Duty and Honor

29

Let’s go back to the start,” Jack replied. “What happened in Abidjan?”

“The night they took me I was going to meet a girl, a Red Cross worker from Strasbourg. We met when her orientation group came to get some basic first-aid training before going into the field.”

“What’s her name?” Effrem asked.

“Uh…” Allemand thought for moment. “Janine Pelletier. No, Périer, that’s it.

“Do you have a picture of her?” Jack asked.

“Perhaps in my OneDrive account…” René got out his phone, tapped a few keys, then handed it to Jack.

He studied the photo and returned the phone to René. “Go on,” he said.

“Not long after I got there, a van pulled up. Five men in balaclavas poured out, swarmed me, put a hood over my head, and shoved me into the van. It happened so fast…” Allemand shook his head. “I barely put up a struggle, I was so shocked. After that, it was all something of a blur. We drove for hours, I don’t know in which direction, but it was almost dawn when the van stopped. I was put in a basement, I think, in a small brick room with no windows.”

Effrem asked, “Did anyone speak to you, ask you anything?”

“No, and that made it all the worse. No one said a word, not from the time I was taken to the day I got free. Once a day, every day, someone would come into the room wearing the same balaclava, give me food and water and change my waste bucket, then leave. A couple times a day two or three of them would come in, beat me and kick me until I passed out. Every few days another one would come in, put a gun to my head and pull the trigger, but the gun was always empty. Several times they had me stand on a chair with my head in a noose, and they would simply watch me. For hours. There were other… things, too, but I can’t…” Allemand’s words trailed off.

“How did you get free?”

“I was rescued. One night, very late, I heard two explosions. I recognized them as flash-bangs — you know, stun grenades — and then there was a lot of automatic weapons fire. About ten minutes after it started, the door to my cell opened and a pair of men in camouflage came in. They told me they’d come to rescue me. They took me somewhere by vehicle, maybe Abidjan, but I can’t be sure. It was a private home, some kind of compound. Waiting for me were a doctor and a nurse. I had broken bones, torn ligaments and muscles, contusions on my liver and spleen. Even with the medication, the pain was indescribable. A few days later Jürgen Rostock showed up. It was his men who rescued me, he told me.

“From there we moved around a lot. Rostock told me my life was in danger, that people were hunting for me, that it had something to do with my father and the Army Defense Staff. I never quite understood it. I was fuzzy, you know, from the drugs, but eventually, after about six weeks, Rostock said they’d eliminated the threat.”

“Which was what?” asked Effrem.

Allemand shook his head. “I’m not sure. I’m sorry, it’s, uh…”

“That’s okay,” Jack said.

Was René a junkie? he wondered, René’s demeanor suggested a narcotic addiction, perhaps to oxycodone. His injuries certainly warranted such a prescription.

Pieces began falling into place for Jack: What kind of group, terrorist or otherwise, kidnaps a soldier — a soldier from a famous family, no less — but claims no credit for it and asks for no ransom? His captors had tortured him, but had neither asked him questions nor tried to coerce him into some trumped-up, inflammatory confession.

And what about after his rescue? Rostock had made no effort to return René to his loved ones. And then there was the constant moving about, the vague, looming threats to René’s life, the insinuations about his father. And through all of this, Jürgen Rostock and his men were the only ones looking out for him, the only ones who could keep the boogeymen at bay.

Seeing it now with fresh eyes, Jack recognized René Allemand’s odyssey for what it was: an elaborately choreographed brainwashing program. But to what end? To answer that question, Jack had to first determine whether René understood the true nature of what’d happened to him. There was a larger worry as well: How reliable was he at all? He’d been kidnapped, that much was fact, but they had only his account of what happened after he was thrown into that van in Abidjan.

“What happened next?” asked Jack.

René replied with a proud grin, “Rostock offered me a job.”

Effrem leaned forward. “What? What do you mean?”

“A job in his company. He offered me a position as a field officer. I’d heard of RSG and knew of its reputation, but I’d always assumed my career would be in the French Army. What happened in Abidjan and then what Jürgen and I talked about made me reconsider. I took the job.”

“And you never thought to contact your father or the Army to let them know you were alive? Why, for God’s sake?”

“At first, it was at Rostock’s suggestion. I was going to be doing undercover work, he said, and the training and transition were going to be intense. Once I was past that, Rostock was going to help me get my old life back. Later, well, I’m not sure why.”

Effrem’s mouth was hanging open. He said, “Are you suggesting you participated in faking your own death to join RSG? That you were going to be part of some secret… what, exactly? What was Rostock asking you to do?”

Allemand stared vacantly at Effrem, his face a mask of frustration and confusion. Clearly he wanted to, and should have been able to, answer Effrem’s question, but there was a disconnect somewhere in Allemand’s brain, related either to his addiction or to his treatment at the hands of Rostock, or a combination of the two.

Effrem said to Jack, “Christ Almighty, this guy is out there—”

Jack cut him off. “We’re just having trouble following this, René.”

“Yes. Of course. These are not simple issues we’re dealing with. The world, I mean. We’re on the brink of a precipice.” Again Allemand’s words trailed off, as though he’d lost his place in a script.

Jack felt a wave of sympathy for René, but it was tainted by a gut punch of fear. He’d already felt he and Effrem had dropped into the rabbit hole. Sitting across from René, Jack now felt like he’d met the Mad Hatter. Or the White Rabbit. None of this was René’s fault, of course, but Jack now realized they’d joined forces with a highly trained soldier who not only had lost touch with reality, but was probably suffering from a narcotics addiction and PTSD as well.

Abruptly, René stood up. “I need the restroom.”

