by Mike Bond
“Where’s Mack?” I whispered.
“They had us together, I think Saint-Denis.”
“How could you tell?”
“Cathedral bells. Maybe a mile. North north-east.”
“Where’s Mustafa?”
“Not here.”
I pulled her up. “Wait!” She tore a strip off the dead man’s shirt, grabbed two empty plastic water bottles off the floor.
“What the fuck?” I snapped.
“DNA.”
We eased up the stairs to the courtyard and out a side gate to the exterior moat, where 800 years ago hundreds of people had starved to death in the French siege. On the open slope below four headlamps were dashing back and forth.
They’d be watching the Beast so we couldn’t chance it. Instead we slipped and slid down through the sumacs and young oaks of the near-vertical slopes below the castle, and reached the main road out of town where I got Anne on the phone.
“You’re alive!” she kept saying, “Oh Christ you’re alive. And Gisèle too ... Mon Dieu ... Where’s Mack?”
“Two days ago they had him in what Gisèle thinks is an industrial building maybe in Seine-St. Denis.”
“Parameters?”
“She could hear cathedral bells. Half a mile maybe. North north-east.”
“Lemme talk to her.”
I handed Gisèle the phone. Anne’s excited voice and Gisèle saying, “God bless you, thank you ... Yes, I think it was an industrial building ... No, nothing else I can think of ... Except ...”
I watched her, intense. Knew this was something.
“A bus went by. During the morning every seventeen minutes. I counted the time with my heartbeat. Then in the middle of the day thirty-five minutes. Late afternoon till maybe seven, every nine minutes ... Don’t know if that helps.”
Anne’s voice was ecstatic. “Of course it helps!”
“Other people lived there too,” Gisèle went on, “like it was a squat?”
“Tomàs’ll find it,” Anne said. “Then we move in.”
“Go in fast and quiet,” Gisèle said. “Don’t let him die now.”
“Remember,” Anne asked me when Gisèle handed me back the phone, “when I said Take tomorrow off?”
“Of course.”
“He’s coming for you. A 2004 green Citroën Xsara. We’ll let you know what we learn. If it’s a takedown we’ll do it fast, before they know what we know.”
Seven minutes later Take tomorrow off arrived and we stepped out of the shadows by the municipal swimming pool. A seedy guy about thirty-five wearing the OGC Nice shirt, who didn’t say a word the whole way. In the back I held Gisèle’s hand but didn’t dare say much in case the guy spoke English, she squeezing my fingers in affection and pain, tears trickling down her bruised cheeks.
Now all I could think about was stopping Mustafa before he killed Mack.
Small Pleasure
“WE’RE MOVING FAST,” Thierry said. “131 Rue Beaumont in Stains, two blocks from the Al Rawda mosque.”
I turned to watch out the car window at our slow progress on the Autoroute. “They’ll have a hundred assault rifles in that block. We go in hard we’ll get shot to pieces.”
He sighed agreement, a gravelly fatigue, trying to get it up for one last battle.
“Thierry,” I said, “we have to win this one.”
“Mustafa doesn’t know we know about this. Thanks to Gisèle’s amazing self-control and memory. So if Mack’s there ...”
Thierry was the team-leader at exfils. When we had guys down or missing he took over, with his particular intensity and lack of fear. With Thierry we never lost an MIA.
Not once.
Now he had to do it again.
“We go in quick with flashbangs and everything else and hope to save him ...” His voice waned, or maybe it was just the traffic as our wordless driver left the Route Nationale for the A13 toll highway.
“Or?” I waited.
“Or we try this new technique. Put everyone to sleep. Then go in.”
I hadn’t heard of this. “Don’t ask,” Thierry said. “Let me decide.”
“What you think?” I said to Anne.
She had to yell over the roar of the Indian. “We can’t risk a big crowd. I’ll go in first.”
I realized she’d get killed, right when we were close to winning.
“Wait for me!” I snarled.
