They were heading east on the Periphique, the ring road that circled Paris, in moderate traffic. The drive to Prague would take about seven hours. From there to Kolin was no more than another hour. By this time tomorrow, it would be done.
“There are four of us, my friend;” the tall man said, remembering finally that his companion had spoken and should be answered.
“You mean our martyrs in the back? Soon we will be two again:” They were speaking in French, a language they knew to be completely foreign to Jamal and Kumar.
“Yes, of course,” said the tall man. “They will be in heaven with their virgins:”
“And soon the Falcon will fly back to Andalus,
inshallah.”
“Yes, Mohammed,
inshallah.”
~24~
NUREMBURG, JANUARY 7, 2004
Geneviève LeGrand, having interrogated many suspected criminals in her day, felt uncomfortably like the tables had been turned. She mused for a moment about the cause of this role reversal, Charles Raimondi, whose duplicitous life and sudden, brutal death had brought her interrogators so swiftly to her hotel room door in Nuremburg. She had allowed herself to believe that she was still desirable, that her beauty was not marred, but rather enriched by age. How foolish. How utterly banal. Personal humiliation, however, she could accept. She understood that suffering was the price of vanity. But now it seemed that in addition to personal humiliation, her fantasy of a romantic liaison with the handsome and much younger Raimondi might have caused the demise of her career and her professional reputation as well. That would be a bitter pill.
“Did you call him when you saw the flowers in your room, Geneviève?” Marcel Dionne asked. He was the good cop, handsome, baby-faced, using her first name, speaking softly. Only he wasn’t a cop. He was DST, and not simply DST but a member of a special homeland security antiterrorism unit so secret that only those at the highest level of law enforcement in France even knew it existed. LeGrand did not miss the irony in the fact that, as an assistant chief inspector of police, she had been one of the recipients, two months after 9/11, of a memo from the interior minister himself advising of the formation of this task force and urging the fullest cooperation with its members.
“Yes.”
She had placed the flowers—hothouse roses and carnations—in a tall glass vase on the room’s spacious desk, where she could see them from bed. Looking at them now, it was hard to believe that Raimondi was dead and, more incredible, that he was the subject of an antiterror investigation. But there it was.
“And? What did he say?” Dionne pressed her.
“He said a complication had arisen regarding the Megan Nolan case. He told me not to discuss the case with anyone until he and I could meet and talk in person. We arranged to have dinner when I returned to Paris:”
“Did he mention anything specific about Megan Nolan or her father?” This question came from the bad cop, André Orlofsky, Dionne’s superior. Small, wiry, his eyes unreadable, his voice carrying a hint of menace, Orlofsky’s intensity permeated the room, touching a chord of fear in LeGrand that she did not know was there.
“No,” she replied.
“Did Catherine Laurence come up?”
“No.”
“Rahman al-Zahra?”
“No.”
“Anything besides what you’ve told us?”
“No.”
“Do you know a man named Mustafa al-Siddiq?” asked the third interrogator, the young American in jeans and a rumpled corduroy jacket. Aside from
Bonjour, enchanté,
spoken in perfect, nearly unaccented French when he was introduced by Orlofsky, this was the first time the FBI agent with the improbable name of Max French had spoken.
“No.”
“How did you know Raimondi?” French asked.
“We met at a conference some years ago and our paths crossed occasionally since. We were acquaintances;” LeGrand replied and then paused, waiting for the next question. When none came, she added, ”That is all:”
“Why the flowers?” French asked.
“He was wooing me:”
“Why?”
“I thought it was because of my great beauty, but I believe now I was wrong:”
French, Geneviève noticed, did not smile at this answer, but a certain light flashed in his eyes which she read as an acknowledgment that he had been forced to insult her and that she had been forced to accept it gracefully, given her behavior.
Perhaps they will believe me, and perhaps
—
just perhaps
—
I will not only keep my job but be able to be of some assistance.
