by Mike Bond
My eyes were seared, I couldn’t breathe. Glanced back, but the skunk hadn’t followed.
I’ve been Maced a few times but it was never like this. Mustafa and the other guy had to have heard my gasps – why didn’t they shoot?
I caught up to them again, their shadows flitting through the trees. They picked up a narrow path and I followed, keeping my distance, knife in my hand, aware of their guns. And that I couldn’t get close, stinking of skunk.
Would they shoot at a skunk, to drive it away?
Or was it good camouflage? Like the Sioux hunters dressed in wolf skins to get near the buffalo, because buffalo were used to wolves wandering near them?
They ran out into a little low-grass clearing flanked by tall firs with a dirt road at the far side. I halted at the edge of the trees. Now maybe I could circle and get them.
Kill the other one, then take the one I thought was Mustafa down and torture him till he said where Mack and Gisèle were.
Then kill him. If it was Mustafa.
Two dark shapes slid out of the darkness toward them. “Seven minutes late!” one whispered angrily.
“Ran into a hunter. Slowed us down,” the one I thought was Mustafa snapped.
“Except for that,” the other gasped, “we were on pace.”
“Not good enough.” This voice was an older man’s, authoritative. “Not good.”
“That’s why we do these trial runs, Abu,” the Mustafa one panted. “To know for sure how much time it takes ...” He’d called the older man “Abu,” a term of respect.
They turned toward the dirt road, still talking, voices rising and falling harshly.
Now there were four. Even if only two had guns, I couldn’t get them all. Mack and Gisèle were beyond my reach again.
I circled ahead, staying in the trees. They were still talking, but I couldn’t hear.
They headed for a glimmer of glass and metal that became a long, low silhouette which I thought was a black or dark blue sedan. They stored the backpacks in the trunk and got in.
I caught the plate number before they accelerated away, with a 77 for the Seine et Marne Département. Fontainebleau? Avon?
If it was Mustafa, what was he doing in Fontainebleau with another guy from the moving company that hacked Thierry’s accounts? Why go jogging at night in Fontainebleau Forest and meet two guys in a car with local plates who berated them for being late? What was in the backpacks?
Were these people the group Mustafa was working with? Who was this “Abu,” the older guy?
That they were doing this at ten-thirty at night meant whatever they were training for was probably going to happen at night. Like the mad ride following Abdel and his three companions from St. Denis to the Eiffel Tower.
Or was it just safer to practice at night, when few people would see?
But why here? When all the action was going to be in Paris?
Or was it?
Was it even Mustafa?
—
“MUSTAFA?” Anne nearly screamed when I called. “You think it was Mustafa? Holy shit, but you’re not sure?”
“I think.” I caught my breath. “But I’ve lost him.”
“You got the damn plate.”
She linked Tomàs and Thierry in. They were ecstatic. “You’re a genius!” Thierry uncharacteristically exclaimed.
“I’ve just run the plate,” Tomàs added. “It’s coming up now ... Belongs to a TV publicity company ...”
“TV?” Anne said. “What the Hell?”
“New Hope Productions. Based in Avon.”
“This is fantastic,” Thierry said, though he didn’t sound happy. “Why didn’t you call in for backup?”
“In the middle of the fucking forest?”
“We could’ve got the bastard.”
“If it was him,” I reminded him.
“We’ve got the plate,” Anne repeated.
“Pono,” he said, “you must stop doing this shit alone.”
“It’s the only way you guys won’t screw it up.”
“Get up here, fast.”
“I’ve got to get the Beast.”
“The what?”
“My car. That’s its name.”
“I don’t care what you call your damn car.”
“It’s DGSE’s car, anyway,” Anne cracked.
“Get it,” Thierry said. “And get up here.”
—
“JESUS YOU STINK!” Tomàs stepped back from his office door, away from me.
“So I’ve been told.” I ducked inside, wrapping myself in the blanket they’d given me downstairs, more to hold in the skunk odor than keep warm.
