by Mike Bond
She slapped the bar. “Give ’em here.”
No matter how many times she stared at each shot of Abdel and friends she shook her head. “These are ugly bastards. If I ever saw them I wouldn’t forget. But I’ve never seen them.”
Another wasted interview. Getting further and further behind.
God had left the stage and the lights were going out. And it came to me perhaps nearly everything I had done was wrong.
—
TWO HOURS LATER she called. “There is something.”
I’d been studying lists of names and license plates and tried to shift gears. “Yeah?”
“The night before my husband was killed, when I got to the bar for dinner shift, he said a guy had come in, North-African, asking for work.” She sounded a little breathless. “The guy asked if Bruno had security when he stayed open late. Bruno laughed, told him he’d been here thirty-one years, that’s all the security he needed ...”
I sat back, rubbed my eyes. Another clue that would go nowhere. Whoever this guy was, Bruno was the only person who could identify him, so we’d never find him now.
Though maybe if we sorted out some pix of other S-List guys with links to the same Stains mosque as Abdel and his three buddies? You never know.
“Can you come to ATS, that’s a police department, tomorrow morning? They need to show you more photographs.”
“I guess I could. Nobody would know, would they?”
“They’ll send a car for you,” I told her. “Unmarked. Nobody will know.”
I closed my list of license plates, struck by the fear in her voice. Which gave me a surge of fear for Anne. The kids and Mamie.
How long would it take Mustafa and whoever he was working with to find them too?
—
“FROM GISÈLE.” Thierry handed me a fax copy of a handwritten note:
Thierry,
I have been told to write this, to save Mack from more harm. The people who have us will release me in return for Pono Hawkins. I do not wish this but it is what I have been told to write, to avoid further pain ... After a torn space it continued, If Pono accepts, they will send him coordinates where he and I can be exchanged. He must come alone. The people who have us say that if he is followed or accompanied in any way they will kill him and Mack and me also. I do not think they are lying.
I stared at him, stupefied. “Where’s this from?”
“A fax. From fucking Bulgaria.”
I hadn’t known faxes still existed. “Let’s trace it.”
“We’ve hit a wall.”
“Gisèle doesn’t write with a backward slant like this ... It’s not her.”
“Yes it is. We checked: the slant is different but the letter formation, all that, is identical.”
“By slanting backwards –”
“She’s saying she’s doing it against her will.”
Free the Guilty
“WE HAVE A WITNESS,” Tomàs on Thierry’s speaker, “to Bruno’s murder.”
“At two in the morning?” I said.
“She lives across the Canal from the bridge where he was killed and thrown off. She’s eighty-eight and can’t sleep and sits in her front room on the fourth floor overlooking the Canal and thinks about the old days when she was twenty-two and in love with her new husband who went to Vietnam and got a bullet through his hip and it took him ten years to die. And she thinks about what could have happened if they’d just missed one train, not answered one call.”
“Okay, Tomàs,” Thierry said. “Okay.”
“What I’m saying is she heard a yell, a curse ...” Tomàs caught his breath. “And when she gets to the window she sees four shapes moving down the far side of the bridge, and one reaches out and hugs the other, and she thinks it must have been some small altercation, already worked out.”
“It backs your theory about the guys on the bridge –” Thierry said.
“It’s not a fucking theory, we have Nassim’s DNA!”
“But you can’t prove when it got there. You know how the courts are. Any chance to free the guilty ...”
“That’s why we don’t arrest them,” I put in.
“Problem is” – Thierry scratched his head – “we have to arrest some of them. To get the others.”
“But when we have Mustafa,” I said softly, “the end of the string ...”
Thierry looked up, smiled. “We don’t need to arrest him.”
“Good.” I nodded, wanting to formalize it.
“But sadly he’s not the end of the string.”
“Fuck that.”
“So maybe if the gods are with us we get Mustafa?” Thierry reasoned. “What about Rachid? If he is in fact working with Mustafa, that means he’s far more insidious and harder to combat – because he can manipulate the media and thus the politicians. And they’re the ones who are going to stand in our way. We must get more proof on him.”
“There’s more,” Tomàs said through the speaker. “Yasmina’s explosives –”
It revolted me, to remember her body splattered over the neighborhood.
“– stolen last year from a quarry near Dusseldorf. Driven across the Belgian border to Molenbeek. From there through Tourcoing and Lille to Paris.”
“Speaking of Tourcoing,” Thierry said, “we got a funny intercept the other day. This Sorbonne prof, he’s French but pretends to be half Arab, does a column sometimes in Le Nouvel Observateur. We have him talking to some imam in Tourcoing about France becoming a Muslim nation – ‘the first in Europe’ he says.
“‘No, no,’ the imam answers. ‘The second. Belgium will be first.’
“‘Ah, to the second, then,’ the prof laughs. ‘Vive la France!’”
“Vive la France,” I said, morosely.
“You have to see it as comedy,” Tomàs said. “Or you go crazy.”
