Red Metal

CHAPTER 14

Pascal Arc-Blanchette shuffled along the Boulevard de la République in a manner that made him appear decidedly older than his sixty-four years. He’d always seemed older than his actual age, in presence and mannerisms; at the Sorbonne he’d worn tweed jackets and pleated wool trousers when his classmates wore turtlenecks and bell-bottoms, and he’d had the same slow, shuffling gait back then.

The coat he wore today was ten years old — one of his latest finds, and in Pascal’s mind it was practically brand-new. He wore his clothes to exhaustion, something else he’d been doing his entire life.

It was almost eleven a.m., which was like dawn for Pascal, because he was no early riser. He made his way along the sidewalk on his way to his favorite café, and on the way he stepped into a small kiosk. He skimmed over the Somali-language newspapers but picked out that day’s copy of La Nation in French. He also grabbed an Arabic-language newspaper and a pack of Gitanes cigarettes.

The clerk behind the low wooden counter was new, Pascal noticed, and the man asked for eight hundred Djiboutian francs. The Frenchman fanned out six hundred and put them down, then shook his head as he scooped up his papers and cigarettes, scolding the clerk for trying to subject him to the “foreigner tax.” The man behind the counter sneered at him but took the six hundred anyway.

Pascal’s white face here in Africa used to cost him a lot of money, but he’d long since learned his way around the markets and street stalls, and now he paid like a local.

As he climbed the steps toward the doors of Restaurant L’Historil, his trousers began to slip and he had to grab them to prevent them from falling. He stopped and adjusted his belt — it was three times as old as his coat — then tucked in his wrinkled dress shirt.

Pascal stepped out onto the crowded terrace of the café but scowled as he sighted a group of young, white-faced tourists sitting in his favorite spot.

Nadal, the maître d’, spotted him and glanced to the corner where the tourists had set up shop. They had taken up almost half of the outside seating, their heavy backpacks filling many of the other chairs and tables, and effectively cordoning off the side that offered the cooling relief of the overgrown vine trelliswork.

Nadal shrugged and pointed to the opposite side of the terrace. Pascal headed to an open seat there, but he wasn’t happy about it.

The outdoor dining space was bustling and the Frenchman maneuvered through, then sat down on the hard metal seat. He shielded the sun from his eyes as he nodded to Nadal, who nodded back and went inside to assemble his usual order.

The Frenchman looked longingly across the terrace to his favorite wicker chair, now cushioning a gray rucksack in the middle of the group of white tourists.

Pascal pushed his frustration away and opened the newspaper, skimming down below the fold to a section detailing the ongoing crisis in Taiwan.

The latest report quoted the Chinese minister saying, “America shall not cross the Pacific and pretend to magistrate or officiate a political process that is uniquely between the people of China. America, you are not needed. Go home!”

As he thumbed through the paper a moment more, a piece on page A3 caught his attention. The headline read, “Kremlin Announces Large-scale Christmastime Snap Military Drill in Belarus.”

Typical Moscow, thought Pascal. The Russians see the Americans pivot to Asia, so they decide to up the tension in Central Europe with a massive military exercise near the border with Poland. It would scare everyone from Estonia to Hungary, but he did not consider the drill to be any real threat against Europe.

Nadal arrived with orange juice and a croissant and then went to fetch Pascal’s coffee. The Frenchman took a break from reading his paper to butter his pastry, and as he did so he looked at the big group of young tourists on the terrace, yammering away across the veranda.

Nadal was nowhere to be seen with his damn coffee.

The Frenchman sighed. He didn’t miss Paris often, but he missed it now.

Pascal Arc-Blanchette worked at the French embassy here in the capital of the small East African nation of Djibouti, which meant his career wasn’t exactly flourishing. He’d been put out to pasture by his office — this was a posting no one, but no one, wanted — and still he’d been lucky to secure it, because the alternative would have been forced retirement.

Pascal thought sometimes that even though this was considered an exceptionally lowly job for a man with his experience and seniority, he’d probably nevertheless still be “retired” soon enough, and they’d just pull him out of service totally. If they did this, he knew he’d leave scratch marks from his fingernails at his desk, because he had nowhere else to go and he loved the intrigue of Africa with all his heart.

Pascal’s cell phone in his pocket rang.

“Allo?”

“Allo, Papa. It’s Apollo.”

In a heartbeat all the Frenchman’s problems — the lousy seat in the café, the old belt jacket, the dead-end job, the grim reaper of forced retirement — all melted away. He smiled into his phone, and smiled wider still as Nadal appeared over him and placed his coffee on the table.

“Hello, my son. Nice to hear from you.” He caught his breath suddenly. “Everything is all right, isn’t it?”

“Bien sûr, Papa. Just thought I’d call to see how you were coming along with your suntan.”