“What happened to your head?”
“Ran into a tree.”
Holding his breath, he came close to inspect my forehead. “You need to get it stitched.”
“That’s not all he needs to get stitched,” Anne snapped.
“We’ll do this fast,” he said to her, “so he can go home and shower.”
“I’m not sure I want him.”
“2016 Maserati.” Tomàs stayed behind his desk, as far from me as possible. Reluctantly he sat and plunked his elbows on the desk, clasped hands under his chin. “As you said, registered to New Hope Productions ... and, get this: which is run by Rachid Raqmi.”
Thierry stared. “Rachid fucking Raqmi? The president of the Muslim Anti-Discrimination Society?”
Tomàs smiled. “The same.”
I was exhausted, tried to think. “Let’s bring him in.”
“If we do, he’ll deny he picked up anyone in Fontainebleau tonight.” Thierry slapped palms on the desk. “Anyway, what if he did pick someone up – what’s the law against that?”
“He met this guy I think was Mustafa!”
“It’s your word against his.”
“Maybe someone,” Tomàs added, “was using his car? Or stole it?”
Anne squeezed my arm reassuringly. “There’ll be a shitstorm in the media if we accuse Rachid of anything ...”
“We ask him,” I answered, “why is he meeting up late at night with S-List guys?”
“We can’t prove it was Mustafa,” Thierry reminded me. “You said you’re not sure.”
“I couldn’t make him out in the dark. And the voice, how can I be sure? After all these years?”
“If it is and if we alert him,” Tomàs chimed in, “then the whole damn crowd will vanish, and the trail will go cold again.”
It was the same ancient question: when to pull the trigger?
“However,” Anne said, “this could be a major success –”
“Astounding,” Thierry added.
“– so let’s move carefully,” she went on. “Not blow it by making it public too soon.”
“This could explain,” Tomàs said, “why Rachid is orchestrating the campaign to allow former ISIS fighters back into France.”
“When they’re known terrorists?” I fumed. “And killed hundreds of thousands in Syria and Iraq?”
“He says they’ve disavowed violence, want to work for peaceful solutions. It’s the false face of the new Islam.”
Dizzy with fatigue, I looked for an empty chair but there wasn’t one. “He could maybe give us Mack and Gisèle? And you won’t grab him?”
“We’d get nothing from him. And he’s got tons of celebrity lawyers who will scream and clamor for our heads. The government won’t allow it.”
“We fly him to Casa. Maybe I can arrange it,” I said, thinking how to convince Harris. But that was impossible.
It was the opposite of where we’d been before. All along I’d wanted to follow people, wait and see where they took us. But DGSI/ DGSE had instead assaulted Yasmina’s place, and she blew herself up. They’d staked out Les Quatre Vents in Paris and spooked Mustafa.
>
And the next day Bruno got killed.
But would grabbing Rachid help save Mack and Gisèle, and get Mustafa?
Though now we thought there might be a Mustafa-Rachid connection. We just had to see where it took us. If, as I’d thought, the voice I’d heard was Mustafa.
“We’ll set up a 24/7 on Rachid,” Tomàs said, “get all his digital stuff, his phone. Then we decide.”
“If Mack and Gisèle die,” I said furiously, “and if we lose Mustafa, now will be the reason.”
“And if Rachid’s car was stolen?” Thierry reminded me. “If the guy you heard wasn’t Mustafa? Just some guy out running at night with a buddy? Training for a goddamn triathlon, something like that?”
Tomàs checked his watch. “It’s three-ten in the damn morning. Go home, both of you. Get some sleep.”
Anne scowled at me. “He’s sleeping in the shower.”
Time and Blood
“I’VE BEEN HANGING out with your furniture moving company,” Mitchell said. “Chérif Frères? From what I can tell, they rent that building from a charity that’s also in Avon.”
