by Mike Bond
“Christ, Mitchell, get to the point!”
“Kahuta.”
“Oh fuck.”
“Oh fuck is right. The Khan Research labs.”
“Where the Pakis make their nukes and long-distance missiles.”
“And just like the Iranians were doing before we sabotaged theirs, Kahuta uses gas centrifuges to make HEU.”
HEU is Highly Enriched Uranium, essential to the production of nuclear bombs. “And,” I added, “those bastards gave the Taliban surface-to-air missiles to shoot down our guys in Afghanistan.” I took a breath, nauseated by the memory. “He was there?”
“Then – get this – he spent a week in Rawalpindia. Stayed at the Pyramid 2 Guest House but spent night and day at the labs ...”
“I remember the Pyramid 2,” I answered. Located just northeast of Rawalpindi’s sprawl, and about 100 km south of Abbottabad, where the Pakis were hiding Osama Bin Laden till our SEALS killed him, Rawalpindia is the Pakistan Institute of Science and Technology’s nuclear research center. They do everything from fuel cycle development to plutonium extraction. Everything you need to kill people.
And Dr. Arawa had just spent a week there.
Now he was coming to Paris.
Foreign Intelligence
“MY FRIEND,” Peter Ivanov said on the phone, his voice near as if we were in our favorite Istanbul bar trying to hook up with magnificent Turkish women. “My friend –”
“Moy droog,” I said companionably back in Russian. We had been friends for years, though at a certain frozen distance, ever since Turkey and the search for a Russian drug lord who later turned up dead in an empty yacht off the Amalfi coast.
“So why,” Peter growled, “are you being caught up in this Paris mess? When everybody knows is mess! Last I know you are surfing.”
“You hear what happened to Mack and his wife? All this stuff going down in France?”
“Is not my fault. I did not invite these bastards into France. Notice in Russia we don’t have lots of Arabs trying to blow things up.”
“You’ve got the bloody Chechnyans ...”
“Chechnya is Russia!”
“Yeah, I know. So is Madagascar, probably.”
He laughed. “Don’t want it.”
I imagined him sitting there in Moscow SVR. This incredibly tough guy with a boxer’s nose and an ardent love for Gorki, Shostakovich, Russian food and women and all the other good things of this world.
“So how are you, Peter? Does my heart good to hear your voice.”
“And mine yours. What can us backward Slavs do for you today?”
“I’m here at DGSE with Thierry St. Croix and Anne Ronsard. And Cedric Harris is on the line.”
“Hello, Thierry and Anne, nice to meet you. Hey, Cedric – how you doing?”
“Everything’s fine,” Harris grumped, and I almost laughed at how he hated being friendly with the Russians.
“Next time you’re in Paris,” Thierry said.
“Or you’re in Russia ...” Peter answered.
“We’re looking,” I broke in, “for anything you guys have on a possible missing Paki backpack. Or a copy, something new, probably built at Khan Research ...”
“Nothing from the top of my head. But we’ll look in it.”
“And anything you have on Dr. Ahmed Arawa. I know you guys have been in bed with the Iranians lately but this guy might be really bad news. Quds bombmaker. His Quds codename is Doctor Death ... I’ll send you what I have. He’s just been to Khan Research and Rawalpindia ...”
“That doesn’t sound good.”
“And,” I made this up, “he’s in touch with people you don’t like in Grozny.”
“You must send us these.”
“Shall do. But get us what you can right away. Dr. Arawa’s due in Paris in three days, so we’re moving fast. We’ve just got some nasty confirming data, this could be much bigger than what we just did for you guys in St. Pete ...”
“Every day we thank you guys for that.”
“Make it even. Give us what you can. Fast.”
“I’ll send it up the line real fast. It will come back fast. I promise.”
“You guys are so fucking organized!”
He snickered. “It is Russian, to be organized.”
