Children of War (21 page)

‘You mean Ghlamallah,’ Bruno said. Dillah nodded. ‘Was it Ghlamallah you saw at the mosque?’

‘Ghlamallah came in to tell us the boys had gone. He insisted they’d planned it themselves and there was nothing the mosque could do. He was sorry and he refunded us the fees for that term.’ Her mouth tightened. ‘He seemed to think it was the money we cared about.’

Nancy said they needed to see Olivier, the one going through the videotapes to make a chronology of Sami’s journeys, to give him the names of the other boys from the mosque. Nancy also wanted to see the file on Ghlamallah.

There was a fat file on him, but none of it damaging. Even with Rafiq’s reports, all they had were suspicions. The precise organization of the mosque was far from clear. The elderly and deeply devout Imam was nominally in charge, and he was highly visible, sitting on the board of France’s national Muslim council, a delegate to the global ecumenical council and to the European inter-faith assembly.

‘He seems to be a figurehead,’ Olivier said. ‘Everybody’s favourite Muslim, but apart from chairing the weekly board meeting it doesn’t look as though he actually runs the place.’

‘So Ghlamallah is the one in charge?’ Nancy asked.

Olivier shrugged. ‘He’s more like the public spokesman, spends a lot of time giving speeches and writing his books and articles. His phone calls and emails seem pretty innocent. We’re running a clean-up program on some of the audiotapes on calls that we think were using a vocal modifier to disguise the speakers’ identities. Maybe that will tell us more.’

‘In his emails, does he send a lot of photos?’ Nancy asked.

‘Funny you should ask, but it’s like he keeps a photo diary of everything he does, photos of audiences at his meetings, of him being interviewed, events he attends. He sends hundreds of them.’

‘Have you run them through a pixel scanner?’ she asked.

‘What’s that?’ Bruno asked.

The National Security Agency at Fort Meade in the U.S. had found microscopic messages embedded in individual pixels in a photograph that could contain hundreds of thousands of them. The NSA had developed an automatic scanning system to look for such odd pixels, blow them back up to normal size and then run the message through the decryption programs.

Olivier shrugged. ‘Not that I’ve heard. We don’t do the analysis ourselves.’

‘Maybe it would be a good idea to check,’ said Nancy. ‘On an operation like this, where we’re working closely together, I’m sure the NSA would be glad to help.’

Olivier raised his eyebrows. ‘I’m sure they would,’ he said, in a voice loaded with sarcasm. ‘I’ll put it to the Brigadier.’

‘Don’t bother, I’ll do it myself,’ she said. ‘But who else seems to be running the mosque?’

Olivier went through the list. There was the
kayim
, or caretaker, who seemed to do most of the administration; a
khalib
, who led Friday prayers, and a
nazir
, the treasurer. He controlled the money, at least that part of it that could be traced through the banking networks. Then there were various departments: the madrassa or school; the social service that ran charities and welfare; the sports association and medical centre; the
publishing company; the job training office and the women’s organization.

‘It’s huge,’ Olivier said. ‘Twenty thousand worshippers, so many they spill over into the streets, and about two hundred people seem to be employed full-time. The annual budget is around twenty million euros, at least that bit of it we can see.’

‘So which section are those guys in that attacked me at the
collège
?’ Bruno asked.

‘We call it the security section. They call themselves the monitors, the guys who keep order at Friday prayers,’ Olivier explained. ‘The man Rafiq was interested in before he was killed is the
Niqab
, the captain, second-in-command. We know this man was in the paras, invalided out after two years when he had a training accident when his chute didn’t open properly. He’s a bit of a mystery, French-born with an Algerian background but no next-of-kin ever listed, never seems to send emails, never makes phone calls, never leaves the mosque. The smaller of the two guys who attacked you is his chief aide, Ali, known as the
Caïd
.’

Olivier paused, looking at his computer screen. ‘Well, look who’s turned up.’

He hit a couple of keys and what had been a small window on one corner of the screen expanded and Bruno saw it was a live feed from France 24, and a familiar face was being interviewed: Ghlamallah.

