Agent in Place Page 18

  “I’ll be on my own, no matter what anyone promises me. Better for me if I go in with that knowledge than thinking you’re up here holding on to my lifeline.”

  “Mon ami, it is clear that you do, in fact, have serious trust issues.”

  “Yeah. I wonder why.”

  CHAPTER 23

  Police Judiciaire Captain Henri Sauvage had gotten cold feet about all this shit. He hadn’t said anything to his partner yet, but he had decided to walk away from all the money he’d been promised, to settle for the money he’d already been paid, and to get the fuck out of Paris.

  As far as Sauvage was concerned, Eric, the shadowy voice on the phone who’d hired him to find and stalk men and women on behalf of Syrian interests here in Paris, could go to hell.

  Sauvage’s division of the Police Judiciaire was the Criminal Brigade, known around Paris as La Crim, and they did have a counterespionage group, but Sauvage wasn’t on it. He worked instead in the homicide division. But even though he wasn’t a spy or a spy hunter, he understood the concept of MICE. MICE was the acronym for the four principal forms of compromise used by intelligence officers—money, ideology, compromise, and ego. And even though Sauvage wasn’t trained professionally on the techniques, he recognized that the man he only knew as Eric had roped him into this mess by using three of the four on him to great effect.

  Henri Sauvage had no ideology whatsoever—he was in it for the dough—but the other three motivations had brought him to where he found himself today. Money was easy to see; this was why he had agreed to work for Eric in the first place. But looking back on it now, he realized the man had played on his ego, as well, by making him feel important enough to recruit three other men in the force to help him. After this was done, Sauvage, Clement, Allard, and Foss continued taking payoffs to provide information to help the Syrians in Paris, first providing information out of Criminal Brigade databases. Eventually Eric upped the ante with footwork, having Henri and his boys tail men and women, Syrian expatriates, rebels, and reporters speaking out against the Azzam regime.

  It was not long before the stakes were raised for the cell of police officers, when one of the Syrian immigrants they had been tailing simply disappeared.

  Sauvage and his group knew good and well the man they’d surveilled had likely been assassinated, and by this time they had worked out that they were proxy operatives of the Syrian regime. But the four kept at it. Their standards of living had risen, and with this rise came the need for more and more money to fuel their lifestyles. Plus, the missing man had not been a French citizen or well connected, so no real attention was paid to the event, and Sauvage and his team got away with it scot-free.

  Over the next year they were involved in two other operations that appeared to have led to assassinations, but Sauvage’s cell was still only involved in hands-off work on the fringes of the operations, so the four men remained compartmentalized from any real danger to themselves, their liberty, or even their careers.

  But then the ante was upped again when the mysterious Eric ordered them to follow a Spanish model named Bianca Medina while she visited the city to work at Fashion Week and to report on the security around her.

  This, Sauvage had known instantly, was a very different animal from all their other work for the Syrians.

  Every fiber of the captain’s being had been against this, and his three partners in crime pushed back, as well, but by then the compromise was in play. Eric had enough dirt on the French cops to put them all in prison, so there was no way they would not comply. Plus Eric insisted that, as always, their input in the operation would be relatively minor.

  So they did as ordered, followed the Spanish model, surveilled the location where she was staying, and passed on the information to Eric.

  And in the process they became fully involved in the high-profile terrorist massacre that took place in central Paris three nights earlier.

  Now the four police officers were in it up to their necks, and when Foss and Allard had been gunned down two days earlier in the apartment of Syrian expatriates, who themselves were now missing, the tension on the two remaining members of the cell of dirty cops was ratcheted up to ten.

  And that tension had become unbearable for Henri Sauvage.

  He’d decided to take his family and run, at least for a while. He knew that when he did leave town, Eric would probably go through with his threat to reveal his involvement in the ISIS attack, but Sauvage told himself Eric had no direct proof, and Sauvage could explain the accusation away by constructing an elaborate explanation that Eric was a confidential informant he’d been running off book, who had now turned against him because of an unrelated disagreement.

  It was a gamble, but less so, Sauvage determined, than continuing the hunt for Bianca Medina and standing by while more people were slaughtered across the city.

  So Sauvage decided to hit the bricks, but he could not just leave his partner behind to deal with this alone. To make his escape from his problem, he needed to sell Andre Clement on the idea of running out on Eric, as well. To this end he’d asked Clement to meet him at a location where they often met confidential informants for clandestine meetings: the Car Park Stalingrad garage next to the Gare du Nord train station.

  * * *

  • • •

  Five minutes before one a.m., an exhausted and on-edge Henri Sauvage drove down the ramp and into the underground garage, parked his little but speedy Renault 308 with the front grille facing the exit ramp, and sat there in the nearly full but perfectly quiet garage while he texted Clement.

  Ou est vous? Where are you?

  Sauvage had smoked half a cigarette before the reply came.

  Deux minutes. Two minutes.

  Soon Clement’s four-door Citroën rolled down the ramp, and Sauvage flashed his lights. The Citroën turned his way and began rolling forward. Behind it, a pair of sedans also rolled down the ramp. One turned to the left and one to the right, and they disappeared in the massive garage.

