Goodbye Paris

by Mike Bond

  “No shit,” he said.

  I leaned over him, trying to hear after the blast. “No shit what?”

  “Not made in Pakistan. From Iran.”

  “I don’t give a fuck where from. Kill it!”

  He yanked a phone from his vest, pushed in a few buttons and set it beside the main power line in the transponder. “Leave it there twenty seconds,” he said. “Scramble its brain.”

  He glanced round the car, the towering darkness outside, the lights of the city far below, then at me. “This isn’t the easiest job.”

  I looked down at dead Mustafa, the scrambled transponder. “I’m tired of it.”

  He smiled into my eyes. A knowledge shared that no one else has. Most of the time I don’t even know it’s there. But it links us all in ways I can’t deny.

  Sometimes I think it’s worth it just for that.

  Dizzy, I took a breath, caught myself. “Never again,” he said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Maybe never again.”

  Tell the Gods

  ANNE GRABBED ME as I stepped off the elevator.

  “Get him to a hospital,” the cop said.

  “The plane’s climbing!” Thierry yelled. “Back on airport approach.”

  I looked up at the silvery dark clouds. There, rising over Paris, the beautiful white needle of an Airbus gaining altitude, heading north toward CDG.

  “What about the nuke?” I said.

  “Doctor Death has one small carryon. No luggage, no bomb.”

  The bomb was a feint, had always been. There had been the transponder to pull the plane off course and into the Tower. I put my head down, from weariness, sorrow, relief and joy.

  Anne held me. In my whole life I wondered if I’d ever been so happy.

  Thierry hugged us. “Thank God,” he whispered. “Thank God.”

  “What about Doctor Death?” I said.

  “There’s fifty GIGN waiting for him at the airport.”

  “They should kill him.”

  He laughed. “Not till we learn everything.”

  “We need to get you to a hospital,” Anne snapped. “Your shoulder’s bleeding. And that arm –”

  I looked at it. It dangled down like a broken bough. Then the pain really hit.

  —

  NISA CALLED as I arrived at Bichat Hospital right off the Péréphérique. They tore off my shirt and swabbed the bullet crease in my left shoulder. One orthopedist after another tried inserting the right arm back into the shoulder but nothing worked. I asked for vodka and morphine and though they didn’t have the first they gave me a lot of the second.

  “I can’t believe,” Nisa said on my phone, her voice hoarse, “that you survived.”

  “We’ve been lucky.” The intravenous morphine was hitting and I was in less pain and in love with the world. Most of it anyway.

  “And up on the Tower, you didn’t die ...” She cleared her throat. “You know, Pono, we live here, my husband and I and our kids, we’re immigrants. This is a free country. There are no free Muslim countries. Here there is freedom, and opportunity if you work hard and are honest and care for others. That’s why we came, or our parents did. We feel very grateful to be here ... It’s awful when people come and hate it.”

  “Yeah. Things need to change,” I said stupidly.

  She gave a soft, sad chuckle. “Isn’t it funny that so many of us try so hard to make a better world and it never happens.”

  “Yes it does happen, Nisa. All the time. You make it happen.”

  We said our goodbyes. My brain, flooded with morphine and the ecstatic release from pain, filled with emotion. I felt grace and joy for my life, for Anne, her kids, Mack and Gisèle, Thierry, Nisa, Tomàs, all of us in the merry-go-round of danger and fear we’d just been through. And Harris, too, in his own way.

  Two of the orthopedists were conferring worriedly in the corridor. A very young woman, slender and barely five-two, came down the corridor and broke into the conversation. She looked so young I figured she was what in the States we call a Candy Striper – someone who volunteers at the hospital in hopes of making medicine her career.

  She came up to me. She had blonde hair, freckles and very blue eyes. She took my arm. “I’m going to raise it to ninety degrees,” she said.

  Wait a minute, I started to say but she already had my arm at ninety. “This may hurt.” She grasped my biceps hard in both hands and with a nasty twist wrenched it back into the socket.

