by Mike Bond
“It was a setup. Once the cops realized they had a marital murder-suicide on their hands they grabbed this poor Arab and killed him. And dragged the other poor Arab into it.”
“It says here” – I held open the paper – “that the police shot him in their house, covered in their blood. This other guy’s fingerprints were all over the family computer ...”
“All lies.”
I scratched my head. “Terrorists are the victims?”
She made a frustrated motion with her hands. “It’s the clash of an ancient religious culture with a capitalist European white male-driven hegemony.”
“Islam isn’t ancient. It began in 670 AD, many centuries after Judaism or Christianity ... I’ve spent years in Islamic countries, from Morocco to Afghanistan, and met many wonderful people. It’s a fascinating, mystical culture, but ...”
“But?” She looked at me as one might an insect.
“Islam represses women. Total domination, burkhas, genital mutilation, child marriage, legalized rape, veils, hijabs, niqabs, abayas, beatings, imprisonment ... a woman can’t do anything without a male’s presence or approval ... Even in the United States a half million Muslim girls have been genitally mutilated ...”
She shrugged: your country is evil anyway.
“Instead of worrying about white male hegemony or whatever you call it, why not try to help the almost one billion severely repressed women in Muslim countries? They’re much worse off than women in the West.” I was pissed for a moment, then saw her face, hard, severe. Her voice like ground glass, edged with sorrow. I wondered what her life had been, maybe an abusive father, absent mother, unhappy siblings? How she’d grown up, the tragedies along the way ...
We should limit our opinions, I’ve concluded, to those situations where we have personal, direct experience. Thus no one who has not lived in a Muslim country can possibly know their reality – the police state of the mind and speech, the crushing enslavement of women, the absolute fanaticism of the religion, the total lack of democracy.
With this in mind I said, “In my own life, I’ve learned the hard way that what matters is to do as much good as we can, and cause as little pain.”
“No,” she snapped. “What counts in life is to destroy injustice.”
“In whose eyes?” I answered.
“Would you two please shut up?” huffed an old man from the seat behind us.
—
SHE SEEMED NOT TO CARE that hundreds had died in recent Muslim attacks in France. A hundred and thirty singing and dancing young people in Paris, nearly another hundred in Nice, hundreds more handicapped for life, journalists assassinated, a priest decapitated, police officers murdered, young women with their throats cut for wearing dresses.
French politicians after years of “multiculturism” and “inclusion” could no longer deal with this growing catastrophe, so pretended it no longer existed. Large areas of France that tourists have never heard of and never go were now dominated by Sharia. And French media were still telling everyone that these multiple massacres “had nothing to do with Islam.”
The growing frequency of Muslim attacks on Jews, some of which had been fatal, as well as the growing leftist antisemitism had led France’s top rabbi to say recently, “Our children are leaving, because France, once a land of safety, has become a land of exile for the Jews.”
And at the Bataclan, where nearly a hundred people were slaughtered by Islamic gunmen, the French government allowed a Muslim rapper to sing the glories of jihad and call for “the crucifixion of non-Muslims,” while ISIS ordered all faithful Muslims in France to “kill the dirty French by stoning, knives, cars, or strangling.”
A former president, Nicolas Sarkozy, had been charged with taking $60 million dollars from Muslim sources to finance his last election campaign. What had he promised them in return?
And Sarkozy was a conservative – how much more money were the Socialists and ultra-left politicians – most who were pro-Muslim – getting from Islamic sources? And what did they do for it? And how to find out?
Thinking of such complicated things hurts my head, so I drifted off, half-dreaming of the last time I’d seen Thierry St. Croix.
Good people make me happy. And Thierry is a good man in love with his wife and family and country. He’s France at its best – large-hearted, outgoing, big-handed, close to the earth and wine and food and nature, fighting his country’s enemies to the death.
