When Maggie checked into the Hotel Shangri-La on rue Philibert Lucot, she plugged in her laptop and hung her clothes up in the freestanding pressboard closet, admiring the new lavender patterned wallpaper and puffy white vinyl headboard replete with chrome studs. The cottage cheese ceiling glitter added a certain something as well; she just wasn’t quite sure what. She shook her head and smiled. It was mid-morning.
She felt rested, having popped for a business class seat from SFO to De Gaulle and sleeping most of the flight. Maybe she would be reimbursed. If not, she considered it almost a freebie, thanks to Sebi’s unexpected loan repayment.
She powered up Dara’s phone, checked for messages. One pending from Kafka. Her pulse quickened. He was still communicating. That was good.
KAFKA: how are you today?
DARA: had a difficult night, habibi
KAFKA: why?
DARA: temperature - an infection? one wound is weeping. She’d keep laying the groundwork for a potential delay in leaving the hospital. Hopefully, not scare him off.
KAFKA: sorry to hear that
DARA: waiting to see doctor. they don’t make the rounds until late morning. I just need some rest . . . will chat later
She signed off, powered down.
With any luck, the longer Kafka waited, the longer he’d keep waiting, like a gambler trying to win his money back. But for Kafka, it wasn’t money he was losing but precious time.
She checked her work phone.
A note from Ed. Bellard was receptive to leading the op. But there were conditions. He was still waiting to hear back from Walder. The world could come to an end while someone waited for authorization. Maggie hoped Senator Brahms was going to come through. Ed wanted to know if Maggie had contacted John Rae.
Not a word from John Rae, though. Not that she really expected anything after last night’s downbeat phone call in SF. She’d have to work on that.
Maggie called Captain Bellard, SDAT. He answered on the second ring.
“You’re here?” he said. “In Paris?”
“I am,” she said. “I take it you’ve spoken to Ed?”
“Café Lepic,” Bellard said. He gave her the location. “One hour.” He rang off. A man of few words.
She left her private phone on the nightstand to recharge, pocketed her work phone, slipped Dara’s phone into a side pocket in the SwissGear backpack containing Dara’s laptop. She threw that over her shoulder and took it down to the front desk.
At reception Madame Nguyen bore an air of rosewater. It complemented the blue frock with the white lace trim at the neck and her soft blue cardigan with the Kleenex stuffed in the sleeve. She and her husband had run this little hotel for decades. Maggie had always had her unspoken trust.
“I need somewhere safe for this, madame.”
Madame Nguyen peered at the pack through cat-eye spectacles. “Too big for the safe. I’ll have Vinh take care of it. Set it there, please.”
Maggie set the bag by the desk. “I also don’t want anyone to know about this—except for you and your husband, of course.”
Madame Nguyen understood that Maggie’s work was confidential. “Of course.”
“Oh, and this is for you.” Maggie slipped her a folded one hundred Euro note. “In case I forget before I leave. I’m always in such a rush, it seems.” One always tipped the concierge, especially if one appreciated the service.
Maggie hailed a cab and headed over to Café Lepic, slugging along the Périph, the ring round the city. They passed the Bois de Boulogne and she savored a brief glimpse of restful green. Gray clouds hung in the sky. The cab took her near SDAT Headquarters, north of the central city, outside of the arrondissments and Paris’s administrative limits. Bellard had picked a meeting spot convenient for him. She got out half a block from the café, following a basic rule—never pull up at an assigned address. They didn’t call it the Kill Zone for nothing. She didn’t see any suspicious people lurking as she walked up the busy sidewalk to the café. Despite traffic, she was only five minutes late.
Lepic was a workingman’s café bar, with its long narrow counter, old black-and-white tile floor, fluorescent lights, dairy cases of drinks and sandwiches, and a few stools, all taken. Most patrons stood as they drank their mid-morning coffee, one elderly gent in an overcoat appending his with a small snifter of Pernod.
Bellard was leaning at a small counter in the back, next to a flight of stairs. He wore a dark blue suit today, jacket buttoned, white short-collared shirt, no tie. He maintained that compact but formidable look Maggie had first noticed about him. Already a shadow of beard darkened his pale face. He consulted his watch as Maggie approached.
“You’re late,” he said in French.
“I don’t know if anyone has ever brought this to your attention but Paris has a complicated relationship with its traffic. I haven’t even changed from the flight.” She wore the jeans, Cuban heel boots, red turtleneck and leather jacket she had worn on the plane. Bellard was trying to act tough, establish dominance. Put her in her place. So much for being welcomed with open arms.