  I sat, almost knocked out by the pain. She looked down at me. “You need to stop doing this.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Dislocating the damn thing.” She turned to the orthopedists. “You have to give it that twist,” she said, “as the head of the humerus meets the coracoid process. Usually with multiple dislocations like this guy, the humerus is abraded and will slip back out again.”

  I sat on the edge of the bed like I’d been visited by angels. Anne came up and gave me a gentle smack upside the head. “Get your eyes off her ass.”

  “Who the Hell is she?”

  “She’s the new trauma surgeon. Only been here a week.”

  They wanted to give me a room for the rest of the night but I demurred. A cindery dawn was paling across the eastern rooftops when Anne and I got home and fed Stranger, who was as usual annoyed at our erratic hours. We tumbled naked on the bed wanting to make love but fell asleep first, holding each other.

  For the first time since I’d met her, Anne was safe. Julie and André too. And I had to remember that Mack and Gisèle were alive and free. And Mustafa dead.

  But Rachid and his millions of smarmy acolytes were still out there festering. Ready to pay us all back for our sins.

  —

  GISÈLE AND MACK were having none of this rescued hostage kid-glove treatment. By the time we got to the clinic the next day they’d tried to check out and Harris had had to intervene with threats of reducing Mack to a mail carrier in rural Nebraska (“God, that sounds wonderful,” Mack had said). Before the unmarked car came to take them home, Anne and I sat with them holding hands and fighting back the tears.

  They each had their own horror stories from the last two weeks. The day I’d arrived in Paris, barely two weeks ago, I’d gone right away to see Gisèle when she told me on the phone that Mack was gone. But after I’d left her at their apartment she’d gotten a call that DGSE was sending a technician to check her place for bugs. When he rang the bell she checked his badge through the safety eyehole and let him in. Another guy jumped in behind him and they pinned her down, taped her mouth, cuffed her and punched a needle into her that stung horribly for a few instants, then she was out in the universe somewhere, then in a dark room with no window and voices in Arabic through the walls.

  At first Mack was there too. They’d tied him to a chair bolted to the floor while she was pinned on a table before him and raped by whoever wanted to. A man would come in and drop his pants and say to Mack, “Tell us who your contact is in Les Andelys and we won’t fuck her anymore ... If we keep this up we’re going to destroy her cunt ...”

  Then Mack was taken away and she was alone, left to lie on the floor at night shivering, trying to stay warm.

  They gave her different drugs and brought Mack back. “We are taking you away,” said the young man she’d named Evil because of his pitiless eyes above his black keffiyeh. They tied Mack to the table where she’d been raped, and with a quick jerk of a knife Evil cut off Mack’s right big toe. Mack gasped, tried not to cry out. “This is what we do to him, piece by piece,” Evil said. “If you don’t do exactly what we say.”

  It was then they took her to Melun to withdraw the funds, then to the HLM in Avon which, she had deduced, was to be a new safe house till suddenly they got a call and spirited her away.

  We never found Evil.

  —

  MACK KNEW MOR
E than Gisèle. “Yasmina was coming over to us,” he said. “I picked her up that morning at St. Lazare train station in Paris. I’d gotten her out of St. Denis and put her with a non-fundamentalist family in that building in Les Andelys, and now I was taking her to DGSE, because I was afraid the Les Andelys place was blown. But nobody knew this; I didn’t tell Harris or anyone at DGSE because I knew we had a leak somewhere, and that she might be killed if anyone found out where she was.”

  “What was her link to Mustafa? To Rachid?”

  “We’ll never know. Rachid won’t tell us and everyone else is dead. But she’d known about Rachid, of course. And that Mustafa was back.”

  “How’d she get into all this?”

  “That?” Mack pursed his lips. “I don’t know much, but she’d come from Reims, her parents moved to Seine St. Denis six years ago, the father deserted them, got ‘married’ by the Stains imam to this fourteen-year old girl – younger than Yasmina at the time ... She got stuck in a squat with some guys who’d attacked a bank and also had killed some Jews but we couldn’t pin anything on them ... That’s how I found out about her ... She’d never taken part in any of it. I thought I could turn her.”

