4

“What did you do with the gun?” Captain Bellard asked Maggie in French, for the second time. “The one you shot the suicide bomber with?”

“I tossed it,” she said, also for the second time.

The two of them were sitting in the captain’s glass-walled office in Sous-Direction Anti-Terroriste headquarters on rue de Villiers in Levallois-Perret. SDAT was the elite counter-terrorist task force of the French National Police and their building was a sleek, modern structure, more reminiscent of a four-star hotel than some grimy police station where interviews were conducted in dirty rooms with questionable stains on the walls. It was late and the rest of the floor sat in empty dark silence.

She’d been there for several hours, with no end in sight.

“You tossed it,” Captain Bellard repeated. He was a smallish man in his early forties with sleepless brown eyes that drilled through you. His short dark hair was thatched and said he didn’t think much of haircuts. His pale skin took a back seat to the five-o’clock shadow that enhanced his angular features. Bellard wore an off-the-rack light blue suit. Despite his size he was muscular and reasonably good-looking, depending on your mood. But Maggie wasn’t in the mood. Kafka might be about to take off for Iraq any minute, and she needed to intercept him. Meanwhile, she and Bellard kept going round and round on the same questions.

“What kind of gun did you use?” Bellard asked.

“Sig Sauer—P238. I’m pretty sure I already said that.”

“Where did you get it?”

“On the street,” Maggie said. “In a bar. Rue d’Aboukir. As I said, it’s not that hard. Not as hard as you think. But we’ve been through this. We really need to get moving before Kafka runs. And the sooner you get hold of my handler, the sooner we can do that.”

Bellard gave an impatient stare. “What was the name of the bar?”

One more time. The age old police technique of asking you the same questions over and over, hoping to trip you in a lie. Maggie had already explained how, as a Forensic Accounting Agent, the op was to provide analysis on Abraqa, a Darknet network used by Jihad Nation to move huge sums of money to fund terrorist activities. Dara had catfished Kafka at Incognito, and passed the info on to one of Maggie’s French contacts in the hopes of finding someone to fund and help drive the operation. Maggie had invested the last two weeks working with Dara, lining up Agency resources to hopefully crack Abraqa.

And now, she and Bellard, back at the gun question. She hoped she hadn’t made a mistake in asking for him when the police questioned her. She brushed her hair back in exasperation. “I don’t remember the name of the bar—and it’s not important.”

“Oh, I see—it’s not important. Why, thank you.”

“Look,” she said. “I came to you, told you a lot more than I was authorized to.”

“More than you were authorized to? Your agency ran a covert operation—in Paris—without our consent, and you tell me what’s important? What you’re authorized to say?”

Maggie put her hands up in a gesture of appeasement. “Bad choice of words. I’m tired and my French is a little rusty. I understand your frustration.”

“You understand my frustration?” Bellard nabbed a blue-and-white pack of Gauloise cigarettes and tapped out a smoke with a snap of the wrist, stuck the cigarette between his thin lips. “You’re not in California now.” He picked up a gold cigarette lighter, flicked it, bent down over a tapered flame, sat back up, blowing smoke which she wanted to fan away but didn’t. Bellard tapped ash into a ceramic ashtray. “Let me ask what your people would do in my position. If I were running a clandestine op in your country.”

She gave him a wry squint. “You’re saying it doesn’t happen?”

“Ah,” he said, pointing the cigarette at her. “But you were caught.”

Maggie wanted to say that it was not her idea to exclude SDAT from Operation Abraqa, that she had recommended they participate, but that the Agency did things its own way, which generally meant keeping everyone in the dark, especially competing intelligence agencies.

“I obviously did not expect a shooting situation,” she said. “I told you, this was meant to be a first interview with a potential terrorist who might want to defect. I was to evaluate what he knew and report back. That was it. I have no other people here. I need your help—and you need mine—if we want to catch this Kafka. Someone found out about his meeting with Dara and sent suicide bombers instead. Now, will you please call my boss, Ed Linden?”

