Agent in Place Read online

  The Hyundai missed the Syrian trucks off to his left, but the soldiers there kept firing into it as it continued along the road lower down the hill. A round struck the gas tank and the vehicle exploded in a fireball but kept rolling downhill while the Syrians climbed back into their trucks to pursue it.

  Court turned away again, focused in the terrible light, doing his best to pick the safest line through the wreckage of an apartment building.

  It took him nearly a minute, but he made it through the destroyed building, then out into an alleyway on the other side. Without his headlights he scraped obstacles every few seconds, but he made it to the end, turned right, picked up speed, then ran over obstruction after obstruction.

  The bumps flung Yasmin and Jamal into the air in the backseat. The baby cried, but Court knew he had to put distance between himself and the last place the Hyundai was seen as fast as possible.

  Out of the wreckage of the bombed-out neighborhood, Court pulled out into light southbound traffic on a two-laned north-south road. He turned on his headlights. A caravan of military trucks raced towards him, but they passed by, and three NDF militiamen standing by their vehicles at an intersection a mile to the south barely looked up as he passed.

  Somehow he’d done it, but he’d only managed to get out of the district where the kidnapping had occurred.

  He still had to get himself, a terrified young girl, and a crying infant out of Syria before the sun came up.

  Yasmin sat in the back of the truck, feeding Jamal from a bottle.

  Court turned back to her as he drove. “I need to make a phone call.”

  She looked up at him. “To tell your friends that we’ve survived so they can throw you a party when we get to safety?”

  Court smiled, and turned back to the road. “Yeah, but I’m sure it will be a great party.”

  He could feel Yasmin looking at him for a long time. “You okay?” he asked.

  “Monsieur,” she replied, “your head is bleeding badly.”

  “Yep,” he replied, but he didn’t know what he could do about it at the moment.

  CHAPTER 50

  Vincent Voland stood alone in the soft rain, his tweed suit soaked through. Boyer and his three associates had left the property; Voland assumed they would go to the road and hitch a ride, but he could not be certain. None of the five men who’d been allowed to leave the farmhouse had made eye contact with any of the others, and aside from a few mumbles here and there between the mercenaries, there had been no words.

  But Voland did not leave. He could not leave.

  He stood still now in a grove of winter pear trees south of the farmhouse, along the driveway that snaked to the east to the road a quarter mile away.

  As soon as he’d left the house he tried making a call on his mobile phone, but just as before, there was a jammer in the area that prevented him from getting a signal. So he stood there, watching, waiting to see what would happen, positioning himself as close to the driveway as possible while remaining out of sight.

  He heard the gunfire in the house peter out after five minutes, and then for another five it was utterly still, until one final crack of a gunshot rang out. And then, the smell reached him, and he realized somehow a fire had started in the building. In the darkness and misty rain he didn’t see anything for the next few minutes, but eventually smoke began pouring from the attic vents and the chimney and out ground-floor windows. He began praying for Rima and Bianca to find some way out, either on their own—which he knew was likely too much to wish for—or at least in the custody of the Syrians and Drexler.

  But they never came out.

  Thirty minutes after Voland exited the farmhouse a sedan raced up the driveway, past his position, then skidded to a stop on the wet stones alongside the side door. Black-clad commandos began rushing out of the building and piling into the car. A second vehicle arrived soon after.

  Sebastian Drexler himself appeared, running out of the house, rubbing his eyes and falling to the ground, coughing and choking.

  Behind him, more men, Syrians all.

  But no women. No Rima. No Bianca.

  Voland watched Drexler get control of his coughing fit, and then he stood and began shouting at one of the commandos. This man was tall with curly black hair; he was the one who shot Tarek. Voland took him as the leader, but this was just a guess, because there were no known photographs of the Syrian operative called Malik.

  The sixty-five-year-old Frenchman standing in the mud, in the rain, told himself that if he only had a rifle or a rocket launcher, he’d extract payback on Drexler and Malik right now. They were only fifty meters away.

  It would be so easy.

  But even he did not believe this. No . . . he had surrendered tonight—rightly or wrongly, this was a simple fact. And the untrained husband-and-wife heart surgeons, who didn’t belong in the world of espionage and rebellion, had both died fighting for what they believed.

  Voland wanted to be sick.

  He was close enough to see everyone on the driveway climb into the sedans and then race away from the house. The roof of the building was fully engulfed in flames now, and it was clear the entire place would burn to the ground before the fire department came.

  And it was Drexler and the Syrians who had escaped. Not Rima. Not Tarek. Not Bianca.

  No one else would be leaving that building with their lives.

  He assumed Drexler himself must have killed Bianca, somehow doing it right under the noses of the other men.

  As soon as the last of the three vehicles raced back down the driveway, Voland stepped out of the pear trees and up to the driveway. He told himself he should be running into the burning building, screaming the names of the women, pulling them out on his back.

  But again, just as his thoughts of shooting the madmen who’d caused this all drifted away, so did his fantasies of coming to the rescue.

