by Mike Bond
“The most dangerous,” she added, “is all these young jihadis who grew up in France and are now coming back from Iraq and Syria, hating France for what we are, and my fear is that they’re going to melt right back in and expand the war here.”
“They already have,” Anne said, “for years.”
Nisa tsskd. “Not like the war that’s coming.”
—
“HOW MANY TIMES,” Anne said, “could we have stopped World War Two before it started? If it hadn’t been for politicians too craven to act? We could’ve stopped Hitler when he went into the Rhineland, when he was ready to retreat at the slightest response from us. And we did nothing. How many other times? And the First World War? Why are we doing it again? Why do we always wait until the danger is probably insurmountable before we do anything?”
“France today,” Nisa said, “is where it was in the 1930s. The German ‘soft’ takeover before the Second World War – it’s what Islam’s doing now. Other writers say this but nobody listens ... The best-known Algerian writer, Boualem Sansal, warns in his latest book that Islam intends to conquer Europe, that it’s a constant theme in Islamic politics and literature. But nobody listens. ‘Europe is afraid of Islam, it’s ready to give it whatever it wants,’ he says. The greatest living French writer, Michel Houellebecq, says it in Submission, and Eric Zemmour in Suicide Français. More and more French writers are saying it – and thus living under 24-hour police protection –”
“And you are too,” Anne added.
“True. Which is very difficult for Ali at the hospital, for our children at school. But it’s not proper to criticize Islam, just as in 1936 in France, when to criticize Germany and Nazism was uncouth and politically incorrect.”
“Thirty years ago,” Thierry said, “we had a hundred mosques in France. Now there’s two thousand, plus thousands of prayer cells and madrasahs, most funded by Saudi Arabia and other Middle Eastern Salafist hardliners. We have no idea what they’re preaching in most of these mosques, let alone in the prayer cells. We can’t wire them all, can’t put agents in them all ...”
“But the ones you do track?” I said.
“The big, dangerous ones, we try to. But we can’t shut down most of them, even when they’re preaching war against us. The courts and media won’t allow it.”
“These Lost Territories,” Anne said, “are not just the hundred or so regional ones, there’s many hundreds of smaller neighborhoods we don’t go into. We need to bring them back under French law, get them out of Sharia. We need to get the veil off the streets, out of women’s lives. No more genital mutilation, home imprisonment, brutality and rape.”
“Everything’s so much harder now because of the EU,” Thierry said. “It has lousy intelligence sharing, poor collaboration and no enforcement. With their inability to police Europe’s borders they’ve put us in a very dangerous situation. While taking away all our tools to deal with it.”
“It’s getting like Beirut,” Nisa said.
“That bad?” I said.
She turned to me. “You’ve been?”
“Many times.”
“You liked?”
“I can imagine what it was.”
“My husband is from East Beirut.” This was the largely Muslim side of the city, and West Beirut more Christian, though many of the Christians have now left.
“His father was an accountant for the city water department, his mother was a teacher. They were religious but not fundamentalist. His mother could drive, wore the abaya over her hair but no niqab, no veil. She could go outside on her own without a man – they were living in the Paris of the Middle East, remember ...”
“When there was one.” I’d heard from my Pa what Beirut had been like, before the civil war that killed 120,000, erased a good part of Lebanon and smashed this magnificent Phoenician-French-international city to ruins.
“Ali, my husband, was born in 1975, the year the civil war really started. By 1990,” she said, “there’d been fifteen years of war. The city was destroyed. The ancient Phoenician quarters and the beautiful oceanfront hotels, the lovely nineteenth century buildings, all annihilated. A hundred twenty thousand dead – for what? All because of the Palestinians coming in from the south and the war between them and the Christians, then Iran’s Hezbollah came in and everyone was trying to survive in basements as the city blew to pieces above them, thousands buried alive under falling buildings ...” She spread her hands, a gesture of appeasement. “Why do we do all this? It is the question that I try to understand every day ...”