  “Did you?”

  “Sort of. Like I said, she didn’t like the violence, then the other mass killings by other Islamic groups ... I followed her one day in the Métro, convinced her to take shelter with this family in Les Andelys ... you know the rest.”

  “Did she hit you?”

  “Hell no. They surrounded us in the St. Lazare parking lot, had guns on us, hit her then me. That’s what I remember.”

  “That’s why her blonde-dyed hair showed up on the back of your seat?”

  “What? I didn’t know that.”

  I saw Yasmina clearly in my mind, her pretty, intelligent face, her feminine toughness. It hurt. “Why did she hate us so much?”

  “Maybe she realized she’d been compromised and was going to die? Felt we’d betrayed her ... by incompetence, if nothing else.” He glanced down. “Which is true –”

  “You ever see Mustafa, when you and Gisèle were held? Rachid?”

  “Rachid never. Mustafa twice.”

  “What’d he do?”

  “Said he was going to get you too, then we’d go to Hell together.”

  “Is that why he grabbed you? Because you’d once escaped? Then why Gisèle?”

  “I don’t know,” he said tiredly. “To make me more cooperative? No. Maybe he was afraid I’d told her something.”

  “And the Airbus, the backpack nuke?”

  “Never mentioned them.”

  My mind foundered in it. Had Mustafa feared Mack was closing in on him? That Yasmina might know too much?

  Or was it someone on the political side, in the government? Like the insiders who alerted Gisèle’s captors that we were descending on them in Avon? Who’d nailed the Mack/Yasmina hookup at Gare St. Lazare? And maybe even the hit on Anne that killed the Romanian girl. And Bruno’s murder?

  If so, was it a message to Thierry? Keep your soldier’s hands out of this. Think of your future. Your family. The truth doesn’t matter – get over it. Either join the future or die with the past.

  It would take time to pick up the pieces. One by one, in stupid, repetitive, mind-numbing detail.

  Why Anne and I had been led on such a merry car chase by Abdel and the other three, we learned it had been indeed a dry run, to measure the shortest time from St. Denis to the Tower.

  Mustafa was dead and thus difficult to interrogate, but we decided he’d been on a training run with the backpack when I’d followed him and his buddy through the forest to meet with Rachid. Maybe if they’d had a backpack nuke, Fontainebleau was where they’d have hid it. And maybe if we dragged Rachid back in we could learn more. Though the chances were slim.

  —

  IT HAD BEEN Rachid’s voice I’d heard on the phone in the St. Denis warehouse, talking with Abdel and the other guy I’d shot, who turned out to be one of the ones Anne and I had chased in the Beast during the crazy late-night race to the Eiffel Tower. It took Tomàs no time to line up the phone calls; Rachid had stupidly used one of the phones we’d already traced.

  When GIGN rooted him out of bed at 4 a.m. Rachid had been furious and profane; as a leader of moderate Muslims in France he was being victimized by France’s Islamophobic government. By eleven that morning, when Anne and I crawled out of bed after a refreshing three-hour nap, he had already lined up four celebrity lawyers, all who’d offered to take his case for free.

  By noon a “Justice for Rachid Raqmi Committee” had been formed, led by several media darlings and representatives from the literary elite, as well as the usual gaggle of Socialists, anarchists, anti-Semites, university types, other “progressive” Islamic leaders and imams. Including, of course, Élysée Pétain and her fourth husband, the Senator Honoré de Montgonad.

  When Élysée was asked by a courageous journalist if she thought there was any possible truth to the charges brought against Rachid, she huffed that the whole thing was a poorly organized campaign of false attacks and racist smearing by the Islamophobic police.

  “It’s going to be hard to prosecute him,” Thierry said. “His lawyers will challenge everything ...”

  “But he was on the phone with Abdel telling him to kill Mack. We heard it. He may have ordered the murder of Bruno, he’d been the brains behind Mustafa’s attack on the Tower, all this other stuff ...”

