The Traitor

CHAPTER NINE

The next morning I listened as Conner washed and dressed and finally left her apartment. I was at the window when I saw her jog off down the street. I used the infrared goggles to check the buildings across the street, trying to find someone who might have me under surveillance — and saw no such person.

I went down to the street and walked around, looking in shop windows and paying particular attention to the vehicles. I didn’t find anyone sitting in any vehicle within two blocks of my building. Surveillance teams often used vans or other closed vehicles for short-term setups; I located a couple that might fit the bill, but even as I watched, one, a flower delivery van, was driven away by a guy who had just carried an arrangement into a building.

The possibility that watchers were monitoring people coming and going, or bugs in her flat, could not be ruled out, I concluded. I hadn’t found them, but that didn’t mean they weren’t there.

The women and their customers on the street? Now that I had time to think about it, I doubted if any of them were watchers. A new woman would draw the instant suspicion of the others, and men that hung out for hours on the street would be labeled as mashers, or worse.

What I really wanted to do was search Conner’s flat. Not that I expected to find her DGSE building pass or a signed note from her boss. Still, whatever was there would offer some insight as to who she was, what she was interested in, or, perhaps, what she might do next. On the other hand, if she thought I might search her place, her apartment could be a trap. It was an interesting problem.

I suspected her next move was to give me the opportunity to know her better, sort of the same thing I did this past spring with the gal in Washington, Marisa Petrou. I wasn’t quite ready for that.

I examined my collection of goodies that Jake Grafton had sent via Salazar. One of the items was an optical camera. It was a curious device. The lens was on the end of a long, flexible stalk, one about a half inch in diameter and ten feet long. The end of the stalk had some kind of wire material wrapped around it, so it would hold a shape. I bent it into a ninety-degree elbow and lowered it out my window. The end of the stalk had a quick-disconnect fitting on it, so I pushed that into the appropriate hole on the small television unit. The viewing screen was about three inches by three inches.

I turned the unit on, adjusted the gain and brightness, and eureka! The gadget worked. I could see most of the room. I played with the controls of the unit. When I finally got the picture as clear as I could, I studied the room below.

Her apartment seemed to be laid out identical to mine, with a large — I am being charitable here — room that functioned as living room, dining room and bedroom. In addition, there was a tiny kitchenette, a miniscule closet and a small bathroom with a tub that was only big enough to sit in. The whole thing was about the size of a standard hotel room. There was no telephone. Like me, Conner probably used her cell to communicate.

Terrific! I turned the unit off and disassembled it. Then I sat thinking about things.

I used the infrared goggles to inspect every inch of the apartment below, just in case. No people in sight. I put on my latex gloves, then went down one flight and examined her doorsill. No sensors, wires, nor any mark that hinted that the moldings had been removed in the last twenty years. I picked the lock and let myself in.

With the door closed behind me, I stood and looked. The time spent looking from the door was insurance; I was looking for markers that would show that someone had searched and memorizing the placement of every item I could see. One of the items in the goodie bag was a small ultraviolet flashlight, which I used now to see if perhaps Conner had dusted her room with a powder that can be seen in ultraviolet after it comes in contact with the oils on skin. I don’t like the stuff because you can’t get a surface scrupulously clean before you apply it, so it reveals itself in ultraviolet even before somebody smears it with a finger, and any pro worth a nickel wears gloves. She hadn’t used the powder. I pocketed the light and began searching.

She had no cameras, no CD player or iPod, none of the usual electronic gadgets that trendy young adults can’t get through the day without. A television was the only artifact of our time. I must say, I wondered how she did it. The answer, apparently, was that she was a reader. Lots of books, many still in boxes waiting to be unpacked. I glanced through the assortment that was on display; most of the titles were French, heavy books of philosophy and social commentary— Camus, Sartre, the struggle of labor, developing a fair trade policy, the economic challenge of the new world order and so on.

Still, the fact that she had no gadgets bothered me. She hadn’t just arrived from planet Ork.

I worked as quickly as I could, checking everything. I found her packet of lock picks, which she probably used to visit my digs, and I learned the brands of her favorite toothpaste and soap and shampoo.

I didn’t find her passport. No doubt she had that on her.

I was standing in the middle of her apartment when I saw the paperback on her nightstand. I had seen it when I first walked in, but the title didn’t register. Now it did. The Sum of All Fears, by Tom Clancy. Were all the spies reading Clancy this year?