Last time I’d seen him was at our FOB up in the mountains. It was winter, so mail was rare. One day he got a package with a can of wild boar pâté from his parents in Cluny. I traded five pairs of new socks for a bottle of fabulous Standart Russian vodka and we drank it with the pâté and Afghani naan flatbread and tried to invent limericks in Franglais.
Now I couldn’t wait to see him, to thank him again for the boar pâté. And see if he had any new limericks.
And I was going to find Mustafa al-Boudienne, the mass murderer now planning more slaughter in France. It had been a long time since he’d imprisoned Mack and me for weeks in Mosul and done every horror to us that he could. That had been my first tour in Iraq, after one in Afghanistan, with more in Afghanistan to come that would bring its own horrors.
This time when I found Mustafa, he wouldn’t survive.
—
“READY TO DIE?” Mustafa jabbed his AK muzzle into my eye and sneered down the barrel. I tried not to flinch so he wouldn’t do it again.
He was tall and thin, with a black keffiyeh around a dirty neck, a thick short beard and sharp mustache, frizzy hair and black empty eyes. He spoke French because he grew up in France and didn’t speak Arabic, though we were in Mosul in Iraq, where most folks spoke the Maslawi dialect.
I couldn’t stop trembling. Tried to stop because I didn’t want to show fear. That would only make him worse. I was going to die, and wanted it to be easy. My gut twisted and burned. Sweat and spit filled my throat, making it hard to suck air into my empty lungs.
“Filthy American!” he smiled. “Shall I let you suffer a bit, no?”
This I feared. When they shoot you in the gut and leave you out in the heat for sepsis to set in. Forty-eight hours of agony, begging for death.
I wanted to say ‘May Allah guide you’ or something foolish like that. But whatever I said would just make my death worse.
Sorrow beyond belief. Yet millions of people had been shot just like this.
Get over it.
He snickered, scanned the sky. He stepped to my right side, angled the AK down at my ribs, so the bullet would cross my gut and smash my left pelvis and thigh. The perfect slow death. I stiffened, exhaled, faced the bloody earth and waited for the bullet to hit.
False Hope
AT 11:05 NEXT MORNING the Airbus landed at CDG and I grabbed a cab to the 7th Arrondissement and the one-bedroom safe house that DGSE had set aside for me.
It was on Passage Landrieu, a narrow, cobbled alley of ancient three- and four-story buildings, a vestige of real Paris but close enough to the tourist Disneyland of Rue Cler and the Eiffel Tower that the presence of another American wouldn’t be noticed.
A fourth-story walkup, a main room with a kitchen to one side, a bedroom and bath, a scintillating view over a tree-lined courtyard and slate and gray metal roofs to the Tower, the smells of good food rising on the spring breeze from the kitchens below – what more do you need in May in Paris?
I put my few clothes away, took a quick cold shower to wash off the salt of Tahiti’s blue Pacific and all the air miles in between, poured a tall glass of Côtes de Provence rosé from the bottle DGSE had kindly left in the reefer, sat down and called Mack’s landline.
A woman answered, hoarse and urgent. “Gisèle?” I said, “that you?”
“Pono? You’re too late!”
“Too late? I just got here.”
“They took him.”
“Mack? Who took him?”
“He’s gone ...” She swallowed a sob. “They found his car. Empty. With blood on the seat.”
“Who? Who found his car?”
“Mack left home at seven this morning, like always. He usually takes the Métro to the Port des Lilas Station near his office and walks from there. But today he had to go to Normandy later, so he drove to the office.” She swallowed. “He never got there. They found his car an hour ago, on a side street off La République. Blood on the seat, the driver window.” She took a breath, calmed herself. “How did they know? Was it because he called you?”
I snatched my coat and phone and stepped in front of an old lady to grab a cab to Mack and Gisèle’s home on Boulevard de Beauséjour in the 16th.
I’d been looking forward to seeing Mack, and hunting down Mustafa together. Now he was missing, blood all over his car. And Gisèle trying not to choke up on the phone. As if the more calm and objective she could be, the more she could help Mack. When we both knew it might already be too late.
