Page 42 of The Nameless Ones
‘Then,’ said Angel, ‘we’ll have a problem.’
‘No,’ said Rosanna, ‘you’ll have a kidnapping.’
Later, Johnston and Rosanna walked Angel back to his hotel and said good night, but when he got to his room, he found he could not sleep. He was struck by a wave of depression, the latest in a succession both unpredictable and unrelenting in their ferocity. Angel had always been prone to bouts of melancholy – given the abuse he had suffered earlier in life, it would have been surprising had he not experienced periods of profound emotional distress – but the nature of them had altered following his recent illness, growing deeper and more emphatic. He wondered if it was a form of survivor’s guilt. He thought about speaking with Louis, but instead used his cell phone to call another number, because he knew one man who might understand how he was feeling. The call was picked up on the second ring.
‘So how is Europe?’ said Parker.
‘Full of Europeans.’
‘I detect a certain absence of joy.’
‘I hurt,’ said Angel simply. ‘In my heart and in my head.’
‘Then let’s talk.’
And they did.
Chapter XXXVII
A cell phone, unsolicited, was delivered to Louis at his hotel shortly after seven the following morning. It was fully powered, came with a Bluetooth earpiece, and rang five minutes after it arrived. Louis picked up, and Harris spoke.
‘Markovic is on the move,’ he said. ‘We have eyes and ears in his room, but he’s using a clean burner phone. He received a text message about twenty minutes ago, armed himself, and left. We’re trying to get a trace on the sender and the message, but that will take time.’
‘Any idea where he’s going?’
‘We think it’s Gare de Lyon. Our information is that it’s the Vuksans’ preferred final destination for important deliveries.’
‘Okay. By the way, I thought you were retired.’
‘Semiretired,’ said Harris. ‘Plus, I’ve always liked France. We’re going to patch you into the coms group, so keep the earpiece in place and you’ll hear what we hear. The phone has a fifteen-hour battery life, so don’t worry about charging it.’
‘I’m on my way,’ said Louis. He inserted the earpiece and dropped the phone in his coat pocket, but not before muting the microphone on the device. It was one thing permitting himself to be tracked by Harris and his people, another to have them listening in on his conversations. He placed one of the Rohrbaugh pistols in a hip holster under his jacket. The other already had its Osprey suppressor in place because he didn’t want to waste time trying to fit it if he needed to use the Rohrbaugh in a hurry. That gun now hung vertically from a custom Velcro strap beneath his coat, and could be released with a single hard yank. The setup wasn’t ideal, but neither was the world. The remaining two pistols had gone to his guests.
When he was ready, he made a call on his own cell phone.
‘Game on,’ he said.
Aleksej Markovic took a seat in the Costa Coffee at Gare de Lyon, which gave him a good view of the station concourse and the exit onto rue de Châlon. At no point would he make direct contact with the two men arriving from Port-Vendres. Their shadows, acolytes of the Vuksans, would stay with them until they left the station, at which point the Syrians’ own people would take over; and that would be the last Markovic or anyone else at the Vuksans’ end would see of them, at least until their photographs appeared on BFM, the BBC, or Sky, alongside images of rising smoke and fleeing bystanders, of blood and broken glass.
He watched the Syrians, Saad and Mahdi, emerge separately. Both were in their forties, which made them old by jihadi standards, and dressed in business suits that looked more expensive than they were. Markovic knew this because he had supervised their purchase himself, just as he had chosen the clear-lens glasses and overnight bags. The men had trimmed their beards and now resembled middle managers for some modestly successful business, or academics at one of the lower-ranked colleges.
A few meters behind them walked Baba and Fouad, the shadows. Both came from the northern suburbs of Paris, the banlieues where immigrant unemployment was high and opportunities for advancement were few. Fouad, the Algerian, was Muslim, although far from observant, while Baba, the Senegalese, was a Christian from that country’s Casamance region. The two men were not close, but managed to work well together. Markovic preferred dealing with Fouad because he didn’t feel compelled to talk about God quite as much as Baba did. Every two years, Baba made a pilgrimage to Popenguine, on Senegal’s Atlantic coast, where he prayed before the Black Madonna and asked her to intercede on his behalf and that of his extended family. How Baba balanced his deep Christian beliefs with a capacity, even a propensity, for extreme violence was one of the mysteries of his particular brand of worship. But then Markovic, a devout member of the Serbian Orthodox Church, was hardly in a position to criticize the contradictions of others, not with all the blood on his own hands.
