I opened a secure line on the phone. I sent a text to a longtime contact in Amsterdam named Roger Anderson. There wasn’t a piece of equipment in the world that Roger couldn’t get his hand on, and I would need his procurement skills in the next forty-eight hours. The text was three short words: Halo. Two days.
I finished my coffee and headed for the exit. I stepped outside. The air was cool and moist; it was going to be a typical spring day in Paris. I discerned a pattern among the people streaming in and out of the airport: hurried and self-absorbed; typical airport behavior. I was on the hunt for that one anomaly. That one person whose glance lingered a blink too long, that one airport employee who seemed a step out of place, that one face with a sheen of anxiety.
I stopped and observed the line of taxis waiting for fares. Most of the drivers looked Arab. I spotted a tall, light-skinned man with exceptionally pronounced cheekbones — he looked Ethiopian or Somali, but I knew different — standing against a less-than-pristine sedan third in the queue. He watched the swarm of arriving passengers with the laconic eyes of a veteran while I watched him. He was a veteran all right, but not of the taxi-driving kind.
When I was sure I was the only person taking an interest in him, I dragged my carry-on his way. This didn’t make me particularly popular with the cabbies at the head of the line, but that was not my problem.
He turned my way. He smiled and his eyes flicked in recognition. I studied them, plumbing them in an instant for any sign of trouble. His name was Hammid Zoghby; he was an Algerian operative and an old friend. But in the shadowy world of black ops, alliances can turn in a moment, and old didn’t necessarily mean trusted.
He stuck out a large paw. “Monsieur Green! Bienvenue à Paris,” he said.
Charles Green was one of three aliases I had invented for this mission. As far as the world knew, a guy named Jake Conlan was having dinner in his Annapolis home and sipping a nice chardonnay.
Zoghby threw my carry-on into the trunk and offered me the rear seat of the taxi. There was a blue gym bag with an Adidas logo on the floor, just as I had instructed.
He pulled away from the curb and traded some choice Arabic with the cabbies at the head of the line. Then he laughed, as if screwing a couple of Iraqis was about as much fun as an African could have. He glanced at me in the rearview mirror and in English said, “Where to?”
All Zoghby knew was that he was to pick me up at the airport with a blue gym bag in tow. “Head for the city and take your time.” At this time in the morning, we would have the road more or less to ourselves, and I was in no hurry. My rendezvous wasn’t until midmorning.
“You got it, boss.” Zoghby kept a close eye on his rearview mirror as we made our way out of the airport and gave me a quick nod as we merged onto the highway. “Looking good,” he said. He sat back and turned on the radio.
I set the gym bag next to me and zipped it open. Hidden underneath a layer of folded towels was a Mauser 7.65 mm pistol — not my gun of choice, but acceptable for the work I had to do here in Paris — and an aluminum tube: a silencer. I checked the magazine. Another two magazines were tucked inside a black nylon pouch. I slid the pistol inside my waistband and the spare magazines and silencer into the pockets of my suit coat.
There were also two Cartier jewelry boxes inside the gym bag, and I set them on the seat next to me. I discarded the lids, pushed aside the interior cotton, and removed two stainless steel memorial bracelets with the names of two former comrades laser-cut into the bands. Paul Redder and Clayton Spriggs were operatives killed in Afghanistan four years ago. Good friends. Superpatriots. And, yes, the bracelets memorialized their sacrifices, but they weren’t the work of Cartier or any other jeweler. They were hand-tooled by an explosives expert in Marseilles named Fabian Tomas. I’d known Tomas for twenty-three years, and there wasn’t anything he couldn’t turn into a weapon.
These particular bracelets were coated with a minute amount of Semtex, a relatively stable explosive until it came in contract with a spark detonator. In other words, I wouldn’t want to rub the two bracelets together unless the situation absolutely called for it. Perfect for locks. Perfect for diversions. Perfect for close contact. I’d never gone into an op without them. I wasn’t about to start now.
I fitted Paul’s bracelet around my left wrist and Clayton’s around my right. Hopefully, I wouldn’t need to use them.
Stopping The Twelver meant I’d have to work with Iranians, people I preferred to keep at a distance, preferably in the crosshairs of a .300 Winchester Magnum sniper rifle. To get inside Iran and to gather the kind of intel I needed, I had to enlist the one group that wanted Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the mullahs who had his back to fail as much as we Americans did. That group was the Mujahedin-e Khalq. The MEK was the most powerful Iranian resistance organization in the world. The irony of the situation was that they were still tagged as a terrorist organization by my own government. Go figure.
Sure, there was a fair share of upstanding patriots in the MEK membership, though most operated in the foggy middle ground between insurgency and organized crime. They bankrolled their operations by dealing on the black market, which meant that their activities also attracted some serious scoundrels. I didn’t mind your average scoundrel. I just wasn’t particularly fond of the kind who looked at patriotism as a marketable commodity.
A Renault coupe slid up next to the cab on our left, close enough for me to recognize the guy riding shotgun. His name was Davy Johansen. Davy was a former SEAL Team Six operator and freelance counterintel specialist, another buddy from the old days. I didn’t recognize the driver, but if he was sitting an arm’s length from a man as cautious as Davy, then he’d been properly vetted. These two were charged with watching my back. Zoghby didn’t know they were there; he wasn’t supposed to know.
As the Renault dropped back a couple of car lengths, the taxi approached the Boulevard Périphérique, the main artery encircling Paris proper.
Zoghby shot me a look in the rearview mirror. I gave him an address in the Tenth Arrondissement. His eyes crinkled. Exactly the reaction I’d expected. We were a stone’s throw from the center of Paris, yet parts of the Tenth Arrondissement made for the roughest neighborhoods in Europe.
“Sounds like fun,” he said.
“A barrel of laughs.” I checked my watch. A quarter to eight.
A block from my destination, we crossed a broad, shimmering canal, and I told Zoghby to take a right turn onto a narrow street crowded with cars and delivery trucks and working folk. It was the kind of place where people scratched out a living and seemed to be enjoying their plight. I could hear radios blasting, people laughing, and the occasional horn sounding. A taxi on these streets hardly warranted a curious glance, but that’s exactly what I was looking for: a curious glance, a face in a window, an idle worker. So far, so good.
“Right there,” I said. I leaned forward and pointed to a dingy apartment building at the end of the block. “Make a left and pull up at the entrance.”
Zoghby did as he was told, though I could see by the look on his face that he was trying to make sense of it. I handed him an envelope with five thousand euros in it, payment for the pistol and the ride and his silence. I left my carry-on in the taxi; it had only been for show as I passed through the airport. If I needed anything, I’d buy it.
“Be well,” Zoghby said with a distracted wave. “You know where to find me if you need me.”
I waited until the taxi was out of sight before setting out. The café I was looking for was a block and a half to the west. I headed that way.