‘This is the last of them,’ said Caitlin. ‘If he’s not here, or hasn’t been here, I’m tapped out, Capitaine.’
The French infantry officer patted her gently on the shoulder. ‘You have done well,’ he told her. ‘Better than we could have asked. Perhaps you should let us handle this now?’
Caitlin peered out through the window of the ruined apartment, across the street from the tenement where Baumer had met with English members of Hizb ut-Tahrir on three occasions. ‘No, I don’t think so,’ she replied eventually. ‘If that fucker turns up, there’ll be a reckoning between him and me.’
‘You are still very weak, Caitlin. If we are to get him, it will mean a struggle.’
‘I’m strong enough to pull a trigger.’
Rolland pulled her around to face him. ‘We need him alive. Both him and Lacan. We need to know the extent of the School Masters’ influence.’
Caitlin folded her arms and leaned against the wet, peeling wallpaper. A bomb had damaged the upper floors of this building, letting in the elements. She was wrapped in a padded army jacket but she still shivered at the unseasonable chill. Three French commandos kept watch on the street while staying well hidden from view. It had been a hellish business, just getting them into the neighbourhood, let alone into this house opposite the last of Baumer’s known addresses. For two whole days they had been on his trail, using her knowledge of al Banna’s networks and contact nodes. Two days of scurrying like dump rats from one ruin to the next, avoiding all contact with the enemy, both uniformed and otherwise.
She felt much stronger in mind and body than she had for a long time, although her illness still weakened her, and it would take her months to fully recover from Noisy-le-Sec. In truth, she should not have been out here, but there was no choice. She was the expert on al Banna, and that meant being in on the hunt, no matter how damaged she may have been.
A wet, dank-smelling armchair, covered in plaster and mouse droppings, sat in the nearest corner. After one more glance at the street outside, she dropped into it. She could hear sporadic firing somewhere out there and the occasional shout, but the street was relatively quiet for now. A more distant thunder spoke of the pitched battle at the edge of the park, as Sarkozy’s forces attempted to break into the heart of the old city.
‘He may not come,’ she said, forcing the weariness she felt out of her voice.
‘No,’ Rolland admitted. ‘Maybe not. He may have fled the city already. But we must do what we will. Would you like a coffee, Caitlin? I saw some in the kitchen before. I could have one of my men heat up some water. We may be waiting a while.’
They did. It was not until night had fallen that any significant activity returned to the street. There had been a small explosion, during the afternoon, and a cloud of dirty black smoke rose over the roofline of the buildings opposite, but nothing came of it. Just another skirmish in a city of a thousand myriad clashes. She dozed through the afternoon, fitfully, for a few hours, waking in the early evening as Rolland’s men ate a cold meal of MREs. She’d been hoping the French might have had better field rations than the US version, but there was no discernible difference in quality. It was all NATO standard slop, she supposed.
‘Caitlin? Come here, please.’
She came fully awake with a start, and slid from the chair like a cat. Rolland stood by the window, narrowing his eyes, peering through the lace curtain.
‘Those men, do you recognise any of them?’
She peered out. At least four men, all civilians, all Arabic or African in appearance, were gathered outside the target address across and down the street a little way. It was dark outside, but some of them smoked, and as they passed around a lighter she was pretty sure she recognised a couple of faces.
One in particular stood out. Short, round-shouldered, with a potbelly. Grey stringy beard but no moustache. His skin was dark brown, as though stained by tobacco juice. He smoked hand-rolled cigarettes and in her imagination she could smell the fragrant blend. Some acne pits blemished the left side of his face, but melted skin from a homemade bomb gone wrong marred his other profile. The permanent squint to his right eye was a result of the same disfiguration. She couldn’t see from here, but she knew he would have yellowed, crooked teeth, with two of the lower incisors missing, thanks to a beating from the Malaysian Special Branch five years ago. Completing the picture were his powerful forearms and thighs from years of silat and karate training.
‘The chunky-looking groover in the nasty grey acid-wash jeans and cheap vinyl jacket, his name’s Noordim ul Haq. He’s an Indonesian. Javanese. We called him “Doctor Noo”. He’s a Jemaah Islamiyah commander, a bomb maker too, but not a great one, as you can see from his pretty face.’
‘He is part of Baumer’s network?’ Rolland asked. ‘I have not heard of him.’
Caitlin frowned. ‘Nope. But he and Baumer have met, twice that we know of. Once in Singapore in August 1998, and in Surabaya later that year. We’re not sure to what end or if they ever met again under the radar. But the Doc there is a heavy hitter in Mantiki 3, the Jemaah Islamiyah franchise with responsibility for the Philippines and central Indonesia.’
Rolland looked lost.
‘Sorry,’ said Caitlin. ‘I can be a bit of a fucking train spotter, can’t I? Noordim’s CV doesn’t matter, the fact he’s here does. He should be about ten thousand miles away, blowing up noodle shops in Jakarta for the glory of God.’
‘Well, we don’t have many noodle shops in Paris anymore.’
‘You never did, Marcel. Not worth a pinch of shit anyway.’
‘So, this Noordim,’ said Rolland softly, peeking out into the dark again, ‘if he is here, there must be something important going on.’
‘Dude, if he’s here, it’s the end of the fucking world,’ Caitlin replied before realising what she’d just said. ‘Oh, wait… We already did that, didn’t we? Okay, look, it’s not just delicious noodles and opportunities for mass murder that kept Noordim in Mantiki 3. This guy, he doesn’t like whitey. His father was a mid-level official in Golkar, the guys who put the “party” into Indonesia’s one-party state under Suharto. His mother was a singer, but more importantly a second cousin to Tuk Tuk Suharto, the big guy’s daughter. The family controlled the distribution of kretek cigarettes in East Timor and lost it all in the Australian takeover of ‘99. Doctor Noo was already into the whole jihad thing by then and his family may well have been funding him, but Timor pushed him right over. Ruined the family and put the zap on his head. So he really hates whitey’
She paused and Rolland took the hint. ‘But?’ he said.
‘But,’ she continued, ‘he really fucking hates Arabs and resents their control of international jihad. To his way of thinking, the Arabs never recovered from the crusader attacks after 9/11. All of the best jihadis since then have been Asian or African, but in the mythology of the jihad, it is the Arabs who matter. And they make sure their little rice-eating cousins know about it, too. Our understanding was that Noordim got ass-fucked three ways from Sunday while he was in Afghanistan. The camel humpers really broke his balls. His raison d’кtre ever after has been to see himself acknowledged as a player of equal importance to the likes of bin Laden and Zawahiri.’