Markovic had not informed Baba and Fouad that he would be present for the handover, if only as an observer. His appearance had altered since last he’d met the two operatives. He was now bearded, and his hair was a few shades darker. Up close, they might have recognized him, but not from any kind of distance. He wasn’t sure what they knew of the Vuksans’ current situation, but he had seen no reason to enlighten them if they were ignorant of it. Both Baba and Fouad were shrewd, which was why they’d been entrusted with the care of the Syrians; but if they became aware of the Vuksans’ problems, the smart move would be to walk away, and Markovic couldn’t afford to let that happen. Their eyes scanned the crowd, always returning to the Syrians. Fouad struck Markovic as the more uneasy of the two, but he was by nature a nervous animal. Baba was always calmer. Even when he was hurting another human being, he remained implacable.
The four men entered the concourse. Fouad glanced to his right, and his gaze froze before moving on. It was only the minutest of pauses, but Markovic caught it, and it seemed to him that Fouad slowed down, falling farther behind Baba and the Syrians. Markovic saw a couple, a man and a woman, cease their examination of a ticket machine and begin closing fast on Baba and the Syrians. Meanwhile, by the exit, a young black man in a clean tracksuit and an older male in a dark suit, a misbaha wrapped around his fingers, brightened as they took in the Syrians’ approach.
Suddenly there was shouting, and the couple from the ticket machine reached for guns, the butts visible to Markovic beneath their jackets. At the same moment, heavily armed officers from RAID, the National Police’s tactical unit, emerged from a pair of unmarked doorways and moved in on the Syrians. Markovic instinctively looked around, expecting to see more armed personnel closing on him. He was carrying a pistol but wasn’t so foolish as to believe he would stand a chance against a cadre of antiterrorist operatives. The best he could hope for was to be taken alive. So far, though, it seemed that he remained unnoticed, and so he began planning his escape.
Curiously, at that point the couple quickly separated, vanishing into the crowd, and Markovic thought he saw at least three other men, all in civilian clothing, head for the exits. They didn’t run, unlike some of the passengers at the station who had immediately panicked at the sight of assault weapons, nor did they remain frozen in place like so many others. In common with Markovic, who was already on his feet, their instinct was to remove themselves from the scene before they were spotted.
Markovic immediately identified it for what it was: a fuckup, two operations being conducted independently of each other on the same target. One unit was clearly French, given the presence of RAID, but the likelihood of two French teams working in ignorance of each other was slim. The French had learned a lot of hard lessons from the terrorist attacks of 2015, one of which was the importance of integration and coordination. UCLAT, the Unité de coordination de la lutte antiterroriste, representing all branches of the National Police, was responsible for the centralization of operational information and decisions. It existed to ensure that, theoretically at least, the main gauche always knew what the main droite was doing. Regardless of divisional rivalries, no French agency would risk a takedown at a site such as the Gare de Lyon without first clearing the operation at the highest levels. That left a foreign power or independent operators as the second team, and Markovic was leaning toward the former.
Fouad, he noticed, was nowhere to be seen. Baba, on the other hand, had peeled away as soon as the police appeared, but only managed to walk a few feet before he was surrounded. He was now lying on the floor with three assault weapons pointing at his head. The Syrians were still standing, their hands raised, although the two men who had been waiting for them were gone. The Syrians had their backs to Markovic, but one of them – Markovic thought it might be Saad – was shouting at the police in Arabic. Around them, passengers huddled low or lay flat on the ground, giving the officers clear fields of fire if required. Saad’s right hand dropped, and he reached inside his jacket. At least three RAID officers opened fire simultaneously, two with pistols and one with a Heckler & Koch G36. They drew no distinction between Saad and Mahdi. Within seconds, both men were dead.
Louis was at the main station entrance when he heard swearing in his Bluetooth earpiece, before Harris’s voice gave the order to abort the operation. Louis listened for a while longer, until a woman’s voice announced that they’d lost Markovic. Almost immediately, his own cell phone buzzed, and he answered.
‘We have him,’ said the voice on the other end. ‘He’s on Place Henri-Frenay, heading north.’