Captain Reid brought the aircraft to a large yellow box on the ramp that was the designated customs area. Once there, the aircraft idled with its door sealed, as per customs requirements, and Jack Junior arranged his luggage on the seats for the customs inspector to look over. Adara had arranged for a customs officer to be waiting for the flight so that they could be cleared immediately, and within a few minutes there was a knock at the door. Adara opened the door and greeted an extremely sleepy-looking man. He boarded, shook hands with Jack and the crew, and made a perfunctory glance into one of Ryan’s bags. All in all, he spent a grand total of two minutes on board doing this, as well as stamping passports and looking over the aircraft’s registry information, before telling the captain that she was now free to park the aircraft at a nearby FBO.
The tired-looking customs official bid everyone on board bienvenu, bonjour, and adieu, and he stepped back down the steps and off into the darkness enveloping the ramp.
Five minutes later, Captain Reid and Country shut down the aircraft at the FBO, and Adara opened the cabin door once again. Dominic Caruso, himself a recent arrival to France, greeted Ms. Sherman on the other side of the door, and then he and Jack unloaded the four backpacks full of gear from the airplane and put them in the back of the Ford Galaxy.
The Gulfstream crew walked toward the lounge of the FBO to arrange for the jet to be refueled and for the oxygen stores to be replenished. They would then wait on the jet until it was time to leave France, whether that moment was to be in three hours or three days.
Dominic and Jack drove off the airport grounds in the Galaxy with no security check whatsoever of their gear or their documents.
When hauling contraband around the world, private aircraft was, indeed, the only way to fly.
At this time of the morning it was only a fifteen-minute drive from Paris — Le Bourget to the Paris safe house. Jack Junior himself had secured this apartment the day before, just after sending Ding and John from Frankfurt to Paris. At that time, he could not have imagined he’d be pulling up at the door himself just nineteen hours later.
The men parked the minivan in the street in front of the apartment. They began unloading the backpacks by themselves, but Driscoll and Chavez appeared at their sides in the dark, and all four men unloaded without speaking. Once the men were back inside the small, furnished flat, the bags were laid out on the floor, the door was shut, and only then was the overhead light turned on.
Under the illumination of a simple steel chandelier, John Clark handed Ryan a cup of coffee. Clark nodded with a crooked smile. “You look like shit, kid. Staff Sergeant Buck has been putting you through the ringer, hasn’t he?”
“Yes. I’ve learned a lot,” replied Jack as he accepted the hot caffeine.
“Excellent. There is a box of day-old croissants and some ham and cheese on a plastic tray in the fridge.”
“I’m okay for now.”
“You were wined and dined on the plane?”
“Perks of the job.”
“Damn right. Okay, then let’s get right to it.” Clark addressed the room: “Everybody front and center.” He stood in front of the television while the four others found seats in the modern living room.
Clark referred to a notebook as he talked. “We’ll organize gear in a bit, but for now let’s go over the op. The plan, in short, is this: I’ve got us the room right above Rokki’s, and a room right next to his. We’ll hit them hard and fast, and from multiple entry points, all while they’re sipping their morning coffee.”
“You got two rooms at the Four Seasons George V? Gerry is going to love that invoice,” Ryan said with a chuckle.
Clark smiled himself. “He knows, and we aren’t paying for it. The rooms were already booked for tonight, so Gavin Biery went into the hotel’s reservation system and moved the existing reservations to other rooms. He made our reservations with a credit card number that we have, which is linked to a guy in Islamabad who moves money between Saudi fat cats and AQ accounts. It will be, according to Gavin, as if someone changed the reservations from one of the terminals at reception in the lobby. The Campus is clean on this operation, and the only vague trackbacks investigators will find after the fact will be the credit card, and that will lead them to an AQ player in the Middle East. When we hit the URC, it will look like some sort of lovers’ quarrel between the two groups.”
“Nice,” said Dom appreciatively.
John smiled. “At the end of the day, gentlemen, we are professional troublemakers.” That got a round of tired laughs from the room.
“Biery is also going to kill the security cameras at the Four Seasons as we come through the front door. He says it will look like the plug was pulled on the inside.”
“Amazing,” said Jack.
“Yes, he is, and he knows it.”
Then Clark turned serious. “Ding and I will lay out exactly how this hit will go down in a minute, but first there is a significant complication we need to talk about.”
The three men who had just arrived leaned forward or sat up straighter.
Chavez took over now, standing and facing the room. “DCRI, French internal security, has been tailing the guy they only know as Omar 8 since he arrived from Tunis yesterday. When he and his mates left their Seine-Saint-Denis safe house last night, the surveillance team tailed them here to central Paris, but they ran into some bad luck. Rokki and his guys had a mutt on a motorcycle pulling a surveillance detection sweep behind him, and we’re ninety percent certain that motorcycle man spotted the backing car.”
Jack winced. “So … French security is burned?”
“Looks that way, but French security doesn’t seem to know it. They completed their tail to the Four Seasons, and now a DCRI static surveillance team is set up around the corner from Rokki’s place in the Hôtel de Sers. They got a room with line of sight on Rokki’s suite. I’m going to guess they needed to be that close because they are using a laser microphone system until they can get a better bug in place.”
Sam looked down at a map of the Eighth Arrondissement. “Wow, DCRI are right on top of the action. Really close, in fact.”
“Too close, we think,” said Clark. “If they have line of sight on Rokki and Rokki knows he’s being monitored … well, we have to proceed on the assumption the URC cell has spotted the French officers in their hotel room at the other hotel.”
Sam asked, “What do we know about DCRI? Are they any good?”
Clark said, “Damn good. We liaised with them in Rainbow on multiple occasions. But they are like the investigators in our FBI. If you need detectives, surveillance men, man hunters anywhere in France, then that’s who you call. But if you’re sitting on top of an assassination team in the heart of Paris that looks like it’s about to go loud … then surveillance time is over, and these guys are out of their depth. They usually aren’t even armed.”
Sam asked, “Any chance the URC will just bug out? Call off whatever they were planning and leave town?”
Jack Ryan answered this. “Under normal circumstances, yes. That’s what we would expect them to do. But these are desperate times for the URC. We’ve seen them take some crazy chances since the disappearance of the Emir was acknowledged. Remember, we think Rokki is there because his boss, al Qahtani, is pissed off at the French government for policies he interprets as anti-Muslim. Rokki doesn’t want to fail his boss, so if he’s pegged the DCRI as just a hotel room full of surveillance guys with microphones and cameras, which is, in fact, the case … well, that just might not scare Rokki and his goons off.”