Liberation Day (15 page)

We’d come into France at different times, but had been operating as a team for the last four days. I alone knew how to contact George. Anything they didn’t need to know I wouldn’t be telling them, just in case they ended up hanging upside down as a nice man read them their horoscopes with a length of two-by-four on the soles of their feet.

Even though I hardly knew these guys, I couldn’t help liking them. It was obvious that they knew each other well, and they made me feel as if I’d been sort of adopted by them. But operational security was something we all understood and, fuck it, I’d never see them again after Sunday, so we weren’t exactly aiming to be friends for life.

In preparation for this job I’d cut the TAOR (tactical area of responsibility) into three areas, allocating one for each of us to familiarize himself with in depth, or at least as much as we could in such a short time. Then we had a day in each other’s areas. Hubba-Hubba had to recce the area from Monaco to the west side of Nice, ending at the airport. I took over from there to the west side of Cannes, and Lotfi took from Cannes down to St. Raphaël, about twenty miles along the coast. We’d now read enough guidebooks and travel information on our TAOR to start our own travel agency. But it had to be done; from the moment the boat arrived, we needed to be able to operate as if we’d lived in this part of the world for years. We could have done with a few more weeks to bed in properly, but as usual we were victims of life’s two fuckers: not enough information, and not enough time.

We now had to learn how the buses and trains worked here, even down to the fare structure. If Greaseball was right, it was highly likely that we’d find ourselves following these people on public transport. At the very least, we’d need to have the correct change or tokens ready so as not to draw attention to ourselves.

To operate successfully, a team like ours had to achieve three goals. The first was to establish efficient communication and information flow within the unit, and then separately between the unit leader and the command structure.

The second was to limit the chances of discovery by outsiders, by minimizing the number of communication links between the members. That meant no phone calls, no meetings other than at the safe house, and even then only when operationally necessary. There had to be no communication other than my contacting them by their individual e-mail, and no marked road maps, in fact nothing on paper. Everything had to be committed to memory. The less of a trail we left, the better our chance of survival.

The third goal was to limit the damage that might be done if one member of the team was discovered and removed from the network, which meant minimizing the number of direct links with each other, and only sharing information on a need-to-know basis. That was why we had split up and done our own thing so far: if one of us got lifted, he didn’t know where the other two were, he didn’t know their full names, he didn’t know anything apart from my Canadian e-mail address.

Working within these constraints had meant that we had to sacrifice efficiency in communications, intelligence-gathering and planning, but it kept us alive. Now, as the job started getting into gear, we had no choice but to operate more visibly as a team, which made us more effective, but more vulnerable to discovery.

My route took me back into Nice along the Promenade des Anglais. I reached the center of town and turned right, away from the beach, heading north. I flicked on Riviera Radio and got the same boring voice I’d heard at the marina. He was blathering his way through a badly worded commercial for easily fitted security shutters for the home and office. Then there was a review of the American newspaper headlines. It was all doom and gloom and people dying of anthrax. For about the hundredth time since I’d left, all I could do was hope that no one I knew was affected.

It wasn’t long before the five-star shopping areas and hotels and palm trees gave way to freight depots, grime-covered warehouses, and dirty cream, rectangular, sixties or seventies apartment buildings built far too close to each other.

I followed the road around a sharp left-hand bend and over the train tracks, then hit the maze of high-speed feeder roads to the autoroute. I drove beside the river. At this time of the year it was just a hundred-yard-wide stretch of sandstone-colored rock and rubble, in the center of which a trickle of water wound its way down toward the sea.

Beautiful nineteenth-century houses that had once lined the banks were now towered over by hardware stores and warehouses. There were no palm trees around here, that was for sure. There were no shiny buses, either.

Autoroute 8 appeared ahead of me now as I crossed the river. It ran along a viaduct, a couple of hundred feet high, that straddled this part of the city before disappearing into a tunnel in the direction of Monaco.

