“YOU’RE PISSED OFF, I know,” Harris said. “You’re exhausted and you’ve been through Hell and come out the other side saving two of the best people on this planet and killing the worst one. And saving the Tower and a plane full of people, by the way. But it should only take you a day or two to get over that.”
I breathed out slowly. Even the tiger can smell the pit. “Where Anne and I are going, I’ll send you pix.”
“She’s going to want to come back.” His voice grew softer, confiding. “To hunt the men who killed her husband ... I expect you’ll help her find them. And I expect you might find out if those men had a link with Rachid Raqmi.”
“Do you think that?” I had to ask.
“Who’s to know? There’s so many S-List terrorists in France ... Though we all know the real number of potential terrorists is at least twice that ... They’re dispersed, there’s no head of the Hydra, they’re not all connected – how do you find the top?”
“You saying it’s insoluble?”
He sighed, looked out his window. “That’s what Cazeneuve says.” Cazeneuve was the Minister of the Interior, France’s “top cop”, who’d recently quit the president’s cabinet over frustration with its pro-Islamic approach. “He says we have five, maybe six years before it will completely overwhelm France –”
“Then what?” I had to ask.
“Get a boat and start rowing.”
“For England?” I laughed. “A Muslim mayor in London? Thousands of mosques sprouting up everywhere? They’re already fucked.”
“For the other side of the pond.”
I almost laughed again. “Rachid isn’t the top.”
“The French don’t even know where the top is. How can you cut off a head” – he raised his hands – “if you can’t find it?”
This was too much theory. “So what do you want?”
“Remember the shit you gave me that we don’t have a good network in France?”
“You don’t.”
“When you come back, why not do it? For our country? Build me a network I can rely on. Good people, brave, tough ... You know the kind.”
“Not without the French.”
“Huh?”
“I don’t do anything behind their back. And make sure they stay straight with us.”
“Of course, of course. That’s in the fabric of the thing ...” He gave me a conspiratorial grin, or as close as he could fake it. “I was wrong, early on, thinking there was no link between Mustafa and the grab of Mack and Gisèle ... If we’d had better folks on the street, maybe I would’ve known?”
I smiled, thinking of the climb I was going to do up Mount Pélé in Martinique with Julie and André. This huge green volcano in hailing rain. Because it always rains up there. How to climb it, one muddy and wind-ripped step at a time.
Easier than dealing with Harris.
I had tried to forgive him for sending me to Leavenworth but couldn’t. His argument that my crime was killing the Afghani girl’s husband didn’t hold water: the husband had burned her alive and deserved to die. And if it hadn’t been for that brilliant West Point grad who got me out, I’d be in Leavenworth still.
But Harris was my country, that I loved and had risked my life for so many years. And he was trying, like Thierry, Tomàs, Anne, and thousands of others, to defend our way of life from what the Czech Prime Minister had recently termed “an anti-civilization that stretches from North Africa to Indonesia, the greatest danger in modern times.” How could I not want to keep fighting that?
“What were you going to tell me,” I said, “that DGSE didn’t know?”
“Ah.” He leaned back, hands clasped behind his head. “They don’t know who’s screwing them over ...”
“Thierry knows. He just won’t say.”
“He won’t say because he doesn’t want to lose his job or his life, or his loved ones.”
“Who is it?”
“Tell him to look at the previous president’s cabinet. Politics, whether in the US or France, is based on compromise. There are people who were in power before but who still have direct influence on DGSE and top levels of government. There’s more than one. Let Thierry find them. It will be good for France.”
When I met with Thierry an hour later I told him what Harris had said. “The previous governments?” He smiled. “Which one? Just like before World War Two, there were lots of top politicians openly working with the Germans, people who then became leaders in Vichy and sent seventy-five thousand Jews to their deaths. It does no good to name them.”
“Then you know?”
He shrugged. “Stay tuned.”
—
MITCHELL OF COURSE was elated that we’d rescued Mack and Gisèle. “Don’t ever forget what you accomplished,” he said. “That your sticking with it was what saved them.”
“We all stuck with it,” I answered. “Anne, Thierry, you, all of us. We never gave up.”
He exhaled quietly, and I knew he was wishing he’d been here to help. “This Anne,” he said, “what can she possibly see in you?”
“Beats me.”
“Beats me too ...”
Mack and Gisèle were back in their lovely house in the Sixteenth when Anne and I visited, Mack in the living room with his damaged foot up on the edge of the couch. “I’m going nuts with this,” he complained. “The docs won’t let me go back to work, and I want to tie up loose ends with these bastards.”
“Rachid’s been released,” I said.
“I heard.”
I told Mack about my plan for Rachid in the Fontainebleau swamp. “We’ll get him,” he grunted. “We always do.”
“Nearly always,” I said.
“Yeah. Nearly always.”
“So why,” I said, “did Yasmina come over to us?”
He looked out the window and the blazing green leaves of the plane trees. At the bucolic blue sky. He nodded, as if deciding something inside himself. “All the recent terrorist attacks, they shocked her. To kill so many innocent people – this was a religious act? What the Koran said, that unbelievers will go to Hell – what if it wasn’t true? The last straw in her slow divorce from Islam. She reread the Koran, realized most of it’s about killing people. Asked herself questions, breaking herself free. It’s hard, you know, when you’ve been so ... indoctrinated?”
