The Motive (57 page)

Glitsky made his 314(a) request more than three weeks ago and hasn’t gotten any response yet. An hour ago, Zachary was cleared for a month without the need for more testing, and the dour and cautious Dr. Trueblood even allowed himself what looked like a genuine and even optimistic smile.

Glitsky gets back to his office at the Hall of Justice in the early afternoon. He greets Melissa, spends a minute giving her the good news about Zachary, then turns left out of the reception area, passes through the small conference room adjacent to it and into the short hallway that leads to his office, where he stops.

His door is closed.

When he left for the doctor’s appointment three hours ago, he’d left it open. He almost goes back to ask Melissa if she’d locked up for him while he was gone, but then realizes that it’s probably nothing. Maybe some cleaning staff, somebody leaving a note, not an issue.

So he opens the door.

Inside, on one of the upholstered chairs in front of Glitsky’s
desk, in a relaxed posture, slumped even, with his legs crossed, is a man he’s never seen before. He’s wearing a business suit and looks over at Glitsky’s entrance. “You might want to get the door,” he says.

Glitsky doesn’t move. “Who are you?”

“A friend of Bill Schuyler’s.” There’s no threat in the soft-spoken voice. He points. “You mind? The door?”

Never taking his eyes off him, Glitsky complies. The man returns the gaze for a second, then stands up. He is probably in his forties, tall, slim and pale, half bald with a well-trimmed tonsure of blond hair. He’s already got his wallet in his hand and opens it up, flashes some kind of official-looking identification. “Scott Thomas,” he says. “You’ve been making inquiries about Missy D’Amiens. Do you really believe she’s still alive?”

“I do. I don’t think there’s any doubt of it. Are you FBI?”

A small, tidy, almost prim chuckle. “No, I’m sorry. CIA.”

Glitsky takes a beat. “I understood she was in witness protection.”

“She was. We put her in it, farmed it out to the bureau.” Another ironic smile. “The company isn’t allowed to operate domestically.”

“All right,” Glitsky says. “How can I help you?”

“Maybe we should sit down.”

“I’m okay on my feet.”

Thomas’s mouth gives a little twitch. The man clearly isn’t used to being gainsaid. His orders, even his suggestions, get followed. His eyes, the pupils as black as a snake’s, show nothing resembling emotion. “It might take a minute,” he says in a pleasant tone. “We’ll be more comfortable.” He sits again, back in the easy chair, and waits until Glitsky finally gives up, crosses behind his desk and lowers himself into his chair.

“I want to tell you a story,” Thomas says.

In the next hour, Glitsky hears about a young woman, born Monique Souliez in 1966 in Algiers. The sixth child and youngest daughter of a very successful French-trained surgeon, she, too, was schooled in France. Linguistically talented, she traveled widely during her vacations—within Europe over several summers, Singapore another, San Francisco, Sydney, Rio. But she came from a well-established and very closely knit family, and when her formal education was completed in 1989, she
returned to Algeria, where she took a job in junior management at the local branch of the Banque National de Paris and soon fell in love with a young doctor, Philippe Rouget.

In 1991, she and Philippe got married in a highly visible society wedding. This was also the year in which a party of some moderate but mostly radical Islamists called the Islamic Salvation Front, or FIS, won a round of parliamentary elections for the first time. This victory prompted Algeria’s ruling party, the National Liberation Front (FLN) to outlaw the FIS, and this in turn led to the first violent confrontations between the FLN and the FIS, confrontations that within a year had grown into a full-scale civil war.

Monique and Philippe were not particularly political. True, they both came from the upper classes and socialized almost exclusively within that circle. But mostly they kept to themselves and to the strong Souliez extended family of doctors, engineers, professional people and their educated, sophisticated, well-traveled relatives. The young couple themselves were contented newlyweds doing work that they felt was important and that would go on regardless of who was in power. After Monique became pregnant, their personal world became even more insular, even as the civil war escalated throughout the country and all around them.

