House of War

by Scott Mariani

  Four down.

  One gone.

  Nazim was suddenly nowhere to be seen. He’d escaped back inside the building. Taking the female hostage with him.

  In the next moment, they heard more gunfire coming from the reservoirs at the far side of the plant. Tuesday and Roth had encountered the rest of the terrorists. Ben’s instant response was to go to their aid. But Jeff shook his head, shoved Ben’s arm and pointed inside the doorway, yelling, ‘Go! Get him!’

  Ben hesitated. Torn between going after Nazim and helping his friends. Jeff yelled again, ‘Go! Move it! Don’t let him get away. We can deal with the rest.’

  Then, slamming in a fresh magazine, Jeff was off at a sprint in the direction of the battle.

  Ben hesitated just a moment longer. Thought, Fuck it. Pushed past the bewildered fat guy in the suit still standing there, and ran into the building after Nazim.

  Chapter 64

  The smoke became thicker and more choking the deeper Ben ran into the building. For a minute it seemed as though Nazim had just vanished into thin air. Or had he made it to another exit and rejoined his men?

  Then Ben saw the blood spots on the floor. Small star-shaped splashes, spaced a few paces apart. Nazim had taken a hit. Or else his hostage had.

  Ben followed the trail, pausing every few instants to listen hard, but he could hear nothing except the tireless jangling of the fire alarm. He rounded another corner and found himself looking down a long passage filled with smoke. And he stopped, looking down. Because the blood trail had suddenly stopped, too. Like a path leading nowhere.

  Or one that had doubled back on itself to deceive him.

  His sixth sense suddenly tingling like an electrical field. Sensing a presence close by. Then his ears picked up a sound behind him. The scrape of a footstep. He turned quickly.

  Nazim al-Kassar was standing there with his young girl hostage. Her hair was all awry, her eyes wide and rolling from side to side like a spooked horse’s. Nazim held her pinned against his body, his left hand clamped tightly over her mouth, the right pointing an AK from over her shoulder. His finger was on the trigger and his face was livid with hate.

  Ben was already ducking back into the smoke. Nazim lost his aim at the last moment, but the trigger was already breaking under his finger. The rifle shot was sharp and loud in the confines of the corridor. Ben raised his pistol to fire back, hunting for an aiming point. His target was small. He didn’t dare go for a headshot, for fear of hitting the hostage. So he aimed a little wide, going for the shoulder.

  And missed. But it was a lucky miss. Instead of the shoulder, his bullet caught Nazim in the wrist. Nazim let out a cry and the AK clattered from his hand. Ben moved in closer, looking for another shot. Then stopped short when he saw the knife in Nazim’s good hand, held to the girl’s throat. She wailed, ‘Mister, don’t let him kill me!’

  ‘Drop the pistol or she dies!’ Nazim said tersely.

  ‘Then you die too, Nazim.’

  ‘You think I’m afraid of dying? Your choice, shaitan.’

  Ben lowered his pistol and let it slip from his hand. He could still hear shooting from outside. He was desperately worried for his friends out there, but he had to close his mind to it and stay focused.

  ‘Let her go, Nazim. Let it be just you and me.’

  ‘Me and you? And who are you?’

  ‘Just a man,’ Ben said.

  Nazim spat. ‘I don’t think so.’

  Now Ben could see the blood dripping from Nazim’s right thigh, the leg of his combat trousers soaked black with it. He must have caught a stray round during the exchange in the doorway. It explained why he’d chosen not to run, but to stay and fight.

  ‘Think what you want,’ Ben said. ‘Just let her go.’

  Nazim smiled. ‘I think she must die.’

  ‘There’s been enough blood for one day.’

  ‘That’s where you’re wrong, shaitan. There is never enough blood.’

