The Convert's Song (19 page)

“Anything else?” Belhaj asked.

“He heard these mugs talking about an ambulance or ambulances. They said someone was going to need an ambulance.”

“Their victims?”

“I suppose, yes.” Adel shrugged. “Voilà. I have done my good deed for the day.”

They fairly sprinted out of the park. Belhaj had Laurent switch cars and drive for her. Their destination was the home of the arms dealer. She sat in the front passenger seat talking on the phone. They had driven about five minutes when Belhaj ordered Laurent to turn on the car radio.

News bulletins were coming in from London. Reports of shootings and explosions outside Harrods, the luxury department store. Between the radio and Belhaj’s phone conversations, the story came together. Men with guns and grenades had attacked pedestrians on Brompton Road, the busy boulevard where Harrods was located. Gunmen had fired from a stolen or commandeered taxicab. Others had attacked the nearby Knightsbridge subway station. The London police, who had been out in force because of the French warning, had responded swiftly and killed or captured the assailants within minutes. But there were civilian casualties.

“They pulled it off,” Pescatore exclaimed.

“An iconic target, the street as stage,” Belhaj said. “As Souraya said.”

Pescatore slumped in the backseat. The London attack recalled Buenos Aires, though these terrorists hadn’t stormed the store or used suicide bombers. He could see the chaos: strolling crowds, one of those big black London cabs rolling down the street, gunfire spraying from the windows…

“Fatima!” He grabbed her shoulder. “Fatima! What your informant said. The ambulance!”

She turned in her seat. “Yes?”

“Remember that scene in
The Battle of Algiers
? The guerrillas steal an ambulance and drive around like maniacs with the siren going, shooting everybody that moves. Raymond loved that scene. It was his favorite part. He said the Algerians were getting payback, spreading the pain around. Look how it went down in London. What if they’re gonna hijack an ambulance and do a drive-by on the Champs-Élysées?”

Her eyes got even bigger. “They were not joking about the victims. They needed an ambulance for the attack.”

“That’s what I’m saying.”

Belhaj ordered the second car to continue to Stains to find the arms dealer. After telling Laurent to drive them back to the Champs-Élysées, she issued an alert to check ambulances on the streets in the central city and review reports of missing ambulances and extremists with access to ambulances through associates or employment.

The sighting happened an hour later as Belhaj conferred with police brass at a command post at the place de l’Étoile. They gathered around a police radio to listen. A patrol car had spotted an ambulance coming off the Périphérique at Boulevard Malesherbes. The officers verified that the ambulance had been reported stolen from a hospital parking lot the day before. The police sedan followed at a distance, joined by marked and unmarked vehicles, a helicopter, a tactical team. The predatory escort closed in as the ambulance rolled toward downtown.

When the ambulance turned onto a one-way side street, police vehicles and officers on foot sealed the block at both ends. The police used a loudspeaker to order the occupants to surrender. The ambulance crashed into a squad car in an attempt at escape. The fusillade killed the driver and both passengers of the ambulance. The only other injuries were two officers grazed by friendly fire.

The shootout scene was east of the Champs-Élysées in an area of narrow streets lined with restaurants and nightspots. Belhaj and Pescatore waded through bystanders, camera crews, law enforcement and fire personnel. Pescatore kept expecting someone to put a hand on his chest, demand his credentials, and end his masquerade. But he was with Fatima Belhaj, so the walls of uniforms parted like magic.

Damaged by bullets and shrapnel and the crash, the ambulance glowed in the glare of spotlights, revolving lights, television lights, the neon of a Chinese restaurant and a strip club. A forensic team in white protective suits was at work. Belhaj ushered Pescatore past them to look at the two bodies in the front of the ambulance. The terrorists were slumped in their seats, bloodied and disfigured. He studied the faces, which were freshly shaved in the manner of aspiring martyrs. He didn’t recognize them.

They walked down the block about a hundred feet. A ring of chalk encircled a third body covered by a sheet and surrounded by blood, glass, debris, and an AK-47. The gunman had bolted from the back door of the ambulance. He had tried to throw a grenade, but gunfire had cut him down. His grenade had exploded next to him.

At Belhaj’s order, a forensic investigator lifted the sheet. Pescatore turned away, fighting down vomit. He took a deep breath. He saw a police helicopter hovering between him and the moon. He had a memory of the young Argentine cop reacting to the aftermath of the shootout in La Matanza. Pescatore had seen too many corpses lately: a gallery of gore.