“We are going to tell you what we know, Inspector LeGrand;” said Orlofsky, ”because we are hoping that you will then be able to give us some insight, once your blinders, shall we say, have been removed. But first tell us again about your unauthorized investigation into the false suicide of Megan Nolan:”
LeGrand had just finished showering when the knock had come on her door. In a thick terrycloth hotel robe, with a towel folded on her head, she had scrutinized three somber faces and three sets of impeccable credentials and known immediately that something was wrong. She had asked the men to wait outside the room while she dressed, but they would have none of it, entering swiftly and going so far as to check her person and the entire room for cell phones and weapons before allowing her to pick out her clothes and change in the lavatory. They had gotten right to the point, or rather Orlofsky had.
Daniel Peletier was dead. Thrown off a cliff by two Arab men. His computer bad led them to Catherine Laurence. Laurence bad asked Peletier to run the prints of a known terrorist and bad inquired about one Megan Nolan. Laurence had called Charles Raimondi and bad lunch with him three days ago. Raimondi was killed execution-style last night. Earlier he had called LeGrand
on
her
cell
phone. Laurence works for LeGrand. Talk to us.
These sentences, delivered staccato-like by Orlofsky, were blows.
Peletier dead. Raimondi dead. Deceived by Catherine Laurence
—
the young and beautiful and desirable Catherine Laurence.
But LeGrand was a professional. She was on their side. She gathered herself and quickly recounted the history of the Megan Nolan affair, starting with Charles Raimondi’s visit to her office on January 2 and ending with his request two days later for Laurence’s cell phone number and address, which he was given. Did
she think it odd that Laurence would go on leave in the middle of the case?
We both thought the case was solved.
Did she know Daniel Peletier? Yes. Did she know he was Catherine’s uncle? Yes. Did she have any reason to believe there was a link between his death and Catherine Laurence or Patrick Nolan?
No, of course not.
Geneviève composed herself once more before repeating her story, amazed in retrospect at its brevity and sparsity of detail. And disgusted with herself for having permitted Charles Raimondi to dictate procedure to her, and worse, to keep the case secret from her superiors. She was sitting on the edge of the room’s large bed. When she was done, she stared at the three men, who stared back at her. French had remained standing, but Dionne and Orlofsky had taken chairs and sat in them facing her. She had put on the chic business suit and silk blouse she had worn to her seminar that day, but no makeup, and her hair was simply drying as they spoke. Vanity had vanished from her thoughts.
“What’s going on?” she asked.
“Until yesterday,” Orlofsky replied, “no one at DST had ever heard of Megan Nolan or her faux suicide:”
“But Raimondi was the liaison to the DST from the Foreign Ministry, was he not?” said LeGrand.
“He was;” said Dionne, ”but he had no authority to initiate an operation. He was a professional diplomat who was part of our intelligence interface with foreign governments, that is all. He did this completely on his own:”
“Mustafa al-Siddiq is the number two man at Saudi Arabia’s interior ministry,” said Orlofsky.“Among other things, he is in charge of their secret police, the
Mabahith.
He and Raimondi spoke several times over the last week. There was also a fax from Raimondi to al-Siddiq, five pages, contents unknown. Three dead bodies were found at Daniel Peletier’s farm. All were carrying
Mabahith
credentials:”
“So Raimondi was cooperating with the Saudis in an unauthorized Saudi operation on French soil,” said LeGrand.
“Yes,” said Dionne, “to find Megan Nolan, who he claimed—or believed—was a terrorist. We don’t know which:”
“Do you have leads on his murder?”
“None:”
“There was a photograph of Megan Nolan in my file,” said LeGrand. “I never thought to ask her father for a current picture:”
“We have your file,” said Orlofsky.“We have seen the picture. It is her, and it looks to have been taken in a souk—a small market—in a Moroccan slum called Sidi Moumim:”
“Is al-Zahra known to you?” LeGrand asked.
“We picked up an intercept after Casa that mentioned the
Falcon,”
French said.“There is an historical figure known as the Falcon of Andalus, a great Muslim caliph in Spain in the eighth century. Real name: Abdur-Rahman al-Zahra. That’s all we know.”
“Someone has taken a
nom
de
terror,”
said LeGrand.
“Yes, that’s how we see it,” French replied.
“Have you spoken to al-Siddiq?” LeGrand asked.
“Yes. He said he was talking to Raimondi about a conference they planned on attending together in the spring. They had formed a friendship, apparently.”