—
YOU NEVER KNEW these days with SVR, the Russian external intelligence agency for which Peter Ivanov was a top guy, how much they’d help. The former KGB First Chief Directorate, SVR has a different team now, lots of very smart young women and men bilingual in languages I’ve never heard of, who can run the forty in under five seconds and have advanced training in everything from personal combat to giving great sex and parachuting behind lines.
And who are smart and fun to be with. Good drinking buddies and lissome lovely women.
Long as you remember who you’re really dealing with.
But at the top, the ones who decide everything, they’re the real deal. Pure strategic intelligence. If anyone could help us with Doctor Death and the Paki nukes it would be SVR. I could’ve asked Peter for a contact in GRU, Russian military intelligence, but he would’ve said no. And he’d know anything they know anyway. Even though they’re lots bigger than he is. And in a lot more trouble lately.
—
“THINK OF IT as a harvest,” Thierry said after we got off the phone. He tried to lean back in his chair that creaked dangerously.
“You need to get rid of that thing,” Anne snapped.
It howled as he swung forward. “... if you harvest too early, you get a few that are ripe but most are still green. If you harvest too late, everything’s mushy. If we harvest this operation at the right time, we might get it all.”
I looked at him, thinking of the lives that could be lost if we didn’t do it at the right time.
“Religious terrorism’s like cancer,” Anne said. “It changes shape, targets, goes into areas it’s never been and starts death there ... Death anywhere.”
“Like this backpack bomb,” I said tiredly. “Isn’t our job to defeat dangers before they happen?”
“Go track an asteroid,” Thierry snickered. “Before it hits us.”
I felt unreasoning fury at him, the whole deal. Incredibly weary. As if I were the only one who really wanted to stop this.
—
“HAWALA’s hard to track,” Mitchell said. “You can never get it all.”
It was noon in Paris, thus midnight in Honolulu. Once again, I felt guilty I’d asked him to do this.
“But,” he said theatrically, “I found a bit you might use ... Your friend Rachid – he whose IT folks screwed with Thierry’s bank accounts – he may have hidden income from some of the arms, oil, and pharmaceutical deals he’s helped arrange between France and Muslim countries. But it doesn’t show on any bottom line.”
The thought was abysmally fatiguing. “We don’t have the time, the energy ...”
“You don’t do it yourself,” he said. “You ask your computer to do it. That’s AI.”
“AI?”
“Artificial intelligence, peasant.”
“All intelligence is artificial.”
“We’re getting some hits.”
“Hits?”
“There seems to be a whole network of people connected to Rachid who are on this money train. Money coming in from the Middle East, politicians getting wealthy by promoting Islam’s expansion in France. And because they got wealthy they got more powerful too ...”
“Payoffs?” I muttered. “That’s going to be harder to prove. With the courts against you.”
“Why would they be against you?”
“Because they’re part of the problem.”
—
ATS DID EVERYTHING they could to triangulate Mustafa. But he kept this phone nearly always off. Then two good thi
ngs happened.
First, ATS tracked down three other numbers “associated” with this, the phone they’d picked up in his post office visit. The three new numbers were ones either Mustafa also used, or which belonged to someone often physically near him. A bodyguard? Subordinate? One of his bearded acolytes?
Second, ATS got two delayed hits after they sent him phantoms. Delayed because he kept this phone off, so the phantom message just sat there waiting till he turned on the phone.
The first was from a cell tower antenna in the Seventh Arrondissement. The second hit was within a half-mile radius of the HLM apartments in Avon where we’d missed grabbing Gisèle.
And it was a half mile from 60 Franklin Roosevelt, owned by New Hope Productions, the TV company funded by MADS, the Muslim Anti-Discrimination Society, and thus by media darling Rachid Raqmi.
“So it probably was Mustafa that I saw, on that run in the forest.”
“It’s enough to bring them in,” Anne said.
“But not to hold them,” Thierry answered. “MADS would just say they’re a charitable organization under French law, they don’t check identities of all the people they give aid to.”