That was the only paperback in English that Conner owned, unless one of the unopened book boxes contained a few.

I made sure I knew how the book was positioned on the stand, then examined it. It was certainly well thumbed. I found one word scrawled in pencil on the title page: definite. No other marks that I noticed. I replaced the book on the nightstand.

Finally I examined the ceiling, every square inch. I didn’t stand on anything, just walked along using my eyes, which are excellent. I was looking for a bug, or a mark that showed a bug had been there — and found one, by golly: a circular mark about three inches in diameter that looked as if it had been made by a suction cup. It was over the desk, in a position she might reach if she stood on the chair. I looked at the seat of the chair — got my nose six inches from it and really looked. It was possible she had stood on it, I decided, but I saw nothing definite. Still, that round thing on the ceiling looked like a mark that a suction cup would make.

I went back to the television and turned it around so I could see the back of it. Well, how about that! The back was held on with four screws. A couple of the heads had marks on them, as if they had been in and out a time or two. I went looking for a screwdriver and found one under the sink in the bathroom.

Working quickly, I took the back off. There was the suction cup, a coil of wire, and a headset. I reinstalled the back and replaced the screwdriver under the sink.

A check of my watch. Seventeen minutes. I had been here too long. I took one last look around to make sure everything was as I had found it, then left and locked the door behind me.

Henri Rodet was late again for his Monday meeting with Jean-Paul Arnaud.

Inside his office with the door closed, the director said by way of apology, “One of my Dobermans managed to break his neck last night on the automobile gate. Apparently he wedged his head under the gate and broke his neck trying to get free — a freak accident. And the power failed. The power fools are still working to replace the transformer.”

The secretary had followed Rodet into the office, and now she served espresso to both men. Then she withdrew.

“I heard on the radio that the Israelis and Palestinians are at it again.”

“A murdered policeman; more shelling in response.”

Rodet opened the classified morning briefing sheet and scanned it as he sipped his coffee. Halfway through he laid it down. “That dog, Marcel — I don’t understand how he did it. He was the brightest dog I have ever had.” He paused, then added, “Without power, the household was in turmoil. There was no breakfast.” He shook his head in frustration, then shrugged and picked up the report. “I will miss that dog,” he remarked. “Nothing new on Bruguiere?”

“No, sir.”

“An unsolved murder of a DGSE agent will cause us problems with all the foreign security people. I will speak to the minister. The police must do more. And we must do more. I want everything that man ever worked on reviewed. And check on the old gang from Algeria — they may know something.”

Arnaud nodded.

They carefully went over current developments in European capitals and had moved on to the political situation in Iraq when the telephone rang. It was the secretary. “Monsieur Rodet, an unsecure call from the CIA Paris station chief, George Goldberg.”

“George Goldberg,” Rodet said to Arnaud, who lifted his eyebrows. Rodet punched the button. “Bonjour, Monsieur Goldberg.”

After the usual pleasantries — exchanged in English, which Rodet spoke fluently — Goldberg got around to the reason he had called. “One of my colleagues is in town, and I wondered if I might bring him around to meet you.”

Since this was an unsecure line, Rodet didn’t ask who the colleague was or what he wanted to discuss. He glanced at his desk calendar, then said, “Of course. Perhaps Wednesday, about three in the afternoon.”

“Perfect. I’ll see you then.”

“Good-bye.”

Rodet said to Arnaud, “Goldberg wants to bring a colleague to meet me. Wednesday at three. Grafton, do you think?”

“It’s very possible.”

“Could you be here for that?”

“Of course.”

They went back to their discussion of the situation in the Middle East and moved on to security preparations for the G-8 conference at Versailles.

That morning Jake and Callie Grafton were playing tourist. They were near the head of the queue when the Louvre opened and marched through the endless galleries with a purpose. Callie had the map, which she consulted regularly. Her husband kept his eyes peeled for signs. He pointed them out.

“That way.”

They went up a wide flight of stairs and along a series of galleries, passing a seemingly infinite collection of old paintings that had little to commend them, Jake thought. Many were portraits commissioned centuries ago by the rich. Callie looked at yesteryear’s aristocracy while Jake scanned the rooms of the old palace, trying to imagine the gentlemen in wigs and silk hose who had once walked these rooms on their way to see the king, and their ladies, with hair piled high, rouged cheeks, and wide skirts. The crowd today was more casual, in jeans and slacks, tennis shoes and cameras. It seemed as if everyone had a camera dangling from his neck.