“He got out, your husband?” Anne said.
“He got out, but no one else. His parents crushed by a falling building, one sister shot, the other blown up by a car bomb. He was fifteen, stowed away on a Norwegian ship out of Jounieh. When it docked in Genoa he walked to the French border – most Lebanese back then spoke good French – and then to Paris, to an uncle who took him in and sent him to school and gave him a family to love and protect him.” Her eyes glistened. “He was a wonderful man, Uncle Sayeed.”
“And now?”
She shrugged. “We do what we can do. Ali saves lives, I try to too.” She looked at Anne. “Like you said, once it would have been easy to stop Hitler. But nobody had the courage.”
“And nobody has the courage now?” I challenged.
Nisa looked at me hard. “We can contain it. We can stop it from growing. Can we reverse it? Probably not.”
“Julie, my daughter,” Anne said, “she’s five now. Two years ago she nearly died of mononucleosis. An emergency doc at La Pitié saved her life. A Muslim ... Even before then I’d refused to make distinctions. But after that? When every day I thank that man?”
Nisa nodded. No one spoke.
“France is stronger,” Anne said, “because of our Muslim and African communities. But we have to come together, stop hating each other.”
“A lot of us don’t hate each other,” Thierry put in.
“True,” Anne said. “But to go forward we must integrate the Muslims now in France. Not allow them to dominate. But we can’t take any more. These people who say we have to be tolerant, open our gates to millions more? Let them do it. We’ve reached the limit. Or it will destroy us.”
No One Escapes
BARELY 24 HOURS ago I’d landed in Paris full of Tahiti surf power, hungry to see Mack and kill Mustafa. But Mack had already been snatched and Gisèle soon after, and now we were facing a tidal wave of terrorism that a day ago I couldn’t have imagined.
On my way to see Cedric Harris I’d grabbed some chicken shawarma at a sidewalk stand near Concorde. Missing my beloved souks and bazaars and knowing somehow the worst for France was yet to come, I tried to recharge my jet-lagged brain and make sense of all this.
Mustafa had returned to life. He who I’d thought was dead, whom I should have killed when I might have had the chance. If I had, how many lives would have since been saved? Five hundred? A thousand? What do you do with all those lives on your hands?
Maybe like Dracula, Mustafa had to be revived before you could kill him. Had to be alive when you drove that final stake through his heart.
In the eight years since Mosul I’d never forgotten him. But I’d been at peace, thinking he was dead.
Now he was alive again. As much as I was hunting him, was he now hunting me?
—
JET-LAGGED, I wandered my way across the lovely Champ de Mars with the bronze-colored Tower at its end rising over the Seine and the world, past thousands of new pilgrims come this day to give it reverence and to email home pix of their nearest and dearest in front of it. Then down Avenue Rapp past lines of magnificent stone-cut buildings golden in afternoon sun to the Seine and its long tree-lined walkways upriver with the Petit Palais and Grand Palais and Le Louvre and so much of the world’s greatest architecture facing you every step of the way ... And of course you haven�
�t seen anything yet, not till you get around the bend and further upriver, toward the La Conciergerie and what was once Notre Dame.
To find Mustafa was why Mack had called me to Paris. And the CIA, who energetically disliked me for sometimes playing outside the rules in order to get things done, were paying me – imagine that! Via of course a Mexican roofing company in Fairfax, Virginia. Which no doubt didn’t exist. So if this roof fell in, it’d be on my head.
Not that I gave a damn.
The CIA is annoyingly parsimonious, unless it’s buying some minor dictator who’ll plant a knife in their back five years later, when he mistakenly thinks he can do so safely.
Mustafa probably already had Mack. And maybe Gisèle? To trade her for me?
“No one,” Mustafa had said eight years ago as he readied to kill us, “ever escapes me.” Then almost benignly he’d added, “Is it not written that infidels, unbelievers in the Koran, shall eternally suffer the fires of Hell? Can’t you see Allah’s will that awaits you?”
