The First Casualty

28

The train to Zagreb and the three-hour Air France flight into a foggy, rainy Orly merged into one miserable journey. First, Jason had been faced with the choice: abandon his weapons or check them. As much as standing around a baggage carousel flew in the face of his training and experience, being unarmed for whatever period was required to either ship the weapons or replace them was worse. He would be relatively safe in the air, at risk once on the ground. Paris, after all, had around 155,000 Moslems, almost 7½ percent of the city’s population.

It would be a good bet some of them wanted Jason dead.

That was the reason he retreated to the nearest men’s room after retrieving his bag. In a stall, he strapped the killing knife to his leg and the Glock in its holster at the small of his back.

He took a cab, which was soon cruising Paris’s 20th Arrondissement through a section of single houses. The soggy day made the stone walls of Père Lachaise Cemetery weep as though mourning the passing of such diverse talents as Oscar Wilde, Chopin, Pissarro, and the Doors’ Jim Morrison. Past the cemetery, they turned left and stopped.

Jason gritted his teeth as he climbed from the cab onto the drizzle-moistened sidewalk. After hours of enforced idleness, the wound in his calf resented the sudden action. He paid the driver with euros he had gotten at the airport’s exchange booth, looked both ways, and crossed the street to an unremarkable wall. Behind the bricks adorned with razor wire, Jason could see the top story of the rather ordinary-looking two-story, freestanding house that was home to France’s Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure, the DGSE, France’s CIA. Because of its proximity to the Piscine des Tourelles, its habitués referred to it as the swimming pool. As he stood before the massive wooden gate, he pulled his jacket collar flat to give a better view to the concealed cameras he knew were transmitting his image to the facial recognition technology.

He couldn’t resist. Putting down his bag, he used both hands to pull his jaws back and stick out his tongue as he gave the invisible speakers the raspberry.

The mechanical voice that followed was not amused. It requested he identify himself and state his business here.

“Jason Peters. René de Terre is expecting me.”

The gates swung open. Picking up his bag, Jason followed paving stones glistening with winter moisture oozing from lead skies, as typical of Paris’s winters as the chestnut blossoms are of spring. He entered a marble foyer. In the center of the floor was a blue mosaic disk, crisscrossed by white lines with a red hexagon in the center, a symbol as enigmatic as the French words for “In every place where necessity makes law” that surrounded the disk.

Jason had long ago abandoned hope of understanding either women or the French.

The room was bare of furnishings or people. There was no need for a receptionist. No one got this far without identifying both self and purpose.

From an entrance Jason hadn’t seen, a dark-skinned, white-haired man in a stylish pinstripe suit appeared. “Jason! Good to see you again, lad!”

Jason submitted to a one-armed embrace and air kissing in the vicinity of each cheek before shaking René’s right hand. René had lost his left arm to a FLN bomb as the eight-year Algerian War wound down in the early sixties and the Fourth Republic was collapsing along with the last vestige of French imperialism. With the advent of de Gaulle and the Fifth Republic, France’s reforming intelligence agencies recognized the Ouled Aissim tribesman’s usefulness. He spoke Arabic, Farsi, and several Berber dialects in addition to impeccable French and Oxford-accented English. Not only had much of North Africa been in turmoil when René had joined the organization, but France had had a long policy of treating its colonials as full citizens of France, thereby causing a migration of poor Moslems whose culture would never be assimilated into that of France no matter how much French liberals had hoped. Instead, the culture and laws of Islam would threaten the nation’s very existence as the pall of Islamic extremism spread across Europe in the following half century.

René’s talents had been useful in the sixties and were even more so as time passed, so useful that France’s mandatory retirement age of sixty-two had been waived, ignored, or simply swept under the rug of bureaucracy.

René shepherded Jason to a section of wall that silently slid open, revealing an elevator. It hummed upward, opening onto an anteroom with a steel door. René leaned toward the door and stood still for a second before it swung open.

He confirmed what Jason had guessed, “Iris recognition. Bloody ingenious!”

After a few steps down a hall lit to operating room standards, they stopped in front of what appeared to be a normal wooden door. Jason knew case-hardened steel was sandwiched between the oak panels. Inside was an office remarkable only for its economy. Two nondescript club chairs faced a desk that had seen long and hard service. On it, sat a computer monitor, a key pad, telephone, a file folder, and a hand-tooled leather desk blotter. A Kerman rug in pale pinks and blues and a well-done reproduction of Renoir’s Luncheon of the Boating Party in a golden frame softened the austerity of the room. Men in straw hats, women in summer frocks. An unidentified but recognizable bottle of wine dark against a tablecloth.

Jason was examining the painting as René slid behind the desk. “I’m rather fond of that picture. The depiction of frivolity lessens the burden of the more serious matters that pass through this office.”

René always talked like that, a professor standing behind a lectern.

This was no art-store print, but an actual painting. The artist had even mimicked the original by using a palette knife to apply a coat of white over the empty canvass before he had begun, giving a translucence to his subjects. Jason was noting the strokes that arranged color rather than applied it, sculpted rather than brushed.

“As delighted as I am to see you, Jason, I was informed you are here for specific information this organization is willing to share, not to admire my art.”