  As though in slow motion Ben watched the muscles in Nazim’s hand holding the knife start to tighten. The fingers clenching, knuckles whitening. The sinews in the forearm squeezing as the blade’s pressure on her throat increased and the cutting edge began to draw horizontally across her soft flesh. She screamed. She was already as good as dead. So Ben no longer had anything to lose by taking a crazy chance. In one smooth, superfast motion he swung out his other weapon. The MP9 that was slung behind his back where Nazim couldn’t see it. Not until this moment. Not until the submachine gun was in Ben’s hands and spitting flame from its short muzzle. Ben actually saw the girl’s blond hair flutter, like meadow grass in the wind, as his bullets passed within two inches of the side of her head and punched into Nazim’s chest. The knife dropped. Nazim staggered back two steps and let her go, and stumbled away up the passage. He crashed through a door and disappeared from sight.

  Ben hurried over to the fallen girl. Another second, and Nazim would have slashed her from ear to ear. The cut was bleeding but not deep. She’d probably live to a very old age, with a little white scar on her throat to remember this moment by.

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Roxane,’ she whimpered, hardly able to speak for emotion.

  ‘Roxane, I’ll be right back. You sit tight, okay?’

  She gave a tremulous nod, gazing into his eyes. ‘Okay.’

  Ben left her and chased after Nazim. There was a bloody smear on the door that the injured terrorist had crashed through, below a sign for TOILETTES. Ben batted the door open and stepped inside the staff bathroom, smelling the scent of ammonia mingling with the harsh tang of smoke. The fire alarm had stopped jangling and the lights had begun to flicker as the fire spread through the building and slowly melted down its electricals.

  Ben stood rock-still in the bathroom and looked around him. The walls were tiled white. A line of sinks and mirrors covered one side, a row of cubicle stalls the other. One of the cubicle doors was open. There was another oily red smear of blood all down the door. And a leg sticking out from inside. A leg clad in combat trousers, with a black high-lace boot on the end of it.

  Ben walked slowly towards the cubicle where Nazim lay curled up and bleeding heavily. Just then the radio fizzed into life. Jeff’s voice crackled, ‘All clear here. Target secured, seven combatants down. Repeat, seven combatants down. No casualties on our side. Talk to me, Ben. Over.’

  With intense relief flooding through him Ben thumbed the talk button and radioed back, ‘Copy that. Be with you in a minute. Out.’

  He stepped closer to Nazim. The man was alive, just about. His breath was coming in gasps and the pool of blood around him was spreading fast and thick, reflecting the flickering lights.

  Nazim raised his head and tried to prop himself up as Ben crouched near him. Ben spoke in Arabic. ‘The great Nazim al-Kassar, dying alone in a toilet. Not exactly the glorious end you’d envisioned for yourself.’

  Nazim coughed blood. Mortally wounded, but not quite dead yet. In a croak he asked again, ‘Who are you?’

  ‘Someone from your past,’ Ben replied. ‘You remembered me, didn’t you?’

  ‘All these years. You still had to come after me. Your kind will always hate my kind.’

  ‘I don’t hate you, Nazim. We’re all locked in a war that nobody can ever really win. That just makes me sad.’

  Nazim’s eyes were beginning to cloud with death, but a flicker of surprise passed through them. ‘Then why did you risk your life to stop me? Have you any idea what we would have done to you, if we had caught you?’

  Ben was surprised, too. ‘You’re asking me this, now?’

  Nazim spluttered up more blood. He managed a nod. ‘I need to understand what drives a man like you.’

  Ben had nothing against indulging a dying man’s final wishes. He replied, ‘I do what I do so that more innocent people don’t have to suffer and die. People like Salim Youssef. People like Romy Juneau and Françoise Schell and the Simonots. People like Samara.’

 
; Nazim blinked, trying to remember even as his life ebbed away. ‘Samara?’ His voice had faded to little more than a whisper.

  Ben’s mind flashed back once again to the woman in his dream. The same dream he’d had so many times. He saw the Iraqi dusty roadside checkpoint from sixteen years ago. The young woman in black, clutching her pregnant stomach as she approached the unsuspecting group of Coalition soldiers. The sudden white flash and deafening percussive blast of the explosion. The grisly aftermath of the suicide bombing. Her poor dead face looking up at him.

