The thought crossed Bruno’s mind that he should offer to cook for the group assembled at Le Pavillon. But he knew that Dillah would be outraged if anyone tried to replace her in the kitchen to feed her family. Trying to think of what Sami might like and also what he might need, Bruno went briefly by his own garden to fill a basket with apples, pears and black currants. From the look of him, Sami had eaten little of anything in Afghanistan, let alone the fruit and vegetables that would do him good. Finally, remembering one of Sami’s favorite treats from his days at the tennis club, Bruno stopped at the supermarket and bought a large carton of vanilla ice cream.
“All quiet in Toulouse,” Gaston told him when Bruno drove into the courtyard where he could park out of sight. “Nobody’s stirring, they tell us. But the boss is on his way. Apparently there’s been a development.”
Bruno found Sami, barefoot and dressed in loose tracksuit trousers and a vest, dozing by the pool, Balzac snoozing on his chest. One of Sami’s hands was shading his eyes, the other lay on Balzac’s back. Bruno stripped to his shorts, dived into the pool and began swimming its lengths, crawl one way, backstroke the other. The splashes woke Balzac and jerked Sami to sit upright. He saw Bruno’s basket lying close by and picked out a pear.
“Have you swum yet?” Bruno asked, pausing at his turn. Sami shook his head and then stripped and rolled into the pool. He floated on his back, arms outstretched and eyes closed as Bruno continued his lengths, wondering what news the brigadier would bring and whether his idea of turning the Desbordes farm into a scout camp would unlock more money from the Halévy bequest. How long would the brigadier want to monitor the phones and e-mails at the mosque and gather intelligence before judging it was time to arrest Rafiq’s killers and let Momu and his family resume a normal life?
“Car coming,” called Gaston. Bruno climbed out of the pool, quickly toweled down and put on some fresh shorts and sandals from the sports bag in the back of his Land Rover. He strapped on his handgun and joined Gaston at the archway that led into the courtyard. Robert had the high ground in the pigeon tower with a view in all directions.
“It’s the doc’s car,” he called down, and Bruno recognized Fabiola’s elderly Twingo as it rounded the bend. He could hear, far off in the distance and barely louder than the buzzing of a bee, the beat of a helicopter.
“I got the lab to expedite the blood tests. They’d never seen anything like it,” Fabiola said. “He’s had hepatitis, amoebic dysentery and jaundice, which is still not cleared up, and he’s still got anemia, hookworm, and they’re still checking for tuberculosis. It’s amazing what a human body can put up with. I’ve brought him some new pills, but you have to make sure he takes them, Bruno. How has he been today?”
“He slept in and had a big breakfast, eggs and yogurt and that flatbread Dillah makes,” said Gaston. “He spent the rest of the morning stroking your horse. Then he sat by the pool with Momu and Bruno’s dog. He’s got a thing about animals; they like him, the way he touches them.”
“Touch seems very important to him as a way to communicate,” Fabiola said. “He doesn’t seem to trust speech much, as if he hasn’t had much practice in speaking. Let’s go and see how he is.”
Sami, who must have heard her voice, came loping around the corner, Balzac in his arms, still dripping water from the pool and his face beaming a wide smile at the sight of Fabiola.
“Fab’ola,” he said, in a voice that creaked like a rusty door. He stroked her forearm as if he were petting a dog.
Fabiola’s hair was piled atop her head, and she wore no makeup. The old mountaineering scar on her cheek stood out plainly, and Sami drew close to look at it. He touched it gently with the back of his hand as if to feel its texture. Fabiola smiled and then turned him to examine the scars on Sami’s back. He was still wet from the pool.
“The brigadier will be here in twenty minutes,” Gaston said, his head cocked as he listened to the voice in his earpiece. “The chopper put him down by the big quarry. He wanted to be sure we were all here.”
“Why not land here?” Fabiola asked.
“It would draw attention,” said Bruno. “Not many holiday rentals come with helicopter service.”
Fabiola took Sami’s hand to lead him indoors and asked Bruno to bring her medical bag. Once in the kitchen and beginning her examination, with Dillah again standing beside Sami, Fabiola said she had something important to tell them.
“These worms Sami has are highly infectious. You need to wash your hands very thoroughly after you touch him, every time. And wash him with this special soap first thing in the morning, whenever he goes to the bathroom, before meals and when he goes to bed.” She put a large white plastic bottle on the kitchen table and then turned to Bruno.
“Dogs are very vulnerable, and they are also carriers to humans, so I’m giving Balzac a deworming cure.”
“What about horses?” Bruno asked. “Sami spends a lot of time stroking Hector.”