She ordered a noisette–an espresso with a dash of milk. “I take it Ed brought you up to speed on Abraqa?”
“Not really much in the way of speed on your end, is there?” Bellard drank from a tall glass of Americano. “Not with your director of Operations dragging his feet.”
“We’re still waiting on official approval.” Maggie took a sip of her noisette. “But we’re moving ahead all the same—unofficially. And we’ve made real progress.”
“You Americans.” Bellard gave a smirk. “We’ve made real progress! We get the job done!”
Maggie did her best to ignore the slight. “I’m ready to get started anytime you are.”
“You’re not planning on skipping town this time?”
She was wondering if that would come up. “You did put me in a cell.” She gave a sly smile as she drank her coffee. “Besides, I had no choice. I was escorted back to Washington. Orders.”
“I’m not going to be the brunt of your agency’s politics. Who knows when Walder’s fabulous approval will come through? Will it be delivered on a silver platter? Will it take weeks? Or will it never happen at all?”
Bellard did have a point. “I don’t see a problem. But we should get started. We don’t have a lot of time . . .”
“Oh, you don’t see a problem? That’s good. Because it’s my operation. Is that understood?”
Maggie picked up her coffee and took a breath while her irritation settled. “I’m more than happy to work with you.”
“You’re happy to work with me?” Bellard set his glass down with a loud clink that caused one of the other café-goers to stop mid-conversation and look their way. “You need to be happy to work for me. Do exactly as I say. Or get on the next flight out of France.”
Maggie counted to three. “Fine.” She dropped her voice. “But Kafka is not your garden variety terrorist. He has the key to turn off Jihad Nation’s money spigot. We have to play our cards right.”
“Let me tell you how it works. SDAT will apprehend Kafka, and he will stay here.” Bellard pressed his finger on the countertop for emphasis. “You assist. But he’s mine.”
“Ed did stipulate we get to interview Kafka first, correct? Long enough to get information on Abraqa’s Darknet? Passwords, server locations, file structure, processes? Your people are welcome to sit in. After that he’s all yours.”
“D’accord,” Bellard grunted, checking his watch. “I have to get back for a meeting. Do you have Dara’s phone?”
She blinked in surprise. “Why?”
Bellard put his hand out.
She assumed a deadpan face, then feigned disbelief. “Oh, you want me to give you Dara’s phone.” In the back of her mind, Maggie had anticipated something like this. That’s why the phone was with Madame Nguyen.
“Phone,” Bellard said through his teeth.
“We’ve already made voice contact. Kafka isn’t stupid. We’ve got to handle the communication with kid gloves. I’ll take care of that part. You take care of the rest.”
“Phone.”
“Blow it and he’ll run. He’s on the verge of running now.”
Hand still up, Bellard said: “I hope I haven’t made a mistake with you.”
“I’m not giving you Dara’s phone, ami. I don’t even have it on me.”
Bellard dropped his hand, glared at her. “Where is it?”
Maggie continued: “Dara did the initial legwork on this op, grooming Kafka, with my assistance. I’ve been in contact with him since her death. I’ve maintained the relationship. Built it up. How are you going to mimic Dara’s voice? We’ve taken care of that. Communication doesn’t get any more sensitive.”
His angular face reddened. “I want that phone.”
“Dara’s phone and I don’t separate.”
“Do I have to put you on the next flight back to Washington?”
She wasn’t going to get anywhere with Bellard right now. She drained her coffee, which now tasted bitter. She jammed her hands in the pockets of her jacket. “Let’s take a break. I’ll sync up with Ed, get back to you this afternoon. We’ll work this out.”
She left Bellard glowering, went out into the hubbub of lunchtime traffic, both motor and pedestrian. She’d collect her thoughts before calling Ed. She headed toward the center of the city.
A small white Peugeot pulled up, squealing to a stop in the middle of the street. Doors opened and two people got out. A woman and a man.
“Good afternoon,” the woman said to Maggie in a harsh Northern French accent as she strode toward her. She was tall, lanky, in her forties, with a short fluffy brown retro haircut, and was wearing black stovepipe jeans, a black T-shirt, and a baggy denim jacket faded to a pale blue that no doubt concealed a weapon. She wasn’t pretty but she was attractive in that way French women were when they didn’t work at it too much. The man who followed her was a skinny kid with acne, wearing a tight black ball cap, who looked like he might have gotten out of the police academy that morning. He wore a voluminous dark blue windbreaker that billowed, showing a glimpse of pistol hanging under his armpit. He was smoking what remained of a cigarette, staring at Maggie through wraparound sunglasses.
Maggie stopped.
“If you two are meant to be undercover,” she said in French. “It’s not working.”