Bellard shook his head, clearly annoyed. “Who the hell do you think you are?” He smashed out the cigarette, left it broken and smoking in the ashtray, then picked up the phone, punched a single digit and said, “I have a person helping me with my enquiries. She will be staying with us overnight. Request a female officer to conduct a thorough search before we process her. Fine. Thank you.”

Maggie’s nerves shot into overdrive. She stood up. “Are you serious? You’re holding me? After I came to you?”

“I need time to gather information. We’ll continue in the morning. Have you eaten?”

“What were you thinking of—some microwaveable treat in my cell? Will I get a plastic knife or will it be taken away? Go to hell.”

Bellard gave a smirk. “I understand your frustration.”

Maggie sat back down, vibrating with anger. She was exhausted. She caught her breath. Bellard was only trying to do his job, one he’d been blind-sided at. “Look, I wanted SDAT brought into the Abraqa op. I was told it was too early. That we were still at the fact-finding stage. You know how it is—everyone is so secretive. Why, you’d think we were secret agents or something.” She smiled.

“Per French law, we can hold you for up to five days.” Bellard consulted his wristwatch. “We’ll continue in the morning.”

Five days. Maggie could do the time standing on her head but Operation Abraqa couldn’t. They needed to nab Kafka, cut off Jihad Nation’s funding.

And Dara’s death couldn’t be concealed for that long.

“Captain,” she said. “I have a favor to ask.”

Bellard gave a bemused smile. “Only an American would ask such a thing at this very moment.”

“I know. But will you please agree not to divulge that Dara is dead? And communicate that bit of misinformation to Hospital Necker so they keep it under wraps? If Kafka hangs around in Paris, we can use Dara as bait . . . we don’t want all of her work to go down the toilet.”

Bellard nodded as he seemed to give that some thought. “Yes,” he said. “That’s wise—not to disclose that Dara is dead. Yes.” He wrote something down on his pad of paper.

“Thank you.” It wasn’t much but it was all she was going to get for now.

She heard the elevator ding out in the hallway and guards chatting. They arrived at the door of Bellard’s office. Dressed in blue with SDAT patches on their shoulders—white panther heads on black, bearing fangs—one guard was a pretty young woman with blonde hair up in a swirl and twinkling blue eyes. She had a wicked-looking collapsible metal baton hanging on her web belt. She gave Maggie a friendly smile, then turned to Bellard.

“Is this our prisoner, Capitaine?”

The pretty blonde guard took her belongings, catalogued them, handed Maggie a receipt. Maggie tried to hang onto Dara’s phone, saying she needed it to call her husband, that her little boy back home was sick with the flu, but her request, of course, was denied. She powered the phone down, handed it over. But she would need that phone back, if she were ever to get hold of Kafka.

She knew she would not sleep, even though she was physically shattered. She kicked off her shoes and climbed under the single blanket in the stark windowless cell. She had a straight-line view of the stainless steel toilet with no seat. A hint of urine hung in the air. The overhead light blazed down. Ambience.

What did she know? That Dara had fostered some sort of romantic connection with Kafka. She and Dara had not spoken about that part of the relationship. It was an eye-opener. From Maggie’s text with him in the ambulance earlier, posing as Dara, she believed it was genuine. Dara had said she never met Kafka in person. That meant the relationship was probably along the lines of infatuation on Kafka’s part, an online romance. Arab men who grew up in repressive cultures were susceptible to that sort of thing. Maggie could leverage that.

Then she wondered, once again, who had sent the suicide bombers?

Someone at Incognito? They were anarchists. Couldn’t be ruled out. But it wasn’t their style. Their MO was to screw up someone’s banking profile, leak their financial data. And Dara was very careful about what information was disseminated, even careful with what she let Maggie know.

Someone on Maggie’s side of the fence? Unlikely. Everyone at the Agency was thoroughly vetted and every op had hurdles of security clearances. And who knew about Abraqa? Not many.

