State of Attack (24 page)

He was intrigued and it had to be investigated thoroughly, both by French intelligence services and his own team. After what he’d heard Tom and Lester had been through after their debriefing at the embassy, he felt bad about sending them to Paris. But he couldn’t afford himself any form of sentiment due to the level of the threat, not even in respect of Tom. But, as things had panned out, it was in fact the least risky mission he’d had to allocate in the past couple of days.

He’d arrange for a helicopter to fly them to a Turkish Air Force base and from there, a flight to France. He knew a handful of ex-DCRI operatives, who were freelancers now. He decided that Tom and Lester would need help from a local in France, and he knew just the man from among that small group.

Crane recalled the Frenchman’s nickname was the Smiling Man. Kinda ironic, really, he thought. TSM hadn’t smiled that much when he’d known him, but he knew where he’d picked up the name.

It had been acquired under dubious circumstances. TSM had been in the 2nd Rep, the elite French paratrooper regiment. He’d been a young officer and was independently wealthy. There was nothing remotely complicated about his nickname. When the Rep had landed on the tarmac of Kolwezi airport in south-east Zaire in May 1978, they’d been ordered to rescue the Belgian and French nationals who were being held captive by the ruthless separatist rebels, known as Tigers.

Massacres and rapes of Europeans had already occurred. The Legion had had to make an impression as they’d been heavily outnumbered. They’d grabbed a dozen rebels, had shoved them into shacks and had tossed grenades in. TSM had, well, smiled. He’d done so every time the exercise had been repeated over the next twenty-four hours, although his bravery in the face of the enemy hadn’t been questioned. He’d fought ferociously by all accounts. The military exercise had been a huge success. Upon his return to Paris, TSM had boasted that he’d been kissed by a hundred different French women.

Crane knew things were getting serious.

Three hours later, after four secure calls and calling in a couple of favours, Crane had also filled in Tom on the recent intel from the French woman and had briefed him on his plan. He and Lester would travel to Paris. Tom would meet up with an associate of TSM, who’d arrange for Tom to make contact. The French weren’t partial to interference in what they’d see as an internal counterterrorist issue, and unlike the Brits they weren’t partial to extradition, either. TSM would use his contacts and intelligence expertise to track the official DCRI operatives, who, Crane had figured, would do the work for them. He knew the chances of the director agreeing to a potential firefight in a Paris suburb by CIA paramilitaries fresh out of Afghanistan was about the same as him appearing on the front of a woman’s magazine with his shirt off. Tom and Lester would only be there to observe, to feed back intel.

He took out a cigar from his pocket, twiddled it in its plastic wrapper. He couldn’t even take a smoke when and where he wanted to these days, at least in the US. Goddamned politicians with the balls of grade teachers were taking over the world, and he felt that one day even the CIA would have to bend over backwards to accommodate them.

His mind went back to his college days. Funny, he thought, how often he thought of the past the older he got. An enthusiastic law professor had told him once that the Rule of Law was like theoretical physics, because neither dealt in absolutes, that there were no absolute truths as such. Instead they dealt with accumulating evidence and examining it to reach a conclusion. The conclusion was not an absolute truth. It was an approximate based on probabilities.

Is the universe one of many universes?
he was fond of saying.
Is a man guilty or not guilty? Evidence, despite what forensic scientists claim, is rarely conclusive in an absolute sense. It can be tampered with. It can be planted. This is why we have trials. This is why it is argued that the death penalty should be abolished. In most cases, the accused is not sentenced to death on the basis of absolute guilt. Remember that when you leave here today, even if you forget everything else.

Crane snapped the cigar between his fingers. It was playing on his habit and it irritated him. It irritated him that he’d decided to send Tom to Gaza. The memory of that law professor irritated him, too. It was conceivable that the man Ibrahim might have nothing to do with what was still a perceived threat. He sure as hell wouldn’t get anything resembling a trial. He’d get a bullet and that was as absolute as it got.

Chapter 62

Tom had been met by an associate of the Smiling Man at the Charles de Gaulle airport as planned. He’d received medical attention to his wounds at the air force base in Turkey, which, despite the way they’d looked, were, he’d been told, essentially superficial. Besides, his blood was up.

