Baland walked back into DGSI headquarters, having taken leave from the ongoing hunt at Élysée Palace. He made a few inquiries downstairs, ensuring that everyone knew he would be in his old office—even if his thoughts had slipped from the search, he could not ignore it completely.
He sank heavily behind his desk, and made no attempt to check his messages. In the guise of Zavier Baland, Ali Samir sat alone reflecting deeply on what LeFevre had just told him. They are brother and sister.
No words had ever affected him so profoundly.
Jalil, he reflected. My only son.
He had never known the boy—never even seen him, in fact. His wife had been pregnant when he’d escaped Gaza, and she’d given birth two weeks after attending the funeral he had so artfully arranged.
No, he corrected, I have seen him once.
That mental image stormed into his head. The CCTV video of the bombing in Grenoble. He remembered watching Jalil walk back to the car. Remembered seeing his sister press the button to activate his suicide vest. It seemed a singularly callous act … but had he not done much the same to his own twin brother? Perhaps. Malika, however, had been explicitly cruel. Not only had she killed Jalil, but in her final actions she had demonstrated a complete lack of faith in him.
She probably had her reasons. Jalil had been raised by his mother, no doubt made into a lamb. But Malika—she was something else. She is every bit as ruthless as I am, Baland thought, more with disbelief than pride. He’d had no hand in her upbringing, at least not in any proper way. He had been too busy constructing bombs to be a father, a talent he’d resurrected today at The Peninsula.
Yet still she is like me.
The door to his office suddenly opened, and Baland stirred back to the present. He recognized a man named Trevant, who was in charge of building security.
“Pardon, Monsieur Director,” Trevant said, prematurely using the title. “I thought you were at the Élysée command center. I have come to update the security keypads. If you wish me to come back later—”
“No, not at all,” Baland said, waving him in. There were two secure fixtures in the room, a small wall safe and one drawer in the heavy desk. Both had locks necessitating a fingerprint scan and a four-digit code to gain access.
Trevant said, “I have already reprogrammed the units in the director’s suite with your fingerprint, and I cleared the old code. You may create a new one whenever you wish.”
“Yes, I remember how to do it.” Baland watched the man connect a small electronic device to the wall safe. “You are working late tonight, Trevant.”
“Not at all, sir. I work two of these shifts every week.”
Baland should have known that … the keepers of DGSI security worked in the dead of night. How much more have I missed? He felt a darkness come over him, something he’d not felt in a very long time. He looked at the computer screen beside him and saw e-mails piling up in his in-box. Some would have seemed important a month ago. He pushed away from his desk and watched the man work.
“Tell me, do you have children, Trevant?”
A hesitation. “Of course, sir. Two boys.”
“Are they good?”
Trevant laughed uneasily. “As good as any, I suppose. One of them wants to be a policeman, but the other … he finds a bit of trouble.”
“What kind of trouble?”
Trevant paused in his task. He smiled awkwardly at the man who was so many steps above him. “He stays out too late, I think, and has difficulty holding a job. But Luc will straighten out—he has never been arrested or anything like that. I look after him, and someday, God willing, he will look after me.”
After an uncomfortable silence, Trevant went back to his lock. A series of beeps punctuated the stillness, and he said, “Voilà! You have two days in which to move any secure items to your new office.”
“Yes … thank you.”
Trevant was gone minutes later, and Baland reached down and opened the secure drawer in his desk. It was full from front to back with files. Only one interested him—directly at the head, the all-important binder. He extracted the same section he had earlier, and paired it with Uday’s addition. With well-manicured fingertips he neatly squared it all on the blotter in front of him. Forty printed pages, and on top of that the well-traveled memory stick. The same information Chadeh had held for a brief time in Raqqa.
“Is this what it has come to?” he whispered.
He’d had a good run in France and nearly succeeded. Nearly carved out a respectable life. But now, with all that was happening around him, it was folly to think his secret would not be exposed. Since the day Malika had first cornered him on the Pont Neuf, he’d known this day would come. Baland had postponed the reckoning to the best of his ability, but with each passing day his options seemed to narrow. He was like a juggler who’d gone beyond his comfort level. Too many knives in the air. He might silence Slaton, but how many others in Mossad knew the truth? So, too, a handful of zealots in Raqqa. And of course there was Malika. He could never contain a secret so widely dispersed.
He felt an old fury rise from deep within. Malika, his fratricidal daughter, had been instrumental in his ruin. But she was not its source. That went undeniably further back. To a childhood spent in dusty streets cleaning up after violence, and so many years thereafter making others do the same. It all rushed back in a torrent of hate. Just when he’d thought they were out of his life forever, the old oppressors had returned to seize him by the throat. The directorship. Jacqueline and the girls. A mostly honest career. All would soon be lost to the tormentors of so many generations of his people.
The Jews.
I never really escaped, he thought. We have only come full circle.
The man who’d tried not to be Ali Samir for so very long regarded the information in front of him. If nothing else, the last fifteen years had granted him opportunity—a chance to hurt them in Europe more than anyone since Hitler. He flicked through the pages and saw endless opportunity. Chadeh’s first wave of attacks had to be nearing its end, and with Uday having ruined ISIS’ comm networks, no others would be ordered soon. Baland, however, was in a perfect position to pick up where Chadeh left off.
His longtime constraint—his sense of duty to France—had effectively been displaced. It occurred to him that he would first have to claim the directorship, but that would happen just over a day from now. After that, he could order attacks against Jews with one hand, and mismanage the French response with the other. For a week, maybe two, he would have free rein in running both sides of the campaign. Baland thought back across history and wondered if there was any precedent. A war in which one man commanded both armies.
He inserted the memory stick into the computer at the side of his desk. The old hatred burned brighter as the screen flickered to life. The execution of his plan might have to wait another day, but the planning could begin immediately.
The only question was where to begin.