  A portion of the burning roof overhang collapsed down on the parking circle, right on top of Voland’s car.

  He turned away from the farmhouse and towards the road, hundreds of meters distant through the trees. He shuffled as he walked . . . because he had nowhere to go.

  His mobile phone rang in his pocket, and this startled him. Whoever had been jamming the signal must have shut down their equipment. Quickly he snatched it up to his ear, hoping against hope it was Rima telling him she’d made it out somehow.

  “Yes?”

  But it was the voice of the Gray Man. “I’ve got them. We’re ten klicks south of Mezzeh, clear for now, but I have over one hundred klicks to go to the border and less than four hours before daylight. Tell me where to—”

  Voland had stepped off the driveway and begun walking through wet grass towards the winter pear again, because of approaching lights and fire truck sirens on the driveway ahead. As he did this he interrupted the American. “There has been an . . . an event.”

  “What kind of event?”

  Voland sniffed, cleared his throat. “She’s dead. Bianca is dead. They are all dead.”

  A pause. “Tarek? Rima?”

  “As I said. They are dead.”

  “Dammit! How?”

  “I tried to help them. Rima and Tarek. But they wouldn’t listen.”

  “Was it Drexler?”

  “Bien sûr it was fucking Drexler, along with Malik, a Syrian government assassin, and his team. Guns, night vision, communications jammers. They burned the house down to embers. They slaughtered everyone!”

  Another pause on the line, but not for long. The American said, “Well . . . they didn’t slaughter everyone, did they, Voland?” Vincent Voland had expected to hear just exactly what he heard next. “I cannot fucking wait to hear the explanation of why you didn’t die in that fire with the rest of them.”

  “I . . . I swear to you. I tried. I fought with them to understand we were outnumb
ered. I told them it was futile to—”

  “Stop right there. You ran out on them, didn’t you?”

  “Did you hear what I said? Azzam’s men were here! GIS. Mukhabarat paramilitaries. We didn’t know GIS would be involved.”

  Slowly, the Gray Man said, “Did you, or did . . . you . . . not . . . surrender to Drexler and the Syrians?”

  “I did!” Voland shouted defiantly, his voice echoing off the trees around him. A fire truck raced past on his left. “It was exactly the right move! The move Rima and Tarek should have taken for themselves.”

  For the next twenty seconds, all Voland could hear was breathing over the phone. Then the American said, “You and I will talk about this again when I get to Jordan.”

  To this Vincent Voland made no reply. Fire trucks continued rolling past, and he walked deeper into the cover of the trees.

  “Hello? The pickup at the border? Remember? I need you to focus and give me my coordinates for—”

  “Monsieur . . . I realize how this will sound, and I’m truly sorry. If it were just me I would get you and the child out of there . . . but, with the mother gone . . . it’s not me making the decisions, you understand.”

  Court’s voice lowered an octave. “Be very careful about what you say next.”

  “What can I say? The child was a bargaining chip, nothing more! The extraction of the baby was only to earn the compliance of Bianca Medina. But Medina is dead, so there is no way to exploit everything she knew about Azzam.”

  “He’s leverage.”

  “How? He’s an infant! Azzam will disavow that baby the moment he knows Bianca is dead. He won’t bring a bastard child into his palace without a mother, and Shakira surely won’t accept him. Maybe Azzam will find another mistress, make another heir, but Jamal Medina is worthless to him now. That means he is worthless to those trying to stop Azzam.”

  The next response from the American was delivered in a matter-of-fact tone that made it all the more frightening to the Frenchman. “I’m going to kill you, Vincent. You know that, right?”

  “Listen to me carefully. If you give me time, I will find a way to get you out. I owe you that for your heroism over the past week. But the Syrian resistance group based in Jordan won’t help now, so it won’t happen tonight. And even when I do find an exfiltration route for you, it will just be for you. The girl and the baby. That operation is played out. They can’t come.”

  “We had a deal, you son of a bitch! I was to bring the child to—”

  “What deal did you have with me? If you will remember, I was firmly against you traveling to Syria! I wanted you up here, where you could protect the Halabys from Drexler.”

  “You promised me you had that end of the operation covered. I was wrong to believe in you.”

  It was silent for several seconds, until Voland said, “I will find a way to get you out.”

  “Yasmin and the baby, too. If I come out, they come out.”

  “Then you have put yourself in a hopeless condition, haven’t you?”

  The American did not reply.

  * * *

  • • •

  Court sat on a pile of rubble in the half-destroyed underground parking garage of a completely destroyed office building. He held the phone to his left ear, and with his other hand he picked out what he hoped was the last shard of protective windshield glass from where several pieces had been lodged under a flap of skin right above his ear. The wound bled freely still, but it was superficial, and hardly his biggest concern of the moment.

  The NDF vehicle he had stolen sat parked twenty feet away in the deepest shadows of the large empty space. He looked over at Yasmin and Jamal, whom he could just barely see through a shaft of moonlight that came through a crack in the concrete roof. She held the baby in her arms and sat with her back against the wall of the garage looking up at Court. She didn’t speak a word of English, this was obvious, because she showed no reaction to the fact that her fate was being discussed in front of her, and things weren’t looking good for her right now.