  The Citroën parked in the closest space, just a few spots from Sauvage, so the captain and cell leader got out of his car, left the door open, and strolled over with his walkie-talkie in his hand. He tossed his cigarette, stepped to the driver’s-side window of the vehicle as it slid down, and leaned down to talk to his old friend.

  And that was when he realized something was very wrong.

  Thirty-three-year-old Andre Clement faced forward, his hands gripping the wheel so tightly his fingers were white . . . and only then did Sauvage see the man in the backseat with a pistol pressed against the back of Clement’s head.

  Andre Clement looked up at his partner with eyes filled with dread now. “I am sorry, Henri. I couldn’t take it, so I tried to run out on this shit. I was going to leave it behind, pack up the kids and just—”

  Without warning, an earsplitting crack battered Sauvage’s senses; Clement’s head snapped forward inside an arc of flame. Blood splattered the inside of the windshield and the steering wheel, but Sauvage did not wait to check on his partner’s condition. Instead he spun away, ducked down as low as he could, and sprinted back around to his Renault.

  He dove through the open door and fired up his engine, not quite sure what the hell was going on but damn sure he needed to get the hell out of there. But just as he shifted gears to race from his space, a Ford van that had been parked in the garage shot in front of him on his left to cut him off. The van had no lights on, but Sauvage could see a man in the front passenger seat spin towards him with a short-barreled submachine gun.

  The two sedans that had entered the garage a minute earlier appeared with squealing tires, shooting forward towards Sauvage.

  The captain only now went for the weapon he kept in a shoulder holster, palmed the grip of the HK pistol, and started to yank it free. But looking around he could see a half dozen guns either pointing at him already or moving into position to d
o so.

  Henri Sauvage released his grip on the weapon and raised his hands. His car door flew open and he was yanked out by a man with olive skin wearing a gray denim jacket and jeans, and the man pushed Sauvage forward and through the sliding door of the van, onto a floor covered in plastic tarp.

  Other men jumped into the van with him; he could hear and feel them more than see them while facing down on the plastic.

  The vehicle squealed its tires again as it headed off.

  Sauvage had a knife in his left boot, but it was found by one of the men on top of him now. He wondered at first if they were federal police or intelligence officials; that would make sense, of course, considering his peripheral involvement in an ISIS operation in Paris, but it certainly did not explain why they’d just executed Andre in cold blood.

  But when he was pulled up into a seated position, pushed against the side wall of the van, he got a better look at the four men in the back with him.

  “Who the fuck are you?” Sauvage asked, but he was pretty certain he knew now. They were all Arab. He assumed they were Syrian nationals, living in Europe but serving as either intelligence operatives or contract operatives for the Azzam regime.

  These men had been sent by Eric, and they’d be killers, each and every one.

  When he and his partners in his “side job” for the Syrians followed someone who soon disappeared, these were likely the boys who did the disappearing.

  But there was a modicum of good news for Sauvage. These men hadn’t killed him yet, so even though he was sitting on a tarp that looked like it had been put there to catch his flying brain matter, he felt like he retained some ability to affect events.

  All he had to do was talk to these guys and say exactly the right things, and he would be able to save his life.

  The man closest to the front of the van wore a black turtleneck, and his black hair was curly, longer than the others. He was somewhere in his late thirties, and he wore a Beretta pistol in a black leather shoulder holster.

  Sauvage could see a confidence and authority in the man’s face, and he decided this was the man to talk to. “Do you speak French?”

  “Yes, you may call me Malik.” He said it in a commanding tone that convinced Sauvage he’d made the right decision to address him.

  “All right, Malik. I take it you’re in charge?”

  “Oui.”

  “Why did you kill Andre?”

  “He was planning on leaving town. We worried you were thinking about doing the same. We could not let either of you go.”

  Sauvage leaned closer to the man and pushed some outrage into his voice, even though fear was the predominant emotion going through him right now. “I’ll ask it again. Why did you kill Andre?”

  “Eric ordered us to sacrifice your partner to teach you a lesson.” Now Malik leaned in towards Sauvage and adopted a similar angry tone. “Have you learned that lesson, Captain Sauvage?”

  The Frenchman leaned back against the wall of the van. They were driving around, making left and right turns, and Sauvage had no idea where they were heading.

  “What the fuck do you guys want?”

  “We want you to fulfill your responsibilities to us. Your work with the police will be crucial in the next days as we hunt for Bianca Medina. We need her alive, unharmed, and we need your help for this.”

  “I can’t help you, man. She’s probably long gone from France.”

  Malik shook his head. “No. The group that has her, the Free Syria Exile Union, is based here. They are being supported by a former French intelligence officer named Voland, who also lives here and has worked here much of his professional life. All signs point to the fact that they are still in the area.”

  Sauvage said, “If you have all this information, what the hell do you need me for?”

  Malik surprised Sauvage with a shrug. “I do not know. Eric has demanded we take you alive, encourage you not to try to run away, and give you something to do before he comes here himself.”