The man he’d met hadn’t been obvious. He’d expected someone very different, like a French equivalent of Lester, perhaps. But not the gaunt-looking guy, his skin as pale as cod steaks, who’d worn tortoiseshell eyeglasses and a woollen scarf, and had stood no more than five-six in sneakers. It had been clear, despite his bald patches and wispy hair that he was in his mid-twenties. Tom had thought he looked like a computer nerd. But had decided that he’d been wholly inconspicuous, which had meant TSM was as good as Crane had said he was.

He’d been standing by an airport bookstore when Tom had walked past, and had gently tugged him by the arm before smiling and introducing himself. He’d said his name was Nicolas. They’d walked through the arrivals lounge to one of the public parking lots, and Tom had been driven into the heart of the city in the man’s white Mazda. They’d stopped outside a Paris bar. Tom had had no idea where. Nicolas had given him a cellphone number scribbled on a piece of crumpled paper, and had told Tom to ring the number via the public payphone opposite.

Now, after standing a few feet from a blue and white, umbrella-shaped Paris payphone shelter for a minute or more, Tom felt cold and a little unsure of himself. He checked his watch. It was 19:34. The wind rose and he pulled up the collar on his double-breasted black overcoat. There were two public phones opposite one another under the same shelter, less than a yard apart. One was being used by a man in his fifties, waving his free hand around in a typically Parisian display of histrionics. He reminded Tom of Yves Montand, the 1950s film star. The man slammed the handset down, then repeated the action twice more. He lit a cigarette, gestured to himself angrily and walked off.

Tom moved under the circular roof of the half-hearted structure and dialled the number on the paper. The dial tone stopped after about five seconds. He figured the cell was stolen, or disposable.

“Yes?” the man said in French. His voice was thinly accented and mellow.

“Tom Dupree.”

A middle-aged English couple, his arm around her shoulders, walked past, smiling and laughing, discussing their day.

“Don’t say anything else,” the voice said. “Nothing, you understand me?”

Feeling like a rebuked kid, Tom said, “Yeah, sure.”

“Hotel Le Meridien Etoile. 81 Boulevard Gouvion Saint-Cyr. Half past midnight.”

The line went dead.

Chapter 63

As soon as Tom entered the bar area, he knew who TSM was, a tall, lean man wearing a blue suit and a pale pink open-necked shirt, a pair of russet tasselled loafers on his feet. He was sitting on a leather sofa just off the bar proper. The interior of the hotel was all marble, chrome and dim light. He had a large round glass of what looked like cognac in his left hand, and appeared to have a nonchalant manner.

The bar was sparsely populated. There was what looked like a local couple, sipping red wine, and two middle-aged executives, apparently too shy to speak to one another. One of them was eating olives from a bowl, the other, using his thumb to flick though a smartphone. A young black bartender, with a white shirt and black necktie, was drying a glass with a cloth, the old-fashioned way.

Tom walked over and TSM looked up, nodded assuredly and gestured to the matching leather sofa in front of him. He put his drink on the rectangular glass table by his extended legs. Tom sat down, inhaling the sofa’s distinctive smell. At once, he noticed the man’s pointed nose, the plump lips; the attentive eyes, the same hue as cornflowers. He had a small purple birthmark, half hidden in the sweeps of his thick grey, immaculately cut hair.

“Please, and forgive me, but—”

He placed his hand inside his breast pocket, glanced around and pulled out what Tom took for a cellphone.

Handing it over, the Frenchman said, “Just brush yourself down with this, please.”

Tom eyed him warily, unsure of what to think, but took it just the same.

“Just to be sure, my friend,” he said, making himself comfortable, arms splayed, his head back. “You have anything on you apart from a watch or a regular cellphone?”

“No,” Tom said.

“No problem then. Take the battery out of your phone, if you please. Did you know that people can listen to conversations via a cellphone, even when it is turned off? They activate the microphone. It’s how your FBI eavesdropped on the Genovese crime family all those years ago.” He grinned then. “Of course you know.”

Tom unclipped his watch and took out the secure cellphone that Lester had handed back to him when they’d arrived at the Charles de Gaulle. He removed the battery, did a cursory scan of his body and handed the detector back to TSM.