The woman returned a flat non-smile and nodded at the wall behind Maggie. “We need to search you.”
“And I need to see a badge.”
The woman flashed her SDAT ID for a nanosecond, put it away. “Up against the wall. Or we can go down to the station. It’s up to you.”
Maggie assumed the position, legs apart, hands against a wall bumpy with hardened untrimmed mortar oozing out between the bricks. The woman patted her down efficiently.
“Did Bellard have you two waiting the whole time?” Maggie said, head turned halfway. The kid glowered at her, holding the butt of his smoke with his thumb and forefinger.
“No questions,” the woman said, pulling Maggie’s work phone from her jacket pocket. “You can turn back around now.”
Maggie did. “That’s not the phone you’re after.”
The woman pocketed Maggie’s phone. “You can go.”
“That phone is for work. I’m going to need it.”
“You can file a report to have it returned.”
“If you try to access it without the correct code,” Maggie said, “it’ll deactivate.”
“I’ll make a note.” She gave a cold smile, turned and headed back out to the car, its doors still open, engine running, a bored-looking man at the wheel. The young cop took one final drag on his cigarette before he flicked the butt at Maggie’s feet where it spit embers.
The two got into the car which took off with a screech of tires.
Kafka showed his forged French National Identity card to the hospital receptionist. He wore a dark brown suit, white shirt and tie, his dark hair plastered down close to his head. Tinted black-framed glasses completed the disguise. He carried a bunch of white lilies.
“Katy Charron, please,” he said in his best French, a bit of a struggle.
“And you are Madame Charron’s husband, monsieur?”
“Brother.”
“I see.” The stout woman in the white lab coat sitting behind the counter picked her glasses up from the chain around her neck and slid them on her face as she consulted the computer screen. “Yes, five-twenty-one. The elevator is over there.”
“Merci.” He gave a slight bow and proceeded to the security guard, who verified his ID, then instructed Kafka to put everything on the conveyer belt, just like at the airport, even the flowers. Kafka gathered his belongings on the other side of the machine and entered the elevator where the guard selected the fifth floor.
On the fifth floor Kafka disembarked, walked purposefully past a doctor holding a clipboard, then found the stairwell, where he took the stairs down to the second floor.
The inner stairwell door was unlocked. He’d had his doubts but, so far so good. He opened it, peered out, saw no one coming either way, and emerged, holding his bouquet. Room 213 was on the west side of the floor. He headed that way, adopting a suitably confused expression, a man looking for a hospital room.
He saw the man seated outside Room 213 before the man saw him. Young, early twenties, short dark back-and-sides haircut, muscular build. Levis and a roomy green gabardine car coat, roomy enough to conceal a weapon. The right age to be a junior policeman standing guard. He was chewing gum and checking his cell phone.
Kafka walked down the hall toward him, checking room numbers.
He got to 213. The door was shut.
The man stood up, put his phone in his pocket.
“Can I help you?” the cop said in French.
“I wanted to visit my coworker,” Kafka said, indicating the door to 213. “Dara Nezan.”
The young man’s eyes narrowed. Khafa spotted the bulge of a pistol under his arm. “Who told you she was here, monsieur?”
“A work acquaintance—at Incognito—where we both work.”
“May I see some ID?” the young man said.
Kafka had another fake French National ID ready. He presented it.
The young man looked at it, then at him.
“No visitors,” he said, handing back the ID.
“But I’ve taken off work!”
“Sorry. No visitors.”
“Can I drop off my flowers, at least?”
The cop softened his tone. “The nurses don’t like flowers or plants in the room. The air, you see. Possibility of infection. She’s had a rough time of it.” He shrugged. “Sorry, sir.”
Typical western police, Kafka thought. Soft. Weak.
“I’m sorry to have disturbed you,” he said.
“Good day, sir.”
Kafka left, headed down the hallway, ducking back into the stairwell and hurtling down the stairs for the first floor exit. He knew he might set off an alarm when he exited but he could pass that off as general visitor stupidity if anyone stopped him. But they wouldn’t. He’d be long gone.
His curiosity was satisfied. The police put a guard on Dara, as she had said, and that made complete sense, considering the shootings.
Dara was in that room. Waiting for him. Tomorrow, hopefully, she’d be discharged.
He tossed the flowers into a trash bin on a lamppost.
He’d stay in Paris a while longer. He must see her. But he must be careful. He mustn’t let his emotions take control.
Back at the Shangri La, Maggie called Ed via the Agency’s VOIP client, sitting on her bed against the white vinyl headboard, the MacBook open on her lap.