There had been one hint of a mole—or maybe just an information slip-up—on her last op. Someone had betrayed Maggie’s position when she was on the run in Ecuador. Unfortunately, the man who could answer that question was now dead.

It was more likely someone with Jihad Nation had found out about Kafka and Dara. But who?

Maggie shut her eyes and saw blurred lines, then the gunfight playing on her eyelids, while the distant clatter of automatic rifle fire reverberated in her ears. Café patrons fell screaming, the suicide bomber’s haunted eyes staring out of the slit of her naqib as she staggered for the café. Maggie’s Sig Sauer popping in her hands, each shot measured. Dara was on the ground, curled up, then gasping in the ambulance. Until she stopped.

Dara’s death was still fresh, but not yet real, even though Maggie’s shirt and tights were stiff with her friend’s dried blood.

What was real was the fact that Maggie had violated protocol, exceeded the drop-dead time for the meeting. What would have happened had she and Dara left the café on time? Dara would still be alive. Maggie soaked up guilt like a dry sponge absorbed water. Tears pulled at her eyes.

Stop. What good would that do?

Then she heard footsteps, coming down the hallway outside her cell. Light enough not to be a man’s. They stopped outside her cell. Followed by the electric whir of the door lock.

Here it comes, Maggie thought, another time-honored police trick—let you fall asleep, then wake you up, question you when you’re bleary, off your guard.

Throwing off her blanket, Maggie sat up, slipped her shoes back on.

The electronic door slid open. The blonde guard stood there with Maggie’s belongings in a blue plastic basket.

“What’s going on?” Maggie said in French, rubbing her eyes.

“You’re leaving us,” she said.

“Leaving you how?” Maggie said. “Am I first in line for the guillotine tomorrow morning?”

The girl laughed as she set Maggie’s box of things on the bunk. “Not this time. Someone arranged for your release.”

Well, Maggie thought, every dog has its day. And she could be a bitch. She probably owed her boss Ed about ten dinners. And how the man could put the food away.

Going through the box, the first thing she checked was Dara’s phone, which she slipped into the pocket of her leather jacket. She hadn’t even taken the thing off; it was still sticky on one side with Dara’s blood. That made her shudder. She’d like to get hold of Dara’s laptop too. That was probably at Dara’s aunt’s house. Or Incognito.

“The captain wants a word with you before you leave,” the guard said.

It was almost two AM.

“I’ll have someone drive you to your hotel,” Captain Bellard said, sitting at his desk, hands folded behind his head, not making eye contact. His unshaven face was slightly pink. Embarrassed.

Ed, her boss, had managed to get hold of Bellard’s superior and short-circuit Maggie’s stint in a cell.

“Thanks for not hitting me with a phone book, at least,” she said with a smile.

Bellard grinned.

“Seriously,” she said. “No hard feelings, hey?”

“We’ll resume our interview at ten o’clock tomorrow morning.”

Maggie’s spirits dropped. It seemed Ed’s efforts had only gone so far. She was still on the hook with Bellard.

“Very well,” she said. But she would be on the phone to Ed as soon as she got out of here. As soon as she got another phone. She wouldn’t use Dara’s. It might be bugged.

Bellard pressed an intercom button on his desk phone. “I need a vehicle escort.” He returned his attention to Maggie and drummed on his desk, one beat for each hand. Maggie didn’t mind another ride in a police car at this time of night.

“You did well out there today,” Bellard said. “You shoot as well as you speak French. Where did you learn French anyway?”

Now he wanted to be friends. Well, she thought, you catch more flies with honey than vinegar. “Here and there. I grew up speaking Spanish so I had an advantage.”

He sat back in his chair, tapping the arms, looking at her. “You’re Spanish?”

“Born in Ecuador. But I’m a US citizen. My father’s a Yankee.”

He scrutinized Maggie’s face, with its high cheekbones, deep-set brown eyes. Dark skin, long black hair. “Ah, you’re part Indian.”

“My mother was Quechua.” Quechua Indians, descended from the Incas, were indigenous to many Andean countries.