But Mack and I had escaped him. And now he might have Mack again. And here I was within reach. How could I use this?
Though Mustafa had much bigger fish to fry. To destroy the Tower. To maybe incinerate Paris. Why care about me?
Because in his mind, brilliant as he was, this was the convergence of opportunities. Getting Mack and me while he took down infidel Paris and maybe the world was only one more proof of Allah’s all-seeing will. Because it must work in every dimension.
“You will be broiled in Hell fire,” he’d once intoned from the Koran. “So many times that your skin shall be well-charred, and we shall give you new skins so that you may be burned again, for God is mighty and wise. Is this not written? Does it not promise you this?”
I batted him out of my mind. No worries, you asshole, I’ll take care of you.
Far more important was to get Mack and Gisèle back. Now.
Then kill Mustafa.
Together we could do this. Anne – upright, committed, and brilliant. I tried to imagine what her husband had been like. To love a woman like that. And be loved by her.
—
MAJOR CEDRIC HARRIS was a hard little man, barely five-eight. Thin pointed face, narrow blue-shadowed chin, sharp elbows, a slit mouth and thin-set brown eyes. He stood so straight he seemed to have rebar for a spine. His every word was chopped-off, precise. With no emotion.
For Major Harris, as I well remembered, duty was all. Never once that I saw – and I saw a lot of him – did he act naturally. As if each instant before he spoke he asked himself What would a successful officer say here?
During my Army trial at Fort Carson in Colorado for shooting the burned and dying Afghani girl, Major Harris was a true hound dog. He seized on every miniscule point however inane or false to build an image of me as a rogue killer who had to be put where he couldn’t hurt people. Sometimes it was so hilarious I laughed, but each new false charge was another spike in my prison door.
Because of his ramrod posture my girlfriend Lexie – a stripper and school teacher who had most recently come with me to Tahiti along with Erica and Abigail, and who had earlier inadvisably married Bucky, the SF buddy who saved my life in an Afghanistan firefight then helped to send me to Leavenworth ... she who during my trial flew weekly from Honolulu to be at my side – called him “Major Hair-Ass,” and soon we had my guards and even once the court recorder saying it too.
To no avail.
Now I’d left one of the traffic-clattery streets around La Concorde and entered a back door to an elevator to the third floor. I stood before him in his silent, elaborate office trying to keep down the bile in my throat and the hunger to kill.
“You’re here.” He gave a sharp nod across his flashy antique desk, didn’t hold out a hand, which was too bad because I would’ve crushed it. “Let’s see what you can do.”
From the number of lines flashing on the console beside him I wondered if maybe Langley was already awake. I didn’t salute, wanted him to know he was a useless asshole. But now he was our top guy in Paris, and to save Mack and Gisèle I might need him.
I sat in the rickety antique chair in front of his desk. “What’s the latest?”
This seemed to rile him. But then, everything riled him. I’m sure he thought an orgasm, if he’d ever had one, was a duty. One you had to fulfill even if you didn’t want to. “If you’re referring to Mr. Rosenthal and his wife,” he said, “it’s in French hands. We’re offering whatever technical help they want, but they’re as technologically advanced as we are.”
“Are you telling me” – I leaped up and leaned at him across his desk – “you don’t have any French fucking networks? No guys on the street? Anybody who knows anything?” Like I’ve said, even while working with a close ally you need eyes on the street. But it had long been a fault in the Agency – they depend too much on cyber and satellite and often have no idea what’s actually happening on the ground. I was furious that it was true even in Paris. And I wanted him to admit it.
He waved it aside. “You won’t need access to any of that.”
“Because it doesn’t exist?” I sat and relaxed my fists on the armrests. Otherwise I might have killed him. “So why are you hiring me?”
