Fifteen

Outside Paris

It was almost 11:00 P.M. by the time Daria found the square block in which, according to Belhadj’s source, Asher Sahar’s mobile phone awaited. She sat, Toyota taxi idling, in a heavily industrial but down-on-its-luck sector of outer Paris, a few miles east of the city. It wasn’t difficult to figure out which building on the block to search: an enormous, hulking factory took up the entire block. Most of the windows on the ground floor had been smashed and boarded over. Signs and spray-paint stencils warned DANGER! and NO TRESPASSING! Most of those had been covered over with gang graffiti, Americano-style, which Daria couldn’t translate and didn’t bother trying.

The factory sat on a railroad spur. It had stood unused and quite uninhabitable. It had thrived for decades, used to mass-produce everything from steamer trunks to canned goods, shipping them by sea to the Americas and by train to Central Europe and Asia. It was a brick affair, grimy, built around the nineteenth to twentieth century fin de siècle. A blocklong and a blockwide, with no lights showing at night, it took Daria a good ten minutes to spot the sweep of a sentry’s penlight from a third-floor window. If she hadn’t been looking for it, there was no way she would have spotted it.

Thankful for the full moon and cloudless sky, she finally spotted the change-of-shift on the roof, as one sniper replaced another.

How classically Asher. He’d found himself an impenetrable fortress.

*   *   *

You can’t, mulled Asher Sahar, tell an abandoned factory by its graffiti.

The outer walls of the suburban Paris factory were grimy and decrepit. But Asher Sahar’s people had had six weeks to work on the fixer-upper.

The northeast corner of the ground floor had been modified substantially. But only the northeast corner, since the floors for the rest of the building were rotting through and treacherous.

Asher’s people had established a grid of aluminum poles directly inside the front door of the factory, sixty meters by sixty meters, then strung sturdy polyvinyl sheets from the poles, creating a room within the room, one foot away from the north and east walls, three feet from the ceiling. They had boarded over all of the first- and second-story windows and had added creosote to the cracks to keep the light inside. Tall banks of halogen lights had been set up at the four corners of the new, plastic cube of a room they had created.

A complicated pyramid of oxygen tanks and compressors was installed, as well as external air vents added to the exterior of the building, then grimed over to avoid being noticed by the daytime neighbors. By the third day, the air pressure inside the white plastic cube room was slightly lower than the air pressure in Paris: In the event of a tear in the sealed fabric walls of the room, air would rush in, not rush out.

Next, a complicated, military tent, also with an aluminum frame, was set up and sealed within the cube but farther back from the factory door. It created a room within a room within a room.

Outside of the white plastic cube, the factory remained dark and dank. Asher did a walk-through that evening, shortly after eleven, to make sure everything was in place. A few electric lanterns had been set on the floor at strategic places, reflecting light up onto his emotionless face and sparse beard as he passed silently through the remainder of the ground floor, picking his footing carefully. The light glinted on his wire-frame eyeglasses. The lanterns had been turned to their lowest setting with photographer’s black umbrellas perched over them to keep their light low and focused on the wooden floor, away from the windows.

Much of the ground floor was unstable. Rats squeaked and skittered under the boards, and the stink of sewer water permeated portions of the warehouse. During their first day at the factory, one of the mercenaries had fallen through a termite-infested floor and broken both his ankles. Eli Schullman eventually found a safe route to the roof, mostly using rickety catwalks and a makeshift ladder of horizontal, C-shaped rebar bolted to the brick wall. They used red bandannas to mark the safe passage, so each shift of sniper-watchers could gain access without falling.

Since then, they had maintained twenty-four-hour surveillance of the building for six straight weeks.

Asher returned to the brightly lit cube room and sat in a folding iron chair, a gray winter coat pulled tight around his thin body, long legs out, crossed at the ankles. He felt a slim volume in his coat pocket and remembered that he had picked up a copy of Night Flight by the doomed aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. Asher always tried to read literature from the country he operated in.

He looked around. Of the eight men with him, three were former Mossad, four were mercenaries from around the globe. The eighth, the newest arrival, was Will Halliday, recently of the Secret Service. It had been Will who had contacted Asher’s benefactors and offered to help any way he could. Halliday had lost too many good men to terrorist attacks. He was a committed anti-Islamist. Now he was fully part of the mission. A true believer. Being paid a king’s ransom, yes, but a believer nonetheless.

Asher’s eyes roamed the oddly futuristic white cube room. It was such an odd contrast to the dilapidated factory around it. It made the perfect rendezvous point. They just had to wait for the pathologist.

*   *   *

Across the street and half a block down from Asher’s factory-turned-fortress stood an old, dilapidated, and badly rusting grain elevator. No grain had been stored there for more than a dozen years.

