Six hours later Slaton walked out of the embassy into an indifferent morning. The wind and rain were fading, trying to hold on, as the sun hid behind the clouds. He carried a small attaché borrowed from the former chargé d’affaires, a man whose current status at the embassy was indeterminate, which told Slaton he was certainly Mossad. The attaché was quite empty, but it advanced the image he was after—a man on the move who had business at hand.
Slaton had gone no more than ten paces on the puddled sidewalk when he put his new Mossad-issued phone to his ear as if answering a call. He stopped abruptly, the way people did for calls of such importance that walking at the same time was inadvisable. He meandered back and forth on the same square of cement for a full two minutes, then pocketed the phone and resumed his westerly trek.
He kept a casual pace, and acted out a simple countersurveillance routine along the way. He arrived at his hotel some thirty minutes later, damp and disheveled and self-assured. At the front desk Monsieur Aranson of Sweden engaged the concierge in a brief back-and-forth about the weather, and she asked if he was enjoying his stay. He assured her that he very much was, thank you, and bid her a pleasant good morning before rambling across the lobby and disappearing into the rising stairwell.
As soon as he was out of sight, Slaton broke into a vertical run, taking the steps three at a time. Inside his third-floor room seconds later, he quickly retrieved the Arctic Warfare Covert from its hiding place, and also the Glock 17. He set the Glock on a table and removed a small screwdriver from his pocket—another acquisition from the embassy. With a deftness that would have impressed any surgeon, Slaton broke down the gun, removed the firing pin, and had the Glock reassembled in less than a minute. The screwdriver and pin went into his pocket. He palmed a full magazine into the weapon, then racked the slide to charge a round into the chamber.
The handgun he placed in the attaché, and that went unlocked onto a midlevel closet shelf. He went to the room’s large main window, outside of which was an exterior fire escape, and unlatched the window lock, then nudged the frame ajar a fraction of an inch. He carried the roller bag with the sniper rifle to the door, then paused to study the room. Struck by one imperfection, he went back and repositioned one of the two upholstered sitting chairs, pushing it against the wall by the window at a forty-five-degree angle. Returning to the door, he again looked over the room and was satisfied.
Slaton shouldered into the hall with the roller bag in hand. He locked the door behind him and made his way to the stairwell. Before reaching the lobby, he diverted into a rough-edged hall and walked a weaving passage through the service corridor—he had learned on the day he arrived that it led to a back door. Luck was with him, and he encountered no hotel staff along the way.
He exited into the alley behind the hotel. It was open on either end of the block, but instead of turning Slaton held a straight line to the service entrance of the opposing building. Having observed the place for days, he knew that back door was unlocked during business hours, and that it accessed a hallway where the establishment’s toilets were located. Seconds later he emerged into the hub of a busy café. Patrons gathered around bistro tables, taking espressos and croissants. The line at the counter was three deep. No one gave a second glance to the casual, athletic man carrying a suitcase who left unhurriedly through the front door, hailed a taxi, and disappeared into the rush on Boulevard Saint-Denis.
* * *
After spending most of the night crafting attacks against Jewish interests across Europe, an exhausted Baland reported for work the following morning to learn the status of the ongoing battles.
At the Élysée command center the mood had brightened. Only one new attack had been reported overnight, giving hope that the worst was behind them. Also to the positive, the mosque in Raqqa had been bombed hours ago, and the initial battle-damage assessment confirmed that the place had been flattened. There were no apparent survivors, and ISIS message traffic had fallen off precipitously. A few analysts went so far as to suggest that elements of the caliphate’s leadership could have been inside. Such claims were maddeningly difficult to verify, and the degree of the victory would take weeks to ascertain, but clearly Uday’s information had been accurate.
The buoyant mood in the command center faded just after nine o’clock that morning when a senior officer from Baland’s cyber unit delivered sobering news. From the trove of Uday’s personnel list, certain phone numbers had been given special scrutiny, and a day-old message was uncovered. Overnight, the encryption had been cracked, revealing a grave directive: A cell of four young men in Lille had been instructed to assemble a truck bomb, which they’d been preparing for months, and obliterate the city’s main synagogue.
The Élysée command center went into action, every element of France’s police and intelligence establishments focused as one. Within thirty minutes signals intelligence had pinpointed the receiving address, and an oversized assault team launched a raid on a small home in Roubaix. What they found was alarming: four unmade beds, signs of a hasty departure, and residue from a sizable stash of explosives. Worse yet, in a small attached garage they discovered a laboratory, precursor chemicals, and tracks where a heavy vehicle—a work truck, according to neighbors—had recently departed over a sodden driveway. The working estimate was that the crew were carrying enough explosives to level a city block.
With a fair understanding of the weapon, as well as the target, authorities placed Lille and the surrounding townships under virtual martial law. Incredibly, nothing was found. The cell of four men, along with a truck carrying over a hundred pounds of TATP, had simply disappeared. Orders were given for the net to be widened.
In a private thought, Baland suspected they were chasing the last of Chadeh’s attacks, and he would eventually be proved correct. In that moment, however, as he sat quietly in a chair at the back of the room, he silently cheered the cell on, hoping they succeeded spectacularly. With a strange new detachment he watched people around him, men and women he’d once considered his countrymen, as they worked frantically to avert the strike. He observed their procedures in the way a chemistry student might critique a peer’s laboratory demonstration—seeking faults in the process.
As it turned out, the joint team in the Élysée command center had it mostly right. They were looking for the right people and the right weapon—but in altogether the wrong place.