Reluctantly, Jason turned from the painting and sank into one of the chairs, not conscious he was massaging the throbbing calf. “You have already been briefed on what I’m looking for?”

René opened the file folder and handed over several typed sheets. “Here is the official BEA report. Attached are some pages that are anything but official. I’ve taken the liberty of having both translated into English.”

“Thanks, but I’ll try the original French. Don’t want risk the translator missing something.”

“As you wish. Read all you like, but these papers don’t leave this room.”

Jason was already absorbing the information before him. He acquiesced with a nod of the head. René began work at the computer.

Twenty minutes later, Jason leaned forward and placed the papers on the desk. “The official report is amazing enough. The unofficial part is right out of some sci-fi story.”

René’s bushy eyebrows lifted, small furry animals arching their backs. “Sci-fi?”

“Science fiction. You know, like Star Wars.”

“Regrettably, this didn’t happen in some galaxy far, far away.”

Jason was rubbing his leg again. “May as well have. Death ray, earthquake machines.”

René was puzzled. “I don’t understand.”

Jason zipped open his bag and handed the man a sheaf of papers. “I’ll wait while you read this.”

After a few minutes, René looked up. “Are you telling me someone has resurrected this man’s inventions, this man…”

“Tesla.”

“Tesla. You Yanks think somehow the jihadists have gotten their hands on his inventions?”

Jason told René of his trip to Croatia, finishing with, “Apparently, the man made a deal with the Croatian Fascists to furnish them his machine — or the one he was working on — to get his nephew out of military service. The Germans couldn’t perfect it, and the Moslems got hold of whatever remained and have finished what Tesla started.”

René stared into space. “The bunch who participated in the massacre, the Bosniaks, they are Sunni, I believe.”

“So?”

If you read the report I gave you carefully, you’ll note whatever impacted that aircraft came at a certain angle.”

Jason stopped rubbing his leg. “I’m not following you.”

René peered over the edge of his desk. “You might want to get that sodding wound looked at.”

Jason averted his eyes downward. A dark stain was spreading across his pants leg. The damn stiches!

René was muttering into the phone. “Help is on the way, old chappie. We have a physician on call, specializes in trauma. Every so often, one of our lads gets banged about, a trauma we had rather not be made public, you understand. He’ll fix you right up.”

“Thanks. But while we wait, you were saying something about the aircraft and an angle.”

René stared at him blankly as though trying to remember, blinked, and stood. Turning, he reached up and pulled down a map of the world, a map that, like those used in schools, unrolled like a window shade.

Using a pen, he indicated a point in mid-South Atlantic. “This is the area where Flight 447 went down.” He moved his makeshift pointer to the skull-like bulge of western Africa. “The angle of impact would place the origins of whatever hit the aircraft roughly here, in the nation of Mali.”

“I understand some sort of triangulation was used to pinpoint the source.” Ignoring the pain in his leg, Jason stood and leaned over the desk for a better view. “In the middle of the desert?”

“Our people used a number of methods to locate the source. They all agreed on this location. You’ll note there’s a city, a town, rather, in the general area. Interestingly enough, we — the Western intelligence communities — have noted a decided uptick in activity there by people we believe to be the Islamic Maghreb.”

Jason inhaled audibly. “The North African arm of Al Qaeda.”

“Not exactly, the Maghreb have allied themselves with Al Qaeda, but they are a separate entity. And they are Sunni just like your Bosniaks and just like Al Qaeda.”

“Same difference.”

“Perhaps. Sat-intel tells us the activity is centered around Timbuktu.”

Jason squinted to make out the print on the map. “Timbuktu?”

“More or less.”

Jason hobbled back to his chair. “If you guys know where the missile or whatever came from, why haven’t you sent someone to investigate? After all, it was your plane that went down.”

René let the map roll itself back up before taking a seat. “Same reasons I’m sure you’ve already heard. Why should we when your chaps are so accommodating?” Elbows on the desk, René made a steeple of his fingers. “Which raises a question of why this matter didn’t refer itself to one of your intelligence organizations, CIA, NIA, et cetera.”

Jason leaned back in the chair and tried to stretch his wounded leg out. The pain continued unabated. “Ordinarily, it would. Problem as I understand it, reason my employer was hired, was that the American intelligence folks want plausible deniability if things go in the crapper. It looks very much like this op is going to be wet and take place in a Moslem country. After the United States’ engagement in Iraq and Afghanistan, after what amounted to an invasion of Pakistan to take out Osama bin Laden… Well, the powers that be in Washington don’t want to take any action that could be construed as anti-Islamic.”

René was now leaning forward, his arms crossed on the desk top. “And if, as you so picturesquely phrase it, ‘things go in the crapper’…?”

“It’s my ass. The bad guys will know Washington’s behind it, but they won’t be able to prove it.”

“You think you could resist, ah, what is the delightfully euphemistic phrase your CIA uses?… ‘Enhanced interrogation,’ that’s it. You think you could withstand enhanced interrogation?”

Jason’s hand grew still on his leg. “I don’t think anyone expects me to resist. If I’m taken, no one expects me to be alive.”