At the warehouse just off the grounds of Toussus-le-Noble general aviation airport, the Syrian commandos tended to their wounded, bagged their dead, and cleaned and reloaded their weapons.

Bianca barely spoke a word as she was shown to her quarters, an area in the corner of the warehouse floor partitioned off with sheets hanging from ropes. Inside was a cot, a change of clothes, and a new pair of tennis shoes in her size. For the third time in the past week, people had given her clothes to change into, although it occurred to her that only the Lebanese fashion designer she’d come to Paris to model for had given her anything she much felt like wearing.

As soon as she arrived Malik told her that President Azzam wanted to speak with her via sat phone, but she surprised everyone by saying she was just too tired and emotional to talk. She asked Malik to relay the message that, thanks be to God, she had been rescued and was unhurt, and she would speak with him in the morning. It was obvious to Bianca that Malik did not want to disappoint Azzam, but also clear he did not want to offend the woman who obviously held a special relationship with the president, so he reluctantly let it go and offered her canned food, which she declined, and bottled water that she took with her to her makeshift quarters.

Rima had warned her that someone with this group had been working with Shakira and had been involved in the ISIS assassination attempt. But even though Rima didn’t specify the attractive blond-haired Westerner standing on the far side of the warehouse floor, Bianca Medina had decided all the Syrians were working for Malik, and Malik was definitely in the Syrian intelligence services. That left two possibilities as to the identity of the man working for Shakira Azzam.

There was the gruff man who’d said not a word to her during the drive from the field to the warehouse, and the blond man . . . she thought he might be Swiss because of his accent and word choices. He had shaken her hand and told her he had been sent here to Paris by Ahmed himself to help with her recovery.

He seemed genuine, and sincere, but she had met many men who could charm and deceive simultaneously.

She didn’t dare say anything to anyone about what Rima had told her. Any hint that the Halabys had allowed her to escape or had communicated information to her would tip off Ahmed’s people that she had been complicit in her own disappearance. If not at first, then at least after the fact.

She just lay down on her little cot and stared up at the rafters ten meters above her. She thought about the American down in Damascus, about Jamal, and about the things Rima had told her and shown her about the crimes of Ahmed Azzam, and she wondered what the hell she was supposed to do now.

* * *

? ? ?

Sebastian Drexler gazed across twenty meters of dusty warehouse floor to the beautiful young woman lying on the cot, just barely visible through an opening in the bedsheets hanging around her. He looked her long, slender physique up and down, then fantasized about pulling his pistol from his coat right now, firing a round into that exquisite body of hers, and then spinning around and dispatching Malik’s men with perfectly placed bullets to their heads. He could then burn this building to the ground and catch the next train to Bern or Zurich or Gstaad or Lauterbrunnen.

It was fantasy, of course. There were still eleven GIS operators here, nine of whom were fit enough to fight effectively.

No . . . Drexler would have to wait, but he didn’t think he’d have to wait too long.

An opportunity would arise to kill Bianca as they traveled to the east; he just had to be ready to take advantage of it.

As he thought about the hours and days ahead, he looked down at his phone and saw that he had four missed calls and a text on his encrypted commo app. He opened the text.

Answer your fucking phone.

It was the first lady. He sighed, long and hard, because he’d have to call and give her the news that Bianca was still alive and, for now, at least, she was surrounded by men who would give their lives to protect her.

He walked over to a darkened distant corner of the warehouse and dialed the number to her satellite phone.

Shakira answered on the first ring. “Dammit, Sebastian!”

Missed you, too, he thought. “The woman has been recovered.”

“Dead or alive?”

“At present she is alive. I have a plan to—”

“There was a shoot-out in Mezzeh tonight. In Western Villas. A man escaped. It’s on the news, and I’m having my staff bring me updates from GIS.”

Drexler was utterly confused and had no idea how this related to him. “Wait. What man? What are you talking about?”

“They are saying this man kidnapped a baby after fighting security forces! He killed several Ba’ath security officers, and more NDF forces that chased him until he disappeared.”

“Who was the baby?” Drexler asked, but he knew the answer.

“On television they aren’t saying anything about the identity of the victims, but they wouldn’t, would they?”

Drexler’s eyes closed and squinted shut, and he gripped the phone just as hard. He understood now, understood even better than Shakira what was going on. “A highly skilled killer who can slip into Syria and kidnap the child of the president. There is only one person who fits that description on this Earth.”

“Who is he?”

“They call him the Gray Man. He is American.”

“What’s he doing in Syria?”

“Apparently, he was working for the Halabys.”

Shakira gasped. “The man who rescued Bianca in Paris?”

“One and the same. And then he went to Damascus to rescue her son.”

Shakira said, “Once Bianca is dead, this won’t matter. He can put the kid on CNN for all I care. Ahmed won’t admit to being his father.”

Drexler did not reply.

“When will you do it? When will you kill her?”

“I am told we will fly to Serbia in the morning. There we will wait for documents to be sent to us so we can continue on to Russia. From there we’ll come home. I’ll take care of everything before we leave for Russia.”

“You had better,” Shakira said.

Drexler passed on a few more promises to the first lady that it would all be over soon, and they would be together again. Then he hung up the phone and looked up to see Henri Sauvage standing over him.

Drexler wasn’t in the mood. “What?”

“Why am I still here? I have done every last thing you asked.”

Drexler knew Malik was the only one who could release Sauvage at this point, and Drexler figured the only reason Malik had not released Sauvage already was that Malik was going to shoot the French cop in the head at some point and dump his body in a muddy field, simply to tie off one of the many compromises of the past week.

Drexler said none of this. Instead an idea came to him. “Henri . . . you might not know it, but you are crucial to this operation, and you are in a position of power right now.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“The next phase, you might have gathered, involves getting Medina back to Syria. To do that we have to travel across Europe. I do not have credentials that can pass scrutiny, and neither does Malik. Unlike me, he is here in Europe legally, but as soon as Rima and Tarek are found dead in that house, men with Syrian diplomatic credentials traveling across Europe are going to be looked at with the highest suspicion.”

“What does this have to do with me?”

“You are a French citizen and a law enforcement officer. If you came with us, you could facilitate any dealings we had at airports, with chance encounters with police or others. You could go out and purchase supplies, rent cars, things of that nature. Logistically you would be a tremendous help.”

“And in the process I would incriminate myself even more into this crime?”

“My dear captain, at this stage of the game I imagine you are already in as deep as you could possibly be. Why not make, say, another one hundred thousand euros in the process? That money could help you as you transition your life to someplace safer for you.”

Sauvage just stared Drexler down. Finally he said, “Two hundred fifty thousand euros.”

Drexler didn’t imagine Henri Sauvage would see fifty cents of this money they were discussing, so this was purely a hypothetical conversation. But to the Frenchman he said, “Two hundred. This will be two days of work. Three at most. Then you can have the rest of your life.”

Sauvage did not look happy, but Drexler doubted this man ever looked happy. He nodded slowly. “Fine. But three days at the most and then I return.”

“Agreed.” Drexler didn’t really need the Frenchman along on the journey; he could tend to any logistical arrangements himself, using his powers of persuasion and charm, but he saw how Sauvage could prove useful.