Idealistic and unaffiliated with any of the warring factions, Philippe volunteered when he could at both emergency rooms and makeshift clinics that treated both sides. Sometimes these weren’t clinics at all, but calls in the night, wounded and dying young men at their doors.

The slaughter, meanwhile, continued unabated until the government finally took the conflict to another level. Anyone suspected of FIS sympathies would simply disappear amid rumors of mass graves and torture. The government issued weapons to previously noncombatant civilians, and this led to a further breakdown in order, with neighbors killing neighbors, with armed bands of simple thieves creating further confusion and havoc. On the rebel side, a splinter organization that called itself the Armed Islamic Group, or GIA, began a campaign of horrific retaliatory massacre, sometimes wiping out entire villages, killing tens of thousands of civilians. Favoring techniques such as assassinations, car bombings, and kidnapping—and then slitting their victims’ throats—they brought a new definition of terror to the conflict.

Philippe and Monique considered leaving the country, of course. They had a baby, Jean-Paul, to protect now. The rest of the family would understand. But the rest of the family wasn’t fleeing. This was their home. They and their civilized counterparts in similar predicaments believed it their duty to stay. And Philippe and Monique came to feel the same way. They would be the only hope for the country when the fighting stopped, as they believed it eventually would.

But it didn’t stop in time for Philippe and Jean-Paul.

Pounding on their door in the middle of the night, a twenty-man squadron of government security forces broke into their home. Informants had told authorities that they’d seen Philippe working on the GIA wounded. He was, therefore, with the GIA. They dragged him from the house, knocking Monique unconscious with rifle butts in the street as she screamed and fought and tried to get them to stop. When she came to, Philippe was gone, the door to her house was open and nearly everything in it was destroyed. Jean-Paul’s broken body lay in a corner of his bedroom with his dismantled toys and slashed stuffed animals littering the floor around him.

Here Glitsky holds up a hand. “I get the picture.” He pauses, explains. “I’m not in a good place to hear stories about dead babies right now.”

Thomas, jarred out of his narrative, narrows his obsidian eyes in impatience or even anger. Then he checks himself. Glitsky suddenly gets the impression that he knows about Zachary. It’s unnerving.

“Sure,” Thomas says. “No problem.”

He gathers himself, picks up where he left off.

After the government thugs killed her husband and her son, Monique became transformed both by her need for vengeance and for her passionate hatred for the government, and particularly its so-called security units. Within a month of the twin tragedies she’d endured, she went underground and joined one of the revolutionary brigades.

At this time, the rebels still lacked a strong organizational structure or even a cohesive political platform. They were united in seeking to overthrow the current administration and replace it with an Islamic state, but there was no central command, or even a consensus on what type of Islamic structure the country would eventually embrace if they were victorious. The
typical cell consisted of a loosely confederated group of between ten and twenty-five individuals. Most of these were Islamic, of course, but many Christians and even some Europeans were drawn to the cause in the way Monique had been—by the government’s brutality or by simple hatred of individuals in power. Many, too, joined the rebels because they hated France, which supported the FLN and its military-dominated regime.

The details of Monique’s next couple of years were sketchy, but it was clear that she had become affiliated with one of the cells. She may or may not have actually participated in many raids and ambushes—the accounts varied—but she certainly became comfortable with a variety of weapons and took part in planning and funding operations, especially against security details such as those that had killed her family.

But as the government’s ongoing campaign continued to dec-imate the rebels’ numbers, the individual cells were forced to congeal into more cohesive and ever more secretive units. The GIA, effectively beaten as an army, had to abandon the pitched street battles that had marked the civil war stage of the conflict, although they continued to assassinate, to bomb and to kidnap. The government, for its part, waged what began as a successful torture campaign against captured prisoners who were suspected of GIA affiliation. Increasingly marginalized, the rebels countered with an effective tool to guarantee the silence of its captured operatives. If a captive talked, his or her entire family would be killed. Not just husbands and wives and children, but fathers, mothers, grandfathers and grandmothers, uncles, aunts and cousins, to the third degree.