“We’re not hiring you.” His lips crisped. “You don’t even exist. I’m supposed to be nice to you so you’ll work with us. Unfortunately, we need you.”
“You need me? Bullshit.”
You were the last to see Mustafa –”
“And live. So what?”
“We have no one since.”
“That was eight years ago. When you were polishing your legalese elsewhere. So you could win a war crimes prosecution and further your career –”
He glanced at me bleakly through sad pale eyes. “You think that judgment helped me? When every single person in this man’s Army was on your side?” He nodded his chin at his tapestried office with its wide damasked windows and ancient oak herringbone floors. “Now I’m stuck here.” He slapped palms on his desk. “You think I like this place?”
If you don’t love Paris, in my view, you’re totally nuts. “I don’t care if you like it. What I care about is you knew I was right to shoot that poor dying girl, and you prosecuted me anyway!”
“No.” For an instant he was far away, elbows on the table, chin on clasped hands. “You shot her husband.”
“He’d set her on fire!”
“Still.” He shrugged as if I were a credulous fool. “It was illegal.”
“I’d do it again.” I wanted to strangle him. “You would too.”
“No.” He barely shook his head. “I would not.”
“Enough!” I sighed. “Let’s find Mack and Gisèle.”
He sat up primly. “You’ll liaison between DGSE and us –”
“You just told me you don’t have anything. So what am I supposed to give them?”
“– and you will keep us apprised of every development in their investigation.”
He went on and on. More bullshit how Mack had really still been SF on loan to him so Mack’s kidnapping wasn’t really his problem. Special Forces should take it.
“SF,” I snapped, “has zero effectives in Paris. And doesn’t know fuck-all about France or its Arabs!”
He grinned, the first emotion I’d ever seen him try to fake. We were both right: the French had the most advanced surveillance – sat, phone, internet and street camera, DNA physical reconstruction, odor identification, instantaneous facial recognition of thousands of potential terrorists, so that the moment a camera saw one the nearest law enforcement personnel knew. And of course the French had the only penetration, poor as it was – into Muslim areas. It was their fucking country, after all. At least it had been.
For all this us Yankees could be nothing but a poor cousin.
“So why was Mack going to Normandy?” I said.
“Normandy?” Harris sat back, a puzzled look on his craggy face. “When?”
“Afternoon of the morning he disappeared.”
“No. He was on his way to DGSE when they grabbed him, not Normandy.”
“No, in the afternoon he was supposed to go to Normandy. Why?”
“Beats me.” He glanced up at me under bushy eyebrows. His hair was gray, he was almost bald, but his eyebrows were still thick and black. “Who says this?”
“Gisèle. Before she disappeared. Thierry says it’s not part of this deal, hunting Mustafa.”
“That’s why Mack’s working with them. Was working with them. Since Mustafa returned to Europe. Before that Mack was working on US-French terrorist links ... you know that.”
“Mack never told you, about Normandy?”
“Not a word.”
“You don’t even overwatch your own? Who the fuck are you? You didn’t know where Mack was, all the fucking time?”
Harris held up a cautionary palm. “Sooner or later the watcher is watched. Which has bad consequences.”
“Only when you screw up.”
“Remember, Mack was you guys. Special Forces. Not us. Whatever happens, buddy boy, you know the script ...”
“Call me that one more time I kill you.”
“What, buddy boy?”
In an instant I was out of my seat and clenched my left hand around his neck. Between fingers and thumb I had half of it. He leaned back in his white leather chair and smiled. “Now you know,” he whispered, “why I need you here.”
I yanked back my hand, embarrassed. What I’d done was militarily unconscionable. I felt shame. But this man had sent me to prison on a lie.
“Why?” I managed.
He twisted his head, loosening his neck. “Because no one else can do it.”
“You little shit, don’t give me that.”
He stood, six inches smaller than me but somehow larger. Patted me paternally on the arm. “Go forth, brave knight. The queen’s love awaits you.”