“So Ballard decided to play hardball,” Ed said angrily, coughing through a cloud of smoke on the webcam. First cigarette of the day. It was early morning his time and Maggie’d woken him. Under different circumstances his striped pajamas might have elicited a comment out of her. “I did my best,” Ed continued, hacking. “But France’s foreign minister filed a formal complaint with the White House over the café attack. Said we caused an international incident. The National Security Advisor called Walder personally and chewed him out.”
“So Bellard is feeling his oats,” Maggie said. “Thinks he can do what he wants.”
“That seems to be the case.”
“The problem is that Bellard thinks he can pull it off on his own. But he can’t. If we switch contacts now, he’ll scare Kafka off.”
“Let me make some calls, Maggs. Sit tight.”
One step forward, one step back. “I’ll be waiting on your call,” she said.
Maggie did a hundred sit-ups. She drank a cup of instant coffee.
Ed skyped her on her laptop. There was a pause while he came into focus, smoke billowing on the other side of the webcam.
“You’re not gonna like this, Maggs.”
Maggie had not been expecting great news. And here it was. “Ed,” she said. “I am not giving Dara’s phone to Bellard.”
“Bellard’s still going to need you,” Ed said. “He’s just throwing his weight around. Well, you did ditch his interview last time.”
“Because you had John Rae pick me up!”
“Thank Walder for that.”
“Ed, Bellard won’t realize what he’s doing until it’s too late.”
“It’s not like we really have a choice, Maggs. The op was conducted on French soil. The phone is technically their evidence. You’re working under NOC—no official cover. So this is the way Walder wants to play it. Let SDAT take Abraqa.”
“You spoke to Walder?”
“Yes.”
The shoe dropped. “Walder wants to stand back and watch SDAT hose it up. Let Abraqa go down in flames. Leave them with the charred remains. The French sent a nastygram to the White House so he’s going to teach them a lesson. Only they don’t know it yet.” Maggie shook her head. Office politics on steroids.
Ed took a drag on his cigarette. “Welcome to the wonderful world of intelligence, Maggie.”
SDAT didn’t care about the Yazidi genocide. They weren’t up to speed on the Darknet angle. All they wanted to do was grab Kafka, throw him in jail. If they managed to catch him.
She didn’t bother to say she’d wanted SDAT involved in the first place again. But she’d like to have known who sent those suicide bombers. In the middle of all this bureaucratic bullshit, that little detail kept getting ignored.
Going off half-cocked wasn’t going to help Dara’s people. Maggie needed to stay cool, even though she was being gutted.
“So Maggie,” Ed said, smoking. “You’ve got Dara’s phone?”
“I thought you had it.”
“No games, Maggie. I’ll do my best to salvage what we can. Try and get you a spot on Bellard’s team. Wait for his call. Then give him the goddamn phone.”
“How the hell is he going to call me? His flatfoots took my work phone.”
Ed sighed. “He’ll have to call you at your hotel.”
What could she do? “You call the shots, Ed.”
“That’s the ticket, Maggs. If we’re going to get anything at all, we are going to have to bend over on this one.”
They signed off.
A slew of choice words shot through Maggie’s head while she regretted not taking that sweet job at Delta Financial again. She let the anger pass, powered up Dara’s phone. Nothing from Kafka. Good enough. Everything was on hold for the moment anyway. She set Dara’s phone in airplane mode and, with Dara’s laptop in its backpack over one shoulder, her own work laptop folded under her arm, went downstairs to the front desk.
“Would you mind putting these somewhere safe, madame?” Maggie asked, handing Madame Nguyen Dara’s phone and her work laptop. Madame Nguyen slipped the phone into the pocket of her cardigan and carefully took Maggie’s laptop.
Maggie took the Metro over to the Bastille, quicker than a taxi with Paris traffic.
Incognito’s door was shut. And locked. Good. They were learning.
She knocked. Waleed answered the door, a cell phone in one hand as he shouted at someone in rough French. “We’re paying for four hundred gigabits per second—and getting half that!” Today he wore his faded Metallica T-shirt. And the ever-present Iman sword on a chain. He looked at Maggie in surprise.
Maggie held up the backpack with Dara’s laptop. Waleed was pleased.
They spent some time syncing up while volunteer hacktivists worked the computers.
There had been several inquiries about Dara at Incognito, which were responded to with the same stock answer: Dara was recovering and expected to be back at work next week.
“Do you know if Kafka was one of those callers?” Maggie asked.
“Not sure,” Waleed said. “Only Dara knew Kafka’s voice.”
And Maggie.
“Do you have recordings of those calls?” she asked.