  “Tell it to the gods.”

  —

  BY 18:00 RACHID had been released and had addressed a cheering crowd denouncing “French police fascism and criminal acts against Muslims” and various other atrocities. Filmed live by Élysée herself.

  According to the government, Mustafa had never shown up in France, and it was to be announced weeks later that he’d died in one of the last ISIS battles in Syria. After I’d killed him in the elevator car and the GIGN guy had shut down the transponder, we stopped at the second floor where his body was removed.

  As for the guy I’d shot on the Tower, the police had tried to save a mentally ill man who had climbed to beneath the first floor then leaped off. So far he had not been identified. None of us had ever seen him.

  He’d been a very good climber, fast and fearless, physically and emotionally very strong. In a way it almost made me feel connected – not only because I’d killed him, but because he was a little bit like me.

  One more of many things I didn’t want to think about.

  There was a feverish fuss in the media that Rachid never would have been arrested if he hadn’t been a Muslim and a public figure for moderate Islam. Donations to his legal fund tripled as did condemnations of police fascism and racism.

  As Tomàs had once said, “You have to see it as comedy. Or you go crazy.”

  Soon, though, I’d come back for Rachid. I knew just the swamp in Fontainebleau Forest to put him in. Though I’d have to watch out for the skunk.

  Three Women Again

  “YOU’RE PISSED OFF, I know,” Harris said. “You’re exhausted and you’ve been through Hell and come out the other side saving two of the best people on this planet and killing the worst one. And saving the Tower and a plane full of people, by the way. But it should only take you a day or two to get over that.”

  I breathed out slowly. Even the tiger can smell the pit. “Where Anne and I are going, I’ll send you pix.”

  “She’s going to want to come back.” His voice grew softer, confiding. “To hunt the men who killed her husband ... I expect you’ll help her find them. And I expect you might find out if those men had a link with Rachid Raqmi.”

  “Do you think that?” I had to ask.

  “Who’s to know? There’s so many S-List terrorists in France ... Though we all know the real number of potential terrorists is at least twice that ... They’re dispersed, there’s no head
of the Hydra, they’re not all connected – how do you find the top?”

  “You saying it’s insoluble?”

  He sighed, looked out his window. “That’s what Cazeneuve says.” Cazeneuve was the Minister of the Interior, France’s “top cop”, who’d recently quit the president’s cabinet over frustration with its pro-Islamic approach. “He says we have five, maybe six years before it will completely overwhelm France –”

  “Then what?” I had to ask.

  “Get a boat and start rowing.”

  “For England?” I laughed. “A Muslim mayor in London? Thousands of mosques sprouting up everywhere? They’re already fucked.”

  “For the other side of the pond.”

  I almost laughed again. “Rachid isn’t the top.”

  “The French don’t even know where the top is. How can you cut off a head” – he raised his hands – “if you can’t find it?”

  This was too much theory. “So what do you want?”

  “Remember the shit you gave me that we don’t have a good network in France?”

  “You don’t.”

  “When you come back, why not do it? For our country? Build me a network I can rely on. Good people, brave, tough ... You know the kind.”

  “Not without the French.”

  “Huh?”

  “I don’t do anything behind their back. And make sure they stay straight with us.”

  “Of course, of course. That’s in the fabric of the thing ...” He gave me a conspiratorial grin, or as close as he could fake it. “I was wrong, early on, thinking there was no link between Mustafa and the grab of Mack and Gisèle ... If we’d had better folks on the street, maybe I would’ve known?”

  I smiled, thinking of the climb I was going to do up Mount Pélé in Martinique with Julie and André. This huge green volcano in hailing rain. Because it always rains up there. How to climb it, one muddy and wind-ripped step at a time.

  Easier than dealing with Harris.

  I had tried to forgive him for sending me to Leavenworth but couldn’t. His argument that my crime was killing the Afghani girl’s husband didn’t hold water: the husband had burned her alive and deserved to die. And if it hadn’t been for that brilliant West Point grad who got me out, I’d be in Leavenworth still.