The ops briefing that morning had been on Baland’s schedule for two days, and because it was entrenched deep within DGSI headquarters he had no reservations about attending. Israeli assassins might be lurking along the shoulders of the Seine or on the boulevards of Courbevoie, but there was certainly no more secure place in Paris than the fortress where he sat drinking tea at five minutes past eight.
This was not to say that Baland hadn’t taken precautions since his rendezvous with Malika. He’d slept in his office last night on the surprisingly comfortable couch, something he’d done before while navigating late-night agency crises. Baland had considered telling Jacqueline to take the girls to her sister’s in Rouen, but he doubted they were in danger, and the greater distance between them would only add complications. He was the one Slaton would be hunting. All the same, he had insisted Jacqueline drive the girls to school today.
His assistant had cleared his schedule for the day, regrets given to his German Bundespolizei counterpart who’d been penciled in for an evening cocktail at a nearby hotel, and Baland relished the excuse to cancel an afternoon interview with a minor television station. The only outside event he did not alter: his lunch date at Le Quinze with director Claude Michelis.
So prepared, he sipped his Earl Grey and flicked through a newspaper until the director arrived—as was his custom, precisely ten minutes late. The first thing Michelis did was curl a bony finger, drawing Baland to a quiet corner of the conference room.
“Good morning, Director,” said Baland.
“Good morning, Zavier. You look well, considering.”
“Considering what?”
“That you slept in your office.”
Baland’s first thought was to wonder how Michelis had found that out. His second was to remind himself that the director was the director for a reason. “This thing in Grenoble,” he said on the fly, “it’s been bothering me. At least here, if I’m unable to sleep, I can do something productive.”
Michelis set a fraternal hand on his shoulder. “This briefing might put us both to sleep, but I suppose it’s ground that has to be covered. We weren’t prepared for Grenoble, and the president himself has directed me to make radiological threats our top priority.”
“A wise decision,” Baland found himself saying. A middle-aged woman approached the lectern, and he turned to go back to his seat.
“I’ll see you for lunch,” said Michelis.
“I look forward to it.”
The director was spot-on—the morning’s briefings were indeed coma-inducing. Everyone first endured the department’s specialist in radiological terrorism, a woman who delivered a lecture on gamma particles and shielding in a flaccid monotone. Next came a bespectacled man who championed a new organizational structure, represented in an unremitting series of Venn diagrams.
Thirty minutes in, Baland stifled a yawn and flicked through the long-awaited report that had reached his desk yesterday afternoon. He’d studied it thoroughly in his office last night, which did nothing to promote sleep. A comprehensive profile of France’s vulnerabilities to terrorism, it covered electrical grids, dams, nuclear power plants, and at-risk public venues. Transportation and commerce were given an entire chapter, and Appendix B catalogued armories where conventional weapons and explosives were stored, along with conceivable security weaknesses for each site.
As individual scenarios, much of what he saw was well-trod ground. Taken collectively, however, the information in the two-hundred-page binder in his hands, which was labeled at the highest level of secrecy, was overpowering. It demonstrated profound weaknesses in France’s security arragnements, and included the most current threat assessments—susceptibilities to dirty-bomb attacks had even been updated for a dozen high-profile sites. The Eiffel Tower, Versailles, Disneyland Paris—all had been freshly reexamined this week using information gleaned from Grenoble. There were also a handful of new scenarios, including a hypothesis that a toxic-waste holding pond, located at a chemical factory upriver from Paris, could be breached and diverted into the Seine with catastrophic consequences—only a small car bomb was needed. A computer simulation of a chlorine gas attack inside the Châtelet Métro station was chilling in its body count. In sum, the report was a wake-up call, and would prove invaluable in assembling defensive measures for years to come. And if such information ended up in the hands of the enemy? he thought.
That would be utterly devastating.
An increasingly conflicted Baland flicked through the bound pages like a battlefield commander going through a casualty list. Having personally commissioned the study at Malika’s insistence, he’d done his best to slow-roll its completion, making at least three changes to his original request. Baland had tried to buy time, hoping for some escape from his situation before the report was delivered. Now, with the document in hand, there seemed little recourse. He would have to send it on to Raqqa.
He imagined redacting select pages, or even entire chapters. That was no more than fantasy, really. Or was it? Baland checked his watch. He had two hours to work with before the delivery. Much of that would be needed to requisition a car, drive to a point near the dead-drop location, then generate a way to be alone without alarming his security detail. He could never sanitize the report in that amount of time. But what if I only deliver part of it? he wondered. Malika and her ISIS minders would be furious, complicating things further.
As if that was possible.
Baland decided it might work. He could deliver what they wanted, but in piecemeal fashion, a few choice sections to begin. Enough to convince them of the value of his information. But then he would take a new tack, perhaps demand money for the rest. Yes, he thought, they’ll understand that. He could haggle over a price for days, even weeks. Malika would threaten him, of course, but her handlers in Raqqa would be smitten by the value of his information. They would tell her to tread carefully. In the end, Baland would earn just a little more time. Time to find an escape hatch from his fast-sinking life.
He flicked through the report, wondering which sections to extract. As a senior officer, he would never be challenged about what was going home in his leather attaché. He was leafing through idly when an addendum near the back caught his eye. It had been one of his added requests, an afterthought … or so he told himself. Now those thirty-odd pages struck a long-buried chord of interest. He pulled them free from the binder, then added the table of contents from the front. That would whet their appetites, he thought. A terrorist’s shopping list.
The removed sections went discreetly into his attaché. Forty pages lighter, the binder was little changed in bulk or appearance. Another speaker arrived at the podium, a liaison from the interior minister’s office here to advocate the synergies of interdepartmental cooperation. The very word “bureaucracy” was sourced in French, and it was alive and well in the fortress of Levallois-Perret, and so too, Baland presumed, in the other seats of power: the nearby Ministry of Defense, and the National Gendarmerie on Rue Saint-Didier. The strike in Grenoble had been a seminal moment, standing out among attacks of recent years. It had afflicted the psyche of France herself, and police agencies and counterterrorism forces were responding with predictable myopia. Everyone was sidetracked looking over their collective shoulders for another radiological strike.
Everyone except Zavier Baland, who knew that the next string of attacks, in which he was unassailably complicit, would be very different indeed.