AN ARMORED LIMO had taken Mamie and the kids to Cousine Claudine’s farm in rural Normandy not far from Lyons-la-Forêt, to help raise chickens and goats, grow apples, and make foie gras, Calvados, and Camembert. While Mamie paced the fences, fierce and vengeful, an ancient shotgun in her hands.
On our own we took several evasive maneuvers from her place to my bugged one-bedroom at Passage Landrieu. Where we left some stuff we didn’t need, locked up, took several taxis to the 15th, where we paid cash to rent a short-term furnished apartment overlooking the new-leafed chestnut trees of the Place du Commerce. Ignoring Harris’s offer to find us a new place, as I didn’t want another safe house: when your killers came for you, it would be the first place they’d look.
To Airbnb we were just another wandering couple looking for a short-term home. For a while there’d be no way our enemies could track us down. Before DGSE and Home Office found us. Then maybe Mustafa.
—
IT DID LITTLE GOOD to try to figure who might seem to be on our side but was betraying us. Thierry was high up in DGSE but there were others well above him of whom he might not be fully aware. In the Machiavellian machinations of intelligence there are many shadowy movers and shakers so well protected by their positions and so connected to unknown sources and powers that no one even knows they’re there. I as an American could have little chance to penetrate this; even Anne, as grounded in the intelligence world as she was, would have great trouble piercing its veils.
No matter our experience and awareness we were foot soldiers in a vast war whose deepest secrets were unknown to us; we lived and died following our determination to make a better world, but sometimes achieving just the opposite.
How much did Thierry really know? How far above him was the enemy, if there was one? What dangers did he, or his family, face if he tried to unmask it?
—
OUR NEW HOME was lovely and sun-bright and had no bugs or hidden cameras that I could find. With a wide kitchen, living room and dining rooms facing the Place two stories below, a bedroom facing the interior court ... If you’re going to die soon, why not spend the money? Plus it had a real shower, not just a hose in a tub.
We dropped our stuff, made love in the shower, and downed some baguette, Camembert and Fleurie. Our kitchen had lots of good things to cook with, the refrigerator hummed diligently, the traffic sounded distant through the double panes, and the sun set in crimson splendor over the slate rooftops to the west.
—
“HOW I GOT THIS?” We were in bed and Anne twisted sideways to point to the lightning tattoo down her left biceps. “I had a boyfriend in high school ...” She pulled back. “You really want to hear this?”
I nestled against her lovely tits. “I love hearing everything about you.”
“This boyfriend, he told me when he came inside me it was like a lightning bolt up his spine right into his brain ...”
“He was right. That’s exactly what it’s like.”
“Then he dumped me and I was so miserable and my best friend told me I was the ugliest girl in our class, so I was really unhappy. Then I said to myself Get over it, nothing bad’s happened to you. And to remind myself what a great fuck I was I went out and got this tattoo.”
I put my hand between her thighs. “I like this one too.”
She rolled so I could kiss it. A white orchid just above her glorious black hair. “I like both of them,” I said.
She said nothing and I had a sudden fear she didn’t care. “What was he like, your husband?”
“Éric?” she lay back, swallowed. “He was loving. Strong, gentle ... funny as Hell. God he could make us laugh.” She sniffed. “But you could trust him. To the end of time.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m so sorry.”
She slid down against me, tickled my chin with a lock of her hair. “He was a lot like you.”
I lay with her head on my shoulder, thinking of the joy and sorrow of it all. And if you try to duck the sorrow you lose the joy.
How wonderful life can be, how intense, profound, multidimensional, exciting, exhilarating, terrifying and moody – which makes the thought of losing it horrendous. When every sweet moment is done it’s gone forever, a delusional memory.
I didn’t want to die. I didn’t want Anne to die. But we would very soon, unless we got Mustafa.
—
THEY CAME in the middle of the night clattering and banging the doors and smashed mine open. Yanked me up and twisted the cuffs off the metal ring on the floor, shoved my face against the wall kicking me behind the knees so I fell and they dragged me up again. I’d been lying in a sombrous pain and tried to wake up but couldn’t tell what was nightmare and what real.
When they shoved and punched me down the corridor and out onto the slippery yard I realized it was the execution ground, and the slipperiness was blood. They tied my knees and ankles together as I tried to kick them but they whacked me on the head with a rifle butt till I began to pass out from the pain.
A cold wind made me shiver, or maybe it was just the knowledge of what was about to happen. They tied my cuffed hands to the rope around my ankles so I couldn’t stand, my knees in old sticky blood, new warm blood running down my temple from where the rifle butt had hit.
Overhead the stars were sharp as broken glass. Despite the darkness I could see three other guys kneeling like me. One looked at me, his white eyes wide with fear, his mouth agape. There was an empty space beside me and I wondered who it was for. A bright white light seared on, blanking out the stars. A shape rustled past, a metal bar banging my shoulder. I feared they were going to beat us, then realized that would be better than what was really going to happen.
