Agent in Place

And a four-month-old child. Son to the devil incarnate, true, but a baby whose only crime was having a shitty dad.

It was a cruel, sick, heartless world; this Court told himself not for the first time, and as he turned onto the Rue Saint-André-des-Arts, his eyes still wary for threats, his mind began wondering just why he gave a damn about some random baby in some faraway land. Twenty-four hours ago he was trying to keep his head in the game because of his feelings for a woman on the other side of the world he might never see again, and now he found himself on the verge of getting caught up in a multifaction civil war in the Middle East, a quagmire that looked more and more like a never-ending meat grinder.

Why the hell did he even care?

It didn’t take him long to come up with the answer. Even though nothing that had gone wrong for the Halabys in the past twenty-four hours was, in any way, his fault, Court knew that his own actions now would determine if these people lived or died.

And it wasn’t impossible to imagine that getting that child in Damascus to safety could also play a small but important part in bringing one of the most brutal dictatorships on Earth to a close.

Court sure as hell didn’t want to go to Syria, but he weighed it against the alternative: sitting around in some European café, sipping coffee with the knowledge that right then a baby was being hunted, a mother was helpless twenty-five hundred miles away from her son, a well-meaning husband and wife were in imminent peril of assassination, and a savage dictator was winning his war.

Court’s moral compass was trying to steer his body to get involved, but his brain was fighting back, because Court’s brain had long ago concluded that this moral compass of his was an unrelenting pain in the ass.

“No . . .” he said aloud. “No fucking way.”

Just then, Court’s attention cycled back to the present. His PERSEC radar pinged when he saw another pair of motorcycle cops pull to a stop on the Rue André-Mazet, blocking the narrow road. But just as quickly as he alerted to them, the two young officers pushed their bikes up on the pavement and took their time removing their helmets. They showed no interest in Court as he approached their position across the little street, and as he passed them he saw no hint of trouble.

As he stepped by the pair, the radio on one man’s shoulder chirped, a voice asked the officer where he was, and the bike cop relayed the street corner. Court thought little of this, until the voice on the radio ordered the two bike officers to maintain their positions until further notice.

Court kept walking, but he understood now that this duo was holding some sort of a soft perimeter, right in the center of Paris. They were clearly waiting for someone or something. Neither of the young cops looked in any way anxious; Court thought they might have been set up for a passing march or something similar.

But he thought back to the other pair of cops he saw. They had been pulling up right in front of the Halabys’ apartment building. Were they part of this perimeter as well, or were the Halabys at the center of this police action?

Court turned left and then he stepped into a restaurant crowded with lunchtime diners, picked his way through the throngs of businesspeople and tourists, and continued walking all the way to the rear of the establishment. Something told him to double back to the Halabys’ apartment building, to check on them just on the chance the police were there, arresting the couple for their involvement in the action the night before.

For their own good, Court realized, the best thing that could happen to Rima and Tarek would be to get picked up by the cops for questioning. Their life expectancy would go up surrounded by locks and bars, because the clock was sure as hell ticking on their survival out here in the wild.

Court told himself he’d feel better about this whole thing if they were arrested and confessed to snatching Bianca Medina, and the Spanish woman was released to go home to her child. He just wanted to see if this was, in fact, what was going on.

He pushed through the back of the restaurant, turned left in a tiny alleyway, then made it out on the street a half block beyond where the two motorcycle cops on the Rue de Buci could see him. He was just two short blocks from the Halabys’ building now, and his only plan was to be a spectator if the cops had come calling on Tarek and Rima.

Court arrived back on the Rue Mazarine, a half block south and across the street from the building, and now he saw a total of four motorcycle police officers from Public Order and Traffic Control, all parked in front of the door to the apartment.

He turned to his left and kept walking, keeping his eyes on the action but affecting the cadence and bearing of just another lunchtime pedestrian.

So . . . the Halabys got themselves flagged by the local police. He wasn’t surprised, and he wasn’t feeling especially guilty about it. He knew that nothing he had done at the scene the evening before had anything to do with them being tied to the event at 7 Rue Tronchet. No . . . One of their surveillance guys talked, or one of their men holding Bianca got cold feet and dropped the dime on them.

Court wondered what this meant for Medina, and for the baby. Perhaps when Bianca was released she’d race back to Syria, into Ahmed’s arms, and all would be quickly forgotten.

A four-door Renault Mégane pulled up in front of the house, and two men climbed out. Court recognized the emblem of the DRPJ on the door of the vehicle, the Direction Régionale de Police Judiciaire de Paris. These were Paris criminal police, local investigators. They pulled badge lanyards from their shirts and waved them at the four motorcycle officers. The four uniformed and helmeted men stepped to the side, the glass door was opened with a code entered into a keypad on the wall, and the two detectives headed inside.

Suddenly Court realized he’d seen these two detectives before. These were the men who’d been hanging around outside 7 Rue Tronchet on civilian motorcycles, and they’d taken off not long after Bianca was dropped off at her hotel.

At the time Court had wondered if they’d been involved in surveillance on Bianca Medina, but since they left within minutes of her arrival, he’d pushed his concerns aside. But seeing them again here, now, was confusing to him.

Court turned into the doorway of a small grocery store and entered. Here he immediately began pretending to look over a display of wine by the front window, giving him a covert vantage point on the building across the street.

Something was very wrong about this situation. These plainclothes guys were investigators for the Paris Police Prefecture, and this didn’t make sense to Court. Of course there were twenty apartments in the building, and these guys could have been conducting an investigation at any one of them. But this was the 6th Arrondissement. Surely there were a hundred crimes going on in Paris right now, but the 6th Arrondissement was about the least likely of any of the twenty in the city to see this kind of action.

No . . . a half dozen police on the scene of the exact building where the couple at the center of the high-profile kidnapping the night before lived. Court wasn’t one to believe in coincidence. These cops were definitely here for the Halabys.

But if the authorities thought there was one chance in a hundred that Bianca Medina was being held here, or if they thought the people involved with her abduction were right here in the city center in an upper-class apartment building, surely they wouldn’t have just parked bike cops from Public Order and Traffic Control out front and sent a pair of local detectives upstairs for a chat. No, terrorism was a federal crime here in France; federal investigators would have brought tactical officers with armored assault vehicles, and they would have hit this building hard.

This whole thing looked fishy as hell, and Court suddenly had a bad feeling about what was going on in front of him.

He stood there in the grocery store across the street, watching the four motorcycle cops standing at the front door, talking to one another. They had been ordered there, obviously, but they weren’t on any sort of antiterror mission. The cops carried SIG Pro 9-millimeter pistols, telescoping batons, and Mace on their belts, and they were four fit enough men, but these dudes were just window dressing. They’d been planted here by the two cops who’d gone upstairs.

The same two guys who’d conducted recon out in front of the Rue Tronchet a few hours before the ISIS attack yesterday.