  He said, ‘You probably never even knew her name. Neither did I. Samara was just what I called her, to make her seem more real to me, not just another piece of torn-up meat. She was an ordinary person caught up in that hell, like the rest of us. She didn’t have to die like that. Men like you made her die. Her and many others. There’s a Samara in every village, in every town and city, vulnerable to falling prey to you and your kind. That’s why I had to end this. Not for politics, not for religion or ideology, and damn well not for country.’

  Nazim sank back to the floor and gave a gasp. ‘And you had your wish,’ he murmured softly. ‘It is over.’

  ‘Yes, it’s over, Nazim. For you and all your men. You failed. But at least you can die knowing that you gave it all you had. Maybe there’s still a place for you in Paradise, if Allah can forgive you.’

  Nazim smiled. ‘He is most forgiving.’ Then the life washed out of his eyes, his head rolled limply to one side and he was dead.

  Chapter 65

  Ben was on his way back to attend to Roxane when the whole building was suddenly swarming with black-clad GIGN troops. They’d come ready for a full-scale war: battle armour, helmets, respirators, goggles and military weaponry bristling in all directions.

  Finding himself rapidly surrounded, Ben put down his gun and made no attempt to resist arrest. He was tempted to say something clever like ‘What took you so long?’ but kept his mouth shut as, with admirable thoroughness and no small amount of yelling, they put him down on his face and trussed his hands behind his back with a plastic tie. Then he was marched outside with dozens of cocked assault weapons poking at him. The police had closed in hard and fast, stealthily and in large numbers. The water treatment plant compound was awash with personnel and vehicles. Four ambulances were rushing to the scene, though they’d probably need more. A fire crew were busy dousing the flames that had consumed much of the front portion of the main building. Black armed response vans were still arriving, pouring yet more boots on the ground as though it was going to take every armed cop in France to contain a situation that was already over.

  Ben’s escorts led him across the compound towards a waiting unmarked police van with smoked-out windows. In the midst of the melee he spotted Jeff and Tuesday, likewise cuffed and surrounded by hordes of anti-terror troops in black who were herding them into another pair of identical plain vans. As happy as he was to see his friends unscathed, it upset him that he’d brought this trouble on them. He should never have called on their help.

  There was no sign of Tyler Roth anywhere.

  Then Ben lost sight of Jeff and Tuesday as he was bundled into the windowless rear of the van, caged behind steel mesh and accompanied by several officers who no doubt had orders to shoot him dead if he tried to escape. If Nazim al-Kassar had received this much care and attention from the US military, back in the day, things might have turned out differently.

  The van took off at speed. Ben settled down for the ride and said nothing to his captors. He guessed they were taking him back to Paris, and wondered if they were in convoy with the vans carrying Jeff and Tuesday. Whatever lay at the end of the road – terror charges, murder charges, incarceration – he could only wait and see how it played out.

  Two hours and twelve minutes later, Ben felt the van come to a stop. His guards were on their feet and pointing their guns at him as the doors opened and he was marched out into a secure underground parking space where more police were standing by with shotguns and machine carbines. If he’d been travelling in tandem with Jeff and Tuesday, they’d been taken to a different location.

  From the underground parking facility Ben was hustled up several floors in a steel lift with more armed escorts, and then to a bare holding cell with no windows and a door like a vault. They cut the tie away from his wrists, took his shoes and his watch, and then left without another word and locked him up.

  At times like these, you try not to let yourself speculate too much about what’s in store. Ben had been a prisoner before, and he knew how to empty his mind and remain utterly still and quiet for many hours. The cell had a single bunk bolted to the floor, a metal toilet and a sink. He sat on the bunk, closed his eyes and sank into a meditative state.

  He’d been sitting like that for over four hours when they finally came for him. Hearing the door unlock, he opened his eyes and turned. A different pair of guards, this time accompanied by a silent, severe-looking man in a dark suit, gave him back his shoes and walked him from the cell and down a passageway to a door. The guy in the suit knocked, and opened it. The guards motioned Ben inside. He stepped through the door and found himself in a plain, institutional office with beige walls, no carpet, a single window and a large desk with two chairs.