“When you are taken to court as often as we are, your lawyers insist you record every single telephone call,” Waleed said. “We use Skype.”
Sitting down at the desk under the poster of the smiley face with its smirk and sunglasses, Waleed logged into a server and pulled up folders of archived calls, organized by date and subject. Under a folder labeled Dara, he selected several recent MP3 files.
The first was a genuine call from a reporter at Le Figaro. A woman. The second was a crazy person saying Dara was being punished by God and would die for it. The last was from a flower delivery service, two days ago. The soft educated tenor of the man’s voice gave Maggie the chills. He spoke French but with a Middle Eastern accent.
“That’s Kafka,” she said.
Waleed rewound the call. A young woman with Incognito had replied to Kafka, saying, “Dara is recovering. She is expected to return next week.”
“Do you know what hospital she’s in, please?”
“I can’t give any information out, monsieur.”
“Do you have her home address?”
“We do not give that information out, monsieur. May I take a message?”
The caller hung up.
Kafka was doing his due diligence. Smart. But perhaps he didn’t trust Dara one hundred per cent.
“Why are you listening to that call?” a twenty-something female at a nearby desk said, startling Maggie. She had purple braids and a nose ring. Her voice was the same one they had just listened to on the recorded phone call with Kafka.
“Trying to track down who made that call requesting Dara’s hospital information, Dani,” Waleed said. “Do you know anything else about it?”
“Only that he called again about two hours ago. I was the only one here. You guys went out for coffee. You forgot my latte, remember?” She grimaced.
Right after Maggie spoke to Kafka. She looked at Dani. “But that call wasn’t logged.”
“We don’t always have time to archive them until end of day,” Waleed said. He pulled the keyboard onto his lap, dug into the file structure, retrieved a time-stamped folder of today’s calls. “Here we go—eleven-oh-three this morning.”
He played the call back.
“This is Maison Hermès chocolatiers. We have a delivery for Dara Nezan and need to confirm an address.”
Kafka again.
Dani replied that Dara was recovering well and expected to return to work next week.
“Is she still at the American Hospital?”
“I can’t give out any information, monsieur.”
Kafka hung up.
Checking up on Dara again—on Maggie as Dara—verifying her story. The last text exchange between them was before that call. Getting suspicious?
“Thanks,” Maggie said to Waleed, standing up. “I’ll let you know about Dara’s funeral.”
“Any messages for me, madame?” Maggie stood in the narrow lobby of the Shangri-La, noting the new poster of an elephant and tiger walking past a fantasy depiction of a mystical temple in a cheap gold frame.
“No, but the police were here, mademoiselle,” a flustered Madame Nguyen said. “They said you had something of theirs. They searched your room. I protested, but, they had a warrant . . .”
Maggie caught her breath. “A tall woman and a young man?”
Madame Nguyen nodded sheepishly.
“Did they take anything?”
“The cell phone on your nightstand,” Madame Nguyen said. “I’m so sorry. Vinh and I watched them the whole time.” She held up a piece of pink paper. “They left a receipt.”
Maggie took the receipt, read it. Sous-Direction Anti-Terroriste. SDAT. Now they had two of her phones. But not Dara’s.
“Did they take anything else, madame?”
“They asked if I had anything of yours in storage. But, of course, I had nothing, did I?” She gave a knowing smile.
Dara’s phone was still safe, as was Maggie’s laptop. “I’m very sorry for the intrusion, madame. Do I need to find a new hotel?”
Madame Nguyen squinted through her cat’s-eye glasses and dropped her voice. “Does this have anything to do with that shooting? At Place de la Sorbonne? A few days ago?”
“Can I trust you to keep what I say between you and me, madame?”
Madame Nguyen gave a taut smile. “I always respect my clients’ privacy.”
Maggie told her what she had to, which was a fair amount of fiction and just enough fact to hold it together.
“I see,” Madame Nguyen said. “Do you think the police will be back, mademoiselle?”
“Not if I can help it. If so, I’ll move to another hotel. But I do like it here.”
Madame Nguyen seemed to mull that over. “Do you need your phone and laptop now? That you left for safe-keeping?”
“Just the phone, please.” Madame Nguyen went off, downstairs to the basement where Vinh was banging away with a hammer. She returned, handed her Dara’s phone.
“If you need to leave it again,” she said, “you can give it to either me or Vinh.”
“Thank you so much, madame.”
Madame Nguyen straightened her cardigan and smiled. “I do hope you like the upgrades, mademoiselle. Vinh has been working very hard on redecorating the rooms, you know.”
“And he’s done a wonderful job,” Maggie said.