  “Wait . . . Eric is coming here?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “From . . . Syria?”

  “I do not know where he is now.”

  “And what is it I’m supposed to do?”

  “Simple. Find the girl.”

  Sauvage sighed. “Clement was holding a low-level operative in the FSEU at his farm near Versailles. This man, Ali Safra, didn’t seem to know anything when we questioned him the other day, but perhaps we could talk to him again.”

  “No,” Malik said. “We just came from there. He knew nothing about where they are now.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “Because he died without telling us, and it did not appear that he much wanted to die.”

  That sank in for a moment. Sauvage slammed the back of his head against the wall of the van in frustration. He knew there would be no getting away from these men, and they wouldn’t leave till they had Bianca Medina in hand. He decided he’d better work with them to get this done fast so they could get out of his life of treason against his nation. “How many men do you have here in Paris?”

  Malik did not answer, and when he did he equivocated. “I have enough.”

  “Come on,” Sauvage said. “I need to know your manpower. We will have people to tail, locations to monitor. I have all the intel from the Police Judiciaire, but it’s only me now. I need help to cover known FSEU locations to find the woman.”

  Still Malik did not speak. Sauvage could tell he wasn’t used to handing over information about his force. “Look, man. I don’t want to have to go to Eric and put you in the crosshairs—”

  That did the trick. Even though Malik was in charge, it didn’t seem like he wanted to cross swords with Eric. “There are fourteen of us. All paramilitary and intel operations trained. We’ve been pulled from work all over the continent. This includes a three-man unit of communications specialists, with equipment capable of jamming mobile phones and Internet.”

  “Fourteen.” Sauvage nodded. “That’s a lot of guns.”

  “What is your plan to find the woman?” Malik asked.

  Sauvage’s actual plan had been to run for his life, but he wasn’t going to tell Malik that. Instead he said, “I have gone back to images we have of Free Syria Exile Union personnel for the last few years. Public events, photos on social media, images captured by police or other cameras around the Halabys. From this we are identifying members who were associated with them back before they were involved with the rebellion itself. We can put tails on all the main players to see where they go, who they meet with.”

  Malik said, “That could take time. We need to know where to go by the time Eric gets here.”

  Sauvage cocked his head a little. “This guy, Eric. What’s his connection to Syria?”

  “I do not know. What I do know is that he has the power to order assassinations on behalf of the regime. That’s enough for me to know to do what I’m told. If you are smart, this will be enough for you, too.”

  The van began to slow; the door was opened on Sauvage’s right. Malik cocked his head towards the door. “That is all.” The vehicle jolted to a stop now. “We are giving you one chance to survive this, unlike your three associates. Find the woman, or find us someone who can lead us to the woman. Do it quickly, or Ahmed Azzam himself will order your death.”

  Sauvage’s knees went weak, but he fought through the sensation, and he climbed out of the van. He found himself back in the parking garage, next to his Renault, and as the van rolled off, he saw that both Clement’s body and his vehicle had disappeared without a trace.

  CHAPTER 24

  Lars Klossner didn’t go anywhere without his bodyguards. It wasn’t that he was particularly paranoid by nature—no, it was that people actually were trying to kill him.

  Munich is a statistically safe city—safe for most everyone not n
amed Lars Klossner. But the forty-seven-year-old German had spent two decades cultivating a reputation that necessitated the four German and Austrian ex–special forces close-protection detail who moved in box formation around him whenever he was in public, and the armored Mercedes G65 utility vehicle that rolled along nearby, driven by an armed driver in constant radio contact with the detail.

  It was past midnight now, and Klossner had spent Friday evening at his regular table at Zum Durnbrau, a traditional German restaurant that began its life as an inn in the fifteenth century. After dinner and drinks he enjoyed an evening walk through the city center, and he pretended that he was just one of the crowd, even though his “mates” were actually his bodyguards and his silver Mercedes rolled along behind, ready to swoop in and cocoon the big German within two inches of steel armor, then race him out of the area.

  The list of people wanting to end Klossner remained fluid. Right now he was aware of two contracts on his life, but his feelings would be hurt to learn there weren’t at least two or three more.

  As he walked through the crowded Marienplatz in the city center this cool and clear Friday evening, he certainly didn’t appear to be a man who needed any more security than anyone else in the square. He had a Santa-like beard and a massive, Santa-like belly, and though he was obviously a middle-aged man he was dressed like a German hipster: a designer hoodie and a 2,500-euro puffy jacket, 1,600-euro eyeglasses, and a red knit cap that made him look like he was posing for a catalog that sold adventure wear to those who had never sniffed a whiff of adventure in their lives.

  Although he didn’t stand out as a dangerous individual, Klossner was a man who had forged great success in the industry of violence. He ran a network of security experts that performed all manner of military training on four continents. From Bolivia to Gabon, from Guyana to Niger, from Indonesia to Yemen, Klossner Welt Ausbildungs, GMBH, provided top-flight private military instruction to anyone who could pay.