Covert One 5 - The Lazarus Vendetta (28 page)

“I remember,” Klein said. “And I meant it.”

“Well, I'm bucking the system right now,” Smith said firmly.
"Peter is

already basically focused on the same problem we
are. Plus, he's got skills and instincts and brainpower we can use to our
advantage."

There was silence on the other end for several seconds while Klein digested
that. “Cogently argued, Colonel,” he said at last. “All right,
cooperate with Howell as closely as you can, but remember: He must never learn
about Covert-One. Never. Is that understood?”

“Cross my heart and hope to die, Chief,” Smith answered.

Klein snorted. “Fair enough, Jon.” He cleared his throat.
“Let me know once you're on the ground, all right?”

“Will do,” Smith replied. He leaned forward to check the
navigation display, which showed their position, distance from Andrews, and
current airspeed. “It looks like that should be sometime around nine P.M.,
your time.”

La Courneuve, Near Paris

The grim, soulless high-rise housing projects of the Parisian slums, the cites, rose black against the night. Their
design—massive, oppressively ugly, and intentionally sterile—was a monument to
the grotesque ideals of the Swiss architect Le Corbusier, who thought solely in
cold, utilitarian terms. The projects were also a testament to the
penny-pinching of French bureaucrats—who wanted only to cram as many of their
nation's unwanted immigrants, most of them Muslims, into the smallest possible
spaces.

Few lights shone around the graffiti-smeared concrete bulk of the Cite
des Quatre Mille, the “city of four thousand,” a notorious haven
for thieves, thugs, drug dealers, and Islamic radicals. The honest poor were
trapped in a de facto prison essentially run by the criminals and terrorists
among them. Most of the street lamps were either burned out or broken. The
charred wrecks of stripped cars littered the potholed streets. The few stores
in the neighborhood were either barricaded behind steel bars or else reduced to
looted, blackened rubble.

Ahmed ben-Belbouk drifted through the night, a shadow among other shadows.
He wore a long black raincoat against the night air and a kufi cap to cover his
head. He was a little less than six feet tall, and he cultivated a full beard
that masked some of the acne scars that pockmarked his round, soft face. By
birth French, by heritage Algerian, and by faith a follower of radical Islam,
ben-Belbouk was a recruiter for the jihad against America and the decadent West. He
operated out of a backroom office in one of the local mosques, quietly and
carefully screening those who heeded the call to holy war. Those he judged the
most promising were given false passports, cash, and plane tickets and sent
outside France
for advanced training.

Now, after a long day, he was at last returning to the bleak, grimy welfare
apartment graciously provided for him by the state. Counting the secret funds
at his disposal, he had money enough to live someplace better, but ben-Belbouk
believed it was better to live among those whose loyalty he sought. When they
saw him sharing their hardships and their hopelessness, they were more willing
to listen to his sermons of hatred and his calls for vengeance on their Western
oppressors.

Suddenly the terrorist recruiter noticed movement along the darkened avenue
ahead. He stopped. That was odd. These were the hours when the streets of this
district were usually deserted. The timid and honest were already cowering at
home behind their locked doors, and the criminals and drug dealers were usually
either still asleep or too busy indulging their vicious habits to be out and
about.

Ben-Belbouk slipped into the darkened door of a burnt-out bakery and stood
watching. He slipped his right hand into the pocket of his raincoat and felt
the butt of the pistol he carried, a compact Glock 19. The street gangs and
other petty criminals who preyed on the residents of the Cite usually
steered a wide berth around men like him, but he preferred the option of providing
for his own security.

From his place of concealment he watched the activity with growing
suspicion. There was a van parked near the base of one of the smashed

street lamps. Two men in coveralls were outside the
vehicle, holding a ladder for a third technician working on something up near
the top of the dark metal pole. Was this supposed to be a crew from the
state-run electricity company? Sent here on some quixotic mission to again
repair the streetlights already destroyed ten times over by the local
residents?

