Agent in Place (Gray Man) Page 7

  The American replied, “Yeah, that’s what you told me.”

  “I’m truly sorry. We were going on information we received from—”

  “You said four gunners. Five, maybe.”

  “Correct. That’s what I was told. How many did you encounter?”

  “Seven, minimum. Could have been more.”

  Halaby considered this, then said, “We knew she would be a prime target for them. But this Islamic State cell was from Brussels, and we did not know for sure how many would come to Paris. I’m sorry the numbers were off from what we expected.”

  “You wanted that woman’s help, and you wanted to save her life so she’d be more inclined to give you the help. The ISIS hitters showed up right when I was making my move, so I’d say everything worked out in your favor tonight.” With an angry glare the American added, “I guess that just makes you one lucky son of a bitch?”

  Tarek Halaby heard the sarcasm, and he saw the irritation, but he had no reply that would convince the American operative that he had not misled him. So he changed the subject. “Did anyone see you?”

  The man seemed to take a few breaths to control his rage, then replied, “No one who is around to talk about it. I avoided hotel cameras. The car is clean.” He looked around at the room. “But still . . . a little free advice, because you guys look like you could use it. Do your organization a favor. Consider this safe house burned. Move your operation as soon as you can. Triple your security, even if you have to hire goons paid by the hour.”

  “I’ll take your suggestion under advisement.”

  The American rolled his eyes. “Or die. It’s up to you. Seriously, dude. This isn’t Band-Aids and biscuits anymore. You do realize you guys are fighting a war, don’t you?”

  “We are not soldiers. My wife and I . . . we are doctors. Healers. We spent the first six years of the war raising relief supplies. Twice a year we would go over the Turkish border into northern Syria with our son and daughter, also doctors, to run health clinics, to perform surgery on wounded civilians. We are not violent people. But we have been forced into a life we did not choose to lead, actions we are not comfortable with, because we know our nation requires—”

  “Skip it. Forget I asked.”

  After a time, Halaby said, “Nevertheless . . . despite the difficulties tonight, you did exactly as you were told. Thank you.”

  The American moved towards the door. “I wanted to help, but now . . . this is just business. You will transfer the rest of the money into my account by dawn or I’ll come looking for you.” He looked at his watch. “You have three and a half hours.”

  “It will be done well within your time frame. Of course.”

  The American turned for the door again, but Halaby called out to him.

  “Monsieur . . . I know you are angry. But remember. We have resources. Donations from all over the world. A man of your skills, of your discretion. There might be more work for you in the future. Opportunities on the horizon involving our struggle.”

  “You had one chance to show me how you operate. You kept key information from me, and you almost got me killed.” He opened the door. “You guys are on your own.”

  Tarek Halaby watched the asset leave without another word.

  * * *

  • • •

  “She’s in the bathroom throwing up,” Rima Halaby said as she entered the living room, startling her husband, who was still facing the door and thinking about what the American had said.

  Tarek was embarrassed to be caught in a moment of self-doubt and reflection. He said, “To be expected. We’ll give her a few minutes, but we don’t have much time to make this work.”

  Rima herself looked to the doorway now. “The American. Any problems?”

  “He’s furious. He thinks we knew Daesh was coming tonight.”

  “Then he’s crazy. Why would we lie about the danger? Our entire operation depended on the survival of Bianca Medina.”

  “Yes . . . but the information about Daesh attacking wasn’t our intelligence, it was intelligence we were given. Do you think it’s possible we’re being manipulated in all this?”

  “By whom?”

  Tarek turned to his wife. “Who do you think?”

  “You’re talking about Monsieur Voland?” Rima looked back to the dark hallway, in the direction of the bedroom. “Of course not. Voland is on our side. He has led us this far. In fact, with the exception of that American, who is a simple mercenary, everyone working with us has the same objective.”

  “I don’t know,” Tarek said. “The American seemed to care about our cause for some reason.”

  She took her husband by the hand. “He cares about one point two million euros. Come. Enough talk of our shadow men. Let’s move on to the next stage of our operation.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Tarek and Rima Halaby entered the back bedroom suite just as the Spanish model stepped out of the bathroom; Bianca had let her hair down and she was now dressed in clothes Rima had bought for her earlier in the day. Dark jeans, a brown cashmere sweater, simple flats. She sat down at a small wooden table across from the Syrian couple, giving off no hint she’d been vomiting just minutes before. She had stopped shaking, her back was straight, her hands were folded on the table in front of her, and she appeared as if she had come for a job interview.

  A young man with a submachine gun hanging off his shoulder sat on the windowsill and looked down to the misty parking lot below, and another man, small and thin and wearing a dark blue suit, sat in a leather wingback chair in the corner. He had wavy silver hair, but his face was enshrouded in darkness because he’d positioned himself outside the spare lamplight in the room.

  Rima Halaby spoke first. “You are certain you are not hurt, daughter?”

  Instead of answering, Bianca motioned to the man in the blue suit. “And who is that, there in the shadows?”

  “He is a friend,” Rima replied.

  Bianca looked at the man for a while, then turned back to the Halabys. “Tell me what happened tonight.”

