Agent in Place

Every fiber of the captain’s being had been against this, and his three partners in crime pushed back, as well, but by then the compromise was in play. Eric had enough dirt on the French cops to put them all in prison, so there was no way they would not comply. Plus Eric insisted that, as always, their input in the operation would be relatively minor.

So they did as ordered, followed the Spanish model, surveilled the location where she was staying, and passed on the information to Eric.

And in the process they became fully involved in the high-profile terrorist massacre that took place in central Paris three nights earlier.

Now the four police officers were in it up to their necks, and when Foss and Allard had been gunned down two days earlier in the apartment of Syrian expatriates, who themselves were now missing, the tension on the two remaining members of the cell of dirty cops was ratcheted up to ten.

And that tension had become unbearable for Henri Sauvage.

He’d decided to take his family and run, at least for a while. He knew that when he did leave town, Eric would probably go through with his threat to reveal his involvement in the ISIS attack, but Sauvage told himself Eric had no direct proof, and Sauvage could explain the accusation away by constructing an elaborate explanation that Eric was a confidential informant he’d been running off book, who had now turned against him because of an unrelated disagreement.

It was a gamble, but less so, Sauvage determined, than continuing the hunt for Bianca Medina and standing by while more people were slaughtered across the city.

So Sauvage decided to hit the bricks, but he could not just leave his partner behind to deal with this alone. To make his escape from his problem, he needed to sell Andre Clement on the idea of running out on Eric, as well. To this end he’d asked Clement to meet him at a location where they often met confidential informants for clandestine meetings: the Car Park Stalingrad garage next to the Gare du Nord train station.

* * *

? ? ?

Five minutes before one a.m., an exhausted and on-edge Henri Sauvage drove down the ramp and into the underground garage, parked his little but speedy Renault 308 with the front grille facing the exit ramp, and sat there in the nearly full but perfectly quiet garage while he texted Clement.

Ou est vous? Where are you?

Sauvage had smoked half a cigarette before the reply came.

Deux minutes. Two minutes.

Soon Clement’s four-door Citro?n rolled down the ramp, and Sauvage flashed his lights. The Citro?n turned his way and began rolling forward. Behind it, a pair of sedans also rolled down the ramp. One turned to the left and one to the right, and they disappeared in the massive garage.

The Citro?n parked in the closest space, just a few spots from Sauvage, so the captain and cell leader got out of his car, left the door open, and strolled over with his walkie-talkie in his hand. He tossed his cigarette, stepped to the driver’s-side window of the vehicle as it slid down, and leaned down to talk to his old friend.

And that was when he realized something was very wrong.

Thirty-three-year-old Andre Clement faced forward, his hands gripping the wheel so tightly his fingers were white . . . and only then did Sauvage see the man in the backseat with a pistol pressed against the back of Clement’s head.

Andre Clement looked up at his partner with eyes filled with dread now. “I am sorry, Henri. I couldn’t take it, so I tried to run out on this shit. I was going to leave it behind, pack up the kids and just—”

Without warning, an earsplitting crack battered Sauvage’s senses; Clement’s head snapped forward inside an arc of flame. Blood splattered the inside of the windshield and the steering wheel, but Sauvage did not wait to check on his partner’s condition. Instead he spun away, ducked down as low as he could, and sprinted back around to his Renault.

He dove through the open door and fired up his engine, not quite sure what the hell was going on but damn sure he needed to get the hell out of there. But just as he shifted gears to race from his space, a Ford van that had been parked in the garage shot in front of him on his left to cut him off. The van had no lights on, but Sauvage could see a man in the front passenger seat spin towards him with a short-barreled submachine gun.

The two sedans that had entered the garage a minute earlier appeared with squealing tires, shooting forward towards Sauvage.

The captain only now went for the weapon he kept in a shoulder holster, palmed the grip of the HK pistol, and started to yank it free. But looking around he could see a half dozen guns either pointing at him already or moving into position to do so.

Henri Sauvage released his grip on the weapon and raised his hands. His car door flew open and he was yanked out by a man with olive skin wearing a gray denim jacket and jeans, and the man pushed Sauvage forward and through the sliding door of the van, onto a floor covered in plastic tarp.

Other men jumped into the van with him; he could hear and feel them more than see them while facing down on the plastic.

The vehicle squealed its tires again as it headed off.

Sauvage had a knife in his left boot, but it was found by one of the men on top of him now. He wondered at first if they were federal police or intelligence officials; that would make sense, of course, considering his peripheral involvement in an ISIS operation in Paris, but it certainly did not explain why they’d just executed Andre in cold blood.

But when he was pulled up into a seated position, pushed against the side wall of the van, he got a better look at the four men in the back with him.

“Who the fuck are you?” Sauvage asked, but he was pretty certain he knew now. They were all Arab. He assumed they were Syrian nationals, living in Europe but serving as either intelligence operatives or contract operatives for the Azzam regime.

These men had been sent by Eric, and they’d be killers, each and every one.

When he and his partners in his “side job” for the Syrians followed someone who soon disappeared, these were likely the boys who did the disappearing.

But there was a modicum of good news for Sauvage. These men hadn’t killed him yet, so even though he was sitting on a tarp that looked like it had been put there to catch his flying brain matter, he felt like he retained some ability to affect events.

All he had to do was talk to these guys and say exactly the right things, and he would be able to save his life.

The man closest to the front of the van wore a black turtleneck, and his black hair was curly, longer than the others. He was somewhere in his late thirties, and he wore a Beretta pistol in a black leather shoulder holster.

Sauvage could see a confidence and authority in the man’s face, and he decided this was the man to talk to. “Do you speak French?”

“Yes, you may call me Malik.” He said it in a commanding tone that convinced Sauvage he’d made the right decision to address him.

“All right, Malik. I take it you’re in charge?”

“Oui.”

“Why did you kill Andre?”

“He was planning on leaving town. We worried you were thinking about doing the same. We could not let either of you go.”

Sauvage leaned closer to the man and pushed some outrage into his voice, even though fear was the predominant emotion going through him right now. “I’ll ask it again. Why did you kill Andre?”

“Eric ordered us to sacrifice your partner to teach you a lesson.” Now Malik leaned in towards Sauvage and adopted a similar angry tone. “Have you learned that lesson, Captain Sauvage?”

The Frenchman leaned back against the wall of the van. They were driving around, making left and right turns, and Sauvage had no idea where they were heading.

“What the fuck do you guys want?”

“We want you to fulfill your responsibilities to us. Your work with the police will be crucial in the next days as we hunt for Bianca Medina. We need her alive, unharmed, and we need your help for this.”

“I can’t help you, man. She’s probably long gone from France.”

Malik shook his head. “No. The group that has her, the Free Syria Exile Union, is based here. They are being supported by a former French intelligence officer named Voland, who also lives here and has worked here much of his professional life. All signs point to the fact that they are still in the area.”

Sauvage said, “If you have all this information, what the hell do you need me for?”

Malik surprised Sauvage with a shrug. “I do not know. Eric has demanded we take you alive, encourage you not to try to run away, and give you something to do before he comes here himself.”

“Wait . . . Eric is coming here?”

“Tomorrow.”

“From . . . Syria?”

“I do not know where he is now.”

“And what is it I’m supposed to do?”

“Simple. Find the girl.”

Sauvage sighed. “Clement was holding a low-level operative in the FSEU at his farm near Versailles. This man, Ali Safra, didn’t seem to know anything when we questioned him the other day, but perhaps we could talk to him again.”

“No,” Malik said. “We just came from there. He knew nothing about where they are now.”

“How can you be sure?”