Throwing a large, oilskin carrying case over his left shoulder, Belhadj climbed the exterior ladder to a narrow iron-mesh balcony, about a hundred meters up, ignoring the lingering pain from the electroshock weapon. He reached the balcony and found a vertical curtain of rust-red iron, dangling by twisted wires from the handrail. It was barely big enough to lie down on but would shield his body from the warehouse. He lay on his stomach. Among the items Belhadj had stolen from the CIA command vehicle—technically Daria had stolen it first and he had stolen it from her—was a pair of powerful Bushnell 10X42 ARC Rangefinder binoculars. He raised the binoculars to scan the vicinity, forcing himself not to flinch when he rotated his right shoulder. He noted one man leaning in the shadows of the front door, smoking. It took him almost no time to spot the sniper-surveillance man on the roof of the oddly disproportional factory, almost two blocks away. The man had camouflaged himself with cardboard boxes. He lay on a roof that appeared to be undulated like a skateboard park. He wondered how the man made it up there without breaking his neck.

Belhadj dutifully and slowly scanned the perimeter; every street, every alley, every rooftop. His diligence paid off when he spotted two men in an aged panel truck, sitting and smoking. Both had military haircuts and bulging biceps. Asher Sahar’s external line of security, doubtless.

Although it seemed odd that the guards were looking toward the factory, not away from it.

More patience led to the discovery of movement on an adjacent roof. His binoculars picked up a blur of a human leg in fatigues, ducking behind a ventilation shaft. He also caught sight of a Renault delivery truck, which passed within a block of the factory not twice, but three times inside a forty-minute window.

That’s when it dawned on him: this wasn’t Asher Sahar’s outer line of defense.

This was French military surveillance.

*   *   *

Daria watched as a car pulled up to the factory and flashed its lights: one-two. A pause, then once more.

Two men emerged from the car and walked to the front door of the warehouse. It opened from inside. The brute of a man who opened the door stood aside to let the newcomers in. Even without binoculars, Daria could identify him. He was the size of a bear, six foot six, with a shaven head and a skull oddly shaped like a bullet, protruding upward in the back, making him look half-alien.

Eli Schullman. Former Mossad agent. He had been Asher’s most trusted confidant and friend for years. She had known the truth since hearing Asher’s voice over the cell phone in the Algerian’s shop. But seeing Schullman confirmed everything.

Belhadj, that Syrian son of a whore, hadn’t been lying. Asher Sahar truly was behind everything that had happened.

*   *   *

Eli Schullman stood aside and let two people in through the factory door. He nodded to one of his men, the Bosnian Croat who had been on the scene in Manhattan. “Stay here. Watch the street.”

Schullman led the two men inside. One was a bodyguard from the Ivory Coast.

The second man was smallish and wore a nice suit under a calf-length cashmere coat, with gloves, a scarf, and a Russian-style woolen hat. He skin was smooth and a little bit pink, with a bulbous nose that dominated all other features.

The Ivorian bodyguard was the opposite, a man so thin and grisly he looked like a suit of wet clothes hanging from a wire hanger. His eye sockets and cheekbones were deeply concave and his skin so black as to be nearly purple in the low light.

Inside the factory door, they brushed aside long, vertical strips of heavy plastic that hung from a curtain rod. Beyond that, Schullman opened a seam in the white cube room, held together with magnets. He and the newcomers entered the clean room. The newcomers squinted at the bright lights, set up strategically to eliminate almost all shadows.

Asher rose from his chair in one easy move, sliding the yellowed aviation novel back into his coat pocket, gracefully crossing the rickety wooden floor to the newcomer. He held out a hand and the small man shook without removing his kid leather gloves. Between them, they looked like academics greeting each other at a symposium.

“Dr. Rabadeau. A pleasure.”

Dr. Georges Rabadeau smiled politely and nodded. “Good evening.” They both spoke in French, Rabadeau’s a gentile and lyrical blend that suggested a wealthy upbringing and the best schools. He studied the clean room, nodded his approval.

“I trust you were not inconvenienced overmuch, being awakened at this hour?” The question was purely polite conversation. Asher knew any inconvenience had been quickly subsumed by the very large increase in the Frenchman’s offshore bank account.

“Think no more of it,” the man almost purred. “I am here to serve.”

“Splendid.” Asher waved an arm theatrically around his sparse, clean, dust-free cube. Plastic sheeting had been stapled down over the aged floorboards, made of the same white plastic material as the walls and ceiling of the room. “Will this do?”

“It is sufficient.” the Frenchman nodded.

“And here, your work space?”

Asher’s gesture revealed the tent, painted in camouflage colors of greens and golds and grays. It looked like the kind of sturdy tent a hunting party might use, with aluminum pipes creating a frame and the painted canvas pulled taught against them. It was the room within the room within the room. Dr. Rabadeau recognized it for what it was.

The tent featured no open seams. The entry wasn’t a flap, but a vertical tube, six feet high, with a flat panel that rotated on its vertical axis like a revolving door. By standing against the panel and pushing, you could enter the tent with just the air that surrounded you. Negative air pressure and powerful fans on the other side of the canvas would assure everyone that precious little air—or anything else—could escape the tent.