The body under the sheet no longer had a face. But whoever that torn-to-shit son-of-a-bitch was, his pudgy frame and short legs ruled out the most interesting possibility.

Fatima Belhaj put her hand on Pescatore’s shoulder. She leaned her weight into it, a furtive act of affection. He collected himself, looked at her, and shook his head.

No Raymond. But he felt close.

H
alf awake, Pescatore ran his fingertips up along Fatima’s bare thigh. He traced the high smooth curve of her hip outlined against the faint light in his hotel room.

They lay entwined in a disorder of sheets and clothes. They had crawled into bed late at night. Pescatore had managed to hide his ankle holster under the bed. They were too worn out to do anything but hang on to each other and surrender to exhaustion. They woke up at dawn, made love with slow-motion urgency, and fell asleep again. Now it was time to get back to work, as she had murmured several times without moving.

Pescatore pushed her curls out of her face and gave her a kiss.

“What’s the rush?” he said. “You’re a hero. You saved Paris. The interior minister ought to come serve you breakfast in bed.”

“Breakfast for you too, then.”

“Tell him I like my coffee
bien serré
.”

She stroked the muscles of his shoulder. “This is not over.”

“Aren’t you glad how things worked out?”

“Yes. But there are unsolved problems.”

The death toll in the London attack had reached twenty-three. The unidentified fourth terrorist in the Champs-Élysées plot remained at large. So did Raymond Mercer—whether he was that fourth terrorist or not. The arms dealer had been shown a photograph of Raymond, but it was no help because the fourth suspect had worn a hooded sweatshirt and kept his distance as they loaded the weapons into the cars.

And the night before, taking second billing to the media frenzy about the Saturday-night jihad on the Champs-Élysées, the hospitalized graffiti artist had died. The news resulted in arson, looting and clashes with police overnight in the slums around Paris. The riots were likely to spread to other cities because of news coverage and rioters bragging on YouTube, Twitter and Facebook. Payday had arrived. Although the events were unrelated, the juxtaposition of the riots and the terror attack was a worst-case scenario for public relations.

“We do not need another 2005, when the American television made it sound like France was burning down,” Fatima said as they drove to her headquarters. “An Islamic insurrection.”

“That wasn’t true?”

“No! They are idiots. In fact, at that time, colleagues from my service were watching a terrorist cell near the airport, the zone of the worst riots. The Islamists had heavy guns. But they did not participate at all. They did not touch the guns. They sat tranquil inside until it ended.”

“But now you’re afraid of copycat terrorists getting fired up by the Champs-Élysées action.”

“Yes.” She smothered a yawn, rubbing her eyes at a stoplight.

At DCRI headquarters, Pescatore worried about getting busted with his ankle gun. But she once again took him in through the garage entrance, bypassing metal detectors and sign-in desks; he was a VIP visitor. Her squad received them in a celebratory mood. Though the officers still didn’t know exactly who Pescatore was, they had heard that his information helped stop the attack.

Belhaj let him sit in on a briefing. The dead leaders of the attacks had been a Briton of Pakistani descent, in London, and a Frenchman of Turkish descent, in Paris. Both were thought to have trained overseas. The rest were mostly converts unknown to antiterror police. The investigators believed the group had not attempted suicide bombings because of their inexperience and the police pressure, which had forced them to rush the attacks. In London, almost half the victims were Saudi. The stores and restaurants of Old Brompton Road had been full of wealthy Saudis on summer vacation.

“That is a curious detail,” Belhaj told Pescatore after the briefing. “It will be interesting to see if the Saudis were targeted intentionally.”

“Because?”

“Because it could mean al-Qaedists wanted to strike the kingdom on European soil. Or, if one thinks like Le Commandant, attacking Saudis could be a sign of an Iranian element. After you and the Israelis, that is who the Iranians hate most. In fact, often there are Saudis on the Champs-Élysées in the summer as well.”

After they had returned from a quick lunch, Laurent walked into Belhaj’s office without knocking. His expression was grim. He put a paper in front of her. She read it, brow furrowing, and looked up at her deputy.

“Where did you find this?”

“A jihadi website,” Laurent said.