“Do you think this Kafka set you and Dara up?”

“I don’t think so,” she said. “Dara spent a lot of time vetting him.”

“And where is Dara’s phone?” Bellard said.

“On the café table last I saw,” Maggie lied. “With Dara dying in front of me, I didn’t think to take it.” She gave a theatrical sigh.

Bellard pursed his lips and nodded, wrote that down on his pad of perfectly aligned notes.

Maggie cleared her throat. “May I ask where we stand on Hospital Necker giving out details on Dara’s death?”

“They won’t release any info.”

“Thank you,” she said with a weary smile. “If we work together, we can salvage this op.”

Bellard returned the smile as his eyes briefly scoured her upright figure in her black tights, T-shirt, and leather jacket. The drying blood probably wouldn’t bother a man who had undoubtedly seen much worse.

“Ten AM tomorrow,” he said.

“I’m looking forward to it.”

He gave a wry smile. “Of course you are.”

It wasn’t until two-thirty AM that Maggie finally got back to the Shangri La hotel on rue Philibert Lucot in the 13th Arrondissement. She had to ring the bell to wake up the night desk clerk, a young woman with a pixie haircut slumped over a text book. Maggie’s head was splitting. In her room on the third floor, with its wild apricot and blue paisley wallpaper that hurt the eye, Maggie pulled Dara’s phone from her sticky leather jacket, peeled off the jacket, dumped it on the bathroom floor, along with her blood-stained tights and T-shirt, destined for the trash.

The day came back at her in jarring flashes.

She raided the minibar in her room, spending a small fortune to fill a tumbler. She sat on the bed in her underwear, gulped an inch of Johnnie Walker. She needed a shower but had a few things to do first.

If Kafka was worth his salt, he’d be tracking the phone he’d given to Dara. Maggie powered up Dara’s phone, saw no new messages, downloaded MockLoc, an app that mimicked GPS locations. She looked up Hospital Necker, plugged the location coordinates for it into MockLoc, in case Kafka was monitoring Dara. If he was he’d see her at the hospital.

She powered down Dara’s phone for the time being.

Using her room phone she made a call to Hospital Necker. No information on the shooting victim she’d arrived with. Good. Dara’s death was still under wraps.

She called Ed, her supervisor, on his personal phone back in San Francisco from the phone in her room.

“Hey, Maggie,” he said, sounding a little surprised she wasn’t calling on his work phone. He was no doubt dealing with the many fires that had been created by the shooting.

“Did you order a pizza?” she said. Safe to talk?

“No. You?”

“No.”

“You at your hotel?”

“I am. I even have a toilet with a seat now. Thanks.”

“Cool,” Ed said, and she could hear him sucking on a cigarette long distance. She could picture him, looking like an unmade bed, hair smashed, untrimmed beard, glasses askew on his chubby face. “See you tomorrow.”

“But I have an appointment tomorrow,” she said, meaning Bellard at ten AM.

“No you don’t.” Ed hung up.

What did Ed mean by that?

Before her next call, she gulped another half inch of Scotch and took a deep breath.

Aunt Amina answered, groggy. Maggie braced herself.

“Oh, hello, Maggie!” Dara’s aunt said with forced cheerfulness that only made Maggie feel more miserable. “With the news, I was worried. I can’t seem to get hold of Dara. Are you two out somewhere?”

There was a long silence. In the street outside her hotel room a couple of stories below, Maggie heard excited young voices chatting away in Vietnamese, heels clicking on down the street.

Had she followed protocol, would Dara still be alive? She downed another inch of whiskey.

“I’m afraid . . . I have some very bad news,” Maggie said.

There was a long stillness.

“Oh,” was all Amina said.

It was one of the hardest phone calls Maggie ever had to make. But she secured Amina’s promise to not discuss Dara’s death. Maggie could only imagine how hard it would be, keeping that grief to oneself. Amina didn’t cry. Her people, the Yazidis, had seen so much, they were hardened to death. Dara’s passing was just another example of how brutal life was.