“Yes,” Thierry said. “That would hold up in court.”
“Can’t be,” I said.
“Thierry’s right,” Anne said. “Forty years of socialism has filled the courts with judges who believe that criminal acts are due to social causes, and that punishment only makes it worse.”
“And now we’re letting people out because we have no more jail cells,” Thierry said. “Already we have the most overpopulated prisons in Europe. And because jails cause crime, we’re not going to build any more.”
Nothing new there. But now we had more possible phones to track, could narrow Mustafa down every time he used one. Till we could go in for the kill.
I wouldn’t miss him this time.
The Field of Mars
“BE READY,” the new fax said, Gisèle’s same unwilling backward script. “Starting tomorrow Pono must be ready for the exchange at any time 24 hours a day. After he is contacted he should make no calls or messages or emails or other connections with anyone. My keepers will know if he disobeys and they will kill me. They will contact him by calling twice with one ring on his DGSE cell, then a third time twice. Then the fourth time he must answer. If that is not acceptable my keepers will kill me.”
“There’s no trial run,” I said. “If I don’t show up they kill her, right there.”
Thierry nodded. “Probably.”
“Don’t be so sure,” Anne put in.
I wanted to snap at her, tell her nothing’s sure, but we both already knew that. Like nothing’s sure about what would happen if I made the exchange. Except we’d all be dead.
Had to be a way to rescue of Gisèle without everybody getting killed.
Had to be a way.
It depended where they wanted to do the exchange. It would be whatever worked best for them. And what was most difficult for me.
Had to be a way.
—
“THE EXCHANGE will be near Mustafa,” Thierry said. “So he can intervene, if necessary.”
Anne turned to me. “He’s going to want to personally ID you.”
“At that point I’ll have no weapons – I’ll be screwed.”
“In Fontainebleau,” Thierry persisted. “Or Les Andelys.”
“Or La République. Or Seine-St. Denis ...”
“For them that’s the smartest,” Anne said. “On every street there’d be a hundred guns aimed at us.”
“We have to say no,” Thierry sighed. “To whatever they offer. Till we get something we can work with.”
Anne huffed. “Good luck.”
—
“THE DEAD MAN’S WIFE,” Tomàs said. “She came in and our guys showed her some pix.”
“That was nice of them,” I said stupidly, too tired to care.
“No one she knew except one guy,” he said teasingly.
“Okay, okay ...”
“You’ve met him, I think. Sort of.”
“C’mon, out with it.”
“Our hero, the head of MADS.”
“What?” I was suddenly awake. “Rachid?”
“She says maybe a month ago, he came in one night. Shook some hands, chattered a bit in Arabic and walked out.”
“Chattered with who?”
“Bunch of guys. She couldn’t identify any of them. Said it was like some kind of politician, visiting his public.”
“Nothing we can use?”
“Nah. Just more background.”
—
MY EXCHANGE for Gisèle would happen at any time starting tomorrow. When soon after I might be dead. What was important, in these last hours? The kids and Mamie.
We jumped on the Indian and tore out of Paris past St. Germain-en-Laye, then Mantes like a bad ghetto one can soon barely remember.
Lyons-la-Forêt is only 65 miles from Paris but another world. Viking land where thousands of years of war has created tough survivors. In the middle of Normandy, the Forest of Lyons was what remained of the ancient oak wilderness that once covered northern Europe with a canopy so tall and vast that when Julius Caesar and his legions trekked from Paris to the Rhine they did not see the sun for forty days.
Today Lyons la-Forêt has still a bit of that: beautiful glades in all directions over undulating hills and wide verdant valleys broken here and there by wheat fields green in the lustful spring sun.
Cousin Claudine’s was a 350-acre goat farm of mixed fields and forests, an ancient, toppling stone barn and late medieval house with a Norman tower standing over it like a watchful timeworn knight.