  Rima said, “A cell of terrorists from the Islamic State tried to kill you. My organization has prevented this, and we delivered you here, to safety.”

  “What organization?” Bianca asked.

  Now Tarek spoke. “Let’s begin with you. You are Bianca Medina, daughter of Alex Medina, a hotelier in Barcelona.”

  “And for that I have been attacked by Daesh and kidnapped by you?”

  “We rescued you. We did not kidnap you.”

  Bianca said, “I am starting to wonder about that.”

  “Your father,” Rima said, “Alex Medina of Barcelona. He was born Ali Medina . . . of Damascus, was he not?”

  Medina lifted her chin a little. “And if he was, is that a crime?”

  “No crime,” Rima said. “I’m just establishing your familial connection to Syria. I’ll come back to it. You are twenty-six years old; you began modeling at thirteen. You must have been very good at it, because you were traveling the world within a year. Living between Barcelona, New York, and here in Paris.”

  “You read old magazines, I see.”

  Rima went on. “At age twenty-four, during the height of your fame and success, you were invited to Damascus to attend a party honoring your grandfather, a construction industry giant in the nation and closely tied to the government in power. There you met Shakira Azzam, the first lady of Syria. The two of you became close friends. Before long you were invited to the palace for a party, and via this invitation you met Ahmed Azzam, the president of Syria.”

  “That’s ridiculous. I barely knew Shakira, through European friends in the fashion industry, and I’ve never met—”

  Tarek leaned over the table now. “There is no use in lying to us. You are here tonight because of your own actions. You are here for the same re
ason Daesh targeted you.”

  “And what reason is that?”

  “You are the lover . . . pardon my indelicacy . . . the mistress of Ahmed al-Azzam. The president of Syria. And this means you are having an affair with the most horrible man in the world.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Bianca felt the muscles in her face quiver uncontrollably, so she turned away from her interrogators and looked to the wall in the room until she felt she could regain enough manufactured poise to face them.

  Eventually she turned back and looked into the woman’s eyes. She chose the redhead as the target of her attention because she was softer than her husband, both in nature and in disposition, but Bianca Medina had no illusions that this woman would be kind to her. Medina constructed her facial expression to convey what she wanted it to convey, to play a role, just as if she were performing for a camera’s lens. She hid her emotions and insecurity and projected a practiced air of confidence, something she had learned from many years of modeling.

  She was an expert at hiding who she was, of masking what she felt.

  “You two are insane. I am no one’s mistress.”

  And, just like a camera lens, Rima Halaby did not blink. She said, “We know everything, daughter. You will only waste time denying what we know to be true.” She put a hand out and rested it on Medina’s folded hands gently. “But don’t worry. No one here is judging you for your decisions.”

  “All right,” Bianca said, and she pulled her hands a few inches closer to her, out from under Rima’s. “I have been living in Damascus. But that is only because my father has a home there. I needed to get away from Paris and New York. I wanted to return to my roots, to my heritage. There is no law against living in Syria with a Spanish passport. In fact, I also have a flat in Barcelona, and an apartment in Brooklyn.

  “But I have no relationship with Ahmed Azzam.”

  Rima surprised Bianca by reaching again for her hands, taking them in hers, and pulling them closer. “Listen to me, daughter. The information about your affair with Ahmed came from a well-placed source inside Syria. Someone who, frankly, knows everything about you and what’s been going on.”

  Bianca forced a laugh. “A source? Who is this supposed source?”

  Tarek leaned forward now. With a solemn tone he said, “The first lady of Syria. Shakira Azzam.”

  There was no more posturing for Bianca, no more contrived poise. The color drained from her face, her eyes widened, and the muscles in her neck fluttered. She muttered a hoarse reply. “What?”

  Rima nodded solemnly. “It’s true. Intelligence officials here in France intercepted a message out of Damascus to an ISIS operations commander in Belgium. It came from someone close to Shakira. The message mentioned that you would soon be taking a three-night trip to Paris to participate in Fashion Week, and it identified you as the mistress of the emir of Kuwait, who is a sworn enemy of ISIS. This is not true, of course. We assume Shakira wanted you targeted, but she did not want it made public that her husband was a philanderer. We have contacts in Syria, however, and they did some further digging on you. They determined you were the lover of Ahmed Azzam.”

  Rima smiled sympathetically now. “I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but it seems Shakira was trying very hard to entice the Islamic State to murder you for sleeping with her husband.”

  Bianca spun out of her chair and raced back into the bathroom. She slammed the door behind her, and the Halabys listened to her vomit again into the sink.

  CHAPTER 9

  The New Shaab Presidential Palace in Damascus sits on Mount Mezzeh, overlooking the Syrian capital, where the ultramodern, cubist complex looks more like a high-tech fortress from a science fiction film than any presidential residence. At 5.5 million square feet and constructed largely out of Carrara marble, it is a gargantuan display of dictatorial excess for everyone in Damascus to see, simply by looking up and to the west.