They shoved someone down beside me and I could see blood running down the side of his mouth, realized it was Mack. “Hey, buddy,” I mumbled. “This is it.”
A huge pain exploded the side of my head smashing it down against my shoulder. “No talk!” a voice hissed. A voice I recognized: Mustafa.
He slid between us, raised a huge glinting thing to the light. A cleaver, thick with blood. He spun and swung it past my ear. It made a whistling sound, a metal hiss. I tried not to flinch.
“Tonight is goodbye,” Mustafa said, a kindly almost-curious voice. “You will confess to your infidel murders or I will kill him.” He slapped the cleaver sideways down on Mack’s head, knocking him backwards. “You will confess,” he repeated. “Or I will kill him.”
Mack gave a sigh of pain or disgust, I couldn’t tell. I imagined the blade flashing down, cutting off his head, it rolling across the ground. Mine too.
Even in this moment of death I cared more for Mack’s life than my own.
“Cameras!” Mustafa chortled. “Action!”
The red light in the camera flashed on. “We will start with this false Muslim,” he said, striding to the man on the right, beyond Mack. “Who is the true descendant of the Prophet?” he asked in a mild, curious voice, as if wanting to know. The ancient hatred between Shia and Sunni over the lineage from the prophet Mohammed, equivalent to how many angels can fit on the tip of a pin, and which has since caused so many millions of deaths.
The man said something I couldn’t understand. Mustafa gestured toward the camera. Two flunkies lifted the tripod and moved it in front of the man, who had raised his face to the now-hidden stars and was mumbling something with trembling lips.
It was beyond horrible, this. If there were a God how could this God allow it? Fear clenched my heart; I couldn’t breathe. Knew I was next. Or Mack.
The cleaver whistled down and with a soggy clunk bit into the man’s neck. It stuck on the spine; the man’s head fell forward, half disconnected. Mustafa yanked it free, dragging the man sideways, raised it and swung down, thunking into the spine in a different place. Pain exploded in my head – the rifle butt again. “Look down!” snarled the man behind me.
From the side of my eyes I could see Mustafa wrenching the cleaver free and swinging it down again, and the head rolled free in a wide-spreading pool of blood that gurgled across the earth between our knees, hot and stinky, bringing out the odor of the older half-dried blood beneath.
“So!” Mustafa stood over me. “That was instructive, no?” He tipped up my chin with the bloody tip of the cleaver. “What did you learn?”
“That you are a coward,” I wanted to say but didn’t, knowing it would just make him draw my suffering out longer. “Go ahead,” I choked. “Get it over with.”
“Yes,” he nodded. “Get it over with.” He raised the cleaver high, halted, turned to the camera and said something about getting a different angle.
I took a breath.
“I love you, man,” Mack said.
“I love you too,” I answered, the only time I’d ever told a man I loved him other than my father. Then I saw Pa’s face, his diligent hedonistic smile, his laughter at the world. “They will burn in Hell forever,” Pa chuckled, “if only there were one.”
I raised my head, determined to look death in the eye. The cleaver glinted as it flashed down, twisted between me and Mack and thudded into the ground.
“Oh, I am bad,” Mustafa panted. “Can’t even aim this weapon straight.” He shuffled sideways to Mack, raised it again. “Confess,” he said softly, bending down to peer into Mack’s eyes. “Confess to your infidel sins, before the camera, and perhaps I will not kill him.”
“You piece of pig shit,” Mack said, braver than I.
“Oh my,” Mustafa sighed, a patient teacher with a recalcitrant pupil. “Now I have to kill you.” Again the raised cleaver glinted in the camera light, flashed down between us. “Ah, I am truly bad. Cannot kill a kaffir, you think?” He turned and waved at the camera, “Stop!” His empty eyes swung back to mine. “Perhaps tomorrow? Perhaps I do better tomorrow?”
I sat up, the bedsprings yowling. There was someone in the darkness beside me. “Who?”
Anne eased against me and my heartbeat slowed, my breathing softened, and I was at home again.
—
FROM THAT NIGHT Anne and I became a single unit focused on our prey. We still reported to Thierry, confided in Tomàs, kept Harris semi-informed, stayed in touch with Claudine and the kids, and tried to work 24 hours a day. But night and day we focused on Mustafa, Mack and Gisèle, the Tower, and the backpack nuclear bomb. And this new enemy, the insider who was trying to defeat every move we made.
After a few days we had to sleep. By two a.m. we’d been at work since seven the previous morning. We’d tumble on the bed and make love, then, sweaty and drained, fall asleep in each other’s arms.
We’d fed Mustafa’s real pix into the system and were getting complementary hits from other camera locations. The same ugly, evil Mustafa trudging a sidewalk, elbows and feet wide, half-hiding his scorn, slipping into a bank with a plastic portfolio under his arm, standing in the Porte de Clichy Métro at the crossing of the Pontoise and Courtilles lines, watching the young women in their flimsy miniskirts walk past.