  Sitting at the desk, dressed in a smart blazer and chinos and looking as if he owned the place, was Tyler Roth.

  Chapter 66

  Roth didn’t get up. ‘You have no idea how much I hate this part of my job, man. I’m a field guy, always was. That’s what I keep telling them, but do they listen?’

  Ben would have been amazed if he hadn’t already half-expected this to happen. He replied, ‘That’s funny. I thought you were retired.’

  Roth laughed. ‘Oh, you know, once you’re in the club they never really let you out of their clutches. One thing leads to another.’

  ‘In your case, those things being Delta leading to the CIA.’

  ‘We prefer to call it the company,’ Roth said. ‘Sounds cosier, don’t you think?’

  ‘To me, it just sounds like you’ve been playing me for an idiot this whole time.’

  ‘Oh, you’re no idiot, my friend. Don’t do yourself down. In fact, you’ve probably got most of this figured out already, a smart dude like you.’

  ‘It all goes back to the very beginning,’ Ben said. ‘You knew Segal was being coerced by Nazim’s people. And you had a tap on Romy Juneau’s phone, because you thought she might be involved, too.’

  Roth shrugged. ‘We didn’t really know about that, for sure. But we did know that we weren’t the only ones listening in. Which kind of suggested that she wasn’t working for the bad guys, and they suspected her. One thing about terrorists, they’re almost as cautious and paranoid as we are.’

  ‘So you were waiting to see if she’d get hit,’ Ben said. ‘How charming. Whereupon you’d have moved on the hitters.’

  ‘Or at least known more about who was involved,’ Roth said. ‘Although we already had a pretty good idea. We had a bunch of agents watching her day and night. We were watching when she bumped into you in the street. Your face got twigged instantly. Gave some folks quite a shock, until they decided it really was just a crazy coincidence and that the Brits didn’t have their own spooks on the case. Then, when you turned up at her place and blundered right into the middle of our operation like some damn fool white knight riding in to help the damsel in distress, we were watching that too.’ Roth shook his head. ‘You could have walked face-first into a fucking bullet, you asshole.’

  ‘I’m so glad we’re having this conversation at last,’ Ben said.

  ‘Absolutely. What a fabulous rapport we’re having. Why don’t you take a seat, make yourself comfortable?’

  ‘No thanks. If I get too close I might want to crack this desk in half with your face.’

  ‘Nice way to speak to the guy who just sprung your ass out of jail.’

  ‘Keep talking.’

  Roth eased back in his chair and put his feet u
p on the desk. ‘So now we had an unwanted witness, and definitely not someone we wanted mixed up in our business. The initial response was that we should intervene to remove you.’

  ‘As in, kill me.’

  ‘Sure, but “remove” sounds better.’

  ‘Good luck with that. It’s been tried plenty of times before.’

  ‘Oh, I know you’re a tough motherfucker. But the company has manuals on covert assassination thicker than a phone directory, and ways and means like you wouldn’t believe. Nobody sees them coming. Not even you.’

  ‘Seems I had a lucky escape there. So why the change of plan?’

  ‘Because when you contacted Keegan wanting to talk to me, of all people, some bright spark inside the company figured that maybe there was another angle here, one we could use.’

  ‘Keegan?’

  Roth chuckled. ‘Getting it, aintcha? Yeah, Keegan was part of the setup. Most of the PMC assignments that he handles are really just fronts for covert CIA operations in countries where the US government can’t openly operate. He’s one of us, or as good as.’

  ‘Small world,’ Ben said.

  ‘Getting smaller every day, that’s for sure,’ Roth replied.

  ‘The island. Is that really your house or is it some kind of CIA station?’

  ‘No, the island is the real deal, home sweet home. We wanted you well out of the way, so we figured, why not bring you over to my place? While you were enjoying my hospitality a couple of our Parisian assets were sent in to snatch your pal Thierry and his friend from your apartment and take them into protective custody. Turns out to be a talented fellow, that Thierry. Once he had access to some proper resources to help him decrypt the audio track on the Juneau video recording, he started getting much better results. The audio was very interesting.’