Liberation Day

Chapter 15

I continued to play around with ways we could take the collectors from the boat to wherever they were going to pick up the money. I needed a half-decent plan I could present to the other two at the safe house. We needed a structure, orders that would be the template for the operation. It would change as more information was gathered or the collectors did something we didn’t expect, but at least we would have something to guide us.

A few old women gossiping at warp speed in high-pitched French were walking behind me with their dogs. I could hear claws scratching the asphalt as they moved past.

I sat for nearly an hour as the police dogs wagged their tails and sniffed like mad things down in the marina. The old guy was still digging his way downhill, unperturbed by the activity going on below us. I wasn’t worried; he shouldn’t see me, and if he did, so what? I’d just pretend to take a piss and hope he wouldn’t be back to tend this part of the garden for another three days.

When I checked traser again it was one-forty-seven. The safe house was no more than an hour away, so I’d stay a little longer. Time spent on reconnaissance is seldom wasted.

A bit of a wind had come up, and the boats were swaying from side to side now. The cry of a seagull took me straight back to the Boston yacht club, and to the thought that I could be working there now, serving Sam Adams in a place where the dogs weren’t allowed to shit, and I wouldn’t have to spend all day in a bush.

Just after two o’clock, a while since the uniforms had gone, I decided to make a move, thinking it was a shame that the gardener hadn’t made it this far along. It would have been a good test of the position.

Not wanting to destroy the very bit of vegetation behind me that was hiding me from the road, I moved right, along the hedge about four or five yards, and, after checking the other side, climbed over. I pulled the brim of my baseball cap down some more and replaced my shades, as I followed the sidewalk back to the marina entrance. Once at the traffic circle, I turned left, past the stores and café on the way to the car. I played the tourist as ever, taking a lot of interest in the boats and how wonderful they were, looking around and enjoying myself as some more Kronenbourgs were being summoned from the tabac. The boys were going to have to wait a while before they kicked some al-Qaeda butt.

I drove back toward Nice. Hubba-Hubba and Lotfi would both have checked their e-mails at one-ish, and be on their way to the safe house. Each of us had no idea where the other was staying, and, just like on the Algerian job, we didn’t know what names we were using as cover.

We’d come into France at different times, but had been operating as a team for the last four days. I alone knew how to contact George. Anything they didn’t need to know I wouldn’t be telling them, just in case they ended up hanging upside down as a nice man read them their horoscopes with a length of two-by-four on the soles of their feet.

Even though I hardly knew these guys, I couldn’t help liking them. It was obvious that they knew each other well, and they made me feel as if I’d been sort of adopted by them. But operational security was something we all understood and, fuck it, I’d never see them again after Sunday, so we weren’t exactly aiming to be friends for life.

In preparation for this job I’d cut the TAOR (tactical area of responsibility) into three areas, allocating one for each of us to familiarize himself with in depth, or at least as much as we could in such a short time. Then we had a day in each other’s areas. Hubba-Hubba had to recce the area from Monaco to the west side of Nice, ending at the airport. I took over from there to the west side of Cannes, and Lotfi took from Cannes down to St. Raphaël, about twenty miles along the coast. We’d now read enough guidebooks and travel information on our TAOR to start our own travel agency. But it had to be done; from the moment the boat arrived, we needed to be able to operate as if we’d lived in this part of the world for years. We could have done with a few more weeks to bed in properly, but as usual we were victims of life’s two fuckers: not enough information, and not enough time.

We now had to learn how the buses and trains worked here, even down to the fare structure. If Greaseball was right, it was highly likely that we’d find ourselves following these people on public transport. At the very least, we’d need to have the correct change or tokens ready so as not to draw attention to ourselves.

To operate successfully, a team like ours had to achieve three goals. The first was to establish efficient communication and information flow within the unit, and then separately between the unit leader and the command structure.

The second was to limit the chances of discovery by outsiders, by minimizing the number of communication links between the members. That meant no phone calls, no meetings other than at the safe house, and even then only when operationally necessary. There had to be no communication other than my contacting them by their individual e-mail, and no marked road maps, in fact nothing on paper. Everything had to be committed to memory. The less of a trail we left, the better our chance of survival.

The third goal was to limit the damage that might be done if one member of the team was discovered and removed from the network, which meant minimizing the number of direct links with each other, and only sharing information on a need-to-know basis. That was why we had split up and done our own thing so far: if one of us got lifted, he didn’t know where the other two were, he didn’t know their full names, he didn’t know anything apart from my Canadian e-mail address.

Working within these constraints had meant that we had to sacrifice efficiency in communications, intelligence-gathering and planning, but it kept us alive. Now, as the job started getting into gear, we had no choice but to operate more visibly as a team, which made us more effective, but more vulnerable to discovery.

