“Real odd.”
They were resting in their room in the hospital’s visitor center, getting ready to go into town for dinner, when the phone rang. It was Jim Anders.
“Crocker, you alone?” Anders asked.
“No. Mancini’s with me. Why?”
“How do you guys feel about detouring to Paris?” Anders asked.
“For what purpose?” If this was for a confab of some sort, he’d pass.
“I’ll explain when you get here. It’s pretty basic. Won’t take more than a day or two.”
“It’s ops-related, right?” asked Crocker.
“Yes. You’ll understand why I called you specifically when you get here.”
“Okay.” It would give him more time to prepare to face Holly.
“I’ll have a Gulfstream waiting for you at the airport in an hour,” said Anders. “Once you land in Paris, take a cab directly to the InterContinental, on the Right Bank near the Opera House.”
“We have time to grab dinner before we leave?”
“As long as you get here before midnight. You’ll be traveling undercover, so use your alias passports.”
“Got it.”
Four hours later he and Mancini were zipping down the Beaux Arts-era boulevards of Paris with the taxi’s windows open, both lost in thought. They registered at the InterContinental under their aliases and met Anders in his suite on the ninth floor.
“Glad you’re here,” he said, ushering them in. Janice was there, too, looking sharp in a dark-blue blouse, along with two officers whom Anders introduced as FBI Special Agents Leslie Farrell and John Wilkens from Overseas Operations.
Anders was all business, showing them to seats around a coffee table in the living room. “We’re here to wrap this up,” he said, sleeves rolled up.
“What, exactly?” Crocker asked, helping himself to one of the bottles of Perrier on a table in the corner.
“The operation that began in Istanbul,” Anders answered.
“I thought that was over.”
“Remember Mr. Talab?”
“Sure. I thought he was still in Syria.”
“Farrell and Wilkens have been searching for him. And guess where they found him.”
“Here?” Mancini asked.
“Good guess,” Wilkens said, handing Crocker a black-and-white surveillance photo taken through the back window of a passing Mercedes. “We took these as he was coming out of the Syrian embassy.” It showed someone who looked like Talab seated in back, with a short beard and wearing sunglasses.
“You sure this is Talab?” Crocker asked.
Wilkens handed him a stack of eight more surveillance photos of the same man standing and talking to several men and getting into the car. It was Talab.
The gears in Crocker’s head started grinding, trying to figure out what was going on. “Why are we going after Talab?” he asked. “I thought he was our friend.”
“We thought so, too,” Janice said. “But it turns out he’s the guy who set the whole thing in motion.”
Crocker had been suspicious of the Syrian from the start. “Wait. He’s been acting as a kind of double agent?”
“More than that,” Janice muttered.
Anders leaned forward and said, “We now believe Talab has been working for President Assad of Syria all along, first as a double agent, fingering people like Jared, and then as the mastermind of the entire sarin-slash-hijacking operation.”
Crocker remembered the light resistance they had encountered while stealing the sarin from the Syrian base, and how it had surprised him.
“It’s extremely devious, really,” Anders continued. “They led us to the sarin, then made it appear that it had been stolen by ISIS terrorists who then went on to hijack the cruise ship. Their larger objective was to alert the United States and the rest of the world to the worldwide threat posed by ISIS-which was easy to do, given recent events in Iraq and Syria-and to shift U.S. and Western sympathies back to President Assad as a more reasonable alternative.”
Made sense, in a diabolical way.
“I never liked Talab,” Mancini offered.
“You think the Syrians are that clever?” Crocker asked.
“The Assads aren’t dummies, which is why they’ve survived so long.”
“So Hassan was involved, too, working for Talab and the Assad regime the whole time?” Crocker asked.
“We believe so, yes.”
It felt like a punch to the gut. He’d rescued that little bastard off the street in front of the schoolhouse in Idlib and helped deliver his son. Never for a second had he suspected that Hassan was an agent for Assad.
“You find Hassan?” Crocker asked.
“No. But we will.”
“Make sure you do.”
They’d been double-crossed to such an extent and had expended so much effort that Anders’s cool-headedness bothered him. Hadn’t Anders been so sure that Talab was a friend? Wasn’t the Agency’s trust in him the basis of everything we had to endure inside Syria, and on the Disney Magic?
He wanted to kick the table in front of him, but he held back. Everyone made mistakes. They misread people and situations, and as a result put others in danger. There was no point pointing fingers or complaining now. It was time to put this hydra-headed monster to bed and move on.
Leaning forward, he asked, “Tell me, what do you want us to do?”
At 0812 the next morning Crocker was sitting behind the wheel of a red-white-and-blue American Airlines van parked in front of the Hotel de Suede on Paris’s Left Bank, not far from the Les Invalides and beyond that, the Eiffel Tower. Under the blue American Airlines overalls he wore an armored vest, the straps of which were cutting into the skin under his arms.
He and the CIA Ground Branch and former British SAS operative named Sully were acting as though they were there to ferry a flight crew to de Gaulle Airport. They were really waiting for a signal from FBI agents Farrell and Wilkens, who were standing in the alcove of a photographer’s studio across the street from the Syrian Embassy at 20 rue Vaneau. A delivery truck with Mancini at the wheel idled in an alley off the cité Vaneau, and a third vehicle waited beyond the embassy on the one-way rue Vaneau.
It was a simple snatch-and-grab. Crocker had executed dozens of them in much more dangerous locales than Paris. Farrell, Wilkens, and their team had been watching Talab for days, tracking his movements, monitoring his security, and establishing the patterns and routes he followed.
As Crocker scanned the street through the windshield, Sully leaned in the passenger window and said, “The doorman with the stick up his arse is complaining. He wants the room numbers of the crew we’re picking up.”
“Tell him you don’t know room numbers. Give him some names instead. Stonewall the bastard. Buy us another ten minutes.”
“I’ll do my best.”
Crocker and Black Cell had worked with Ground Branch often, but never with Sully, who was new to the unit. He glanced at his watch: 0815. The target was late. Looking right, he heard Sully joking in French with the uniformed head doorman.
The voice of Special Agent Wilkens blasted through his earbuds. “All units, stand by to move. The side gate is opening.”
He turned the knob on the Motorola in his pocket that controlled the volume. Two seconds later Wilkens continued: “Observe a black Mercedes 450 limo emerging. Stand by thirty seconds.”
Crocker honked twice. Hearing the go signal, Sully slid in.
“Stand by ten seconds while we ID the target,” said Wilkens through the earbuds.
“What’s going on?” asked Sully.
“Close the door,” Crocker ordered.
“All units, target IDed. Go!” Wilkens shouted.
Crocker pulled the black one-hole face mask over his head and hit the gas. A small Fiat sedan was up ahead, between him and the Mercedes limo, but he managed to weave around it. A white sedan beyond the limo did a sharp U-turn, stopped, and blocked the street. A second later a truck sped out of an alley and T-boned the Mercedes.