“I don’t know. I’ll check and get back to you. And make sure to tell those two security men because all this applies to them, too. Dillah, every time Sami uses the bathroom, please wash everything afterward with bleach: the shower, handbasin and toilet bowl. Here, I’ve brought you a big pack of rubber gloves. Use each of them only once.”
Dillah’s eyes widened in alarm but she nodded firmly.
“One more thing,” Fabiola went on. “No babies and no lactating mothers may visit until I say so. I’ll do more tests in a few days. The antibiotics and other treatments should have killed the worms and eggs by then. But babies are very vulnerable, and breast milk from an infected mother can be lethal.”
She turned to Bruno, who was thinking that there would now be no visit by Rashida and her children. “You might want to remind them of the legal situation on quarantine,” she added as she climbed into her car. She drove off.
Bruno nodded as he waved farewell, recalling one of his lectures at the police academy and a section of the legal code that he had not studied for years. But he remembered the extraordinary powers that French doctors could assume to impose strict quarantine to prevent public health risks. Briefly, he explained that Fabiola could have them all kept here behind barbed wire and watched by armed sentries, if she thought it necessary.
As he finished, Bruno heard Gaston’s voice warning of an approaching car. Bruno told the others to stay inside for the moment and went out to greet the brigadier. To his surprise, the brigadier was being driven in the mayor’s big Renault. The mayor gave Bruno a cheery wave as he parked. Two tough-looking strangers climbed out from the rear seats, nodding amiably at Gaston and Robert.
“All in order, Bruno?” the brigadier asked, shaking his hand and nodding at the two men who’d come with him. “I’ve brought you some reinforcements.”
“Yes, sir. The doctor has just been scaring the pants off us with awful warnings about some intestinal worms that Sami picked up when he was overseas. It looks like we’ll all be bathing in bleach from now on.”
“Do whatever she says,” said the mayor, coming forward to shake Bruno’s hand. “If any kind of infection like that takes hold, we can say good-bye to next year’s tourist season.”
“In that case, gentlemen, you’d both better wash your hands after shaking mine,” said Bruno. “It’s a pleasure to see you, Monsieur le Maire, but a bit of a surprise.”
“I’ll explain,” said the brigadier. “The situation has changed dramatically since we last spoke. You remember that small château in the vineyards we used for the summit during that Basque business? We’ve found a similar place, only more remote, for your boy and his family. The buildings are being secured by the army as we speak, and facilities are being installed, beds and so on. Deutz will be there tomorrow, and he wants the family kept together, so you’ll all be moving there. I want you to stay there with them, Bruno, and be sure you’re armed. And it may be getting crowded. It looks as though we’ll have to convene a tribunal on his mental competence.”
Bruno frowned. That was usually only needed if there was to be a trial. “Are charges being brought against Sami?”
“Not yet, and not by us, but I suspect we’ll be getting an extradition request from Washington. Sami’s thumbprints are all over some of the unexploded IEDs they found in Afghanistan. It looks like your boy is the expert the Americans call the Engineer.”
Bruno’s jaw dropped. He recalled reading articles in the French press about this legendary bomb maker, his innovative designs and the meticulous craftsmanship of his work, never a centimeter of wire wasted nor a junction that wasn’t doubly soldered. A caption to a photo in Paris Match of one of the bombs that had been defused said it looked as professionally made as the interior of a mobile phone or a computer.
“Even if Sami is not the Engineer, at the very least he worked with him. So your young friend may be responsible for dozens of deaths. Under a whole shelf load of antiterrorism agreements we had no choice but to inform our allies that we’ve got him,” the brigadier said. “I wish to heaven that he’d never left Afghanistan.”
Bruno kept his face expressionless as he absorbed the news and the visceral shock of horror that it brought. Bruno had seen men he knew maimed and killed by roadside bombs and cleverly rigged artillery shells that could be timed to spew shrapnel into a passing column. Mon Dieu, if Sami had been guilty of that …
He took a deep breath and tried to reconcile the image of Sami putting together the intricate timing mechanisms of bombs and booby traps with the pathetic figure huddled in a ball on the airplane bringing him home to France. Bruno also recalled Sami smiling beatifically as Balzac lay in his arms. But recalling the careful artistry of Sami’s repairs at the tennis and rugby clubs in St. Denis and his work at Lespinasse’s garage, he knew that Sami could well be the Engineer.
Then the wider implications began to occur to him: of extradition hearings, court appearances, outraged American politicians demanding that the French hand the Engineer over so he could be brought to justice.