  The New Shaab had been built in the midseventies, designed by a Japanese architect for Jamal al-Azzam, the father of the present leader of Syria, but Jamal never lived in the monstrosity himself; he deemed the palace too big and ostentatious for one family. And for the first dozen years of his son Ahmed’s rule, Ahmed Azzam agreed. Before the war came to the city, the Azzam family had lived in a modern but relatively nondescript home in a residential district of the Mezzeh municipality, west of the city center. But when bombings, assassinations, and kidnappings kicked off in the capital city itself, the pretentious citadel on the hill became the only safe place for the Azzams. Ahmed fortified the complex with his most trusted guards, police, and intelligence officials, and he moved himself and his family inside.

  The first family of Syria lives in a thirty-room guesthouse on the northern edge of the property, officially speaking, but Ahmed Azzam almost always spends the night in an apartment in his suite of offices a quarter mile away from his family in the palace proper. His wife also has an office suite at her disposal on the other side of the palace grounds, but with young children, she finds herself with the kids most nights in the guesthouse.

  But not this night. This night the forty-seven-year-old first lady sat alone in a plush salon in her private apartment. At three a.m. she wore a sweater and a pair of designer jeans, her dyed blond hair was pinned up, and she sat on a white leather sofa with her legs curled under her.

  She watched Al Jazeera World News with the volume low, and a satellite phone rested next to her.

  She’d been like this for the past two hours.

  Her half dozen personal assistants had been sent away for the night, so they were all back in their palace apartments, but they also knew they needed to keep their phones on. All six of them remained on call for the summons that often happened when Shakira was up late and scheming.

  She might want food; she might want information; she might want someone to drive over and personally check on the nannies of the children to make sure they were watching over her two teenage daughters, Aaliyah and Kalila.

  And if this happened, any one of her assistants would climb out of bed and do her bidding without hesitation, because the mercurial Shakira al-Azzam commanded just as much respect and fear among the staff as the president of Syria himself.

  Shakira had not been raised to live in a palace. Born in London to Syrian parents, she had grown up in an upper-middle-class Western childhood. She studied business and graduated from the London School of Economics before taking a job at a bank in Switzerland. She worked hard and enjoyed the life of a successful young Western European. But on a trip home to London she met Ahmed al-Azzam, then a fledgling orthopedic resident working at a clinic in Fulham.

  The two young and good-looking Syrians fell for each other quickly, and they were married within a year, and just a year after that they were forced to return to Syria when Ahmed’s father died of liver disease.

  Ahmed had had no desire to lead Syria, but his older brother, the real heir apparent, had died in a car crash in Damascus, and the al-Azzam family would not relinquish the power over the nation that Jamal Azzam had fought so hard to acquire and maintain. For Shakira’s part, she’d had no aspirations to be first lady, but just like her husband, she fell into the job, and soon decided no one would ever take it from her as long as blood pumped through her veins.

  Before the civil war that now ravaged her nation, Shakira had spent ten years cultivating an image. She was beautiful, brilliant, and unceasingly kind to everyday Syrians, and never more so than when the cameras were rolling. Despite ongoing accusations of atrocities attributed to her husband’s government, even before the war, she was a fixture among the glitterati in London, Paris, and Milan.

  A New York fashion magazine had referred to her as “the Rose of the Desert,” and this moniker stuck with her for a decade. Another magazine had dubbed her the Lady Diana of the Middle East.

  Ahmed was socially awkward, soft-
spoken, and easily distracted. Shakira, on the other hand, was a master manipulator of her husband’s message, and she managed his relationship with his people. She controlled how his image and voice made it to the citizens of Syria and the citizens of the world.

  Her husband was an Alawi, but Shakira was a Sunni, and when the war came she helped broker deals between many of the Sunni groups in Syria that were now helping the Azzam government in its war against the Sunni majority.

  Few knew that much of her husband’s success, his power, his very survival, was due to Shakira.

  The war had changed her husband. In the past three years the Russians had moved into Syria en masse to help Azzam, not because they liked him or believed him to be in the right in this struggle. No, they helped him because they wanted air and land bases in the Middle East, and access to a Mediterranean port. Along with the Iranians, the Russians had helped turn the tide against the rebels, and while Shakira had seen herself as invaluable to her husband for years, now she worried that his alliance with Russia was minimizing her importance to him.

  Ahmed had grown into the scheming and brutal dictator that for fifteen years he’d only portrayed himself as while Shakira had served as the major power broker behind the scenes.

  Though she, the Iranians, and the Russians had successfully bolstered her husband’s regime, bringing it from the brink of destruction to where they were now, within a year of outright victory in the brutal civil war that had raged for over seven years, the public image Shakira had carefully cultivated for herself had been utterly destroyed. The wider world knew her husband for what he was, and the wider world was not buying what Shakira was selling anymore. The civil war that the Azzam regime prosecuted mercilessly had eroded any lingering goodwill that the jet set, the Western press, and anyone outside the loyalist enclaves in Syria had for Shakira. No longer was she flying off to Italian islands to meet with rock stars to talk about world hunger. The EU had banned her from traveling into its borders, and sanctions locked down all of her husband’s personal bank accounts in Luxembourg and Switzerland, and more than half of hers.