It would have been a lot quicker and easier if we’d allowed ourselves to use the autoroute, but that wasn’t going to happen unless the shit really hit the fan. The toll booths had cameras and, besides, the police always hung around these places checking car tax and insurance. For all we knew, the booths might also have face-recognition technology on the cameras.

All three of us had to avoid leaving sign. We were careful to pick cafés and stores with automatic doors, or ones we could push open with a shoulder. Even drinking coffee was a major challenge, as it had to be done without leaving prints, and every attempt had to be made to prevent leaving DNA. It wasn’t so much what they could do with any of the information we might leave in our wake right now, it was what it could tell them later: this stuff stays on computer forever.

I remembered a job I’d been on with the Regiment (SAS) in Northern Ireland, when we were trying to get some fingerprints to connect a suspect with a bombing campaign. This guy was so good, he wore gloves most of the time, and when he didn’t, he took care to remove all print traces.

In the end, we risked everything to follow him, just waiting for him to slip up. He went into cafés several times and had a cup of coffee, but wiped the cup and the spoon every time before he left. If it was a paper cup, he took it home with him. And he didn’t just throw stuff like that out with his household rubbish, he burnt it in his backyard.

It took weeks, but we got him in the end. One day he used a teaspoon, stirred his coffee, put it down, and forgot to wipe it. The moment he left, the team was straight in.

There was no way I was going to make the same mistake. Everything I touched I wiped, or if the prints weren’t wipable, I’d keep it with me and destroy it later. Even taking cash from an ATM was a chore. All three of us had had to do it a lot, since we paid cash for everything. When we took money out, we did so from the same area—I used Cannes—so that no pattern of movement could be established. I never used the same ATM twice; I wasn’t giving anyone a known location to stake out and lift me. The only routine I followed was that I always got money out at night, varying the time and slipping on a hat and sunglasses and standing an arm’s length to the side so the ATM camera didn’t get me. Even then, I had to make sure I didn’t leave a print. It was the same when it came to buying stuff from a shop or café—it was vital not to go to the same place twice. It was all a major pain in the ass, but if things went noisy, I wanted to leave the French police as few pieces of our jigsaw puzzle as possible. I knew that prison-visiting wasn’t high on George’s list of priorities.

I drove under the viaduct, past the huge concrete funnel that belched smoke from the city’s incinerator. I was now in L’Ariane, very near the safe house.

Areas like these, Hubba-Hubba had told me, were called
banlieues,
the suburbs. That word had always conjured up the image of nice three-bedroom split-levels with lawns near the commuter station. But here it meant ghetto; high-density tower blocks where
les immigrés,
mostly North African, had taken refuge. L’Ariane had the reputation of being one of the most deprived and violent
banlieues
in France, after those that ringed Paris. Hubba-Hubba had told me plenty of his aunt’s horror stories; it was a no-go area for the authorities, out of bounds even to ambulance crews and firemen, who didn’t dare set foot in the place without police protection—and just one glimpse of a
gendarme
was all it took to spark a riot. I couldn’t think of a better place for a safe house.

I passed a burnt-out car that hadn’t been there three days ago. Apart from that, everything else looked the same—a grim, rat-infested, litter-strewn warren of graffiti-sprayed concrete and satellite dishes.

I took the first turn left into the housing project and parked outside the kebab-dry-cleaner’s-pâtisserie-laundry. I got out of my car immediately so it looked as if I had a reason to be here—which, in fact, I did, though it wasn’t one I wanted anyone to know about. I worried about the Mégane; the roads were packed with vehicles, but mine was four or five years newer, and still had its plastic hubcaps.

I’d only been here twice before: when we’d gotten together on the twentieth to sort out the recces and divide the areas, and again earlier today, to deliver the equipment I’d picked up from the DOP.

16

I
’d tucked my pistol into the front of my jeans. I worried about having just one mag with me, but then again, if I needed more than thirteen rounds to protect myself, I was beyond help and should probably be serving beer at the yacht club.