But if Sami was formally declared to be mentally unfit to stand trial, or had been acting under duress, what then? Like most policemen, Bruno thought that pleas of insanity were open to wide abuse. In the case of Sami, Bruno felt in his bones that the conventional legal rules of guilt and responsibility and medical evidence could hardly apply. Momu had phrased it best: Sami was put together differently. He was not like other people.
And how would the French state react? After terror attacks in Paris, France had been one of the strongest voices for international conventions against terrorism and the extradition of suspected terrorists to stand trial. Could Sami, could the massed ranks of the French psychiatric profession, stand against the overwhelming demand of realpolitik that Sami be surrendered?
Since French soldiers had been killed in roadside bombings in Afghanistan, it was unlikely that public opinion would stand up for Sami. The best that could happen was that Sami would be tried in France and condemned to a psychiatric prison hospital for the rest of his life. That possibility gave the men from the Toulouse mosque even more incentive to find Sami and to silence him. Now he understood just how desperate they must be to kill him before he might talk.
“I see you understand the implications of this,” the brigadier said. “As we speak, letters are going out to the legal attaché of the United States embassy in Paris, along with the proper representatives of our British, German, Dutch, Canadian and Australian friends, all of whom have lost men to IEDs. I have no doubt we’ll be getting formal applications for extradition. The British and Germans can simply send us European arrest warrants, and he’d be handed over to them almost automatically.”
“Well, it would be automatic unless we charge him first under French law,” the mayor said. “That would take precedence. We’d be in charge and could set up medical tribunals to assess competence and so on. I’ve been talking to the minister of the interior and he’s been talking to the Élysée, and this is the way we’re going to handle it.”
Bruno nodded slowly as he thought through the implications. “At what point does all this become public? The media will be all over this.”
“It becomes public when formal charges are made or if it leaks, and it had better not be leaked from here in St. Denis,” the brigadier said, menace in his voice.
“It won’t just be the media, Bruno,” the mayor said. “I can think of some of our own politicians who will want to make use of this. A young Algerian immigrant, now a naturalized French citizen, a bomb-making terrorist whose work has killed French soldiers … You know as well as I do what the anti-immigrant politicians will do with that. Then there’ll be Muslim hotheads trying to turn Sami into some jihadist martyr.”
“That’s why we’re going to move all this into the château, where we can secure the grounds and close the roads if we have to,” the brigadier said. “And if all this redounds badly on St. Denis, you two gentlemen have only yourselves to blame for arranging to bring Sami home.”
“Understood,” Bruno said. “But there might be one legal way to keep this area buttoned up. The doctor reminded me of her powers under the public health regulations. If necessary, we can get this whole area declared to be under quarantine and sealed off.”
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, Bruno. That might be useful to bear in mind for the future, but it won’t be easy to persuade our medical tribunal to convene in the middle of a plague zone, or whatever you plan to call it. The immediate priority for you is to take a full set of Sami’s fingerprints and DNA samples, just so we can be absolutely clear whom we are dealing with.”
“Any word from Toulouse about those two guys who killed Rafiq?” Bruno asked.
“They’re still holed up in the mosque, as far as we know,” the brigadier replied. “Don’t worry, Bruno, we’ll get them when we’re ready. But in the meantime it would be helpful if the mayor could make clear to Sami’s family that this is likely to become an international incident.”
“In that case, sir, since we’re likely to be holed up in the château for some time, would it be okay if I took tonight off and join you at the château tomorrow? You have the extra security guards, you don’t really need me. And if you need an extra vehicle, the keys to my Land Rover are in the ignition. I’ll take my horse.”
The brigadier nodded and turned away. The mayor caught Bruno’s arm and asked, “Are you riding all the way home?”
“No, just to Pamela’s place; I know Fabiola’s on duty tonight, so I have to exercise the horses.”
“You and I need to talk about the Halévy bequest and the Desbordes farm,” the mayor said. “The Paris lawyer is coming down tomorrow. He’ll be here in time for lunch. He was very pleased that you’d tracked the place down. I’ve spoken to the brigadier, and he’s prepared to spare you for the day.”
“The Desbordes farm is in another commune. Do we yet know of any Desbordes link to St. Denis itself?”
The members of Florence’s computer club were helping the staff of the mairie, the mayor explained, hunting down the names of Desbordes family members, along with local scoutmasters and Protestant pastors.
“How do you think the Halévy family will react to this accusation of Sami as an Islamic militant? It can hardly make them feel better about St. Denis.”
“I think we’d better warn the lawyer what’s coming,” the mayor replied. “St. Denis gave refuge to Jewish children and also tries to deal honorably with its Muslims, whatever the consequences. There’s nothing else we can say.”
“And it happens to be true,” added Bruno.