“Good.” The Frenchman picked up his glass, let the brandy slide down his throat. “How did you learn about me?”

“Look, we can dance around all night, if you like,” Tom said.

TSM raised his hands, palms up.

“C’mon,” Tom said.

“Is it you who is dancing now, Mr Dupree.”

“Okay. Dan Crane.”

“Thank you. He’s a one-off, no?”

“As you say.”

He bent over and picked up his glass again. He took another relaxed sip of cognac. “My goodness, how rude of me. A drink?”

“I’m fine,” Tom said.

“Not by the look of you,” he said, referring to Tom’s scars. “Crane has a particular habit. What is it?”

Crane had many habits, Tom thought. He smoked cigars. He was downright rude. But he knew instinctively that those weren’t what TSM meant. He racked his brain for ten seconds before he said, “He rides chairs.”

TSM made a disinterested face and shrugged a little. “Okay. Now to business.”

Chapter 64

The mosque in Paris was two semi-detached three-storey nineteenth-century houses, with the adjoining wall knocked down. It had a reputation for being non-radical and attracted local store owners, cab drivers and artisans, but the imam was an ex-jihadist and knew Ibrahim from Syria.

They had learned that preaching extremist sermons wasn’t a good idea if a Muslim wanted anonymity. Without anonymity there would be no chance of evading the national and international intelligence communities, and if they didn’t there was no chance of being able to carry out successful jihadist acts. It was simple pragmatism. The imam, whose name was Mohammed, had said that Ibrahim was a scholar and a refugee from Yemen, who was resting up in the converted loft before he made his way to London.

They were sitting now, cross-legged and barefoot in an empty room on the second floor, the high ceiling draped with a black sheet like a sail. They were wearing eggshell-white dishdashas and had spoken openly about the jihad taking place in Iraq and Syria, the fact that their enemies in Shia Iran and the infidels in the US were sharing intelligence and opening up diplomatic ties. It was something that no one could have predicted, just like all the major geopolitical events that had happened in the last decade or more. There were no experts when it came to predicting world events, Ibrahim knew. There were just old enemies, and unlike the Christians and the Shias, who had all but forgotten the past, Sunnis didn’t forget.

Numerous national security services monitored myriad Internet, cellphone and landline communications from all over the world on a minute-by-minute basis. Not least the US National Security Agency’s complex at Fort George G. Meade in Maryland. The computers, which were programmed to identify, among other things, key words and phrases, or repeatedly used commonplace ones in an unfamiliar context, were some of the most powerful in the world. But the jihadists had become wily and were more than familiar with the methodology which had resulted in the imprisonment of many of their brothers in Guantanamo and the death of the modern father of jihad, Osama bin Laden. They no longer used cellphone communication regularly, and since the incident with the Mossad spy, Ibrahim no longer spoke to anyone who hadn’t already killed in action and had pledged his life to the Silent Jihad.

“How long do I have, brother?” Mohammed said.

He was a softly-spoken man, with eyes at once intimate and detached. Ibrahim noticed that he kept his beard short, his hair shaved at the back. He worried that here in France the anti-Muslim state was baring down too hard on his faith and gradually emasculating it. But he too was aware of the need to be seen to be as invisible as possible, and looking like a crazy prophet fresh out of the desert wasn’t the way to go in the long term. Still, he had kept on his scruffy beard and long hairpiece. In Gaza, the Mossad had photographs of him looking quite different, after all.

“Two weeks at most,” Ibrahim said.

“Are we safe?”

“Yes,” Ibrahim said, although he thought then of the two Americans who had escaped from the baba in Turkey. He still had no idea how, given the mafia’s connections, but it was so.

“Strength lies in your resilience, brother.”

Mohammed nodded.

“I will bring the phials and we shall drink together,” Ibrahim said.

The virulent and deadly virus would be transported by Ibrahim to the brothers in France, Germany, the UK, and, chiefly, the United States, given their primary role in what they considered to be the invasion of Muslim soil and the bloodshed that had resulted from those sacrilegious Crusades.

“It will be a terrible and wonderful thing, brother,” Mohammed said.