The bearded man's eyes narrowed, and he spat
silently to one side. The very thought was ridiculous. Representatives of the
French government were despised in this district. Policemen were mobbed on
sight. BAISE LA POLICE, “screw the police,” was the single most
popular graffiti. The coarse, obscene phrase was spray-painted on every
building in sight. Even the firemen sent in to put out the frequent arson
blazes were greeted with barrages of Molotov cocktails and rocks. They had to
be escorted by armored cars. Surely no electrician in his right mind would dare
to set foot in La Courneuve? Not after dark—and certainly not without a
detachment of heavily armed riot police to guard him.

So who were these men, and what were they really
doing? Ben-Belbouk looked more carefully. The technician on the ladder seemed
to be installing a piece of equipment—a small gray rectangular plastic box of
some kind.

He ran his gaze along the other street lamps in sight. To his surprise, he
noticed identical gray boxes mounted on several of them at precise, regular
intervals. Though it was difficult to be sure in the dim light, he thought he
could make out dark round openings on the boxes. Were those camera lenses? His
suspicions hardened into certainty. These cochons, these pigs, were
setting up something—a new surveillance system, perhaps—that would tighten the
government's grip on this lawless zone. He could not allow that to pass without
resistance.

For a moment he debated whether or not to slip away and rouse the local
Islamic brotherhoods. Then he thought better of it. In the inevitable delay
these spies could easily finish their work and vanish. Besides, they were
unarmed. It would be safer and more satisfying to handle them himself.

Ben-Belbouk drew the small Glock pistol out of his coat pocket and moved out
into the open, holding the weapon unobtrusively at his side. He stopped a few
paces away from the trio of technicians. “You there!” he called out.
“What are you doing here?”

Startled, the two holding the ladder turned toward him. The third man, busy
tightening screws on the clamps holding the box to the utility pole, kept
working.

“I said, what are you doing here?”
ben-Belbouk demanded again, louder this time.

One of the pair at the ladder shrugged. “Our work is none of your
business, m'sieur,” he said dismissively. “Go on your way and
leave us in peace.”

The bearded Islamic extremist saw red. His thin lips turned downward in a
fierce scowl, and he brought the Glock out into plain sight. “This,”
he snarled, jabbing the pistol at them, “makes it my business.” He
moved closer. “Now answer my question, filth, before I lose my
patience!”

He never heard the silenced shot that killed him.

The 7.62mm rifle round hit Ahmed ben-Belbouk behind the right ear, tore
through his brain, and blew a large hole in the left side of his skull. Pieces
of pulverized bone and brain matter sprayed across the pavement. The terrorist
recruiter fell in a heap, already dead.

■

Secure in the concealing shadows of a trash-strewn alley some distance away,
the tall, broad-shouldered man who called himself Nones tapped his sniper
lightly on the shoulder. “That was a decent shot.”

The other man lowered his Heckler & Koch PSG-1 rifle and smiled
gratefully. Words of praise from any of the Horatii were rare.

Nones keyed his radio mike, speaking to the pair of observers he had posted
on nearby rooftops to watch over his technicians. “Any further sign of
movement?”

“Negative,” they both replied. “Everything is quiet.”

The green-eyed man nodded to himself. The incident was unfortunate but
evidently not a serious threat to his operational security. Murders and
disappearances were relatively common occurrences in this part of La Courneuve.
One more meant little or nothing. He switched to the technicians' frequency.
“How much longer?” he demanded.

“We're almost finished,” their leader reported. “Two
more minutes.” “Good.” Nones turned back to the sniper.
“Stay ready. Shiro and I will dispose of the body.” Then he looked
back at the much shorter man crouching behind him. “Come with me.”

■

About one hundred meters from the place where Ahmed ben-Belbouk now lay dead, a slender woman stayed prone, hidden beneath the
stripped and burnt-out chassis of a little Renault sedan. She was dressed from
head to foot in black, with a black cotton jumpsuit for her torso, arms, and
legs, black gloves, black boots, and a black watch cap to conceal her golden
hair. She stared at the image in her night-vision binoculars. “Son of a
bitch!” she swore under her breath. Then she spoke softly into her own
radio. “Did you see that, Max?”