My route took me back into Nice along the Promenade des Anglais. I reached the center of town and turned right, away from the beach, heading north. I flicked on Riviera Radio and got the same boring voice I’d heard at the marina. He was blathering his way through a badly worded commercial for easily fitted security shutters for the home and office. Then there was a review of the American newspaper headlines. It was all doom and gloom and people dying of anthrax. For about the hundredth time since I’d left, all I could do was hope that no one I knew was affected.

It wasn’t long before the five-star shopping areas and hotels and palm trees gave way to freight depots, grime-covered warehouses, and dirty cream, rectangular, sixties or seventies apartment buildings built far too close to each other.

I followed the road around a sharp left-hand bend and over the train tracks, then hit the maze of high-speed feeder roads to the autoroute. I drove beside the river. At this time of the year it was just a hundred-yard-wide stretch of sandstone-colored rock and rubble, in the center of which a trickle of water wound its way down toward the sea.

Beautiful nineteenth-century houses that had once lined the banks were now towered over by hardware stores and warehouses. There were no palm trees around here, that was for sure. There were no shiny buses, either.

Autoroute 8 appeared ahead of me now as I crossed the river. It ran along a viaduct, a couple of hundred feet high, that straddled this part of the city before disappearing into a tunnel in the direction of Monaco.

It would have been a lot quicker and easier if we’d allowed ourselves to use the autoroute, but that wasn’t going to happen unless the shit really hit the fan. The toll booths had cameras and, besides, the police always hung around these places checking car tax and insurance. For all we knew, the booths might also have face-recognition technology on the cameras.

All three of us had to avoid leaving sign. We were careful to pick cafés and stores with automatic doors, or ones we could push open with a shoulder. Even drinking coffee was a major challenge, as it had to be done without leaving prints, and every attempt had to be made to prevent leaving DNA. It wasn’t so much what they could do with any of the information we might leave in our wake right now, it was what it could tell them later: this stuff stays on computer forever.

I remembered a job I’d been on with the Regiment (SAS) in Northern Ireland, when we were trying to get some fingerprints to connect a suspect with a bombing campaign. This guy was so good, he wore gloves most of the time, and when he didn’t, he took care to remove all print traces.

In the end, we risked everything to follow him, just waiting for him to slip up. He went into cafés several times and had a cup of coffee, but wiped the cup and the spoon every time before he left. If it was a paper cup, he took it home with him. And he didn’t just throw stuff like that out with his household rubbish, he burnt it in his backyard.

It took weeks, but we got him in the end. One day he used a teaspoon, stirred his coffee, put it down, and forgot to wipe it. The moment he left, the team was straight in.

There was no way I was going to make the same mistake. Everything I touched I wiped, or if the prints weren’t wipable, I’d keep it with me and destroy it later. Even taking cash from an ATM was a chore. All three of us had had to do it a lot, since we paid cash for everything. When we took money out, we did so from the same area — I used Cannes — so that no pattern of movement could be established. I never used the same ATM twice; I wasn’t giving anyone a known location to stake out and lift me. The only routine I followed was that I always got money out at night, varying the time and slipping on a hat and sunglasses and standing an arm’s length to the side so the ATM camera didn’t get me. Even then, I had to make sure I didn’t leave a print. It was the same when it came to buying stuff from a shop or café—it was vital not to go to the same place twice. It was all a major pain in the ass, but if things went noisy, I wanted to leave the French police as few pieces of our jigsaw puzzle as possible. I knew that prison-visiting wasn’t high on George’s list of priorities.

I drove under the viaduct, past the huge concrete funnel that belched smoke from the city’s incinerator. I was now in L’Ariane, very near the safe house.

Areas like these, Hubba-Hubba had told me, were called banlieues, the suburbs. That word had always conjured up the image of nice three-bedroom split-levels with lawns near the commuter station. But here it meant ghetto; high-density tower blocks where les immigrés, mostly North African, had taken refuge. L’Ariane had the reputation of being one of the most deprived and violent banlieues in France, after those that ringed Paris. Hubba-Hubba had told me plenty of his aunt’s horror stories; it was a no-go area for the authorities, out of bounds even to ambulance crews and firemen, who didn’t dare set foot in the place without police protection — and just one glimpse of a gendarme was all it took to spark a riot. I couldn’t think of a better place for a safe house.

I passed a burnt-out car that hadn’t been there three days ago. Apart from that, everything else looked the same — a grim, rat-infested, litter-strewn warren of graffiti-sprayed concrete and satellite dishes.

I took the first turn left into the housing project and parked outside the kebab-dry-cleaner’s-pâtisserie-laundry. I got out of my car immediately so it looked as if I had a reason to be here — which, in fact, I did, though it wasn’t one I wanted anyone to know about. I worried about the Mégane; the roads were packed with vehicles, but mine was four or five years newer, and still had its plastic hubcaps.

I’d only been here twice before: when we’d gotten together on the twentieth to sort out the recces and divide the areas, and again earlier today, to deliver the equipment I’d picked up from the DOP.