Tarek reached a hand out now. “We thank you for what you are going to do.”

Court shook Tarek’s hand and said, “Save your gratitude for when I get back. I might get popped at the border, at a roadside checkpoint. My cover might get compromised and I could get tortured to death in a prison before I get within twenty klicks of that kid.”

Rima stood and put her hand on Court’s face, looking up at him with warm eyes. “Most people just don’t care. The fact that you care enough to try makes you someone worthy of my respect. My nation needs your help, monsieur. I’ve seen so many people die in my hands in the past seven years.”

Me, too, Court thought, but while she was thinking about those she’d lost on the operating table, he was thinking about those he’d killed.

* * *

? ? ?

In the car on the way back to Paris, Vincent Voland drove in silence. Court could tell something was on his mind.

“What is it?” he asked.

The Frenchman said, “The Halabys might not be battle-worn resistance leaders, but they do have contacts in Damascus, and you are making a mistake by not using them to get into the country and get around.”

Court said, “You think I’m going to trust a network of theirs? No . . . if I go in, I go in with my own resources.”

“Again . . . I must ask. What resources do you have in Damascus?”

Court didn’t answer. There was no need to tell Voland anything else about his plan to get in. Instead he pivoted. “You need to help them with Bianca and the safe house. With guys and guns, yes, but they also need training. Their tradecraft is nonexistent, and you can be damn sure that if Sebastian Drexler comes here, he’ll be ready for a bloody fight.”

Voland said, “We will be prepared for him if he finds us here. I have four men joining us. All ex–Foreign Legion, masters in weapons and tactics. These four, along with the six armed Syrians here on the property, mean we will be ready for anything.”

Court hadn’t liked the layout of the property at all from a defensive standpoint. The woods all around would make it easy for infiltrators to get close to the farmhouse, and he had only noticed the one way into Bianca’s room in the basement; this made retreat impossible. But all he could do was hope the men Voland said he was bringing in would take steps to minimize the problems with the location.

Something else was bothering Court, so he changed gears. “What aren’t you telling me?”

“What do you mean?” asked Voland.

“There are parts of your story I’m not buying. The handler in Monte Carlo, for instance. You went to him to find someone to grab Bianca, and he told you he just happened to have access to the Gray Man?”

Voland shrugged his shoulders. “Not exactly. When you first contacted him and established your bona fides, he came to French intelligence. They notified me.”

“French intelligence again,” Court said. “They seem to be more involved in all this than even the Halabys.”

Voland simply said, “As I have told you many times, I am not directly affiliated with any agency of any nation. But my contacts have been very helpful in my work with the Halabys. Remember, if Sebastian Drexler comes up here looking for Bianca, a lot of agencies around the world will be happy.”

“They’ll be happy only if you kill him,” Court corrected.

Voland made a face of displeasure. “We do not have the death penalty here, like you do in America. If he comes up here, our intelligence services will pass the information on to the Police Nationale, who will simply try to arrest him.”

Court said, “From what I know of the guy, he won’t go down without a fight.”

“D’accord.” Agreed, said Voland.

“Too bad I’ll be out of town.”

To this Voland smiled gravely. “Yes . . . too bad, indeed.” After a few seconds Voland added, “Maybe you should stay here. Not go to Syria.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I can pressure Bianca to work with us. We can tell her you have gone, and are working on getting her son back. We can salvage something out of the Medina operation, and you can help us with Drexler.”

“You sound concerned suddenly about how much trouble Drexler can cause here.”

“It’s not that. I am concerned about your chances in Syria. I know your reputation, but still . . . you are going into a war with many sides, and you have no side of your own.”

Court said, “I have to see this through. For all their failures in this operation, the Halabys are good people, and their cause is honorable. And from what I can tell, I’m the only good guy in the Halabys’ corner.”

Voland made an annoyed face. “Present company excluded?”

“Hardly.”

The Frenchman sighed. “Then let me talk to my former counterparts at DGSE, foreign intelligence. If you don’t trust the Free Syria Exile Union to support your operation, perhaps you will let someone with more experience provide you with assistance while you are down there.”

Court just stared out the window. “You’re forgetting one thing.”

“What is that?”

“I don’t like you, Voland. You’re the asshole who sent me in on top of an ISIS operation. And I don’t even trust people I do like, so there is no way I’m going to have you, or the DGSE, working as my handler on my operation down in Syria.”

“So you are just going to Syria on your own?”

“I’ll be on my own, no matter what anyone promises me. Better for me if I go in with that knowledge than thinking you’re up here holding on to my lifeline.”

“Mon ami, it is clear that you do, in fact, have serious trust issues.”

“Yeah. I wonder why.”

CHAPTER 23

Police Judiciaire Captain Henri Sauvage had gotten cold feet about all this shit. He hadn’t said anything to his partner yet, but he had decided to walk away from all the money he’d been promised, to settle for the money he’d already been paid, and to get the fuck out of Paris.

As far as Sauvage was concerned, Eric, the shadowy voice on the phone who’d hired him to find and stalk men and women on behalf of Syrian interests here in Paris, could go to hell.

Sauvage’s division of the Police Judiciaire was the Criminal Brigade, known around Paris as La Crim, and they did have a counterespionage group, but Sauvage wasn’t on it. He worked instead in the homicide division. But even though he wasn’t a spy or a spy hunter, he understood the concept of MICE. MICE was the acronym for the four principal forms of compromise used by intelligence officers—money, ideology, compromise, and ego. And even though Sauvage wasn’t trained professionally on the techniques, he recognized that the man he only knew as Eric had roped him into this mess by using three of the four on him to great effect.

Henri Sauvage had no ideology whatsoever—he was in it for the dough—but the other three motivations had brought him to where he found himself today. Money was easy to see; this was why he had agreed to work for Eric in the first place. But looking back on it now, he realized the man had played on his ego, as well, by making him feel important enough to recruit three other men in the force to help him. After this was done, Sauvage, Clement, Allard, and Foss continued taking payoffs to provide information to help the Syrians in Paris, first providing information out of Criminal Brigade databases. Eventually Eric upped the ante with footwork, having Henri and his boys tail men and women, Syrian expatriates, rebels, and reporters speaking out against the Azzam regime.

It was not long before the stakes were raised for the cell of police officers, when one of the Syrian immigrants they had been tailing simply disappeared.

Sauvage and his group knew good and well the man they’d surveilled had likely been assassinated, and by this time they had worked out that they were proxy operatives of the Syrian regime. But the four kept at it. Their standards of living had risen, and with this rise came the need for more and more money to fuel their lifestyles. Plus, the missing man had not been a French citizen or well connected, so no real attention was paid to the event, and Sauvage and his team got away with it scot-free.

Over the next year they were involved in two other operations that appeared to have led to assassinations, but Sauvage’s cell was still only involved in hands-off work on the fringes of the operations, so the four men remained compartmentalized from any real danger to themselves, their liberty, or even their careers.

But then the ante was upped again when the mysterious Eric ordered them to follow a Spanish model named Bianca Medina while she visited the city to work at Fashion Week and to report on the security around her.

This, Sauvage had known instantly, was a very different animal from all their other work for the Syrians.