AT 11:05 NEXT MORNING the Airbus landed at CDG and I grabbed a cab to the 7th Arrondissement and the one-bedroom safe house that DGSE had set aside for me.
It was on Passage Landrieu, a narrow, cobbled alley of ancient three- and four-story buildings, a vestige of real Paris but close enough to the tourist Disneyland of Rue Cler and the Eiffel Tower that the presence of another American wouldn’t be noticed.
A fourth-story walkup, a main room with a kitchen to one side, a bedroom and bath, a scintillating view over a tree-lined courtyard and slate and gray metal roofs to the Tower, the smells of good food rising on the spring breeze from the kitchens below – what more do you need in May in Paris?
I put my few clothes away, took a quick cold shower to wash off the salt of Tahiti’s blue Pacific and all the air miles in between, poured a tall glass of Côtes de Provence rosé from the bottle DGSE had kindly left in the reefer, sat down and called Mack’s landline.
A woman answered, hoarse and urgent. “Gisèle?” I said, “that you?”
“Pono? You’re too late!”
“Too late? I just got here.”
“They took him.”
“Mack? Who took him?”
“He’s gone ...” She swallowed a sob. “They found his car. Empty. With blood on the seat.”
“Who? Who found his car?”
“Mack left home at seven this morning, like always. He usually takes the Métro to the Port des Lilas Station near his office and walks from there. But today he had to go to Normandy later, so he drove to the office.” She swallowed. “He never got there. They found his car an hour ago, on a side street off La République. Blood on the seat, the driver window.” She took a breath, calmed herself. “How did they know? Was it because he called you?”
I snatched my coat and phone and stepped in front of an old lady to grab a cab to Mack and Gisèle’s home on Boulevard de Beauséjour in the 16th.
I’d been looking forward to seeing Mack, and hunting down Mustafa together. Now he was missing, blood all over his car. And Gisèle trying not to choke up on the phone. As if the more calm and objective she could be, the more she could help Mack. When we both knew it might already be too late.
—
IT WAS A WIDE street of chestnut and plane trees in early leaf, stone four-story town homes with flowers in front and lots of Audis and Mercedes dozing at the curb.
Number 49 was a sculpted stone building behind a steel spike fence, a front garden with three cypresses and a Lebanese cedar on each side of the stone front stairs.
“Hi!” She turned aside when she opened the door so I wouldn’t see her red eyes.
“Hey.” I tried to hug her and stepped on her toe. “Damn!”
“It’s okay.” She hugged me back, her cheek wet. “Thanks for coming.”
Her blonde, tangled hair had tumbled down her brow and she kept pushing it aside. Her cheeks were bone pale, her eyes shiny. It wrenched my heart – even in the deadly no-one’s land of Waziristan between Afghanistan and Pakistan she’d always seemed fresh, energetic, and organized, despite the horror and tragedy she faced every day. But the horror and tragedy had never struck someone she loved with the focused and undivided passion they had for each other.
“We’ll find him,” I said stupidly, my arm round her shoulder walking into the living room that seemed too bright and pretty for this moment.
It was a big place, a double séjour, dining room, large kitchen, four bedrooms upstairs and assorted baths, well-furnished, lots of bookshelves, good paintings and a couple of nice tapestries on the walls.
“At first I hoped there might be some reason,” she said. “That he’d hurt his head somehow, went to a hospital ... Hôpital Saint-Louis, it’s only five minutes from there ... But he’s not anywhere. No one’s seen him.”
“The car – no witnesses?”
“No one. As if it didn’t happen. Suddenly his car is there, illegally parked in a delivery zone. It was the shopkeeper who called, wanted it towed.”
“The blood on the seat,” I said. “There’s no proof it’s his ...”
“Don’t say that! You know it is. I know it is. Don’t dredge up false hope.”
I sat heavily in an antique chair. It squeaked. She sat across from me, open-faced, wrists on knees, hands dangling, her lovely face contorted with pain.
“Tell me the whole deal,” I said. “Mack’s last morning, his last week – phone calls, people on the street, things he might have said late at night while half asleep.”
“I’ve already gone over all this,” she exhaled. “With the Agency and the French.”
“Do it again. This time don’t leave anything out.”
As she spoke I was stunned by her self-control. She was not going to cede to emotion because pure focus was essential to any hope of saving Mack. She sat there, knees locked, wet tissues in her clenched hands, speaking softly and clearly. “Mack watches everything. All the time. And if he sees or feels anything, he aborts. If we’re together he tells me what he’s seeing and I check it out too.”
This was old news. One of the many troubles with covert life is it destroys your freedom. You never know if a person on the sidewalk behind you has a gun, if there’s a bomb under your car or waiting for you on the street, if there’s poison in something you breathe or eat, or if you’re in the crosshairs of a sniper’s rifle a quarter mile away. Never when you sleep can you be sure you’ll be alive in the morning.
“If it’s a tail I tail it,” she went on as if she had to convince me. “A car, person, doesn’t matter. And anything digital gets double-screened at the office ... but lately there’s been nothing. No way these bastards could’ve even known Mack was on their trail.”
“Why was he going to Normandy?”
“He didn’t say ... I wasn’t even supposed to know he was going ...”
“Someone didn’t want him to go there?”
“Ask Thierry.” She watched me. “But he’ll want to know how you know.”
“What about the COS?” This was the CIA’s Paris Chief of Station.
“Harris? Maybe he doesn’t know.”
I sat back, eyes on the floor, tried to imagine how it might have happened. “No bullet hole in the driver side window?”
“No bullet hole anywhere. No brass, no powder.”
“The window was up?”
“It’s spring in Paris. Of course the window was up.”
“So he got whacked.”
“Whacked?”
“Sorry – I meant someone hit him on the head. So he’s probably not dead.”
“Probably not?”
“Probably a grab.”
“That’s what Harris thinks.” She looked down, nodded. “Me too.”
“Harris?”
“COS, like I said. Mack didn’t tell you?”
“Never said his name.”
So somebody named Harris was COS, but that probably wasn’t the Harris I knew. In the midst of this awful dialogue I glanced out the ancient window at the afternoon sunlight cascading down the broad new leaves of a chestnut tree in the garden. It shimmered with life and meaning – a vision of something forever beyond us – innocent and true, the miracle of sunlight on the green magic of leaves, in this world of mysterious beauty we do not love or understand.
Gisèle’s lips were moving but I hadn’t heard. “Say again?”
“What are you, deaf?”
“Actually” – I banged a hand against my ear – “too much incoming.”
“What are you going to do, Pono?” She stood over me, gripped my wrists in her strong fists, burrowed into me with those blood-red eyes. “If it’s a grab, how are you going to save him?”
How could I save him? What had I learned from the magical sunlight on the leaves? “What’s Harris’s number?”
She told me and I memorized it. “When you talk to Thierry,” she begged, “please let me know the latest? I’ve been calling him every ten minutes ... can you, maybe you, you could find out if they know anything?”
“This COS, what’s he say?”
“The French are in charge.”
“It’s their turf.” I shrugged. “But ...”
“He says it’s their operation, their terrorists, their danger.” She glanced around the room, seeming to see nothing. “I always knew this was coming. Even when we met, and then you guys went back to Afghanistan and I never expected you’d survive, either of you.”
“But we did.” I wanted to add that Mack too would keep surviving.
It never occurred to me, nor would I have cared, that I might not survive either.