I saw where his head was going. “Don’t you dare blame yourself she’s dead.”
He gave me that steely black look. “More this shit comes down, more I can’t figure out why ...”
“It’s our fate.” I shrugged. “Fuck it, can’t change it.”
He looked out the window at the new leaves scintillating in the spring wind, turned back to me, and grinned. “Why would we?”
Gisèle brought us Côtes de Provence rosé, crackers and Rocamadour, and for a few moments we sat quietly as if none of this had ever happened.
“How are you?” Anne said, breaking the silence. “Really?”
“We’re so lucky to be alive,” Gisèle answered. “Strange, but that’s mostly what I think of.”
“She goes for a hike every day,” Mac said. “Bois de Boulogne. Wants to get back to the clinic.”
“Doctors say next week.”
“She says there’s too many hurting people out there,” Mack grunted. “That she can’t take more time off ...”
“Oh Mack,” she scoffed. “You make me sound like a fake.”
I smiled at them, at Anne. The world seemed split between the majority who work hard and care for others, and the minority who don’t.
I wouldn’t want to be in their camp.
—
ANNE AND I had reserved two bungalows on Martinique’s east shore, one with three beds for Mamie and the kids, the other for Anne and me. Each dawn to go barefooting soft green lawns down to the glass-clear sea to swim out into the sunrise. The world’s best Caribbean cuisine with rum so good it makes the gods weep. Vertical emerald mountains and an ocean brighter than light.
The surf in Martinique’s lousy in some places – go to Le Grand Macabou if you want fabulous, dangerous surf – but what joy to ride a windsurfer beyond the break and cavort in soaring, spinning flights across huge white-flecked crests and howling winds.
—
BEFORE WE LEFT PARIS I had a long talk with Stranger. Explained the virtues of retirement, that he’d paid his dues and didn’t have to be a roof cat anymore. That he could live out his golden years in rural Normandy with Cousine Claudine. Be a house cat, a barn cat, whatever he chose.
“When you getting back from Martinique?” I thought I heard him say.
“Couple weeks.”
He gave a quick glance around the apartment. “With the kids and Mamie you can’t possibly live here.”
“We found a dynamite place in the Seventh,” I said. “A whole new set of roofs, older, not so steep. Lots of rats and pigeons.”
He winked a yellow eye. “I’ll hang out here for two weeks. There’s a new hatch of mice in a building down the street. When you return come get me.”
—
THE FIRST NIGHT in Martinique Anne and I were too weary to sleep, tossing on our big bed in the cool breeze, the soft waves susurrating against the velvet sand beyond the window. The moon threw silvery stripes across our naked flesh. I felt completeness, almost free, all spent, all action done, danger quelled, enemies dead.
“It’s not so easy, for these Muslim guys,” I said. “Can you imagine life with several different women telling you what to do?”
“You try that,” Anne whispered, her hand down my ribs, “and see what happens.”
“I’ll have three. If I live with you.”
“You would have another woman?” She dug her nails into my ribs. “Two other women?”
“Of course.”
She readied for the kill. “You think?”
“Of course,” I repeated. “You first of all. And then Mamie and Julie. Between the three of you, I don’t stand a chance.”
“For once in your life.” She caressed my shoulder, snuggled against me and fell asleep.
—
I LAY THERE THINKING of what had happened and what it was really about. We had won, saved the Eiffel Tower and a plane full of people. Dr. Death was cooling his heels in a French cell till his Iranian masters traded the French some oil to let him out. Mustafa was dead, and others in Rachid’s evil clan were either dead or headed for whatever minimal jail terms the French courts might give them.
But a much bigger villain, Rachid Raqmi, had walked away for now, even stronger than before. More beloved by his coterie, more praised by the media.
And he was not the only one. Islam’s attack on the west had many perpetrators, not linked but separate. Like the ones who’d killed Anne’s husband – how were she and I going to find them? In addition to the 22,000 known terrorists in France, how many others that hadn’t been identified? We could cut off one head but that wouldn’t harm the many others.
The war with Islam would go on, perhaps Islam would win. We were naïve and lazy, and believed ourselves to be good-intentioned. And they were smart, very driven, and ruthless.
It would be lovely for all of us to coexist. No religion should attempt domination but most do. And religious domination is the end of freedom. The end of human progress and evolution. The end of the individual.
If there’s a solution it’s love. The best of all possible worlds.
—
THE NEXT MORNING Anne and I swam out beyond the coral sands brilliant in rising sun, past myriad fish flashing and exploding round us, past a sleepy tarpon lazing across the bottom, out a mile to the edge of the vertical wall where the sandy bottom thirty feet below comes to a cliff that drops straight into the depths.
I dove maybe forty or fifty feet till the surface above was hazy pale green like an old glass float. The cliff wall was thick with coral and vegetation and alive with fish of all colors and sizes darting and feeding and looking for love. Drifting down there I thought of the great wave in Tahiti less than three weeks ago that had nearly killed me, that maybe I’d been saved so I could help save Mack and Gisèle. And meet Anne.
I rose slowly to the surface, clasped her close then sank to kiss her between the thighs till she tugged off her bikini bottom and we made love in the warm dawn with golden sands below us on one side and the dark abyss on the other.
THE END