The Convert's Song (16 page)

The report ended with an urgent request for a full investigation of Alberto/Raymond with assistance from other law enforcement and intelligence services, including foreign ones.

“What do you think?” Pescatore asked.

Belhaj studied a diagram of phone links. Pescatore added excitedly: “Belisario. That’s gotta be Belisario Ortega, the ex-cop who was the leader of the attack in Buenos Aires.”

“It is the most interesting and solid detail in this,” she said.

“Meaning you have doubts.”

“Remember, this was written defensively, to explain the loss of control of an informant. It is full of speculation. Many Islamist groups send jihadis to South Asia through Iran. The Iranian services are aware of it, but that does not mean they infiltrate the networks. The war between Shiites and Sunnis in Syria has made the Iranians more hostile to al-Qaeda.”

Fatima was right to be hard-nosed; the theory required that Raymond be sneaky enough to run a secret parallel network. Still, Pescatore wondered if her beef with the Commandant might affect her objectivity.

She asked him to bring Esposito back. Pescatore went to the table where Esposito sat laughing with his crew. In a friendly tone, the Commandant asked, “Is the
haute personnalité
from Paris ready for me?”

As they walked, Pescatore asked, “How long have you been jousting?”

“Since I can remember. My father was a jouster. There has been jousting here since the Crusades. The crusaders invented it while they were waiting to sail to the Holy Land.”

“Looks like fun, if you don’t mind a spear in the face now and then.”

Esposito chuckled. He asked Pescatore his first name. When he heard it, he asked him to repeat it. The ex-cop hesitated with a curious expression, but said nothing more.

Belhaj lit a cigarette and asked Esposito to resume the briefing. After he submitted the report, he said, his chiefs called him on the carpet. They lectured him about speculation based on limited proof. Then they bigfooted him. A squad based in Paris took over as handlers for Raymond, who helped prepare an operation to dismantle his own network.

“He went to someone powerful behind my back and made a deal to protect himself and his family. Perhaps U.S. intelligence. The Americans were keenly interested in the case. After all, the militants were traveling and training with the goal of killing U.S. troops. I made strenuous objections. I said we couldn’t let Raymond go free. He was the ringleader! He had deceived us. But he convinced everyone that he was indispensable.”

The roundup produced a dozen arrests in France, Belgium, Spain and Turkey. Raymond and Belisario were not captured.

“A farce. He threw them bones. They didn’t even arrest anyone in Pakistan, because the Pakistani services are on the side of the enemy. The affair left a bad taste in my mouth. It was a question of honor. I retired. Imagine, at forty-seven. A full-time jouster.”

“What do you know about Raymond today?” Belhaj asked.

“Nothing. Recently I was informed that you were looking for him, and that he is really an American. It only makes me more suspicious. But your colleagues who took over the dossier are the ones to ask. It is my understanding they have lost track of him. Not very impressive.”

Belhaj shrugged, conceding the point.

“Be careful with this guy,” Esposito said. A grimace etched lines like cracks in granite on his broad earnest face. “He’s a scorpion. He destroys whatever he touches.”

Belhaj thanked him for his time. She handed him the report, but he asked her to keep it. He hoped it might still be of value.

“I presume that, like me, you are the first in your family to join the police,” Esposito said to Belhaj. He sighed. “It was once a source of great pride for me. But it turned out to be ephemeral. Other things endure.”

The Commandant scanned the crowded, boisterous tables around him.
Back home, back in his tribe,
Pescatore thought.

A
s the taxi drove toward Paris from Charles de Gaulle Airport the next morning, a fleet of police vans sped by in the opposite direction.

A dozen vans. Lights flashing. Crammed full of officers. The initials
CRS
on the sides:
Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité.
The riot squad.

“Merde,”
Fatima Belhaj said. “It begins.”

Newspapers and televisions in Montpellier had blared the news as Pescatore and Belhaj were leaving. After weeks of scattered violence in the slums, police nationwide were girding for the worst because of an incident in a housing complex near the Paris airport. Armed with spray cans and bad attitudes, two teenage graffiti artists had tagged the wall of a police substation. Officers gave chase. A boy fled into the path of a bus. He was in a coma.

“If he dies, this area we are passing now will be very hot,” Fatima said.

“Are the Islamic networks stirring it up?” Pescatore asked.

“No. They are a separate world, though sharing the same space. The rioters are low-level gangs. Normally they do not respond to politics or religion. They have particular codes, their own logic. Riots happen because of conflict with the police. Especially if someone dies, accident or no.”

“Not a great atmosphere to be hunting for Raymond. Imagine a terrorist attack now.”

“This is what I fear.”

The traffic slowed. She pointed out fresh graffiti on the cement wall of the highway.

“You see it?” she said.

The graffiti proclaimed,
C’est le Jour de Paye.
It was the phrase the youth had painted on the police station before the bus hit him.

“‘It’s Payday,’” Pescatore said.