Georges Rabadeau had worked in tents like these before. It had been during his stint with the World Health Organization, at a field station in the northern Democratic Republic of Congo. When he had served as a pathologist on the banks of the Ebola River.

*   *   *

As the French pathologist examined his airtight work environment and the full-containment hazardous-materials suit, Asher Sahar stepped next to Eli Schullman and reverted to Hebrew.

“Have the Americans caught Daria and Belhadj?”

The big man reached into his shirt pocket for a packet of smokes and a lighter. “Not yet.”

Asher smiled up at the man. “May I ask a favor?”

“Anything.”

“Could you not smoke next to the massive tanks of superpressurized oxygen?”

Schullman cast a baleful look at the horizontal pyramid of tanks, eight high, that were stabilizing the air pressure both in the white cube room and in the incubation tent. “It’s a sad state of affairs when you can orchestrate an international military strike with global repercussions, but you can’t catch a smoke.”

Asher nodded. “Life is unfair.”

“You said it. Law enforcement, intelligence agencies, everyone’s still looking for Daria and the Syrian bastard.”

Asher nodded and shrugged as if it were no big deal.

Schullman rolled the unlit cigarette between the pads of his finger and thumb.

Asher’s personal cell phone throbbed. He pulled it out of his pocket, entered his security code. A text appeared on the screen.

Schullman held the cigarette under his nose and inhaled the faint smell of stale tobacco. “Trouble?”

“My foster parents.” Asher allowed himself a shallow smile and adjusted his bifocals. “They are vacationing in London. Mother wants to see West End plays. Father wants to bomb Parliament.”

“For a literature professor, he was always progressive. You have someone watching them?”

“Remember Aguirre? The mercenary from the Dominican Republic?”

“Sure. He’s good.”

“Hmm.” Asher smiled some more and scrolled through the text. His foster parents had visited four bookshops so far: his father’s idea of Disneyland.

Asher continued to smile softly, and anyone other than Eli Schullman would have missed the anguish behind his eyes.

“The Knesset plot. The one that got us sentenced to that hellhole prison. Without a public trial…” Schullman let his voice drift off.

Asher keyed in a thank-you text to the Dominican. “Without a trial, my foster parents never heard any news about me. Nothing about my arrest, the military tribunal, or prison. They believe I’m dead. Mossad told them I died overseas, in the service of my country.”

Schullman kept his counsel, waited.

“My parents sat shiva. Mother had been given a folded Israeli flag at the funeral. No coffin, of course. No body. I’m told she held it on her lap the full seven days. Today, they have a fireplace mantel that they’ve turned into a shrine. Photos of me in school, in the Air Force. Playing cricket. It’s nice.”

Schullman contemplated the dimly lit white cube room. “When Hannah Herself found you a foster home, she couldn’t have known you’d bond to them as if they were your real parents.”

“Hannah knew what she was doing,” Asher whispered. “Hannah knew. The Group knew. I’m grateful. Not many people like me have the luxury of parents to worry over.”

Schullman seemed to absorb this, nodding silently.

Asher smiled up at his friend. “I wish Daria had played her designated role in New York.”

Schullman rolled the cigarette back and forth. He kept an eye on the camouflaged medical tent. “You warned her. Didn’t you.”

Asher peered around at his men, spread out in the white-walled space.

“That’s why you were surprised when she tripped us up in Manhattan. You didn’t expect her to even be there. You warned her to stay away.”

Asher turned to his friend and the tripod lights glinted off his flat, round lenses. Schullman waited. He didn’t appear judgmental.

“I sent her a message at the New York airport, telling her she was burned. She didn’t take the warning. Then again, that one rarely follows a given script.”

Asher shook his head, smiling.

“God in Heaven, that was a risk. Why do it? The plan came from Hannah Herself.”

“Bringing Daria into this was a mistake. I told Hannah that from the very start. But I couldn’t talk the Group out of it. For all that, I couldn’t just let Daria walk into the CIA’s clutches, either. I owe her too much.”

“You spent almost four years in a secret military prison because of her.”

“And I shot her. I can’t ever forgive myself for that.”

Schullman rolled the cigarette between his fingers and kept his face neutral. None of the other soldiers could tell what he was thinking.

“It could have been worse,” Schullman said. “Having Daria and that Syrian butcher in CIA custody would have been good. Having them lead the CIA on a romp through America is maybe even better. As long as they stay distracted for another day.”

Asher smiled to his friend, thankful that he hadn’t been lectured. It never dawned on him to wonder if Schullman would report this news to their superiors. There was no truer friend than Eli Schullman.

And as the big man said, warning Daria did make her more of a roving target for U.S. intelligence, and thus more of a distraction. But Asher couldn’t help wondering what mischief she and Belhadj could be up to.

He took comfort in the thought that, at least, they likely hated each other as much or more than they hated Asher himself.