by Mike Bond
There I sat in a half-lit room with my eyes closed, trying to remember exactly what Mustafa al-Boudienne looked like.
“Keep his face in the front of your mind,” the technician named Antoine said. “We will slowly create this same face on the screen, but you must keep the real one in your mind and not let it slip away, not even for a moment.” He leaned back, scratched his chin. It made a loud scraping noise in the silent, darkened room.
“Black frizzy hair,” I said. “Five-eleven, maybe –”
He flashed steadily through hundreds of images. “That’s one-eighty meters.”
“Rectangular face, big jaw, small ears close to his head ... muscular but lean ...”
“We will make this –”
“And his eyes, you can’t imagine – there was no life in them.”
“I can imagine. I will show you.”
“And the beard,” I said, “it was cut short. But thick.”
“Under normal conditions, we like to do a robot-portrait within hours of the crime, while the perpetrator’s face is still fresh in the victim’s mind. Though sometimes it’s better from a distance, a day or two, after the victim’s stress has diminished ...”
For two hours Antoine worked the computer’s drawing pad with my every suggestion and correction, till slowly, awkwardly, the face of Mustafa al-Boudienne stared back at me.
As I remembered him, eight years ago.
But what did he look like now?
When he stood over me with the black muzzle of his AK an inch from my forehead, Mustafa had a short thick beard and mustache that nearly hid a crimped, downturned mouth. It gave his face the look of a hive of hornets, and thick eyebrows from which his black dead eyes glittered with joy and hatred.
He jabbed the muzzle into my chest, dragged it down my ribs. I tried not to look but saw his finger on the trigger. Just relax and take it. Sweat poured down my chest onto the dirt. Just take this. He twisted the muzzle into my side. Giggled.
—
“FORENSICS has gone through Mack and Gisèle’s house at the microscopic level and found nothing,” Thierry added. “Except that they make love a lot.”
“I could’ve told you that,” I muttered.
“No matches with our database on the door handles, the phone, any of that ...”
He looked weary and nervous, angular, unkempt, in a wrinkled shirt with a coffee stain down the left side. He’s been here in the office all night, I realized, and this worried me more. Thinking how we hunger for good news when there isn’t any.
“And the DNA of the blonde-dyed black hair will be back soon,” he continued. “Maybe, just maybe, somewhere in our database there’s a match.”
“Gisèle’s not been heard of since Pono left the house yesterday at one forty-eight,” Anne said. “Her cellphone still doesn’t answer. It doesn’t show up on the France Telecom locator nor ours, and her face hasn’t hit a single surveillance camera in the Paris region – and we have thousands of them.”
Thierry made more coffee while Anne and I summarized the Fontainebleau trip, the guy I’d grabbed. “Good try,” Thierry said, and I gave Anne a quick sneer.
Thierry leaned forward on his desk, clasped his hands. “Yesterday afternoon we sent fourteen officers into the streets around Rue Beaurepaire, right off La République, where we found Mack’s BMW. No one, not one person, noticed the car or anything happening in it.”
“That’s crazy,” I said.
“Impossible!” Anne added.
“It could be Mack was attacked somewhere else and the car was then driven to where it was found.”
“In which case there’ll be somebody’s else’s DNA in it,” she said.
“Hopefully. Or” – he gave his head a questioning tilt – “it happened there, where we found it.”
“Hah!” she scoffed. “A million people would’ve seen.”
“Didn’t you have a transmitter,” I said, “on that car?”
“Mack wouldn’t allow it. Said anybody he was dealing with would be smart enough to pick it up, and that would be the end of the relationship.”
“True,” I said.
“When he left home we assume he drove down Avenue Victor Hugo to the Étoile then Friedland to Haussmann to La République and straight out Belleville toward DGSE.”
This was logical, I realized, a big arc across the middle of the Right Bank, from the chic apartments of the 16th through the showy 8th then the dirty working districts of Paris and train stations to the illegal migrant sectors where DGSE was based.
“But he never got here,” I said.
“And his car was back by La République, on Rue Beaurepaire,” Anne said.
He steepled his fingers, took a long quiet breath. “The total distance by that route, from Mack’s place to here, is 17.6 kilometers.”
“If that’s the way he went –”
“We checked the car’s onboard computer. Mack drove 29.3 km that morning, enough to go from his house in the Sixteenth to DGSE and halfway back. Another four km beyond Rue Beaurepaire –”
I took a breath. The multitude of possibilities was stunning. We were talking about an area covering much of the right bank of Paris. How in all these vast neighborhoods of ancient stone and stucco and tall steel and glass, could we ask everyone who lived there about a black BMW gone astray?
“I’m asking for ten more agents to work this,” Thierry said, “starting at La République.”
“We need more people than that!” Anne snapped. “It’ll take us weeks to cover it.”
In Thierry’s harrowed face I saw a sudden flash of how bureaucratic French intelligence could be – the need for signoffs, no one wanting the lead. “I’ll find out who’s running things on my side,” I said. “Maybe we can double up?”