“And now I have a huge favor to ask, Amina . . .”

Amina said, quietly: “Of course.”

“Is Dara’s laptop in your apartment?”

“Let me check.” She put the phone down. A minute later she picked it up again.

“In her room.”

That was what Maggie wanted to hear. “I’ll pick it up first thing in the morning.”

There was another pause. “So you can continue where you and Dara left off.” Amina exhaled. “Yes, that is what my niece would have wished. To keep fighting for our people.”

Maggie said goodbye, hung up and guzzled more whiskey before stepping into a long hot shower that had no regard for the planet’s dwindling water supplies. She stood under the jets, letting hot needles of water drill into her face until it was numb, and the vision of bodies tumbling at the café and Dara’s sickening demise blurred.

When she emerged from the shower, she found the red light blinking on the phone by her bed. Wrapping her wet hair and a towel and gathering her robe around her, Maggie called reception.

“There’s a man waiting for you in the lobby, mademoiselle,” the girl at the front desk said.

All Maggie wanted to do was finish off the lesser liquors in the minibar and crawl between the sheets for a few hours, pretend that today never happened.

“Is he a flic?”

“No, he’s not a policeman. He’s an American. He’s actually quite entertaining.”

“Does he sound like a cowboy?”

“Oh, yes. He certainly does.”

John Rae had the ability to charm most women. Even Maggie from time to time. But she wasn’t going to ask him up with her in a bathrobe, not at almost four in the morning.

“I’ll be right down.”

“And there she is,” Agent John Rae Hutchens said as Maggie stepped out of the elevator into the narrow lobby. She wore fresh jeans and a burgundy turtleneck sweater under a linen jacket. The leather jacket and yesterday’s outfit had been relegated to the trash.

John Rae wore a slim-fitting dark blue suit over a black silk T-shirt and tasseled loafers. His longish sandy colored hair was combed back behind his ears and the designer stubble he’d sported last week had morphed into a neatly trimmed goatee. Doing his best young Brad Pitt impression. Always easy to look at. He stood up as she went to greet him. “Remind me not to challenge you to a duel.”

“Too soon,” Maggie said, giving him a platonic peck on the cheek, intending to keep it that way, although it was sometimes tempting to let things slide. “Way too soon.”

“The sooner the better.” He squeezed her shoulder, dropped his voice. “How you holding up?”

She stood back. “If I had my way, I’d be in bed by now.” She gave a tired smile. “Alone. So I hope this is important.”

“Important enough the powers that be scheduled a private flight for me from Berlin.”

“Berlin?”

“The Class Four thing I’m on?” John was one of the Agency’s top operatives. Class Four was so hush-hush even JR probably didn’t know what it was about yet. “We’re still ramping up. So I have spare cycles. Which means they sent me to pick you up. Take you home.”

“Take me home?” she said.

“Your home away from home. Langley.”

A post mortem of the shooting with Agency brass. Oh joy.

“When?”

“We get on a C-130 leaving Le Bourget eight-oh-five AM tomorrow. We’ll be keeping a bunch of army regulars coming back from Kandahar company.”

“I’m supposed to meet Captain Bellard at ten AM for ongoing questioning.”

“Not anymore,” he said.

So that’s what Ed meant when he said he’d see Maggie tomorrow. “If I blow Bellard off, JR, it won’t do our rapport any good.”

John Rae grinned at Maggie’s use of his nickname. “I hear you but you are talking about The Captain Bellard—a complete however-you-say-it in French. Walder figures Bellard’s going to hang us out to dry over the unauthorized op by making an example of you.” Walder was Director of Field Operations, John Rae’s boss, Ed’s boss too. “Walder doesn’t want that.”

That could doom any chance of Abraqa continuing. “There’s a little hole-in-the wall Vietnamese place down the street,” she said. “Open all night. I haven’t had anything to eat since lunch yesterday.”

