Dark Zone

8

Mussa Duoar smiled at the waiter as he placed the large cup of coffee down on the small table at the café on boulevard Saint-Germain near the heart of Paris.

“Merci,” he told the man, thanking him in French. “How long would it take me to get to the Seine from here?”

The accent in the reply, though clipped, cinched it for him.

“You are from Algiers, yes?” Mussa asked, this time in Arabic.

The man stared at him for a moment. “Oui,” he said. The French word was followed by a flood of Arabic, asking Mussa how he knew and if he was Algerian as well.

“No,” said Mussa, speaking again in French. “I came from Egypt many years ago, probably before you were born.”

Mussa was barely thirty and the waiter twenty at least, but he liked to play the old man. It was not so much of an act, he calculated; his experiences had aged him in many ways. He began telling the man about Cairo — a very beautiful city, he claimed, and one he longed to return to.

Perhaps it was beautiful, but Mussa had no claim to it; he had been born in Algeria just as the man had. Mussa’s father had worked against the French and been executed, rather cruelly, nearly a decade after the struggle for independence — a revenge killing ordered by a member of the foreign service, Mussa had learned nearly five years before. Though an infant at the time, his father’s death had shaped Mussa’s life in many ways.

Soon it would be avenged. But there were other matters to deal with now.

“Tell me about yourself,” he told the waiter. “Have you been in France long?”

The man nodded. Something about his gesture — the way his head drooped at first, perhaps — told Mussa more about his attitude toward his adopted land than his words. As the waiter related how he had come to the country several years before, where he lived, how he studied, Mussa watched his face and gestures for the unspoken story — the disappointment and emptiness in his new life, the missing core of connectedness to the community, the doubts about himself and who he truly was. Mussa knew this story very well; it was his business to know.

He did not ask the man outright if he was an observant Muslim. Instead, Mussa mentioned a place in his arrondissement, or quarter of the city.

“Yes, I know that place. It is right across from the mosque,” said the man.

A few more questions and Mussa learned the man’s attitude toward the local teacher at the mosque. As the waiter spoke, his spiritual thirst began to betray itself. His words came more quickly; there was tension and yearning in his voice. Here was a soul in search of salvation.

“A bright young man like you,” said Mussa finally, “should mix with others of potential.” He took a business card from his pocket — it belonged to a pharmacist in a town twenty kilometers away, pinched from the counter — and wrote an address on the back. “The mosque here has a very good set of such people.”

The waiter took the card eagerly, stuffing it into his pocket, then went back to the kitchen to get another order. Mussa took a sip of the coffee, then glanced at his watch. Paris was an hour behind London; the job there would be done by now.

He took another sip of coffee, then left some change in the plate along with the euros for the bill. He got up and got into his car, trolling slowly through the narrow streets as he made his way to his next appointment in the Marais.

Driving through the Jewish quarter of Paris amused Mussa. He found the small plaques dedicated to the dead killed by the Nazis — and the few who resisted them — quaint in a way. As a devout Muslim it could not be said that he liked Jews; on the contrary, he hated them quite probably as much as the thugs who had planted the bomb in the synagogue he was just passing soon after the Germans took over the city. But he did not find them much of a threat, surely not in France. In Israel it was certainly a different story, but here in France it was more sensible — and profitable, surely — to hate the French. This white woman with her dog, slowing him now as she crossed the street near the Musée Picasso: he hated her with her upturned nose and her snooty expression. Their eyes met and a frown came to her lips as she saw a dusky face in the big BMW.

All his life, Mussa had seen such frowns. Soon he would have his revenge, striking a blow that would resound through Europe.

A man was waiting for him around the corner from the museum. The man was not in Mussa’s employ but a Yemeni whose interests overlapped his own. Mussa pulled over to the curb and made as if he were asking directions. The man came over and, after pointing vaguely to the north, bent down to talk.

“The brothers are ready to strike, but they need more material,” said the man.

“The material is not easy to obtain,” said Mussa. “My technical adviser had commitments that could not be avoided.”

“They need more material according to the plan you outlined.”

The material they needed was plastic explosive. Mussa had supplied them with a new type that he had manufactured himself; the material was slightly more powerful than the American C-4 and somewhat more stable, but it was expensive and difficult to manufacture. He needed his own store for the Chunnel project. Still, the brothers’ “project” was an important one and he would have to find them more material.

“They are devout,” said the man. “And ready.”

“It is important that they act when I tell them,” said Mussa. “Vitally important.”

“An hour here, a half hour there — what is the difference?”

“The difference is everything,” said Mussa sharply.

“Then they will do as they are told,” said the other man.

“I will find what they need,” said Mussa. “They are wise enough to follow the instructions explicitly?”

“We have been over this.”

“Explicitly? The number of packages is very critical.”

“Explicitly,” said the Yemeni, a note of surrender in his voice.

“It will be done, with God’s will.” Mussa saw someone on the street and raised his voice. “And where can one find good knishes?”

The Yemeni was used to Mussa’s provocations. “Around the corner and to the left.”

“I’ll tell the rabbi you sent me,” said Mussa, putting his car into gear.