‘Whoever this so-called Engineer might be, there can be no question of handing him over to the Americans,’ Ghlamallah was saying. ‘We know from Guantanamo and the Abu Ghraib prison scandal how the Americans treat their prisoners, even when they don’t fry them in the electric chair or inject
them with lethal chemicals. Many French people, not just Muslims, have severe doubts about the American operations in Afghanistan, the countless deaths of innocent civilians in drone attacks. If this Engineer is in French hands, he must be dealt with under French law.’

‘But France has also been part of the NATO effort in Afghanistan, in support of the elected government and against the Taliban,’ the interviewer objected.

‘Some of us question that policy, which seems neither to have produced stability nor a decent government in Afghanistan and certainly has not defeated the Taliban,’ Ghlamallah said, sounding very reasonable. ‘We think it’s time to put down the guns and start negotiating.’

‘Glib son-of-a-bitch, isn’t he?’ said Nancy, her arms folded as she watched the screen. ‘Just made for prime time.’

Ghlamallah was wearing Western dress, a dark suit with open-necked white shirt. His short beard was carefully trimmed and his teeth, which he displayed often as he smiled when making his points, had that too-perfect white symmetry that suggested expensive dentistry. His dark hair was trimmed short and neatly parted. Bruno saw Nancy’s point; the man was a highly skilled TV performer.

‘The sooner we get that pixel-scanning operation running, the happier I’ll be,’ she said, and turned to Bruno. ‘So how is Monsieur prime-time there going to spin it when
Paris Match
breaks the news that the Engineer came from his mosque?’

‘I imagine he’ll say exactly what he said to Momu and Dillah,’ Bruno replied. ‘He’ll say the three young men left of their own accord, choosing the path of jihad in the service, perhaps mistaken, of what they saw as their victimized Islamic
brethren. Nobody could be more sorry than him about Sami’s eventual fate, but the fault lies with the Americans and tragically mistaken policies by successive French governments. Was it his fault if there were too few special schools in France for autistic children, particularly if they were Muslim? The mosque did their best to help, but they were not running a prison camp. The students were given considerable freedom and they chose jihad.’

‘Not bad,’ said Nancy, nodding her head in approval as she glanced at him. ‘Needs a little polish, but if he sticks to his guns he could just get away with that. Maybe you have a future in politics.’

Her tone was light and joking, but suddenly Bruno was aware that Nancy’s eyes were still on him, as if reappraising what she saw. He felt a sudden spark flash between the two of them that went beyond the professional relationship they had established. But with the stir of attraction he felt for her came an automatic caution. It was partly a sense that duty came first, but he knew it came also from his uncertainty at navigating delicate terrain. Almost automatically he responded as a policeman.

‘That’s why I want those bastards who killed Rafiq and hit me with that cattle prod,’ he said, and saw the spark fade from Nancy’s eyes. ‘If we have them facing murder charges we can go in and turn that mosque upside down.’

‘Not with twenty thousand devout worshippers standing solidly as a human chain to protect their mosque, you can’t,’ Olivier interrupted.

‘Are you telling me that mosques are off limits?’ Nancy asked, dragging her gaze from Bruno.

‘Usually yes, with a mosque this big and this well connected,’ Olivier replied. ‘But there is one way in. They run a small orphanage that operates as a kind of extortion racket. A gang of kids go into a shop, start breaking and stealing stuff, and of course they’re too young to be arrested. Then the
Caïd
comes along to apologize and explains how underfunded the mosque is in trying to deal with those poor fatherless boys. The shopkeepers get the message and fork out to the welfare fund and the kids move on to the next store. That’s the lever we’ll use when the time comes.’

The sun was still warm in mid-afternoon and Bruno was in his garden wearing a polo shirt and shorts when he heard a car lumbering up the lane. Gilles had called to say he was on his way. Balzac darted off down the drive to investigate the new arrival. Bruno had been weeding his vegetable patch and filling a wicker basket with tomatoes that he would turn into a compote for freezing. Some olive oil, garlic, chopped onion and balsamic vinegar and he’d have more than enough to keep him through the winter. And there’d still be plenty of tomatoes left over for the
tarte
he planned to make for dinner.

He stood, stretching his back, put the basket by the kitchen door and went in to take some beers from the fridge and glasses from the freezer. Gilles had taught him that trick, and Bruno was looking forward to seeing him, although not to fulfilling Pamela’s request to probe him about the stalled affair with Fabiola. Once the Brigadier had told him to leave the château for the rest of the day and concentrate on Gilles, Bruno had called Pamela and Fabiola and invited them to supper.