The CIA’s Paris Station Chief, I reasoned, would have a few French “consultants” to hit the streets with us. Ex-military tough guys, Foreign Legion and Mali vets looking for a little extra fun and cash on the side. A joint deal; both sides stayed in touch and everybody came out ahead. We Americans owe a good part of our 1776 independence to the French under Lafayette. And they owe us for saving their ass in World Wars One and Two. Plus all the money we poured into France under the Marshall Fund. To keep France from turning Communist. As it was about to do.
Thierry gave me a quick grimace. “The person running your side is Cedric Harris. I’ll give you his number.”
“Major Cedric Harris?”
“That’d be the one.”
“That little bastard’s the one who put me away. The first time.”
“Ah!” Thierry exhaled. “He was the one?” He turned to Anne. “I told you about this, when Pono went to Leavenworth Army Prison for shooting that Afghani girl who was burned and dying?”
“I remember. But then” – she gave me a bemused look – “idiot, you shot the husband too.”
“He was the one who burned her!” Thierry said.
“Major Harris,” I said, “was the Army prosecutor at my trial. He tried every nasty trick in the book to get me. He didn’t give a damn if I was guilty or not. They needed to show that the good old USA doesn’t tolerate war crimes.”
“That wasn’t a war crime,” Thierry said. “It was an act of mercy.”
“Not shooting the husband,” Anne interjected.
“He poured kerosene on her,” I said. “And lit her afire because he thought she’d glanced through her burkha at another man. She was fourteen. Her father, too, he was in on it. Family honor, the father said.”
“You shoot him too?”
I shook my head.
“You should have,” Thierry said.
“So why are you here?” she said. “And not in jail?”
“A fantastic lawyer. West Point grad. She got wind of my case and blew it apart. I was out in six months.”
“But
then,” Anne went on, “you were in jail again? You like it there?”
“Ah, yes?” Thierry said.
“A lot of our injured vets end up in Hawaii. The weather doesn’t aggravate their wounds, the medical care is excellent, and even if you have no legs there are ways to get around.”
“That doesn’t explain your going to jail there,” Anne said.
“I was delivering weed to a buddy who had lost his legs in combat, when a cop pulled me over. He had a dog who smelled it.” I shrugged. “It was a setup. I got ten to fifteen in Halawa Prison, the worst in Hawaii and one of the worst in the US.”
“So why aren’t you still there?” she persevered.
“An undercover cop I’d smoked weed with once, she set it up. Then when she met my buddy without legs – he came to prison to see me every day, lots of vets did – she realized what she’d done, vanished the evidence, convinced the cop who arrested me to change his story, put her brother, also a lawyer, on the case, and got me out.”
“Wow,” Anne said. “I would never get anyone I’ve arrested out of jail.”
I smiled at her. “You’re probably a lot nastier than she is.”
Thierry raised a placating hand. “In the present situation, then, we have two separate crimes. The arrival in France of Mustafa al-Boudienne, and Mack’s disappearance.”
“No,” I said, “we have three.”
“Of course,” he nodded. “But Gisèle is surely part of Mack’s disappearance.”
“There’s nothing else,” Anne said, “I can try. To find her.” She turned to me. “What about Mack?”
“What about him?”
“Where is he in this?”
“In what?”
“Maybe I’ve been missing something.” She leaned forward, musing. “In this tangled web with the black-haired blonde-dyed girl, with something in Normandy?”
Exasperated, I leaned back in my chair. “You got to understand, when you’ve been through what Mack and I did, he’d never let you down. He’d never get caught up in some tangled web ...”
“Sure,” Anne said quietly.
“So,” Thierry broke in, “let’s get all those new agents out there. They have photos of Mack and Gisèle, and Pono’s sketch of Mustafa.”
“Sure,” Anne repeated, subtly conveying the absolute impossibility that any of this might work.
Thierry glanced at his desk, a defeated man stumbling back into the ring for another round. No matter the cost.
No, I wanted to tell him. We haven’t lost yet.
Beirut
“A PLANE HAS TO HIT the Tower straight on,” Thierry said. “To knock it down.”
“Like the Saudis did to the World Trade Center in 9/11.”
“And just like it, the Tower’s been a terrorist target for years. The most-visited and most-loved human structure on earth – what better way to make your name than knock it down?”
Thierry rubbed his neck wearily. “After the 1994 Algerian attempt things were quiet for a while as the terrorists went after easier targets – the Métro, or a concert of happy young people, families on a sidewalk, an office full of journalists, cops with their backs turned. But they’ve always come back for the Tower ... a 2014 attack with automatic rifles, could’ve killed hundreds of people – we caught them at the last moment ... Another one later that year, then in 2015 the ISIS press secretary, Mustafa Al-Adnani, released a video promising the Tower would soon be destroyed, so for months we had no end of young terrorists trying to find enough explosives to knock it down.”
“So far so good?”
“You did know that in August 2017, two of the Muslim group that five days later killed 16 people and injured 126 in Spain had gone to Paris and taken pictures of the Tower from every angle, mostly of the security installations, the entrances and exits, and the lines of tourists waiting to get in?”
“It’d take a truck full of plastique just to take out one pillar.”
“Like Beirut?” He meant the 1983 Iran-backed bombings of the US Embassy, the US Marines compound, and the French paratroopers’ headquarters, all of which had killed nearly 400 people, and had driven the US out of Lebanon.