—
IT WAS A WIDE street of chestnut and plane trees in early leaf, stone four-story town homes with flowers in front and lots of Audis and Mercedes dozing at the curb.
Number 49 was a sculpted stone building behind a steel spike fence, a front garden with three cypresses and a Lebanese cedar on each side of the stone front stairs.
“Hi!” She turned aside when she opened the door so I wouldn’t see her red eyes.
“Hey.” I tried to hug her and stepped on her toe. “Damn!”
“It’s okay.” She hugged me back, her cheek wet. “Thanks for coming.”
Her blonde, tangled hair had tumbled down her brow and she kept pushing it aside. Her cheeks were bone pale, her eyes shiny. It wrenched my heart – even in the deadly no-one’s land of Waziristan between Afghanistan and Pakistan she’d always seemed fresh, energetic, and organized, despite the horror and tragedy she faced every day. But the horror and tragedy had never struck someone she loved with the focused and undivided passion they had for each other.
“We’ll find him,” I said stupidly, my arm round her shoulder walking into the living room that seemed too bright and pretty for this moment.
It was a big place, a double séjour, dining room, large kitchen, four bedrooms upstairs and assorted baths, well-furnished, lots of bookshelves, good paintings and a couple of nice tapestries on the walls.
“At first I hoped there might be some reason,” she said. “That he’d hurt his head somehow, went to a hospital ... Hôpital Saint-Louis, it’s only five minutes from there ... But he’s not anywhere. No one’s seen him.”
“The car – no witnesses?”
“No one. As if it didn’t happen. Suddenly his car is there, illegally parked in a delivery zone. It was the shopkeeper who called, wanted it towed.”
“The blood on the seat,” I said. “There’s no proof it’s his ...”
“Don’t say that! You know it is. I know it is. Don’t dredge up false hope.”
I sat heavily in an antique chair. It squeaked. She sat across from me, open-faced, wrists on knees, hands dangling, her lovely face contorted with pain.
“Tell me the whole deal,” I said. “Mack’s last morning, his last week – phone calls, people on the street, things he might have said late at night while half asleep.”
“I’ve already gone over all this,” she exhaled. “With the Agency and the French.”
“Do it again. This time don’t leave anything out.”
As she spoke I was stunned by her self-control. She was not going to cede to emotion because pure focus was essential to any hope of saving Mack. She sat there, knees locked, wet tissues in her clenched hands, speaking softly and clearly. “Mack watches everything. All the time. And if he sees or feels anything, he aborts. If we’re together he tells me what he’s seeing and I check it out too.”
This was old news. One of the many troubles with covert life is it destroys your freedom. You never know if a person on the sidewalk behind you has a gun, if there’s a bomb under your car or waiting for you on the street, if there’s poison in something you breathe or eat, or if you’re in the crosshairs of a sniper’s rifle a quarter mile away. Never when you sleep can you be sure you’ll be alive in the morning.
“If it’s a tail I tail it,” she went on as if she had to convince me. “A car, person, doesn’t matter. And anything digital gets double-screened at the office ... but lately there’s been nothing. No way these bastards could’ve even known Mack was on their trail.”
“Why was he going to Normandy?”
“He didn’t say ... I wasn’t even supposed to know he was going ...”
“Someone didn’t want him to go there?”
“Ask Thierry.” She watched me. “But he’ll want to know how you know.”
“What about the COS?” This was the CIA’s Paris Chief of Station.
“Harris? Maybe he doesn’t know.”
I sat back, eyes on the floor, tried to imagine how it might have happened. “No bullet hole in the driver side window?”
“No bullet hole anywhere. No brass, no powder.”
“The window was up?”
“It’s spring in Paris. Of course the window was up.”
“So he got whacked.”
“Whacked?”
“Sorry – I meant someone hit him on the head. So he’s probably not dead.”