Beside the barn a cage of snails ready for the saucepot, a vast chicken house, expansive goose and turkey pens, and behind it rolling pastures where goats grazed on spring grass.
The kitchen was at the back on the ground floor, yard-wide paving stones, a huge black woodstove. It smelled of oak smoke and fresh herbs. Everything was cavernous – the height of the gnarled oak beams, each ancient foot-worn stone, the spiral oak staircase ascending into darkness, the souls of all the humans who’d lived here nearly a thousand years. Every fear and sorrow, every joy and full stomach, every runny nose, sad death, and wonderful orgasm. All here, in these cold stone walls.
Till now I’d had little time with Julie and André, and then they’d seemed distant and shy. But now, perhaps due to their relative isolation (Anne had decided not to put them in the local school because Mustafa’s people might somehow be able to trace it), they took my hand and showed me the farm, introducing me to goats, chickens, an old mare whose back they climbed on together, an irritable donkey and lots of gobbling turkeys.
As I looked down on Julie’s glowing pigtails and André’s short dark hair and felt the warmth of their small hands in mine, I realized I was beginning to care deeply about them. And fear for their safety.
We had dinner in the old kitchen, nettle soup then fresh raw goat cheese on lettuce that half an hour ago was in the ground, then lamb so tender and juicy it reminded me of what meat used to taste like, with beets, broccoli, and all that other funny green crap they grow here too.
Cousine Claudine I loved right away, as if we shared ancient roots. White hair clipped page-boy short, a wrinkled sunny broad face with sharp black eyes and a humorous twist to a wide mouth.
The food came in an avalanche, each course punctuated by the Norman trou, a shot of hundred-proof calvados that goes down like fire and reduces to ash anything you already ate.
The oak smoke, marjoram and rosemary, granite air and goat manure odor from the barn and the memory inherent in these ancient stones all told me that if we survive the Hell we’re in we too can live like this.
Just love each other and be happy.
Anne was an angel from a 16th cent
ury Dutch painting sitting with her children on a wooden bench in the medieval stone kitchen – the slant of her head and tumbling mahogany hair against an ancient window’s golden sunset – she was the Madonna, Priestess of Life, the eternal mother’s transcendent love, her subconscious gift beneath that love like the subterranean rivers that feed a valley. How could I refuse the joy that soared through me just to see her sitting with one arm around each child? Most of all I wished her husband could be there, as they too wished. But knowing he could not, and that he would want me to love his wife because he wanted her to be happy, I felt happy too, and deeply wished I’d known him. Wished that I’d been their friend. Now, if I cared for his children? Tried to give them what he would?
That was enough for me.
How good to live like this, in the depth of love and understanding. Which made me even more determined to come out of this horror with everything we could.
—
HOUR AND A HALF LATER we were back at the Place du Commerce and half asleep when Stranger dropped in off the roof.
He checked the kitchen and hopped on the bed giving us an annoyed patient look. We’d come home late and not put out his dinner. But as a good friend he pretended not to mind. Sat licking his left front paw as if that’s what he did every night at eleven-thirty. “Liar,” I told him, and fell back asleep.
—
“I KNOW WHERE he is!” Anne sprang up in bed staring out the window at the Tower’s half-lit skeleton.
“Who?” I sat up looking around.
“Mustafa. Just saw him. Dream.” She slipped naked in the moonlight from the bed to the window.
I shook my head trying to wake up. “Where?”
“Champ de Mars. Walking up an alley of trees, staring up at the Tower.”
We scrambled into our clothes, grabbed our guns and mikes, ran downstairs to the Beast and raced the wrong way up Rue du Commerce to La Motte-Picquet and pulled over on a side street right off the Champ de Mars.
“You want to call Thierry?” I said.
“Not for a dream,” Anne huffed, looking nasty and pissed off in black leather, black sweats, black Kinvaras, a black Glock under her jacket and her black hair all tangled with sleep.