“And the fax?”
“He said it was a conference schedule:”
“Did you check?”
“Yes. The conference is on the issue of enhancing cooperation between law enforcement and embassies in handling visa applications. We called the organizers. There is no five-page schedule:”
“What about the Saudi agents?”
“Al-Siddiq says the credentials must have been forged:”
“Is Megan Nolan a terrorist?”
“We don’t know,” Orlofsky answered. “She is an expatriate, a writer. Her agent in New York hasn’t heard from her in two years. She wrote for women’s magazines for ten years or so, but lately has been writing about the Arab problem in Europe. She was in Morocco from January until May, then in Spain, then of course in Paris to fake her suicide. That’s all we know. We are looking for friends and other relatives, but for now that’s it:”
“What about the woman who actually did kill herself?” Geneviève asked.
“Nothing,” Orlofsky answered.“Her prints were not on record. She had Megan Nolan’s ID. No one’s reported anyone matching her description missing. Nothing:”
“What is your next step?”
“We have put a Europol bulletin out for Laurence’s car. We are going through airline manifests for entries from Morocco and Saudi Arabia in the last ten days. We may get lucky.”
“Is there a target? Any intelligence about a terrorist operation?”
“Nothing;” said Orlofsky. ”We are looking and listening. We have people in Muslim communities all over France and we are monitoring telephone and e-mail traffic to the top of our capacity.”
“Can I help?” Geneviève asked.
“Yes,” said Orlofsky.“You can call Catherine Laurence on her cell phone. We have brought a phone for you to use. If she answers, it will triangulate nearly instantly. We will know where she is:”
“Anyone could answer.”
“Yes, of course. But if someone has her cell phone, we will very much want to talk to that person:”
“Now?”
“Yes, now.”
“What shall I say?”
“Anything. Just keep her talking for fifteen seconds or so.”
“And then what?”
“And then you will return to Paris, Inspector LeGrand, and speak to your chief and to the interior minister, who will tell you if you still have a job, and if you do what it might be:”
Geneviève LeGrand looked at the men confronting her. There were no smiles on their faces, no satisfaction in their eyes, only grim determination. And something else, something she recognized as fear, fear of the consequences of their failure. They were trying to stop, with little in the way of leads, a terrorist attack inside France. An attack that it appeared she had unwittingly, stupidly, helped facilitate. Reaching for the phone, which Dionne had already dialed, she prayed that Catherine Laurence would answer, and that whether or not she lost her job or her reputation, she would not go down as a footnote in the history of mass murder.
~25~
MOROCCO, MAY 15-16, 2003
Casablanca’s French colonial quarter was within walking distance of the city”s modern center. As a result, the explosions Megan heard while she was eating dinner in her room at the Porte Rouge seemed to have occurred right outside her door. One nearly did, in the cemetery around the block, where earlier the neighborhood boys had been playing. Looking out her fourth-floor window, she could see over the rooftops to the chaos that was once the pleasant and orderly burial ground: the tops of trees burning like giant torches, the doors blown off charred mausoleums that glowed like furnaces on the inside, and smoke everywhere, rising into the night. There were no televisions in the rooms, so she joined the handful of Porte Rouge’s other guests in the lobby to watch CNN’s local French language station. The others, two middle-aged couples and a female lawyer, all French, were swift to blame America’s adventure in Iraq for the bombings. They spoke openly in their native tongue, not seeming to care whether Megan, an obvious American, could understand them or not. They soon left to go out for dinner, but Megan stayed for several hours, watching and listening and smoking. Five suicide bombings had been staged simultaneously around the city, two at Jewish restaurants, one at the Jewish cemetery in the old quarter (she could hear the fire trucks outside all night), one at the Farah Hotel, and one at a Spanish social club. Speculation as to the Farah centered around a conference held there some months ago that included a delegation from Israel. Commentators could not understand the targeting of the
Casa de España,
the popular Spanish gathering place, but Megan knew of the burning hatred in the hearts of some jihadists for Christian Spain. She was not surprised to hear Salafist Jihad mentioned along with al-Qaeda as possible responsible parties.