“Again,” he said dully, rubbing the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger.
“Oui, mon general.”
Gadbois sighed as his assistant rewound the digital tape. Though it was two A.M. and well past normal working hours, three other officers of the French intelligence service were also present. Two of the men came from the Arab Department, known inside the service as the “Midi Club,” as it handled information concerning Spain, Morocco, and the erstwhile French colonies of Algeria and Tunisia, as well as the Middle East. They were here to translate and to offer opinions that Gadbois knew in advance he would disagree with.
The third man came from the operations directorate, or the DST, the crazy bastards who had bombed the Rainbow Warrior, Greenpeace’s protest ship, in Auckland Harbor fifteen years back. It was he who had lifted the digital film from the evidence locker at the Sûreté’s headquarters. He was short and thin, and looked like he weighed less than a fully loaded pack. But he was tough, thought Gadbois, for whom “tough” was the highest accolade. Anyone who was still on his feet after such a blast, let alone operating with his faculties intact-well, he must have a head like pig iron. If only he’d cut his hair like any self-respecting soldier.
Without preface, the dark screen came to life. Fragments of binary data flashed on the screen in colorful erratic patches. Fifteen seconds passed before the first clear image appeared.
“Stop!” Gadbois pounded his meaty fist on the table.
The image froze. A male figure clad in the Palestinian freedom fighter’s de rigueur getup of olive drab combat jacket and red-checkered khaffiyeh, or headdress, stood in front of a generic Islamic flag-crescent moon and star against a field of forest green. What wasn’t de rigueur, however, thought Gadbois, was the pair of mirror sunglasses.
“Print a picture,” said Gadbois. The digital VCR player whirred and a moment later, he had a snapshot of the freedom fighter. “Go on.”
The image remained clear. The man began to speak.
“Americans, Zionists, and your sycophantic allies, I address you in the name of Muhammad, peace be unto him, and in the name of everlasting peace between all peoples. Today our battle has reached your shores…”
The picture sputtered, dissolving into a chaotic digital patchwork, before regaining clarity. Gadbois watched for another three minutes, jotting down the words he was able to pick up, stopping twice more to ask his assistant to print a photograph. Finally, the picture crapped out altogether. Gadbois grunted again. “Anything else on the tape?”
“No, sir.”
“Well?” he asked. “What the hell is it? A martyrdom message?”
“Certainly not,” declared Berri, one of the Arabists. “At no time did he offer himself to the ‘Lord, Allah,’ as is customary. At least not that we saw. It is simply a claim of responsibility.”
Gadbois agreed. This was something different from the trash that had been coming out of the Middle East the past few years. He was reminded of the time in the mid-seventies when every week had seemed to bring similar messages from the Red Army Faction, the Baader-Meinhof gang, and Black September. But this- Gadbois grimaced, as his stomach rumbled, souring with acid reflux. This looked like it might be on a larger scale than a kidnapping or a car bomb. He looked at the man from the DST. “And so?”
“They are planning an attack,” said Leclerc, sitting forward to meet Gadbois’s pouchy stare. “That much is apparent. We have some idea where and we may assume it will be soon. They do not make these tapes until shortly before the attempt is carried out. That is all, except for one small thing.”
“S’il vous plait, Capitaine.”
“They are quite certain that they will succeed.”
General Gadbois stood, signaling the meeting was over. For the moment, he didn’t need to know anything more. When the room was empty, he picked up the telephone. “Get me Langley,” he ordered.
Waiting, he lit a cigarette and exhaled a thick stream of blue-gray smoke toward the ceiling. A familiar voice answered, and Gadbois said, “Hello, Glen. I have some news that might require disturbing the President.” He wanted his colleague’s full and undivided attention.
Yet even as he related the contents of the tape he had just watched, a most uncharitable and unprofessional thought crossed his mind: Thank God it wasn’t going to happen in France.
Chapter 9
“Get up!”
In the intensive care ward of the Hôpital Salpetitpierre, Adam Chapel shuddered, his body lifting from the bed as if juiced with ten thousand volts. The voice echoed across the recesses of his memory, dragging him from the darkness like a prisoner to the executioner’s block. Chapel ordered his limbs to move, his head to rise from the pillow, but the drugs that numbed his body had left him as frozen as his fear had twenty years earlier. Consumed with dread, he lay still, hearing his father’s voice, recoiling at the cruel, mocking melody of his childhood.
“Get up!”
The voice was not directed at him, yet Chapel flinched all the same. In the swirling crucible that was his mind’s eye, he saw himself, a pale, chubby ten-year-old boy with tousled black hair, sitting at his desk in his cramped bedroom. He can smell the meat loaf his mother is making for dinner and knows that there will be pears and Hershey’s chocolate syrup for dessert because pears were on special at Mr. Parks’s grocery store.
The door to his room is closed and he looks at himself in the full-length mirror hanging on its back. Get up, he tells himself. Go help her. Several times he begins to stand, only to fall back to his chair. He wants to go to her, but he can’t. He’s too scared. Only the shame weighing on his shoulders, the shame that shrinks him to a tenth his size, is worse than the fear.
“Stay down,” he whispers to her. “Stay down and he’ll leave you alone.”
But his mother is a stubborn woman. Through the paper-thin walls, he hears a chair scrape the linoleum floor as Helen Chapel claws her way to her feet.
“About time,” bellows his father. “Aren’t you going to make your son some dinner?”
“Robert, please… Adam’ll hear…”
“Let him hear. I don’t want him to think his father allows a woman to speak to him that way.”
“I’m your wife. If your commissions drop, I have every right to ask why. If you’re having trouble with the new line, let’s talk about it. Maybe I can help.”
“Help? Business is lousy. There, I told you again. People are buying loafers and we’re selling lace-ups. You want Adam to hear that, too? Do you want him to know that his father can’t hustle enough shoes to pay off his wife’s charge at Alexander’s? Let him hear. The boy’s a freakin’ genius. You think he doesn’t know what’s what? He’s going to earn big money someday. Important he knows enough not to get stuck with some nag who never stops whining. Who else is going to teach him?”
Hurriedly, Adam turns the page of his algebra text and throws himself into his homework. Numbers are his refuge. Among the figures and equations and theorems, he can lose himself like a shadow in the night. Cheek pressed to paper, he asks himself question after question as the solutions spill from the tip of his Ticonderoga No. 2 pencil-4(X-2) = 8. Answer: 4. 3X+8X =? Answer: 11X.
“Let go of me, you bastard. Let go!”
Let her go! Adam closes his eyes so tightly, his cheeks ache. Angrily, he wipes away the tears as he recites the quadratic equation, the Fibonacci sequence to a thousand, pi to the twenty-second digit, which is as far as he’s memorized it so far, but he promises to go higher, to thirty, even fifty. Anything to block the images of his father grasping his mother’s long, graying hair, lifting her off the floor to give her a few pointers about “the world out there” as he knows it. Adam has listened to the drunken soliloquy so many times, he has the words memorized. “American-made products don’t sell anymore. The Pakis are undercutting us by a dollar a pair. They’re dumping the stuff to get share; selling at below cost. It’s illegal, but no one gives a shit. It’s all about price, Helen. You have to fight for every cent. Scrap for every dollar.” And then the wider lessons about life. “The only thing that means anything is money. Hear me, Helen? Money buys you respect. Money buys you position. Money buys you a better class of friends. You don’t have money in this world, you don’t have a life. Sooner Adam learns that, the better.”