—
IT WAS GETTING HARD to see any comedy, to remember anything but this relentless hunt, the eye-burning fatigue and wearied shoulders, the dizziness, the sickened gut. A few minutes at a café in the stench and scream of vehicles, wondering if the network of interlocking beer glass rings atop the smutty table is a key to anything at all, while the room around us is full of joy and laughter and happy conversation, amid the divine fragrances of foods and wines as Anne and I each down a double express and stale croissant while Anne swears at her phone and I scan the evening traffic through the rain-hazed windows. And I realize that no one, not one of all these people laughing and talking, the others out there hunched impatiently over their steering wheels, the face-down pedestrians and soaked, unhappy bicyclers, has the faintest idea what the fuck is really going on and how dangerous it is.
That we could lose it all, the cars and restaurants and streets and Tower and people and pigeons and sewer rats. All gone in a flash.
No one had a clue.
I’d felt this way before, detached, in a kind of supernatural awareness, aware of dangers that no one else feels ... To be among civilians in the States, contented in our naïve, good-hearted way – we’re good people, why should anyone hate us? When those of us who know worry all the time ...
One night in a screaming Afghanistan blizzard at ten thousand feet I suddenly wanted to take the longer and more rugged way around a steep cliff, not knowing why. But it was such a deep urge I couldn’t ignore it despite my three buddies treating me to language unusual even in Special Forces. But I persevered, and at the trail junction we came up behind thirteen Taliban all dug in with a Russian PK machine gun, facing down the easier trail we had avoided. We divided them up: three each, and as team leader I got four.
My old mantra – you’re never more in danger than when you think you’re safe.
Other times in other wars in other places. Even in Hawaii and Maine, fighting politicians and other crooks. To be aware of things most folks aren’
t.
But never like this.
No, I told myself. It won’t ever happen.
It felt better when I told myself that.
—
NO WAY I’d survive an exchange for Gisèle. The moment Mustafa had Mack and me, he’d kill us. And Gisèle too. And laugh his heart out.
And no way to go in there with a hidden weapon. They’d grab it and everyone would be even worse off.
I thought of Abdel and his three friends in two speeding cars on a trial run to the Tower. Mustafa and the other jogger from 60 Franklin Roosevelt had done a trial run, too, that was seven minutes late. Would Gisèle’s captors do a trial run? Practice the exchange beforehand?
If so, they’d do it at the same place, the same time.
If we could catch the trial run, we’d know where the real exchange was going to be.
Maybe.
—
ANNE AND I HAD JUST returned to Commerce and I was sitting on the bed taking off my shoes, when Mitchell called. “This is just the beginning,” he said. “And it’s complicated.”
I waited, saying nothing, knowing Mitchell’s predilection to spin things out, leave you hanging on each word. “What in life isn’t complicated?” I said finally.
“Let me start at the beginning.”
I pulled off my socks and scratched between my toes. “Why not?”
“Every time the Socialists run France, unemployment goes way up.”
“When you have laws that you can’t fire anybody, of course no one dares hire anybody. What’s new about that?”
“Thus the Socialists are always looking for overseas contracts, anything to bring work into the country. If they can get a big contract to sell Airbuses or helicopters, or fighter planes –”
“Rafales.”
“Yeah, Rafales. They just sold a whole bunch to India, for instance. A huge contract that will allegedly create 40,000 more jobs. And they sell lots of weapons to Middle Eastern dictators, contracts they can’t afford to lose.”
“This doesn’t explain the past forty years.”
“The goal of Islam is to make the whole world Muslim. And any effort, any expense, to grow Islam in France will be rewarded in Heaven. The billions in Middle Eastern funding here for charities, mosques, schools, sports groups, cultural events, plus all the money we don’t know about –”
“Hawala.”
“Yeah, and hawala. Lots of it.”
“The House of War. The strategy of slow conquest.”
“As always, paired with violence.”
I yawned, watching Anne undress at the foot of the bed. “So what’s new?”
“I looked at the last ten years of contracts between France and Muslim countries. Not just the so-called defense contracts ... but all major purchases by these countries of French goods and services –” The phone screeched while Mitchell scratched his beard against it.
“Mitchell! Don’t do that!”
“– I wanted to know if any major concessions, where France protected some nasty Middle East regime or took a very strong anti-Semitic stance on Israel, were followed by sizeable purchases of French goods and services by these nations ...”
I felt let down. “Everybody does that! Christ, Obama wouldn’t release the 28 pages of proof that the Saudi government helped mastermind 9/11, and he tried to stop American citizens from suing the Saudis for doing it. In return Saudi, Kuwait and Qatar bought thirty billion in F15s, Super Hornets and other crap ...”
“You have the brain of a hornet,” he said. “All you want to do is sting.”
“What I want,” I said, getting angry, “is proof that some French politicians took money from Muslim sources and did favors in return. That’s what I want.”
“Why?”
“Because maybe we can find a path that leads to the truth. To find out who’s trying to mess with DGSE and ATS and us ... To find a link between Rachid and the French government, see who’s giving him all that air time and for what purpose ... to save the fanatics from themselves, or help them carry out their plan to destroy us all ...”
“Well if that’s all you need ...”
