Agent in Place Read online

  He turned to his left and kept walking, keeping his eyes on the action but affecting the cadence and bearing of just another lunchtime pedestrian.

  So . . . the Halabys got themselves flagged by the local police. He wasn’t surprised, and he wasn’t feeling especially guilty about it. He knew that nothing he had done at the scene the evening before had anything to do with them being tied to the event at 7 Rue Tronchet. No . . . One of their surveillance guys talked, or one of their men holding Bianca got cold feet and dropped the dime on them.

  Court wondered what this meant for Medina, and for the baby. Perhaps when Bianca was released she’d race back to Syria, into Ahmed’s arms, and all would be quickly forgotten.

  A four-door Renault Mégane pulled up in front of the house, and two men climbed out. Court recognized the emblem of the DRPJ on the door of the vehicle, the Direction Régionale de Police Judiciaire de Paris. These were Paris criminal police, local investigators. They pulled badge lanyards from their shirts and waved them at the four motorcycle officers. The four uniformed and helmeted men stepped to the side, the glass door was opened with a code entered into a keypad on the wall, and the two detectives headed inside.

  Suddenly Court realized he’d seen these two detectives before. These were the men who’d been hanging around outside 7 Rue Tronchet on civilian motorcycles, and they’d taken off not long after Bianca was dropped off at her hotel.

  At the time Court had wondered if they’d been involved in surveillance on Bianca Medina, but since they left within minutes of her arrival, he’d pushed his concerns aside. But seeing them again here, now, was confusing to him.

  Court turned into the doorway of a small grocery store and entered. Here he immediately began pretending to look over a display of wine by the front window, giving him a covert vantage point on the building across the street.

  Something was very wrong about this situation. These plainclothes guys were investigators for the Paris Police Prefecture, and this didn’t make sense to Court. Of course there were twenty apartments in the building, and these guys could have been conducting an investigation at any one of them. But this was the 6th Arrondissement. Surely there were a hundred crimes going on in Paris right now, but the 6th Arrondissement was about the least likely of any of the twenty in the city to see this kind of action.

  No . . . a half dozen police on the scene of the exact building where the couple at the center of the high-profile kidnapping the night before lived. Court wasn’t one to believe in coincidence. These cops were definitely here for the Halabys.

  But if the authorities thought there was one chance in a hundred that Bianca Medina was being held here, or if they thought the people involved with her abduction were right here in the city center in an upper-class apartment building, surely they wouldn’t have just parked bike cops from Public Order and Traffic Control out front and sent a pair of local detectives upstairs for a chat. No, terrorism was a federal crime here in France; federal investigators would have brought tactical officers with armored assault vehicles, and they would have hit this building hard.

  This whole thing looked fishy as hell, and Court suddenly had a bad feeling about what was going on in front of him.

  He stood there in the grocery store across the street, watching the four motorcycle cops standing at the front door, talking to one another. They had been ordered there, obviously, but they weren’t on any sort of antiterror mission. The cops carried SIG Pro 9-millimeter pistols, telescoping batons, and Mace on their belts, and they were four fit enough men, but these dudes were just window dressing. They’d been planted here by the two cops who’d gone upstairs.

  The same two guys who’d conducted recon out in front of the Rue Tronchet a few hours before the ISIS attack yesterday.

  Court made a judgment quickly, using all the evidence before him. Those two cops were dirty. Working for the interests of Ahmed or Shakira Azzam, was his best guess.

  He told himself he could not stand here across the street while the Halabys were detained or assassinated by Azzam’s proxies. He had to stop them, and to do this he’d need to get past the bike cops. He could take another route into the building, but that would take time. He’d gained access via the roof of an adjoining building earlier in the day, and there were second-floor windows that he could possibly scale up to, but whatever the hell was going on over there was going on right now. And if they were planning on bundling the Halabys up to take them to a secondary location, then at least six armed men would be out in the street at the same time when the couple came out the door. For all Court knew, a paddy wagon was en route, or another dozen motorcycle cops would be here any minute.

  Court wasn’t going to shoot it out with French cops, most of whom would be completely innocent.

  Shit, shit, shit! Court thought. He looked up and down the street, trying to decide what to do.

  Part of him wished he’d just kept walking five minutes earlier, but part of him knew this was exactly why he had come back to check on the situation. If the Halabys had one shot in hell, that shot was the Gray Man.

  He blew out a long sigh, looked up and down the narrow winding street, and realized he was probably about to beat the shit out of four innocent policemen who hadn’t done anything wrong.

  CHAPTER 16

  The gentle knock on the door of the Halabys’ apartment came as Mustafa was dealing with the whistling teakettle in the kitchen, so only Rima heard it at first. She was alone in the living room, with Tarek back in the master bedroom, changing out of the clothes he’d been wearing for the last thirty hours. When she heard the rapping she immediately thought of her upstairs neighbor, Mrs. Rousseau, who often called unannounced. Perhaps she’d heard the talking and had come to see if she could pick up any gossip as to the identity of the Halabys’ English-speaking visitor.

  Rima went to the door and looked through the peephole, and was surprised to see a police badge being held up by a clean-shaven man in his thirties. Behind him, a bald man had a badge of his own, hanging from a lanyard around his neck.