“Probably not?”
“Probably a grab.”
“That’s what Harris thinks.” She looked down, nodded. “Me too.”
“Harris?”
“COS, like I said. Mack didn’t tell you?”
“Never said his name.”
So somebody named Harris was COS, but that probably wasn’t the Harris I knew. In the midst of this awful dialogue I glanced out the ancient window at the afternoon sunlight cascading down the broad new leaves of a chestnut tree in the garden. It shimmered with life and meaning – a vision of something forever beyond us – innocent and true, the miracle of sunlight on the green magic of leaves, in this world of mysterious beauty we do not love or understand.
Gisèle’s lips were moving but I hadn’t heard. “Say again?”
“What are you, deaf?”
“Actually” – I banged a hand against my ear – “too much incoming.”
“What are you going to do, Pono?” She stood over me, gripped my wrists in her strong fists, burrowed into me with those blood-red eyes. “If it’s a grab, how are you going to save him?”
How could I save him? What had I learned from the magical sunlight on the leaves? “What’s Harris’s number?”
She told me and I memorized it. “When you talk to Thierry,” she begged, “please let me know the latest? I’ve been calling him every ten minutes ... can you, maybe you, you could find out if they know anything?”
“This COS, what’s he say?”
“The French are in charge.”
“It’s their turf.” I shrugged. “But ...”
“He says it’s their operation, their terrorists, their danger.” She glanced around the room, seeming to see nothing. “I always knew this was coming. Even when we met, and then you guys went back to Afghanistan and I never expected you’d survive, either of you.”
“But we did.” I wanted to add that Mack too would keep surviving.
It never occurred to me, nor would I have cared, that I might not survive either.
Too Late
OUTSIDE HER HOUSE I called Thierry, left a message.
They’d be torturing Mack now. Trying to learn what he knew. It was a waste of time, but no doubt they were doing it mostly for fun.
How had they known where he was? Had they tracked him? When?
Like Gisèle said, was it because he’d called me? Was it me they were trackin
g?
That was nuts. I’d been far away in Tahiti with three wonderful women. Why would these homicidal nutcases be after me?
Thierry called right back. “How is she?”
“In control.”
“Where are you?”
“Front of their place.”
“We’re hitting every angle. Nobody knows a thing.”
“The blood in the car?”
“O Positive. Same as Mack’s. We’ll know for sure when the DNA comes back.”
“Where’s Mustafa?”
“Vanished since Fontainebleau.”
“There’s a connection?”
“Between this and Mustafa? Get over here.”
I grabbed another cab and for cover gave the driver the address of a bar on Avenue Gambetta in the 20th Arrondissement, the Bistrot du Poinçonneur, which just happens to be around the block from 141 Boulevard Mortier, home of DGSE.
We travelled a cross-section of Paris in twenty minutes from the high-class park-side apartments of the 16th through fancy shopping districts and offices across the Champs Élysées and then the grittier neighborhoods of what used to be working-class Paris till you end up in the city’s illegal immigration capital, the 20th Arrondissement. I tried to call Gisèle to tell her what Thierry’d said, but her land line was busy. I wished I’d asked for her cell.
—
MOST OF MY TROUBLES have been brought on by myself. Joining SF was the best thing I’ve ever done, but it led to tons of trouble. Like when I shot the dying Afghani girl who’d been burned alive, to put her out of her misery, and got sent to Leavenworth Army prison. Or got caught with a kilo of weed in Honolulu destined for injured Special Forces buddies who needed it to ease the pain, and got ten to fifteen in Halawa Prison, a circle of Hell even Dante couldn’t have imagined.
Or when I bumped into a beautiful drowned woman off Waikiki and ended up hunted by her killers. Or when I went to Maine to save an SF buddy from a false murder charge and soon faced one myself.
I wouldn’t change any of this, but it sure had made for a crazy life. But that’s how life is. You do what you think is best and pay the consequences.