It was 06:05 here in Paris, the sun not up yet, so cocktail hour in Honolulu. But Anne and I had had a good two hours’ sleep plus a quickie in the shower after I’d scrubbed off as much skunk as I could, so I felt ready to take on the world. “What fucking charity?”
“The Muslim Anti-something –” He flicked through screens.
“– Anti-Discrimination Society.”
“How you know?”
I told him about chasing the guy I’d thought was Mustafa and the other one from the moving company, their meeting with people using Rachid’s car. Or with Rachid himself. “How’d you find them?” I said.
“Tracked them backwards.”
“And this Anti-Discrimination Society is linked to the people who hacked Thierry’s bank accounts?”
“To make him look like a crook.”
“When that’s the last thing he is.”
“Obviously, they want to stop this investigation.”
—
“WHO the Hell is MADS?” I near-yelled at Thierry. “Why aren’t we following them?”
“We are.” It was 7 a.m. and Anne and I had just arrived at Thierry’s office. He turned to Nisa, who stood by the window watching the rain. “We disagree about this.”
“MADS?” She scowled. “According to them, if you criticize anything Muslim you’re a fascist Islamophobe. You can be sued, fired, even jailed. So even when Muslims kill hundreds of French people in a few short months no one’s allowed to criticize them, because that would be Islamophobe ... You can’t even say these killers are Muslims. No, they’re terrorists.”
“Everyone sees through that,” I said. “Or do they?”
“Perhaps taqiya,” she said. “They are not what they appear.”
“So where,” I said, “is Rachid in all this? When it’s now clear that he’s tied to the group that was hacking Thierry’s accounts?”
“This is the problem. Where is moderate Islam really at? Or is it, as people like you say” – she turned to Thierry – “just a front for the slow takeover?”
“In this world,” he said consolingly, “it’s hard to know. Like Anne mentioned the other day about World War Two, the German slow takeover of the French intellectuals. The enemy can seem to be your friend, to be rational and moderate. Till the fun begins.”
“I suppose,” Nisa added, “that just because someone like Rachid is saying what we want to hear doesn’t mean his words are true or honest. It could be all for show. And, if it is all for show? If Rachid is manipulating the media? If he too is taqiya?”
“You asked who is MADS?” Thierry smiled at me. “That’s who they are.”
—
TAQIYA, the art of dissimulation, Nisa went on to say, is an ancient tactic most recently utilized by Al Qaeda, ISIS, and other Islamic groups. It allows the faithful to ignore Islam’s prohibitions in order to infiltrate the infidels. They can drink, take drugs, sleep with infidel women and ignore Ramadan, all the better to melt into the enemy population unsuspected.
“Like the Saudis who flew our planes into the World Trade Center,” she said. “They embraced taqiya when they entered pilot training and pretended they were in the US because they liked it.”
Even before my SF team reached Afghanistan we’d learned about taqiya and many other aspects of Islamic life and religion. Once there we ended up sometimes on these silly outreach programs to build alleged ties with the locals, which usually entailed no gain but great risk. But for all this we had to know the Koran, the Hadiths. Had to understand how these people so close and warm could yet be so fanatic and dangerous. And why they hated us.
The Art of War, that ancient book of strategy, says it best: He who knows neither the enemy nor himself will invariably be defeated.
We couldn’t claim we knew the enemy. I wasn’t sure we knew ourselves.
MADS of course was just more taqiya. The cooperative, friendly façade of moderate Islam. Red wine and canapés, media coverage, limos, and lots of sex with Paris models.
If Mustafa had embraced taqiya that only made him harder to find. He’d be among the millions of semi-Muslims in France – they identify with the culture but do not often practice the religion. But the moment they feel this culture is threatened, of course they defend it. Lapsed Catholics are the same. We all are. The trouble is their culture, beyond a certain density, is destructive of ours. And whatever Mustafa was doing, he knew we were hunting him. And he was hunting me.