The anonymous Internet diatribe identified Fatima by name and rank. It accused her of abusing Souraya during her interrogation. It claimed that Fatima and her officers had beaten Souraya, touched her indecently, made sexually offensive comments, threatened to strip her naked, terrorized her sons, torn up her head scarf, and used the vilest possible language to insult Souraya, her family, the Koran, the Prophet Muhammad, and Islam itself.

“‘Fatima Belhaj is a servile, hateful, traitorous, apostate repressor of her own people,’” Belhaj read aloud, enunciating with exaggerated precision. “‘It is the duty of strong devout brothers everywhere to rise up and avenge the violation and humiliation of sister Souraya, a Moroccan lioness of the faith.’”

Laurent had ordered an investigation. He suspected the writer had been in touch with Souraya’s lawyer or her relatives.

“What annoys me is the inaccuracy,” Belhaj said. “I said she could wipe herself with her head scarf. Why not quote that? Why invent things? She is an idiot.”

Laurent said higher-ups wanted to give Belhaj special security. She said that was out of the question. When Laurent left, Pescatore spoke up.

“Fatima, I gotta say I’m a little worried about your name plastered all over terrorist websites.”

“Don’t be absurd,” she declared, swallowing almost imperceptibly. “They are the ones who should worry about me. I assume you are checking for a response from Raymond?”

“Every other minute.”

She swiveled pensively in her chair.

“If he is not the big boss, if he really thinks he can offer a deal, now is the time to come forward.”

“You want me to e-mail him again?”

“Not yet. But soon we tell him that if he does not surrender, we will make public his name. That will hurt his ability to negotiate.”

Laurent stuck his head back into the office. There was a lead on the missing suspect from the Champs-Élysées crew.

A few hours later, they were in an unmarked van with tinted windows cruising through the damaged landscape of a place known as the Rock.

“You know, in the States that’s what we call prison,” Pescatore said. “The Rock.”

“It is not the real name,” Fatima said. “Actually, it was designed by a famous architect. In the 1960s, it was bold, innovative. Perhaps not practical: putting thousands of poor immigrants on top of each other in huge towers, all cement, no grass, no trees, the middle of nowhere.”

“I coulda told him that. Shown him the projects in Chicago, saved you some grief.”

The Rock was the nickname of a housing project. The futuristic vision had decayed into a ghetto-Jetsons reality. It was a brutalist maze of towers shaped like giant hair rollers and filing cabinets: multilevel plazas, curving elevated walkways, the surfaces smothered in graffiti, the cement cracked and discolored. Pescatore and Belhaj rode with Laurent and a driver; a second van followed. The street entered a tunnel below a building. They passed carcasses of charred cars, pools of water, ash and garbage, a fetid smell of destruction from rioting the night before.

“These aren’t Rolls-Royces down here,” Pescatore said. “They’re burning their neighbors’ cars.”

She bridged her eyes with her hand, pressing her temples. She had complained of a headache earlier.

“They burned the new pharmacy, the post office, the gym, the nursery school,” she said.
“C’est le nihilisme total.”

She knew the turf well. He wondered if that was the result of previous cases or if she had grown up in the Rock. She had talked about the
cité
of her youth without being specific. She was private about certain things, and he didn’t plan to ask.

The van drove up a circular ramp and pulled into an open-air second-story parking lot. They had a commanding view of the central pedestrian esplanade, a kind of town square of the housing complex. Garbage cans had been torched and windows smashed. Vandalized light poles slumped like drunken skeletons. Soot and spray paint covered walls. The dominant graffiti slogans were
C’est le Jour de Paye
and
Police: NTM
(
nique ta mere,
or “fuck your mother”). Kids kicked a soccer ball off the metal shutters of a closed bar. A family walked through the debris in full fundamentalist regalia: the heavyset husband wore a skullcap, chest-length beard, sweater over salwar kameez, the pants cuffed well above the ankle, white tube socks, and gym shoes. He carried groceries. His wife trailed him pushing a baby stroller with her black-gloved hands, a tentlike, burka-style outfit revealing only her eyes.

Young men and teenagers congregated on the esplanade and in walkways between buildings. They wore hoods, caps and scarves to hide their faces and because it had turned unseasonably cold, more like June in Argentina than in France. Many youths rode scooters, motorcycles, or all-terrain three-wheelers. The riders sped through the tunnels and parking lots, rolled in lazy circles on the esplanade, popped wheelies. The police did not interfere. After the night’s clashes, the riot squad had pulled back to the edges of the complex. Police and rioters were in halftime mode, letting the civilians do their business, return from work, and get inside before dark fell and the duel resumed.