“Down that hall and left,” Jack replied.

Allemand walked away.

Effrem leaned across the table at Jack and rasped, “The man is insane, Jack.”

“Hold on—”

“No! I’ve spent a long time on this story, maxed out my credit cards, and almost gotten myself killed chasing a lunatic. We’ve got to get out of here. I’m done, Jack. Let’s go.” Effrem moved to stand up.

“We’re not going anywhere,” Jack snapped. “Sit down. You’re not seeing it, are you?”

“What?”

“René was kidnapped and he was held and he was rescued, but it’s all Rostock.” Jack spent the next two minutes explaining his theory until slowly Effrem’s expression softened.

“Jack, brainwashing? That’s Manchurian Candidate stuff. Science fiction.”

“You’d be surprised. I think what happened to René is an extreme form of operant conditioning combined with drug therapy. Negative reinforcement, isolation, threat of extinction, desocialization, a skewed version of Stockholm syndrome — it’s all there. It’s what he went through, from the time he was kidnapped until Rostock offered him a job.”

“If that’s the case, why is he on the run from Rostock?”

“I think he knows something’s not right about all this, but he can’t pin it down. It’s like trying to grab a fistful of water. One minute he’s suspicious of Rostock, the next praising him. Allemand either saw or heard something that spooked him — something that contradicted his conditioning — so he bolted.”

“Let’s just assume you’re right. Why him? Aside from his famous name, right now he’s just another soldier. Why would Rostock go to all this trouble?”

“I don’t think it’s got anything to do with René. This is about his father, Marshal Allemand.”

“In what way?”

“I don’t know yet. But as a coercion technique, what Rostock’s done is brilliant. If you kidnap a child your leverage lasts only as long as you have control of that child. Same with threatening the child’s life. But what happens when you take the child’s mind and turn it against the parent?”

“A puppet,” Effrem replied.

“A puppet whose narrative and fate you control,” Jack added. “René is either a heroic French soldier who survived a horrendous experience, or he’s a traitor to his country. To someone like Marshal Allemand, that’s a powerful lever.”

The question was, a lever to accomplish what?

Effrem’s eyes had glazed over. “Kidnapping,” he murmured.

“What?”

Effrem held up his finger for Jack to wait. He got out his cell phone, browsed for a minute, then said, “Son of a bitch! I knew I’d read something about this. René wasn’t Rostock’s first victim. Five years ago Alexander Bossard’s daughter, Suzette, was kidnapped in Brazil. RSG rescued her.”

“Save a man’s child and you could own him for life.”

“It’s a hell of a debt to repay,” Effrem said. “So what do we do with René?”

“In the long term, that’s a question for a psychologist. In the short term, René’s going to keep going until he assembles the puzzle in his head or Rostock kills him. If we keep him close we can at least steer him a bit.”

Allemand returned to the booth and sat down. He drummed his fingers on the table and looked at each of them in turn. “You have more questions, yes?”

“You said you and Rostock talked,” Jack replied. “About what?”

“What else? Islamic terrorism. It has to be stopped.”

Jack didn’t disagree, but René’s tone had been condescending, as though Jack had asked what should be done with a lawn that needed to be mowed. You mow it, idiot.

“How?”

“Not the way we’ve been doing it here, or in the United States, for that matter. It’s time to remove the gloves, as you might say. We root them out, wherever they are, and kill them all. If you help a terrorist, you are yourself a terrorist. If you sympathize with a terrorist, you are yourself a terrorist. We’ve been treating this like a conventional war. That’s ludicrous. We need to go nuclear.” As he’d been speaking, René’s tone had become increasingly strident, and now he punctuated this last statement by jabbing the table with his index finger.

“You mean literally or figuratively?” asked Effrem.

“Whatever it takes. Nation-state armies are worthless in this kind of fight. Too many laws, regulations, rules of engagement. Governments come and go, as does political will. Terrorists don’t bother with those things; we can’t afford to, either. It has to stop, don’t you see that? We have to stop them before it’s too late. Rostock’s approach is the only one that can work.”

Jack thought: The looming threat, the ticking clock, and the savior. Three more operant-conditioning techniques.

“What approach?” asked Effrem.

Allemand was gazing out the window. After a couple seconds he snapped his head toward Effrem. “What?”

“I said—”

Jack broke in: “Maybe you can help me understand something. If you believe in Rostock’s message, why are you running from him?”

“Schrader,” Allemand replied simply. “I didn’t trust him. He was my contact, my training officer, but there was something about him. I started following him.”

“And?” asked Effrem.

“Did you follow the Lyon attacks?”

Both Jack and Effrem nodded.

“Do you remember the bomb maker’s apartment they found a week later, near that pharmacy, and the makeshift shooting range outside Montanay? A few days before the attacks, Schrader visited both places.”

Jack was stunned. Provided this wasn’t a delusion of René’s, Eric Schrader, one of Jürgen Rostock’s operatives, had been involved in the Lyon attacks.

“But Schrader was working for Rostock,” Effrem said.

“No, I think he turned. I was trying to get proof to take to Jürgen. I didn’t know who else at RSG might be allied with Schrader, so I decided to handle it myself. And it’s a good thing I did. Schrader and Alexander Bossard met a number of times with Rostock present.”

Once again Allemand’s reasoning was muddled. Schrader was a rogue agent and Rostock a terrorist-fighting savior who couldn’t see what was happening under his own nose. Jack suspected part of René’s mind was pushing him toward the truth about both Rostock and what had happened to him in Abidjan, but he couldn’t yet make the leap. What would happen when the man had no choice but to face that chasm?