Fatima had explained that “Jour de Paye” was a song by Booba, a gangster rapper of Moroccan-Senegalese descent with jailhouse muscles and a way with words. The slogan had appeared overnight on walls across the country.

The taxi cruised along the Seine into the heart of the city. Pescatore experienced the splendor of Paris at full blast: the symmetrical stone facades enclosing the river, the boats skimming the water, the elegant frame of the Eiffel Tower. The vista made him feel like what he was: a kid from Taylor Street.

“Nice town you got here, Fatima,” he said, lifting her hand to kiss it. “I went from the Paris of South America to the real McCoy.”

“I am happy you are here,” she said, holding his gaze.

They had slept together at the hotel in Montpellier, making up for the missed nights. He had learned more about her personal life. She got a lot of attention from male colleagues, but warded off serious relationships. She maintained a discreet distance from her family. Two brothers were serving time in prison. People in the neighborhood asked for favors now that she was a big shot. That came with the territory, as did her vigilance for challenges or slights to a Muslim woman who had gone far.

“Like Le Commandant making that jungle crack,” Pescatore had said sleepily in bed.

“I feel sorry for him.” She lay with her head pillowed on his chest. Her hair smelled sweet.

“You do?”

“He was a good officer. He had a bad experience with a manipulative informant. Yes, I have doubts about his Iranian theory, but he is not dumb.”

“I thought you were gonna smack him.”

“He probably did not mean to insult me personally. But it was still insulting. I could not let it pass.”

“I think he got the message.”

The only hint of conflict between them came at breakfast in the hotel when Pescatore broached the subject of obtaining a gun for self-defense.

“Impossible,” she said.

“Came in pretty handy in Bolivia.”

“In the jungle, an extreme situation,” she said. “Now we are in France. It is against the law for you, Valentín. I cannot permit it.”

The taxi left her at the Ministry of the Interior on place Beauvau in front of a tall, ornate gate flanked by flags and columns. Her bosses had summoned her to discuss the Raymond Mercer investigation and the terrorist threat. Pescatore checked into a small hotel on boulevard Malesherbes.

The cool June day was great for walking. He wandered from one majestic landscape to another: the place de la Concorde, the Tuileries Garden, the Louvre. The problem was that he kept looking at the terrain through the eyes of a terrorist. Noting a busload of cops parked outside the U.S. embassy, he asked himself if Raymond’s network—whoever they were—would go after soft targets in Europe as they had in Argentina. He thought about Raymond’s role. During the phone call, Raymond had given the sense that he was a secondary player in the South American plots. Yet the Commandant said that Raymond had run the show in Montpellier.

Pescatore stopped near the place Madeleine to eat at a little lunch spot called Caffè Corto. An Italian named Massimo served him an espresso and a prosciutto sandwich and gave him a piece of intel: your chances of scoring a good cup of coffee in Paris were improved if you requested it
bien serré
(short and tight).

After a second espresso, Pescatore pulled out his notebook. He reviewed what he had jotted down in recent days and decided to put together a timeline of Raymond’s movements.

The exercise helped him organize his thoughts. Pieces were missing: The gap after Bolivia and before France. The extent of contact with U.S. agents. The possible Iranian link. Pescatore wanted to consult with Facundo and check how the surgery had gone. As he pulled out his phone, it occurred to him that Facundo could help with another issue.

Facundo sounded strong.

“The surgery was a success,” he declared.

Pescatore gave him an update. Then he spoke in code.

“Facundo, I need help,” he said. “I left my copy of
Martín Fierro
”—he emphasized the final word—“and I’d like to get a new one. Do you know where I could do that? I feel lost without
Martín
…
Fierro.
”

Martín Fierro
was an Argentine epic poem. The word
fierro
was slang for a pistol.

Facundo understood immediately. “Are you sure?”

“I’m at a point in my intellectual development where I need it,” Pescatore said.

“That’s a heavy book. A serious commitment. Especially overseas. That kind of reading is easier here.”

“I understand,” Pescatore said. “But I’m a serious and careful reader. I really think I’ll be better off. I wouldn’t bother you otherwise.”

“Very well. By the way, do you need money?”

“No, I’ve got plenty left from what you gave me.”

“Fine. I’ll call you back. Be careful, son.”

Within the hour, Facundo called with an address and a name. Pescatore took the Métro to the Marais neighborhood. He found himself on a subway platform among a group of small boys on a school outing. There were two dozen of them, seven or eight years old. Pescatore noticed that all of the boys, and a male teacher, wore baseball caps. He didn’t think the French were into baseball. A boy stopped to remove his sweater with the help of a woman teacher. She held his baseball cap as he pulled the sweater over his head. Pescatore saw the boy was wearing a
kippah—
a skullcap. The teacher replaced the baseball cap carefully over the
kippah
, took the boy’s hand, and hurried to catch up with the group.

