’d found at Giselle’s house down on the table. “Look at this. Tell me you recognize it.”

  Frowning, like a parent humoring a child, Sensen crossed the kitchen and picked up the fragment. A smile formed on his lips. Not an encouraging smile. An I told you so smirk. “Yes. I’ve seen something like this before, but not in Rotterdam.”

  Sensen left the kitchen, and Ben heard him open the same closet where he’d stashed the sniper rifle. He tensed, but Sensen returned unarmed, carrying a small black case, and popped it open on the table between his guests. He lifted a cloth, revealing two blocks of C4, a remote, and a receiver/detonator.

  Sensen held Ben’s fragment close to the detonator’s lower left corner—a perfect match, right down to the seam in the plastic. “Do you recognize it now? This is a Company demolition package.”

  Ben stood, knocking over his chair. “No. This can’t be right.”

  “But it is. And these packages are highly controlled. This one is left over from my Amsterdam mission. I’ve been ordered to hold on to it until my next assignment.”

  A hole developed in Ben’s gut. He nodded. “I had one just like it sent to us for the Morocco gig. For contingencies. Never used it.”

  “So you still have the package?”

  “No.”

  “Then where did it go?”

  “I’m not sure.” But he could guess. The evidence told Ben the explosive package he’d signed out for his last mission had been used to blow up the cottage and murder Giselle. But he hadn’t seen it in days. “In Rome, on the morning of our last day while we were setting up at the piazza, I gave it to our mission tech to carry back to DC, along with the case we stole.” He locked eyes with Sensen. “I gave it to Dylan Morgan.”

  26

  “Dylan can’t be involved.” The protest sounded hollow the moment it fell from Ben’s lips. The fragment matched the detonator in Sensen’s case in every detail. Ben let the fragment slip from his fingers. “Unless he turned traitor and joined Leviathan.”

  Sensen gently removed the fragment from the case and set it in front of Ben. “Open your eyes. There is no great conspiracy of traitors. Leviathan has not infiltrated our ranks. The most likely answer is that you are in denial. Your own guilt is too great for you to comprehend.”

  Absurdity. Ben kept his focus on Sensen. “I need a meeting with the Director.”

  “And I would like a pig who whistles.”

  Ben only stared at him.

  “Oh, you were serious?” Sensen laughed. “My friend, you are radioactive—persona non grata. And even if you weren’t, foot soldiers like us do not demand meetings with the Director.”

  “Please. Try to set it up. You have access to lines of communication no longer open to me.”

  “And be dragged deeper into the mess you’ve made for yourself? No thank you. I will offer you my guest rooms for the night.” He regarded Ben’s mud-caked shirt and jacket. “And perhaps some clothes. That is all. Rest. Clean yourself up. But when I wake tomorrow, it will be best if you are gone.”

  The evening may have started with a shootout, but Ben could not complain about Sensen’s hospitality. He emerged from the shower to find a button-down shirt and a pair of khaki slacks laid out on the bed. Sensen had him by more than an inch in height, but the two were close enough in size that Ben could get away with wearing his clothes. Clara—not so much. When he checked on her in the room next door, he found her wearing a sweater long enough to be a dress. She sat on the bed between two dinner trays with venison steaks and greens. A third tray, now empty, sat on the floor beside a bowl of water and a contented dachshund.

  “Look.” Clara tore a page from her sketchbook. “I asked our host to describe the sea monster from the bomber’s backpack. He remembered it well.”

  Ben studied the sea monster drawing. Its three coils wrapped around a globe, and a forked tongue lashed out from between its fangs. Leviathan. Maybe. A poor clue, but his only clue that didn’t point straight back to his own agency. He gave her a fleeting smile. “Thanks.”

  “So where will we go now?” she asked, cutting into her steak. “Rotterdam?”

  “I will go to Rotterdam. I had some time to think in the shower, let the steam clear my head. You’re staying here, where you’ll be safe.”

  Her knife clattered to the plate. “Safe? With the sniper?”

  “Sensen has no quarrel with you. I’ll work it out—play on his sense of honor and pay him for the favor.”

  Her lips parted in protest.

  Ben held up a hand to stop her. “No arguments. I’m doing this for my sake as much as yours. I need to stay light and move fast from now on.” He took his tray and left.

  Sleep came only with the use of a sedative, another boon from Sensen. Ben could safely say he’d paid for it. Several thousand euros covered the pill, the damage to the house from the gun battle, and playing innkeeper to Clara for a week. Ben figured if he hadn’t come back for her by then, he’d be dead, and she’d be on her own.

  The following morning, he and Clara said their goodbyes at the door to her room.

  “Are you sure it’s safe for me to stay here?” she asked.

  Ben nodded. “Sensen is a good man, or tries to be. But just in case . . .” He gave her the revolver. “Keep it close.”

  Clara tucked the gun into her waistband and pulled her borrowed sweater down over it. “Come back to me.”

  “I will.”

  “You said that before, remember? What if you don’t?”

  “If I’m not back in a week, ask Sensen to get you a clean passport and a one-way ticket out of Europe, wherever you and Otto want to go.” He showed her a roll of bills. “This will cover it, with enough left over to get you started wherever you land.”

  She glanced down at the money. “A gun. Getaway cash. You’re not inspiring confidence with these gifts.”

  “I have no confidence left.”

  “I do. This will all come right in the end. You’ll see.”

  Ben saw no trace of exaggeration, no false bravado in those ice-blue eyes. “How can you know?”

  She shrugged one shoulder. “I just do. Call it faith.”

  Faith. That word again. But where
had faith taken Ben? On the run. Banished from the Company by the Director. Girlfriend murdered. How much longer could he hold on to faith? How much more could he take?

  “I have to take the Peugeot.”

  Clara gave him a smile. “As if I wanted that piece of junk anyway.”

  Otto appeared at her ankles, and Ben kneeled to scratch his ears. “You take care of her, you hear me?”

  The dachshund’s watery gaze spoke of understanding and affirmation. Don’t you worry. I’ve got this.

  When Ben straightened, Clara wrapped him in a hug and held it for a long time. She let her cheek brush against his. He felt a kiss. In a barely audible whisper, she repeated her former command. “Come back to me.”

  Downstairs, Sensen sat wide awake and dressed for the day in a large stuffed chair near the door. “I thought I told you to be gone before I woke.”

  “Maybe you should learn to sleep in.”

  “This business makes light sleepers of us all. Besides, I wanted one more chance to lay eyes on the strange and tragic creature who came to visit my chalet.”

  Ben didn’t quite catch his meaning. “Tragic, yes. But strange?”

  “A man trapped in his delusions, ready to face destruction rather than face the truth of his own failures.”

  Germans. In Ben’s experience, they never minced words. Sensen remained true to his heritage.

  “I also wanted to give you this.” Sensen handed him a slip of paper. “The address of the pier where the dog flagged the bomber.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Don’t mention it. And I mean that. Don’t mention this to anyone. I’ve already done you—the severed Company man—too many favors.”

  Sensen saw him to the door, and Ben paused at the threshold. “While you’re feeling generous, I’d like one more favor.”

  “I told you. I can’t get you a meeting with the Director.”

  “Not the Director. Colonel Hale. Ask him to meet with me—a few minutes, that’s all.”

  Sensen looked as if he might argue, but sighed. “All right. But you know how these things work. He’ll choose the time and place, not you. How do I reach you with the rendezvous point?”