A new song had just started and two young Vietnamese women, one in a black leather miniskirt, the other in a clingy beige knit minidress, hopped up from their crowded Formica table and danced in front of the fish tank in the corner. Their friends clapped along to the beat and shouted encouragement.

John Rae watched, obviously savoring the moment, before he turned back to Maggie. “Paris is pretty cool.”

“What we need to do,” Maggie said as she munched a hot onion pancake that was well worth the calories, “is to ‘transfer’ Dara to the American Hospital of Paris—a keep-alive.” A keep-alive fabricated a scenario in which a dead person appeared to still be alive. “We get Bellard to play along, then we can lure Kafka. If he’s still here, that is . . .”

Maggie caught the disheartening frown on John Rae’s face.

“Maggie,” he said, swigging Tiger beer, “you need to see the cold gray light of dawn.”

She picked up her glass of Chablis, took a swallow. On top of the minibar binge, her head was buzzing, which at least meant her headache had been pushed into the background, along with the images of the shooting. “Has Abraqa been cancelled yet?”

“It’s only a formality.”

She set her glass down. “What have you heard?”

“Nothing. I just know how it works. The fact that you saved about one hundred lives is going to be a dim memory once the French start sending nastygrams to Washington. Since SDAT weren’t informed about the operation, they’re going to be out for blood.” John Rae drank some more beer. “Yours, in this case. Abraqa was never high-priority. You were the only agent on it, because you pushed. Well, good for you. But it’s over. Now the Agency’s going to run for cover.”

She straightened her napkin. “I’m not prepared to throw in the towel yet. Any way we can take a later flight? I think we can sway Bellard.”

John Rae shook his head. “I’m escorting you to Le Bourget first thing. Orders.”

“And you always follow those, right?” She drank wine, gave a wink.

“When your ass is in a sling, I do.” He set his bottle down.

The tinny pop song came to an end and the girls sat down amidst rounds of applause.

Maggie let out a hard sigh. “If we can break Abraqa, we stop close to a billion dollars of Jihad Nation money being funneled through the Darknet.”

“Ours is not the reason why,” John Rae said.

“Dara gave her life for this. Her people are being raped and beheaded, nine-year-old girls sold into sexual slavery by Jihad Nation. But all the Agency is focused on is damage control.”

John Rae turned his bottle on the table. “You’re top notch, Maggie, but you need to let go when something flames out on you. Like it just did. I’m on your side but you need to see that. When we get back home we can see if anyone will listen to you—but don’t get your hopes up. You’re getting on that plane with me. In about four hours.”

Maggie saw it was futile to argue at this time.

“I need to swing by Dara’s aunt’s place first thing, though,” she said. “On the way to the airport. Amina’s the only family Dara has–had–outside of Iraq. She also has Dara’s laptop. There’s a ton of data on that.”

John Rae frowned as he peeled the label of his bottle. “If we can fit it in before we head to Le Bourget, fine. But it means an early start. We’re getting on that eight-oh-five flight.”

She drained her wine. She’d gotten that much out of John Rae. He was a good guy. If they didn’t work so closely together, it would be a different story between the two of them. She wondered if he’d break rules for her then.

A new song had started and the two Vietnamese women were back up, dancing, pulling their friends out of their chairs. Everyone was laughing. For some Paris was a different city right now.

Across town, Kafka rolled over on the rough wooden floor of an abandoned house. The snoring of a vagrant in another room was not keeping him awake. He had not been sleeping. Not only was it too cold, without a blanket or mattress, but he would not let himself become a victim of whoever might wander in. So he’d wait until morning, the stench of urine and human waste permeating his thoughts.

He’d have to contact his masters at some point. Even though he felt like disappearing. But his mother. His father. Jihad Nation had them in their clutches any time they wanted them.

They had him where they wanted him.

And then there was Dara. Was she in intensive care? Was she . . .

He’d find out more tomorrow, when the day began.

He adjusted his shoulder bag under his head, a hard pillow to be sure, and listened to the rush of the motorway in the distance, while the man in the other room snored.