Belhaj leaned between Laurent and the driver to point binoculars at the windshield. Laurent communicated on the radio.

“Nothing?” she asked.

“Nothing.”

An extra layer of law enforcement had deployed in and around the Rock. An anonymous phone tipster had reported that the fugitive fourth terrorist was in the housing project. No details, just a general location. Officers spotted a stolen Renault Clio identified by the gun seller who had armed the would-be Champs-Élysées shooters. The Clio was in an open-air parking lot visible from where the police van now sat. The Clio’s windows had been broken and the trunk popped, one of many vehicles vandalized in the unrest. The police used the pretense of a uniformed foot patrol to run an explosive-sniffing dog around the car and glance inside. Satisfied that it was safe, they set up surveillance. Then a phone intercept picked up chatter among local drug dealers alluding to a fugitive hiding on their turf. No mention of terrorism, but a good lead. Belhaj had a plan to pursue it. After dark.

Pescatore adjusted the body armor under his jacket. When Belhaj had given him the vest before leaving for the Rock, he made another appeal to borrow a pistol. He hoped that would let him lose the ankle gun and calm his conscience.

“A vest and no gun, that’s a bad combination,” he argued. “Remember what happened in La Matanza.”

“You Americans and your guns,” she responded. End of discussion.

Pescatore’s iPhone buzzed: an e-mail from Facundo. It asked him to call as soon as possible. Pescatore wanted to talk to his boss in private, but the operation was too sensitive to propose getting out of the van.

They waited. Fatima took aspirin and rested with her eyes closed. With the exception of when she had been taken hostage in La Matanza, Pescatore had yet to see her rattled. But he believed the Internet attack was bothering her. He watched the sunset glint off a sea of windows in the concrete citadel. He fretted about the threat against Fatima, the message from Facundo, the mayhem that Raymond had spread in his wake.

The evening brought more rioting, which served Belhaj’s plan. The wiretap had caught a teenage drug dealer named Bakary mentioning a fugitive in the Rock. Belhaj’s crew, joined by twenty riot cops, set up near Bakary’s building: a high-rise tower dotted with miniature satellite dishes and shaped like the monolith in
2001: A Space Odyssey.
Belhaj, Pescatore and the rest were given riot helmets and Plexiglas shields to blend into the phalanx of CRS officers.

Fires flared, rioters roamed, motorcycles whined back and forth. Word came over the radio that a group had attacked passing buses with Molotov cocktails and were retreating into the complex. A handful of youths jogged to the entrance of the building. They carried bottles and gasoline cans. The police charged, but slowly enough to ensure that their prey fled inside. Belhaj’s plan was to use the chase as camouflage. A visit from the counterterror squad could raise the alarm; hot pursuit by the CRS was business as usual.

Pescatore hung back during the chase, worried about his ankle holster. Hoisting the shield, he followed the throng of cops pounding up the dim narrow stairwell. The air was cold and heavy with odors of smoke, marijuana and cooking. The officers took the stairs two at a time in their Robocop armor, cursing as the fleeing youths dropped bottles, gas cans, knives, lighters and other incriminating objects. The police caught the suspects at the sixth floor. Breathing hard, bellowing commands, they forced the prisoners to put on plastic gloves in order to test their hands for residue from Molotov cocktails.

Pescatore continued, now more slowly, up the stairs with the counterterror unit and a couple of CRS men. At the eighth floor, music boomed from the hallway into the landing: the angry synthesizer chords and snarling rhymes of “Jour de Paye.”

As Belhaj climbed, she muttered a verse along with the rapper Booba:
“Dangereux banlieusards, ici c’est Paris, fuck l’OM.”

“What’s that?” Pescatore asked.

She grinned sardonically beneath the face shield of the helmet. “The Marseille soccer team. Paris and Marseille rap groups are rivals. Like East Coast and West Coast.”

Their destination was an apartment on the thirteenth floor. In the hallway, the officers unholstered their pistols and held them at their sides, pointing down. The uniformed officers banged on the door. A black youth opened it.

“Bakary,” an officer said. It was not a question.

Bakary shook his head and said,
“Non, merci,”
waving his arms as if fending off a salesman. A gloved hand planted itself on his chest and propelled him backward. The platoon surged in.