  The man closest to the door clearly saw someone looking through the hole, because he said, “Monsieur and Madame Doctors Halaby, I am Lieutenant Michael Allard of the PJ. I have Intern Lieutenant Anton Foss with me. Open the door so we can speak for a moment, s’il vous plaît.”

  Rima knew the Police Judiciaire were local criminal investigators. She also knew this was not good, but she saw no way to avoid a conversation. She turned to the kitchen and whispered to Mustafa, telling him to hide the pistol he kept inside his jacket, but she had no idea if he heard her. Unsure, she left the chain on the door but unlocked it. The idea was to talk to the men, to make some noise doing so, and to buy some time.

  “Bonjour, monsieur, how can I help you?”

  Lieutenant Allard smiled. “Comme ça.” Like this. Without hesitation he brought his leg up and kicked hard against the door, breaking the chain and knocking Rima back two meters into the entryway.

  The second man rushed past the first; Rima saw a black gun with a long silencer in his hand, and as they moved into the living room, the bald man shouldered into Rima as he passed, knocking her back several meters more.

  Lieutenant Allard kicked the door shut as he entered, then raced across the entryway, took a stunned Rima by the arm, and pulled her deeper into the apartment.

  Mustafa spun into the living room from the kitchen with his pistol just coming out of his jacket, a look of alarm on his face. The bald Parisian police officer was only three steps away, and he was raising his own weapon. Both men were committed to action; their proximity and mutual surprise meant there was no opportunity for de-escalation. Foss fired before his silencer was level with the Syrian’s chest, hitting the Syrian in the shin and causing him to jerk his body in reaction to the pain and noise. A second loud snap came from the cop’s gun as a round hit Mustafa in the stomach, and a third caught him in the top of the head
as he fell forward, face-first onto the floor.

  Expended cartridges from Foss’s SIG bounced around the room. Blood drained freely from the dead man’s skull, creating a halo in red on the brown tile flooring.

  Lieutenant Allard pushed Rima hard, deeper into the living room, shoving her onto the sofa she’d been sitting on minutes earlier while talking to the American. Allard’s own gun was out, but it wasn’t pointed at Rima. Instead it was pointed at the hallway leading to the rest of the apartment.

  Dr. Tarek Halaby raced out of the hall, straight into the line of fire. He wore his undershirt and his suit pants, and he pulled up immediately, raised his empty hands, and stood there, looking down to his wife, who lay on the sofa on Tarek’s right.

  “Non!” he shouted. “Don’t hurt her! We’ll give you whatever you want!”

  Lieutenant Allard lowered his weapon, then twitched it towards Rima, motioning for Tarek to join his wife. The second police officer stepped over to Mustafa, picked up his gun, and slipped it into the small of his back.

  Allard now pointed with his free hand to the dead body in the kitchen doorway with the halo of blood around the head. “That man, I am sure we will find, had no license to carry a firearm in France. We had no alternative but to shoot him.”

  Tarek and Rima just stared back at him. Tarek asked, “What do you want?”

  Allard pulled a chair out of the seating area, spun it around, and sat down on it backwards. “We want Bianca Medina, and before you tell me that you don’t know who or what I am talking about, you need to understand one thing. We arrested Ali Safra, your underling at the Free Syria Exile Union. He informed us about his surveillance of Bianca. We also have video of her being led away from her hotel last night by a man, obviously hired by you. You have broken dozens of French laws in your kidnapping operation, and you both could spend the rest of your lives in prison for your actions, but we would be willing to work with you on the charges if you tell us where Medina is being held.”

  Tarek said, “Only two of you? You think we have kidnapped a woman at gunpoint, killed five bodyguards and at least as many terrorists, and you and your colleague here are the only ones to come to look into the matter? Do you take us for fools?”

  Rima’s voice cracked when she spoke. “You are not policemen. You are agents of Ahmed Azzam.”

  The Frenchman made a face of disgust at the name. “I assure you my badge is legitimate. I am merely here making an inquiry.”

  Allard pulled his badge lanyard from around his neck and tossed it to Tarek, now sitting on the couch next to his wife. “Trust me, monsieur. I have more officers at the front door, and several more holding a perimeter around the neighborhood. And inspect my badge, if you must. Ask yourself . . . if I were not a real policeman, why would I keep up the ruse? Why wouldn’t I just shoot you in the knee, or your wife in the forehead, and force you to give me information?”

  Tarek looked at the badge, then up at the man standing over him and his wife. The second man was closer to the kitchen, his pistol low in his hand. “I know people at PJ. Let me contact them, see if you are who you say you are.”

  Allard chuckled. “You are in no position to make counterdemands.”

  “Then we will say nothing until you take us to the Thirty-Six,” Tarek said. The massive headquarters of the PJ was at the famous address of 36 Quai des Orfèvres, and Parisians referred to the building simply as “the 36.”

  Allard shrugged. “We could go to the station . . . but time is of the essence. The life of the Spanish national who was taken last evening is all we care about.”

  Tarek repeated himself. “We will say nothing until we are at the station.”