As I closed the door, a young Muslim woman appeared, eyes lost in the shadows of her headscarf, shoulders drooping under the weight of two plastic shopping bags full of cans and breakfast cereals.

I went to the trunk and got out my duffel bag, locked up, and headed straight for the entrance to the nearest apartment building on my side of the road. The mosaic tiles decorating the front of the building had crumbled away long ago. The concrete underneath was now decorated with a blend of French and Arabic graffiti that I didn’t understand.

The security locks and intercom system had been trashed years ago. The entrance hall stank of piss, the floor was littered with cigarette butts. Shouts came from the floor above me, and a barrage of loud French rap. At least I was out of sight of the road. Anyone watching would assume I was visiting someone in the building, and since I was a white stranger, that probably meant I was there for drugs. Because I was alone and without armed backup, I couldn’t be a policeman.

I headed straight out of the back door and into a courtyard flanked by four identical buildings. It had probably looked wonderful when it was full of shiny little Matchbox cars in the architect’s model. I could still make out the markings of a parking lot, but now the place looked more like a storage area for the incinerator next door than the front lot of a Citroën dealership. It was littered with burnt-out cars and rotting food that seemed to have been flung out of the upper-story windows. Windblown garbage was heaped in drifts against the walls of every building and, for some reason I couldn’t work out, dead pigeons seemed to be lying everywhere. Maybe someone was shooting them from a window with an air rifle, or perhaps they’d eaten some of the food. A couple of seriously macho rats darted from bird to bird.

I strode purposefully across the courtyard, putting in an antisurveillance route to make sure I wasn’t being followed.

I entered the next building to the blare of music and kids screaming upstairs. There was a strong smell of cooking. Two guys who looked as though they’d just gotten off the bus from Kosovo were in the entrance hall ahead of me, surrounded by kids with ski hats and baggy jeans. The kids were in the process of paying for whatever it was these guys were selling them. The men froze, the foil packets in their hands, and stared me out, waiting to see my next move. The kids couldn’t have cared less, they just wanted the packets.

It was pointless turning back. I just acted as if I belonged, didn’t give a shit what was going on, and walked past. The moment they realized I wasn’t concerned they carried on with the deal. I pushed open a door and hit the road.

I worked my way through a maze of small alleyways. Hollow-eyed men in hoodies and jeans hung out on every corner, smoking and occasionally kicking a stray ball back to their kids, who looked like smaller versions of their dads. These people had no work, no prospects, no future. It didn’t matter what color they were, in this part of town everyone was burnt-out, just like the cars.

I turned toward the last building. On my first visit I’d thought it had been condemned; the place had scorch marks licking up from every window. Cinder blocks filled the window frames on the first few floors. This was my last checkpoint before heading for the RV; I was clear, nothing behind me, and everything looked normal, or as normal as anything could look around here. A Muslim woman came out onto a landing above me and gave the family comforter a good shake.

I crossed the debris-covered road and headed for the RV, one of the three farmworkers’ cottages that crouched in the shadows of the housing project. I imagined the owners sitting here fifty years ago, minding their own business, watching their chickens and sheep go down to the river for a drink. Next thing they knew, they were living in the middle of a trash can of a housing project, as the city swallowed them up and introduced them to the brave new world of high-rise living. The far one now belonged to Hubba-Hubba’s aunt. He’d paid for her and her husband to go back to North Africa for two months and see their family before they died, so the house was ours for the duration.

I checked the position of the Browning; I really wanted to check chamber as well, but couldn’t. In a place like this there would be eyes everywhere.

I made my way along a stretch of dried mud that might once have been grass. The cottages had been painted dark beige many years ago. The faded green shutters on the farthest one were closed, the windows covered with metal grates. Litter blown from the road had piled up against the bottom of the rusty, sagging chain-link fence that surrounded them. Beyond it was a concrete path and a dilapidated chicken coop that had last seen an egg in the fifties.