What Comes Around

CHAPTER 4

Most afternoons, Harding Torrance walked home from work. His cardiac guy had told him walking was the best thing for his heart. He liked walking. Also, he liked walking in Paris. The women, you know? Paris had the world’s most beautiful women, full stop, hands down. Plus, his eight-room apartment was on the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. A famous street in one of the fancier arrondisements on the Right Bank.

He’d lived here over twenty years and still didn’t know which arrondisement was which. He had learned an expression in French early on and it always served him well in life: “Je ne sais quoi.”

I don’t know.

His homeward route from the office took him past the Ritz Hotel, Sotheby’s, Hermès, Cartier, et cetera, et cetera. You get the picture. Ritzy real estate.

Very ritzy.

Oddly enough, the ritziest hotel on the whole rue was not the one called the Ritz. It was the one called Hotel Le Bristol. What he liked about the Bristol, mainly, was the bar. At the end of the day, good or bad, he liked a quiet cocktail or two in a quiet bar before he went home to his wife. That’s all there was to it, been doing it all his life. His personal happy hour.

The Bristol’s bar was dimly lit, church quiet, and hidden away off the beaten path. It was basically a nook in a far corner of the lobby where only the cognoscenti, as they say, held sway. Torrance held sway there because he was a big, good-looking guy, always impeccably dressed in Savile Row threads and Charvet shirts of pale pink or blue. He was a big tipper, a friendly guy. Knew the bar staff’s names by heart and discreetly handed out envelopes every Christmas.

Sartorial appearances to the contrary, Harding Torrance was one hundred percent red-blooded American. He even worked for the government, had mostly all his life. And he’d done very, very well, thank you. He’d come up the hard way, but he’d come up, all right. His job, though he’d damn well have to kill you if he told you, was Station Chief, CIA, Paris. In other words, Harding was a very big damn deal in anybody’s language.

He’d been in Paris since right after 9/11. His buddy from Houston, the new President, had posted him here because the huge Muslim population in Paris presented a lot of high value intel opportunities in one concentrated location. His mandate was to identify the Al Qaeda leadership in France, whisk them away to somewhere nice and quiet for a little enhanced interrogation.

He was good at it, he stuck with it, he got results, and he got promoted, boom, boom, boom. The President even singled him out for recognition in a State of the Union address, had specifically said that he and his team were responsible for saving countless lives on the European continent and in the U.K.

Harding had gone into the family oil business after West Point and a stint with the Rangers out of Fort Bragg. Spec ops duty, two combat tours in Iraq. Next, working for Torrance Oil, he was all over Saudi and Yemen and Oman, running his daddy’s fields in the Middle East. But he was no silver spoon boy, far from it. He had started on the rigs right at the bottom rung, working as a ginzel (lower than the lowest worm), working his way up to a floor hand on the kelly driver, and then a bona fide driller in one year.

Oilfields were his introduction to the real world of Islam.

Long story short?

He knew the Muslim mind-set, their language, their body language, their brains, even, knew the whole culture, the warlords, where all the bodies were buried, the whole enchilada. And so, when his pal W needed someone uniquely qualified to transform the CIA’s Paris station into a first rate intelligence clearinghouse for all of Europe? Well. Who was he to say? Let history tell the tale.

His competition? Most guys inside the Agency, working in Europe at that time, right after the Twin Towers? Didn’t know a burqa from a kumquat, and that’s no lie—