“I’ll be there first!”
“Mustafa, suppose he’s there?”
“He knows by now you escaped,” she said. “And you’re trying to find Mack ...”
“But he doesn’t know we know where Mack is –”
“So I go in fast.”
“Pono, where are you?” Thierry said.
I looked out the window. “Mantes.”
“Grab the A14 north of Paris to the A86 and we’ll meet you in Stains.”
“Ten minutes, we’ll be there.”
“Ten minutes,” Anne said over the Indian’s howl. “Me too.”
“Don’t go in by yourself,” I said.
“Fuck you.”
What if I not only didn’t save Mack, but lost Anne? I pulled a dirty trick. “Julie and André, they going to like growing up alone?”
“Fuck you!” she repeated, and I could tell by her sharp voice she was driving too fast, trying to get there before me.
“Wait for us,” Thierry snapped, but she’d signed off.
“I want you doing 180!” I yelled at our driver in French. “I want you there in seven minutes!”
—
AN OLD tattered warehouse from the 1950s, back when this area was part of France. We pulled in a block away. The streets ahead were dark.
23:20. It seemed the night had lasted forever and it wasn’t even midnight. I called Anne. “Where are you?”
“Two blocks away. Parked the bike. Coming.”
Lights in three warehouse windows. A smell of meat cooking over a fire, chatter of Arabic radio.
“They don’t have a clue,” I whispered.
“Who doesn’t?” Gisèle said anxiously.
“We’re on our way,” Thierry answered. “Wait for us.”
“Stay in the car. I’ll send people to get you,” I told Gisèle, got out and bent to the driver’s window. “Stay with her.”
Anne came up beside me, nodded at the warehouse. “Let’s go in.”
She was all in black Kevlar, Garand in her hand.
I felt intense, perfectly on target.
“Don’t either of us die,” she said.
There was no front door. We ducked inside and stepped carefully across a cavernous dark area littered with refuse to a dark metal stairway where the cooked meat smell and Arabic radio was coming from.
I had a feeling it might work, but that I might die. That it was out of our control.
I eased softly down the metal stairs, Anne ten feet behind me. She had the automatic rifle so she’d take care of crowds while I dealt with finding Mack and killing Mustafa.
It wasn’t Arabic radio but two men arguing on a speakerphone with someone. In an open space that seemed in firelight to have hangar doors on the left and office doors on the right. “How do you know?” one yelled. “How do you know they don’t know?”
The fire was of broken pallet wood in the middle of the floor, two other men holding chunks of mutton over it, a dead sheep half-disemboweled behind them.
The voice I’d just heard was familiar from the surveillance tapes. Abdel, Mustafa’s buddy from St. Denis.
“Kill the one you have,” the phone voice said. “Before things get worse.”
“Mustafa, he wants the other American first ... What he always wanted. Now that we have this one ...”
“Tell him we don’t always get everything we wis
h, even if we’re good Muslims. Even if we do jihad and kill the infidel. Kill this one you have, and Allah will reward you.” The voice on the phone I now recognized too: Rachid. “Since,” he went on, “you let the wife get away.”
“She was a slut,” Abdel said. “Everyone fucked her.”
“Did you?”
“Of course. In front of the husband. We all did.”
“Thank Allah for that small pleasure. Kill the husband now and take the escape route we’ve given you. Tell Mustafa not to worry, he will kill the other American some other day. Allah will bring him to him.”
I could make them out now, Abdel and another hunched over a cell phone in the chiaroscuro of firelight against concrete.
Plus two others at the fire.
“Let’s kill him now,” one of the voices at the fire called. “And get out of here.”
Abdel and the other man with the phone were still arguing with Rachid so it was easy to come up on them. I shot them both in the head from twenty yards, Anne’s automatic rifle picked up the two at the fire and tumbled them halfway across the room.
I sprinted to the first office door and kicked it down. Nothing.
The second. Nothing.