  The Frenchman did not move a muscle for nearly ten seconds. Then he slowly smiled and shook his head. “Non. I think we will do this right here.”

  He pulled out his phone, dialed a number, and actuated the speaker function.

  * * *

  • • •

  Court stepped out of the grocery store and walked purposefully across the street and directly towards the four police officers. The door to the Halabys’ apartment building had been propped open with a planter by one of the policemen, and Court hoped like hell the four men standing there would let him enter unchecked.

  But he had no such luck. As soon as it became apparent where he was going, one of the men spoke to him in French, asking if he lived in the building.

  Court stopped ten feet from the door, in front of the four officers. “Sorry, do you speak English?”

  One of the other police officers took over. “Do you live here?”

  “Yes . . . what’s going on?”

  “Investigation upstairs. What is your flat number?”

  Court couldn’t see the address cards on the wall by the entryway, but when he’d been inside before, he’d gotten a handle on the organization of the building. “Five oh two.” He smiled. “Hope it’s not me you’re investigating.”

  The cop shook his head. “Three zero one. Still . . . you’ll need to remain outside. Only for a few minutes.”

  Court knew the Halabys lived in 102, but he didn’t believe they were off the hook in this. No . . . these guys down here had been given the wrong apartment number by the shady cops upstairs to disguise their real operation.

  Court ignored the cop’s request and continued up to the door by stepping between the policemen, but he kept smiling. The English-speaking cop spoke louder now. “Hey . . . can you hear?”

  Now there were two men on each side of him, all on the street or the narrow sidewalk. Court’s hand was extended towards the propped-open door, still eight feet away. He kept moving and took another step on the sidewalk until the closest motorcycle cop reached out with a hand and put it on Court’s right bicep to stop him.

  And that was all Court needed.

  He locked the cop’s grasp down on his arm with his left hand, then spun hard to the right, taking the young man by surprise, yanking him off balance, and sending him stumbling helmet-first into his motorcycle. Behind him, Court heard the snap of a telescoping baton firing out to its full length, and in front of him Court saw a second officer reaching for his baton, an instant away from bringing the steel shaft into the fight.

  Court spun around and charged; he took the wrist of the first officer who had his baton out and controlled the weapon with his left hand. The other officer flicked his own baton, telescoping it into a two-foot-long pipe that he moved to swing at Court’s forehead, but Court yanked the baton arm of the man in front of him forward and used this man’s weapon to block the strike from the second officer. After the blow bounced off, Court stripped the weapon in the hand he held by twisting it hard and down, and he body-checked the man over the top of the same motorcycle the first man had crashed into.

  Pedestrians on the Rue Mazarine all around shouted and screamed in alarm.

  The fourth cop snapped open his baton with one hand while he keyed the radio on his shoulder with his other, preparing either to call in reinforcements or to alert the pair upstairs, but Court swung his baton and smashed the radio and the officer’s hand, sending the man to the ground clutching his wounded fingers.

  Two cops swung at him nearly simultaneously with their blunt weapons; he blocked the first blow, then jabbed the butt of his baton forward, striking the attacker in the mouth and knocking him backwards. As soon as his hit was achieved, he moved his body low and into the man swinging from behind, closing the distance and halving the efficiency of the man’s blow. Court took this weak baton strike off his shoulder, absorbing the pain to process it later, and he swept around the man’s backswing with his right hand, bringing his baton around and slamming it hard into the officer’s helmet at the left temple.

  The first man who’d fallen was back up; he readied his own baton, but Court targeted his hand, picked it up with his own, and closed his body into the threat. Their batons b
oth swung and struck each other, first low, then high over their heads.

  The second officer Court struck was now pulling himself up to a standing position with the aid of his motorcycle, and Court saw him reaching for his pistol. Court looked back to his present adversary, and on his next swing, Court caught the inside of the man’s elbow with his hand and did something no cop was trained to defend against in baton class. Court let go of his baton, fired his hand straight forward at the officer’s face, and rammed his fingers under the cop’s sunglasses and into his eyes.

  The man dropped with a shout. His eyes would be bruised and burning and swollen. He’d be out of the fight for the rest of the day, if not the week, but Court hadn’t done to this man a tenth of what this man was trying to do to him.

  As the cop fell, he released his baton. Court grabbed it by the telescoped end, swung it in a full-power 180-degree arc, and cracked the handle of the weapon against the slide of the SIG handgun that had been rising behind him.

  The pistol flew from the officer’s hand, spun through the air across the street, and clanged along the sidewalk there.

  This man realized he didn’t have a gun or a baton now, so he charged in desperation, but Court sidestepped him, took him in a headlock, and reached down to the man’s utility belt. He pulled off the can of chemical spray attached there, thumbed open the safety tab, and shoved the man away. As the uniformed officer spun back around to face his attacker, Court fired the thick gel across the man’s face, sending him to his knees screaming, clawing at the chemical irritant in his eyes.

  All four officers lay in the narrow street now. Two were unconscious, one rolled around grabbing at his face, and the fourth moaned in the fetal position clutching his broken fingers. And around the scene, twenty or so passersby, men and women of all ages, stood and stared in disbelief at what they’d just witnessed.