“Then get going.”
“Fuck you. Speaking of which, you getting laid?”
I watched Anne unhook her bra and slide down her underpants. “None of your business.”
“Ah, so you are, then. That’s wonderful. Live it deep, dear friend. Live it irreproachably deep.” He cleared his throat. “Nothing lasts ...”
Quds
“AN IRANIAN NUCLEAR scientist is due in three days in Paris.” It was Thierry on the phone as usual at two a.m.
“What for?” I sat up, instantly awake.
“Some EdF conference.” EdF is Électricité de France, the world’s largest utility and the operator of the country’s fifty-eight nuclear power plants, which supply 88% of the nation’s electricity. EdF is also the world’s largest exporter of nuclear energy. French nuclear plants have an astounding safety record and give France Europe’s lowest-cost electricity plus Europe’s lowest level of greenhouse gases. It made a perfect cover for an Iranian nuclear bomb maker to attend an EdF conference on clean nuclear energy.
“When you find out?” I said, flipping the call to speaker so Anne could hear.
“He just showed up on an Air France reservation.”
“I’ll call Harris.”
“What time is it in Honolulu? Why not call your friend Mitchell?”
I’d briefly mentioned Mitchell to Thierry; they’d never met in Afghanistan. “I wish I’d known him,” Thierry had said.
Mitchell would know of any Iranian scientist working in the nuclear field. His files would know the scientist’s family, where he lived and exactly what he did, his bank account, sexual preferences and a lot of other stuff.
“I’ll call him. What’s happening your side?”
“Still mapping connections, background ... I’ll talk to EdF in the morning.”
“If he does come, make sure Air France security in Teheran searches his baggage.”
“He’s got a diplomatic passport. His baggage doesn’t get searched.”
“Tell them do it anyway.”
“It will have locks that can’t be decoded that quick.”
“Deny him a visa.”
“Upstairs says no.”
“No? What the fuck for? Who upstairs?”
“Foreign Ministry. And Interior. All those invisible assholes who run us.”
“I want names –”
“Even I don’t know. So many of these things are trade-offs.”
I climbed out of bed and headed for the kitchen. “I’ll call Mitchell now. And Harris tomorrow. What’s his name, this Iranian guy?”
“Dr. Ahmed Arawa, 52, undergrad Mosul University, PhD nuclear physics Université de Lyon, postdoc Geneva, went back to Iran in nuclear research, everything that could be classified peaceful, principally energy production.”
At the sink I filled a glass with water and drank it, hating the chemical taste. “Must be a hundred guys like him. Send me his stuff and I’ll pass it on.”
“But I haven’t told you the best part. Before he went to university he spent four years in Quds as an explosives specialist. After that he did all his studies in nuclear.”
Quds (Sepah-e quds in Persian) is the Special Forces branch of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. It has eight target areas, the first of which is Europe and North America, and another is Iraq, where they were responsible for the deaths of nearly a thousand US soldiers. They have been a major terrorist force in Syria and Lebanon, and responsible for numerous attacks on civilians in Israel.
Quds trains and provides weapons for Islamic terrorist forces in many countries, often brings them to Iran for intensive weapons and explosives work, then returns them to their home countries to do as muc
h harm as possible.
When you joined Quds, as Dr. Arawa had, it was for life. You could go back to the world, but you always owed them. Whatever they wanted. Whenever they wanted.
A one-way street.
Headed our way.
“You’re going to have to keep him off that plane.”
“Not happening.”
“Or intercept it.”
“Yeah, right.”
Or maybe Dr. Arawa was working to develop peaceful Iranian nuclear energy. But he was Quds, and his background was explosives. The link between Quds and Hezbollah is deep, between the Iranian military and terrorism. On the surface this guy was working on nuclear energy. But he was also a bombmaker.
“You want to know his Quds codename? Doctor Death.”
So maybe the story Thierry’s two jihadis had told about a bomb coming to Paris was true after all.
—
“DO WE ARREST Tariq?” Tomàs said at our 07:00 meeting that morning. “He showed up with a broken jaw a half mile from the murder site, and we know that Bruno fought back. And do we bring in Nassim, the guy with his DNA on the torn keffiyeh? For a proper interrogation?”
Despite myself I grinned at the absurdity of it. “Once you arrest these guys, you have to give them lawyers, an imam, a cell phone, copies of Penthouse to wank off with and all kinds of other goodies. And they don’t have to talk for weeks. If ever.”
“Sadly true ...” Thierry said.
“Plus we alert Mustafa and everyone else, Mack and Gisèle die, Mustafa accelerates his schedule and does a hit on the Tower or an Airbus before we can stop it ...”
I was silent a moment, took a breath. “What are the chances it would be an Airbus hit on the Tower? An actual hit?”
“Jesus, they keep trying ...”
When my phone buzzed I saw it was Mitchell and went into the corridor to take it. “Yeah?”
“You alone?”
I told him where I was.
“You’ll want to tell them –”
“Tell them what?”
“Your Iranian nuclear scientist?”
“Dr. Arawa.”
“Guess where he’s just been?”