  But she could clearly see there was a problem. She watched Court intently, certainly wondering why he was yelling at the people that he’d promised were waiting right over the Jordanian border with open arms.

  Court turned away from the young girl and blew out a long sigh. “What would it take for you to agree to extract the child and the girl?”

  The Frenchman on the other end of the line said, “What do you mean, ‘what would it take’? This is not a negotiation. I have to find people in Jordan or Syria or Lebanon or Turkey who will risk their lives to get you out. I can find someone, probably, but only to get out an able-bodied man of incredible skill. No one would be foolish enough to take on the added danger of an untrained civilian and an infant. There is nothing that would—”

  Court said, “What if I helped you eliminate Ahmed Azzam . . . would that do it?”

  “Eliminate?”

  “Assassinate. I won’t do it myself, that’s impossible. But it might be possible for me to acquire intel that helps the FSA or the SDF or someone out there to kill him. Intel better than anything you could have gotten from Bianca Medina.”

  Voland sniffed out a surprised laugh. “Ha! Well, yes, of course, in that case I could find someone who would help me bring out an entire nursery school.” The Frenchman clearly thought Court was joking.

  But Court just sat there with the phone to his ear.

  Voland slowly realized the American was serious. “What are you talking about?”

  Court said, “I know where Azzam is going. Exactly where he is going. And I can get there myself. Close, anyway.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “Bianca told me he was going to make an appearance at a Russian military base outside Damascus.”

  “There are a half dozen that I know of, and I assume there are others I don’t know about. You can’t—”

  Court cut him off. “And then, tonight, a regime-backing militia officer told me the SAA was creating an unprecedented security cordon around a new Russian special forces base outside Palmyra, possibly for a high-profile visitor.”

  “That’s it?”

  “No, that’s not it. Yasmin tells me Ahmed told her he’ll return to Damascus on Tuesday. I think he’ll be at a Russian base in or near Palmyra on Tuesday morning.”

  “That’s not enough intelligence to get the FSA to attack a Russian base.”

  “Of course it’s not.” He said, “But here’s my offer. You talk to your people in the French government. You know, the ones you aren’t working with right now.”

  “Go on.”

  “Find a way to get the kid and the girl out of here, and I’ll stay in Syria. I’ll go north, I’ll try to get more intel on Azzam’s exact location and the time of his visit. I’ll push any intel I get to you, and you push it to the FSA. If they have any assets in the area at all, I’ll give them a target.”

  “How on earth can you possibly get close enough to provide intelligence?”

  “That’s my problem, not yours. Do we have a deal?”

  Voland took a long time before replying. “What is wrong with you?”

  “Meaning?”

  “Those are not your people. That is not your war. What is your personal motivation? Why are you doing this?”

  “We had a shitty plan from the start. That plan got a lot of people killed, and so far, it’s achieved nothing. But I am not going to let Jamal and Yasmin swing in the wind because of our mistakes and miscalculations. I won’t abandon them!”

  “But . . . it wasn’t your plan.”

  “No, it was yours. You should feel the responsibility for these two that I feel, but apparently you don’t.”

  “I am a realist.”

  “You are a piece of shit!” Court’s rage threatened to overtake him. At this moment he wanted to kill
Voland almost as much as he wanted to kill Azzam. But he got control of his emotions, enough to reply. “This is my offer. I will serve as your agent in place here in Syria, but if I do this for you, then it will leave you with two choices. Only two. You can get the boy and the nanny out of here through your contacts, or you can do the other thing.”

  “What . . . what is the other thing?”

  “The other thing is run and hide, because if you don’t come through on this and I do survive Syria, I’ll come hunting you. And since you now see what I will do without any personal motivation, just imagine what I’m capable of when I’m on a mission of revenge.”

  Voland sounded utterly terrified now. “No threats are necessary, I assure you. I agree to your request, and I swear I will not let you down.”

  “Your promises are less than worthless. Show me action.”

  “Of course. Rima gave you the name of someone there in the city you could call on in an emergency.”

  “She did.”

  “Take Yasmin and the boy to him. I know how to reach him, so when all is arranged, I will contact him about the extraction.”

  Court looked at his watch. “Okay.” And then, “You’re all I’ve got, Voland, and I don’t trust you. But I do believe that I scare the living shit out of you, so I think you’ll do your best to come through.”

  “You have my personal motivation figured out. And you’re all I have down there with the ability to change the outcome of this horrible war. With you working as my man in Syria, there is some hope for that wretched place.”

  Court hung up the phone. He didn’t find himself filled with the same level of optimism as Voland, and he chalked that up to the fact that Voland wasn’t relying on a man who’d double-crossed him and then turned his back on his clients.

  He looked to Yasmin and switched to French. “Back in the car. We’re going back to Damascus.”

  Yasmin did not hide the confusion and displeasure from her face.

  “Yeah . . . tell me about it,” Court said as he pulled himself off the rubble.