They finally arrived at Callie’s destination: the Mona Lisa. “It wasn’t on display when I came with Amy,” she whispered.

He left her to stare while he wandered on. He found dirty windows that looked out into courtyards that were either under renovation or abandoned, awaiting someone’s attention, someday. The day was gloomy, with clouds rushing by overhead. Pigeons perched on every ledge and left their deposits to eat at the stone. No one paid any attention to the American standing with his hands in his jacket pockets, looking out.

He was still there when Callie found him a half hour later. She wrapped her hands around one of his arms. “You’re wishing you were back in the States, aren’t you?”

“I shouldn’t have taken this job.”

“Oh, Jake.”

“I’m in over my head on this one, Callie. I have never in my life felt so damn overwhelmed.”

“You’ve been in tough situations before,” she pointed out. “I seem to remember you were up to your eyes when I met you, all those years ago. You’ve always found your way through the forest.”

“Everyone strikes out, sooner or later.”

She stood with him watching two workmen in the plaza below cleaning up construction debris.

“The world was simpler then,” he said.

She squeezed his arm. “Let’s go get some lunch.”

“Okay.”

Holding hands, they wandered along looking at tourists while the long-gone Europeans watched from the walls.

As they were eating lunch in the museum cafe, Jake said, “I have a little job for you, if you would like to help?”

Jake glanced around to ensure they couldn’t be overheard, then told her about Henri Rodet’s spy. He gave her the name he was given in Washington, Abu Qasim. “As it happens, Qasim is one of the names that a top Al Qaeda lieutenant, Abdullah al-Falih, uses occasionally. We know a little about him. He was originally from Algeria and spent time at the university here in Paris as a philosophy student. Al-Falih was one of the men the Egyptians swept up after the assassination of Anwar Sadat in 1981. They didn’t think he was anything but a religious fanatic, or they couldn’t find any evidence against him at all, whatever, so they didn’t execute him. They kept him locked up for two years and then released him. Of course, he met many of the major figures in Al Qaeda while he was in prison.”

“What is the source for the Qasim name?”

Jake smiled. His wife always asked the right questions. “Interrogation.”

“Torture, you mean?”

“I don’t know. But the name came up in an interesting way. The source claimed that Abu Qasim had a source inside French intelligence who passed him information.”

“Do you believe that?”

“No, but it would be the perfect cover to pass information the other way. And we do know, or think we know, that the head of the DGSE got some critical intel from someone in Al Qaeda.”

“So what do you want me to do?”

“Go over to the university this afternoon and ask questions. I would like to find at least one person who remembers Abu Qasim or al-Falih. I want a description, some fact or facts that will put flesh on this legend.”

“Okay.”

“If the DGSE has an agent, it’s someone that Rodet recruited or someone he once knew well,” Jake mused. He commented on how difficult it was to recruit agents, who were by definition traitors to the society in which they lived. The possibility of talking a religious fanatic on the inside into becoming a traitor struck Grafton as very remote, and to do it without endangering one’s self or the prospective recruit, probably impossible. On the other hand, a man who had never believed and infiltrated … he might have a chance. A slim one, true, but a plausible chance. If he could live in the belly of the beast and keep his nerve.

“What if there is no record of him?” Callie asked.

“That would be a factor in the equation.”

“You mean someone could have removed his name from the records?”

“Or he never existed. What we have is a tidbit spit out by the computer, a factoid someone once passed to an interrogator. It may be dross, pure fiction.”

“Or a story woven around a germ of truth,” Callie said thoughtfully.

Henri Rodet sat staring at a painting on the wall, an Algerian desert scene by a well-known young artist. “The old gang from Algeria…” He had used that phrase with Arnaud. The men he had known in Algeria all those years ago were either elderly or dead.

Except for Abu Qasim.

After he met Qasim, he checked on him the following week. Yes, he lived in a mud hut on the ragged edge of nowhere. There was the old man, Qasim’s mother, two younger brothers, and a sister or two. The family had owned just one camel, and Rodet had killed it. The dressing on the wound in Qasim’s arm had not been changed, and the wound was infected. If the boy didn’t get medical treatment soon, he would lose the arm. Or die.

So there he sat, the Frenchman who caused it all.