“Oh, I saw it,” confirmed her subordinate, posted farther back in
the shelter of a small copse of dead trees. “I'm not sure I believe it,
but I definitely saw it.”

CIA officer Randi Russell focused her binoculars on the three men grouped
around the street lamp. She watched silently while two more men—one very tall,
with auburn hair, the other an Asian —crossed the street and joined the others.
Working swiftly, the two newcomers rolled ben-Belbouk's corpse up in a black
plastic sheet and lugged it away.

Randi gritted her teeth. With the dead man went the fruits of several months
of hard, concentrated research, complicated planning, and risky covert
surveillance. That was how long her section of the CIA's Paris Station had been
tasked with tracking the recruitment of would-be Islamic terrorists in France. Zeroing
in on ben-Belbouk had been like finding the

pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. By monitoring
his contacts they were beginning to build comprehensive files on a host of very
nasty characters, just the sorts of sick bastards who would get a thrill out of
murdering thousands of innocents.

And now her whole operation was wiped out—well and truly wrecked by a single
silenced shot.

She rubbed at her perfectly straight nose with one gloved finger, furiously
thinking. “Who the hell are those guys?” she muttered.

“Maybe DGSE? Or GIGN?” Max speculated
aloud, naming both the French foreign intelligence service and the country's
counterterrorist specialists.

Randi nodded to herself. That was possible. The French intelligence services
and counterterror units were known for playing rough—very rough. Had she just
witnessed a piece of government-sanctioned “wet work” designed to rid
France
of a security threat without the inconvenience and expense of an arrest and a
public trial?

Maybe, she thought coldly. If so, though, it was a remarkably stupid thing
to do. While alive, Ahmed ben-Belbouk had been a window straight into the
deadly underground world of Islamic terrorism—a world that was almost
impossible for U.S.
and other intelligence services to penetrate. Dead, he was useless to
everybody.

“They're pulling out, boss,” Max's voice said in her ear.

Randi watched closely while the three men in overalls folded their ladder,
shoved it into the back of their van, and drove away. Moments later, two cars,
a dark blue BMW and a smaller Ford Escort, pulled onto the darkened avenue and
followed the van. “Did you jot down the license plates on those vehicles?”
she asked.

“Yeah, I got 'em,” Max replied. “They were all local
numbers.”

“Good, we'll run them through the computer once we're finished here.
Maybe that'll give us some idea of which jackasses just kicked us in the
teeth,” she said grimly.

Randi lay motionless for a while longer, now focusing her binoculars

on the small gray boxes fixed to a number of
lampposts up and down the avenue and on the nearby side streets. The more she
studied the boxes, the odder they seemed. They looked very much like containers
for a variety of sensors, she decided—complete with several apertures for
cameras, intakes for air sampling devices, and short, stubby data relay
antennae on top.

Weird, she thought. Very weird. Why would anyone
waste money setting up a whole network of expensive scientific instruments in a
crime-ridden slum like La Courneuve? The boxes were reasonably unobtrusive, but
they weren't invisible. Once the locals noticed them, their life span and that
of the equipment they contained would be measured in minutes at most. So why
kill ben-Belbouk just because he was starting to raise a fuss? She shook her
head in frustration. Without more of the pieces to this puzzle, nothing she had
seen tonight made much sense.

“You know, Max, I think we ought to take a closer look at what those
guys were installing,” she told her subordinate. “But we're going to
have to come back with a ladder to do it.”

“Not tonight, we're not,” the other man warned. “The crazies,
druggies, and jihad boys are due out on the streets any minute now, boss lady.
We need to git while the gittin' is good.”

“Yeah,” Randi agreed. She tucked her binoculars away and slithered
gracefully backward out from under the charred Renault. Her mind was still
working fast. The more she thought about it, the less likely it seemed that
killing ben-Belbouk had been the primary aim of the men installing those
strange sensor arrays. Maybe his murder was just a piece of unintended
collateral damage. Then who were they, she wondered, and what were they really
up to?