Mack lay in the third, on his side on the floor, wrists and ankles tied. I thought he was dead, till he spoke, voice harsh with pain.
“You asshole,” he groaned. “Why’d it take you so long?”
Prey
“THE PLANE FROM TEHERAN,” Tomàs said on the radio, “Doctor Death’s not on it.”
“Where is he?” Thierry said. He’d arrived just after we’d sent Mack and Gisèle in an unmarked ambulance to a safe-house clinic in Neuilly. We were huddled outside the warehouse in a kaleidoscope of flashing lights while the forensics and other folks went in and out taking pictures and samples and putting little yellow numbered cones by each spent cartridge.
“They don’t know,” Tomàs said.
“They?”
“Teheran. And I don’t think they’re lying.”
“You believe them?” Harris’s voice rattled the radio. We’d called him instantly to say Mack and Gisèle were safe. “Turn the plane back,” he said.
“Our folks say no,” Thierry countered. “Teheran cleared the passenger list. Asking the plane to turn back is a provocation. And with billions in oil and weapons deals in up in the air right now between France and Iran because of American boycotts – even Renault factories – our government sees their point.”
“It’s your damn Tower,” Harris said. “Your damn city.”
I imagined the plane descending over the Seine, past the blackened shell of Notre Dame, La Conciergerie, the Louvre, the Concorde, the Tower rising above straight ahead, the two pilots in the cockpit raging and desperate: nothing they could do would change anything.
“Can’t you send up Rafales,” I said, “to block it?”
“You want we shoot it down, with two hundred seventy people? And hundreds more on the ground? For maybe nothing?”
“If the bomb hits CDG, a small nuke won’t do much damage to Paris,” I said. “Won’t take down the Tower.”
“It’ll wreck everything north of Paris for a thousand years, and kill a million people.”
It was insane to compare likely deaths, to choose the fewest possible.
Thierry’s phone rang. He listened a minute, said, “Okay,” and hung up. He looked down at the phone a moment, then up at us. “Doctor Death is on that plane.”
“How?” Anne stuttered. “What?”
“Turns out Marcus Sulla has a Quds file.”
I felt furious we hadn’t figured this out before. Tried to think of everything we had to do. “How long we got?”
“Ninety minutes. At most.”
“You have to scramble interception!” I insisted.
“No.” He seemed lost in thought, came back to us. “Government thinks we’re crying wolf. That we’re anti-Islamic, causing trouble and getting in the way of multiculturalism.”
I sat on a wall looking through the treetops and smog to the clouds over Paris, all ablaze with city lights.
When my phone buzzed it was Tomàs again. “You know the latest?” I started to say.
“Forget that, we got the real deal. A camera on La Motte-Picquet caught a guy who looks like Mustafa. Headed toward the Tower with a big backpack.”
Breathing deep, I tried to think. “How big a backpack?”
“Big enough for a small bomb. Or a transponder with a foldout antenna.”
Like the backpack Mustafa had been carrying when I followed him through Fontainebleau Forest. “See you there.”
“Wait for me!” Anne yelled.
“Where’s your damn bike?”
We roared from the warehouse across Seine St. Denis to the Seventh and Avenue Rapp three blocks from the Tower. “Maybe it’s not him,” she said, out of breath. “Just some tourist with a backpack.”
I glanced up at the Tower brazen with lights. Turned my half-blinded eyes back to the Champ, a sea of pathways like a blurry black-and-white film. Mustafa could be anywhere out there. With his evil weapon ready to bring death down on the world.
Anne and I split up as we had the night before, one on each side of the Champ. “If you grab him,” Thierry said on the radio, “and that backpack’s live it’ll blow us all to kingdom come.”
“Is it a bomb, or a transponder to bring the plane in?” In my earbud I could hear Anne breathing, the rustle of her clothes, her quickening footsteps. And in the background Thierry’s quiet inhalations, the scrape of cloth on leather.