“Inshallah,” the old man muttered. As God wills it.

Using French and a smattering of Arabic, Rodet explained about the infection, how the wound must be cleaned and disinfected. He explained about germs. The old man was having none of it. No one was touching his son. It would be as Allah willed it. Finally it dawned on Rodet that the old man didn’t know what germs were.

Why didn’t he let the boy ride away on that mangy, half-starved camel? Why on earth had he shot the beast?

He went to see the company doctor, a fat man who had lived most of his adult life in Algeria, and explained the problem.

“Why did you return?” the doctor asked.

“Because I shot the camel and the boy broke his arm.”

“You cannot save these people from themselves. They live in squalor and filth, ignorant, illiterate, besotted with God, and there is nothing you can do to save them. You understand, Rodet? Nothing!”

He had had it up to here with Algeria. He knew it was true. And yet… “I want bandages and disinfectant, sulfa powder, something to clean the wound.”

The doctor threw up his hands. “They will not let you touch the boy. They will not thank you. They would rather watch him die. Whatever happens will be God’s will, and man must submit. Don’t you see, nothing can be done. It’s useless to fight against your fate. The boy was doomed when he was conceived.”

“We all were. Give me those things.”

On the way back to the hut he bought a goat, paying twice as much as it was worth, and put it in the bed of the truck. The animal leaped out and he had to run to catch it while the seller laughed uproariously. He stuffed it into the passenger seat, where it promptly emptied its bowels and bladder. He rolled down the window and drove on.

The old man accepted the goat, which was a fine one. Food was food. After much talking about the animal, the old man led it away. While he butchered it, Rodet worked on Qasim’s arm. The young man never whimpered, never made a sound as he scraped the wound, cleaned and disinfected it, and injected the boy with a massive dose of penicillin. After he dressed the wound, he rolled up his pant leg and showed the boy his scar, which he had collected in a motorcycle accident years before.

He left a stack of bandages and instructions to change the bandage daily. He stayed and ate goat and had to stop alongside the road when the vomiting and diarrhea got him.

Yet when he went back two weeks later the infection in Abu Qasim’s arm was gone, the wound had a healthy scab, and the boy smiled at him.

Henri Rodet smiled back.

Callie Grafton started at the Sorbonne’s main records office. It helped that she was herself a professor of languages at Georgetown University and that she spoke fluent French. The clerks were helpful, but after twenty minutes, they confessed defeat. They had no record of a student named Abu Qasim, nor one named Abdullah al-Falih.

The library was cool and quiet. Two hours later, Callie admitted defeat herself. She could find not a single scrap of paper in the building with either name written on it. Some of the records were incomplete, with the records of entire years missing. It was suggestive, she thought, but proved nothing.

She headed for the philosophy department, only to find the doors locked.

Tired and frustrated, Callie asked directions to the faculty club. Yes, the university had one. Armed with her passport and Georgetown University ID, she had no trouble talking her way in.

It was nearly six o’clock when Jake Grafton pulled the rental car over to the curb and watched his wife come out of the club. She was listening intently to the white-haired man beside her, who was talking a mile a minute. He held on to her arm to steady himself. As they approached the car, Jake realized the man was at least eighty.

Jake got out and came around to the passenger side. Callie introduced him to the man, Professor Heger, as cars swerved by the illegally parked vehicle. The French flew thick and fast. Jake nodded and smiled as passing cars beeped. Callie kissed the professor on the cheek and got into the car. Jake shook hands with Heger and got back behind the wheel.

When they were rolling along, he said, “You look as if you had a wonderful afternoon.”

“Oh, I did. I met some delightful people. And Professor Heger is a gentleman, a ladies’ man, and, believe me, he loves to talk.”

When she fell silent, thinking about the conversations of the afternoon, Jake prompted, “Well, what did you find out?”

“Professor Heger taught philosophy until he retired, but he remembers no student named Abu Qasim.”

“Huh,” Jake grunted.

“He was lying,” Callie said. “Chattered away about Paris and teaching and Americans he had known, tried to recall Abdullah al-Falih and couldn’t. Then I mentioned Qasim’s name, and he gave me an abrupt denial. He was lying — I’m sure of it. He did know Qasim, and now he refuses to admit it.”

“We need more than a denial,” her husband said gently.

Callie smote the dashboard with her fist. “I know that,” she roared in frustration.