The most celebrated of these slaughters occurred in 1997. The government arrested a nineteen-year-old boy named Antar Rachid on suspicion of taking part in the carjacking and assassination of a minor Algiers municipal official. Three days after Rachid’s arrest, government security forces raided the downtown café out of which Rachid had operated, in the process killing three other GIA soldiers and confiscating a large cache of automatic weapons, cash and ammunition from the hidden room in the café’s cellar. Obviously, they broke Rachid with torture and he talked.

Here Glitsky speaks again. “How many of his relatives did they kill?”

“I was getting there.” The number seems to slow down even the phlegmatic Thomas. He takes a breath, tries to sound matter-of-fact. “One hundred and sixty-three. Raids in Algiers itself and in thirteen villages over the next couple of days. Gone before they knew what hit ’em. After that,” Thomas says, “captured suspects stopped talking and started dying in jail.”

In 1999, Algeria finally got a new civilian president, Abde-laziz Bouteflika, and he offered amnesty to rebels who hadn’t been convicted of rape or murder or other heinous crimes. Along with about eighty-five percent of the rest of them, Monique returned to civilian life, moving back in with her father and mother, going back to work at the bank. But she’d proven herself a valuable organizer and strategist to the GIA, and they weren’t ready to abandon her. It wasn’t the kind of organization where you simply walked out—Rachid’s experience, and many others similar to it, made that crystal clear. It was like the mob. It doesn’t matter if you were arrested, or if you tried to leave on your own
…you are never out.

“But by now, I’m talking 1999,” Thomas continues, “things have really begun to change over there. A new faction called the GSPC splits off of the GIA, and though they’re still hitting government and military targets, they swear off civilian attacks within the country. After all the killing of the past years, this has a lot of grassroots appeal. The GIA leadership doesn’t see it that way, but they’re losing influence and, more importantly, members. And funding. They need to do something dramatic to call the faithful to them. This is jihad now, not just revolution. The will of Allah will be done, and even if fellow Muslims are killed, it is acceptable because they all become martyrs.” Thomas pauses again. “The GIA decides they are going to blow up the biggest elementary school in Algiers. Six hundred kids.”

“Lord, the world.” Glitsky’s elbow is on his desk. His hand supports his head.

“But Monique won’t help them. She can’t go there. It’s too much.”

Glitsky snorts a note of derisive laughter. “A saint, huh?”

“In some ways, she was, actually.” Thomas shifts in his chair. “But now she’s got an even bigger problem. On the one hand, she hates the government and what it stands for. But on the other, she can’t let the GIA go ahead with this bombing. But if she tells anybody, if she betrays her cell, she knows what happens
next. Her family disappears, all of it. She’s seen it happen not just to Antar Rachid and his family, but maybe half a dozen other times.

“She’s got four brothers and a sister, all of them married with kids. Her mother and father, both still young enough to be working. Her mother comes from a family of five, her father’s the oldest of four. She’s got about forty-five cousins.” Thomas comes forward, finally showing a hint of urgency. “They’re all dead if she talks. There’s no doubt about it. Meanwhile, she’s in on the planning. If she refuses, she’s with the enemy. She can’t show a thing.”

Glitsky, nodding, appreciates her problem. “So she comes to you guys.”

“She comes to me, personally. I’m stationed over there at the time. My cover is I’m with the visa section at the embassy, but she’s been underground for four years and she’s figured that out. I do some banking at her branch and she approaches me one day, tells me her story.

“The only way she figures she can do it is if she appears to be killed in the raid on the planners. If I’d help her appear to die, she’s got information on a major planned terrorist attack. Remember, this is pre-9/11, but the
Cole
had already happened, the African embassies. It might have been a trap, but the bottom line is, I believed her. And it turned out it was all true. They raided the cell and found the explosives, and the government announced that Monique Souliez was one of the rebels killed in the raid.”