‘You’ve lost weight. You’re even thinner than you were in Sarajevo,’ Bruno laughed, welcoming his friend with a hug. He shook the hand of the photographer who accompanied Gilles, an unshaven young man in jeans who looked too frail for the
big camera case he carried. He was introduced as Freddy, and his eyes darted inquisitively around Bruno’s property, the restored old cottage, the line of truffle oaks, the chicken coop and
potager
.

‘I don’t think Freddy is quite used to the countryside. More of an urban guy,’ said Gilles, fondling Balzac’s long ears, which always made the puppy roll onto his back to have his tummy scratched. ‘He’s going to leave us to talk, and if you can show him the château on the map he’ll take some exterior shots if that’s OK.’

‘We might be able to do better than that,’ said Bruno, handing each of them a cold beer. ‘We can arrange for you to have an exclusive: photos of Sami and his family, the scars on his back and as much of an interview as you’re likely to get from an autistic young man who’s been through hell.’

‘You’re kidding.’ Gilles looked amazed.

‘No, we thought it was time to tell Sami’s full story, including the way he was let down by one of France’s biggest mosques, run by two of France’s most respected Imams. But you and I need to talk anyway and the full photo shoot can’t be till tomorrow, so let Freddy go and take his exterior shots and maybe he’d like to join us for dinner.’

Freddy declined, blushing, saying he had a date with one of the girls who had checked him into their hotel. Quick work, thought Bruno, but his absence would make the dinner conversation easier. Gilles’s rental car map didn’t show the château, so Bruno lent Freddy his local map and marked his own house, the hotel and the château.

‘Fabiola will be joining us for dinner, along with Pamela,’ Bruno said when Freddy had gone. ‘I hope that’s OK.’

‘No problem on my side. Does she know I’m coming?’

‘Yes, and she sounded pleased. I know things didn’t work out too well when she came to Paris and if you don’t want to talk about it, that’s fine. But you can expect Pamela to quiz you, so be prepared.’

Gilles grinned. ‘I know you too well, Bruno. You’re making out Pamela to be the tough cop so I’ll spill the beans to you. Don’t worry, I was going to tell you all about it, because I want your advice. Fabiola is the woman I want in my life. I’m head over heels in love with her and I just want to make it work. Do you know what happened between us?’

‘Not really, just that she was coming to see you in Paris for a weekend, apparently determined to spend most of it in bed. That was Pamela’s interpretation.’

‘And mine. And we did, except that we just talked, and held each other and slept. Somehow when it came to it, she couldn’t make love, not properly.’

‘Did she say why?’

‘She wouldn’t talk about it. I thought after we’d slept together, just holding each other, she’d be used to me and it would be fine in the morning. But it wasn’t. It was like she was furious with herself, which was why she dressed and stomped out from my apartment, saying it wasn’t me. It was all her problem. That was it. We’ve talked a lot on the phone since then, but she just refuses to go into it or even to talk to a woman psychologist. I asked some medical contacts and some female colleagues for recommendations, but Fabiola said she’d been let down by women like that before.’

Bruno did not know what to say. He’d have recommended
patience, platonic embraces and some female counselling for Fabiola but Gilles had already tried that.

‘Pamela and I are on your side,’ he said. ‘We think you make a great couple. Pamela says Fabiola’s in love with you, buys every copy of
Paris Match
, follows you on Twitter, has your name on Google alert so everything you write online goes straight into her inbox. Apparently it’s the modern way of romance.’

Gilles looked pleased. ‘You forget the other part of modern love,’ he said. ‘The gym; that’s why I’ve lost weight. I’m trying to get into better shape so I don’t feel like a fat slob if I ever do get her into bed properly. This is the first beer I’ve had in ages.’

He took a long sip, put down his glass, and said, ‘In fact, I went to one of these women psychologists who’d been recommended by a colleague at
Paris Match
. She said all the usual things, be patient, give her time. But she also asked whether Fabiola had ever been able to resolve what had happened to her. She called it closure. I hate these psychobabble words but I know what she means.’