“Or Nairobi?” he added, referring to the truck bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that had killed over 220 people and injured 4,000 more.
“And with all the new security measures there’s no way a truck can get near one of the Tower’s four pillars. There’s vehicle blocks, a ten-foot bulletproof glass wall, a tall picket fence. And we have hundreds of surveillance cameras covering every angle, every face tied to instantaneous facial recognition systems.”
“I checked the Tower out this morning,” I answered. “That kind of surveillance won’t stop a truck. And that picket fence won’t stop bullets. They can mow down hundreds of tourists. And they can get over those walls and fences in seconds ... There’s the four operations entries and two exits, all easy to smash into ...”
He nodded. “It’s the best we could get.”
“What about drones?” I persisted.
“There we’re okay. In the area around the four pillars we neutralize their controls. Knock out their signals. They have to land. And they can’t carry enough explosives, anyway, to hurt the Tower. Just kill some innocent people ... And we’re scrambling cellphone waves around it so no one can use their phone to set off a bomb ... We jam the frequency, so the phone picks up our transmission and nothing else ...”
This was more old news. Every cell phone transmits and receives radio waves to communicate at the speed of light – digitized voice or data in the form of oscillating electric and magnetic fields. The rate of oscillation is the frequency. You jam or scramble the frequency and the phone will pick up your message and nothing else. And can’t set off a bomb.
That was the idea. But new technology can now unscramble jammers before they ever reach a phone. Meaning that a phone could still trigger a bomb ...
I wondered if Thierry was right.
That you could blow out a pillar and the Tower would still stand.
It hadn’t worked in Beirut.
—
HER NAME WAS NISA, which in Arabic can also mean woman. A DGSE advisor, she had written three brilliant books on Islam and the West. Maybe five-ten with thick, curling dark hair down both sides of a long neck, a nose and lips slightly too big and eyebrows too wide, a fearful wondrous glance as if hoping for the good but expecting the bad. A look that said, life is too short, we must not harm each other. She was someone whose face told you all you needed to know: she wouldn’t lie.
I liked that about her, as I’m used to people who rarely tell the truth. She had that clear, front-faced way of speaking to you that couldn’t be mistaken. And the look in her eye of someone who’s seen far too much and can’t hide it.
She had a broken upper front tooth that had been well repaired but was still visible, and I wondered how she got it.
She had an undergrad in biology from Nantes and a doctorate in anthropology from the Sorbonne, Thierry had said, but that she knew her history and lit too. “Her background is straight-up Algerian,” he’d said. “Grew up in Stains, a miserable Muslim ghetto north of Paris –”
“I know where Stains is.”
“First generation, father a devout Muslim. Mother fully veiled, never allowed to leave the house without a man. Her father never acknowledged her successes in school, she was not allowed to tell her mother. At eighteen, just having acquired somehow a copy of Madame Bovary, she revolted.”
I grinned. “Madame Bovary?”
He nodded. “She saw it as a parable of herself. The change was subtle at first, she says, a disinterest in prayers – for which she initially felt guilty – then slowly a wonderment at what the world might be like for a young woman not saddled by Islam.”
“She’s married to a doctor,” Anne said. “C
ardiologist at La Pitié.”
La Pitié-Salpétrière is Paris’ largest hospital, a sprawling campus of buildings that is almost an entire arrondissement by itself. To be a cardiologist there is to be at the very top of one of European medicine’s greatest centers. “From Algeria too?”
“Lebanese. He escaped Beirut during the 1990s, at the end of the civil war. It’s quite a story ... Maybe she’ll tell you sometime.”
—
SHE HAD the instant effect of making you trust her. She, Anne, Thierry and I sat at his conference table, the sun low through the western smog over the rooftops and shining fully into her face.
Like many journalists, human rights advocates, and writers who have dared to criticize Islam, she and her family had to have full-time police protection. That she was a Muslim and a woman merited her an even greater level of danger.
“What do you make of all this?” Thierry asked. He had summarized what we knew about Mustafa’s sudden appearance, then Mack’s and Gisèle’s disappearances and what the two jihadis had told us about Mustafa’s return to France and the plan to attack the Eiffel Tower and maybe Paris with a backpack nuke.
She leaned forward, thinking, tugged a dress hem over one knee. “The first thing to understand about Islam is that it divides the world into the House of Islam and the House of War. And everything not Muslim is in the House of War, and needs to be taken over and Islamic law enforced.”
“We know that,” Anne said. “That’s why we asked you here.”
“This belief underpins what is now happening. Makes it inevitable.” A phantom smile crossed her lips. “I have heard of this Mustafa. He has a large following among our young men.”
“What’s he selling?”
She leaned back, one wrist and hand still on the table. “An imaginary way out.”
“Out of where?”
“A shattered family, rabid religion, no money, nothing at all, living in a Salafist den in one of the Lost Territories of France, where if you don’t conform you don’t survive ... That kind of thing.”
“The Lost Territories?” I said.
“The parts of France run under Sharia,” Thierry said. “The places most French never go, and tourists never hear about.”