Pescatore understood. The boys wore the baseball caps to hide the fact that they were Jewish. Facundo had told him about the dangers on the streets of Europe: beatings, stabbings, the occasional murder. Pescatore remembered the terror spree in Toulouse by a French extremist gunman who had killed French Muslim soldiers because he saw them as traitors, then slaughtered children at a Jewish school. Like Raymond’s crew, the killer had links to Islamist networks in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

The address provided by Facundo was a shoe store near rue des Rosiers, a charming neighborhood with narrow streets and lots of pedestrian traffic. The contact was the youthful rumpled proprietor, whose name was Moshe. He wore a
kippah
and a sport jacket with rolled-up sleeves. His store was small, cluttered with merchandise and bereft of customers. A bored saleswoman with stylishly short hair glanced up at Pescatore, then returned her attention to her cell phone.

Moshe led Pescatore down a narrow hall and through a courtyard to a storeroom. Once they were inside, Pescatore said he needed a gun he could carry discreetly. Moshe outlined options. Pescatore settled on a Colt .25 automatic and an ankle holster. Moshe put a leather satchel on the table. Pescatore inspected and loaded the gun and strapped it onto his ankle.

“What do I owe you?”

“Please.” Moshe waved him off. “We have an arrangement with our mutual friend.”

On the subway again, Pescatore brooded. He hated to deceive Fatima. However, he was sick of his limbo status, first with the FBI and now the French police. He considered the prospect that Fatima was not telling him everything, especially about U.S. involvement. Furukawa had said a team from FBI headquarters was on the case. The Commandant had said U.S. intelligence knew about Raymond the year before the Buenos Aires attack. Apparently, they had signed off on a deal to let him walk in exchange for rolling up the Montpellier network. That raised serious questions. Like whether the attack in Argentina could have been averted.

It’s no fun being kept in the dark,
Pescatore thought.
And it can get you killed.

The closer he got to Raymond, the more dangerous the situation became. He was a cop; he was going to carry a gun. Better the good guys caught him with it than the bad guys without it.

Back in his hotel room, he watched television. No riots yet. The injured youth remained in a coma. The news showed police vans and kids milling around in front of towers. Waiting for payday.

Fatima called. She gave him an address and told him to take a taxi. On the ride out, he made sure the ankle holster was well concealed. The route led through a long complex of tunnels beneath the high-rises of the outlying La Défense business district. The taxi rolled into the sunset—green hills, shopping centers, leafy streets—then climbed past walled homes and stopped in a narrow cobblestoned plaza with a post office and a café. The community seemed a mix of rich suburb and country village.

Fatima waited at the wheel of a gray Peugeot 407 sedan. She squeezed his hand when he got in.

“You found him?” Pescatore blurted.

She allowed herself a triumphant smile. “His family.”

“This isn’t the kind of area I expected.”

The intelligence agency had tracked down the wife and set up surveillance. The property had been purchased in her name two years earlier. The neighbors often saw Souraya, who wore a head scarf and Muslim attire, and the two sons. There had been a few sightings of a man resembling Raymond.

Belhaj would have preferred to watch as long as possible to identify suspects and hope that Raymond showed up. But her bosses feared that a terrorist attack was imminent. They wanted to swoop in and make arrests to disrupt any potential plot.

Belhaj cruised past Raymond’s house. The street meandered up a hillside past a row of large lots. An ivy-covered stone wall with a portico entrance for cars fronted Raymond’s property, which was near the top of the hill.

“Nice place,” Pescatore said.

“Drug money.”

Belhaj drove to a nearby parking garage, where they found six officers from her unit and twice as many SWAT officers. Belhaj got into a van to confer with the chief of the SWAT team. After she got out, Pescatore took her aside.

“I can come along, right?” he asked. “It doesn’t create a problem?”

“I am in charge,” she said. “I want you there. But please put on this Spider-Man thing when the operation begins. It is protocol.”

She handed him a wool ski mask.

A few hours later, he sat with Belhaj’s unit in a van parked on the hilltop near Raymond’s house. An officer’s laptop computer showed several angles of the house from spy cameras. The SWAT officers waited in a second van. At about midnight, a Volkswagen sedan arrived and drove up through the portico. Two North African–looking men with thick beards went into the house. Pescatore heard an officer describe them as
barbus.
Neither visitor appeared to be Raymond. Belhaj thought one was the brother of Raymond’s wife. Their presence complicated the situation.

“It appears something is going on,” Belhaj said. “Perhaps they are preparing to help the family leave.”

Pescatore toyed with the ski mask. He glanced around at the investigators, who looked rumpled, unshaven and swashbuckling in sweaters and leather jackets. They had accepted his presence nonchalantly and treated him with courtesy and discretion. They probably thought he was CIA. The warm welcome brought back memories of raids he had done on smugglers’ safe houses in the Border Patrol. A familiar sensation: anticipation, anxiety, hyperconcentration. Now he felt even more guilty and nervous about the ankle gun. He did his best not to move around and kept his shoes planted on the floor of the van.