“I’ve warned the Tower guards, the Army Sentinelles,” Thierry said. “Everyone’s looking for him. Got three squads of RAID on the way.”
“Where’s the plane?”
“On its way.”
The city hushed, darkened, the air damp and foul. The streets lonely and miserable, empty of promise. A cop car wailed, faraway; another answered.
I returned to La Motte-Picquet, named for the French admiral whose navy helped the new United States win the Revolutionary War.
—
TO HUNT A DANGEROUS PERSON is traumatic. Not only was I hunting someone who could kill me, wanted to kill me, could kill many people tonight, maybe this whole city, if we didn’t stop him. I reassured myself that there were two hundred other very well-trained folks here who would probably be the ones to catch or kill him. But I felt somehow it was going to come down to me and him.
And it’s traumatic because you’re trying to kill someone. As in all battle moments – those most horrible of times – you fear instant death, or a gory one, and you hunger to kill to end this fear.
It takes years off your life. My Pa died of it. It’s acid in the gut, a dry mouth and loss of breath, a savoring of every moment heightened by the deadly knowledge of how fast it could end.
From weeks of little sleep and frequent risk I was so tired it felt like death. A transcendent zone like an overdose of those pills the Army gives you to fight without sleep. Everything’s in a white light and very clear and you can see danger on the other side of a wall – you feel it. Not just sight and sound and touch but you actually feel it.
High on the drug of danger, to oneself and the world. You walk a razor edge over an indefinable height, a grand canyon of death, your prey on the same razor edge.
At Avenue Duquesne I saw a tall guy with a backpack duck into the Café des Officiers opposite École Militaire. I dashed across Duquesne against the light getting nearly smacked by a rampant taxi.
I couldn’t see the inside through the café’s misted windows. Two double glass doors faced the patio of empty tables and chairs. No way to get inside without being seen.
But no reason to call Thierry till I verified this. Because by the time everybody showed up my prey would be gone.
In my throat tha
t sweet taste of danger and revenge. A savoring mixed with fear. I checked the Glock – ready. The knife – good.
I looked down the side alley, keeping my eye on the front. Three quarters of the way down was the vertical black block of a doorway. At the end of the alley a brick wall: anyone coming out that door would have to turn this way, toward the front.
Palm loosely over the Glock under my black jacket, I eased the glass door open and slipped into the room. It was large and well-lit, forty tables maybe, mostly four or six chairs, a few large booths in the back, and tables for two along the windows.
Three people at a booth, gray-haired, overweight. Tourists. A couple at a window table holding hands across a clutter of wine and brandy glasses. A black waiter in a white smock, fatigue on his face as he stood over a table of four while one of them punched a code into his card reader.
Where was my guy? The backpack? No one at the cash register. Voices in the back kitchen, dishwashing machines and clatter.
No backpack near the loving couple. None by the booth of three tourists. I stepped around a chair for a better look at the table of four. Nothing there.
“Restaurant is closed, Monsieur,” the waiter said.
Could my guy have gone out the back that fast? I raced outside to the head of the alley: no one. Dashed back inside. “Monsieur,” the waiter said. “The restaurant is closed.”
“Looking for someone.” I pushed through swinging doors into a kitchen awash with sudden light and stainless steel. Two guys at the sinks, another putting something in the refrigerator, all in kitchen hats.
I ran back to the main room. The waiter was at the register, raising his hands to chase me out.
“Where are you?” Thierry said into my earbud.
“Cop!” I told the waiter, showed my DGSE badge. “I’m at La Motte-Picquet and Duquesne,” I said to Thierry. “Guy went into this café with a backpack. Vanished.”
“Idiot, you should’ve called. I’ll send some folks.”
“I’m coming!” Anne broke in.
A door flashed open at the back of the room. Toilets. A tall dark young woman with black pigtails, carrying a backpack. A wandering tourist washing up for a night on a bench somewhere, under a blanket in a doorway, over a Métro grate.