In Special Forces you’re taught that when a problem seems insoluble find a little piece you do understand, and solve that. Then find another, and soon they lead you to a major thread, and pretty soon you’ve conquered it from the inside out.
Looking for threads, what did I really know?
I knew that Mustafa had come into France in a Passat with Austrian plates that had been stolen in Torino, if one were to believe the Italians.
According to the two jihadis DGSE had “interviewed,” Mustafa was planning a major terrorist attack, either on the Eiffel Tower, an Airbus, or on Paris itself. Worse than what happened to Notre Dame. But guys will say anything under torture. Wouldn’t we all?
And supposedly Mustafa was meeting with guys at Les Quatre Vents, who had vanished.
He was in contact with Abdel and his three buddies.
He may have had some relation to Yasmina.
Mack and Anne were hunting him since he reappeared, then Mack disappeared, then his wife too.
Mack had gone to Les Andelys, was going there again the day he disappeared. But no one seemed to know why.
Mustafa had known right away I was after him. How?
And now the person I’d thought was Mustafa had maybe met with Rachid Raqmi, or at least with someone using Rachid’s Maserati. And Mustafa had been staying in the house in Avon where the moving company had set up false bribery accounts on Thierry, to render him powerless. And Rachid was pushing for an amnesty for ISIS terrorists returning from Iraq and Syria ...
Find a thread and unravel it, I told myself.
There wasn’t one.
Every single thread we’d tried to pull on had broken.
Thierry bent over a thirty-foot conference table spread with every clue and lead we had, or thought we had, with every surveillance photo and scrap of conversation ... He looked up, focusing for an instant on each of us. “We’ll find a way.”
“It always takes time,” Anne said.
Thierry nodded. “Time and blood.”
—
“WE HAVE DNA,” Tomàs declared breathlessly on Thierry’s speaker. “From the keffiyeh.”
“Whose?”
“Nassim Faraz. Friend of Abdel. An S-List guy.”
“So now we have him.”
“Problem
is,” Thierry snorted, “what do we have?”
On the surface we might have enough to arrest Nassim and Tariq. When Homicide had fished Bruno out of St. Martin canal he’d had no torn clothes; and now the piece of checkered cloth had come back with Nassim’s DNA. But who could say when the cotton had been torn off and stuck on the bridge? No way to prove when. Nassim would say he’d climbed over the edge for some other reason, as a dare perhaps, at a totally different time.
If we had Bruno’s DNA also on the cloth that would show a link. But there was none. A good lawyer and a pro-Muslim judge would get the case thrown out in no time.
Nassim would be free in an hour without saying a thing. And we, once again, would have blown everything.
Like what happened with Yasmina.
Like Mustafa never returning to Les Quatre Vents.
Like Bruno getting killed because I’d talked to him.
If we arrested Tariq, Nassim and friends we’d end up with four nasty Arabs who would give us nothing, and Mustafa would change cover and keep advancing whatever he planned to do to the Tower. Or to Paris.
Because Abdel was connected to Mustafa, and Abdel’s brother Tariq had been one of the four who killed Bruno, probably Mustafa was tied to Bruno’s death. Probably ordered it. And because Mustafa seemed to be the cause of Mack’s and Gisèle’s kidnappings, Abdel, Nassim and Tariq were connected to that too.
But how, in France, could you prove it?
And where was Rachid in all this?
I downloaded some pix and went to see Bruno’s wife.
—
THE LIFE HAD GONE out of Les Quatre Vents. Empty of clients, dust in the corners, two bulbs out on the Amstel Beer sign. The reek of rotting beer.
“I’m closing down.” Bruno’s wife stood in black behind the bar like an Easter Island statue, erect and alone. “The bank can have the place. There’ll be a loss, so I can go on welfare ... Imagine, me – on welfare?”
“I have some pix I want to show you.”
“Since I was fourteen, I’ve worked every day of my life ...”
“Just four guys, won’t take a minute.”