Pascal laughed at the joke, because his son would know that his father was as pale as ever. He lived and worked in East Africa, true, but the work Pascal was engaged in involved sitting at a desk or slipping out into darkened bars, hotels, and back alleys, often late at night.

The elder Arc-Blanchette was a spy. An officer in DGSE, Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure, the French foreign intelligence agency. And while the men and women who had joined the service at the same time in the early eighties and come up the ranks with Pascal were now running the entire intelligence apparatus of the French Republic, Pascal himself walked the alleyways behind the markets of the former colony of Djibouti, desperate to pick up scraps of intelligence that might be of some slight value to his nation eight thousand kilometers away.

He enjoyed his coffee while he chatted over the phone with his son, a French army captain now stationed in Belgium. As they talked, Pascal sat facing the group of young backpackers across the terrace, and he could not help but eye them as a curiosity. Something from his training, his occupation: he wanted to determine from some little clue where they were from and what they were doing here in Africa.

There were nine of them — seven men and two women — and they all seemed to be in their twenties or thirties. Most of the men had beards; young people had given up on even maintaining their facial hair these days, and Pascal thought this was yet another indicator of the coming end of the world. From the gear around the entourage, he thought at first that they might be American adventure travelers. Americans spent a lot of money on backpacks even when they weren’t traveling any distance at all, and this equipment all looked topflight.

Pascal could pick up some snippets of the conversation, enough to hear they were speaking English, but he detected some sort of accent.

The women had their hair pulled back tightly in ponytails tucked through their ball caps. Pascal caught himself glancing at their physiques. They looked exceedingly fit.

But again, what caught his eye most of all was their gear. The rucksacks, the Gortex-outer-shell jackets, even their ruggedized cell phone cases, were all brand-new, smart-looking, and pricey.

“Apollo, hold on one moment.” Pacal switched to the camera function on his phone, zoomed in as tightly as he could go, and balanced the phone on his table. He then nonchalantly centered the lens on one of the big rucksacks and took a picture. When he looked at it on his screen, he zoomed in tighter on the manufacturer. “Random question: Are you familiar with a backpack called Peak Design?”

Apollo did not hesitate. “Of course. They make good stuff, but you pay for it. One of their bigger bags can run six hundred euros, easy.”

“Interesting.”

“Why, Papa? Thinking of getting me a nice Christmas present?”

“Maybe so,” Pascal said with a laugh. “Although, on my salary, six hundred euros is pretty steep.”

“Yeah, well, the ones you find for sale in the market down in the Horn of Africa won’t be six hundred euros, and they also won’t be anything other than cheap knockoffs.”

“I’m sure you’re right about that.” He changed the subject. “I just read in the paper about the Russian exercises. Hope that won’t ruin your Christmas.”

“Pas de tout. (“Not at all.”) No worry for us, but I imagine my counterparts in the Polish and Lithuanian militaries are pretty unhappy. The leadership here in Western Europe assures us we’ll have ample warning if the Reds decide to invade.”

“No such thing as strategic surprise anymore,” Pascal said.

“Oui. That’s what they say. Let’s hope they’re right.”

Soon Pascal said good-bye to his son and put his phone back in his jacket, then motioned to Nadal. The maître d’ stepped over and leaned down to the older man.

“Our new friends over there,” Pascal asked softly. “Who are they?”

“No clue, monsieur. They arrived just minutes before you. Haven’t seen them before.”

“Did you hear how long they were in town? Where they were staying? What they were doing?”

“Nothing at all. I don’t understand Russian.”

Pascal cocked his head. “Russian, you say? I hear them speaking English.”

“I heard some Russian. Softer, as if they didn’t want me to hear.” Nadal winked at Pascal. The maître d’ knew the old white man was French intelligence, and Nadal had made a little money in the past passing on tips.

“Very interesting,” Pascal said as he looked at the group.

“Really?” Nadal said with a smile. “How interesting?” He was asking if he’d get paid for this, and Pascal snorted out a laugh.

Pascal had run into Russian visitors to Djibouti countless times. They worked on ships that docked in the harbor, or for geological surveys or multinationals, or sometimes they were budget adventure tourists.

This group dressed and acted more or less like tourists, but from the looks of their gear there was nothing budget about them. Odd, because they were relatively young to be blowing six hundred euros on a backpack. Still… Russians eating lunch in a café in East Africa didn’t add up to much of an intelligence coup.

“Sorry, my friend,” Pascal said. “Not that interesting. But if they come back, do see if you can find out more.”

Pascal left the café, crossed the street, and entered an alleyway where a small cluster of kiosks formed a small market. The shadows were high and he began looking through a large plastic bin full of cigarette lighters for sale while keeping one eye across the street at the new visitors to his city.

The foreigners left a few minutes later, and Pascal Arc-Blanchette set off behind them.

He was a spy, it was in his blood, he was curious about them… and, as much as anything, he saw a foot follow as something that would be a fun diversion for his day.